Lady Antonia Fraser was on the radio this morning, reading extracts from the book she has written about her adulterous affair with, and subsequent marriage to, the libidinous playwright, Harold Pinter.
When their affair started in 1975, the great lovers were both married, and both eventually abandoned their spouses. They were married in 1982. Lady Antonia’s union with Sir Hugh Fraser had been blessed with six children; Pinter’s marriage to the actress Vivien Merchant had produced a son.
My first reaction on hearing the Lady’s deep, purring, insufferably patronising tones was to look forward to the inevitable Craig Brown parody. Then I realized he needn’t bother – this stuff was beyond parody.
Here she is, crowing at the effect Vivien Merchant’s speaking to the press about her husband’s affair had on Antonia’s noble Prince Hal: “She had turned all his chivalry and pity away from herself towards me.”
Chivalry. Hmm.
Mind you, Vivien’s loose tongue meant Antonia had to enter her own home round the back to avoid the press gathered at the front. How infuriating! How inconsiderate of the woman! Honestly!
In case we, the little people of Britain, might be in any doubt as to where the blame lay for the passionate Lady dumping her hubby for a bit of theatrical rough, she makes it quite clear in this passage when speaking of her original, fuddy-duddy partner: “I even admired him for his detachment, although his lack of emotional intimacy - he once told me he preferred families to individuals - was with hindsight probably what doomed us.”
You see, Hugh’s fault.
Vivien Merchant died at the age of 52. Lady Antonia is in no doubt what caused her early demise: “I did not know at this point that Vivien was on her way to being a serious alcoholic; a condition which would lead to her death in her early 50s.”
Ah, alcoholism. Well, that could happen to anyone. No need to apportion blame.
Pinter always struck me as a horrible little man: rude, pompous and cruel. No amount of creative talent excuses the way you treat other people. The mystery is that some otherwise sensible people seem to have genuinely loved him. I read Simon Gray’s three-volume The Smoking Diaries with great pleasure, except for his descriptions of his best pal Harold’s various tirades. I was bemused by Gray’s evidently genuine regard for him, and by the unwillingness of people whom he treated like dirt to stick one on the ill-mannered twerp. (The BBC has a phrase for talented people who use their reputation as an excuse to be beastly to lesser souls – BAFTA Bastards. Pinter won three.)
Harold’s political views were equally unpleasant. In 1987, the Pinters’ Camden Hill Square home saw the first gathering of the June 20 group – which included John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer – to fight the vicious oppression of the Thatcherite junta. How we all laughed!
But in later life this East End boy’s politics became positively gangrenous: a mildly left-wing loathing of lower middle class Philistinism turned into full-blown anti-American mania (which, naturally, earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature). In case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a stanza from 2003’s God Bless America:
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America’s God.
Time for your medication, Mr P?
Recent revelations concerning his amatory cavortings have done nothing to alter my opinion of Pinter as a human being (nor, indeed, my regard for him as an excellent screen-writer).
As for his wife (the one who hasn’t died from an attack of alcoholism), well, she’s even more sublimely silly than I suspected.
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