Must You Go?

I've just read Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?, a memoir of her life with and eventual marriage to Harold Pinter. I'm not sure exactly why I picked this one up, or what I expected, but once I started reading I was hooked. At first, knowing that Lady Antonia was a Pakenham, the same aristocratic family that Anthony Powell had married into, I was curious to see if Powell and others from his orbit would appear, and indeed they do from time to time. It turns out that Antonia was quite fond of Uncle Tony. But then she was fond of quite a large number of family and friends, or so I gather from the evidence of her memoir, which while focused mainly on her relationship with Pinter, covers a good deal of the doings of the literary and artistic crowd in London and New York, as well as various European countries and other parts of the world. Fraser and Pinter had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, and one of the deficiencies of the advance reading copy I read was the lack of an index of names.

My first reaction to the book was that it was little more than a lightly edited version of Lady Antonia's personal diaries. Such books tend to succeed or fail according to the skill of the diarist and her ability to make her daily activities interesting. Happily Antonia Fraser is a good story teller, and in fact her book is very carefully edited, so that it doesn't follow a strictly chronological account of the passing days, months, and years, but picks up interesting threads of stories and related people and events and weaves a complicated narrative of experiences and relationships. And it's clear that while she has included many touching personal details of their lives together, she has also left out much that would have been either distracting or unnecessary to advance her narrative.

Along the way there is quite a lot of information for those interested in either Fraser or Pinter as writers, with telling insights into the books, plays, and screenplays that were written during these years of love, romance, and family drama. I always think that the mark of a really good biography of a writer or artist of any kind, and I count memoirs as biography, is that it sends the reader back to the work with new insights. And I think this book scores pretty high in that regard. After reading Must You Go?, I found that I wanted to go back to Pinter's plays, but also to revisit some of his screenplays, which I have also admired. In addition, I learned that Pinter directed several plays I saw back in the seventies and eighties, something I'd somehow forgotten or never properly registered. Who knows, I may even read some of Antonia Fraser's histories. They're certainly about a period I very much enjoy studying. And I'm sure I have at least one or two sitting on my shelves somewhere, or more probably stored away in boxes.

(This review refers to an Advance Reading Copy of the book, which I received from the publisher; no other form of compensation was offered or accepted.)