Must You Go? Lady Antonia Fraser's eulogy to her husband - the late, great, Harold Pinter is not a grief book but a compelling love story packed to the rafters with colorful, supporting casts in politics, theater, film, literature and the arts spanning a period of thirty plus years in English (and American) history, following the couple's fortuitous meeting at an after show dinner party in the 1970s.
English playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, theatre director and left-wing political activist, Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, three years before his death on Christmas Eve, 2008. Fraser's inspiration to revisit her diaries of their life together one month after losing him, led to a first draft of this remarkable read in just 10 weeks, not at all her usual pace of painstaking historical detail, rather one which invited insightful commentary from a 2009 perspective, looking back at an extraordinary, inspirational relationship.
Fraser, prolific author and historian in her own right, is best known here in the States for biographies such as Mary Queen of Scots, King Arthur, Cromwell, Six Wives of Henry VIII, King Charles II and Marie Antoinette - adapted in 2006 into a film by Sofia Copolla.
Pinter's plays, born in the aftermath of the chaos of World War II certainly don't elude to the romantic that he was in his private life. Publishing a pamphlet of his love poems to Fraser penned in longhand throughout their relationship, was his way of commemorating that part of an immensely creative life and separating what he clearly considered his most celebrated success from career.
I found this intimate 'happiness memoir' thoroughly engrossing, in hardcover, by Deckle Edge and sobbed at the inevitable towards the final page.
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