How I learnt to love Pinter

It wasn’t until I bought a copy of Henry’s book and saw that it had not only been endorsed but published by Harold that I began to suspect that there might be absolutely nothing Pinteresque about him.

About six or so years later I went to a party at the publisher Eyre Methuen, given in honour of a man who seemed to be retiring from the firm. When the time came for speeches, Harold paid generous tribute. The man had published The Birthday Party even though the play had flopped in London, and Harold thanked him warmly for his loyalty and trust in his work. He went on to make a pretty savage and eloquent attack on Eyre Methuen which, as far as I could see, was letting the guy go because it didn’t want people around who stood up for work in which they believed.

I was just coming to terms with the difficult proposition that Pinter might actually be a nice bloke, when he and Antonia [Fraser] swept out of the room. He was no sooner out, however, than he was back. “You’re Nigel Williams!” he said, thrusting out his hand to me. “I saw your play at the Royal Court! Bloody good!”

This was getting more and more confusing. Not only was the great man generous to others, he was actually capable of being generous to me! About the only remotely sinister thing about him seemed to be that he was still wearing black.

So when, about ten years later, Robert McCrum of Faber and Faber told me that Harold was interested in the Beeb making a film about him, I came along to lunch with him, thinking that he and I would get along just fine. His agent, Judy Daish, had told me that Harold’s father was a wonderful character — funny, tough and touchingly devoted to his famous son. I thought it would be great to get Pinter Sr on camera and devoted much of our four-bottle lunch, in what I thought was a pretty subtle fashion, to letting Harold know that I thought this would be a good idea. On his way back to Notting Hill with McCrum, Harold apparently said: “I think interviewing my father is a sticking point for Nigel. Tell him that won’t be possible.” I think I made some speech to McCrum about the need for documentary makers to have complete access to their subjects’ private lives and, with much Chinese politeness on both sides, we let the project go.

I heard nothing from Harold for some years, though someone told me that they had seen him in the Groucho Club and he had told them to tell me, should they run across me, to “f*** off”.

The thing that finally led to that film about his life and work being made was another accidental meeting in a nowdefunct restaurant called Orsino’s in Holland Park. I saw him sitting alone at the bar and on an impulse asked him if he would like a drink. We both had a glass of champagne. He was carrying a small, rather official-looking briefcase. I told him I was about to leave the Beeb and try writing full time. The prospect, I added, terrified me. Harold looked glumly at his briefcase and said: “It can be pretty bloody difficult.” He looked some more at the briefcase and added: “I’ve got a play in there. God knows whether it’s any good though.”

There was a long, fairly companiable pause, at the end of which I said: “How’s your father?” Harold looked at me. “How’s yours?” he said. “He’s dead,” I said. “So’s mine,” he said. I think that was the moment when I really started to like him. It was also the moment when I finally grasped the very simple point that a writer’s life may have absolutely nothing to do with the nature of his or her work.

So when Anthony Wall, the editor of the BBC arts programme Arena, asked if I would like to make a two-part documentary about Harold I was, at last, ready. So, to my surprise, was he. The first film we made was called The Room, the title of his first play. We didn’t do yet another interview (as Antonia Fraser pointed out, Harold gave hundreds of interviews, in most of which he said exactly the same sort of thing). We simply found every room where Harold had ever lived or worked — although we never got inside the Nash House in Regent’s Park that he had shared with Vivien Merchant, his first wife. There was the terraced house in Hackney where he wrote poetry at the kitchen table late at night. The room in Chiswick where the kitchen table was a plank of wood laid over the bath. The shed in the garden — the one referred to in The Caretaker — is still there. There was the flat in Kew, “handy for the cemetery”, which was the first piece of property he and Vivien owned. And the house in Worthing where he wrote The Homecoming — still grand, but chilly, just down the road from where he and she first appeared together in the local rep.

The second film, called Celebration, the title of the last play he wrote, featured the happy intimacy of his study in Campden Hill Square, but if there was any discrepancy between the calm content of his second marriage and his very public anger at the politics of Bush or Blair, I could not see it. What made Harold unique as an artist was the complete consistency of his vision. Like all really great writers, he lived almost entirely through his imagination.

The paradox of making the film was that the more we stayed away from his private life the closer we seemed to get to the man himself. The famous irritability at waiters who sneaked up behind him was not mere grumpiness but a reflection of the fact that he was intensely private. He hated people saying to him, “How are you?” because, to him, a question put without any real interest in the answer was a kind of obscenity.

I remember Antonia telling me how the two of them had spent the weekend in an hotel in Brighton, both writing. She had tapped away dutifully for six hours only to find Harold, at close of play, studying a blank page and an empty packet of cigarettes. Silence for him wasn’t a cheap way of raising significance, it was a precondition of civilised life, of being able to think. If you hadn’t anything to say, you didn’t say it.

That famous reserve — grimness almost — that I might once have taken for grandeur or pretension was in fact the complete opposite. Harold absolutely loved Christmas, for example. And I can still picture the vivid distress on his face when a member of his beloved cricket team fell ill with cancer.

And he loved to laugh. Not long after his cancer was diagnosed, in the middle of filming, we finally got round to talking about his father. He told me how he had gone to see him a few weeks before he died and Pinter Sr had read somewhere that some third-rate playwright had been offered a knighthood. “What are they thinking of?” he had said to Harold. “You’re twice the writer he is, aren’t you? You should be Sir Harold Pinter, shouldn’t you?”

“I couldn’t bear to tell him,” Harold said, “that I had been offered a knighthood and turned it down. I think it would have put him in his grave there and then.”

On the last week of filming Anthony Wall and I visited him in his study. Downstairs were shelves of full-length critical studies of his work, in almost every language from Norwegian to Greek. I asked him why he kept them all. “People send them to me and it seems churlish to throw them in the bin,” he admitted.

Anthony opened one tome and read a few lines. They talked of menace and brooding and the authoritative nature of silence. “What,” Anthony said, “are they on about?” “Haven’t got a clue,” said Harold. “I mean,” Anthony went on, “had you any idea when you wrote those plays that people would see all these meanings in them? All this significance?”

“Of course I didn’t,” Harold said. “I just wrote them. Now, shall we have a drink?”

Arena: Harold Pinter — A Celebration is on BBC Four on Sunday (9pm) . The Caretaker is at the Trafalgar Studios, SW1, until April 17. Antonia Fraser’s Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson (£20)