“Women who understand their sexual experience in the way that Jackie Collins writes of it are irretrievably lost to themselves and their lovers:

He took her to the bedroom and undressed her slowly, he made love to her beautifully. Nothing frantic, nothing rushed (…) She floated on a suspended plane, a complete captive to his hands and body. He had amazing control, stopping at just the right moment. When it did happen it was only because he wanted it to, and they came in complete unison. She had never experienced that before, and she clung to him, words tumbling out of her mouth about how much she loved him. Afterwards they lay and smoked and talked. ‘You’re wonderful,’ he said, ‘You’re a clever woman making me wait until after we were married!’”

The Female Eunuch (1970), p. 58 (2008 edition). Jackie Collins citation from The World is Full of Married Men (1969).

lareviewofbooks:

Keri Walsh
Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser. 1980  Photo by Srdja Djukanvic.
Antonia Fraser
Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter
Nan A. Talese, November 2010. 328 pp.

“I’ll take the dark one,” says Antonia Fraser, singling out the brooding figure at a nearby table. The restaurant is Étoile in London’s Fitzrovia. The time is the mid-1970s, and “the dark one” is Harold Pinter, looking dashing over lunch with fellow thespians. So begins the affair between Pinter, Britain’s leading playwright of the postwar period, and Fraser, the biographer who made her name with the 1969 best seller Mary Queen of Scots. He is a stormy creative titan, widely acknowledged as the heir to Samuel Beckett. She is a beautiful, fair-haired aristocrat who has carved out a place as a popular historian by writing the lives of royal women. In a milieu of scruffy hotel bars, opening nights, and family homes, they promptly recognize each other’s glamour and fall in love, not just with each other, but also — and perhaps more importantly — with the idea of each other.

This is no springtime romance. The lovers are both in their forties, and both married. They come from different worlds: she from a privileged upbringing in North Oxford, he from a Jewish family in the East End. They cross paths now because they move in the same circles of literary prestige. Fraser’s husband is an easygoing Tory MP with whom she has six children. Pinter’s wife is actress Vivien Merchant, who originated what he called the “mysterious, sexy Pinter Woman” onstage in the late 1950s. No strangers to extramarital romance, the new lovers are surprised by the strength of their feelings. And so they set about dismantling their respective lives and forging one of the most enduring partnerships in British public life. Must You Go? chronicles the three decades they spent “famously married,” writing, traveling, campaigning, loving, and quarrelling, until Pinter’s Nobel Prize win in 2008, followed shortly after by his death from cancer at 78.

Fraser adds her book to a genre with a long history: the marriage memoir. When husbands attempt it, the results tend to come trailing clouds of scandal and betrayal. After Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth, her husband William Godwin published a record of her unconventional life. In Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Godwin laid out her highs and lows, her love affairs and suicide attempts, to clear the record and establish her genius. But instead of enshrining his wife’s reputation, Godwin’s book had the effect of tarnishing it for nearly 150 years. Two centuries later, British poet laureate Ted Hughes reportedly went into hiding for nineteen days following the publication of Birthday Letters, the 1998 volume in which he finally broke the silence about his marriage to Sylvia Plath. The poems, assembled from across the years, were as contentious as could be expected: Marjorie Perloff called them “the unkindest cut of all.”

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