The news of Harold Pinter’s death came on Christmas Day. He was 78. It wasn’t unexpected. Cancer of oesophagus had been diagnosed eight years ago and the treatments plus several other illnesses had weakened him in the time since. Still, it was a sad surprise. However fragile Pinter came to look, with his walking stick and soft shoes and the little cap he wore to compensate the loss of his hair, he had an aura that seemed indestructible. Very few people have such self-belief. It was awesome to behold, and sometimes frightening to encounter.

It doesn’t do to speak ill of the dead — de mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans said — so the obituaries passed over or euphemized this aspect of his character. His biographer, Michael Billington, alluded to “a reputation for being short-tempered” in The Guardian as though Pinter was merely irritable. His rages were much more primeval. The late Simon Gray, who was perhaps Pinter’s closest friend, described them eloquently in his memoirs. “When he becomes angry the eyes become milky, the voice a brutal weapon that is virtually without content. What I mean is that he speaks violently, really violently. His voice is like a fist driving into you, but he uses almost no words, three or four at most — ‘shit’, ‘fuck’ and ‘I’ are the ones you hear — [the rest are] dark and ugly sounds incomprehensible because not intended to be comprehended except as dark and ugly sounds, and full of eloquence therefore.”

As a reporter and then an editor, I met Pinter occasionally. Then, through my friendship with Simon, I began to see him more frequently. I was always rather careful and he was always very charming. Then, last May, a dinner was organized for the publication of a book by Simon, as it turned out the last volume of his memoirs to be published during his lifetime. As I had to make a little speech, I turned up early. Pinter arrived soon after and stood on the outside of our little crowd, talking to nobody. I went over and thought I heard him grunt some words like “How are you?”

“Fine,” I said. “How are you?”

“I didn’t ask you that question,” Pinter said. “I never ask people that question. It’s a bloody stupid question.”

There was nothing I could say. I prepared to wait out the storm.

“How are you? How are you? What an insufferably silly question,” Pinter continued, bleating the phrase as though it were Baa-baa black sheep. “Sometimes I come into my office in the morning and I hear my secretary on the phone saying, ‘Fine, thank you,’ and I know the stupid question she’s just been asked.” His voice was turning into its familiar bark. “Why do people say it? Why? Such a pointless and ignorant question.”

A few people had gathered around us by now, spectators to the car crash. One of them, the novelist, Howard Jacobson, came to my aid. “Oh, come on Harold, it’s just a little social grease, helps make the wheels go round,” Howard said.

“Really? Do think you so?” Pinter said. “Well, I don’t. Bloody stupid question. I never ask it and I don’t expect people to ask it of me. Where’s my chair?”

A chair was found. The great playwright and Nobel laureate sat down. Slightly dazed by the assault (though it was only a mild one by Pinter’s standards), I wondered how harmony was to be reintroduced. And then a small miracle happened. My wife came forward and knelt at his feet. She’d been talking to a couple of women elsewhere in the room when Pinter came in and telling them how much she admired him as a playwright. The women said she should tell him that, he’d be pleased, and my wife, who had never met him, said she couldn’t possibly, but the women prevailed and so there she was, sitting suddenly at his feet and looking up and saying (so she told me later), “I was doing the ironing and listening to the BBC News when I heard you’d won the Nobel prize, and I put down the iron and cheered.”

I couldn’t hear my wife saying this. All I could tell was that Pinter had heard something that had utterly changed his mood, so that he now sat like a benign pope, listening and smiling to a supplicant in a pretty dress who was expressing her forthright (and sincere) admiration for his genius. The situation had been retrieved. We all went in to dinner. We ate and drank and I made my little speech, never turning to look at Pinter (whom I felt would certainly not be laughing). He was on the same side of the table and only a seat away. Over the coffee, I heard him saying to the woman between us, “How are you? How are you? Isn’t that a bloody silly question?” I thought then — not an original thought — that Pinter’s plays are often most easily explicable as a display of the playwright’s character; the sinister interrogations, the menace behind apparently innocent remarks, the capricious switches in mood, the brute power wielded over the weak — he found all these things in himself and then put them on stage, brilliantly.

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His plays are what we should remember him for. His anti-American politics may have helped win him the Nobel — the Swedish Academy is America-phobic — but to my mind they represented just as black-and-white a division of the world as George W. Bush’s. No shades of grey. The US was always an instrument of evil and never of good, and you don’t need to be an apologist for Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and Guantanamo Bay to see raging emotion at work here rather than reason. In any case, what were Pinter’s politics if you exclude his loathing of the US? To be fair, he spoke up for human rights everywhere, for imprisoned writers and victims of torture. But his opinions on less dramatic but more intractable problems remained unknown, at least to me. Economic globalization, the National Health Service, taxation, poverty: I never heard him speak of them. It would be hard to call him a ‘socialist’, no matter how much he may have disliked Mrs Thatcher. His reputation as a political writer came late, when he was in his fifties and sixties, and it owed more to his personal protest at American foreign policy than anything to be found in his plays.

And then of course there was his poetry. When personal — about cricket or his cancer — it was never less than interesting, but it became comically splenetic when the US was in the frame. His celebrity guaranteed publication of the briefest and crudest poem so long as it had his name attached to it. He would write the poem furiously, sometimes over a drink on a table napkin, and fax it off to newspapers, where editors would smile or scratch their heads and put it on the front page. I sometimes wondered if he realized how he was being mocked, and I was told no he didn’t, he was like Picasso in his last years, believing that his own signature elevated the simplest pencil marks to the level of genius. “Why does he hate America?” a friend of mine said. “Probably because it’s more powerful than he is.”

But, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, my last memory of Pinter is different. Our friend Simon Gray died in August and the funeral was arranged in a church near his home in Holland Park, west London, where Pinter also lived. Pinter was frail now, and had to be helped to the pulpit, where he climbed the steps slowly and then read aloud a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. He spoke gravely and clearly; if nobody understood the poem’s mystery, that was Eliot’s fault rather than Pinter’s. Then the mourners walked to Pinter’s house for the wake, the funeral drinks, which had been generously organized by Pinter’s wife, Lady Antonia Fraser.

It was a lovely August day. The party spilled from the house into the garden. People drank wine and fondly remembered their friend. As I was leaving, threading my way through the flower pots, Mrs Pinter called over and asked me to sit beside Harold for a while at their big garden table. I think her husband may even have patted the empty chair. I steeled myself: “How are you?” mustn’t escape my lips. “That was a terrific reading you gave in church,” I said. “Really tremendous.” “Yes, and it wasn’t easy you know,” Pinter said, looking at me firmly. “I can imagine how hard it must have been for you.” “Not easy, not at all easy,” Pinter said. There was just a tiny suggestion in his tone that I hadn’t quite grasped the difficulty of it, but after that things began to go very well. There were some wasps hovering over the table, which led to a conversation about wasps as they appeared in a play — it might have been one by Simon Gray. Pinter remembered how two characters are trying to get the right word for what wasps do: sting or bite? One character says finally, “No, they suck.” Pinter relished the word as he spoke it — making sucking sound the most evil thing. A young man sat down next to us, quite drunk, and suggested pompously that the wasp business in the play was metaphorical, didn’t Pinter agree? I waited apprehensively for the worst — ‘red rag’ and ‘bull’ were words that occurred to me — but Pinter replied quietly that no, he thought not. That was all. He sat in the sun for a few minutes more and then went carefully indoors for his afternoon nap. In that moment he was the epitome of gentleness. That quality, too, can be found in his plays. Every aspect of his strange self is inside them, and therefore of our strange selves. With his death the world has lost its greatest maker of modern theatre.