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Pinter, Harold, 1930-
When Alan Bennett was asked for a fitting tribute to Harold Pinter (1930-2008) on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, he suggested two minutes' silence. If silence became the most famous element of Pinter's writing, then it was chiefly because he made it contain so much: confusion, rage, bemusement, humour and suffering. It was one of the principal aspects of a style that earned him a place in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: 'Pinteresque: of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the British playwright Harold Pinter'. His elisions and silences, along with his surreal borrowings from everyday speech, his use of slang and his demotic poetry, made him one of the most influential dramatists of the late twentieth century. With his unique and memorable style, he was able to summon up a world in which confused, displaced characters (usually male) struggle pointlessly against the dead weight of family, class, religion, work, romantic convention and the past. Profoundly influenced by Beckett, but also by John Webster, Kafka and Dostoevsky, Pinter blended terror and absurdity to expose the unspeakable futility at the heart of existence. The more this is appreciated, the less his characters can acknowledge it: 'The more acute the experience, the less articulate the expression', as Pinter put it. In his depiction of words as obstructing or confusing meaning, he was like his contemporaries Orton, Osborne and Stoppard. But his work lacked the intellectual relish of Stoppard, the seedy mischief of Orton and the superficial intelligibility of Osborne. He was more interested in leaving dilemmas unresolved and unexplained. His commitment to 'uncomfortable' theatre had an inestimable effect on late twentieth-century playwriting: notably on Steven Berkoff and David Mamet, but also on younger writers such as Patrick Marber, Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane.
Pinter was born at Hackney, in London, on 10 October 1930, the only child of Hyman Pinter, a tailor, and Frances Mann. Although his background was solidly working-class, the extended families of his parents offered him sharply contrasting responses to poverty and want. His father's relatives immersed themselves in music and culture: they had a keen appetite for art and literature. His mother's relations were borderline criminal, prizing the virtues of adaptation and survival. Pinter's maternal uncle was a bare-knuckle boxer who eventually severed all links with his family. These conflicting attitudes -- refinement and crudity, courtesy and aggression, writing and fighting -- would be detectable in all of Pinter's later work.
During the Second World War, Pinter was evacuated from London. Although this was a common enough occurrence, for Pinter the effects were devastating. As the only child of doting parents, he could not understand how separation from them was meant to be 'for his own good'. Certainly in his later plays he is haunted by the idea of illusory refuges and hidden traps. He was moved to a castle in Cornwall with a group of other children. As an adult, he obsessively revisited the area, as if to kill off -- or resuscitate -- personal demons. He went back in his late teens with one of his closest friends, Morris Wernick. He returned on his honeymoon with Vivien Merchant. He went back with his second wife, Antonia Fraser, to try and find the castle at Caerhays where he had stayed.
After a year in Cornwall, he returned to London, but was evacuated again: this time to Reading. In between he saw his neighbourhood repeatedly bombed. The East End was one of the main targets of Nazi bombing during the Blitz, and parts of Hackney were reduced to rubble. This unforgettable, harrowing vista of mass devastation and suffering had a huge impact on the young writer. It fostered his growing perception that civilisation and culture were precarious inventions: the threat of murderous violence was always present.
As the war reached its conclusion, Pinter was sent to Hackney Downs Grammar School. By all accounts, this was an Edenic period in Pinter's life. After the disruption of being an evacuee (and before the frustration of being an out-of-work actor), Pinter's schooldays were notable for their lack of tension. He was at the centre of a network of friends who stayed friends well into adult life. The security and intimacy of this group gave him an almost sacred regard for male bonds and an implicit distrust of female intrusion. Indeed, it was a protective shell in many ways. On more than one occasion, Pinter and the other Jewish members of the group were threatened by East End fascists. Together, the seven or eight friends could defend themselves.
It is impossible to tell how Pinter was influenced by his Jewishness. Even though he emerged unscathed from his brushes with British anti-Semites, he could not have been unaffected by the Holocaust and its aftermath. In a biography by Michael Billington (The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, 1996), Pinter admitted that there had been at least one occasion when he had accosted a man in a pub for saying: 'Hitler
didn't go far enough'. Moreover, his plays are about motiveless persecution. However, Pinter himself played down the effect of his ethnicity, stressing the assimilated nature of London Jews and the universal applicability of his writing.
Throughout his adolescence, Pinter read voraciously. He loved Joyce, Dostoevsky and Yeats. He also saw a seminal production of Webster's The White Devil at the Duchess Theatre in London. Partly because of this, he decided to apply for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) instead of considering university. Although he arrived with high hopes, his time at RADA was actually profoundly depressing. He did not like the theatricality and artificiality; he despised the teachers; he disliked his contemporaries ('poofs and ponces'). He lasted a year. He spent another year convincing his parents he was still a student while actually pursuing his own interests: reading, writing and acting. Then he was called up for National Service. Pinter, however, refused to consider military service, registering instead as a conscientious objector. At any time, this would have been a brave step, but in the early 1950s, in the aftermath of the war, with the British Empire crumbling, it was particularly hazardous. He was put in prison for brief periods. He was repeatedly fined. He fell out with both of his parents.
Hereafter Pinter spent most of his time acting. He toured with Anew McMaster's company in Ireland. He acted in Donald Wolfit's company in London. At the same time, he was writing two semi- autobiographical novels: The Queen of all the Fairies and The Dwarves. It seems that acting and writing were equally important to him. While touring in rep, he met Vivien Merchant, an up-and-coming young actress. They married in September 1956.
Pinter's background as an actor is hardly unusual in playwriting circles. In the Renaissance and Jacobean periods (which Pinter admired), it was common for a playwright to take the stage. In the twentieth century, Noel Coward had made the actor-playwright a common sight. Joe Orton, John Osborne, Alan Ayckbourn and Steven Berkoff all acted -- if not always in their own work. But Pinter's time as an actor had a unique and tangible effect on his work. Critics comment that his plays often seem like an actor's exercise: all ponderous phrases and mannered gestures. Others opine that he reverses the usual experience of theatre-going: the actors seem to know what's going on, the audience doesn't. But perhaps it is more accurate to say that Pinter was alive to the way in which all speech is borrowed speech, all activity is drama. He understood that whenever two people meet, they become actors: indeed we are actors even to ourselves; faking our past and our present circumstances for the sake of psychological equilibrium.
In 1956, Pinter's writing career really began. While he was acting in Rattigan's Separate Tables at the Pavilion Theatre in Torquay, he wrote his first play, The Room, about a dysfunctional couple in a bed-sit, and in May 1957 it was performed at Bristol in a converted squash court. Although Pinter's ascent to success was by no means smooth, especially after The Birthday Party flopped in 1958, it is from this date that his writing career should be charted, because from this first play and its successor, The Dumb Waiter, he emerged as a mature, fully formed talent with a range of recognisable, recurrent themes. In The Dumb Waiter for instance, two hit men wait in a room, while a small service lift shuttles down with a succession of orders ('Two braised steaks and chips. Two sago puddings. Two teas without sugar'). Since they do not yet know who they are meant to be killing, the hit men carry out the dumb waiter's instructions. As the play progresses, they start to bicker, fighting for conversational advantage, affirming and challenging their roles. Pinter's territory is established. On the surface, it seems like an obscure play: who are these men? Where are they from? Where are they now? But on the other hand, it is piece of sustained and shocking realism. This is what people do: wait, obey without question, talk without purpose. People's identities have to be pieced together and, even then, the composite image may be a fake. Words are less important than what lies behind them. Dialogues become a tense, ultimately futile battle for temporary supremacy.
From this point, it is possible to pinpoint key works in Pinter's writing career. The Birthday Party, written in 1957 and performed in 1958, was Pinter's first full-length play. It is set in a seaside boarding house. It centres on Stanley, a man who claims he used to be a brilliant young pianist, but who now does nothing except goad and exploit his sluttish landlady Meg. This state of affairs is overturned by the arrival of two strangers, Goldberg and McCann, who interrogate, humiliate and finally remove Stanley to an unknown location. What Stanley has actually done, what Goldberg and McCann represent, what conclusions we are meant to draw, remain deliberately unclear. In a public conversation with Mel Gussow in 1988, Pinter seemed to favour the interpretation which associates Goldberg and McCann with Old Testament and New Testament theology, bullying and demonising the individual: 'The play showed how the bastards, how religious forces ruin our lives.' But in reality, this is only half an explanation. Goldberg and McCann
past mistakes and missed opportunities, No Man's Land remains both a powerful reconsideration of old themes and a tentative attempt to consider why new themes are so difficult for writers to broach.
However Pinter did strike off in a new direction. Betrayal, written three years later, is more transparently autobiographical than its predecessor. Even without knowing anything about Pinter's private life (his marriage to Vivien Merchant had ended in divorce), it is easy to sense that the play is rooted in his own response to the emotional complexities and duplicities of middle age. The language is less stylised, more like normal speech. The people are middlebrow, middle-aged North Londoners, not Kafkaesque ciphers. The subject matter is quite conventional: an affair between Jerry and Emma. Emma is married to Jerry's best friend, Robert. Robert and Jerry continue to be friends throughout the affair. What makes the play Pinteresque and what makes it a valuable addition to his oeuvre is his handling of time: the relationship is played in reverse. In the first scene, the lovers meet again after four years. In the fourth scene, the lovers have split up. In the ninth scene, they have just got together. This technical experiment expertly conveys the dislocation and disorientation of adulterous sex, as well as bringing out the pathos of past things. When the lovers first fall in love, the audience already knows how it is going to end.
Moonlight was first performed fourteen years later in 1993. It was as if, after the emotional catharsis of Betrayal, Pinter had little motivation to write. Although he spent the 1980s experimenting with short plays and screenplays, he seemed to be unwilling to return to the ambitious complexities of full-length stage dramas like The Caretaker and Old Times. A clipped, enigmatic piece about the death of a suitably Pinteresque patriarch, Moonlight is in many ways a return to old territory. It does have some of the semi- autobiographical elements of Betrayal: especially the scenes in which the dying father, Andy, has difficulties relating to his estranged sons, Jake and Fred. Pinter himself has a troubled relationship with his son, Daniel. Also, like Betrayal, the subject is marital fidelity and infidelity. Death is traditionally seen as a time when wrongs can be righted. But are some crimes unforgivable? However, the mood of the play harks back to The Birthday Party and Old Times. Couples struggle for the upper hand. They fight for custody of the past. Even though he is ill, Andy lashes out at his wife, his mistress and his best friend. In earlier works, the male protagonist was pinned down by class or religion or poverty. Now he is pinned down by death. As ever, he struggles in vain to be free. Moonlight is a subdued, but suitable, coda to Pinter's career.
Of course, other works by Pinter should be mentioned. The Hothouse was written in the 1950s, but only published, and performed, in 1980. It is set in a scientific research laboratory and demonstrates, in Pinter's words, 'the indifference of this particular department to the human material on which it bases its deductions'. Again, the theme is menace and persecution by faceless institutions. The Lover is a short play first performed in 1963. It focuses on a middle-class man who spends his afternoons pretending to be his wife's mysterious lover. It shows how manipulative role-play is built into the very structures of affection. Pinter's screenplays should also be mentioned. Three of them (The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Servant and The Go-Between) are among the best in the genre. Others (The Handmaid's Tale, The Comfort of Strangers) are not as successful, but are still interesting, if only for Pinter's choice of source material. Perhaps most intriguing of all is Pinter's unsuccessful attempt to turn Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu into a film. His unfilmed screenplay was published in 1978. George Painter, Proust's biographer, called it 'a masterwork'. As well as being fascinating in its own right, it also sheds new light on Pinter's pre-occupation with memory, time and death in Old Times, No Man's Land and Betrayal.
Any discussion of Pinter's career also has to include his efforts as an actor and a director. Although principally a playwright -- and his plays represent his chief contribution to theatre -- he also spent forty years acting in and directing work as diverse as Joyce's Exiles, Coward's Blithe Spirit and David Mamet's Oleanna. Perhaps most importantly, he acted in his own plays. It is impossible to know whether we are meant to read anything into his choice of roles, but suffice it to say that he tends to play the talkative and sadistic torturer. He famously played Goldberg in The Birthday Party, Mick in The Caretaker and Lenny in The Homecoming. His style of direction was also influential, again particularly when he took on his own plays. Although acknowledged to be brilliant, he was also notorious cagey and pedantic about his scripts. A young Alan Ayckbourn was cast as Stanley in The Birthday Party at Scarborough Theatre in
- He asked Pinter about the character: 'Where does he come from? Where is he going to?' Pinter replied: 'Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what's there.' Later in his career, Michael Horden was playing Harry in Pinter's The Collection. After one performance, Pinter said exasperatedly: 'Michael, I wrote dot, dot, dot, and you're giving me dot, dot.' Horden duly made his pause slightly longer. This also seemed to foreshadow Pinter's erratum to the published edition of Moonlight. A pasted note on the front page read: 'Page One, Line One should read: I can't sleep. There's no moon. It's so dark.
I.' The original line read: 'I can't sleep. There's no moon. It's so dark, I.' Pinter had changed a comma to a full-stop.
Pinter's life came under media scrutiny when he left his first wife, Vivien Merchant, for Antonia Fraser, the wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament. He also had related problems with his children and stepchildren. Sometimes Pinter courted media interest by making political pronouncements; these started in the early 1970s with protests against American involvement in Chile and Russian crimes against political dissidents. They continued in the '80s and '90s with continuing attacks against government incompetence and inhumanity. However, by and large, Pinter remained a private and guarded writer, reacting angrily when interviewers tried to pry into his home life, or attach biographical significance to his work. He was well liked by his fellow performers and writers, and one of the passions of his life, perhaps surprisingly, was the game of cricket. He supported younger writers, but discreetly rather than publicly. He was unquestionably one of Britain's greatest writers during the second half of the twentieth century, feted internationally for his contribution to drama. Often imitated, but rarely equalled, he expertly conveyed the solitariness, complexity and darkness of modern life. Of course his plays are also funny: lively, riddling and absurd. But Pinter himself preferred to stress the seriousness of his endeavour. Responding to Leonard Russell's celebration of The Caretaker's humour, Pinter wrote: 'As far as I am concerned The Caretaker is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point, it ceases to be funny and it is because of that point that I wrote it.'
Pinter was diagnosed with cancer in 2002, but continued working, performing that year at the National Theatre in his political sketch Press Conference. Pinter then increasingly turned his attention away from plays to other forms, including poetry. A vehement critic of the foreign policy of the United States and Britain, he published a collection, WAR, in 2003, criticising the invasion of Iraq, for which he won the Wilfred Owen Award for poetry in 2004. In acknowledgement of Pinter's non-dramatic output, his collection Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics (1998) was reissued in 2005, covering the period 1948-2005 and including speeches, poems and articles.
In October 2005 Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In its citation for the award, the Swedish Academy described Pinter as 'the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the twentieth century', stating that his work 'uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms'. Unable to accept the award in person due to ill health, Pinter made full use of his pre-recorded acceptance speech, again haranguing both Britain and the United States over the decision to invade Iraq. A much-lauded and revered giant of the theatre, Harold Pinter finally lost his battle with cancer in 2008, dying on 24 December. Those wishing to know more about Harold Pinter's works would do well to consult Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History (2005), by William Baker and John C. Ross.
