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Harold Pinter was speaking to the press just after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. "I was told today that one of the Sky channels [the satellite news network owned by Rupert Murdoch] said this morning that Harold Pinter is dead.' Then they changed their mind and said, 'No, he's won the Nobel Prize.' So I've risen from the dead."
This true-life joke is repeated in Charlie Kaufman's film about a madly ambitious theater man, Synecdoche, New York. So people have been anticipating the death of one of the 20th century's most revered and mysterious playwrights — the near equal to his fellow Nobelist Samuel Beckett, with plays that achieved far more commercial success than Beckett's — for quite some time. Now they can stop. Pinter, who had long been ailing from cancer, died on Christmas Eve at 78. (See the top 10 plays and musicals of 2008.)
The most appropriate tribute would be an hour and a half of silence. For Pinter was the master, virtually the copyright holder, of the pregnant pause that never gives birth. Words hurt in his plays, but the withholding of them can inflict deeper wounds — on the characters in his plays and on some of perplexed members of the audience. "Pinteresque" came to suggest an edgy break in an uncomfortable conversation, and the playwright tended to these ellipses like a doting mother. "I did change a silence to a pause," he said about a scene in one of his plays. "It was a rewrite."
In such acclaimed plays as The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1966), Old Times (1971), No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal (1971), Pinter radically altered and energized the traditional dynamic of the stage. It was no longer simply the place where people spoke; it was where not speaking could be far more suggestive, dangerous, theatrical, eloquent. Like Beckett, he renounced the flossy rhetoric of such postwar playwrights as Christopher Fry and Jean Anouilh for a back-to-basics starkness — a two-men-on-a-stage simplicity that Aeschylus would have admired. In its citation, the Swedish Academy said Pinter "restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles."
This unease was a handsome fit for serious drama in the early Atomic Age. When the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. both had The Bomb, what was the point in pretense or courtesy? Pinter's quietly murderous insolence was the theatrical equivalent to Nikita Khrushchev's shoe-banging at the United Nations. Good manners were the creamy lie the great powers poured on the toxic gruel of their realpolitik. The only counteroffensive was to write plays in which people misbehaved, tortured each other; for the postwar generation, writing what the Cambridge Review called his "skull-beneath-the-skin" plays, he was the Pinter of Our Discontent. Back then, his works were taken as murky dramas; now they look like snarky, superior comedies of bad manners. (Pinter half-acknowledged this reading of his works, saying that The Caretaker was "funny, up to a point.")
When Mel Gussow, the New York Times theater critic who was Pinter's most assiduous American promoter, asked the author, "Do your plays have more to do with your life than we know?", he replied, "They have more to do with my life than I know." In other words, an artist, no matter his aim, is always writing his autobiography. He could also have said that each production of a play creates its own unique meaning. When Old Times had its premiere in London, with Colin Blakeley, Vivien Merchant and Dorothy Tutin as the threesome, it seemed the story of a man victimized by two women; in the Broadway version later that year, when the stars were Robert Shaw, Dorothy Tutin and Mary Ure, the man seemed the predator, the women his prey.
Both times, though, they were splendid eviscerations of married life. So we may say that "meaning" doesn't matter if the work creates its own world, if it lives onstage, as Pinter's plays so vibrantly and mischievously did. Under all the mysterioso legerdemain, he was the Shakespeare of rhetorical bullying. The bickering men in The Caretaker and Old Times, the quarreling couples in Old Times and Betrayal, the desperate or rancorous family in The Birthday Party and The Homecoming — the rivalries and recriminations of all these mean creatures sparked instant and lasting theatrical pyrotechnics. Who could ask for more of a modern playwright?
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How Pinter Became Pinteresque
He was born Oct. 10, 1930, in Hackney, London, into what he called "a very respectable, Jewish, lower-middle-class family"; his father Jack was a ladies' tailor. At Hackney Downs School, perceptive teachers nurtured Harold's talent for writing. He was also mad for sports, especially cricket, which would prove a lifelong passion. In his 50s he said that his "three main interests" were family, work and cricket.
Instead of university, Pinter turned to the theater for his advanced schooling. Hating his time at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (and registering as a conscientious objector when he was called up for national service), Pinter escaped into regional theater, where he played in repertory for a dozen years. The man who much later reputedly turned down a knighthood rather than align himself with the British government once acted like a baron: David Baron was his stage name. (He would keep acting, off and on, for the rest of his life.) It allowed him to prep for the stage characters he would create, since, as he told Gussow, "I always played the sinister parts." In 1956 he married Merchant, an actress whose acute rendition of spiky hauteur made her the perfect interpreter of such Pinter women as the "wife" in The Homecoming. In 1980 he would leave her for the novelist-historian Lady Antonia Fraser. Within three years Merchant had drunk herself to death.
Like John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Alan Sillitoe and other novelists and dramatists in what was dubbed the "Angry Young Men" group (after Osborne's 1956 play Look Back in Anger), Pinter was not a product of the Oxford-Cambridge factory for leaders in politics, industry and the arts. Being neither born nor bred into the upper class, these writers made class their theme: the resentment and suspicion the unders had for the uppers, which Pinter stripped of overt political references and flipped into the power that one person exercises with cool brutality over another. The TIME description of his script for the 1963 film The Servant — that it was "acid splashed into the wound of class distinction" — could apply to much of Pinter's work: an outsider's unblinking view of the sadism with which the haves humiliate the have-nots.
He reached an early maturity with his second full-length play, The Caretaker, which the Lord Chamberlain, the British censor, called "a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett" — unintentional high praise indeed. It's the tale of an old homeless man, Jenkins (played onstage and in the excellent 1963 film version by Donald Pleasance), who is brought to the home of the simple-minded Aston (Robert Shaw) and his conniving brother Mick (Alan Bates). Jenkins begins as the ratty interloper but becomes sympathetic by default as the brothers play their mind games. The plot fits the contours of a standard nightmare: being invited into a place where you are misled and mistreated.
You could call The Caretaker an Old Dark House horror movie, where a ghost comes in to haunt the humans and is scared away by their calculated nastiness. It's also Pinter's first political play: Jenkins is a refugee, poor and tired, the very definition of wretched refuse. Aston, who as a teenager was submitted to shock therapy, leaving him effectively lobotomized, can be seen as a victim of state-sponsored torture. And Mick is the bluff overlord, cracking jokes as he metaphorically cracks skulls.
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Pinter's plays perplexed not because they withheld information but because what was onstage didn't always scan logically. In The Homecoming, for instance: the philosophy professor — at least that's what he says he is — returns to his boyhood home, bringing a woman he describes as his wife of nine years. Yet his two brothers, their father and an uncle seem surprised at the news. Has the professor been out of touch for so long he hasn't told them he's married? Is she his wife, or perhaps a woman he's engaged to as a test of men's sexual predation? Pinter would tell you to figure it out for yourself, or don't bother figuring. Looked at today, the play makes perfect sense as Pinter's ribald, misanthropic version of Snow White, with the father and brothers as the dwarfs and the "husband" as her Prince Charming. And the wicked witch with the poisoned apple? Pinter, presenting his play.
One way the powerful intimidated their victims was to accuse them of being unclean — tidiness being a mid-1950s British preoccupation. In Mick's first chat with Jenkins, he accuses the old man of "stinking the place out," and he ends his final diatribe by saying, "And to put the old tin lid on it, you stink from arsehole to breakfast time." Wendy Craig, as the young employer's upper-class fiancée in The Servant, turns her sneering attention to the new butler (Dirk Bogarde) and asks him, "Do you use a deodorant? Do you think you go well with the color scheme?" The father in The Homecoming calls his new lady guest "a stinking pox-ridden slut" as well as a slop bucket and a bedpan. "Take that disease away from me," he commands.
Though his plays became sparer and less frequent, he remained an industrious producer of scripts, especially for the movies. Assigned all manner of British novels to adapt, he turned virtually all of them — The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater, The Quiller Memorandum, Accident, The Go-Between, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Handmaid's Tale — into parables of class inequity and betrayed alliances. (He also did a starchy version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and, for his last script, an ugly botch of the Anthony Shaffer thriller Sleuth.) He directed other men's plays, notably Simon Gray's (Butley), and appeared frequently onstage and screen. The man kept busy.
Meaning What?
"I can sum up none of my plays," he protested. "I can describe none of them, except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did." The meaning of his plays was the Deep Throat that Pinter died without divulging. But maybe he was reluctant to say what what his plays "meant" or what the figures in them symbolized because he didn't know — that he was not so much their author as their midwife, and that to explain the process, to himself or others, would rob him of the freedom of encountering them and putting them on paper. In his Nobel speech, which tried to explain his method of evasion, Pinter said, "It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's bluff, hide-and-seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort."
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In later years Pinter and his plays became more overtly political — the mean men now had jobs in government embassies and prisons. He sought further refinement, a paring down to the essence in poetry that explicitly condemned U.S. government militarism. In The Bombs: "Here they go again/ The Yanks in their armored parade/ Chanting their ballads of joy/ As they gallop across the big world/ Praising America's God./ The gutters are clogged with the dead."
But in his Nobel year, 2005, when he was wracked with infirmities, he could still distinguish politics from life. "When my wife Antonia is pouring my cranberry juice in the morning," he said, "I don't regard that as a political act. Nor am I thinking politically at the time, though I do have the Guardian to my left hand and the cranberry juice to my right. But Antonia's act of passing the cranberry juice to me is an act of married love. I should say that, without her, I couldn't have coped over the last few years. I'm a very lucky man in every respect."
Pinter did not consider his fellow inhabitants of the world lucky, especially those squirming under tyranny's boot. That sense of moral outrage made his political statements more surgically excoriating. His Nobel speech included a bitter reprise of U.S. foreign policy, which he saw as criminal; and he puckishly offered his services as George W. Bush's speechwriter, with this as an audition text for the President: "My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians." Though the cancer had made his voice weak and raspy, Pinter had not forgotten the lessons of his years in repertory; the consummate actor delivered his screed with understated power.
Though it was not his final performance (he did Beckett's monologue Krapp's Last Tape from a motorized wheelchair at the Royal Court in 2006), the Nobel speech was the last great play of a man who knew the value of silence, the importance of speaking out.
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- The Nobel-winning master of quiet malice dies at 78