With due and high regard for John Donne, every man is an island. We make beachheads on these islands, advance with deceptive ease for a few hundred yards, and then run into an impenetrable rain forest. No modern playwright has been more acutely conscious of the resistant density of the human personality than Harold Pinter.
To interpret his plays, a good guide is a necessity. He exists in Martin Esslin (The Peopled Wound; Doubleday; $5.95). Author of The Theatre of the Absurd and Brecht: The Man and His Work, Esslin is a genial host of a critic. He shares an avant-garde playwright with his readers in the same enthusiastic way that he might recommend an excellent little restaurant slightly off the tourist track. The Peopled Wound is valuable not because it makes some intuitive new leap of insight but because it gathers in one convenient place most of what has been said and thought about Pinter. The son of a Jewish tailor, Pinter grew up in the congested, polyglot and intensely familistic world of London's East End. His mastery of English contains elements of a quasi alien's act of assimilative will, an acute tuning of the ear to the language of success and survival.
He lived in a tough neighborhood that was periodically invaded by Oswald Mosley's fascist bullyboys. Pinter remembers that as an adolescent, he had to run a gauntlet of broken milk bottles thrust menacingly at him. Not surprisingly, the boy's imagination was permeated by the Nazi massacre of the Jews. The threatened knock at the door, with the certainty of horrible punishment for an uncommitted crime, was a sound of terror in his mind before he ever recorded it on the stage.
Winning Humility. In approaching the substructure of Pinter's dramas, Esslin is appropriately psychoanalytical. To take a hard line on the "meaning" of a Pinter play is like taking a hard line on the meaning of a sunrise. In his play-by-play analysis, Esslin displays a winning humility. He is never arbitrary about imposing interpretations.
The core of a Pinter play is a room.
Whether or not it is a womb, it is a warm sanctuary from a cold external world. Two things tend to happen to the people in the room: expulsion or intrusion. Expulsion, in the larger sense, means being thrown out of Eden, out of a particular role, out of life. Intrusion means a violation of person and mind, a destruction of being.
A prevailing Pinter image is blindness, used to denote loss of potency, status or life. Women in the plays are almost always presented in either the image of the "mother/madonna/housewife" or the "whore/maenad." Sometimes they merge, as in the character of Ruth who, in The Homecoming, leaves her husband and three children to become a very businesslike whore in the employ of her husband's father and brothers.
The immediate reaction of many playgoers was that no wife and mother would behave that way. But, as Esslin keeps saying, Pinter is an existential playwright. His brief basic creed holds that human nature is not fixed and ordained, either by divine law or some ingrained edict governing the behavior of the species. Man instead defines himself in moment-to-moment acts that may be quite contradictory. This accounts for the breath-stopping power of the totally unexpected in a Pinter play.