Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate for Literature, was born October
10, 1930, in London's working-class Hackney district to Hyman and
Frances Pinter, Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to the United
Kingdom from Portugal. Hyman (known as "Jack") was a tailor
specializing in women's clothing and Frances was a homemaker. The
Pinters, whose families hailed from Odessa and Poland in the Russian
Empire, were part of a wave of Jewish emigration to the UK at the turn
of the last century. It was a community that revered learning and
culture. The Pinter family was close, and young Harold was traumatized
when, at the outbreak of World War II, he was evacuated from London to
Cornwall with other London children for a year to avoid becoming
casualties of German aerial bombing.Pinter has said that his encounter with anti-Semitism while growing up
was the fuse that ignited the organic process leading him to becoming a
playwright. As the Nobel Prize citation attests, Pinter developed into
the greatest English dramatist of the post-World War II era. The young
Pinter studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the
Central School of Speech and Drama. In 1950 he published several poems
and began working as a professional actor. Under the stage name David
Baron, he toured the Republic of Ireland with
Anew McMaster's Shakespearean repertory
company in 1951-52. Significantly for Pinter's future, 1951 not only
marked the debut of his career as a professional actor but also marked
the first performance of future Nobel Literature Laureate
Samuel Beckett's absurdist masterpiece
"Waiting for Godot." He next appeared with Sir
Donald Wolfit's theatrical company at the
King's Theatre, Hammersmith, for the 1953- 54 season before becoming a
player with various provincial repertory companies, including the
Birmingham Rep, until he gave himself over full-time to playwriting in
1959.Two significant events that would change Great Britain forever occurred
during his apprenticeship in provincial rep: (1) the Suez Crisis of
1955 that shattered the UK's pretensions to empire in a post-colonial
world and doomed the imperial generations represented by Prime Minister
Anthony Eden and his mentor
Winston Churchill, and (2) the
1956 premiere of John Osborne's
play "Look Back in Anger." The shattering of the United Kingdom's
complacency over imperialism meant that many successful people of
Pinter's generation, who normally would have become Tories upon
achieving some modicum of success, were disillusioned and drifted
towards Labour and the left. No longer would a working- class person,
if he so chose, have to be ashamed or stymied if eschewing becoming
middle-class or bourgeois. Osborne's play was the seminal work of the
"kitchen-sink" school of drama that would dominate English theater for
a decade, in which working-class life and struggles were dramatized.
The hegemony of this school of theater was such that for the first
time, a working-class or provincial accent became something treasured,
something to be proud of, as the former world was set firmly upon its
head. Even the great Laurence Olivier
turned his back on the commercial theater to assay Osbourne's Archie
Rice, a down-at-the-heels music hall performer, in "The Entertainer"
(1957).The kitchen-sink drama was a movement that Pinter would not be a part
of, though it did open the doors for working-class writers who, unlike
the working class-born Noël Coward, had no
interest in becoming bourgeois. The other major element in the cultural
milieu that forged Pinter was the Cold War, the absurdity of facing
doomsday everyday under the threat of The Bomb (the USSR had acquired
the means to produce a bomb through its atomic spy ring and exploded
its first A-bomb in 1949, thus ending the US monopoly on nuclear
weapons and making the Korean war, the suppression of an East Berlin
uprising and the squashing of the Hungarian Revolution practical, if
not possible). The Cold War gave legitimacy to the rise of the police
state, not in totalitarian countries but in the use of police-state
tactics in the western industrial democracies. To quote American poet'
Charles Bukowski', this was an era marked by "War All The Time," not
between two superpower behemoths but in everyday human relations,
poisoned as they were by the Cold War climate of absurdity, paranoia
and imminent holocaust.In 1953 the accused "atomic spies"
Julius Rosenberg and
Ethel Rosenberg were executed in the
United States when President
Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who
had overseen the liberation of Europe as Supreme Allied Commander
fighting the Nazi totalitarian menace, had refused clemency for even
Ethel, the mother of two small boys. It was a domestic drama -- a
woman's loyalty to her husband, her loss of not only her life but the
Issac-like evocative sacrifice of any normal life for her two children
when Eisenhower-Jehovah refused to stay the executioner's hand -- that
had combined with the felicities of affairs of state and world power
politics. The question of whether they were guilty or innocent--not
proven beyond a doubt in 1951, when they had been convicted in a trial
that was compared by many to the Stalinist show-trials that had
occurred in the Soviet Union and still occurred in the satellite
countries of the Warsaw Pact after World War II - gave rise to an
overwhelming fundamental question: What is real? Reality, as Hannah
Arendt had put it in "The Human Condition," is socially defined; that
is a given. But how about when that reality no longer makes sense, when
the individual cannot partake of the consensus demanded of him in the
1950s, whether conservative, middle-class, haute bourgeoisie or radical
left as dictated by some flaming Red party boss - a person struggling
with his own life? How does he answer the question: What is real? It is
a question that Pinter took upon himself to answer, and answered by
showing us there is no answer. In this quest, a genius arrived on the
world stage in the form of a player who decided to craft his own words,
for himself and his post-Holocaust, pre-Holocaust audience. When life
stops making sense, as it did in the 1940s when the global war against
fascism left 50 million dead and the modern industrial state was tasked
with the exigencies of mass- murder, and as it did in the 1950s when,
under the aegis of combating another totalitarian system a domestic
fascism in kind if not degree arose in the Anglo-Saxon countries with
their great gravital pull towards conformity within a shell of
consumerism, it still behooves a human being to try to understand the
human condition.In 1957 Bristol University staged Pinter's first play "The Room." He
had told a friend who worked in Bristol University's drama department
an idea he had for a play. The friend was so enamored of the idea that
he commissioned the work, with the proviso that a script be ready
within a week. Though he didn't believe he could meet his friend's
demands, Pinter wrote the one-act play in four days. "The Room" had all
the hallmarks of what would become known as "Pinteresque," in that it
had a mundane situation that gradually filled with menace and mystery
through the author's deliberate omission of an explanation or
motivation for the action on stage. It is ironic perhaps that an actor
would rid his script of motivation as "motivation" is the Holy Grail of
inwardly-directed actors such as those tutored in "The Method" in
America, but it was emblematic of the times that stated motivations
frequently masked other, starker, more id-like drives in people or in
nation-states that were beyond human comprehension in terms of being
rational. Modern society had become irrational, and motivations
post-Freud could be understood as a manifestation of Thanatos, the
Death Instinct. Imminent violence and power plays would become other
leitmotifs of Pinter's oeuvre.Pinter wrote a second one-act play in 1957, "The Dumb Waiter," an
absurdist drama concerning two hit men employed by a secret
organization to kill an unknown victim. It was with this play that
Pinter added an element of black comedy, mostly through his brilliant
use of dialog, which not only elucidated the killers' growing anxiety
but underscored the very absurdity of their situation. The play would
not be performed until 1960, after the staging of his first two
full-length plays, one a flop, and one a hit. His first full-length
play, "The Birthday Party," debuted at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in
1958. In the play the apathetic Stanley, the denizen of a dilapidated
boarding house, is visited by two men. The audience never learns their
motivation, but knows that Stanley is terrified of them. They organize
a birthday party for Stanley, who insists that it is not his birthday.
Pinter is following in the footsteps of the great absurdist Samuel
Beckett in that he steadfastly refuses to give clear motivations to his
characters, or rational explanations for the sake of his audience
(Pinter and Beckett became friends). The play, now considered a
masterpiece, flopped on its initial London run after being savaged by
critics. It was revived after Pinter's second full-length play, 1960's
"The Caretaker," established him as a major force in the
English-language theater.His early plays were rooted in the absurdism that became the major
theatrical paradigm on the European stage in the third quarter of the
20th century, after the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. The early
plays that made his reputation such as "The Homecoming" (1964) and his
middle-period work such as "No Man's Land" (1976) have been called
"comedies of menace." Typically, they use what at first seems like an
innocent situation and develop it into an absurd and threatening
environment through actions that usually are inexplicable to the
audience and sometimes even to the other characters in the play. A
Pinter drama is dark and claustrophobic. His language is full of
menacing pauses. The lives of Pinter's characters usually are revealed
to be stunted by guilt and horror. The duality and absurdity of
Pinter's theatrical world-view gave rise to the adjective
"Pinteresque," which took its place next to "Kafkaesque," a product of
the horrors of the first quarter of the century (Pinter would write the
screenplay for an adaption of Franz Kafka's
"The Trial".)Beginning in the 1960s, Pinter further enhanced his reputation as a
writer with his screenplays, particular his work with
Joseph Losey in
The Servant (1963) and
Accident (1967) (Losey planned an
adaptation of Marcel Proust's "Le Temps
Retrouve" and commissioned Pinter to write the screenplay. The film was
never made by Losey, but Pinter's screenplay was subsequently published
to great acclaim). His later screenplays, including his last produced
work with Losey,
The Go-Between (1971), are,
ironically, noted for their clarity. He was twice nominated for the
Academy Award as a screenwriter, for his adaptation of
John Fowles' labyrinthine novel into
the film
The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)
and for Betrayal (1983), his adaptation
of his own play. Such was the respect that Pinter was held that
Elia Kazan, one of the great film directors,
complained in his autobiography "A Life" (1988) that
The Last Tycoon (1976) producer
Sam Spiegel had such reverence for
Pinter that he would not let Kazan change his script.After the great plays of his early and mid-period, Pinter became more
overtly political. His later plays, which generally are shorter than
the plays from the period in which he made his reputation, typically
address political subjects and often are allegories on oppression. In
the late 1970s Pinter became more outspoken on political issues and is
decidedly of the left. He is passionately committed to human rights and
is not shy about bringing examples of oppression from client states
sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon democracies to the public's attention. In
2002 Pinter experienced what he described as a "personal nightmare"
when he had to undergo chemotherapy to treat a case of cancer of the
esophagus. The ordeal, which has been ongoing for three years,
triggered a personal metamorphosis in the man. "I've been through the
valley of the shadow of death," Pinter explained about his quickening.
"While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm
also a very changed man."In early 2005 Pinter declared in a radio interview that he was retiring
as a dramatist in favor of writing poetry: "I think I've stopped
writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29
plays. Isn't that enough?" Pinter has become an outspoken critic of
war. He was a bitter critic of the US-led intervention against
Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia
during President Bill Clinton's
administration and an even harsher critic of the US-led war in Iraq.
The fiercely anti- war Pinter has accused President
George W. Bush of being a "mass-murderer"
and has called British Prime Minister
Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" for
supporting US foreign policy. Pinter claimed immediately after the 9/11
attacks on New York City and the Pentagon that they were a requited
revenge for the destruction wrought on Afghanistan and Iraq by US
imperialism and its anti-Taliban policies and sanctions on Iraq. He has
publicly denounced the retaliatory U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the
unprovoked 2003 invasion of Iraq. Pinter likens the Bush administration
and Bush's America to Adolf Hitler and Nazi
Germany, claiming the US is bent on world hegemony. Controversially, he
has declared that the only difference between Nazi Germany and the
Stalinist Soviet Union is that the US is more hypocritical and has
better public relations.One cannot fault Pinter, in the political ring, for being inconsistent
or for jumping on a bandwagon. The man, as well as the artist, is a
person that sticks to his convictions. The award of the Nobel Prize for
Literature to Pinter just after he celebrated his 75th birthday was
completely unexpected by pundits handicapping the award. Turkish writer
Orhan Pamuk and Syrian poet Adonis were
considered the front-runners, as European writers recently had
dominated the award (Pinter's Nobel Prize makes it nine out of ten
times in the past ten years that a European writer has won, and the
second time in the past five years an English writer has banged the
gong), and it was felt the Academy would recognize a writer from
another continent, particularly one from Asia Minor. Thus, the award
can be seen as a not-so-veiled criticism of the United States in
general and President George W. Bush in particular by the Swedish
Academy. Because of Pinter's renouncing of the form of which he was a
master and his anointment of himself as a poet, in light of his volume
of poetry, "War" (2003) that denounces the Iraq War frequently in
vulgar, raw and unrythmic poetry that poses no threat to
William Butler Yeats or
W.H. Auden or
Robert Frost or Stevens, one must
consider that the Swedish Academy was giving the world's highest prize
for literature at least in part to a poet whose latest work was
fiercely anti-American and anti-imperialist.Despite being highly controversial, Pinter -- who was appointed a
Commander of the British Empire in 1966 (one step down from a
knighthood, an honor he subsequently turned down) -- was named a
Companion of Honour in 2002, an honor that does not carry a title. In
addition to writing poetry, acting and directing in the theater, Pinter
serves as the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, an affiliate of he
Club Cricket Conference. He also is active in the Cuba Solidarity
Campaign, an organization that supports
Fidel Castro, who remains the #1
bugaboo of the United States after Islamic terrorists, just slightly
ahead of fellow hemispheric boogeyman
Hugo Chávez, a recent arriviste on the world
stage. He also is a member of the International Committee to Defend
Slobodan Milosevic, an organization that appeals for the freedom of
Slobodan Milosevic on the grounds that NATO's war against Milosevic's
Yugoslavia was unjustified under international law.