Harold Pinter’s artistic achievement
By Paul Bond
World Socialist Web Site
When playwright Harold Pinter was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 2005, it produced anxiety within government circles in Britain. Pinter’s determined opposition to US and British foreign policy, and his resistance to the renewed imperialist carve-up of the globe centring on the war against Iraq, have brought attacks on him from many quarters. His fellow playwright David Hare noted that not a single party leader in Britain had congratulated Pinter on the award. This was hardly surprising, given the support the major parties in Britain gave to the US-led invasion of Iraq.
The Swedish Academy’s citation noted Pinter’s position as “the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century,” and recognised that his opposition to imperialist war and his dedication to freedom of speech and democratic rights “can be seen as a development of the early Pinter’s analyzing of threat and injustice.”
At the time of his acceptance lecture, the World Socialist Web Site commented that even certain sections of the media that had supported the war against Iraq, like the New York Times, were forced to acknowledge Pinter’s fiercely critical comments. But there was nevertheless a widespread effort to ignore Pinter. David Hare also noted that the lecture was neither broadcast by the BBC, nor even reported on their terrestrial news programmes.
There were those who went further, seeking to discredit Pinter. The most brazen piece, by Johann Hari in the Independent, ran under the title “Pinter does not deserve the Nobel Prize.” Writing before Pinter’s acceptance speech was broadcast by Channel 4, Hari asked whether anyone doubted that it would be “a rant.” Unless there was a new prize for “rage-induced incoherence,” wrote Hari, Pinter’s “ravings” should not be broadcast.
Hari explicitly attacked Pinter for his record of political opposition to the escalation of imperialist carnage in the Middle East and the Balkans. He criticised Pinter’s opposition to the imperialist show-trial of Slobodan Milosevic, for example, seeing it as impermissible to attack US and British imperialist intervention in the region. Pinter’s argument that Milosevic should be released until he is joined in war crimes trials by former US President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was derided by Hari, who lines up with those “decent people” who called for the arming of the Kosovo Liberation Army, without acknowledging the role played by inter-imperialist rivalries in deliberately whipping up ethno-chauvinist conflicts and dividing the region. Accordingly, Hari is scathing about Pinter’s factually impeccable appraisal of the KLA as “a bandit organisation.”
The main thrust of Hari’s attack was against Pinter’s politics. In the last 15 years, particularly, Pinter has been a vocal and trenchant critic of militarism and war and the erosion of democratic rights. Pinter has remained defiantly “off-message,” championing critical independence from government propaganda. For Hari, this is unforgivable, accusing the playwright of taking “a desirable political value—hatred of war, or distrust for his own government” and “absolutising” it.
As the Swedish Academy noted, Pinter’s hostility to oppression, militarism and war were intimately connected with his artistry. The same rage at injustice and oppression has fuelled his polemics against wars in the Gulf and the Balkans, his antiwar poetry, and his 29 plays. For Hari, therefore, the easiest way of attacking the politics was to belittle the art. Pinter, he wrote, has only “one literary accomplishment: he imported the surrealism of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Luis Buñuel into the staid English theatre.”
There is a lot to be said about this. For one thing, only Buñuel among these writers was ever formally a surrealist. Beckett was influenced by surrealism; Ionesco’s absurdism was antithetical to surrealism. (Early in his career, Pinter denied that he wrote symbolically, partly because critics tried to associate him with absurdism.) Hari’s intention becomes clear when he compares Pinter to Beckett. Beckett’s work is underpinned by “an elaborate existentialist philosophy,” whereas with Pinter, according to Hari, “if you turn on the light and switch off the atmospherics, you find...nothing, except a few commonplace insights.”
To supposedly illustrate this, he points to what Pinter has called “the most important line I’ve ever written.”
In The Birthday Party, when Stan is being taken away, Petey cries out, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do.” Pinter has said that he has lived that line “all my damn life. Never more than now.”
For Hari, this is “depressingly revealing”; the line is an “unobjectionable platitude” and Pinter’s point is “banal.” This comes from a man who believes it impermissible to denounce the British and US governments for their actions in the Balkans and Iraq. For a man who makes a living from parroting precisely the sort of propaganda Pinter has resisted to describe this comment as banal is merely impudent.
Hari notes that since Pinter’s formative years he has been a “relentlessly contrarian.” He acknowledges that some of Pinter’s targets have “really deserved it.” But no more. For Hari, supporting the Sandinistas against US-backed forces was heroic, but resisting the arming of the KLA was not. In particular, Hari is unable to reconcile Pinter’s early resistance to fascists in London with his subsequent critical independence.
Pinter was born in 1930 in Hackney, in northeast London, the son of a Jewish immigrant tailor. Throughout the 1930s, the area was a recruiting ground for fascists, and there was fierce resistance from migrant workers, leading often to violence. Pinter has often talked of the lasting impact his experiences of anti-Semitism at this time had on him. It also informed the work of actor Henry Woolf, the school friend from Hackney Downs School who produced Pinter’s earliest plays. Pinter was later fined for his refusal to do compulsory National Service in the army in 1949. For Hari, this opposition to militarism is another sin. Writing of an event that occurred four years after the end of World War II, he pontificates: “It is good to hate war, but to take this so far that you won’t resist Hitler and Stalin...is absurd.”
What is clear both from the Nobel citation and from Hari’s attack is the extent to which Pinter’s political thinking and his art are interlinked. Although he has written constantly throughout his career, he has never forced his work. It is surprising how few of his 29 plays are full-length pieces. He once said that “you write because there’s something you want to write, have to write.” From this vision of the necessity of artistic expression flows his confidence that you can “take a chance on the audience.” This is an increasingly rare trait and demonstrates a remarkable artistic independence in the present period. That he has been able to maintain this critical independence throughout a 50-year career marks him as quite extraordinary.
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