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Harold Pinter

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Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (born October 10, 1930) is a British playwright and theatre director. He has written for theatre, radio, television and film. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.

Early life

Pinter was born in Hackney in London to working class Ashkenazi Jewish parents with possible Sephardi and Hungarian family links. (One of the family traditions claims that the name Pinter is changed from da Pinta or possibly Pinto, but Pinter himself has said in an ABC interview in 2002 that he might be Hungarian ('Pintér' is a typical Hungarian name)). He was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School and, briefly, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). He published poetry as a young man.

Career

Pinter began working in the theatre as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first play, The Room, was first performed by Bristol University students in 1957, including acclaimed actor Henry Woolf, who commissioned the play.

His second play (which is today one of his best-known), The Birthday Party (1957), was initially a flop, despite a positive review in the Sunday Times by leading theatre critic Harold Hobson. But after the success of The Caretaker in 1960, which established him, The Birthday Party was revived, and this time was well received.

These plays, and other early works such as The Homecoming (1964), have sometimes been labelled as displaying the "comedy of menace". They often take an apparently innocent situation, and reveal it as a threatening and absurd one because of characters acting in ways which may seem inexplicable both to the audience and, at times, to other characters. Pinter's work was marked by the influence of Samuel Beckett from the earliest works onwards, and the two men became long-standing friends.

Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973. His later plays tend to be shorter, often appearing as allegories of oppression.

He has been nominated for an Oscar for best adapted screenplay twice (The French Lieutenant's Woman, 1981, and Betrayal, 1983).

In January 2005 he announced that he was retiring from writing plays to dedicate himself to political campaigning.

Political campaigning

Pinter has been a champion of freedom of expression for many years through his association with International PEN. In 1985, he joined the American playwright Arthur Miller on an International PEN-Helsinki Watch Committee mission to Turkey to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met many victims of political oppression. At an American embassy function honouring Miller, instead of exchanging pleasantries, Pinter spoke of people having an electric current applied to their genitals—which got him thrown out. (Miller, in support, left the embassy with him.) Pinter's experience of oppression in Turkey and the suppression of the Kurdish language inspired his 1988 play Mountain Language.

Pinter strongly opposed the NATO bombing campaign on Yugoslavia, which he held was illegal, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He famously called President of the United States, George W. Bush a mass murderer and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair a 'deluded idiot'. He frequently writes political letters to British newspapers. He has likened the Bush administration to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying the U.S. was charging towards world domination while the American public and the United Kingdom's "mass-murdering" prime minister sat back and watched.

In his Nobel Prize Lecture Art, Truth & Politics (December 7, 2005) he asserts:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al-Qaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.
The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

Pinter is also an active delegate of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that defends Cuba, is supportive of the government of Fidel Castro, and campaigns against the U.S. embargo on the country. He is a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević, an organization which appealed for the freedom of Slobodan Milošević until Milošević's death in 2006.

Honours

Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood in 1996).

On October 13,2005 the Swedish Academy announced Pinter was the recipient of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, stating that, "in his plays [he] uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". Pinter, ailing from throat cancer, could not attend the Nobel Prize awards ceremony in Sweden, and chose instead to deliver his laureate lecture via satellite link on December 7, 2005. Speaking with obvious difficulty, and seated in a wheelchair, he attacked the United States for having "supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War." Tying in his political stance with literature, Pinter spoke about the search for the truth in both literature and politics. The United States is the "greatest show on the road," said Pinter, because it masquerades an aggressive foreign policy with the rhetoric of freedom. For example, of the use by American politicians of the phrase "the American people" Pinter said, "language is actually employed to keep thought at bay." He also attacked Great Britain and the United States over the Iraq war, and demanded war crimes prosecution of Tony Blair.

Neoconservative UK writer Christopher Hitchens disputed the awarding of Pinter by commenting: "...the ludicrous elevation of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq" (Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2005).


Personal life

Vivian Merchant, who was probably best known for her performance in Alfie, was Pinter's first wife; they married in 1956.

She appeared in many of his works, notably The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973). Their marriage began disintegrating in the mid-1960s and Pinter left Merchant suddenly in 1977 to live with historian Lady Antonia Fraser, daughter of the 7th Earl Longford, who left her husband, Sir Hugh Fraser.

Harold Pinter had also been unfaithful with Joan Bakewell previously, about which he wrote the dramatic play, Betrayal, which ended up on Broadway.

Merchant went public about her distress, and famously told the press that Pinter had not taken many clothes with him; but, she quipped, if he didn't have any shoes to wear, he could always borrow Fraser's: "She has very big feet, you know."

However, Merchant never got over the dissolution of her marriage, which finally came about in 1980, and her premature death at the age of 54 on October 3, 1983 was brought about by acute alcoholism.

Miscellaneous

Pinter is the chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club. He is also an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

On October 13,2005 (the day his Nobel Prize was announced) Pinter was erroneously reported dead on Sky News. (This may have been because he has been suffering from throat cancer for several years, and also injured his head in a fall shortly before the report.)

His unique brand of drama has been given the name Pinteresque, thus placing him in the company of a few select authors who have been unique or influential enough to become adjectives (see: Brechtian, Joycean, Kafkaesque, and Orwellian).

His play "Betrayal" was made into a Seinfeld episode also called "The Betrayal". Like the play, the episode goes in reverse, and it features a character named "Pinter". The play itself features a character named "Jerry", the first name of the main character on Seinfeld.

Works

Plays

Sketches

  • The Black and White (1959)
  • Trouble in the Works (1959)
  • Last to Go (1959)
  • Request Stop (1959)
  • Special Offer (1959)
  • That's Your Trouble (1959)
  • That's All (1959)
  • Interview (1959
  • Applicant (1959)
  • Dialogue Three (1959)
  • Night (1969)
  • Precisely (1983)
  • Press Conference (2002)

Radio

  • Voices (2005)

Films

Prose

  • Kullus (1949)
  • The Dwarfs (1952-56)
  • Latest Reports from the Stock Exchange (1953)
  • The Black and White (1954-55)
  • The Examination (1955)
  • Tea Party (1963)
  • The Coast (1975)
  • Problem (1976)
  • Lola (1977)
  • Short Story (1995)
  • Girls (1995)
  • Sorry About This (1999)
  • God's District (1997)
  • Tess (2000)
  • Voices in the Tunnel (2001)
  • "Death etc." (2005)

Poetry

  • Poems (1971)
  • I Know the Place (1977)
  • Poems and Prose 1949-1977 (1978)
  • Ten Early Poems (1990)
  • 100 Poems by 100 Poets (1992)
  • Collected Poems and Prose (1995)
  • "The Disappeared" and Other Poems (2002)
  • War (2003)
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