Pinter in winter
Before he took up full-time America-hectoring (and awful poetry), Harold Pinter was the greatest playwright of his time. Buried in his speech to the Swedes last month is a hint at how he succeeded in the first phase of his public life:
I always start a play by calling the characters A, B and C.
In the play that became The Homecoming I saw a man enter a stark room and ask his question of a younger man sitting on an ugly sofa reading a racing paper. I somehow suspected that A was a father and that B was his son, but I had no proof. This was however confirmed a short time later when B (later to become Lenny) says to A (later to become Max), ‘Dad, do you mind if I change the subject? I want to ask you something. The dinner we had before, what was the name of it? What do you call it? Why don’t you buy a dog? You’re a dog cook. Honest. You think you’re cooking for a lot of dogs.’ So since B calls A ‘Dad’ it seemed to me reasonable to assume that they were father and son. A was also clearly the cook and his cooking did not seem to be held in high regard. Did this mean that there was no mother? I didn’t know. But, as I told myself at the time, our beginnings never know our ends.
Most plays, including great ones, are steeped in context. Even for today’s audiences it’s something of a contractual given that, when characters are introduced, clear backgrounds and objectives usually follow (however gradually). Pinter generally does the opposite. His characters are introduced with about as much information as you’re likely to get, and from there they become murkier. They discourse on random subjects, they make brazenly implausible statements, and they contradict themselves. But his plays are popular, not obscure, and this is because they pulse with conflict. In them, someone is always trying to subordinate someone else, and the games, deceits and taunts deployed to that end have an inventiveness and surprise that could probably only be achieved through the free association that Pinter describes. In the post-Ibsen era, it takes a kind of aesthetic courage to set out writing a play whose object isn’t necessarily to make a point.
And sometimes, art that doesn’t try to make a point can say the most. I just read Old Times. Its endless non-sequiturs veer nearly into Dada at times; yet the wallop at the end, where a jolting revelation is made through the turning of someone’s back against the sound of piercing sobs, is as eloquent a statement of loss as anything a Kushner or David Hare might spend paragraphs of dialogue on. There have been intimations that the Nobel Committee wanted a slate of anti-Americans on the awards roster this year (you’d think that from the screed that takes up 90% of Pinter’s Nobel address). That may be partly true. But in Pinter’s case, art is still the winner.