Harold Pinter, one of the true greats, dead at 78

[blp]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/25/harold-pinter-dies

One of the greatest dramatists of the 20th Century. Certainly my favourite and one of the few famous people I might have liked to meet one day, however long the odds of that happening. I feel genuinely sad.

But hey, at least this might mean a retrospective of his work on the BBC this year. Controller willing.

Some clips:

A scene from The Birthday Party (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZxt2rqBoAc&feature=related). This is the film version. There's actually a better TV version in which Pinter appears himself as Goldberg. But the casting of McCann here is very good.

A scene from The Homecoming (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv4-XI1hD9o&feature=related).

Here's one of his seventies TV plays (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPxLEAfjdIY&feature=related), for those of you who don't have UK TV. No guarantee of that retrospective anyway. I haven't seen this yet, so can't vouch for it, but it was the only thing I could find complete on Youtube.

Excepts from a very great speech at the National Student Drama Festival, Bristol, 1962:

'I'm not a theorist. I'm not an authoritative or reliable commentator on the dramatic scene, the social scene, any scene. I write plays, when I can manage it, and that's all. That's the sum of it. So I'm speaking with some reluctance, knowing that there are at least twenty-four possible aspects of any single statement, depending on where you're standing at the time or what the weather's like. A categorical statement I find will never stay where it is and be finite. It will immediately be subject to modification by the other twenty-three possibilities of it. No statement I make, therefore, should be interpreted as final and definitive. One or two of them may sound final and definitive, they may even be almost final and definitive, but I won't regard them as such tomorrow, and I wouldn't like you to do so today.'

On an early performance in Dusseldorf:
'I was at once booed violently by what must have been the finest collection of booers in the world. I thought they were using megaphones, but it was pure mouth. The cast was as dogged as the audience, however, and we took thirty-four curtain calls, all to boos.'

'What I write has absolutely no obligation to anything other than itself.'

'A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.'

'Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not impossibility, of verifying the past... If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can, I think, treat the present in the same way. What's happening now? We won't know until tomorrow or in six months' time, and we won't know then...'

'The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear.'

Any my favourite bit by far:

'We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase: "Failure of Communication"... and this phrase has been fixed to my work quite consistently. I believe the contrary. I think we communicate only too well...'

The whole thing is worth quoting, but that would probably be illegal and anyway I haven't got the patience to type it all out.

Thanks for everything, Harold.

[shortstoryfan]

This is rather sad. I've never read any of his works, but I remember when I first about him, in a drama class, and the "Pinter pause". I'll have to get myself in gear and read some of his plays now.

[mortalterror]

He was very good, one of the few modern Nobel Prize winners who I think deserved the award. However, I believe he got it for his anti-war work more than for his writing. I wouldn't put him above Williams, Miller, or O'Neill, and he's certainly below his friend Beckett, but for the second half of the twentieth century he's definitely one of the front runners. I don't have any trouble considering him alongside the previously mentioned authors and others like Pirandello or Sartre. I don't know that he'll last as long as Shaw, but The Dumb Waiter was very good.

If anyone wants to see some good interviews of Pinter, Charlie Rose interviewed him in two hour long segments, and all of Rose's shows are available free on Google Video.

[Jozanny]

Sadly, I have never experienced Pinter in the theater, because my forays into performance were mainly during university, and then some short stints at Wilma while I still had a real career, but Pinter is constantly discussed as someone who changed theater itself, and I did happen to see his interview with Rose, but that seemed to drift off into Pinter's leftist stance, more than not. He said he would never write another play.

I do wonder though: Is it that he made Beckett relevant to modern audiences?

[blp]

He was very good, one of the few modern Nobel Prize winners who I think deserved the award. However, I believe he got it for his anti-war work more than for his writing.

His Nobel Prize was for literature. At the time, he was writing anti-war poems protesting the War in Iraq. They were widely criticised as being lacking in literary merit, trite and overly reliant on obscenities. The suggestion that it was this that he got his prize for this work was made by him, mainly, I think, as a jokey response to his detractors.


I wouldn't put him above Williams, Miller, or O'Neill, and he's certainly below his friend Beckett, but for the second half of the twentieth century he's definitely one of the front runners. I don't have any trouble considering him alongside the previously mentioned authors and others like Pirandello or Sartre. I don't know that he'll last as long as Shaw, but The Dumb Waiter was very good.

So are The Birthday Party, The Homecoming and Old Times, to name a few.

For some reason I can't resist engaging in this comparison game: I think Pinter's better than either Williams or O'Neill, both of whom date a lot less well and can end up ridiculous when they want to be gut wrenching.

[blp]

I do wonder though: Is it that he made Beckett relevant to modern audiences?

Beckett's a huge influence on Pinter, but a lot of their work is contemporaneous and I wouldn't say one was more relevant to modern audiences than the other.

[Niamh]

What!!! Harold Pinter died! Cant believe it! He has had a long battle with cancer. may his soul rest in peace.
The Gate will be playing his works more often than usual now. They always have a Pinter on every year.

[TheFifthElement]

Would that we all had such a legacy as Pinter has left. May he rest in peace.

[Ron Price]

I feel as a citizen of the world that I have a responsibility, to the best of my ability, to find out what is going on, to be vigilant, to speak about it, to act on it. My poetic writing is an expression of this action, this speaking, this finding out. It allows me to confront the issues which concern me. It also allows me to celebrate life, to set the living language of poetry, of art, against the dead prose of so many places, to challenge the established views of society and oppose them with the power of my own imagination; and to enjoy the private, solitary side of my life. My religious commitment is also an expression of this trying to find out what is going on, but in a different way; so is a plethora of acts in my daily life. As we strive to understand what is going on we must keep in mind that we often will not know until tomorrow, or in six months time. By then we might have forgotten or have our imagination attribute false chacteristics to the past event. The following poem is a meditation on the question of finding out what is going on. -Ron Price with thanks to Penelope Prentice, The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic, Garland Pub., Inc., NY, 1994.

What is going on? you ask.
Well, there is a question
of such immense complexity,
such staggering fascination,
that this poetic opus can be
filled again and again until
I leave this mortal coil and
confront and celebrate in the
privacy of my chamber until
tomorrow and tomorrow and
tomorow become yesterdays
and my metaphysic,
my epistomology,
my ontology,
my weltanschaung,
meets yours in what seems to me
a never-ending journey or, more
often, on a trip that goes absolutely
nowhere, fast, or so it often seeems,
eh, Harold: I wonder if you have gone
nowhere, Harold: time will tell, yes....

Ron Price
3 August 2000

[Mr. Vandemar]

I was in a production of "One for the Road".

[mayneverhave]

Great. The one living writer that I actually liked is no longer living.

[blp]

Great. The one living writer that I actually liked is no longer living.

That's it, isn't it? He was also the last living link I can think of to Modernism and the foremost proponent of the great, iconoclastic tradition of absurdist drama that came out of that.

It's a hard act to follow and I don't think it's been adequately followed yet. Younger writers for theater have either gone kind of po-mo and fantastical, returned to realism or got stuck in sub-Pinterisms on the order of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Jez Butterworth, the little clutch of writers who hit it big briefly in the nineties. Kane was the only one who might have had staying power, though I disliked her work, but she killed herself. The other two have faded away, mainly, I think, because they didn't have voices of their own, just a shallow ability to mimic the Pinter manner, with none of the tension, oddness and surprise of his work.

I always think Pinter and the painter Francis Bacon are sort of artistic equivalents. Pinter said he only met Bacon once at a dinner for three arranged by another man. At some point, the other man left and Pinter asked Bacon who he was. No idea, said Bacon, I thought you knew him. Not me, said Pinter, I thought he was a friend of yours.

MEG. Was it nice?
STANLEY. What?
MEG. The fried bread.
STANLEY. Succulent.
MEG. You shouldn't say that word.
STANLEY. What word?
MEG. That word you said.
STANLEY. What, succulent--?
MEG. Don't say it!

-- From The Birthday Party

[mortalterror]

It's a hard act to follow and I don't think it's been adequately followed yet. Younger writers for theater have either gone kind of po-mo and fantastical, returned to realism or got stuck in sub-Pinterisms on the order of Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Jez Butterworth, the little clutch of writers who hit it big briefly in the nineties. Kane was the only one who might have had staying power, though I disliked her work, but she killed herself. The other two have faded away, mainly, I think, because they didn't have voices of their own, just a shallow ability to mimic the Pinter manner, with none of the tension, oddness and surprise of his work.

I take it you don't think much of Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, or Peter Shaffer?

[blp]

I take it you don't think much of Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, or Peter Shaffer?

At a glance, that looks a pretty big assumption, but maybe it's based on a misunderstanding. It's true that I don't think much of Kushner and it's so long since I've seen Equus that it wouldn't be fair to say comment on Shaffer, though I remember it favourably. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf seems pretty much as good to me as anything in Pinter. Stoppard's a clever writer, but really really not to my taste. I dunno. Pinter, with a lot of pointers from Beckett admittedly, created a poetics, a new mode of language. I don't think any of the others have his strength of voice.

But all of these people, except for Kushner, are pretty much the same generation as Pinter. They weren't trying to follow his act. I meant to refer to younger writers. Kushner was exactly who I had in mind when I was talking about po-mo fantastical writing.

[blp]

Here's a Guardian piece on this, with a slew of tributes from other playwrights:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2008/dec/27/harold-pinter-tributes-shakespeare-gambon
From the above:



David Edgar said Pinter would be remembered for his "brilliant" dialogue and uncompromising politics, as well as for works which illustrate "the power of metaphor - quite strong, still shocking metaphor" in a society that had come to view drama in increasingly literal terms.

I like the attack on increasing literalism, but it seems wrong to me to suggest that metaphor is the only alternative or that that was what Pinter employed.

[amalia1985]

It is writers such as him that achieve true immortality. One of the greatest...Where can one start? The Caretaker, The Lover, The Dwarves...

[mortalterror]

It is writers such as him that achieve true immortality. One of the greatest...Where can one start? The Caretaker, The Lover, The Dwarves...

I don't think there is such a thing as true immortality in literature. I prefer to think of books as having life cycles. A Shakespeare or a Dante might live about five thousand years I'm guessing, but even they will eventually pass into obscurity, since new Dantes and Shakespeares will spring up, and people can't read everything. Aeschylus is rarely read these days, a mere twenty-four centuries later, and he is a much better playwright than Pinter. I'm guessing that Pinter will have a shelf-life of about two or three centuries, before he's only read by specialists on our time, which is very good but not incredible.

[Sepulchrave]

Terrible news.

The Homecoming really stuck with me -- I can still remember some scenes vividly, years later. I also really liked the concept and execution behind The Lover. He's not my favourite playwright, but I really respect his distinctive style and skill.

[Farah786]

what did you guys think of sleuth??

[optimisticnad]

This is heartbreaking. I love Pinter's work, love imitating him. gosh he was so bloody brillant.

[Ron Price]

One of English dramatist Harold Pinter's biographers, Michael Billington, says that "you don't live at home till your early twenties without developing an awareness of private space or a fear of unwanted invasion."1 This fear for me was limited because my parents had always given me lots of space to be myself. Invasion of my space was not a serious issue, although occasionally it did rear its head, ugly and otherwise.

Some of the young misspend their time. This misspending must be accomplished in some genuinely prodigal way: some form of low sensuality, vast laziness or generally accepted profligacy must be proven. In my case no misspending can be said to have occurred in my undergraduate youth to the age of 24, although I must admit to a degree of sensuality which some might consider low but which, after the passing of more than forty years (1968-2011), I consider more to be a search for relief from depression, a natural enough interest in the opposite sex and a rare giving way to the demands of my id.
---------------------
Billington goes on to write about Pinter's "rage against the world." It was also a rage for life, a rage to do something, to achieve something. With the onslaught of the depressive and then manic or hypomanic phase of my manic-depression, as early as September 1963, my life was inhabited by a certain rage as well. But by July-August 1964 the rage had died and I was plunged into the depressive side of my bi-polar tendency. Whatever rage, whatever manic, proclivities I exhibited in these early years of pioneering, 1962 to 1967, they were channelled for the most part into getting through my academic studies in history, philosophy, sociology and education; into one of four serious relationships or, perhaps more accurately, four minor flirtations, with young women at university and into a developing orientation to my new role as a pioneer. It is often, if not always, hard to know when something serious is serious and when it is a flirtation, a short term affair, something that is here today and gone tomorrow, just another name, however intimate, in the long road of one's days.

This is also true of political and religious interests; they are often as passing as the wind. I think that, except for a very few Christian evangelicals and Catholics whom I knew in my life, and they were indeed a small handful, most people had no political or religious affiliation whatsoever. The political and religious domain was not unlike the world of entertainment: just something to watch, very occasionally get involved in some way in the form of a demonstration, a letter of protest, perhaps an attendance at a church service at Christmas. It appeared, to me at least, not unlike a form of consumption, a form of shopping. Given the complexity of affairs and the great number of groups to choose from, such an orientation is not really surprising.
-----------------
In the late 1980s and early 1990s I taught English Literature at the Thornlie Tafe College in Perth WA. Harold Pinter’s plays played a prominent part in the programs. Most of the notes I now have come from those years that I taught Pinter’s plays. Pinter’s ideas and concepts left a mark on my mind and I continue, not so much to read his plays, but to study the criticism that continued to flow from the English-speaking world. I found this criticism to play a useful part in the analysis of my age.

Ron Price
January 10th 2004