A great writer and champion of the oppressed: Nobel laureate Pinter
By Michael Billington
LONDON: When Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1969, his wife described the news as a catastrophe. For Harold Pinter, even though it means an inevitable invasion of his cherished privacy, the news that he is this year’s Nobel winner comes as confirmation of his international status.
In Britain Pinter is ritually described as an ‘angry old man’. In the world at large he is seen as a great writer and champion of the oppressed.
The gulf between the understanding and appreciation of Pinter at home and abroad is astonishing. Travel to virtually any country in the world and you will find a Pinter play in production.
And last weekend at the Gate Theatre in Dublin it was moving to see an audience spontaneously rising to honour the man and his work. At the end of an evening of readings from a lifetime’s plays, poetry and prose, the 75-year-old Pinter looked visibly rejuvenated by the acclaim. Why, one wondered, was this not happening in Britain?
One answer may be that we think writers should keep out of politics. We still revive Pinter’s earlier work like The Caretaker and The Homecoming. We also periodically stage mid-period plays, such as Old Times and No Man’s Land, dealing with the subjectivity of memory and the uncertainty of existence.
But Pinter’s later, overtly political work, such as One For The Road, Mountain Language, Party Time and Ashes to Ashes, has fallen into a strange limbo. And Pinter’s espousal of political causes — from his vocal protests over the Israeli government’s illegal abduction of Mordechai Vanunu to his comprehensive attacks on American foreign policy — is seen by many as an unfortunate aberration.
What we fail to appreciate is that Pinter’s politics are inseparable from his life and work. For Pinter, politics and the personal are indivisible. That is what the Nobel committee seems to have instinctively understood. In its citation, it says Pinter’s work ‘uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms’. Whoever wrote that has got the precise point.
In Pinter’s dialogue no exchange is ever innocent: there is always a battle for power being conducted on the edge of an
abyss. But equally Pinter’s later plays reveal the insecurity, panic and hypocrisy that lie behind the stony masks of political authority.
But what will the Nobel prize mean to Pinter? The prize-money itself — $1.3m (£723,000) — is welcome but is hardly the issue. What I suspect matters more is that Pinter’s constant campaign against the devaluation of language — particularly words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ — and his moral opposition to the abuse of human rights, has been internationally recognized. At a time when he is in frail health after his battle with cancer, I suspect the prize will also give him renewed energy.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
