Harold Pinter

"Pinter" redirects here. For other uses, see Pinter (disambiguation).

Harold Pinter
On the steps of his house, fielding questions from the press on the afternoon of the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement, 13 October 2005 On the steps of his house, fielding questions from the press on the afternoon of the Nobel Prize in Literature announcement, 13 October 2005
Born	(1930-10-10) October 10, 1930 Hackney, London, England
Occupation	playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, political activist
Nationality	English
Period	1950–
Genre	Modernism, Theatre of the Absurd, Post-Modernism
Spouse	Lady Antonia Fraser (1980– ) Vivien Merchant (1956–1980)
Children	six step-children (with Fraser) Daniel Brand (with Merchant)
Website
HaroldPinter.Org

Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (born 10 October 1930), one of the most prolific of living British authors and the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, is an English playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor (also known as David Baron), director, and political activist. The author of 29 plays and 26 screenplays, poetry, and other writings spanning a career of sixty years, he is best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), and for his screenplay adaptations of novels by others, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), and The Trial (1993). Pinter has been recognized internationally for his widespread cultural and artistic influence and his achievements in multiple genres and media since the 1960s. In December 2005 Pinter received the Nobel Prize in Literature (in absentia, due to illness). In its citation, the Academy states that "Harold Pinter is generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century". On 17 January 2007 Pinter received the Légion d'honneur, France's highest civil honor. He is the recipient of seventeen honorary degrees as well as numerous other awards.

His works, his political activities, and his winning the Nobel Prize have all been the subject of voluminous critical commentary. Pinter's dramatic work is marked by theatrical pauses and silences, ambiguity, irony, menace, comedic timing, witty dialogue, provocative imagery, strong conflicts among ambivalent characters fighting for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own remembered versions of the past. In the mid-1980s, Pinter began dramatizing more-overtly political situations with more-prominent political implications, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life (Merritt, Pinter in Play xi–xv, 170–209; Billington, Harold Pinter 286–338; Grimes 19). His highly-controversial Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics", delivered on video, culminates decades of creative activity and political activism. Those who do not appreciate Pinter's work or his "Leftist" political activities and views tend to charge him with "anti-Americanism" and to question the validity of his critique (Billington, Harold Pinter 424-28). Pinter and his supporters, including many Americans, point out that he criticizes policies and practices of American administrations, not American citizens (Pinter, Various Voices 243), that his political analyses depend upon his sharp critical acumen (Merritt, Pinter in Play 171-89, 208), and that he is "a man of infinite complexity and abundant contradiction" (Billington, Harold Pinter 388).

Though in February 2005, he had announced that he would stop writing plays, later that year Pinter completed a final draft of his screenplay for Sleuth, and in May 2006, he wrote a new dramatic sketch, "Apart From That". Two months earlier, on being awarded the Europe Theatre Prize, when asked "is the itch to put pen to paper still there?", he replied, "Yes. It's just a question of what the form is ... I've been writing poetry since my youth and I'm sure I'll keep on writing it till I conk out. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?" Prevailing over persistent health challenges, in June 2006, Pinter attended "a celebration of his work in cinema organised by the British branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures" (Billington, Harold Pinter 429). In October 2006 he performed the role of Krapp in Samuel Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape in a limited run at the Royal Court Theatre to sold-out audiences and "ecstatic" critical reviews, "probably the best Pinter has received in his entire life" (Billington, Harold Pinter 429–30).

Biography

Personal background and education

Pinter was born in Hackney in London to working class, native English-Jewish parents of Eastern-European ancestry on 10 October 1930. Correcting general knowledge about Pinter's family background, Michael Billington, Pinter's authorized biographer, documents that "three of Pinter's grandparents hail from Poland and one from Odessa, making them Ashkenazic rather than Sephardic Jews" (Harold Pinter 1–5). Pinter was educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. His evacuation to Cornwall and Reading from London during 1940 and 1941 before and during The Blitz and facing "the life-and-death intensity of daily experience" at that time influenced him profoundly: "His prime memories of evacuation today [circa 1994] are of loneliness, bewilderment, separation and loss: themes that are in all his works" (Billington, Harold Pinter 5–10). Although he was a "solitary" only child, as a student at Hackney Downs Grammar School, "where Pinter spent the formative years from 1944 to 1948," he "discovered his true potential": "party throught the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys' Club ... he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship. The friends he made in those days – most particularly Henry Woolf, Michael (Mick) Goldstein and Morris (Moisehe) Wernick – have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life" (Billington, Harold Pinter 11). Significantly "inspired" by his English teacher, mentor, and friend Joseph Brearley, "Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting" (Billington, Harold Pinter 10–11). He wrote poetry frequently and published some of it as a teenager (and has continued to do so throughout his career). He played Romeo and Macbeth in 1947 and 1948, in productions directed by Brearley (Billington, Harold Pinter 13–14). He broke the Hackney Downs school sprinting record and especially enjoyed running (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 28–29). Since his youth he has been an avid cricket player. Chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club, Pinter has called cricket one of his three great abiding "loves"; the other two are "love" (of women) and "writing" (Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 28–29). Reading (which Billington documents in considerable detail) is another pleasure that he mentions frequently in interviews (e.g., Billington, Harold Pinter; Gussow, Conversations with Pinter).

Early theatrical training and stage experience

Beginning in autumn 1948, for two semesters, he attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and, later that year, he was "called up for National Service", registered as a conscientious objector, was brought to trial twice, and ultimately fined by the magistrate for refusing to serve (Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25). "Loathing" RADA, he mostly cut classes and dropped out in 1949 (Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25, 31–35). He had a minor role in Dick Whittington and His Cat at the Chesterfield Hippodrome in 1949–50 (Billington, Harold Pinter 37). From January to July 1951, he attended "two terms" at the Central School of Speech and Drama (a constituent college of the University of London since 2005) (Billington, Harold Pinter 31, 36, 38). About Pinter). From 1951–52, he toured Ireland with the Anew McMaster repertory company, playing over a dozen roles; in 1952 he began regional repertory acting jobs in England; and from 1953–54, he worked for the Donald Wolfit Company, King's Theatre, Hammersmith, performing nearly ten roles (Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25; 31, 36, 37–41; Batty, "Chronology", About Pinter). From 1954 until 1959, Harold Pinter acted under the stage name David Baron; Pinter's paternal "grandmother's maiden name was Baron … he adopted it as his stage-name … [and] used it [Baron] for the autobiographical character of Mark in the first draft of [his novel] The Dwarfs" (Billington, Harold Pinter 3, 47–48).

As Billington observes, in Pinter: The Player's Playwright, David Thompson "itemises all the performances Pinter gave in the [David] Baron years", including those in English regional repertory companies, nearly twenty-five roles (Harold Pinter 49–55). In an October 1989 interview with Mel Gussow, reprinted in Conversations with Pinter (Nick Hern Books), he states: "I was in English rep as an actor for about 12 years. My favourite roles were undoubtedly the sinister ones. They're something to get your teeth into" (83). During that period, he also performed occasional roles in his own and others' works (for radio, TV, and film), as he has done increasingly more recently (Billington, Harold Pinter 20–25; 31, 36, 38).

Marriage and family life

From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, a rep actress whom he met on tour, probably best known for her performance in the original film Alfie (1966), and their son, Daniel, was born in 1958 (Billington, Harold Pinter 54, 75). Through the early '70s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, most notably The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973), but the marriage was turbulent and began disintegrating in the mid-1960s (252–56). For seven years, from 1962–69, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with Joan Bakewell, which informed his play Betrayal (1978) (264–266). Between 1975 and 1980, he lived with historian Lady Antonia Fraser, wife of Sir Hugh Fraser (272–76), and, in 1975, Merchant filed for divorce ("People"). After the Frasers' divorce became final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980, in October 1980, Pinter married Antonia Fraser; but, due to a delay in Merchant's signing the divorce papers, the reception had to precede the actual ceremony (originally scheduled "to coincide with Pinter's fifieth birthday on the tenth) by two more weeks, "a small vindictive triumph for the disgruntled Vivien" (271–272).

Unable to overcome her bitterness and grief at the loss of her husband, Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in October 1982 at the age of 53 (Billington, Harold Pinter 276). According to Billington, Pinter "did everything possible to support" her until her death and regrets that he became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation and Pinter's remarriage (276, 345). A reclusive gifted musician and writer (345), Daniel no longer uses the surname Pinter, having adopted instead "his maternal grandmother's maiden name," Brand, after his parents separated (255). "Pinter's new life with Antonia … obviously released something that had long been dormant: a preoccupation with the injustices and hypocrisies of the public world," but his "sorrow, and even residual guilt, over Vivien's death" could have resulted in "Pinter's creative blankness over a three-year period in the early 1980s" (278). Since Pinter "loves children and … would have liked a large family of his own, the progressive separation from Daniel is obviously a source of anguish" which Billington speculates is "reflected in Moonlight" (written in 1993, the year that Pinter and his son mutually decided to cease contact), "not only in Andy's cry of 'Where are the boys?' but in his final sad enquiries after his imagined grandchildren," though Pinter disavowed any conscious connection (346). Yet Pinter has stated publicly in interviews that he remains "very happy" in his second marriage and enjoys family life, which includes his six adult step-children and sixteen step-grandchildren, and, after vanquishing cancer, considers himself "a very lucky man in every respect" (Billington, Harold Pinter 388, 429–30; Billington [comp.], "'They said…'"; Moss; Rose; and Wark).

Career

Further information: § Works of Harold Pinter

1957–2005

Pinter is the author of twenty-nine plays, fifteen dramatic sketches, twenty-six screenplays and film scripts for cinema and television, a novel, and other prose fiction and essays, and co-author of two works for stage and radio. Along with the 1967 Tony Award for Best Play for The Homecoming and several other American awards and award nominations, he and his plays have received many awards in the UK and elsewhere throughout the world. His screenplays for The French Lieutenant's Woman and Betrayal were nominated for Academy Awards in the category of "Writing: Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium" in 1981 and 1983, respectively.

Pinter's first play, The Room, written in 1957, was a student production at the University of Bristol directed by his good friend (later acclaimed) actor Henry Woolf, who also originated the role of Mr. Kidd in that play (which he reprised in 2001). After Pinter had mentioned that he had an "idea" for a play, Woolf asked him to write it so that he could direct it as part of fulfilling requirements for his postgraduate work. Pinter wrote it in three days (Qtd. in Merritt, "Talking about Pinter" 147). To mark and celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that first production of The Room, Henry Woolf reprised his role of Mr. Kidd, as well as his role of the Man in Pinter's play Monologue, as part of an international conference at the University of Leeds, in April 2007.

The Birthday Party (1957), Pinter's second play and among his best-known, was initially a disaster, despite a rave review in the Sunday Times by its influential drama critic Harold Hobson, which appeared only after the production had closed and could not be reprieved (Hobson, "The Screw Turns Again"). Critical accounts often quote Hobson's prophetic words:

One of the actors in Harold Pinter[']s The Birthday Party at the Lyric, Hammersmith, announces in the programme that he read History at Oxford, and took his degree with Fourth Class Honours. Now I am well aware that Mr Pinter[']s play received extremely bad notices last Tuesday morning. At the moment I write these it is uncertain even whether the play will still be in the bill by the time they appear, though it is probable it will soon be seen elsewhere. Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party is not a Fourth, not even a Second, but a First; and that Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.… Mr Pinter and The Birthday Party, despite their experiences last week, will be heard of again. Make a note of their names.

Hobson is generally credited by Pinter himself and other critics as bolstering him and perhaps even rescuing his career (Billington, Harold Pinter 85); for example, in their September 1993 interview, Pinter told the New York Times critic Mel Gussow: "I felt pretty discouraged before Hobson. He had a tremendous influence on my life" (141). After the success of The Caretaker in 1960, which established Pinter's theatrical reputation, The Birthday Party was revived both on television (with Pinter himself in the role of Goldberg) and on stage and well received. By the time Peter Hall's production of The Homecoming (1964) reached New York (1967), Harold Pinter had become a celebrity playwright, and the play garnered four Tony awards, among other awards ("Harold Pinter" at the Internet Broadway Database).

In a review published in 1958, borrowing from the subtitle of A Lunatic View, a play by David Campton, critic Irving Wardle also called Pinter's early plays "comedy of menace"––a label that people have applied repeatedly to his work, at times pigeonholing and attempting to tame it. ("Comedy of menace" is also a verbal pun on "Comedy of manners", said with a Jewish accent [Merritt, Pinter in Play 225–26].) Such plays begin with an apparently innocent situation that becomes both threatening and absurd as Pinter's characters behave in ways often perceived as inexplicable by his audiences and one another. (Cf. Theatre of the Absurd.) Pinter acknowledges the influence of Samuel Beckett, particularly on his early work (Billington, Harold Pinter 64, 65, 84, 197, 251); they became friends (354), sending each other drafts of their works in progress for comments (Wark).

From the late sixties through the early eighties, Pinter wrote Landscape, Silence, "Night", Old Times, No Man's Land, Betrayal, The Proust Screenplay, Family Voices, and A Kind of Alaska, all of which dramatize complex ambiguities, elegaic mysteries, comic vagaries, and other "quicksand"-like characteristics of memory and which critics sometimes categorize as Pinter's "memory plays".

Pinter began to direct more frequently during the 1970s, becoming an associate director of the National Theatre in 1973, and he has directed almost fifty productions of his own and others' plays for stage, film, and television.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, his plays tended to become shorter and more-overtly political, serving as critiques of oppression, torture, and other abuses of human rights (Merritt, Pinter in Play xi–xv, 170–209; Grimes 19). In a 1985 interview called "A Play and Its Politics", with Nicholas Hern, published in the Grove Press edition of One for the Road, Pinter states that whereas his earlier plays presented "metaphors" about power and powerlessness, the later ones present "realities" of power and its abuse. Grimes proposes, "If it is too much to say that Pinter faults himself for his earlier political inactivity, his political theater dramatizes the interplay and conflict of the opposing poles of involvement and disengagement" (19). From 1993 to 1999, reflecting both personal and political concerns, Pinter wrote Moonlight (1993) and Ashes to Ashes (1996), full-length plays with domestic settings relating to death and dying and (in the latter case) to such "atrocities" as the Holocaust; in this period, after the deaths of first his mother and then his father, again merging the personal and the political, Pinter wrote the poems "Death" (1997) (which he read in his 2005 Nobel Lecture) and "The Disappeared" (1998).

In July and August 2001, a Harold Pinter Festival celebrating his work was held at Lincoln Center in New York City, in which he participated as both a director (of a double bill pairing his newest play Celebration with his first play The Room) and an actor (as Nicolas in One for the Road).

In October 2001, as part of the "Harold Pinter Homage" at the World Leaders Festival, in Toronto, he presented a dramatic reading of Celebration (2000), following the reception and during the dinner honoring him, and also participated in a public interview (Press release, International Festival of Authors). That winter his collaboration with director Di Trevis resulted in their stage adaptation of his as-yet unfilmed 1972 work The Proust Screenplay, entitled Remembrance of Things Past (both based on Marcel Proust's famous seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time), being produced at the National Theatre, in London. There was also a revival of The Caretaker in the West End.

Late in 2001, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, for which, in 2002, he underwent a successful operation and chemotherapy. During the course of his treatment, he directed a production of his play No Man's Land, wrote and performed in his new sketch "Press Conference" for a two-part otherwise-retrospective production of his dramatic sketches at the National Theatre, and was seen on television in America in the role of Vivian Bearing's father in the HBO film version of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit. Since then, having become increasingly politically "engaged" as "a citizen," Pinter has continued to write and present politically-charged poetry, essays, speeches and two new screenplay adaptations of plays, based on Shakespeare's King Lear (completed in 2000 but unfilmed) and on Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth (written in 2005, with revisions completed later for the 2007 film Sleuth). Pinter's most recent stage play, Celebration (2000), is more a social satire, with fewer political resonances than such plays as One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), and Ashes to Ashes (1996), the last of which extends aspects of Pinter's "memory plays". His most recent dramatic work for radio, Voices (2005), a collaboration with composer James Clarke, adapting such selected works by Pinter to music, premièred on BBC Radio 3 on his 75th birthday (10 Oct. 2005), three days before the announcement that he had won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature (13 Oct. 2005).

On 28 February 2005, in an interview with Mark Lawson on the BBC Radio 4 program Front Row, Pinter announced publicly that he would stop writing plays to dedicate himself to his political activism and writing poetry: "I think I've written 29 plays. I think it's enough for me. I think I've found other forms now. My energies are going in different directions—over the last few years I've made a number of political speeches at various locations and ceremonies … I'm using a lot of energy more specifically about political states of affairs, which I think are very, very worrying as things stand."

After 2005

After returning to London from Edinburgh, in September 2006, Pinter began rehearsing for his performance of the role of Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape, the one-man play by Samuel Beckett. This production, which occurred from 11 October, the day after Pinter's 76th birthday, to 21 October 2006, was part of the fiftieth-anniversary celebration season of the Royal Court Theatre, in London. Prior to this Royal Court production, Pinter said: "It's a great challenge and I'm going to have a crack at it" (Qtd. in Robinson). His performances sold out by the first day of general ticket sales (4 Sept. 2006). One performance was filmed and produced on DVD, and was shown on BBC Four on 21 June 2007.

According to one press account, "Pinter, whose last published play came out in 2000, said the reason he had given up writing was that he had 'written himself out', adding: 'I recently had a holiday in Dorset and took a couple of my usual yellow writing pads. I didn't write a damn word. Fondly, I turned them over and put them in a drawer'" (Qtd. in Robinson). It appeared to Robinson that "despite giving up writing [Pinter] will carry on his acting career." From another perspective, however, as two other journalists observe: "So keenly is Harold Pinter relishing his return to the stage this autumn [in Krapp's Last Tape] that he has put his literary career on the back burner" (Eden and Walker).

At the Europe Theatre Prize ceremony in Turin, Italy, part of the cultural program of the XX Winter Olympic Games, in his public interview with Billington, "Prior to vowing that he would be writing poetry 'until I conk out,' when Pinter reiterated 'I've written 29 damn plays. Isn't that enough?' many of us [in the audience] felt compelled to reply, in unison, 'No-o-o-o-o-o!'" Yet Pinter occasionally leaves open the possibility that if a compelling dramatic "image" were to come to mind (which he states as "not likely"), perhaps he would still be obliged to pursue it. Indeed, after making this point, at the end of his June 2006 interview with Wark broadcast live on Newsnight, with Rupert Graves (projected on screen), Pinter performed a dramatic reading of his "new work," a "very funny" dramatic sketch called "Apart From That", inspired by Pinter's strong aversion to mobile telephones (He made clear that he does not own one); "as two people trade banalities over their mobile phones there is a hint of something ominous and unspoken behind the clichéd chat" (Billington, Harold Pinter 429).

As he had announced that he planned to do, Pinter remains committed to writing and publishing poetry (e.g., his poem "The Watcher") and to continuing political pressure against the "status quo," battling politically what he considers social injustices, as well as personally his post-esophageal cancer bouts of ill health, including "a rare skin disease called pemphigus" (that "'very, very mysterious skin condition which emanated from the Brazilian jungle'" that he mentioned in the Turin interview by Billington) and "a form of septicaemia which afflicts his feet and makes movement slow and laborious" (Billington, Harold Pinter 394).

Sheffield Theatres hosted Pinter: A Celebration for a full month (11 Oct.–11 Nov. 2006). The program featured selected productions of Pinter's plays (in order of presentation): The Caretaker, Voices, No Man's Land, Family Voices, Tea Party, The Room, One for the Road and The Dumb Waiter; films (most his screenplays; some in which Pinter appears as an actor): The Go-Between, Accident, The Birthday Party, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Reunion, Mojo, The Servant, The Pumpkin Eater; and other related program events: "Pause for Thought" (Penelope Wilton and Douglas Hodge in conversation with Michael Billington), "Ashes to Ashes –– A Cricketing Celebration", a "Pinter Quiz Night", "The New World Order", the BBC2 documentary film Arena: Harold Pinter (introd. Anthony Wall, producer of Arena), and "The New World Order –– A Pause for Peace" (a consideration of "Pinter's pacifist writing" [both poems and prose] supported by the Sheffield Quakers), and a screening of "Pinter's passionate and antagonistic 45-minute Nobel Prize Lecture."

Pinter's screenplay adaptation of the 1970 Tony Award-winning play Sleuth, by Anthony Shaffer, is the basis for the 2007 film Sleuth, directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Michael Caine (in the role of Andrew Wyke, originally played by Laurence Olivier) and Jude Law (in the role of Milo Tindle, originally played by Caine), who also produced it; scheduled for release on 12 October, the film debuted at the 64th Venice International Film Festival on 31 August 2007, and was screened at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, on 10 September.

On 18 March 2007, BBC Radio Three broadcast a new radio production of The Homecoming, directed by Thea Sharrock and produced by Martin J. Smith, with Pinter performing the role of Max (for the first time; he had previously played Lenny on stage in the 1960s), Michael Gambon as Max's brother Sam, Rupert Graves as Teddy, Samuel West as Lenny, James Alexandrou as Joey, and Gina McKee as Ruth (Martin J. Smith; West).

A revival of The Hothouse, directed by Ian Rickson, with a cast including Stephen Moore (Roote), Lia Williams (Miss Cutts), and Henry Woolf (Tubb), among others, opened at the Royal National Theatre, in London, in July 2007, playing concurrently with a revival of Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse, also starring Samuel West (Robert), opposite Toby Stephens (Jerry) and Dervla Kirwan (Emma) and directed by Roger Michell (West). A Broadway revival of The Homecoming, starring Ian McShane as Max, Raul Esparza as Lenny, Michael McKean as Sam, and Eve Best as Ruth, and directed by Daniel Sullivan, is "scheduled to begin rehearsals in October 2007", to begin previews on 23 November, and to open on 9 December 2007, for a "20-week limited engagement … through April 13, 2008" at the Cort Theatre (Gans).

Civic activities and political activism

Pinter was an early member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the United Kingdom and supported the British Anti-Apartheid Movement (1959–94), participating in British artists' refusal to permit professional productions of their work in South Africa in 1963 and in subsequent related campaign (Reddy). He has been active in International PEN, serving as a vice-president, along with American playwright Arthur Miller. In 1985, Pinter and Miller travelled to Turkey, on a mission co-sponsored by International PEN and a Helsinki Watch committee to investigate and protest the torture of imprisoned writers. There he met victims of political oppression and their families. At an American embassy dinner in Ankara, held in Miller's honor, at which Pinter was also an invited guest, speaking on behalf of those imprisoned Turkish writers, Pinter confronted the ambassador with (in Pinter's words) "[t]he reality … of electric current on your genitals": Pinter's outspokenness apparently angered their host and led to indications of his desired departure. Guest of honor Miller left the embassy with him. Recounting this episode for a tribute to Miller on his 80th birthday, Pinter concludes: "Being thrown out of the US embassy in Ankara with Arthur Miller — a voluntary exile — was one of the proudest moments in my life." Pinter's experiences in Turkey and his knowledge of the Turkish suppression of the Kurdish language "inspired" his 1988 play Mountain Language (Billington, Harold Pinter 309–10; Gussow, Conversations with Pinter 67–68).

He is an active delegate of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign in the United Kingdom, an organization that defends Cuba, supports the government of Fidel Castro, and campaigns against the U.S. embargo on the country. In 2001 Pinter joined the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milošević (ICDSM), which appealed for a fair trial for and the freedom of Slobodan Milošević; he signed a related "Artists' Appeal for Milošević" in 2004. (The organization continues its presence on the internet even after Milošević's death in 2006.)

He strongly opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, the 2001 United States war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. He has been very active in the current anti-war movement in the United Kingdom, speaking at rallies held by the Stop the War Coalition. He has called the President of the United States, George W. Bush, a "mass murderer" and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair, both "mass-murdering" and a "deluded idiot"; he alleges that they, along with past U.S. officials, are "war criminals". He has compared the Bush administration ("a bunch of criminal lunatics") with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany, saying that, under Bush, the United States ("a monster out of control") strives to attain "world domination" through "Full spectrum dominance", while, like a "bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain," led by Blair, participates in "an act of premeditated mass murder" instigated on behalf of "the American people", who, Pinter acknowledges, increasingly protest "their government's actions". Pinter's published his remarks to the mass peace protest demonstration held on 15 February 2003, in London, on his website: "The United States is a monster out of control. Unless we challenge it with absolute determination American barbarism will destroy the world. The country is run by a bunch of criminal lunatics, with Blair as their hired Christian thug. The planned attack on Iraq is an act of premeditated mass murder." Those remarks anticipate his 2005 Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth, & Politics", in which he argues: "Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force… yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish" (21).

In March 2006, upon accepting the Europe Theatre Prize, in Turin, Pinter exhorted the mostly-European audience "'to resist the power of the United States'" (Anderson), saying, as quoted by Michael Billington: "'I'd like to see Europe echo the example of Latin America in withstanding the economic and political intimidation of the United States. This is a serious responsibility for Europe and all of its citizens,'" and, according to Billington, "His words went down a storm" (Billington, Harold Pinter 428).

He continues to sign petitions on behalf of artistic and political causes that he supports. He became a signatory of the mission statement of Jews For Justice For Palestinians in 2005 and of its full-page advertisement, "What Is Israel Doing? A Call by Jews in Britain" featured in The Times on 6 July 2006. He also co-signed an open letter about recent events in the Middle East dated 19 July 2006, distributed to major news publications on 21 July 2006, and posted on the website of Noam Chomsky on 27 July 2006. The letter was signed first by John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Harold Pinter, and José Saramago and "later endorsed" by Tariq Ali, et al.

On 5 February 2007, The Independent reported that, along with historian Eric Hobsbawm, human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman, fashion designer Nicole Farhi, film director Mike Leigh, and actors Stephen Fry and Zoë Wanamaker, among others, Harold Pinter launched the organization Independent Jewish Voices in the United Kingdom "to represent British Jews … in response to a perceived pro-Israeli bias in existing Jewish bodies in the UK", and, according to Hobsbawn, "as a counter-balance to the uncritical support for Israeli policies by established bodies such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews" (Hodgson).

Further information: Independent Jewish Voices § Declaration

.

Pinter also contributes letters to the editor, essays, speeches, and poetry strongly expressing his artistic and political viewpoints, which are frequently published initially in British periodicals, both via print and online publishing and, increasingly, distributed and re-distributed extensively over the internet and throughout the blogosphere. These have been distributed more widely since his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005; subsequent related news accounts often cite his status as a Nobel Laureate.

For over the past two decades, in his essays, speeches, interviews, and literary readings, Pinter has focused increasingly on political issues. Since the mid-eighties, he has described his earlier plays retrospectively from the perspective of the politics of power and the dynamics of oppression.

During his appearance at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 25 August 2006, for example, after reading an interrogation scene from The Birthday Party, Pinter offered a rare "explanation": Pinter "wanted to say that Goldberg and McCann represented the forces in society who wanted to snuff out dissent, to stifle Stanley's voice, to silence him", and that in 1958, "'One thing [the critics who almost unanimously hated the play] got wrong … was the whole history of stifling, suffocating and destroying dissent. Not too long before, the Gestapo had represented order, discipline, family life, obligation — and anyone who disagreed with that was in trouble'" (Qtd. by McDowell).

In accepting the Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry, on 18 March 2005, wondering "What would Wilfred Owen make of the invasion of Iraq? A bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law?", Pinter concluded: "I believe Wilfred Owen would share our contempt, our revulsion, our nausea and our shame at both the language and the actions of the American and British governments" (Various Voices 247-48).

In his first public appearance in Britain since he won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature and his near-death experience in hospital in the first week of December 2005, which had prevented him from traveling to Stockholm and giving his Nobel Lecture in person, Pinter participated in "Meet the Author" with Ramona Koval, at the Edinburgh Book Festival, in Edinburgh, Scotland, in the evening of 25 August 2006. Prior to the interview, during which he described his fight for his life in moving terms, Pinter read a scene from his play The Birthday Party.

In both his writing and his public speaking, as McDowell observes,

Pinter's precision of language is immensely political. Twist words like "democracy" and "freedom", as he believes Blair and Bush have done over Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people die.

Earlier this year [March 2006], when he was presented with the European Theatre Prize in Turin, Pinter said he intended to spend the rest of his life railing against the United States. Surely, asked chair Ramona Koval, [at the Edinburgh Book Festival that August], he was doomed to fail?

"Oh yes — me against the United States!" he said, laughing along with the audience at the absurdity, before adding: "But I can't stop reacting to what is done in our name, and what is being done in the name of freedom and democracy is disgusting." (Qtd. by McDowell)

In March 2007, Charlie Rose had "A Conversation with Harold Pinter" on The Charlie Rose Show, filmed at the Old Vic, in London, and broadcast on television in the United States on PBS, in which they discussed highlights of his career and debated his ongoing opposition to the Iraq War.

Honors

An Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, Pinter was appointed CBE in 1966 and became a Companion of Honour in 2002 (having previously declined a knighthood in 1996). He accepted the 1995 David Cohen Prize for Literature, in recognition of a lifetime's achievement in literature and the 1996 Laurence Olivier Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in the theatre; became a BAFTA Fellow in 1997; and received a 2001 World Leaders Award for "Creative Genius", as the subject of a week-long "Homage" in Toronto, and the 2004 Wilfred Owen Award for Poetry—"in recognition of Pinter's lifelong contribution to literature, 'and specifically for his collection of poetry entitled War, published in 2003'" (Wilfred Owen Association Newsletter) and the Europe Theatre Prize, in recognition of lifetime achievements pertaining to drama and theater (conferred March 2006).

On 18 January 2007 BBC News announced that French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin presented Harold Pinter with one of his country's highest awards, the Légion d'honneur … at a ceremony at the French embassy in London, shortly after holding talks with Tony Blair" and that Prime Minister de Villepin "praised Mr Pinter's poem American Football (1991)," saying: "With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence"; "in return," Pinter "praised France for its opposition to the war in Iraq"; according to the BBC's Lawrence Pollard, "the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual" ("French PM Honours Harold Pinter").. On 13 April 2007 the honorary Doctor of Letters was conferred on Harold Pinter by the University of Leeds in conjunction with a three-day conference and celebration marking the 50th anniversary of the first performance of his first play, The Room ("Pinter Honoured for a Lifetime’s Contribution to the Arts").

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2005

On 13 October 2005 the Swedish Academy announced that it had decided to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2005 to "Harold Pinter", "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

When interviewed about his reaction to the Nobel Prize announcement by Billington, Pinter joked: "I was told today that one of the Sky channels said this morning that 'Harold Pinter is dead[.'] Then they changed their mind and said, 'No, he's won the Nobel prize.' So I've risen from the dead" (qtd. in Billington, comp., "'They've said …'").

Nobel Week, including the Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony in Stockholm and related events throughout Scandinavia, occurred early in December 2005. Due to concerns about his health, Pinter and his family could not attend the Awards Ceremony and related events of Nobel Week. After the Academy notified him of his award, he had arranged for his publisher (Stephen Page of Faber and Faber) to accept his Nobel Diploma and Nobel Medal at the Awards Ceremony scheduled for 10 December, but he had still planned to travel to Stockholm, to present his lecture in person a few days earlier (Honigsbaum). In November, however, he was hospitalized for a rare mouth infection, and his doctor barred such travel. While still hospitalized, Pinter went to a Channel Four studio to videotape his Nobel Lecture: "Art, Truth & Politics", which was projected on three large screens at the Swedish Academy on 7 December 2005 (Lyall).

The video was simultaneously broadcast, introduced by friend and fellow playwright David Hare, that evening on Channel Four in the UK as well. Subsequently, the full text and streaming video formats were posted for the public on the Nobel Prize and Swedish Academy official websites. These formats of Pinter's Nobel Lecture have been widely cited, quoted, and distributed by print and online media and the source of much commentary and debate.

© Illuminations

Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture

In his highly-controversial Nobel Lecture "Art, Truth & Politics", speaking with obvious difficulty while seated in a wheelchair, Pinter distinguishes between the search for truth in art and the avoidance of truth in politics.

He describes his own artistic process of creating The Homecoming and Old Times, following an initial line or word or image, calling "the author's position" an "odd one" as, experiencing the "strange moment … of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence," he must "play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek" during which "the search for the truth … has to be faced, right there, on the spot." Distinguishing among his plays The Birthday Party, Mountain Language, and Ashes to Ashes, he segues into his transitions from "the search for truth" in art and "the entirely different set of problems" facing the artist in "Political theatre" to the avoidance of seeking "truth" in "power politics" (5–9).

He asserts:

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory [of the artist] 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 11, 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.

Charging the United States with having "supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War," leading to "hundreds of thousands of deaths," Pinter asks: "Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy?" Then he answers his own question: "The answer is yes, they did take place, and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it" (9–10). Revisiting arguments from his political essays and speeches of the past decade, Pinter reiterates:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

I put to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It's a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, 'the American people', as in the sentence, 'I say to the American people it is time to pray and to defend the rights of the American people and I ask the American people to trust their president in the action he is about to take on behalf of the American people.' (15)

In imagery recalling his description of "speech" as "a constant stratagem to cover nakedness", Pinter adds:

It's a scintillating stratagem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words 'the American people' provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don't need to think. Just lie back on the cushion. The cushion may be suffocating your intelligence and your critical faculties but it's very comfortable. This does not apply of course to the 40 million people living below the poverty line and the 2 million men and women imprisoned in the vast gulag of prisons, which extends across the US. (16)

Toward the end of the lecture, after reading two poems referring to "blood in the streets", "deaths", "dead bodies", and "death" by fellow Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda and himself, in a whimsically-humble gesture, Pinter offers to "volunteer" for the "job" of "speech writer" for President George W. Bush, penning a ruthless message of fierce aggression masquerading as moral struggle of good versus evil yet finally proferring the "authority" of his (Bush's) "fist" (17–22). Pinter demands prosecution of Tony Blair in the International Criminal Court, while pointing out, with irony, that he would do the same for Bush had he not refused to "ratify" that Court (18). Pinter concludes his Nobel Lecture with a call for "unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies" as "a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all," one which he regards as "in fact mandatory," for, he warns, "If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man" (23–24).

Public criticism

In response to his videotaped Nobel Lecture broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK, heated critical debate about Pinter spiked in the public media and spread throughout the blogosphere. Such criticism of Pinter encompassed thousands of commentaries and focused mostly on his political activism, particularly his purported "anti-Americanism" and his generally-"leftist" views. Billington observes that "the reactions to Pinter's Nobel Prize and Lecture" were "fascinating" and "overwhelmingly positive," though he thinks "it is worth picking out the few negative ones" as examples. He observes, "The most startling fact was that Pinter's Nobel Lecture on 7 December was totally ignored by the BBC," adding: "You would have thought that a living British dramatist's views on his art and global politics might have been of passing interest to a public service broadcaster"; yet "There was ... no reference to the speech on any of BBC TV's news bulletins that night or indeed on its current affairs programme, Newsnight" (Harold Pinter 424). While "in the press, there was also a handful of attacks on both the award and the Lecture," Billington dispatches criticisms by three of them: "the normally sensible Johan Hari," who "dismissed the Lecture in advance [of its broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK] as a 'rant' and falsely claimed that Pinter would have refused to resist Hitler"; "in fact," Billington says, Pinter "has repeatedly said that, had he been of age, he would have accepted conscription in World War II" (424-25). "More predictably, Christopher Hitchens was wheeled out to dismiss Pinter as 'a bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long'", and, finally, Billington cites the Daily Telegraph historian Niall Ferguson's having "attacked the Lecture," quoting in part Ferguson's statement that in his Nobel Lecture Pinter "'pretend[s] that [US] crimes were equivalent to those of its Communist opponents ...'"––a distortion according to both Billington and Pinter: "he never made any comparison in his speech between atrocities committed by the Soviet Union and China and those of America"; "'All I ever said,' [Pinter] retorts, 'is that Soviet atrocities were comprehensively documented but that American actions weren't. I didn't go into comparisons as to who killed more people as if it were a contest. Ferguson distorted the whole bloody thing'" (Qtd. in Billington, Harold Pinter 425). Billington also points out that the Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library contains "two large boxes containing the thousands of letters Pinter received from friends, colleagues, public eminences and total strangers applauding both the prize and his political stance" (425). The "Harold Pinter Community" Forum hosted on Pinter's official website illustrates further critical debate among its participants about Pinter's politics.

Pinter and academia

Among his other honors, Pinter is the recipient of seventeen honorary degrees conferred by European and American academic institutions, as well as an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) (1970).

In 2006 Pinter was elected a "foreign member" of the Department of Language and Literature of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English on 13 April 2007.

The Harold Pinter Society

In 1986, a group of American academic scholars formed the Harold Pinter Society, which became an Allied Organization of the MLA. The Pinter Society is international in membership and scope. Members and individual and institutional subscribers receive The Pinter Review: Collected Essays, co-edited by Francis Gillen (University of Tampa) and Steven H. Gale (Kentucky State University) and published by the University of Tampa Press. At first an academic journal begun in 1987 and now a biennial book publication, each volume contains a bibliography of works, productions, and other events by and about Pinter compiled by Susan Hollis Merritt. The cover of The Pinter Review: Collected Essays 2002 and 2003 (published in 2004) features Pinter's poems "Meeting" and "After Lunch".

Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter

In conjunction with the Harold Pinter Society, several of whose members participated, Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds hosted "Artist and Citizen: 50 Years of Performing Pinter", a conference organized by Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies and Workshop Theatre director Mark Taylor-Batty. The conference celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first production of Harold Pinter's first play, The Room, from 12 April to 14 April 2007 ("Pinter Honoured for a Lifetime’s Contribution to the Arts"). On 13 April Pinter was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from the University of Leeds School of English by University Chancellor Melvyn Bragg. Invited guests included Harold Pinter and Henry Woolf, who reprised his original role as Mr. Kidd in a revival of that play and also his performance as the Man in Monologue; Michael Billington, who led a "roundtable" discussion on "Working with Pinter", with composer James Clarke, visiting playwright in residence Donald Freed, and Pinter directors Katie Read and Ian Rickson; and "plenary speakers" Steven H. Gale and Susan Hollis Merritt.

The conference poster features a photograph of a portrait of Harold Pinter by artist Amy Shuckburgh on display at the Workshop Theatre during the conference, at Trafalgar Studios, London, during Harry Burton's production of The Dumb Waiter, and "reproduced in the programmes for The Dumb Waiter; the touring production of Old Times; Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse; and The Hothouse at the National Theatre, London."

Following the honorary degree ceremony, on the evening of 13 April 2007, the Free Theatre, of Minsk, Belarus, where several of its members have been censored, imprisoned, and "under attack" by the authorities, performed their "collage" of Pinter's work Being Harold Pinter, introduced by "their patron", Sir Tom Stoppard, receiving strong notices from Billington and his colleagues. Pinter participated in the post-performance discussion with the company through a Belarusian-English interpreter. After Pinter added his support to recommendations by Tom Stoppard, Václav Havel, and Arthur Kopit, the European Theatre Convention invited the Belarus Free Theatre to become a member, waiving the membership fee.

The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing

Goldsmiths College, University of London, established the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing, inaugurated in June 2003, with Harold Pinter as Honorary President. It is "an interdisciplinary research centre, involving principally the Departments of English & Comparative Literature and of Drama, the latter organising and hosting the Centre, and with links in Media and Communications, Music, PACE and the Digital Studios." So far it has planned three conferences, "one on the work of Stephen Sondheim, and another on African Women Playwrights." Its third conference, Ravenhill 10, was a symposium on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the first production of Mark Ravenhill's play Shopping and Fucking (11–12 Nov. 2006). The Pinter Centre will sponsor additional conferences in the future, "including one on Black British Drama and a major conference in 2008 to be entitled, 'Pinter, Postmodernism and Contemporary Writing'."

Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History

In 2005, Harold Pinter: A Bibliographical History, compiled by William Baker and John C. Ross, was published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press. As a result of Pinter's winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, according to its publisher, the book, which "provides a comprehensive account of the print-published writings, and texts in other media, which he has wholly or partly authored," became an academic library "bestseller" ("Oak Knoll Press Bestsellers" 37).

Works

Main article: Works of Harold Pinter

Main article: Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work

See also

• Jewish left

Notes

Main article: Selected bibliography for Harold Pinter

Selected bibliography

Main article: Selected bibliography for Harold Pinter

External links

• "Harold Pinter". The Artists Network of Refuse & Resist! 12 Dec. 2005. (17 pages.) A selection of writings by and commentary about Pinter.
• Harold Pinter at IMDb.
• "Harold Pinter". Contemporary Writers. Biography and critical account by Michael Billington for British Council: Arts.
• "Harold Pinter". Literary Encyclopedia. Biography and critical account by Andrew Wyllie, University of the West of England.
• "Harold Pinter (1930– )". Books: The Authors. Guardian Unlimited. (Hyperlinked account.)
• "Harold Pinter (1930– )". Books and Writers. Biography and critical account. Authors' Calendar. (Featured Nobel Prize in Literature winner for 2005.)
• "Harold Pinter (1930– )". Brief biography, critical account, and selected bibliography compiled by Roger Phillip Mellor. Encyclopedia of British Film. Hyperlinked filmography ("Film and TV Credits") with featured works. ScreenOnline at the British Film Institute (BFI).
• The Harold Pinter Society. An Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and an Associated Organization of the Midwest Modern Language Association (M/MLA).
• "Listmania: Harold Pinter: Winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature: A Listmania! list by Amazon.com Bookstore".
• "The Nobel Prize Medal for Literature" ("Registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation") at nobelprize.org.
• The Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
• "Pinter on War". Red Pepper. Feb. 2004. (Texts of poems "Weather Forecast", "Democracy", "The Bombs", "God Bless America", and hyperlinked "Related articles".)
• Pinter's works currently published by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. (US publisher).
• "Short Bibliography" of Pinter's works currently published by Faber and Faber (UK publisher).

Template:Persondata