Under the volcano

A woman once wrote to Harold Pinter to ask him to explain The Birthday Party. “These are the points I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to these questions I cannot fully understand your play.” Pinter replied: “These are the points I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to these questions, I cannot fully understand your letter.”

Alan Ayckbourn, then a callow 20-year-old playing Stanley in an early production of the play in Scarborough, also had the temerity to ask Pinter for some biographical details of the mysterious concert pianist. “Mind your own fucking business,” he was told. “Just say the lines.”

Undeterred, Ayckbourn pursued him to a pub – most Pinter stories involve pubs – where he intended to press the point, but before he could, a man rushed in claiming to have killed his mother-in-law by ramming her up a chimney. Pinter had to hear the man’s story, and Ayckbourn never did discover where Stanley came from or where he was going. Nor do we know what happened to the man, or his mother-in-law.

Stories and batty characters tend to cling to Pinter. The one about the rehearsal in which he stopped an actor in mid-flow and told him he was playing two dots rather than the three that were written; the time he had a BBC journalist who was eating at the River Café thrown out because he thought he was there to spy on him; the fallings out with Peter Hall, Alan Coren, Simon Gray. All good knockabout stuff and the makings of a legend – irascible, menacing, self-important, egoistical. But is it true? Who is this man? Where did he come from? Is he normal?

The media think not: they – we – portray him as an impatient, aggressive control freak. How does he plead? “I don’t believe I’m particularly egoistical. To be egoistical is to be ambitious and also indifferent to the views of others. I am neither. I’m not in the least ambitious, never have been, and I don’t tread on people. To a great extent my public image is one that’s been cultivated by the press. That’s the Harold Pinter they choose to create.

“I’m perfectly prepared to admit that there have been times in the past when I have exploded, sometimes justifiably, sometimes stupidly. But most of these incidents are at least 10 years ago. I don’t do that kind of thing any more – or very rarely anyway. When the press write about me they are digging up references in the cuttings to things that happened a very long time ago at some damn dinner party.”

If there’s one thing that makes Pinter really angry, it’s being characterised as someone who is permanently enraged. It is, he believes, a way of marginalising him. “According to the press I rage about everything. If I said casually, for example, that Flintoff should bat at number three for England, there’d be a headline the next day saying ‘Pinter rages against England selectors’. The thrust of it seems to be – ‘this man is deranged’. I tend to believe that it’s a calculated act, though who is doing the calculating I can’t say.”

Certainly, the effect is to undermine his arguments, to allow them to be discounted in advance. Pinter, a good conspiracy theorist, sees it as organised denigration, but he reckons without media laziness. We love to categorise: Amis is the money-grubbing bloke who needed a big advance to fix his dodgy teeth; Stoppard is that clever fellow with a neat line in cod Shakespeare; Pinter is the chap who goes puce, tells journalists to fuck off, and is forever banging on about Iraq or the Kurds or the iniquities of US imperialism. We prefer idées fixes to ideas.

One of the myths about Pinter is that he doesn’t talk to journalists. Interviews with him are invariably labelled “rare”, which is odd because he makes himself far more available than, say, Stoppard. He is naturally gregarious and enjoys conversation, though he will not attempt to explain his work. “Everything to do with the play is in the play,” he wrote in 1958, echoing Eliot. “Meaning which is resolved, parcelled, labelled and ready for export is dead, impertinent – and meaningless.” In that, he has not wavered, but he will talk in general terms about his life and career, is generous with his time, is far from the menacing caricature of media myth.

This week sees the publication, in paperback, of a collection of occasional writings by Pinter called Various Voices – memoirs, reflections, letters, speeches, poems, polemics, shreds of a long, remarkably pro ductive life. The anniversary is entirely coincidental but this year also marks his 50th in professional theatre; he will be 70 next year. It may be a moment for remembering and for celebrating, two acts at the heart of his life and art.

The man who greets you at the door of the squat house in Holland Park that serves as his office is dark, tough, fit, intensely physical. As an actor in rep in the 50s, Pinter was always cast as the saturnine heavy, the man who could turn nasty at any moment, and he retains that aura, a still energy, a volcano that might just blow.

His book-lined study is peaceful, ordered. He has scrapbooks filled with notices of his plays, from his first, The Room, performed by Bristol University’s drama department in 1957. (He recently went back to Bristol to collect an honorary degree and was taken to the cramped room where it was originally performed; the room is now used for storage.) He may be suspicious of critics, but he catalogues their verdicts. The scrapbooks also seem to log his life. He has every Wisden (the first 10 in facsimile only) neatly arranged – the entire history of first-class cricket, its collective meaning and memory, at his disposal. He once enumerated his family, the theatre and cricket as his principal pleasures, adding sex and drink as an afterthought.

It is a cliché but you can’t enter a room with Pinter without thinking of his plays, of other rooms, of characters vying for territorial and psychological advantage. He will answer frankly, often effusively, talks affectionately of his childhood and his early days as a struggling actor, but also protects his private space, says little in reply to questions that threaten – his divorce from his first wife, Vivien Merchant, his estrangement from his son, Daniel. That is his business, he will imply politely; the life and the art are separate; have another glass of wine.

The cover of Various Voices is a portrait of Pinter by Justin Mortimer, which is in the National Portrait Gallery (Pinter the political firebrand is also Pinter the establishment man, though he did turn down John Major’s offer of a knighthood). The portrait captures much of Pinter: his intelligence, inquisitiveness, wariness, physicality. He looks strong, and yet there is a hint of self-consciousness and insecurity; his sharp eyes look down; he has seen something that intrigues him; one day he will use it.

Pinter was an only child in a large, noisy, extended Jewish family in London’s east end. He was born in 1930 and evacuated during the war, experiencing the pain of separation and the fear of an uncertain future. If you wanted to be mechanistic about it – he would hate this – you could trace much of what follows from that: impersonal forces that destroy our security; the oppressive effect of religious (and by extension political) orthodoxies; his celebration of life; his lament for loss. “I saw Hutton in his prime; another time, another time,” as his couplet about his cricketing hero, Sir Leonard Hutton, has it. Such beauty, elegance and strength; now gone. Cricket is a game that mixes ordered violence with sentimentality and a longing for a lost world. A cricket team is a surrogate family. Cricketers are simultaneously deeply selfish and interdependent. Discuss with reference to the works of Harold Pinter.

In his admirable (and admiring) biography of Pinter, Michael Billington presents memory – the way he remembers – as the key to unlocking Pinter’s work and world. Billington cites Peter Hall, the director most closely associated with Pinter. “There is”, says Hall, “an almost mystic quality about things and people from his past.” Billington goes on to show how specific incidents inspired many of the, for want of a better word, character plays – The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Betrayal, Moonlight. No Man’s Land, too, since Pinter has said it began when he was sitting in a taxi and saw (and, oddly, heard) a man in a room offering another a drink. “You have to follow the clue of what you’re given, but the crucial thing is to get a clue in the first place, to have a donnée , a given fact. If I don’t have that, I’m in the desert.”

His childhood gave him many données . Moreover, he had the artistic advantages of the only child – the parental attention, the ready-made audience, the need to invent childhood friends. Billington latched on to a remark by Joan Bakewell, who had a seven-year affair with Pinter in the 60s and remains close to him: “He’s immaculate about the significance of his life. Which is why he doesn’t need to do much more than walk to the Tube – that is full of significance for him.” He has the only child’s sense of his own importance.

“I was very close to my parents, especially my mother,” says Pinter. “My father was a pretty volatile, abrasive fellow, but warm-hearted too. He was a tailor and worked nearly 12 hours a day, so I couldn’t blame him for being a bit short-tempered. I was part of a very big family. Although I was an only child, I had lots of cousins and aunts and uncles. We were Jewish but I had a very odd relationship with being Jewish. I felt both Jewish and not Jewish, which in a way remains the case. After my bar mitzvah when I was 13, I hardly ever set foot in a synagogue again.”

Evacuation was a key formative experience. “Separation made a great impact on me. I was evacuated three times. I came back right into the blitz, went away and came back to the V1s, then went away again and came back as the V2s were being dropped. The condition of being bombed has never left me.”

Did the fear and dislocation influence his writing? “I can’t subject myself to that kind of analysis. It’s very difficult to be objective about one’s self, although I do try. I suspect that when I started to write plays, people like Goldberg and McCann in The Birthday Party did reflect forces that I had appreciated in the world. But I didn’t write The Birthday Party with a conscious awareness of those issues.”

But the sense of arbitrariness, the fact of being removed suddenly from a warm, loving family, that must have had an influence? “Oh yes, ungovernable forces, things you couldn’t control, things that were totally out of your control. I do indeed see that. I think that is now a common experience. It doesn’t simply apply to one’s childhood under those conditions; it seems to apply generally for most people – that forces are operating which are outside your control. Power certainly doesn’t rest with Joe Dokes and you and me; it rests with others, and one is less and less able to define them.”

The connection between life and work is easy to draw, but Pinter prefers not to draw it. He has an almost mystical view of the act of artistic creation, a lifelong aversion to attempts to reduce the irreducible. The first words in Various Voices, written in 1950, would be just as applicable to his view of art today: “The mistake they make, most of them, is to attempt to determine and calculate, with the finest instruments, the source of the wound.” He is writing in praise of Shakespeare – his many- sidedness, mystery, inexhaustibility – but he is also, at a tender 20, recognising that great art, like life, resists analysis.

Pinter writes quickly. His donnée prompts him to pick up his pen, he reaches for the yellow pads on which he always writes, and something happens. He trusts the initial inspiration, prefers not endlessly to revise it. “It’s very easy to fuck up a play,” he once said. Last month he took his yellow pads on his annual family holiday to Dorset and something came – a play called Celebration, “a kind of farce”, which he reckons will run to 40 minutes on the stage. He only finished it this week, and he is elated. “It surprised me. I began it four months ago, then stopped. It stuck. Then, while I was in Dorset, it clicked – the sea burst, the waters broke. It made me laugh; I am very high on it.” Pinter has said that when he isn’t writing he feels “banished from myself”; he has known bleak periods when he could not write; in the fifth decade of his writing life, his joy at creation is still palpable.

His refusal to explain, to seek the roots of his inspiration, can be frustrating for audiences. He doesn’t care. “Will the audience absorb the implications or not?” he once wrote to a bemused director. “Ask the barber.” He was even more explicit in an interview in 1993. “As a director I give the actors one note at the very end of the other notes, one note: fuck the audience. And every actor knows what I’m talking about. If you want the audience to love you, you’re finished. When an audience is a good and intelligent audience, I like them as much as anybody does. But you’ve got to take a strong view, saying you’re going to get what we’re giving you, you’re not going to get what you want. There has to be someone in charge of a theatrical enterprise, and it has to be the work itself.”

Pinter sometimes implies that he is not writing the work; the work is writing him. That also helps to explain the long periods between plays in the past 20 years and the increasing difficulty of writing as his career has progressed. He has to wait for the donnée , for the image that sparks the thought, for the stream of consciousness to flow. Many of those données were drawn from his childhood, from what he remembers as a glorious adolescence with a band of highly literate mates at Hackney Downs school immediately after the war, from his impoverished years in rep in the 50s, and from his marriage to Vivien Merchant, from whom he separated when he met Antonia Fraser in 1975. Later, the stream became more irregular; as he lived the life of the writer, he found it harder to write.

It wasn’t just the content of his work that was influenced by his rumbustious early days, it was the style too – the music of his writing, the joyous playing with words. “In the east end of London, where I grew up, it was a very lively, active kind of world – a lot of people who talked a lot and very fast,” he told New York drama critic Mel Gussow in 1993 in one of a series of conversations between the two that punctuate Pinter’s career. “There was a kind of vitality in the world I grew up in.”

That vitality is brilliantly caught in the early plays: even at their most desperate, they are filled with life, energy, comedy and, central to that comedy, a love of language. Pinter adores poetry, would perhaps have preferred his poetry to have taken precedence over his plays, and his prose often has the compression and musicality of poetry, what he calls the “question of rhythm”. “Why don’t you just say the line, rather than thinking and thinking,” he once said to an actor rehearsing one of his plays. “It will come and you’ll feel OK, really.”

His great influence at Hackney Downs was a teacher called Joseph Brearley, who taught him to love language, introduced him to the plays of John Webster (another lifelong passion), and cast him in Shakespeare. When Brearley died in 1977, Pinter marked his death with a poem which ended: “You’re gone, I’m at your side, / Walking with you from Clapton Pond to Finsbury Park, And on, and on.” The emotion, the affection and the specificity of the memories are typical of Pinter, who is a dedicated memorialist for whom the past, while lost, is recoverable. There is a brilliant memoir in Various Voices of Anew McMaster, the charismatic actor-manager with whom Pinter toured Ireland for two years in the early 50s; in 4,000 words Pinter captures the man, the place, the times, a vanished touring tradition, the glories of Shakespeare.

The poem about Brearley, the memoir of Mac, the loyalty to his friends from Hackney Downs (he is still, 50 years on, in regular touch with three of them, even though two live in Canada and the other in Australia), the Wisdens and scrapbooks and numerous postcards in his study are all redolent of a man for whom the past is ever present. He adores Proust and, in 1972, spent a year adapting à la Recherche du Temps Perdu for the screen; the movie has yet to be made but the effect of living with Proust was profound.

For Pinter, past, present and future at times become one. He told Billington a story. “I have a son, Daniel, who is now a grown-up man, but when he was very, very young indeed I woke up one night – this is 40 years ago, but I can’t forget it – and I found myself in tears. My first wife said to me, ‘What in heaven’s name is the matter?’ Daniel, who was about six months old, was in a cot in the room. I didn’t know what was the matter or how to explain what was happening to me. But I realised what was happening after half an hour or so. It was simply that I couldn’t bear the life that was in front of him. I thought here he is having a good time, quietly asleep at this moment … but I actually looked ahead and thought, ‘My God, what is in store for this infant.’ “

How poignant that story is now, knowing what we know. That Pinter and Vivien Merchant were to divorce; that she was to die in 1982, an embittered alcoholic; that his son was to suffer a breakdown and become a recluse – father and son now have no direct contact. It is inconceivable that so emotional a man as Pinter would not be moved by these traumas. He will say little about his first marriage, but his comments on the separation from Daniel are heavy with regret. “We haven’t spoken for about six years,” he tells me. “It was by mutual agreement – we decided to have a break. I miss him because I was very close to him when he was young, very close. He lives alone and we don’t have any contact. I think that’s the way he now wants it. He’s an extremely gifted writer and musician, but I’ve lost track of him and that’s the way it sometimes goes, you know. And you have to accept it. I respect his decision to be alone.”

In 1993, talking about the broke but buoyant early years of his marriage to Merchant, he hinted at why the marriage broke down: “When you’re right up against the wire, you share a lot. We both in fact fought our way out of it. She was pretty indomitable in those days. She was acting with a three-month-old baby in the dressing room. She used to feed him in the intervals … I think in a way Vivien probably enjoyed acting in rep more than anything else. There was less pressure, naturally … But gradually, as the big world started to roll up, I think it proved rather destructive … Vivien was a hell of an actress and a woman of undoubted independence of mind, but having said that, she was also very dependent.”

When Merchant met Pinter, he was using the stage name David Baron, and she always called him David. But when David Baron, the struggling actor, had been transformed into Harold Pinter, the acclaimed playwright, the marriage was on the skids. A partnership of equals had become desperately one-sided. Pinter was travelling, he began his long affair with Joan Bakewell, he and Merchant started to resent each other; yet the decade of pain and deceit was highly productive in terms of work: not just the plays, but his most highly regarded screenplays, The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between. That is not to denigrate (as many of his critics do) the value of what has been produced in the past 20 years – Moonlight, Ashes To Ashes, the shorter, political plays – but domestic accord, a powerful personal partnership with Antonia Fraser, a growing public role, an increasing dissatisfaction with character plays and stage mechanics have all contributed to a diminution in the volume of new work.

In 1971 he said an extraordinary thing: “I think I am in a trap, always. I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else … I often feel that about waking up with myself in the morning. You’re trapped with yourself all your damned life.” This at a time when he was successful in every sphere. Four years later came No Man’s Land and the portrait of Hirst – a rich, successful but creatively (spiritually?) bankrupt writer; surely, as Billington suggests, a fleshing out of Pinter’s fears of what he might become.

In 1975, as No Man’s Land opened at the Old Vic, Pinter was beginning the remaking of himself that he had so fervently desired. He left Merchant, began living with Fraser, and they married in 1980. “My life has undergone a considerable transformation,” he says now. “Antonia and I have been together for nearly 25 years. I have six step-children for whom I feel great affection, and we have 13 grandchildren, who are a delight.”

He has also become increasingly absorbed with politics. Some attribute this to Fraser’s influence, but his public role began before the start of their relationship, with his opposition to the US-backed coup against the Allende government in Chile in 1973. He became increasingly vocal during the Reagan-Thatcher hegemony of the 80s, and in 1988 he and Fraser launched a left-leaning discussion group that was mocked in the media; he took it as confirmation that no one cared about the damage being caused by Thatcherism. (Ironically, Pinter had voted for Thatcher in 1979, as a protest against a strike at the National Theatre that was dogging a production he was directing. He now calls that vote “the most shameful act of my life”.)

There are those who lament Pinter’s growing engagement with politics, and who would swap all the proselytising for one more big, broad-canvas play. Political pundits are many, great writers few; shouldn’t the passion he devotes to politics be devoted exclusively to his work? “I don’t believe that at all,” he insists to me. “The only obligations I have as a writer are to the work I write. I don’t see it as a public obligation. I’ve no obligation to society to write anything. Just because people say I am a writer doesn’t mean I have to write. If I feel like it I will, but I write only for myself. If that strikes a chord with anybody else in any terms, either political or non-political, that’s fine. But I have a responsibility as a citizen which I take seriously.”

Certainly, he has nothing left to prove. Bristol University may not have turned the room in which The Room was first performed into a museum, but posterity is likely to be kinder. The media, hooked on its caricature, may not realise it, but Pinter is a writer of worldwide renown.

In receiving the David Cohen Literature Prize for lifetime achievement in 1995, he spoke of the sheer pleasure that writing gave him: “I’m well aware that I have been described in some quarters as being ‘enigmatic, taciturn, terse, prickly, explosive and forbidding.’ Well, I do have my moods like anyone else, I won’t deny it. But my writing life … has been informed by quite a different set of characteristics which have nothing whatsoever to do with those descriptions. Quite simply, my writing life has been one of relish, challenge, excitement.” That speech, needless to say, didn’t get many column inches; relish is so much less marketable than rage.

← History, his way
Fiery Fred goes quietly →