SOURCE: Gussow, Mel. “The Prime of Harold Pinter.” American Theatre 11, no. 3 (March 1994): 14-21.

Harold Pinter has always been able to surprise himself as well as his audience. Several years ago, he said with an air of resignation, “My attitude towards my own playwriting has changed. The whole idea of a narrative, of a broad canvas stretching over two hours, I think I've gone away from that forever.” Fifteen years after Betrayal, he wrote Moonlight. Although it runs only 75 minutes without intermission, it is a complete, richly textured play. As his body of work testifies and as Moonlight certifies, at 63 he is England's foremost living dramatist. Only Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn are close contenders.

Writing the play, he said, was “like opening a door and suddenly realizing you're on a plane of gold. I don't want to sound mystical about it, but I know that something happened which I can't really account for.” Because he wrote six short plays and eight screenplays in the interval between Betrayal and Moonlight, he becomes edgy when it is suggested that he overcame writer's block. But he acknowledges the new play as a breakthrough after periods of “bumping into brick walls.”

The opening of Moonlight at the Almeida Theatre in London began what was to be one of the most salutary weeks of Pinter's career. Several days later, the playwright presented his papers—all his extant manuscripts of 26 plays, 17 screenplays and sketches, prose and poetry—on a long-term loan to the British Library. In accepting the Pinter papers at a festive luncheon, Sir Anthony Kenny, the chairman of the library's board, said that the generosity was unprecedented. The “Deposit of the Archives” was followed by the reopening on the West End of Pinter's compelling production of David Mamet's Oleanna (starring David Suchet). Surrounded by these visible signs of his success, Pinter was in a celebratory mode.

But—and this is a but as big as a butte—there is the matter of his public image. Despite the favorable reviews and a Times of London editorial extolling his work, the British press treats him with hostility traditionally reserved for enemies of the State and prodigal members of the Royal Family. Every day during Pinter Week, the newspapers were filled with verbal and graphic putdowns. The most vicious attacks were unsigned. Because Pinter is chary about giving interviews, quotations and anecdotes were recycled and apocryphal. The playwright refers to this as “cuttings journalism.” Nothing fresh in the hopper? Call up “Pinter” in the computer menu and out pops all the old hearsay and gossip about his rudeness and hot temper.

Such assaults on a major artist seem unconscionable, but to the playwright, it was a bitter fact of his theatrical life. As the press marshalled its familiar arsenal, he kept his ire to himself. The focus was on Moonlight—a portrait of family relationships undermined by years of divisiveness. At the center of the play is a father on his deathbed, raging against the night of dying, a character superbly played by Ian Holm, himself returning to the stage after a long absence. As with all Pinter, Moonlight is filled with mystery. Is the daughter, a wraithlike poetic figure, a ghost? Are the grandchildren imaginary? Why do the two sons refuse to return home? Free reign is given to the eye and ear of the theatregoer. The mysteries will accumulate as the play is done in other countries and makes an inevitable move to New York. As with The Homecoming and Old Times, this is a play that will be greatly discussed, analyzed and debated.

As a confrontation with questions of mortality, it is a return to earlier Pinter as well as a step into previously uncharted dramatic territory. The early plays (The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming) were linked as comedies of menace. Next came a number of plays (from Old Times to Betrayal) concerned with love and the fallibility of memory, and they were followed by short sharp political works like Mountain Language that deal, in Pinter's words, with “power and powerlessness.”

On one level, the plays could be called comedies of language. As Peter Hall, who has staged more Pinter than any other director, says in his autobiography, with him, “words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other; and in defense to conceal feelings.” The plays, Moonlight definitely included, illustrate one of Pinter's favorite Cockney expressions, “taking the piss,” which means mocking people with apparent deference so that they do not know that they are being mocked.

As Ian Smith, a young Oxford don and cricket teammate of Pinter, says, all the plays are about “Englishness as an urban experience of alienation and dislocation, about establishing a personal identity in relation to other people and to language.” Smith equates Pinter's art with his bold style of playing cricket. As he says, “Everything is focused. It's about performance and economy of gesture.”

At the end of The Birthday Party, as McCann and Goldberg are taking Stanley away to what they euphemistically describe as “a long convalescence,” the landlady's husband says sympathetically, “Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!” In conversation in 1988, Pinter said that he lived that line all his life. That stubborn individuality has been a chief motivating factor for the playwright, whether, as a young man, he was rejecting his call up for national service, or, later in his life, he was reacting to censors, dismissive critics or nations undermining human rights. In the broadest sense, Pinter has always been a conscientious objector, even as people keep trying to tell him what to do.

In photographs he can look foreboding, but in the proper circumstances he is approachable and communicative, especially when speaking about subjects like cricket, James Joyce, Nicaragua, Bosnia and East Timor. On subjects of a closer personal nature, he remains circumspect. One direct result of his years as an actor is that he speaks in a crisp, carefully cultivated voice. Tall, black-haired and broad-shouldered, he is resolutely athletic and keeps fit by playing tennis (often with his wife Lady Antonia Fraser). As the captain of a cricket team, he is devoted to that sport but plays only when he feels he can earn a spot in that day's lineup.

The Pinters are a glamorous couple with a tight circle of protective friends, who include members of Lady Antonia's large family (many of them writers) and playwrights like Ronald Harwood and Simon Gray. For all the publicity that pursues them, they lead a comparatively quiet life, dining together in favorite restaurants, playing bridge at home with Karel Reisz and his wife Betsy Blair and visiting European hideaways on family holidays. They live in a large elegant townhouse on a quiet square in the Holland Park section of London. Every day, the playwright walks through the couple's lush garden to a two story stucco house that faces the next street. The building was renovated into what Lady Antonia calls his “superstudy.” It is super. On the first floor is an office, with fax, photocopier and files superintended by Pinter's assistant. On the second floor is his workroom.

At noon two days after the opening of Moonlight, Pinter greets me at the door, for the first of a series of conversations. For a moment it seems I have arrived too early: He is wearing what looks like a pajama top, a silky shirt with broad blue stripes. But, along with slacks and sneakers, this turns out to be a typical at-home outfit. As we walk through the study, everything seems to be precisely in place. The shelves are alphabetized with books in categories: Beckett and Joyce (Ulysses is nightly bedtime rereading); political works with an emphasis on books dealing with Nazi Germany; plays by fellow dramatists. There is a shelf for poetry and another for Lady Antonia's best-selling historical biographies and mystery thrillers; and an entire bookcase for volumes on cricket. In the hallway are copies of all his plays with their covers facing forward as in a wall-size collage.

On one shelf is a collection of scrapbooks of his clippings which he has carefully kept since the beginning of his career. On the first page is a review of his first play, The Room. The headline reads, “Written in Two Days. This Young Author Scores a Hit.” But soon there are other reviews with comments like “Mr. Pinter, you're just not funny enough,” and “What all this means only Mr. Pinter knows.” He keeps the bad with the good, though he draws the line at the scurrilous.

His desk is filled with memorabilia: a brass dodo from his wife for writing Moonlight; a brass buckle (not a knuckle) from Mamet for directing Oleanna. Facing the desk is a large painting of Joseph Losey's sitting room, Losey being the film director with whom he closely collaborated on The Servant and Accident. In Pinter's bathroom is a photograph of Sir Len Hutton, the cricket star who was his idol, about whom he wrote a three-line poem (“I saw Len Hutton in his prime / Another time / another time”). He sent that poem to Simon Gray and then called him to see if he had received it. Said Gray, “Yes, but I haven't finished reading it yet.”

Next to Hutton in the Pinter pantheon is Samuel Beckett. For many years, Pinter sent manuscripts of his plays to Beckett, who responded with valuable suggestions. The last time he saw him, Beckett was in a nursing home in Paris and feeling “pretty gloomy.” Pinter said, “I'm going to send you something to cheer you up: my adaptation of The Trial.” Both playwrights laughed loudly at the thought of Kafka as a day brightener. (The film of The Trial, directed by David Jones, opened late last year.) Now Pinter sends his plays to a number of people, including Simon Gray, David Mamet and Ian Smith. “It's called a mailing list,” he said. “I do feel my life has become much more open since Antonia and I have been together, which is now almost 18 years. I send my plays to more people and I say more and irritate more people than I ever did.”

Over lunch at a nearby restaurant (champagne and white wine to whet the conversation), we talk about the origins of Moonlight. Printer's plays have almost all begun with an image or a line of dialogue that triggered the playwright's imagination. In the case of Moonlight, it was something in No Man's Land, a play thought to be unrevivable because it was so identified with its august original stars, Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud. While others feared to follow them in a second production, the dauntless author stepped into the Richardson role himself, playing opposite Paul Eddington. The fact that they succeeded unlocked the play for future productions (Jason Robards and Christopher Plummer are starring through March 6 in a new mounting at the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York). In character in the play, Pinter said, “Tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered in what you describe as your life.” As he recalls, “There was always an absolute hush in the house during that speech. That sense of the dead who are alive in us quickened something in me.” Speaking dialogue he had written also sparked his creativity. As he said, “I was led through the act of acting back into the act of writing.”

He began writing, as usual on a long yellow, legal-size pad, then suddenly stopped as he realized, “I've been here before.” He ransacked his papers looking for pads from the past. “I became like a wild, mad composer, throwing scripts and papers all over the place.” Finally he found what he had been looking for, pages written 15 years before. Rereading his jottings, he agreed with his original assessment that the material was not progressing but there were certain elements that echoed in the present. “A man was in his bed dying and his wife was in the room. I knew he was a man of considerable vigor and it was a question of children who weren't there.” In January, while on holiday in Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, he rented an old manual typewriter and typed “feverishly, banging and clanking way into the night. I couldn't stop.”

In characteristic fashion, he was not aware of the shape of Moonlight or of the ending until he had finished it. “I didn't know what was going to happen between those people, except I knew the father was raging a good deal of the time.”

Taking a reflective look at his work, he said, “Theatre is essentially exploratory. Even old Sophocles didn't know what was going to happen next. He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, I've found things out, but I don't say, ‘I have illuminated myself, you see before you a changed person.’ It's a more surreptitious sense of discovery. Writing for me is an act of freedom and celebration.”

Asked how Moonlight related to his own family life, he pauses, then says, “Parent-children relationships are very very complicated. Both from natural observation of others and my own experience, I think it must have a general application.” About his son, Daniel, who is 35, he says, “He lives alone in the country, he writes music and we're in touch.” When I suggest that the play might subconsciously derive from his own experiences as a son rather than as a father, that sets him off on a memory trip back to his youth as the only child of a lower-middle-class Jewish couple in Hackney on the East End of London (according to family lore, the name was originally de Pinta).

“My mother died last October at the age of 88 [on the first day of rehearsal of No Man's Land] and my father [who was a tailor] is still going strong at the age of 91. When I ask him, ‘How are things, Dad?’, he says, ‘Well, no fireworks.’ My father was a man of considerable authority when he was young. He still is.” At the beginning of World War II, Pinter was sent to Cornwall for safety, a traumatic experience for a nine-year-old. Back in London, with the war still on, he watched as his street was struck with incendiary bombs. Evacuating their home, he rescued his two most prized possessions, his cricket bat and a “paean of love” he was writing to a girl down the street. From an early age, he wrote poetry and went to the movies, growing up on a diet of American gangster movies and British war films.

With a natural flair for dramatizing himself, he decided to become an actor. Skipping university, he joined Anew McMaster's touring company in Ireland. It was an eye-opener to be introduced to the theatre by appearing in Hamlet, Oedipus Rex, Julius Caesar, Othello and The Importance of Being Earnest all in the same week. Shakespeare “was given very directly and received very directly” by country audiences. Pinter began specializing in sinister roles, like Iago. For one performance, at a matinee in a convent, McMaster let him go on in his place as Hamlet, with the older actor playing the Gravedigger. After the performance, Pinter asked him how it went and he replied, “Very good, but be a little more compassionate with your mother.”

Under the name David Baron, he then acted with provincial troupes throughout England, meeting and marrying the actress Vivien Merchant. As journeymen actors, they struggled to make a living. Having written a novel, The Dwarfs, drawn from his roistering life as a young man in London, and thinking it unpublishable, he decided to shift his attention to playwriting. Writing the one-act The Room for his friend Henry Woolf at Bristol University, he plunged into The Birthday Party, which opened in London and was demolished by the critics. The play, but not the production, was rescued by Harold Hobson in an historic Sunday Times review. A touring production of the play was directed by the author with a young actor named Alan Ayckbourn in the central role. As Ayckbourn recalls, when he asked the playwright questions about his character, Pinter replied, “Mind your own business.” Pinter denies making that statement but savors the story and remains an admirer of Ayckbourn.

Pinter persisted and, with The Caretaker, found his voice and was proclaimed one of the leaders of a new wave of British dramatists. Early in his career, he began diversifying by writing screenplays and directing plays by others (in particular, Simon Gray). If he did face a writer's block, it was not in recent years, but in the early 1980s, after A Kind of Alaska. “There was a period of roughly three years when I did not write a play,” he recalls. “Something gnaws away: the desire to write and the inability to do so.” He felt that he wanted to write plays that would address his political convictions, and was finally able to do so “out of anger, very very cold anger.”

From the first, Pinter was regarded as an intuitive playwright rather then an intellectual one. The truth is that he is both. After the act of inspiration comes careful construction, meditation if not premeditation. The plays are dense with references to writers like Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Pinter is as much an autodidact as Stoppard (who also did not go to university), but he does not readily reveal his literary leanings. Over the years, his work has become more widely seen and more influential (and the word Pinteresque entered the international lexicon, joining Shakespearean, Shavian and Beckettian). His plays are performed even, to his surprise, in China, where The Lover, a play about “sex in the suburbs,” has recently been touring.

The Pinter Review, a scholarly journal published annually by the Pinter Society in Tampa, Fla., is one of many indications of his academic ascendancy. Scholars are probing and parsing his works in essays and books that range from the general (The Pinter Problem) to the specific (“Das groteske Kurzdrama und der Anreiz zur Entratselung: Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter”). Though he has a shelf full of these texts, he feels nonplussed by the critical attention and, for example, by a structuralist reading of one of his brief revue sketches (“a conversation that is mutually and simultaneously phatic for both interlocutors”). He explains, “I don't understand how people can be so terribly earnest and serious about a damn sketch. It's only a sketch.”

He is adamant about seasoning his plays with humor, with “salt, vinegar and mustard.” “Laughs are a constant factor in my work, and they always have been. You wouldn't glean that from our dear old friends, the press. Not a laugh, not a giggle, not a whisper of a smile attends these events. The history is: lots of laughs. The distortion is: no laughs!”

In speaking about his temperament, he says, “I know I've had the reputation of being a real pain in the ass over the last few years, and on certain occasions I have been.” But from his point of view, his reactions have been provoked, usually by an assault on his sense of justice. He has the strongest feelings about the hypocrisy of “the destructive society” he lives in, and is never hesitant to offer his opinion. Several years ago, he and his wife formed an anti-Establishment political discussion group that met in their house, a gathering that included Salman Rushdie, Germaine Greer and David Hare. They were criticized, and still are long after the group disbanded, for being “champagne socialists,” the British equivalent of America's radical chic. Soon after a Greenpeace ship was blown up by the French secret service, an event that Pinter describes as “an act of governmental murder,” he found himself at a dinner party across the dinner table from the French Ambassador to England. The playwright promised his wife that he would be polite, but his anger overcame his company manners and he became argumentative. “The ambassador accused me of insulting La France and nearly challenged me to a duel. Though in one way I regret that—it was the wrong occasion—on the other hand I don't. People who stand on a spurious sense of dignity irritate me. The solemnity of the official position!” Only once, he said, has he resorted to violence. That was in the 1960s when he heard a man in a pub making an anti-Semitic remark. The result was a brawl. “There is a violence in me,” he admits, “but I don't walk around looking for trouble.”

In our first conversation in 1971, at the time of the opening of Old Times on Broadway, Pinter said, “I think I am in a trap always. I sometimes wish desperately that I could write like someone else, be someone else.” When those words were quoted back to him, he said that he had changed. “I'm actually much happier in myself than I was 20 years ago.” Then he offered a correction. “When I talked then about the closeness of my family, in fact I was very unhappy, and I had not been happy for some time. You wouldn't believe this, but I have a tendency to the melancholic.” Then he smiled. “It really would be a waste to be melancholy when you're married to Antonia Fraser.”

On Sunday of Pinter Week, there was an unsigned profile in the Observer, deriding him for his pomposity in saying at “an expensive dinner party” that he was “sick to the soul.” Trying to track down the root of at least this one item, I asked him if he had ever said that in public, in private or in a play. He offered a categorical denial. Perhaps someone was eavesdropping and had misheard a comment. Could it be his old friend, the proverbial weasel under the cocktail cabinet? Offered roast beef at Buckingham Palace, Pinter may have said that he would “stick to the sole.”

On my last day in London, I visited the Pinter archives at the British Library. The magnificent high vaulted reading room was filled with authors and scholars. On any given day, Lady Antonia and several members of her family might be among those diligently at work. A maze of corridors led to a large, cold storage space. Pinter occupies one section of the room with 60 boxes of material, arranged alphabetically. The Moonlight files begin with 19 pages of yellow lined paper dating from 1978, followed by a scribbled notepad from Air Mauritius, an outline, drafts and completed manuscript. Names of characters changed, as did words (“codswallop” was replaced by “pigswill”). Clearly, the play grew by a process of distillation.

The fact that the Pinter papers are enshrined in the British Library with the works of G. K. Chesterton and Evelyn Waugh should make him an immortal of English letters. But wait a minute! Look whose papers are in adjoining bookcases: the collected works of Lord Chamberlain, for so many years the nation's official censor, arbiter of taste and gadfly to Pinter and other playwrights. Together with his staff of readers, he searched for improprieties and innuendo (dismissing The Birthday Party as “an insane, pointless play” and The Caretaker as “a piece of incoherence in the manner of Samuel Beckett”). He demanded excisions before licensing the plays to be seen by the public. This means that, in a final ironic coincidence, Pinter's manuscripts coexist in intimate proximity with the Lord Chamberlain's censorious reviews.