Harold Pinter, the English playwright, died on Wednesday at the age of 78.
In 2005, Pinter won the Nobel Prize for literature, and the individual making the Swedish Academy’s presentation noted of Pinter: “In your works, seductively accessible and frighteningly mysterious, the curtain rises on dense life-landscapes and harrowing confinement. In poetic images, you illuminate an existence where fantasy and the nightmare of reality clash.”
Printer’s genius was to break away from the customary genteel, sitting room English plays of the first half of the century and to create intense, claustrophobia dramatic environments in which words had the ability to sear the heart and the soul, stripping away any pretense, and, at times, one’s very humanity.
In America, Pinter is perhaps best known for “The Birthday Party,” “The Caretaker,” “The Homecoming,” and “Betrayal.” The American playwright, David Mamet, owes much to Printer for his delicate balance between intense words and silence which Mamet used to his own advantage in his Pulitzer Prize winning play “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
I had the fortune to meet Harold Pinter in 1970 at a the The Bat & Ball pub on Old Dover Road in Canterbury, England, which was directly across the road from the Canterbury Cricket ground.
I had been living on Old Dover Road near the The Bat and Ball for a year, first studying at the University of Kent and then teaching.
Pinter was avid follower of cricket, and although somewhat of a private person, he loved British County cricket and frequently traveled to matches at many of the county cricket grounds.
On that day, he had been in the stands at Canterbury’s St Lawrence Ground watching one match in Kent’s long march to the 1970 Country Championship.
After the day’s play, my flat mate and University colleague, Martin and I entered the pub, ordered pints and sat in two comfortable arm chairs next to a thin man with a East London accent. Martin had played cricket in school, and he quickly struck up a conversation with the man who turned out to be incredibly knowledgeable about first class first class county Cricket and international Test Cricket.
When Pinter learned that Martin and I had recently earned our Master’s degrees in English Literature at the University of Kent, he probed us deeply on our interpretations of themes in works by Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka.
Pinter had not introduced himself to us, but the playwright’s appearance was well known to those interested in modern English literature, and in no time, we found ourselves referring to him as Mr. Pinter, and he was calling us Marty and Peter.
After we gave our analysis, Pinter held forth for more than 45 minutes on what he called the “themes of tension and anger” in Beckett’s and Kafka’s works.
It was immediately clear from the extended dissertation Pinter delivered that Martin and I had failed the playwright’s literary test, but now, almost four decades years later, I think back on that hour or so we spend with Pinter as the most intense intellectual experience I have ever had.
Peter B Hayward
Copyright © 2008 Peter B. Hayward All Rights Reserved
