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Lincoln Center's festival of plays by Harold Pinter was, the critics
said, one of the highlights of that long ago Manhattan summer, that
summer before, the summer of 2001. The sequence of nine pieces
was a celebration and a tribute, New York's homage to England's
most celebrated dramatist, a man that the city had, apparently,
taken to its heart. To Newsday, the plays were "deliriously
rewarding," while the Village Voice found them "a
source of pleasure and contemplation." One writer in the New
York Times talked of "genius," while another, gleefully
anticipating the menace of a typical Pinter production, warned that
"alarm sirens should be screaming at Lincoln Center. Evil has
arrived…"
Well, the alarm
sirens did scream in New York, but not at the Lincoln Center. Evil
did come to Manhattan, but it was no play. And down, down in Hell,
in that wrecked abomination that they call Ground Zero, the rescuers
still dig, looking for traces of people, including, quite possibly,
some who might have attended a Pinter festival just a few weeks
before.
With his audience
in body bags, and the city that had so recently honored him torn
and broken, you might expect that the eloquent Harold Pinter could
find something to say, something to let us know, in words that we
could never hope to find, what he thought about this tragedy.
And so, in
his own fashion, he did.
On September
20th, Pinter cosigned a letter to the London Daily Telegraph
that gives us his view on downtown's mass murder. It begins with
a brief nod to New York's dead, but then, comes briskly to the real
point. "Stop the war!" As the letter is, effectively,
addressed to America, we can only assume that its authors believe
that the responsibility to abandon any fight lies with the U.S.,
not bin Laden. Retaliation, they argue, would be pointless. A crusade
against countries which "are said to" harbor terrorists
will not, the writers warn, bring safety to the "cities of
America and Europe."
The "are
said to" betrays, I suspect, the skillful dramatist's touch,
the insertion of ambiguity, where there is, in fact, none.
The greater
criminals, the letter implies, are to be found in London and Washington.
"In Afghanistan, four million people are homeless and scores
of thousands are starving or dying…because of sanctions, imposed
by the West in their attempt to force the Taliban government to
hand over Osama bin Laden." It is a new variant on that old
tired theme of moral equivalence, the perverse logic once used to
support the claim that there was no meaningful difference between
the home of the Gulag and the land of the free.
And, as always,
those making such a case need to keep clear of any awkward, inconvenient
reality. Why the Taliban should want to play host to bin Laden is
never discussed in the letter, and nor is there is any mention of
the fact that Afghanistan's misery began long before the imposition
of sanctions. There is no suggestion either that the Taliban's savagery,
of a type so primitive that "medieval" would be an compliment,
might have something to do with the country's current predicament.
We are told nothing of the relief workers, driven out of Kabul by
the Taliban's village Stalins, for being too modern, too helpful,
too threatening. There is silence too about the regime's laws, cruel
dictates that deny people medical care, or even the right to work,
because they are, unfortunately for them, women. Widow? Well, that's
just too bad. Mr. Pinter and his friends also seem to have little
to say about those tens of thousands of Afghanistan's brightest
who have fled, escapees from a nation where going beardless can
be a crime, exiles from a country that they might otherwise have
helped to rebuild.
But perhaps
we should not be surprised at these omissions. Pinter's plays, renowned
for their enigmatic silences, are as famous for what they leave
out as for what they put in.
Equally well
known, at least over in England, are Mr. Pinter's leftist politics,
and it is these that place the letter to the Daily Telegraph
in its real context. Now, he is, of course, a man of the theater,
and these views may in part be a pose, a thrilling role, perhaps,
for a dramatist who has always seemed to relish the drama of opposition
and the excitement of some safely imaginary martyrdom, but that
doesn't make them any more attractive. We saw this display at its
self-indulgent worst during the Thatcher years, a time when the
rich, successful playwright liked to portray himself as a dissident
(he was a founding signatory of Britain's Charter 88, a British
pressure group of which the very name was an insult to Charter 77's
brave fight against the Communist system in Czechoslovakia), a fantasy
Havel for Britain's alienated chattering classes.
With humbug
comes hypocrisy. A self-proclaimed humanitarian (of course!) Pinter
is, he likes to remind us, a campaigner against torture, and yet
he is also "an active delegate" of the Cuba Solidarity
Campaign, an organization that likes to claim that Castro's Caribbean
charnel house "is the most democratic state in the world."
Good leftist that he is, Pinter is, we must presume, an egalitarian,
but he is an egalitarian with a big house, a fat bank account and
a ludicrously self-important website,
a website where he is at pains to remind us that he is married to
Lady Antonia Fraser. Don't worry comrade, we peasants know
our place.
And through
it all, dank and poisonous, runs a visceral anti-Americanism. It
is an old European infection, still all too common and with more
than a whiff of the continent's dark 20th century about it, and
it is likely to cause trouble as this crisis unfolds. It is a hating,
jealous assumption of moral and intellectual superiority, the wrath
of the pygmy who has discovered that he is no giant. You can hear
this rage in the virulence of Pinter's language over the years (the
U.S.A., is a "bully," "a bovine monster out of control,"
its crimes are "systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless")
the one-sidedness of his causes, and in his choice of favored authoritarian
regimes (Castro's Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua), a curious selection
that would seem to hint that the playwright is yet another European
intellectual who still sees something sexy in the socialist jackboot.
Under these
circumstances, Harold Pinter's signature on this letter should be
seen for what it is, a particularly tasteless attack on an America
he despises, whose hospitality he has recently accepted, whose checks
he has just cashed and whose dead he now insults.
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