Lady Antonia Fraser, who was married to the late playwright Harold Pinter for 33 years, reveals in a new memoir that he was “a devoted husband who wrote love poetry to his wife and held to their agreement never to go to bed angry.” In a recent interview, Lady Antonia remarked that, going by his plays, “people were expecting to find our marriage was filled with morbid silences and pauses” and to hear of Harold as “a brooding menace.” She sipped her white wine, and laughed at the thought.
Ha ha, but the laugh is on us. So while Pinter was enjoying his high-level marriage of refined intellectual equals in the British upper class, he was inflicting on his servile public a dark vision of obscure miseries, casual cruelties, inarticulate vulgarity, strangled miscommunications, and menacing silences in sordid rooming houses.
According to Wikipedia, at least one of Pinter’s plays, The Caretaker, “is widely studied in schools in England for the General Certificate of Secondary Education and A-Levels English, sometimes as Drama Coursework, in the United States, at both high-school and college and university levels, and worldwide. It is studied at many schools as part of the International Baccalaureate curriculum. It is among Pinter’s most frequently-studied and most frequently-reprinted works.”
I'm a little unclear on the point here. People shouldn't write plays about dark subjects? It would have been better if Pinter had been a jerk and mistreated his wife? Or that schools shouldn't study the plays of left-wing activists?
I'm honestly asking: what is the intended point here?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI recalled this PBC post, so pardon my late response.
The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco is running Pinter's "The Homecoming." I hadn't planned to see it (indeed, had never heard of Pinter), but after reading this PBC message I got a cheap seat and went.
All I can say is, Bah! The play was poorly written, had no particular purpose, was not entertaining, was not thought provoking, was not radical, was not illuminating. It was, however, illogical. I believe that my view was shared by the majority of the middle-aged audience, who did not applaud much (ACT is very good, so it wasn't the acting) and who did not talk much on the way out.
I am sure that Pinter got a Nobel prize for much the same reason that Obama got one for Peace, and Gore got one for... What?
One would think that the theme of twits with personal issues, family problems, and poor communication skills was already explored by depressed Norwegians a century ago. Say, maybe that's why Pinter is studied, as a distraction!
When I went to college (late 1960s) I was placed in freshman lit beside English majors (not being one myself). The choice of lit was mostly along the lines of upper middle class Europeans and Americans with personal issues, family problems, and poor communication skills, as described above. Not being of Anglo descent, not being upper middle class, and having good communications skills, I wondered why anyone wrote such books, much less studied them as literature. My summary of the lit, which I recall to this day, was that if the folks in the books actually had to work for a living at real jobs, then they wouldn't be so problematical. The English majors did not see my point of view. Most of them went on to teach, I believe.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm with Dave. The idea seems to be that if you write about people who behave badly, then you yourself should behave badly, otherwise you are guilty of some sort of fraud ... This is baffling and nonsensical.
As to the gentleman who didn't like The Homecoming, whenver someone says that a work of art "had no particular purpose" you can be sure that they have no clue whatsoever as to the purpose of art.
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