From a reader:

Here’s the thing: early Pinter is brilliant stuff, if
you care even marginally about theatre. He made a mark
on theatre that has been profound and important
and–speaking strictly from the perspective of what
happens on a stage, and what happens between actor and
audience–magnificent.
And having grown up in a left-wing household, in which
I was forbidden to go to Walt Disney movies because
old Walt was an anti-communist, and in which I
provoked a major shout-down one Thanksgiving over the
sweet potatoes for offering the mild observation that
John Wayne captured an extraordinary essence of the
American myth onscreen (“But he’s right wing!” my
sister shouted repeatedly, stabbing at her stuffing
with a revolutionary fork), I am not much of a one for
pinning artists to their politics. Think Ezra Pound,
after all: some good stuff in those cantos, though he
was indeed an anti-semitic SOB, not to mention a major
loon.
It is my delight to admit I am elitist on the topic of
the arts, if that’s the right word: I have no
expectation that the work of art will please me
outside its own context. As a right-winger, after all,
I would be limited to virtually nothing in the
contemporary era–no movies, no music, no books–if I
only watched or listened to or read right-wing
artists. As for the conceit of artists without
politics–well, artists inhabit the real world when
they’re not creating, and often make spectacularly
silly choices about how they go about inhabiting it.
Not all of them, true, but any number of them. Pinter,
for sure.
But the work remains, whatever kind of dunce the
artist may be when he’s not doing his thing. If it is
passionate art, if it is evocative art, if it
resonates in some extraordinary way with its audience,
then whether it is high art or low art, from Bambi to
Stagecoach to The Birthday Party, I truly don’t give a
rat’s rear end what the artist does or says when he’s
off the clock. I’m sick and tired of all this passion
about other people’s points of view–it lends a
relevancy to their politics that really doesn’t exist.
And it transforms the experience of being a consumer
of the arts into a sort of priggish screening process,
in which the artist is carefully vetted for wrongthink
before we can sit back and drink in his work. Leave
that to our Stalinist chums on the left…please let’s
not join them.