Peter Kennard remembers his friend, Harold Pinter
Peter Kennard remembers playwright, poet, and political activist, Harold Pinter who died on Christmas Eve 2008.
By Peter Kennard on Friday, December 26th, 2008 - 607 words.
We must all shout louder; a great voice for humanity has gone. Harold Pinter died on Christmas Eve. In his writing he took the everyday speech of the ordinary people of London and made it resonate with the crimes of the 20th and 21st centuries.
He put flesh onto the pared-down voice of Beckett. The people in his plays lived in real lodging houses and walked on the actual streets of Hackney where he was born and grew up. Through the use of silence and the detail of everyday speech he showed that our conversations are all about a struggle to maintain our status and position.
Pinter was able to cut through the political lies dribbling from the mouths of our leaders by speaking in such a direct way. Commentators argued he was resorting to cliché, whereas in fact he wanted to cut through the sludge of imperialist language and find the humans struggling underneath it.
This made him a hated figure amongst the toadies of power who treated his political speeches as an aberration, rather than as being the deep embodiment of everything he wrote. His poems have been especially vilified as being “juvenile” and “simplistic” whereas the whole point of them is to find a language that can shock us in to feeling the horrors of war, especially the invasion of Iraq in which he wrote a number of painfully honest poems.
His Nobel prize acceptance speech is one of the great statements expressing the vital connection between art and politics, and should be read by all young creative people. He knew that the blurring of the line between art and politics was key to the developing resistance against oppression and ecological catastrophe that we are in the midst of. And he always encouraged practitioners in any art form who were trying to find way to give form to this reality. In my own case, he wrote an introduction to my book-length poem Domesday Book, and on one memorable occasion came to an exhibition of mine in July 2004 when he had already been ill for some time, and stood on a box outside the gallery to read his anti-war poems.
Friends of mine still think of it as one of the most memorable cultural/political moments of their life. The fact that he was ill and this was a tiny gathering outside a gallery off Oxford Street made it all the more moving that he would think any act of resistance against the war in Iraq, however minimal, was important enough to take part in.
My generation’s literary stars have shown themselves to lack the spine and humanity of Pinter. Ian McKewan, Salman Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, have turned against humanity and lined their pockets with the proceeds of the dollars of the establishment. The few voices that are now speaking out and managing to be heard are risking the obloquy of the powerful. Figures like Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, John Pilger, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, must now be added to by a new generation of voices passionate in their denunciation of oppression.
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Below is one of the poems that Pinter read at Peter Kennard’s show in July 2004:
American Football by Harold Pinter
Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
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Peter Kennard remembers his friend, Harold Pinter
Peter Kennard remembers playwright, poet, and political activist, Harold Pinter who died on Christmas Eve 2008.
So your lot are all dying off.
What do we have?
What can we do?
When we open our mouths all that comes out
is wiki google yahoo txt
accepted cross posted truth-ish.
We fuck for fun and not to breed.
Most us haven't read or read
Those tomes, those Noams you speak of.
We're under thirty, under debt,
undereducated, under….dead.
As a playwright he was merely a minor talent, an imitator of Beckett without Beckett's compassion or universalism. As a political figure he was an apologist for dictators, from Stalin to Milosevic and Saddam. And I doubt he went anywhere near Hackney after he'd left – it's not as nice as Hampstead, and Lady Antonia wouldn't have liked it at all. Good riddance to the vicious old hypocrite, who's now in Hell nodding vigorously in agreement as Bobby Fischer and Jorg Haider ramble on. RIP Vivien Merchant – she experienced just how "humanitarian" Pinter really was.
Horrible. And so wrong.
Unlike the Blessed Harold, I never claimed to be a humanitarian. The reference to Haider and Fischer, which still makes me laugh however much it offends your tender sensibilities, is an invocation of the commonalities among the three: their psychotic anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, their affectations of populism from positions within national elites, the enormous contrast between their public gravitas and their private viciousness, and their uncanny ability to fool gullible idiots like you.
As for the fantasy that Pinter "invested much of his energy into increasing public awareness of tyrannous regimes", I somehow doubt that that was his purpose in joining the International Committee for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic. To use the kind of language Pinter used whenever anyone dared to disagree with His Majesty about anything, the guy was a shit, and you should be ashamed of yourself for being taken in by him.
Oh, and while you're wrong about Beckett, the reference to Rattigan was interesting, so thanks for that. It confirms my impression that Pinter really was little more than a serial plagiarist.
Happy New Year!
You can’t suspect Pinter of plagiarising Beckett, only to refer to my alternative suggestion (that Rattigan was a more likely influence) as confirmation that Pinter was a plagiarist. Beckett and Rattigan are chalk and cheese. And since when was a detectible influence sufficient grounds for a charge of plagiarism? I think I’m being embarrassingly obvious here.
Not a Pinter Fan (if that is your real name) I would like you to explain a few things to me. We’re both on holiday, I hope, so I’m sure you can afford the time.
1. As a non-humanitarian, do you think that anti-Americanism is innately ‘psychotic’, or were you meaning to imply that Pinter’s brand of anti-Americanism was of an especially psychotic nature? If the latter, please elaborate (specifics). You might want to extract from his Nobel Lecture particular instances of the psychotic. Here he outlines a few of the reasons behind his anti-Americanism: ‘’the justification of the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in forty-five minutes. We were assured this was true. It was not true … We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al-Qaida and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York on September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true.’ Again, all quite embarrassingly obvious.
2. I feel I was too lenient before in accepting that there was something of the apologist in Pinter. Again, I would stress that the word is ‘realist’. But I would only accept this remark (reservedly) in relation to Saddam (see above) and not to ‘Stalin to Milosevic’. Please do explain, with the following in mind, again from his Nobel Lecture: ‘Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post war period … the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought’.
3. As for your remarks about Pinter joining the International Committee for the Defence of Slobodan Milosevic. His objection was quite particular: ‘I believe his arrest and detention by the international criminal tribunal is unconstitutional, and goes against Yugoslav and international law. They have no right to try him.’ He did not apologise for Milosevic, but said that he was ‘ruthless and savage’. What was it about Pinter’s objection to the extradition of Milosevic that most bothered you?
4. Again, please explain: ‘Their affectations of populism from positions within national elites’. You wrote that, and I’m not sure it makes any sense.
I will overlook your remarks concerning the ‘public gravitas’ of Bobby Fischer. I will overlook the fact that you called me a ‘gullible idiot’. I will even overlook your grandiloquent manner. I will overlook all of these things if you can answer just one of my questions without provoking the kind of response that leads to people like Clare form London writing: ‘Horrible. And so wrong.’
And a Happy New Year to you too.
Well I doubt that Beckett would agree, certainly regarding the whole compassion and universalism nonsense. That Pinter's work was imitative is a cheap charge. It's clear to see that Beckett had precursors in Jarry, Genet, Cocteau and Satre. You'll get yourself into an impossible muddle if you disregard any playwright who resembles another.
Still, Pinter was no 'imitator'. His appreciation of Beckett was originally confined to his novels and short stories. He wrote to his old teacher Joe Brearley in October 1957, following Godot's arrival in London: 'I've been a Beckett man for years since long before the fuss started'. The Room, Pinter's first play, debuted in May 1957. Given that Beckett had no other plays in print prior to Godot's British debut, it would be almost impossible to argue that Beckett 'as a playwright' influenced Pinter's first work. 'The Room' was complete before Pinter would have seen or read any of Beckett's plays.
And did Pinter become more like Beckett after he had witnessed Godot? If anything, I would argue the reverse. His later, more successful plays were more formally conventional than The Room; less static, less wilfully inexplicable and less spatially restricted. Ultimately I would argue that The Room is, aside from Pinter's most recent (and least appreciated) writings, his most Beckettian.
If you're going to accuse Pinter of imitating anyone, it should be Rattigan. Separate Tables, which Pinter performed around the period of The Room's composition, is far closer thematically and formally to Pinter's subsequent work.
Anyway, if you're going to accuse Pinter of being rubbish, please don't accuse him of being an apologist for dictators. It's clear to anyone concerned that he invested much of his energy into increasing public awareness of tyrannous regimes. Pinter commented upon these dictators because he recognised that to deal with dictators of the present requires a rigorous appraisal of the conflicts that led to the dictatorships of the past. For apologist, infer realist, if you care.
As for suggesting that Pinter is nodding along in Hell with two notorious anti-Semites – well, oh dear. Quite the humanitarian, aren't we?
Never mind. Pinter had a virile contempt for his fans, so I’m sure he would have valued such a non-fan.
Impressed by the ongoing debate here, if I had read Pinter to such an extent as you two then i would be able to pick a side. However, I would like to say that I recently went to see No Man's Land starring Michael Gambon and David Walliams. I must admit that I initially found it utterly mundane, there was little action and the dialogue, though amusing and particularly eloquent at times, seemed to represent the ramblings of a man with too much on his mind and too little paper to write it on – i felt the words were as tightly squeezed into the lenghty arias as much as the characters were in the small room in Hampstead.
The thing I realised and now admire though, is that Pinter's manipulation of the english language, and, perhaps more importantly, the spaces in between, have created lengthy discussion over the true nature of Pinter's plays – it was conflict through language – not necessarily visually enticing but certainly thought-provoking. Disagreeing with his views on war and politics is fair, but the most significant thing is that we agree we have lost a great British dramatist who created the very source of such contempt and discussion through the medium of theatre.