HAROLD PINTER
THE WEASEL UNDER THE COCKTAIL CABINET
I was 16-years old, incarcerated in a Yorkshire boarding school & on the cusp of a simple but crucial realisation. Having spent a couple of years sauntering around classroom & corridor with what I considered to be hip volumes peeping slyly above the top of my jacket pocket for all to see & marvel at, I found myself actually reading one of them from front to back. I had decided to display a series of Russian novels, feeling them to reflect appropriately the dignity of my suffering at that time. I was woefully crossed in love, had just started to write poetry & it seemed to me that only the vastness of the Russian soul could comprehend & encompass the journey that I had to undertake.
And then I fell ill. At first I thought that it must be a sickness of the spirit, a decline towards dereliction & madness brought on by a broken heart. In fact, it turned out to be a gastric complaint & instead of coughing up blood into a silk handkerchief I spent many dismal hours reading & re-reading the messages Now Wash Your Hands, Please & Supplied by the Management alternating sheet by sheet on the toilet paper hanging on the back of the Sanatorium lavatory door. The latest Russian novel that had spent display time in my jacket pocket was Crime & Punishment & it offered the only literary antidote to Tales of Pluck & Peril & the loo paper. So I read it from cover to cover in two days. Enthralled, I demanded more &, if two weeks later I rose from my bed of pain no less insufferably pretentious than before, I had at least begun a more substantive love affair.
The further pursuance of this relationship was given enthusiastic encouragement by two men, both of whom have been acknowledged in an earlier post as key figures in my early life. They were Roger Gerhardt, the French teacher, & Brian Merrikin Hill, the English teacher. Relieved that I was now actually opening the covers of the books that I carried around, both of them stoked the fires. Brian ensured that I became exposed to poetry that was robust, challenging & literate & Roger saw to it that I came across European & American writing & Drama that had pushed, or was pushing back the boundaries.
It was Roger who introduced me to the work of a difficult but dynamic new playwright whose work was either intriguing or confounding the London theatre-going public, depending on which critics you read. His name was Harold Pinter & the play that divided its audiences was The Caretaker. I remember my parents going to see it & returning entranced by the hypnotic quality of the sparse, repetitive idiomatic language. Already a fan of the rising genre of the theatre of the absurd, Roger was an instant convert & when a handful of Pinter’s plays were broadcast on the BBC’s arts radio channel, the Third Programme, he recorded them on his state of the art Ferrograph reel-to-reel tape recorder & insisted that his jeunesse d’oree – the budding intellectuals, jazz fans & general malcontents - sat down & listened to them.
I was an instant convert too. With my new passion for D.H. Lawrence, the Russians, Henry Miller, Beckett, Joyce, the Beats, anything that confronted, clamoured, stirred up the dust turned my head. But Pinter appealed across a much broader front. Within that lean, terse, economical language there were to be found references from contexts a world away from high art. In those early plays, Pinter drew on elements intimately familiar to anyone who was sentient during that strange, latter-day dark age in Britain, the late 1940s & the ‘50s. His characters lived in the anonymous terraces & gloomy villas converted into flats of Camden Town, Battersea, Edmonton & Balham. They were enigmatic, unheroic figures, shifty & evasive, trailing patchy, inconsistent personal histories. They moved within the territory of music hall jokes, off-season seaside resorts, London bus routes, seedy launderettes, grubby junk shops, steamy corner cafes, fleapit cinemas, railway sidings. They spoke obliquely, repetitively, non sequitur following non sequitur, an unsettling miasma of menace hovering around the strange, canted utterances. Accustomed to the intoxicating cataracts of language that typified the works of Joyce or Kerouac, I was utterly seduced by the minimalist poetry of those early works. My own parlance, & the parlance of my fellow Pinter converts, became infected by the surreal combinations of archaic & contemporary figures of speech – “You succulent old washing bag”, ”I’ll rip your spine out, you talk to me like that”, “I said ‘Light the kettle’, not ‘Put on the kettle’. How can you put on a kettle?'”
Subsequently I have followed his career closely, not always convinced by latter directions, but drawn as ever by the luminous (if not always illuminating) language. I have directed a couple of Pinter plays too, both crewed by casts sensitive to the requirements of the subtle relationship between speech, non-verbal action & silence. My one unconsumed ambition is to stage with an adult cast his famous ‘missing’ play, lost for many years at the back of a drawer, The Hothouse.
A large printout of a Pinter statement about the nature of speech has accompanied me through three schools. It’s one of a small group of utterances from different sources that underpin deeply held personal beliefs & convictions. Currently it sits above the noticeboard in the Drama Room at St Francis’ College. It reads thus:
There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is employed. This speech is speaking a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of what we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.
Harold Pinter’s most recent work is his speech accepting the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature. Even if he has now relinquished his role as one of the most important productive playwrights of our time, at 75 Pinter has lost none of his passion, nor his command of language. I commend it to you.
4:34:40 PM 
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