‘P’ is for Pinter, pauses and poetry

By Rushda RAFEEK

‘Pinter, strong black hair, gleaming spectacles, dark suit, well- polished shoes was, superficially, more solid than one might have expected from his work. At first glance, you have taken him for a person who enjoyed discussing fast cars in pubs…It was when he took off his dark glasses and twirled them round that you notice the dark eyes and sensitive face that looked as though it had its worries.’

This was John Gale’s impression of Harold Pinter written for the Observer and this is just only a light scratch of his enigmatic portfolio’s surface.

Even more telling is Pinter’s affection for cricket, sprinting and poetry. However, the first thing to identify is his massive exposure as a playwright teemed with a sense of disruption recurring in his works. A little strange– pauses preaching the miasmic darkness but very memorable, Pinter's oeuvre often get in the way as an approach mostly known in a comedy of menace sprinkled with a clutter of nonsensical repetition resulting to entertain.

Feedback

Let me indulge in a minute; right after his acclaimed play The Birthday Party (1958) opened on Broadway, Pinter received a letter from a confused woman whose feedback contained questions in point form about the entire play itself. The last of her questions begs in one breath: “Were they all supposed to be normal?” which we understand is pointed at the characters. Her woe and Pinter’s firm reply: “Are you supposed to be normal?” That says a lot like the character Lionel in the play The New World Order (1991) plainly quipped, “The level of ignorance that surrounds us. I mean, this prick here--.”

Hard-hitting Pinter is one of those interesting passages one would reel back to, stare for a moment, then underline and commit to memory during a drama lesson. Altogether triumphal and remorseful, a sign in the dust settling, he perhaps, conveys so much precision with a language crammed in the little of a script.

Born in 1930 to an Eastern European family caught up in the immigrant avalanche of the Jews, took root in Pinter’s mind with a punitive vision ultimately milking his imagination for the works. As his wife Antonia Fraser tells Michael Billington in an interview, “Harold’s memory is not linear at all. He’s got a memory like a camera as if he’s taking shots. Occasionally they are moving photographs: extraordinarily sharp and vivid, but not necessarily connected.”

Poetry

It might be fairly assumed that as we set foot into the theatre of Pinter’s poetry thus shedding light to his sleeping minor, he wrote of note – little ones that painted something profound beneath the lurking presence of his life experience indeed in numerous as often as life translates into art. Pinter began with poetry from the age of 12 continuing until his last. There are poems mad-talking and there are poems talking of the mad, reckoning about the world, more distilled by utilising with original analysis of the tormented human behaviour that screams the pauses of fear and life’s dark howl.

Much of his poems prove evident enough that Pinter ventured outrageously into the deviousness of American policy. It is also the poem ‘God Bless America’ a brash attempt to plump the absolute hatred breeding within Pinter as a political activist. It begins with the merry attitude played by sarcasm:

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

In their dance to the end, so goes the artful blast of honesty, speaking for the millions smeared with bloody death in an attempt to shut the torturers’ “freedom to go which way they will” six lines later:

Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead

There is always something like a pungent spirit as “the smell of America's God” expanding in the mind, the pith of message simply carries an iron’s weight. Nevertheless the paradigm of the crime underlies much of Pinter’s concern.

Strongly implicating in that sense is Pinter’s essay titled ‘Why George Bush is insane’ like an uncut diamond is blunt in its beauty: ‘“If you are not with us you are against us” President Bush has said. He has also said, “We will not allow the world’s worst weapons to remain in the hands of the world’s worst leaders”. Quite right. Look in the mirror chum. That’s you.’ It is clear Pinter expresses a strong personal vision, charged with a comic effect spun out negating the unremitting degradation of the American democracies. It deals not just with a promise of brevity that comes on its tail but carving a challenge that the suspect hides not across the Atlantic, but within.

The cold, more distressing we are moved by the poems fused with death and illness. It is both trenchant and stands up from the page sustaining an emotional scar affected by personal circumstances draining through, richly. ‘Cancer cells’, a poem, coils around the struggle with bereavement by a voice anxious to meet, if better, kill it: “I need to see my tumour dead

A tumour which forgets to die
But plans to murder me instead.”

The favoured weapon is a dramatic language which crops up again and again in his poems by a “Pinteresque” twist. Ushering very knotted and dark-drunk visual terms with crepuscular deeds of imagery, through which the poem ‘Death Maybe Ageing’ can wrestle with its concerns, the miserable acceptance towards its sober yet pricking end:

Death may be ageing
But he still has clout
But death disarms you
With his limpid light
And he's so crafty
That you don't know at all
Where he awaits you
To seduce your will
And to strip you naked
As you dress to kill
But death permits youTo arrange your hours
While he sucks the honeyFrom your lovely flowers

Death

Death maybe meek at first, but come with its own emotional ache and backdrop of macabre moments dancing, taunting “as you dress to kill.” This gives “a poet's ear for language”, a language homed by complexity writhing out of its simplicity, hinted rather than exposed like Pinter once said of language ‘true silence falls we are left with echo but are nearer nakedness.’

Against all odds, chaos and misery onstage and inpage, there is the Pinter of romantic rooms we enter, breathing the atmospheric of love hung on every word for his now widowed Lady Antonia Fraser at the same time, details close scrapes of his failed first marriage with Vivien Merchant and the affair with television presenter Joan Bakewell in the likes of Betrayal (1978), Accident (1967), Landscape(1967) and novel adaptations such as The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) to a pick a few. The Homecoming (1964) with just the right pinch of salt and sanity to make it enthralling to fully describe if unbecoming, won Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 as well as the Tony Award for Best Play in 1967.

The curtain white in folds,
She walks two steps and turns,
The curtain still, the light
Staggers in her eyes.
The lamps are golden.
Afternoon leans, silently.
She dances in my life.
The white day burns.

It is in the above poem titled ‘Paris’, that we perceive the celebration of a strong fondness regarding joy and rays of light for “the lamps are golden” in Pinter’s life with Antonia Fraser. Elegantly written on a personal level to warm the heart, gives a reminder of what is being treasured as a gift and just how abiding the relationship cruised therefore continued apace leading to a two decade marriage.

With a face like a theatrical charm, Pinter “was dashingly and saturninely handsome and blessed with a deep, dark resonant voice quite unusual at the age of twenty,” said Barry Foster, a fellow-student who Pinter met at the Central School of Speech and Drama.

By plunging full into finding his literary gifts in prose-poems, poetry, revue sketches, radio plays, getting work as an actor, and lastly writing out an autobiography novel, Pinter did not believe in a university education thus turning to study acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art although he says he ‘eventually faked a nervous breakdown and attended no more’ in his autobiography memoir, ‘The Queen of all the Fairies.’

Using the mysterious masterstroke of stage dialogues to explore the cracks in human condition, soured LBWs of marriage, sharp tramps, crucifying ironies with a chilling mix of intellectual memories, and dramatic significance. Pinter embraces life – more than anything – plucks it off a society devoid of dignity and conduct to question our attitudes to compellingly makes sense of the chaos. ‘But you cannot possibly sum up Harold Pinter in a nutshell, Michael Billington once wrote, ‘: he is too complex, too elusive and too contradictory.’ And so, the pauses can wait.