Courage of Harold Pinter

The Courage of Harold Pinter

PRESENTED APRIL 13, 2007, BY DONALD FREED, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS IN HONOR OF HAROLD PINTER.

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Friends and Conference participants in, this, the University of Leeds Convocation in honor of the Nobel Laureate, the Playwright, Poet, and Citizen—Harold Pinter.

I want to put before you an intensely concentrated example of the necessary function of courage in an artist of genius. And, further, to illustrate the fundamental connection, the "persistence of style," between the Artist’s deepest life and his work.

THE DREAM—PART I

The year is 1966. The place is an interview in the Paris Review with Harold Pinter. This is the period—after the phenomenal worldwide impact of his play The Caretaker—when the Playwright’s fame was sweeping everything before it.

Here, in a few hundred words, is the Genus Loci, the very ground, of the fateful act of courage in question, an act destined to change the cultural narrative of our time.

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THE DREAM—PART II

THE TIME: AFTER THE CARETAKER

THE PLACE: THE URBAN MISE EN SCENE LEADING TO "AN INNER ROOM SOMEWHERE."

THE CHARACTERS: TWO BROTHERS, MICK AND ASTIN; AND A THIRD MAN, UNNAMED—WHO IS, NATURALLY, THE DREAMER, HIMSELF, HAROLD PINTER.

THE ARGUMENT:

SCENE ONE: The two brothers—Mick and Astin from The Caretaker—have burned down the Man’s house. The Man, the terror victim, in a state of nature, searches the city trying to find the answer and the reason for the crisis that has overwhelmed him. Through "alleys and cafés" he ran—and he had been a runner—until, at last, he found himself in "an inner room somewhere."

SCENE TWO: THE ROOM

"So, you burned down my house!" The Man in the dream—the Protagonist, whose name in Life was Pinter—demands an accounting for the disaster and the crime these others, these brothers, have committed against him.

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"Don’t be too worried," says the younger brother, Mick. The Man, the author of the dream, is staggered—he cries out, "I’ve got everything in there—everything—you don’t realize what you’ve done!"

Do you have this Boundary Situation, the confrontation in the room, in mind? Ecce Homo! Behold The Man, the Poet Pinter, literally, beside himself: lost, burned out, penniless, stripped naked, homeless!

Now, in the silence the brother Mick speaks again: "It’s all right, we’ll compensate you for it, we’ll look after you allright…"

Silence. Do you have the tableau in your mind’s eye? The Room, The Boundary Situation, the brothers staring straight at the Protagonist and he, the Playwright, at the mercy of these Strangers who have burned him down to the ground. You have it in mind? The wounded Poet gazes into their eyes and then this bare, forked creature—Harold Pinter, I say—he, who in his own words will later tell us, Quotes, "and there upon I wrote them out a check for fifty quid… I gave them a check for fifty quid! Exclamation point, Close quotes… This concludes the "manifest content" of the Dream.

The Latent Content of the Dream: It was Yeats, not Freud, who wrote that "Responsibility begins in dreams": begins at "the bottom of your spine," as

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the other poet, Pinter, would write in another context. Here, at the bottom of this great reckoning in a little room, is the absolute terror of a one-time only

life choice: Hoard the world success of The Caretaker, become a corporation, a boulevard icon, a co-opted "National Treasure" named Lord Harold, or: Fan the cathartic flame, let the fire ignite the incendiary power of his genius, let it explode—as it has across these five decades. Burn the bridges and let the fire consume every rotten stick of the old house of lies and false consciousness: come what may—riches or revolution or ruin—prison or freedom. Light up the sky!

And so he did. For, of course, the three were one: Mick and Astin, the two Brother’s Keepers, and the desperate author—of the Dream and the plays and the poems—they were all one. Re-united, there, in the Limit Situation of the Room, where the broken heart in conflict with itself was made whole.

And, so, of necessity, the Writer wrote the check to them, to make them whole. To pay the debt he owed these strange brothers who would become the forerunners and outlyers, the advanced guard, and above all the

Caretakers of the Dreamer, the artistic genius known to the world as Harold Pinter, still burning bright in his eighth decade.

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The check has been cashed and all debts and dues paid. It broke the bank. But we are all the heirs, outright, of the compound interest that is the new language that has revolutionized the world theatre.

Euripides did this when he invented the "New Comedy", twenty five hundred years ago. We have lived in the Age of Pinter—when, once again, language had to be purged of its pathology. Euripides was hounded to death, as the price of his genius, by the Democratic War Party of Athens. So far our luck has held out: we are still here—to honor the artistic and political courage of the Dreamer and the Playwright and the Poet and the Citizen—our brother Harold Pinter!

EPILOGUE

So, now, how does this beginning of the "New Comedy" for our age end?—You still have the interview, the scene, in mind? the interviewer pauses, perhaps…then:

Paris Review Interviewer: "Do you have a particular interest in Psychology?"

Harold Pinter: "No."

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