A giant fell on Christmas Eve. Harold Pinter died at Hammersmith Hospital in London on December 24. Pinter belonged to the same generation that formed the British, literary epoch-defining “Angry Young Men” of the ’50s, but went where “angry young” playwrights like John Osborne didn’t. Thus he begat an adjective that came to capture the quintessence of a Pinter play or anything like a Pinter play: Pinteresque. Utter the word, especially unconsciously, in everyday talk, and you conjure up the latent, bottled-up and about-to-burst-forth violence in ordinary life; you summon the fear that underlies our apparently harmless existence; you abruptly grasp the threat borne by language, the danger behind the façade of comedy. That is the legacy of the most original British playwright of the 20th century through plays like The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, The Dumb Waiter, The Caretaker, a legacy that his later overtly political and weaker work cannot destroy.Pinter began as an actor, an experience that was to have a defining influence on what he did with words and the stage. But in later years his politics appeared to compromise his art. Given the Nobel Committee’s predilections, and given Pinter’s own political position, eyebrows were bound to be raised when he was named for the 2005 Nobel for literature.For Pinter was a literary giant: a dramatist who changed the stage for ever. But as a campaigner against torture, a harsh critic of Messrs Bush and Blair, a prominent anti-Zionist, leftist Jew, Pinter was yet a political nobody. Nor was his politics particularly perceptive. He could condemn the Iraq war and also support the defending of Milosevic: both because of his hatred for NATO and the US. Ironically, Pinter himself had wondered aloud if the Nobel was not indeed for his politics. He was right. He should have deservingly got it earlier.
