Harold Pinter

Rex Features

NOTHING in Harold Pinter's life explained the rage in him. A happy lower-middle-class childhood in an “immaculate house” in east London, the cherished only son of a Jewish tailor. Enjoyable years at Hackney Grammar, with an English teacher who inspired him. Batting, bowling, fielding slip, and all the lifelong joys of cricket. A close and loyal group of Hackney friends, whose friendship lasted. A decade acting in repertory up and down the country (sinister roles preferred), while delivering milk or clearing snow to bring in money. A rocky first marriage, with a seven-year affair, but a good, doting, purringly contented second one to Lady Antonia Fraser, the daughter of an earl. A cataclysmic start in playwriting with “The Birthday Party” in 1958, which was panned and ran a week in London, but then redemption and fame with “The Caretaker” two years later. Accolades, lionising, two dozen more plays, two dozen acclaimed screenplays (“Sleuth”, “The Go-Between”, “The French Lieutenant's Woman”) and, in 2005, the Nobel prize for literature.

Laurels to rest on indeed. Yet this was also the man who last September appeared at Bolivar Hall in central London, paper-frail from cancer, needing the help of two sticks and three friends to get to the stage, and then thundered out in a furious bellow his “Reflection on the Gulf War”:

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.

Because he could be charming company, he and Lady Antonia were fixtures on the literary cocktail circuit. But he seldom cut a comfortable or happy figure. Instead he would stand beside her like a metaphor for silence and death, his black polo-neck pulled up ruthlessly to his big, baleful, staring head. Like Stanley in “The Birthday Party”, caught up in a game of blind man's buff that turns very nasty, he seemed to expect at any moment the shadows to move in, knee him in the groin, break his glasses. Except that, unlike Stanley, he would roar back and punch them senseless. He would never let them tell him what to do.

His playwriting life, he said, was much like that. His characters rose up randomly (from the mere word “dark”, the question “What have you done with the scissors?”, an image of a couple by a window in Kilburn) and then began to play taunting games with him. They resisted him, went their own way. There was no true or false in them. No certainty, no verifiable past. Truths, he found as he wrote drama, “challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other.”

Accordingly, in his plays, questions went unanswered. Remarks were not risen to. A “what do you mean?” signalled the demolition of conversation. In “Betrayal” (1978), based on his own affair, two former lovers tiptoe round each other:

Emma: Ever think of me?

Jerry: I don't need to think of you.

Emma: Oh?

Jerry: I don't need to

think

of you. Anyway I'm all right.

Pause

.

How are you?

Emma: Fine, really. All right.

In Beckett, a strong influence on Mr Pinter in his beginnings, ordinary conversations would turn metaphysical. His own were packed with menace. Words were offensive, defensive, barriers, knives, stones, a “stratagem” or a “mocking smoke screen”, as he put it, to cover nakedness. Underneath them, something else was being said. Truth was being smothered. He had felt it himself: the suffocation of drama school (abandoned after two terms), or National Service (doggedly resisted, and the fine paid, in 1949), or the bourgeois smugness of the London theatre scene in the late 1950s, which he had tried to explode. Like him, his characters often suddenly made for the window, desperate for air.

Or they fell silent. Silence, applied almost musically and poetically, let the dark in. Or the unsaid.

Silence.
A drip sounds in the bucket. They all look up.
Silence.

Mick: You still got that leak.

Aston: Yes.

Pause

.

Mr Pinter's characters were often would-be homebuilders. They remembered the comforts of hot milk and hotwater bottles, dreamed of kitchens with matching worktops and lino tiles, dwelt longingly on casseroles and fried bread. But nothing could bridge the void or make it cosy. The theme Mr Pinter lived with and raged against was human alienation.

It was his own, as much as anyone's. Despite the contentments of his life he felt exposed to all the winds, naked and shelterless. Only lies would protect him, and as a writer he refused to lie. That was politicians' work, criminal Bush or supine Blair, or the work of his critics, who could go and fuck themselves.

But he also left them a more surprising instruction. It came from “No Man's Land”, though it was also reminiscent of Ruth, restored to happiness of a sort, lightly touching Joey's head at the end of “The Homecoming”: “Tender the dead as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life.”