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Harold Pinter



On 18 January 2007 BBC News announced that French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin (a published poet himself) presented Harold Pinter with one of his country's highest awards, the Légion d'honneur … at a ceremony at the French embassy in London, shortly after holding talks with Tony Blair."[6] Prime Minister de Villepin "praised Mr Pinter's poem American Football (1991)," saying: " 'With its violence and its cruelty, it is for me one of the most accurate images of war, one of the most telling metaphors of the temptation of imperialism and violence.' " "In return," Pinter "praised France for its opposition to the war in Iraq."[6] According to the BBC's Lawrence Pollard, "the award for the great playwright underlines how much Mr Pinter is admired in countries like France as a model of the uncompromising radical intellectual."[6] M. de Villepin concluded: "The poet stands still and observes what doesn’t deserve other men’s attention. Poetry teaches us how to live and you, Harold Pinter, teach us how to live."[6]

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Pinter and academia

See main article: Harold Pinter and academia
See main article: Honors and awards to Harold Pinter

As Merritt observes, some academic scholars and critics challenge the validity of Pinter's critiques of what he terms "the modes of thinking of those in power" (Pinter in Play 171–89; 180) or dissent from his retrospective viewpoints on his own work (Begley; Karwowski; and Quigley). In his personal political history,

Pinter's own "political act" of conscientious objection resulted from being "terribly disturbed as a young man by the Cold War. And McCarthyism. . . . A profound hypocrisy. 'They' the monsters, 'we' the good. In 1948 the Russian suppression of Eastern Europe was an obvious and brutal fact, but I felt very strongly then and feel as strongly now [1985] that we have an obligation to subject our own actions and attitudes to an equivalent critical and moral scrutiny." (Merritt, Pinter in Play 178)

Scholars who have studied the evolution of Pinter's life and work over the course of his career agree that Pinter's analyses and dramatizations of power relations reflect such a "critical and moral scrutiny" astutely.[24]

Pinter's aversion to any censorship by "the authorities" is epitomized in Petey's line at the end of The Birthday Party. As the broken-down and reconstituted Stanley is being carted off by the figures of authority Goldberg and McCann, Petey calls out after him, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" "I've lived that line all my damn life. Never more than now," he told Gussow in 1988 (Qtd. in Merritt, Pinter in Play 179). Pinter's ongoing opposition to "the modes of thinking of those in power"—the "brick wall" of the "minds" perpetuating the "status quo" (180)—infuses the "vast political pessimism" that some academic critics may perceive in his artistic work (Grimes 220), its "drowning landscape" of harsh contemporary realities, with some residual "hope for restoring the dignity of man" (Pinter, Art, Truth & Politics 9, 24).

As Pinter's longtime friends and colleagues director David Jones and actor Henry Woolf often remind serious-minded scholars and dramatic critics, Pinter is also a "great comic writer" (Coppa); but, as Pinter said of The Caretaker, his work is only "funny, up to a point" (Qtd. in Jones; cf. Woolf in Merritt, "Talking about Pinter").

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The Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library

The British Library (BL) announced publicly, on 11 December 2007, that it has purchased Harold Pinter's literary archive, augmenting its current "Harold Pinter Archive" of 80 boxes ("Loan 110 A").[7][8] It now comprises "over one hundred and fifty boxes of manuscripts, scrapbooks, letters, photographs, programmes, and emails," constituting "an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars of Pinter's work for stage, cinema, and poetry."[7][8][25] Among its "highlights" are "an exceedingly perceptive and enormously affectionate run of letters from Samuel Beckett; letters and hand-written manuscripts revealing Pinter's close collaboration with director Joseph Losey; a charming and highly amusing exchange of letters with Philip Larkin; and a draft of Pinter's unpublished autobiographical memoir of his youth, 'The Queen of all the Fairies'," as well as especially-poignant letters from Pinter's "inspirational" Hackney Downs School English teacher and friend, Joseph Brearley.[7][8]

According to the official BL press release, citing its head of Modern Literary Manuscripts, Jamie Andrews, the "extensive collection of correspondence" of "over 12,000 letters" in its expanded Pinter Archive "encompasses the personal, professional and political aspects of the legendary writer, whose career has covered directing, acting, screenwriting, poetry and journalism, as well as his original work for the theatre" and documents Pinter's "key role in post-War theatre and film ... through his extensive correspondence with [other] leading playwrights and literary figures such as Simon Gray, David Hare, David Mamet, Arthur Miller, John Osborne, and [Sir] Tom Stoppard, as well as actors and directors including Sir John Gielgud [corrected] and Sir Peter Hall."[8] This collection also "documents all international performances of Pinter's plays, as well as exchanges with academics that highlight Pinter's engagement with the global scholarly community. There is also extensive material relating to Pinter's commitment to human rights, covering his journalism, poetry and direct action."[8]

From 10 January through 13 April 2008, the British Library is exhibited a "small temporary display, 'His Own Domain: Harold Pinter, A Life in Theatre', featuring a range of unique manuscripts, letters, photographs, and sound recordings from the archive charting Pinter's life in the theatre as an actor, director, and writer of some of the most significant and celebrated plays of the twentieth-century."[8]

The British Library expects to catalogue the whole Archive by "the end of 2008."[8] The Harold Pinter Archive Blog, hosted for the BL by Typepad, provides updates about the cataloguing process by Pinter Archive cataloguer Kate O'Brien and the other BL curators, including Jamie Andrews, director of Modern Literary Manuscripts, where the Archive is housed.[26]

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Works

See main article: Works of Harold Pinter
See main article: Characteristics of Harold Pinter's work

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See also

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Notes

See main article: Selected bibliography for Harold Pinter
  1. ^ a b c d e "Acting" and "Directing" sections of HaroldPinter.org, compiled by Mark Batty (Mark Taylor-Batty).
  2. ^ a b Billington, Introd., "Pinter: Passion, Poetry and Politics", Europe Theatre Prize–X Edition, Turin, 10–12 Mar. 2006. (Corrected title.)
  3. ^ a b Merritt, Pinter in Play xixv, 170–209; Billington, Harold Pinter 286–338; Grimes 19.
  4. ^ "Biobibliographical Notes", compiled by the Swedish Academy, includes the full text of the Nobel Prize citation and a selected bibliography of critical commentary in several languages. Excerpted by Agencies.
  5. ^ Pinter's "Nobel Lecture: Art, Truth & Politics" is posted online on the official website of the Nobel Prize, nobelprize.org. All in-text parenthetical references are to the Faber and Faber edition, Art, Truth & Politics: The Nobel Lecture.
  6. ^ a b c d e French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, in his speech qtd. in "Légion d'Honneur for Harold Pinter"; cf. "French PM Honours Harold Pinter".
  7. ^ a b c d Brown, "British Library's ₤1.1m Saves Pinter's Papers for Nation".
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h British Library, "Pinter Archive Saved for the Nation" (British Library press release).
  9. ^ Howard, "British Library Acquires Pinter Papers".
  10. ^ Billington draws upon B.S. Johnson, "Evacuees" (1968; published 1994).
  11. ^ See also pathologist's report cited in "Death of Vivien Merchant Is Ascribed to Alcoholism".
  12. ^ Cf. Koval, Moss, and Rose.
  13. ^ "Biography", haroldpinter.org; Gordon, "Chronology", Pinter at Seventy xliii–lxv; Batty, "Chronology", About Pinter xiii–xvi.
  14. ^ Cited by Merritt in "Sir Harold Hobson: The Promptings of Personal Experience", Pinter in Play 221–25; "The Birthday Party (premiere)", HaroldPinter.org.
  15. ^ Merritt, Pinter in Play 5, 9, 225–26, and 310, citing Lois Gordon, "Pigeonholing Pinter: A Bibliography", Theatre Documentation 1 (Fall 1968): 3–20; chap. 2 in Hinchliffe 38–86, particularly on origins of the term and Campton's own view of Theatre of the Absurd as a prior "pigeon-hole" (40).
  16. ^ "Comedy of menace" is also a verbal pun on "Comedy of manners", with menace being manners said with a Judeo-English accent. See Merritt, Pinter in Play 9, 225–26, 240–41; Diamond.
  17. ^ Reports and reviews of the 2001 Lincoln Center Pinter Festival productions and symposia, The Pinter Review (2002); Merritt, "Talking about Pinter".
  18. ^ Harold Pinter to Professor Avraham Oz, "one of Israel's leading internal opponents of authoritarianism," in a letter of 2005, as qtd. in Billington, Harold Pinter 395, 430.
  19. ^ For a further perspective, see Toíbín.
  20. ^ Royal Court Theatre box office production announcement for Krapp's Last Tape, as well as "Upcoming events for the year 2006", on the home page of HaroldPinter.org (since updated).
  21. ^ Other recent and "upcoming events" (updated periodically) are listed on the home page of Pinter's official website and through its menu of links to the "Calendar" ("Worldwide Calendar").
  22. ^ Discussion of Pinter's "political awareness" pertaining to his political development as a playwright and as a citizen appears in Billington, Harold Pinter 234, 286–305 (Chap. 15: "Public Affairs"), 400–3, 412, 416–17, 423, & 433–41 (a sec. of Pinter's Nobel Lecture, "Art, Truth & Politics"); Merritt, Pinter in Play xi–xii, xiv, 171–209 (Chap. 8: "Cultural Politics", espec. "Pinter and Politics"), 275; and Grimes; in sources that they cite; and in sources published in 1990 and afterward listed in the Swedish Academy's "Biobibliographical Notes".
  23. ^ An edited version of Pinter's Turin speech is published as an article with the explosive headline " [']The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild animal['] " [Pinter's words taken from the speech without the internal quotation marks], The Daily Telegraph 11 Dec. 2002. Other versions of this speech are reprinted online with the more generic headlines "Harold Pinter's Speech at Turin University" and "Harold Pinter Gives Honorary Doctorate Speech at Turin University–27th November 2002" in Stop the War Coalition and The Artists Network of Refuse & Resist!, resp., and in print as "University of Turin Speech" in Various Voices 241–43.
  24. ^ Cf., e.g., Batty, "Preface" and chap. 6–9 in About Pinter; Grimes 19, 36–71, 218–20, and throughout.
  25. ^ See Merritt, "The Harold Pinter Archive in the British Library"; Gale and Hudgins; and Baker and Ross.
  26. ^ Harold Pinter Archive Blog: British Library Curators on Cataloguing the Pinter Archive, inaugurated in February 2008, accessed 9 May 2008.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

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Selected bibliography

See main article: Selected bibliography for Harold Pinter

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External links


v • d • e
The plays of Harold Pinter
Plays : Ashes to Ashes, The Basement, Betrayal, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, Celebration, The Collection, The Dumb Waiter, The Dwarfs, Family Voices, The Homecoming, The Hothouse, A Kind of Alaska, Landscape, The Lover, Moonlight, Monologue, Mountain Language, A Night Out, Night School, No Man's Land, Old Times, One for the Road, Party Time, Remembrance of Things Past (with Di Trevis), The Room, Silence, A Slight Ache, Tea Party, Victoria Station, Voices (with James Clarke)
Sketches : Apart From That, Applicant, The Black and White, Dialogue for Three, Interview, Last to Go, The New World Order, Night, Precisely, Press Conference, Request Stop, Special Offer, That's All, That's Your Trouble, Trouble in the Works
v • d • e
Nobel Laureates in Literature

V. S. Naipaul (2001) · Imre Kertész (2002) · John Maxwell Coetzee (2003) · Elfriede Jelinek (2004) · Harold Pinter (2005) · Orhan Pamuk (2006) · Doris Lessing (2007)
Complete roster · 1901–1925 · 1926–1950 · 1951–1975 · 1976–2000 · 2001–present
Persondata
NAME Pinter, Harold
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION English playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, political activist
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Hackney, London, England
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH



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