Jonathan Heawood: For Pinter, the outsider came first

In his art he sought to describe injustice. In his life, justice was
what he tried to create

Saturday, 27 December 2008
Independent.co.uk Web

As even the most respectful tributes have been forced to acknowledge,
Harold Pinter was not an easy man. The rage that animated his work for
50 years could also manifest itself in his personal life. He did not
suffer fools gladly, and was likely to answer an innocent "Good
morning" with the demand to know what was so bloody good about it.

Yet this anger was underscored by a fervent belief in justice. From his
early psychological dramas to the late political plays, the imaginary
world he created is unspeakably unjust. His characters say and do
horrendous things to each other and get away with it. "I’ve never been
able to write a happy play," he said; and a happy ending tagged on to
any of his works would be as ridiculous as Nahum Tate’s rewrite of King
Lear, in which Lear survives and Cordelia marries Edgar.

There is no possibility of such redemption in any of Pinter’s plays.
Yet it is this impotence which makes his work so distinct, and is why
the Pinteresque condition so closely resembles the Kafkaesque.

Unlike Kafka, however, Pinter took his passion for justice on to the
streets, and into decades of campaigning on behalf of English PEN and
other human rights organisations. The world he
created in his plays was
chaotic and unjust, but his political life was driven by a commitment
to the possibility of change.

In his 2005 Nobel lecture, he recalled the belief he had held as a
young writer that there are no hard distinctions between what is real
and what is unreal. Now, in his seventies, he said: "I believe that
these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration
of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen
I cannot. As a citizen I must ask, what is true, what is false?"

These two halves to his identity ` the relativist writer and the
activist citizen ` seem to sit oddly beside one another, but for Pinter
they were integrated into a coherent whole. He spent part of his life
describing injustice in the form of theatrical unreality, and another
part attempting to create justice through human rights campaigning.
Each part was motivated by the passionate empathy that he felt for the
outsider, even when he became a feted man of letters and a member of
the literary aristocracy.

Pinter became intimately involved in the work of PEN around the time
that his wife, Antonia Fraser, was elected president of English PEN in
1988. He had already joined Arthur Miller on a PEN mission to Turkey in
March 1985, when they were guided around Istanbul by a young ` and then
little known ` novelist called Orhan Pamuk. Y
ears later, when he
succeeded Pinter as the Nobel laureate in literature, Pamuk recalled
how this meeting ` at a time when Turkey was blighted by censorship,
and writers and other dissidents were being tortured in police cells `
had shown him that "a consoling solidarity among writers was possible".

Pinter maintained this commitment to human rights in general, and the
plight of Turkish writers in particular, until the end of his life. Two
years ago he turned up on his walking stick on a freezing cold January
afternoon outside the Turkish embassy for a vigil in memory of Hrant
Dink, the Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor who had been shot dead in
Istanbul.

He was in poor health but he stood in the cold for 40 minutes,
surrounded by admirers who couldn’t believe that one of the most famous
writers in the world had joined their demonstration. He departed as
quietly as he had arrived, climbing awkwardly into a taxi. His presence
did more than anything else to galvanise those of us who were there,
and contributed to the pressure on the Turkish authorities to bring
Dink’s killers to justice.

A few days later I saw him again in a very different setting, at an
English PEN dinner in his honour at Cumberland Lodge, where Lindsay
Duncan, Michael Pennington and Alan Rickman read from his plays and
poems and a glittering guest list sat down to dinner. Pinter rounded
off the evening with an excor
iating speech against the human rights
abuses of George Bush and Tony Blair. His voice had by now taken on the
hoarse quality which gave his every utterance the air of oracular
authority, and we shifted uncomfortably in our seats.

The last time I saw Pinter he was in the audience for an extraordinary
play called Being Harold Pinter, devised by the Belarus Free Theatre,
an underground group from Minsk. For the gala performance, an ensemble
of famous British and American actors swapped with the cast to read
from the testimony of Belarussian dissidents who had been imprisoned
and tortured. These readings formed a powerful conclusion to an evening
which was otherwise made entirely of Pinter’s own words, taken from his
plays and the Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Pinter, however, wasn’t
impressed, deploring the use of Western stars in this way, which he saw
as a distraction from the work of the Belarussian actors.

It was characteristic of him to be noisily discontent at the dinner and
grumbling at the gala but quiet in his support of a fellow writer of
conscience at the demo. Standing shoulder to shoulder with other
outsiders, he was part of something bigger than himself, whereas
grandiosity, even when it was conjured up in his honour, clearly made
him uncomfortable.

Pinter famously called speech "a constant stratagem to cover
nakedness", and it seemed that he used it to cover his own essential
shyness, and=2
0the feeling of being the outsider which lasted throughout
his life.

Jonathan Heawood is director of English PEN.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress