The plays of Harold Pinter combine comedy, menace, poetry and mystery to mesmerising and disturbing effect. My first encounter with Pinter came with a television production of No Man’s Land in the 1970s. I was hooked from start to finish despite the fact that the meaning of the play eluded me entirely. I’ve been hooked on Pinter ever since and continue to be mesmerised by the multilayered power of his imagination.

Michael Billington’s book, first published in 1996 and written with Pinter’s cooperation, is not a full biography of Pinter but essentially a critical biography which examines the work in relation to the life. Pinter’s life and work, it transpires, were intimately related with much of his inspiration arising directly from his experience. An encounter would leave a lasting image in his mind and the image would eventually transform itself into a play. The extraordinary thing is that Pinter was able to transmute these fragmentary moments of remembered experience into plays of universal relevance and political resonance. His years as an actor in the 1950s, slogging around British repertory theatres performing in formulaic dramas, also left its imprint on his dramaturgy. Some of his early plays are like Agatha Christie thrillers rewritten by Samuel Beckett.

Reading this book it struck me that his plays are autobiographical in another and arguably deeper sense. The personality of the plays themselves, as distinct from individual characters or events within them, is remarkably similar to Pinter’s own personality: charming and witty on the surface but with anxiety, emotional disturbance and potentially explosive anger lurking just beneath.

Received opinion insists that Pinter was an apolitical writer who suddenly acquired a political consciousness in the 1980s. Billington, with his combination of biography and close textual analysis of the plays, is able to demonstrate that received opinion is talking through its collective arse. A man who declared himself a conscientious objector aged 18, to the consternation of his uncomprehending parents, was hardly without political concern. Pinter’s first full-length play, The Birthday Party, is about a nonconformist who is crushed by the forces of convention. The themes which run through all the plays - the battle for territory, dominance and control, the use of language as a weapon - are fundamentally political ones. Billington argues, convincingly in my view, that Pinter’s plays collapse the barriers traditionally erected between personal and political drama. He is concerned with power structures, whether between state and citizen or in a marriage. For Pinter the personal is political and was long before that became a popular slogan.

With a tape recorder between his ears and a direct line to his subconscious forever at his disposal, or so it seemed, Pinter was able to capture the illogicalities of speech and the incongruities of experience with disorientating precision. It was instructive, in this respect, to learn from Billington that the great surrealist Spanish filmmaker Louis Bunuel was one of Pinter’s artistic heroes. I don’t say Pinter was a surrealist but the cumulative effect of such meticulously rendered reality is certainly surreal.

Pinter started as a poet but his poetic ambition achieved its best realisation on the stage. Old Times and No Man’s Land, while not containing a single line of verse, are nonetheless among the most perfect examples of poetic drama ever written. These plays are three-dimensional poems in which words and images are combined to haunting effect. They possess a seamless fluidity of structure which Billington suggests came from Pinter’s experience of writing for film and television. The ultimate expression of Pinter’s open-ended approach to playwriting they are capable of almost endless interpretation while retaining an impenetrable mystery.

The charge of misogyny, sometimes levelled against Pinter’s plays, is certainly unjust. His female characters are richly complex creations and often more sympathetic than his male characters. But having made this point Billington then proceeds to the unconvincing extreme of claiming that Pinter was a feminist playwright. This is a provocative and intriguing argument but ultimately an overstatement and simplification.

My major criticism of Billington, however, concerns his treatment of Pinter’s first wife, the actress Vivien Merchant. Far too much is made of her allegedly imperious behaviour, anti-intellectualism and political ignorance. Pinter’s habitual infidelity is noted without comment. The breakup of their marriage - Pinter left Vivien to live with Lady Antonia Fraser - is viewed entirely from Pinter’s perspective. Vivien Merchant was a superb actress, Pinter’s muse during his most fertile creative years and the originator of many of his female roles. She deserved better than this.

Pinter was never indifferent to public affairs but it was only in the 1980s that he finally emerged as a political activist and implacable opponent of American foreign policy. He was motivated by a deep-seated hatred of injustice and anger at the moral hypocrisy of Western governments - preaching democracy while facilitating tyranny abroad. He also spoke out against the erosion of civil liberties in Thatcherite Britain. He became that rarity in British cultural life, the politically committed writer. Predictably, in an increasingly conformist and right-wing Britain, he was met with hostility and abuse from most journalists. Billington observes how the British press, rather than engaging with Pinter’s arguments, chose instead to attempt to discredit him by creating a caricature of a pompous, bad-tempered, angry old man.

This is an insightful blend of critical analysis and biography and I strongly recommend it to Pinter fans and students of drama. Biography of a writer is valuable only if it extends or deepens our understanding of his or her work. This book certainly does that, casting light on the autobiographical origins of the plays, while never making the mistake of reducing Pinter’s work to his biography. ( )

Bootlicking

From Booklist
Billington's exhaustive critical biography of one of Britain's major modern playwrights is long on literary analysis and shorter on biography. Billington discusses nearly all Pinter's major plays at length, from his earliest forays (e.g., The Room, The Dwarfs) to the famous Birthday Party and The Homecoming and beyond. The book's most fascinating sections explore the sources, literary and biographical, of Pinter's evocative, cryptic plays. Billington's analysis relies heavily on the hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) political messages in Pinter's work, and they are there, although if the plays were only complaints against authoritarian regimes, they would be a lot less interesting. As hinted above, Billington's portrait of Pinter feels incomplete, especially appearing, as it does, side by side with his fine literary scholarship. You can't help wondering how much more Billington might have turned up about the man if Pinter were not still a living force to be reckoned with in the English-speaking theater. Jack Helbig