Every Pinter tells a story

David Sexton

THE LIFE AND WORK OF HAROLD PINTER by Michael Billington Faber, £20, pp. 384 Hindsight is seductive. Like the last light of the evening, it can make any mess look composed, necessary. Michael Billing- ton has written an 'authorised biographical study' of Harold Pinter which is entirely a work of hindsight.

It began, Billington says, as a short book `about his work, his political ideas and the way in which these relate to his life'. Although much expanded, that is essential- ly what it has remained — an 'interpreta- tion of Pinter's work as seen in the context of his life'. Although he delivers a fairly full biography along the way, Billington never tries to reverse these unfashionable priori- ties. He makes no attempt to imagine how 'I can't talk to you just now, Jennifer. We're right in the middle of pulling Pooh out of Rabbit's house.' uncertain every life feels at the time, as it is lived, without foreknowledge. So it's hardly a suspenseful read.

`A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery,' says Stephen Daedalus, talking of Shakespeare. It may be a mystical insight, but it's still an unusual approach for a modern biographer. Some of Billing- ton's interpretations are distinctly over- determined. Early in the first chapter, for example, he describes Pinter's extended family and sees in it a source for those famous pauses:

Passover — the Jewish festival commemorat- ing the liberation of the Israelites from Egytian bondage — was always a big event. The young Harold participated in the ritual of the symbolic descent of the Angel of Death which was always followed by a long, and significantly dramatic, pause.

Born in 1930, he experienced both evac- uation and the Blitz. 'It is hardly surprising that he grew up with a sense of the precari- ousness and fragility of existence', Billing- ton says, before prodding further:

Like many children who grew up in wartime, Pinter had a strong sense of life's drama and impermanence; and like any incipient artist, he was alert to the significance of his own experience.

An only child, Pinter lived with his par- ents in Thistlewaite Road in Hackney until in 1951 he joined Anew McMaster's tour- ing company as a Shakespearean actor. Again, Billington moralises the facts:

You don't live at home till your early twenties without developing an aware- ness of private space or a fear of unwanted invasion —

classic Pinter themes', he emphasises. Yet although these matters may have been nec- essary components in Pinter's make-up, they are hardly sufficient as explanations. Others have lived through the war, observed Passover, or shared a family home without having become Pinter.

Nonetheless, much the most interesting section of the book is the description of Pinter's Hackney background. His grand- parents on both sides were Ashkenazic Jews (three from Poland, one from Odessa), a fact which Billington can't resist prognostically underlining:

They imported from East Europe a residual love of culture, a memory of suffering and an extraordinary resilience.

His father, Jack, born into a musical fam- ily, built up a ladies' tailoring business in Stoke Newington; his mother, Frances, came from a more secular and sceptical tradition. The love they gave their son can perhaps be inferred simply from his achievement.

His parents must have been so wonderful to him because he has never, ever really doubt- ed himself, an early girlfriend in Hackney, Jennifer Mortimer, is quoted as saying.

More than this, all Pinter's thinking and feeling is first-hand, not just the borrowings with which most of us make do. He has a quick ear and a thin skin. The induration which others come to welcome has some- how passed him by.

Billington quotes Joan Bakewell: He's immaculate about the significance of his life. Which is why he doesn't need to do much more than walk to the tube — that is full of significance for him.

This characteristic has both given his writ- ing its originality and latterly led him into some of his odder political stances. It's a stage beyond being simply an auto-didact. Forties Hackney gave Pinter an intellec- tual life to rival that to be found in any more materially privileged environment. (Though Pinter obviously changes and develops as an artist, these early years form the matrix of his creative imagination', Billington tirelessly prompts.) To anybody who knows the corruption and degradation of Hackney today, where the children have to ask the shopkeepers what the packets contain, it is hard to realise the richness it supported then. Pinter went to Hackney Downs Grammar School which then had `an over 50 per cent Jewish intake and a high regard for learning'. Last year it was closed by the Department of Education as unsalvageably bad.

There he found one of those teachers Joe Brearley, an English master — who can enhance a life. He also found a group of friends with 'a passion for intellectual dis- covery and argument about ideas' who have remained important to him ever since. `Not one of us adhered without question to any given, to any state of affairs or system of thought', Pinter says. Hackney Public Library to them was 'a fountain of life'. It is now a decayed sump which might as well be closed too.

All that is best in Pinter comes out of these years. If he's left Hackney, Hackney has never left him (it's why he is where he is). 'There's an almost mystic quality about things and people from his past', Peter Hall says, speaking of filming The Homecoming in Hackney. Billington demonstrates how often he specifically alludes to this era, but more importantly the spirit of his early milieu lives on in his work. 'He has created an entire world out of Cockney speech', Hall suggests.

At 18, Pinter was sure enough of himself to become a conscientious objector, which in a sense he has remained. A story he wrote at 19, `Kullus', immediately ushers us into a Pinter world that now seems eerily familiar [Billington comments]: a room, a space, a territorial battle, a triangular encounter between two men and a woman, a reversal of power.

He became an actor, touring Ireland and then slogging around the reps (a year in Colchester, poor man), while he continued to write. In Bournemouth in 1956, he met and married Vivien Merchant. His first play, The Room, was written six weeks later. The Birthday Party was produced unsuccessfully in 1958, being taken off on the Saturday of its first week, the night before Harold Hobson published a rave in the Sunday Times. It was not until The Caretaker opened in 1960 that he found commercial success.

From this point, Billington's book becomes ever more a play-by-play study (and rather wearingly production-by- production too). Most of this discussion is illuminating, although occasionally in his eagerness to defend every detail, it sags into sorry critical jargon. Of A Slight Ache, he comments:

Far from being 'the laziest of symbols', as Robert Cushman once suggested, the match- seller is the dramatic catalyst who exposes the difference between the male and female principles, and who highlights the psychic instability and unexpressed longings that lurk within bourgeois marriage and the pastoral ideal.

Pinter's main literary debts, to Beckett and the Eliot of Sweeney Agonistes, are only briefly discussed. Rather, he finds that the plays are 'much closer to observed real- ity than has ever been acknowledged' (The Homecoming), varying the formula only slightly. 'It has an authenticity that comes from experience,' he says of Moonlight, which he links to Pinter's distress at his separation from his only child, Daniel, who `now lives as a recluse in the Fens where for many years he has been working on an ambitious musical collage'.

Of The Caretaker, he says categorically: Tinter's most universally performed play had its origins in the specific circumstances of life in 373 Chiswick High Road', where Pinter and Merchant then lived. 'It is not a direct transcription of experience, but its three characters all had their antecedents in life ....'

It is with the same scholarly note that he discloses that Pinter's 1978 play about pro- tracted adultery, Betrayal, is based not, as most people had idly assumed, on his rela- tionship with Antonia Fraser which began in 1975, leading to divorce and remarriage in 1980, but on an affair he had between 1962 and 1969 with Joan Bakewell, then married to the producer Michael Bakewell, one of Pinter's champions.

`If one rakes over the embers, it is partly because it helps to illuminate Betrayal,' Billington says blandly. His apparent sur- prise at the newsworthiness of this fact becomes comprehensible when it is put back into the context of his respectful and painstaking study, where it appears on a par with the less than hair-raising revela- tion that there was a real caretaker and a real tramp at 373 Chiswick High Road. That he is concerned primarily with the plays is perhaps proved by a hapless remark that the affair was 'ultimately to bear creative fruit'.

Bakewell herself speaks about this and about Pinter in general extremely well.

I was upset ... because it was called Betrayal. It's such a judgemental word. But we go on betraying, don't we? Here I am telling you about it. The irony is that the process never ends.

Early in the book, Billington admiringly remarks that 'one of Pinter's rare qualities is that he always remains on friendly terms with former lovers'.

Pinter's sometimes slightly antique sexu- al attitudes he glosses over by saying that his 'intuitive feminism often seemed the by- product of a certain romanticism about women'. His politics are equally defended in a chapter called 'Public Affairs' — just one of a number of comically bald head- ings, the last being 'Onwards and Upwards' — as

a logical development of everything that had gone before. Both his character and his work had long been imbued with a profound suspicion of authority and of handed-down judgements ...

Bakewell says in the Sixties she asked Pinter why he didn't write about politics.

He'd say, 'Hold on a minute. I write what I write. I write about what I know. I can't just write about politics to order.'

Since then, he appears to have changed his mind. His anti-Westernism may seem in excess of the facts as they appear, but there's no doubt that if he were in a more repressive society elsewhere, he would fearlessly be as dissident a voice there. It's just that we're lucky enough to have him.

Miss Blemby, I don't seem to have one of those desk things to speak into.. ' Pinter himself has lapsed at times into the Pinteresque — a word now in The Shorter Oxford. But that's his right. He has, after all, given us a body of work that has, as Billington says, `become part of the general culture'. He has made us hear afresh the way we talk to each other, pursu- ing our own paths, listening and not listen- ing, making our escapes. Although no thriller, The Life and Work of Harold Pinter explains a great deal about how it was done.