One for the Road

Deservedly lauded since the news of his death was announced on Christmas Day, friends of Harold Pinter in the theatre have uniformly mourned their loss of a generous companion who happened also to be a genuine literary giant. Influenced by the purity of language found in the prose and dramatic writings of Samuel Beckett, Pinter became, in retrospect, his only real theatrical equal. While literary movements came and went, he had that rare allusive gift of contemporaneity.

What was astonishing about Harold Pinter was that right from his first play, 1957's The Room, he seemed ready-formed as a devastatingly incisive and individual voice. Both in the spare, halting, guarded nature of his dialogue and the observation of the underlying menace in the everyday. Pinteresque. That adjective described his impact on a culture far wider than theatre and film, but its flattering coinage had already become a burden by as early as the mid-1960s (as a recently republished interview with The Paris Review from the era touches on). Stubbornly, his writing fought on regardless against such labels of containment that hinted at mere artifice and cynical mannerism.

Until the publication of Michael Billington's 1996 biography, we never realised just how much Pinter drew personally on his own experience to create comedies of such existential menace. A Jewish boyhood in pre-war Hackney and a post-war life spent in digs as a repertory actor provided much of the starting points for his creations. Similarly, his latterly regular appearances campaigning for human rights and a stunning denunciation of US and British foreign policy in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech revealed his ingrained forceful use of metaphor and a precise construction of language. Never less than impressive, he was the real deal who left us with a call to arms that was implicit throughout his mature work:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.