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The Late Harold Pinter
 Basil Chiasson

The Late Harold

Pinter
Political Dramatist, Poet and Activist
Basil Chiasson
University of Leeds
Leeds, United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-137-50815-7 ISBN 978-1-137-50816-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50816-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937069

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The
publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu-
tional affiliations.

Cover illustration © Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
For MTB
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to all the good folks at Palgrave Macmillan for accepting this
single-author project and for shepherding it, with patience, to completion.
April James deserves special mention here. I want to thank both Emma
Cheshire at Faber and Faber London and Keelan Pacot at Grove/Atlantic
New York for working with me on the use of passages from Pinter’s later,
political verse. A warm thank-you to the staff in the manuscripts room at
the British Library in London for assisting me during my research in the
Pinter Archive. Thanks to Pattie and Donald Freed, Lexie Hamblin, and
David Leveaux for responding to my inquiries regarding personal letters
written to Pinter. Thanks to Judy Daish for kindly clarifying the circum-
stances of copyright which pertain to Pinter’s personal letters and other
unpublished materials. Philippa Lubbock has been most generous, not
only permitting me to quote from a personal letter to Pinter but also
committing graciously to email correspondence with me and informing
me about her encounters with Pinter during the late 1980s. My respect
and appreciation go to Susan Hollis Merritt given her fine work on and
tireless commitment to Pinter, and for taking an interest in my own work
on him. Respect and thanks go to R. Darren Gobert, who some years ago
gave me the space to begin to settle into Pinter as a research focus.
Gratitude, respect, and love go to Goran Stanivukovic for looking at and
commenting on several chapters from this book, and also for always
standing behind my intellectual work and for being an inspirational thin-
ker, friend, and human. Many thanks and respect to James Hudson for
talking about Pinter with me, for imparting his significant knowledge of
Pinter’s contemporaries, and for refusing to treat Pinter with the reverence

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

that is often bestowed without question. Similarly, I want to thank

Jacqueline Bolton for our brief but meaningful exchanges regarding
Pinter over the years, which have been so useful to me in my research on
and teaching of Pinter. My dearest friend, Paul Aitken—guitarist, impro-
viser, scholar, and Canadian son of Scots—deserves my sincerest apprecia-
tion and awe for being with this project since its beginning: listening,
discussing, reading, and commenting upon so much of it in most impor-
tant ways. Grammercy to Mark Taylor-Batty for his dedication to all things
Pinter and for incisive scholarship on the playwright and his work, for
introducing me to Pinter from Britain, and most for engaging me in a truly
reciprocal dialogue which has led to many insights, opportunities to pub-
lish, and, more seriously, life-long memories and ongoing friendship.
Thanks and love to my parents, Loretta and Alex Chiasson, for believing
in and supporting my career as a scholar. Big love and adoration are
reserved for my children Atticus and Ida, who by turns hindered and
inspired my work on this book. The final acknowledgment goes to
Joanna Redden, who has buoyed me up through all kinds of vicissitudes
so that this book could happen and take the course it has. Her impact
upon my thinking, my approach to the study of Pinter, this book, and our
life together eludes verbal articulation—as it should.
 CONTENTS

1 Introduction: On the Meaning of Late, Affect, and

Aestheticizing Politics 1

2 The ‘Early’ Years: A ‘More Precisely Political’ Drama 31

3 Political Drama through the 1990s and After: Dialogue Is

the Thing 71

4 The Political Verse: A Poetics of Force 117

5 A ‘Citizen of the World’: Aestheticizing Politics 149

6 The Nobel Lecture: Artist and Citizen Converge 185

Bibliography 219

Index 239

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: On the Meaning of Late,

Affect, and Aestheticizing Politics

This book is an exploration of the later output of the world-renowned

British playwright Harold Pinter. Its title, The Late Harold Pinter, plays
upon the word ‘late.’ It refers to the fact that Pinter is no longer
among us, having passed away in the year 2008. It also points to
much of Pinter’s later output, the expressly political work which ranges
across the dramatic arts, poetry, and non-fiction prose and activism. It
is important to note how engagement with the late Pinter tends to be,
however tacitly or explicitly, informed by the temporal and stylistic
categories which parcel Pinter’s lengthy, productive career. Three
stages and their attendant labels have at this point become axiomatic:
the early dramas, globally referred to as ‘comedies of menace’; a middle
period usually characterized as invested in memory and the presence of
the past in the present tense; and a later shift during the early 1980s,
where Pinter’s output becomes to a great extent overtly political.
Meanwhile, Pinter’s output throughout these periods betrays a writer
and works that are both far more dynamic than any categorization will
allow. Each phase reveals several styles, and thus several ‘Pinters.’
The title of this book takes a page from how so much of Pinter’s
writing opens up meaning, as opposed to stabilizing or foreclosing it,
by acknowledging the existence of several Pinters, even within the
temporal parameters suggested when referring to a late Pinter versus
an early or middle one. The Late Harold Pinter is concerned to uncover
a persistence of style and the notable developments which emerge

© The Author(s) 2017 1

B. Chiasson, The Late Harold Pinter,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50816-4_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION: ON THE MEANING OF LATE, AFFECT . . .

therefrom through a later season of Pinter’s career which has not yet
been taken up in a book-length study. Working through much of
Pinter’s later output, from the early 1980s until his being awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, means that a critical eye must
range over several decades, and in that block of time examine the
changes Pinter went through as he worked within and across several
media, doing so as both a continuation of an extant approach (Roof
1993, 88) and a development of it.
This is the first book-length study of Pinter’s later work, and the first
book-length examination to work across three of the principal media in
which Pinter worked: dramas, poetry, and political speeches and acti-
vism. Its contribution to the field is embellished by the approach, which
uses affect theory to refine and develop existing definitions of what
makes the work political. To speak of a late, post-1980 Pinter is to
speak more often than not of a political Pinter, of a man who is political
but also politicized, an artist and an activist whose work and positions
outside of the arts seem different than the playwright whose quasi avant-
garde style ‘did not speak from a recognizable political platform’ and
seemed above politics (Knowles 2001, 74). What is more, to read across
these three media and fields of activity without placing Pinter’s work
into three discrete categories, apart from separating them into focused
chapters, suggests the ways and extents to which Pinter’s political dra-
mas, poetry, and activism are mutually informing and evolve a kind of
political project.
In contrast to trends in scholarship which read Pinter’s poetry or
screenplays as a means to elucidate the dramas, my approach is to treat
the dramas, poetry, and speeches and activism as the development of a
coherent style through three reciprocal modes of creativity.
Nevertheless, advancing an understanding of this project as it coheres
during the later stage of Pinter’s output will to some extent require
returning to prior stages, and thus to earlier Pinters. Occasionally
glancing backwards selectively through Pinter’s oeuvre as an artist can
be an effective way to discern how the political artist and activist could
only have emerged with the establishment of certain conditions pre-
dating Pinter’s emergence as a self-declared political artist and what he
called a ‘citizen of the world’ (Gussow 1994, 266). In other words, the
late Pinter can be seen to rely in myriad ways upon the sensibilities of
several earlier stages and selves.
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