Pinter wins Literature Nobel

Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize. Comedy of menace, he called his plays -- the weasel lurking under the carpet. He's supposed to be the Brit child of Beckett, but I think that, far from being absurd, he's a hard-bitten naturalist who simply exposes the bloody-mindedness that lurks beneath the British veneer of civility. Anyway, this time the Nobel people come up with a total surprise. Perhaps it has something to do with Pinter's current utter anti-Americanism, or his stand against torture.

It seems the Nobel Committee gives their Literature Prize as a sort of adjunct to their Peace Prize -- to those writers who take moral stands. This would be in line with Swedish tastes anyway: they give more of their money per capita to foreign aid than most other nations, and take better care of their own people than most other nations. The Swedes are nothing if not politically correct. I've always found it astonishing that they instituted their welfare state in the early 20th century, when Russia was going communist, and Europe was on its way to fascism. What is it about the Swedes? How come they're so progressive, ahead of the rest of the world by a factor of fifty years? Something in the water? Or because it's so bloody cold there? Maybe those long days of night in winter? In their art they project a lot of angst (Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman) -- does that explain their compassion and sense of justice? It's not just them -- all the Nordic states are progressive. Funny, the only other place I can think of as moral and progressive is Canada, and they happen to live in a cold climate, too. (The closer you get to the Equator, the more shit there is. Look at Congo -- constant war, Mobutu, a land of persistent pain.) I know I have some Swedish readers; I wonder if they could explain to us Americans, who still don't have a health system that works, why they're such ... what's the word? ... good people.

ANYWAY, here are three bits about Pinter, who along with Kafka and Orwell, has given us an adjectice: Pinteresque (Kafkaesque and Orwellian are the only two others I can think of):

1. From the good old Guardian:
This has been quite a week for literary coups. In an almost entirely unexpected move, the Swedish Academy have this lunchtime announced their decision to award this year's Nobel prize for Literature to the British playwright, author and recent poet, Harold Pinter and not, as was widely anticipated, to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk or the Syrian poet Adonis.

The Academy, which has handed out the prize since 1901, described Pinter, whose works include The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter and his breakthrough The Caretaker, as someone who restored the art form of theatre. In its citation, the Academy said Pinter was "generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century," and declared him to be an author "who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms."

Until today's announcement, Pinter was barely thought to be in the running for the prize, one of the most prestigious and (at €1.3m) lucrative in the world. After Pamuk and Adonis (whose real name is Ali Ahmad Said), the writers believed to be under consideration by the Academy included Americans Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth, and the Swedish poet Thomas Transtromer, with Margaret Atwood, Milan Kundera and the South Korean poet Ko Un as long-range possibilities. Following on from last year's surprise decision to name the Austrian novelist, playwright and poet Elfriede Jelinek as laureate, however, the secretive Academy has once again confounded the bookies.

Pinter's victory means that the prize has been given to a British writer for the second time in under five years; it was awarded to VS Naipaul in 2001. European writers have won the prize in nine out of the last 10 years so it was widely assumed that this year's award would go to a writer from a different continent.

The son of immigrant Jewish parents, Pinter was born in Hackney, London on October 10, 1930. He himself has said that his youthful encounters with anti-semitism led him to become a dramatist. Without doubt one of Britain's greatest post-war playwrights, his long association with the theatre began when he worked as an actor, under the stage name David Baron. His first play, The Room, was performed at Bristol University in 1957; but it was in 1960 with his second full-length play, the absurdist masterpiece The Caretaker, that his reputation was established. Known for their menacing pauses, his dark, claustrophobic plays are notorious for their mesmerising ability to strip back the layers of the often banal lives of their characters to reveal the guilt and horror that lie beneath, a feature of his writing which has garnered him the adjective "Pinteresque." He has also written extensively for the cinema: his screenplays include The Servant (1963), and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981).

Pinter's authorial stance, always radical, has become more and more political in recent years. An outspoken critic of the war in Iraq (he famously called President Bush a "mass murderer" and dubbed Tony Blair a "deluded idiot"), in 2003 he turned to poetry to castigate the leaders of the US and the UK for their decision to go to war (his collection, War, was awarded the Wilfred Owen award for poetry). Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry, declaring on BBC Radio 4 that. "I think I've stopped writing plays now, but I haven't stopped writing poems. I've written 29 plays. Isn't that enough?"

In 2002, Pinter was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus and underwent a course of chemotherapy, which he described as a "personal nightmare". "I've been through the valley of the shadow of death," he said afterwards. "While in many respects I have certain characteristics that I had, I'm also a very changed man." Earlier this week it was announced that he is to act in a production of Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of the English Stage Company at London's Royal Court Theatre. Last weekend some of Britain and Ireland's finest actors got together at Dublin's Gate Theatre to celebrate Pinter's 75th birthday, which was on Monday.

Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, said that Pinter was overwhelmed when told he had won the prize. "He did not say many words," he said. "He was very happy."

2. From the NY Times:

In his versatile and productive career, Mr. Pinter, 75, has written plays and screenplays, directed theater productions, acted on screen and stage, and won awards across Europe. So precise and pared down is his prose, so artful his use of pauses and omissions to invoke discomfort, foreboding and miscommunication that he has his own adjective, Pinteresque, signifying a peculiar kind of atmospheric unease.

In "The Birthday Party," "No Man's Land," "The Homecoming" and other plays, Mr. Pinter dispenses with the easy comforts of fluent speech and has his characters speak in non sequiturs and sentence fragments, interrupt one another, fail to listen, fail to understand. He uses language to convey miscommunication and lack of understanding rather than shared comprehension.

He is an overtly political writer, vehemently opposed to the Iraq war, to the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair and to what he sees as bullying American imperialism in the Middle East and around the world. A recent poem, "The Special Relationship," refers to the alliance between the United States and Britain but is consumed with bombs exploding, limbs being blown off and the atrocities committed at places like Abu Ghraib.

The Swedish Academy occasionally presents awards with a political edge, and this is the second prize in a week that has gone to an honoree at odds with the Bush administration over the Iraq war. On Oct. 7, the peace prize was given to the International Atomic Energy Agency and its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, who in the weeks before the invasion of Iraq was skeptical of American accusations that Saddam Hussein had rebuilt a nuclear program.

The literature award is kept a close secret, and rumors of who is likely to win usually turn out to be wrong. This year, the candidates mentioned included the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis and the American writer Joyce Carol Oates. Mr. Pinter was not considered a front-runner, to the extent that anyone ever can be, and he said Thursday in a brief e-mail interview that he was "very surprised" and had not entertained the possibility of winning.

"I was called 20 minutes before the official announcement," he said in his e-mail message. "The chair of the Nobel committee phoned and said, 'You have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.' I remained silent and then said, 'I'm speechless.' "

Adding to the sense of mystery this year was the timing of the announcement, which was made a week later than usual, suggesting last-minute infighting in the Swedish Academy. Earlier this week, the writer Knut Ahnlund resigned from the academy, using an article in the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet to attack the work of last year's winner, the Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, as "whingeing, unenjoyable, violent pornography."

It is unclear why he waited a year to criticize Ms. Jelinek, but the timing of the resignation suggests, perhaps, unhappiness with the choice of Mr. Pinter as well. In any case, the academy's permanent secretary, Horace Engdahl, said Mr. Ahnlund had not participated in its meetings for nearly 10 years.

Mr. Pinter is known for plays like "The Caretaker," about the painful power struggles between two brothers and the tramp who comes to stay with them, and "Betrayal," which dissects a seven-year adulterous liaison and is told backwards, from the sad postscript to the affair's hopeful beginning. The Swedish Academy said that he "restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles."

Always ready to stick up for his beliefs - in 1949 he was attacked when he challenged a group of fascists in the East End, and in the same year he was fined for refusing to perform his National Service, the country's postwar system of mandatory conscription - he has become increasingly outspoken about international politics in recent decades.

Mr. Pinter's poems often express fury at war and state-sponsored destruction, and he also gives impassioned speeches and writes polemical articles about what he once called "the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence."

"We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery and degradation to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East,' " he said in March, accepting the Wilfred Owen prize for his antiwar poetry.

Mr. Pinter said he did not know if his politics had had any bearing on the Nobel decision. In its citation, the academy said only that he had "won recognition as a fighter for human rights" and that he "has often taken stands seen as controversial."

3. What the Nobel Prize people themselves say about Pinter:

Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in the London borough of Hackney, son of a Jewish dressmaker. Growing up, Pinter was met with the expressions of anti-Semitism, and has indicated its importance for his becoming a dramatist. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated from London at the age of nine, returning when twelve. He has said that the experience of wartime bombing has never lost its hold on him. Back in London, he attended Hackney Grammar School where he played Macbeth and Romeo among other characters in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. This prompted him to choose a career in acting. In 1948 he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1950, he published his first poems. In 1951 he was accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama. That same year, he won a place in Anew McMaster's famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David Baron. Between 1956 and 1980 he was married to actor Vivien Merchant. In 1980 he married the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser.

Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with The Room , presented in Bristol. Other early plays were The Birthday Party (1957), at first a fiasco of legendary dimensions but later one of his most performed plays, and The Dumb Waiter (1957). His conclusive breakthrough came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964) and other plays.

Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: "Pinteresque".

Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter's drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as "comedy of menace", a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past.

It is said of Harold Pinter that following an initial period of psychological realism he proceeded to a second, more lyrical phase with plays such as Landscape (1967) and Silence (1968) and finally to a third, political phase with One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991) and other plays. But this division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing, such as No Man's Land (1974) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early Pinter's analysing of threat and injustice.

Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a fighter for human rights, alongside his writing. He has often taken stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio plays and screenplays for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are those for The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go-Between (1971) and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981, based on the John Fowles novel). Pinter has also made a pioneering contribution as a director.

THERE, RIGHT in the last paragraph, is the moral note, the Swedish reminder: "... a fighter for human rights ... taken stands seen as controversial..." -- stands that the Swedish Academy agrees with, to the tune of over a million bucks.

P.S. Pinter also wrote two films, "The Servant" (Joseph Losey) and "Accident" (Alain Resnais), which are probably masterpieces.