Eminentoes: Silly Scenes of Pinter
Reid, Stuart
EMINENTOES by Stuart Reid Silly Scenes of Pinter I f Harold Pinter had not been such an accomplished womanizer, you might think he was an angry old queen. Say a forgiving word about a fascist...
...Perhaps there was an element of snobbery as well as salaciousness in the newspapers' interest...
...The day after they chucked him out of the Salvation Army...
...There seems to be something almost clerico-fascist in his contempt for America's bourgeois liberal values, and by extension Great Britain's...
...scene if any such thing were suggested—but he voted for Margaret Thatcher in 1979, in protest against the strikes that had shut down the National Theater for weeks on end...
...He is in danger of becoming ridiculous...
...Anderson complained that "we couldn't change the mildewed carpets or the broken seats without petitioning them...
...Had a penchant for nuts...
...He must therefore take his share of the blame for the Thatcher Terror...
...They" are right sods...
...The late Pinter, while retaining much of his poetry, has been overfly, tiresomely, naively political, and at times is a pastiche of his former self...
...what he values is truth...
...We have a precise agenda," he declared, "and we are going to meet again and again until they break the windows and drag us out...
...We blew the s--t out of them, They suffocated in their own s--t...
...Sometimes he stomps out of parties in a huff...
...it is "Pinteresque...
...These things happen...
...The D.C...
...In a fit of left-wing fury he can be a disturbing sight...
...I in fact realized within weeks hat it wasa stupid, totally irresponsible and shameful act...
...There is paranoia at work here, or maybe at play...
...In Annapolis, Maryland, preservation police are fighting a crime wave of hanging flowerpots alleged to be defacing the historic district...
...I am not talking wildly...
...Hearing nothing from his fellow-playwright Simon Gray, he rang him to ask what he thought of the poem...
...Francis of Assisi and the Lion King...
...In Billington's view he is not just a literary genius but a cross between St...
...Harold and Antonia were, and are, charming, witty, and generous hosts, and their Holland Park home has been the scene of many memorable parties...
...Not long ago he produced a poem that (in its entirety) went like this: I saw Len Hutton in his prime;/ Another time, another time...
...Still, any man who provides such good knocking copy is a person to be treasured, and Pinter is enjoying—if that's the word—one of his regular revivals...
...They are eating it...
...We blew their balls into shards of dust, Into shards of f---ing dust...
...What he does is to take the banal phrase, the apparent non sequitur, the awkward (or sinister) repetition and create a world that is by turn fantastical, terrifying, and darkly funny...
...She and Pinter still have what she describes as "great lunches...
...Pinter learned his craft in the streets of London's East End, where he grew up the only and much loved son of a Jewish couple (papa was a tailor...
...Say a forgiving word about a fascist thug — a Somoza, say, or a Ronald Reagan, or even a Charlton Heston—and he loses it...
...In 1975 he left Vivien Merchant, whom he had married in 1956, and in 1980 married Antonia...
...America goes to war, he is saying, with murder in its bowels, gum in its brain, and a copy of Hustler in its back pocket...
...A1995 Wall Street Journal article noted, "Just about anything more than 25 years old can qualify as an historical landmark here...
...His genius is hard to isolate...
...True, the press has mocked him, traduced him, misrepresented him, and misreported him...
...We did it...
...Looked at from an American perspective, it was as though Pat Buckley had left William and run off with Philip Roth...
...if he were less morally indignant...
...It works...
...JAMES BOVARD is this year's Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute...
...I look back on that vote with disbelief," he now says...
...The Seattle Landmarks Preservation Board even forced a biotech company to spend half a million dollars to add fake smokestacks to an old power plant that it had converted to a research laboratory...
...Praise the Lord for all good things...
...Pinter's friendship with Vaclav Havel speaks well of both men, and his work on behalf of the Kurds and Turkish dissidents is not to be dismissed simply because he overlooked the plight of, for example, contra dissidents under Ortega...
...Very much your build [this to a sick old tramp...
...At 66, Pinter gives us pause...
...He was always on the move, that man...
...52 April 1997 • The American Spectator its best expression in his letter to the New York Review of Books in June 1994: "Of course there is a difference...
...With Pinter in particular there is a detestation of cant, of sloppy thinking, of unprincipled assertion...
...The meaningful silence is pure Pinter...
...It goes like this (send the children from the room): Hallelullah...
...Chambers 2oth Century Dictionary defines Pinteresque as a writing style "marked by halting dialogue, uncertain, ty of identity and air of menace...
...Oil THE PUBLIC POLICY by James Bovard Don't Touch That Style...
...He was having an affair with the gifted historian Lady Antonia Fraser at the time of this shameful act...
...This sounds very much like the old doctrine of moral equivalency...
...Still, no man can be wrong, or absurd, all the time...
...It is almost impossible to exaggerate the overreaching of some preservation Historic preservationists hate the modern church...
...City rules require only that a structure meet certain broad criteria, such as 'prominence of spatial location.' Or it must be 'an easily identifiable visual feature of a neighborhood...
...Seattle, the paradise of coffee pretension, is flush with preservation fever...
...indeed, as someone tasteless remarked the other day, he gives good pause...
...Picked it up in Hong Kong...
...They invited a group of worthy lefties—among them the playwright and author John Mortimer—to their home for what became the first of a series of meetings to find ways of fighting the threat The American Spectator • April 9 9 7 53 to Britain's traditional freedoms from the Thatcher regime...
...Vivien went into an alcoholic decline, and died two years later, aged 53...
...His heart is often in the right place, even if he wears his spleen on his sleeve...
...The same bureau-crats imposed landmark status and seized control over the 1958 interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, prohibiting the owner from removing two hanging sculptures, changing the draperies, or modifying the restaurant's bar...
...Thus: "What Pinter hates, above all, is hypocrisy...
...We blew the s—t right back up their own ass And out their f---ing ears...
...In his plays (though not in his poems) he is a poet...
...Sometimes this hatred expresses itself comically, as when he told the Independent in 1988: "There are emergency plans for America to take over this country...
...Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth Okay, it doesn't rhyme, but it is not without (flawed) reason...
...In fact, Pinter tells this much-quoted story against himself...
...His play The Homecoming (1965) is doing brisk business at the National Theater in London, and in the United States the first full biography, by the Guardian theater critic Michael Billington, has just been published (The Life and Work of Harold Pinter, Faber & Faber, $24.95...
...Peanuts, walnuts, brazil nuts, monkey nuts, wouldn't touch a piece of fruit cake...
...What Billington describes as Pinter's acute sense of the pain of the world expresses itself in virulent anti-Americanism...
...Gray said: "I haven't finished reading it yet, Harold...
...Len Hutton was a cricketing hero of the 194o's and 1950's —equivalent of Babe Ruth, perhaps...
...The historic preservation movement did much a few decades ago to educate the public about the value of historic buildings...
...He has not, at any rate, been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...greatest since Shakespeare...
...In the 1980's he made the Sandinistas his pet project, and America his pet hate...
...What Pinter is suggesting here (I suggest) is that the great dictators are somehow to be preferred to America's leaders, because at least they were not humbugs, at least they had the courage to do their own killing...
...A knighthood can't be far off...
...In his mid-sixties...he seems to feel that pain of the world more acutely than ever...
...On June 20, 1988, however, they made what turned out to be a public relations mistake...
...The trouble with Pinter is not that he is entirely wrong but that he is entirely righteous...
...Craig Anderson, a movie producer and the founder of the Hudson Guild Theater, abandoned efforts to resurrect a run-down concert hall in Manhattan after the Commission slapped a historic designation on the building...
...There is added piquancy in this tale of infidelity now that we learn (from Billington) that between 1962 and 1969 Pinter was having an affair with a television personality called Joan Bakewell, who, because she was sexy and bright, was known as the "thinking man's crumpet" — as though a think- ing man's taste in babes is any different from those of a truck driver or a President of the United States...
...Some preservationists seem paranoid about any change...
...Antonia was a Catholic, the daughter of Lord Longford, the Labour politician and sometime friend of Evelyn Waugh (and irrepressible romantic: in the 197o's he earned the nickname "Lord Porn" for his crusade against pornography, in the course of which he sat solemnly in sex clubs and watched acts of unspeakable depravity...
...but that's freedom for you...
...That's what it was...
...Instead he has had to make do with being made a Commander of the British Empire...
...Since the success of The Caretaker Pinter has not looked back...
...Hallelullah...
...He has a loyal circle of friends and he is in turn a loyal and generous friend...
...The New York Landmarks Commission banned residents of Manhattan's Soho neighborhood from planting trees—simply because Soho did not have trees when it was a grimy industrial neighborhood in the late i800's...
...Love is in the air...
...It has since been replaced by what might be termed hysterical preservationism...
...Before her divorce Antonia was married to the respected Tory MP Hugh Fraser, and they had six children...
...Bit of an athlete...
...In spite of being married to the shimmeringly beautiful —but big—Lady Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter apparently suffers delusions of inferiority...
...Couldn't eat enough of them...
...You can see what he is driving at, you get his drift...
...The press salivated...
...But he has a problem with the Great Republic...
...His view of America's place in the halls of evil found perhaps Harold Pinter loves the stage and hates America...
...54 April 1997 • The American Spectator...
...During the Gulf War he was onthe side of the angels (and Martin Amis) when he campaigned successfully to prevent Abbas Cheblak, a Palestinian enemy of Saddam who had lived in Britain for sixteen years, from being deported as a security risk...
...His friends are expected to read everything he writes, and pass intelligent (but favorable) judgment on it...
...Poor Harold: he has spent much of the past twenty years waiting for a squadron of Cossacks to charge him, but no one will even break his windows and drag him out of his house...
...Praise the Lord for all good things...
...has, I suggest, accepted that the death of millions is inevitable if its 'national interests' are to be protected...
...Had an eye for the girls...
...We blew the s--t out of them...
...John Casey, a conservative don at Cambridge, has said that Pinter is not just the greatest living English playwright but one of the STUART REID is assistant features editor at the London Sunday Telegraph...
...Pinter would of course hotly and loudly deny that he had any affinity with the far right—he might indeed create a44 Poor Pinter: he has spent much of the past twenty years waiting for a squadron of Cossacks to charge him...
...Pinter reacted farcically...
...The ubiquitous "they" willnot jail him, they will riot wiretap him, they will not rape his wife or kidnap his children...
...Never without his passport...
...Photographers and reporters were stationed outside the Pinter home to harry and snap members of the "June 20" encounter group...
...Pinter duly distributed the poem...
...The U.S...
...but many of his admirers have...
...but try this, from The Caretaker (196o): You remind me of my uncle's brother...
...He would be taken more seriously, however, if he took himself less seriously...
...He is also courteous and considerate in his dealings with strangers, even when they are Americans...
...At other times it is not funny, or not very...
...Preservationists have progressed from targeting specific buildings to targeting neighborhoods, even entire valleys and states, for strict, government-enforced controls...
...Long-jump specialist He had a habit of demonstrating different run-ups in the drawing-room round about Christmas time...
...Preservation League issued its own "Most Endangered Properties List" last year—and among the group's demands was that Pierre L'Enfant's original 1791 plan for the city of Washington be given historic status—thus locking the nation's capital into a zoo-year old strait-jacket to comply with the Frenchman's fancies...
...His eyes blaze, he goes crimson...
...Once at a distinguished gathering in London he burst into tears when someone mentioned a less than unctuous profile of him in Vanity Fair...
...It works...
...Had a marvellous stop-watch...
...We blew them into f---ing s--t...
...In the Gulf war he condemned American action in a poem which, although not exactly clerical, sums up a view of the United States found in the darker corners of reactionary Europe...
...people look the other way or stare earnestly at their place settings...
...Meanwhile, there are the plays...
...Hitler, Stalin, Mao, in one way or another, intended the death of millions...
...In recent years historic preservation boards have seized control over places as diverse as pet cemeteries and real-estate advertisement concrete elephants...
...A jogging path received landmark status, as did a ship that sank several years ago...
...Hang down your head, Joe Sixpack...
...He has an unerring ear, but it is not the case that he writes the way people talk...
...Nothing else but a penchant...
Vol. 30 • April 1997 • No. 4
