Lachlan Mackinnon's review of The Life and Work of Harold Pinter was published in the TLS of October 25, 1996.

There is a story about the woman working in the box-office who said how much she liked Mr Eliot's plays and, when asked why, replied that they draw a better class of audience. Something of the same cultural mausoleum has been erected about the work of Harold Pinter, an effect redoubled by his unfortunate public identification with a particular kind of radical chic. One function a critical biography might have is to demystify both the works and their author.

Drawing heavily on Pinter's own accounts, Michael Billington presents an engaging picture of Pinter as a boy and adolescent. He recognizes the importance of the dramatist's Jewishness, but at times overdoes it. "Passover – the Jewish festival commemorating the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian bondage - was always", he tells us, "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. Grandma Fanny was also the life and soul of the party. . . ." The first sentence assumes an audience of unusual ignorance before clunking to its end; the second tells us nothing of the ritual but preens its breath-holding commas as it makes its pointless point; the "also" in the third refers to nothing. Pinter deserves better writing than this, but it is rarely to be found here, and the effect is to make us doubt Billington's critical judgment.

The story of Pinter's early years touring and in rep becomes too much a catalogue of forgotten plays. Extraordinary personalities like Anew McMaster and Micheal MacLiammoir are given sketchy personal and theatrical genealogies, but one gets no sense of what they were like as people. As Pinter becomes a dramatist, it is fascinating to learn that the origin of The Room was a meeting with Quentin Crisp, but Billington makes no effort at all to characterize the latter, or to suggest how he seemed in 1955 beyond calling him "a flamboyant, henna-haired sexual outsider". Pinter's own memory of "a little man with the most extraordinary colour hair, bare feet and extremely fluid clothes" helps more, but where records and witnesses are available, a biographer should not see everything through his subject's eyes.

Unless, perhaps, what is at hand is a hagiography. Billington describes how the success of The Caretaker affected Pinter's first marriage, to the actress Vivian Merchant. She had been the more professionally successful, and it is clear that the reversal of economic and worldly power Pinter's acclaim brought about began the slow attrition of their relationship. When Billington comes to the marriage's final collapse, he is very clearly of the playwright's party – probably, on the evidence he gives, rightly. Justice, though, would allow us to hear more of her side of the case.

Once Pinter is launched as a writer, the book becomes increasingly an extended critical essay with occasional snatches of biography, sometimes little more than a change of address. Places are not described, people still uncharacterized. Billington has essentially two critical arguments to pursue. One is that Pinter's work has always been implicitly political. So far as one agrees that the personal is political, this is persuasive. He also wants us to understand how often Pinter works by transmuting autobiography, and he reveals a great deal about the writer's sources which will be useful to future scholars. He tells us too little about what Pinter read, though, and almost nothing about what films he went to see. Pinter's relation to popular culture goes largely by the board – I could find, for instance, no mention of television's Steptoe and Son.

Billington's disclosure that Pinter had a seven-year affair with the television presenter Joan Bakewell explains the origins of the play Betrayal, but somehow adds nothing to our picture of Pinter the man. Occasional attempts at psychological portrayal are useless; for example, "he is an intensely emotional man who often masks his powerful feelings under a peremptory facade and dark glasses".

Pinter's happy second marriage, to Lady Antonia Fraser, began under intrusive and ignorant newspaper scrutiny. This may have helped bring on a long period of dramatic silence, since when his work has been increasingly overtly political. Billington describes this change well in literary terms, and offers us the suggestion that Pinter felt particularly obliged to carry on the work of his friend and fellow-dramatist David Mercer, who died in 1980. He tells us nothing about that friendship, though.

Pinter's involvement in politics was visible to a wider public from his participation in a discussion group, the June 20th Society. This group was much mocked in the press, and Pinter was "deeply hurt by the derision". However, what he said in reply was that "we have a precise agenda and we are going to meet again and again until they break the windows and drag us out". Billington calls this "obviously a dramatic metaphor rather than a statement of reality"; like his subject, he sees neither that it is inherently ridiculous nor that for many of the writer's admirers it suggested that, far from genuine involvement, he had chosen the kind of socialism that gives champagne a bad name.

Looking back, that utterance's ludicrous self-importance may remind us that Pinter has been a professional actor all his life. Billington never considers how far the human emptiness of many of Pinter's characters and their fixation on language may derive from that experience, or how far the dramatist-politician's self-regard is characteristically thespian. In one way, Billington takes Pinter too seriously and too much in isolation, but, in another, he does not take him seriously at all. Pinter is clearly psychologically very complex, and does not wish to share that private complexity with us. A life written in his lifetime is almost bound to be a fiasco, therefore; this one certainly is, but it leaves us with the sense of a far more engaging human being than the one it so lamely portrays.

Michael Billington
THE LIFE AND WORK OF HAROLD PINTER
414pp. Faber. £20.
0 571 17103 6

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