Alastair Macaulay's article was published in the TLS of April 14,
2006.
Last year, Harold Pinter let it be known that he was unlikely to write more
plays. He said he would devote the remainder of his artistic energies to
poetry. I was curious to know if all his recent poetry was about war,
cancer, death. Next time I saw him, I asked him. Without skipping a beat, he
recited the following:
Breasts, bottom, thighs, the whole palaver,
I raise my hat to my uncensored sister
Who shone the light of love on those about her
Who lusted longest on her black suspender.
I remember laughing. But I later realized that he'd quoted it because it had
just been published in the Spectator. In fact, according to the latest
edition of his anthology Various Voices, he'd written it in 1973. (He didn't
quite answer my question.) Still, it reminds us that his thoughts turn
readily to women and, in part, to their sexual allure, even at a time when
he knows that the end of creativity and the end of life may be near.
As far as I know, Pinter does not believe in God. Some of his characters seem
to, but I pay a different kind of attention when Pinter himself refers to
the Almighty or the Creator. He does so in a 1996 interview when the subject
turns to women: "There's a terrible two-line poem by Kingsley Amis, in
which he says 'Women are so much nicer than men / No wonder we like them'.
My wife considers these lines to be very patronizing and they certainly are,
I agree. But nevertheless I just believe that God was in much better trim
when He created woman".
In fact, Pinter misquotes Amis here, from a poem that actually consists of
several stanzas. But leaving that aside, what does he mean? There's no one
pattern to the women in his work. They come from the upper class, middle
class, lower class. Some are strong, some weak, some both. Some have
children, some parents, some sisters, some husbands, and some seem to have
arrived out of the blue from nowhere. Some have lives that are circumscribed
by men, others demonstrate various degrees of independence from men. Some of
them – not all – are intensely sexual beings, but their sexuality isn't all
addressed to the male sex. Some make men suffer, some suffer because of men.
What's more, Pinter doesn't need women in his plays. In some of his finest –
The Dumb Waiter, The Caretaker, No Man's Land – there are no women at all.
Much of his drama is concerned with power politics; and a point that
invariably emerges is that those who try to exert control over others are
doing so out of weakness. Another point that arises is that no one in Pinter
can be fully possessed or fully controlled by anyone else. And the reason
for this is that no one in Pinter can be fully known. Humans in Pinter are
inscrutable, ergo unpossessable, ergo uncontrollable. We feel this best when
we sense the space and time he places around each character. Time, of
course: those pauses, those silences. But space, too. He told me once that
he thinks choreographically in planning his plays. Time and space are part
of the inviolable mystery of each person on his stage; but he gives more
space and more time to certain kinds of women.
The other chief means by which a character will demonstrate his or her freedom
from another is the non sequitur. One of the best examples comes in Act Two
of The Homecoming. The men have been talking, and Ruth has been silent for
two pages.
Finally, they get round to talking about chopping up a table (as men do). Then
Ruth speaks:
Don't be too sure though. You've forgotten something. Look at me. I . . . move
my leg. That's all it is. But I wear . . . underwear . . . which moves with
me . . .it . . . captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret. The
action is simple.
It's a leg . . . moving. My lips move.Why don't you restrict . . . your
observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant .
. . than the words which come through them. You must bear that . . .
possibility . . . in mind.
Silence.
I was born quite near here.
Pause.
Then . . . six years ago, I went to America.
Pause.
It's all rock. And sand. It stretches . . . so far . . . everywhere you look.
And there's lots of insects there.
Pause.
And there's lots of insects there.
With this speech, Ruth changes the play. She states, for one thing, that this
is her homecoming, too. She says, in effect: "Watch what I do – actions
speak louder than words. And pay attention to the things that are implicit
without being seen or heard". She asserts her sexual allure. But she
also acquires a certain pathos.
She went to America, but it isn't home; it's arid, and it has these damned
insects. She goes on to discard her husband, to become instead a lover,
wife, mother to the other men in his family, and probably to many other men
to come.
She plays the men's game, but on her own terms. Isn't she the necessary
descendant of Nora at the end of Ibsen's A Doll's House? Like Nora, she
claims that she has a duty to herself that is more important than her duty
as wife and mother; unlike Nora, it is Ruth's husband who walks out and
closes the front door. Ruth's homecoming is, for her husband and for us,
dismaying. But it is among the more breathtaking acts of independence to be
found in Pinter.
Let's not kid ourselves. In giving voice to individual female characters,
Pinter is not just saying, This is what women are like and what men cannot
be; this is what I desire or admire or fear or distrust in women. He is also
giving voice to an aspect of himself.
Memorable as The Lover, The Homecoming, and other early Pinter plays (and
their women) are, the later plays are more audacious and difficult -and in
the best of them, he created women who achieve a much stranger, more painful
kind of independence. To my mind, the greatest Pinter starts around 1968.
One of the distinctions between the earlier and later phases of his work has
to do with a largeness of spirit in the latter, and a new ability to
articulate feeling and experience, which he locates principally in certain
women. In early Pinter, the main drama is found in what is left unsaid, or
what neither men nor women know how to say. (Of course, that's true of much
later Pinter, too, even where the characters are clever, as in Betrayal.)
Looking at early Pinter, I find just one character who is an exception; and
she comes from a 1956 poem called "The Error of Alarm", subtitled "A
Woman Speaks".
Here are the last four of its five stanzas:
If his substance tautens
I am the loss of his blood.
If my thighs approve him
I am the sum of his dread.
If my eyes cajole him
That is the bargain made.
If my mouth allays him
I am his proper bride.
If my hands forestall him
He is deaf to my care.
If I own to enjoy him
The bargain's bare.
The fault of alarm
He does not share.
I die the dear ritual
And he is my bier.
This is an enigmatic poem, but "her" tone is open, honest, because
she understands the tension, the ambiguity, of male-female relations. And
it's a striking early example of Pinter disclosing the female voice in
himself. You can't think about Pinter long without feeling that, inside this
out-and-out Modernist, there is a powerful Romantic at work. When it comes
to gender, he is a Romantic dualist.
There isn't much androgyny in Pinter. Men are men, women women, and the
distinction between the two is already one basis for drama, though he
expresses part of himself in some or all of his women. As with heterosexual
male artists from Wagner to Balanchine, Pinter has needed to use the
feminine principle to give voice to things he will not ascribe to male
characters. If I understood Jung better, I think I would analyse some of his
male-female dialectic as the dialogue of animus and anima.
Pinter first fully enunciated these separate principles in his 1968 play
Landscape, and I think he never wrote anything so perfect before or since.
Duff and Beth sit at a table and talk, but they seem not to hear each other.
The differences between them are crucial. He talks to her and about her, and
is frustrated that she never hears. She, by contrast, never looks at him.
Yet it is possible that at some level she does hear: every time she speaks,
she seems to be changing the subject, to be eluding him. The main ambiguity
of the play is whether she is talking about him or about some other man.
Gradually it emerges that she has suffered some prolonged episode of shock
and has blocked herself off from present-tense reality. But the beauty of
the play is that she has retreated to a realm of memory; of sensitivity, and
love. At its end, Duff describes a moment, possibly the moment when first
she succumbed ("You stood in the hall and banged the gong"). He
recalls what he'd like to have done to her, with very definite ideas of what
men and women are.
Duff: I thought you would come to me, I thought you would come into my arms
and kiss me, even . . . offer yourself to me. I would have had you in front
of the dog, like a man, in the hall, on the stone, banging the gong, mind
you don't get the scissors up your arse, or the thimble, don't worry, I'll
throw them for the dog to chase, the thimble will keep the dog happy, he'll
play with it with his paws, you'll plead with me like a woman . . . .
But Beth's memories are of a quite different moment; and she closes the play
like this:
Beth: He lay above me and looked down at me. He supported my shoulder.
Pause.
So tender his touch on my neck. So softly his kiss on my cheek.
Pause.
My hand on his rib.
Pause.
So sweetly the sand over me. Tiny the sand on my skin.
Pause.
So silent the sky in my eyes. Gently the sound of the tide.
Pause.
Oh my true love I said.
Landscape is a Modernist version of a Romantic mad scene: Beth is singing of
love and bliss and loveliness; everyone else, in a realm of blunt prose,
knows that she has lost her wits. Yet she is happier, freer, and, in an
important sense, larger, even stronger than they (or we) are. The unbearable
poignancy of the play is its two opposite implications: one, that she is
indeed talking about Duff; the other, that it was Duff who drove her into
this condition.
One way or another, Pinter's women often elude their men. They remind me of a
late- Romantic heroine, Melisande. In Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et
Melisande, and in Debussy's opera, in the opening scene, her future husband
Golaud, finding her amid a forest, starts to interrogate her. At one point,
he says: "Oh! Vous etes belle! Quel age avez vous?" To which she
replies with a non-sequitur that sounds echt Pinter: "Je commence a
avoir froid".
To talk of "cold" is Melisande's way of eluding Golaud's grasp, and
also of putting the dampers on his possessiveness. Kate does it in Old Times
to Deeley and Anna. They're talking about her smile, the smile she had years
ago and that she still has; Kate chimes in by saying: "This coffee's
cold". Anna apologizes straight away; and the conversation changes.
(This isn't the only time in Pinter that "cold" puts a chill on
people who are becoming possessive.) Kate takes charge of the end of Old
Times by the opposite of a non sequitur. She turns to Anna, and says: "I
remember you dead".
Kate pronounces her dead at some length, consigns her to the past, and -still
addressing Anna -refers to the memory of a man who is almost certainly
Deeley. Devastatingly, she says:
He suggested a wedding and a change of environment.
Slight pause.
Neither mattered.
Kate asserts her complete freedom from the others, and remains immobile for
the remainder of the play. When you first take in Old Times, you feel
liberated with Kate: her act of independence is as breathtaking as Ruth's in
The Homecoming, but it seems less dismaying because she really has achieved
liberty. The more one sees it, however, the more its ending touches on
tragedy. Pinter closes Old Times with seven different wordless tableaux:
Kate is motionless in each, but Anna and Deeley take up positions around
her, positions that re-enact the past – that are the past, the past in which
they are stuck for ever.
I have mentioned the Romantic mad scene, and Pinter comes close to it again
in two later plays: A Kind of Alaska (1982) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). The
heroines of these two plays are both set apart psychologically, like Beth in
Landscape. In A Kind of Alaska, Deborah is emerging from a terrible ordeal,
twenty-nine years of apparent sleep, and the play's climax is her delivery
of an astounding monologue.
As it begins, she relives the waking claustrophobia of her supposed sleep:
Yes, I think they're closing in. They're closing in. They're closing the
walls in.
Yes.
Let me out. Stop it. Let me out. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Shutting the
walls down on me. Shutting them down on me. So tight, so tight. Something
panting, something panting.
She moves through various stages of feeling and awareness before reaching
these final two paragraphs:
You say I have been asleep. You say I am now awake. You say I have not awoken
from the dead. You say I was not dreaming then and am not dreaming now. You
say I have always been alive and am alive now. You say I am a woman.
She looks at Deborah, then back to Hornby.
She is now a widow. She doesn't go to her ballet classes any more. Mummy and
Daddy and Estelle are on a world cruise.
They've stopped off in Bangkok. It'll be my birthday soon. I think I have the
matter in proportion.
Thank you.
Deborah is not a victim of other human beings, but of an accidental medical
condition. She comes to terms with it; in the end – and this is what makes
her a Pinter heroine – she is not dependent on the people who have looked
after her for nearly thirty years. She takes control and responsibility for
her life, and regains her own space. She has been through something like a
tragedy, bears witness to it, and achieves a painful kind of grim victory.
But it is also a kind of shrinkage. Like anyone who has been through a huge
emotional experience, she finds that the return to the blunt facts of
everyday reality does not bring with it unequivocal relief: it brings, too,
a sense of loss.
I don't think Ashes to Ashes is a flawless play. Even so, I am tempted to
call it Pinter's greatest. In Landscape, the heroine is locked into an
altered psychological state; in A Kind of Alaska, she is painfully emerging
from one; in Ashes to Ashes, she keeps slipping back into one. She, Rebecca,
keeps expressing what she feels are memories, and what he, Devlin, sometimes
insists are delusions.
Devlin is the most ambiguous man in all of Pinter. The conversations between
him and Rebecca obey several patterns. At first, they feel very much like
Freudian analysis: she is recounting memories or dreams, and he is trying to
pin these accounts down, to understand them. But soon he steers the
conversation towards Socratic logical dialectic, trying to bring rational
explanation and argument - traditional male strengths -to bear on what she
says. And through all of this, she eludes him with lateral thinking of her
own, or with what we might call dream logic. Here is one example. As she
speaks, we can hear her "vision" inventing itself as she goes
along.
Devlin: Do you follow the drift of my argument?
Rebecca: Oh yes, there's something I've forgotten to tell you. It was funny.
I looked out of the garden window, out of the window into the garden, in the
middle of summer, in that house in Dorset, do you remember? Oh no, you
weren't there. I don't think anyone else was there. No. I was all by myself.
I was alone. I was looking out of the window and I saw a whole crowd of
people walking through the woods, on their way to the sea, in the direction
of the sea. They seemed to be very cold, they were wearing coats, although
it was such a beautiful day. A beautiful warm, Dorset day. They were
carrying bags. There were . . . guides . . .ushering them, guiding them
along. They walked through the woods and I could see them in the distance
walking across the cliff and down to the sea. Then I lost sight of them. I
was really quite curious so I went upstairs to the highest window in the
house and I looked way over the top of the treetops and I could see down to
the beach. The guides . . . were ushering all these people across the beach.
It was such a lovely day. It was so still and the sun was shining. And I saw
all these people walk into the sea. The tide covered them slowly. Their bags
bobbed about in the waves.
These things haven't happened in Dorset. But they have happened. Rebecca's
imaginings are large, and to us, disturbing. What makes them more disturbing
is the near-detached tone in which she relates them.
It strikes me that, whether by design or not, Rebecca resembles the speaker
of Wallace Shawn's play The Fever (1991), who addresses, head on, the
killings of American foreign policy and cannot reconcile them with the
peaceful domesticity of life at home. This way madness lies. In Ashes to
Ashes, though Devlin is, in part, concerned for Rebecca, he also wants to
possess her, to control her, to claim he knows her, and not to inquire about
her visions – which are of mass deaths, flights from genocide, the
Kindertransport, massacres of the innocent. Here is the climax of the play:
Devlin: What do you say, sweetheart? Why don't we go out and drive into town
and take in a movie?
Rebecca: That's funny, somewhere in a dream . . . a long time ago . . . I
heard someone calling me sweetheart.
Pause.
I looked up. I'd been dreaming. I don't know whether I looked up in the dream
or as I opened my eyes. But in this dream a voice was calling.That I'm
certain of.
This voice was calling me. It was calling me sweetheart.
Pause.
Yes.
Pause.
I walked out into the frozen city. Even the mud was frozen. And the snow was
a funny colour. It wasn't white. Well, it was white but there were other
colours in it. It was as if there were veins running through it. And it
wasn't smooth, as snow is, as snow should be. It was bumpy. And when I got
to the railway station I saw the train. Other people were there.
Pause.
And my best friend, the man I had given my heart to, the man I knew was the
man for me the moment we met, my dear, my most precious companion, I watched
him walk down the platform and tear all the babies from the arms of their
screaming mothers.
Silence.
Devlin: Did you see Kim and the kids?
She looks at him.
You were going to see Kim and the kids today.
She stares at him.
Your sister Kim and the kids.
Rebecca: Oh, Kim! And the kids, yes. Yes. Yes, of course I saw them. I had
tea with them. Didn't I tell you?
Of all the moments in all the plays I've reviewed over the years, I don't
think any has felt stranger than Devlin's question, "Did you see Kim
and the kids?". At the Royal Court world premiere in 1996, it seemed
such an act of denial on his part, such a refusal to attend to her
astonishing testimony, that it felt like being slapped in the face – like
walking into a brick wall. But I was lucky enough to see Pinter's original
production, with Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea, four times in all, first in
London, later in Dublin. And in due course I came to realize that Devlin,
here, is trying, however questionably, to restore Rebecca to the real world,
trying to bring her back to her senses. And he succeeds, for the moment.
He pulls her back from the brink a few more times. But it never lasts. She
keeps withdrawing into this other world, of what strikes us as horror, but
is in fact worse – because it is a calm complicity with horror. I don't
believe she has ever experienced this trauma in her own life; I think Ashes
to Ashes is Pinter's most disturbing psychodrama. Unlike Rebecca, Devlin is
utterly sane. He is lucid, and, partly, a figure of pathos and compassion,
trying to comprehend her. Another part of him, though, is more dictatorial;
and, like every bully in Pinter, he senses his own weakness. He makes
matters worse when he tries to get Rebecca to re enact with him her memories
of a fascist brutalist lover. He tries to possess her fantasy, and his
manner of doing so suggests to me that Rebecca's fantasies of the fascist
monster she recalls having loved are really dreams of this man she has been
living with all along, Devlin.
She is locked in memories that aren't memories. She talks about her baby,
then says she doesn't have a baby. There is, finally, no dialogue between
her and Devlin, only between her and an echo of herself. The echo tells us
that she is now stuck in her own imaginings and can hear nothing else. But
it tells us, too, that she is dreaming of something: a baby, somebody's
baby, anybody's baby. Rebecca's dreams, her madness, are larger, more
inclusively sane than Devlin's sanity. Does drama get stranger than this?
I met Pinter a few days after the premiere of Ashes to Ashes. He asked me if I
would be seeing it again. I said yes, I would be going back to it in a few
days' time. He asked me to let him know what I made of it after this second
viewing. So I did. I wrote him a long letter, in which I explained the four
or more main ways, each quite different, in which I felt the play could be
interpreted. In one of these ways, I said that Rebecca, however deranged she
might seem, was nonetheless in touch with the larger crimes against humanity
of our time, whereas Devlin was deliberately deaf to them; and that Rebecca
and the play therefore were saying "No man is an island". Pinter's
reply said mainly this: "Dear Alastair, Your letter was a good read!
'No man is an island.' That's it".
And, if I understand Pinter's plays aright, it is his women -some of them
-who comprehend best that no man is an island. They are the divining rods of
identity that commune with larger aspects of feeling and experience,
sometimes at a terrible personal cost. Really, the dialectic of Ashes to
Ashes is the dualism that we can discern in Pinter's Nobel acceptance
speech. On the one hand, there are facts; on the other, uncertainty. On the
one hand, there is denial; on the other, there is open witness and serious
re-imagination of trauma, of death, of horror, even though these may be
inextricably connected to love and loyalty.
How do we reconcile the two? It seems that Harold Pinter does it by giving
voice to the masculine and feminine sides of himself – and thereby finding
those voices in us.
This was the opening lecture at a recent symposium in Turin called Pinter:
Passion, Poetry and Politics, marking the playwright's acceptance of the
Premio Europa per il Teatro.
