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.
