Harold Pinter is one of the greatest British dramatists of our time. Pinter has written a number of absurd masterpieces including The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming, Betrayal, Old Times, and Ashes to Ashes. He has also composed a number of radio plays and several volumes of poetry. His screenplays include The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The Last Tycoon, and The Handmaid’s Tale. He has received numerous awards including the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear, BAFTA awards, the Hamburg Shakespeare Prize, the Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and the Commonwealth Award.
Harold Pinter was born on October 10, 1930 in Hackney, East London. He was the sole child of Jack Pinter and Frances Franklin. His father was a ladies’ tailor whose family was among Jewish immigrants that reached the East End of London. Both sides of Harold’s family were Jewish, but they had different personalities and characteristics. His paternal side was Orthodox Jewish and they had an artistic background, whereas his maternal side was more secular and skeptical about strict rules of religion and were known for their entrepreneurial background.
Although the Pinter’s were relaxed and usic-loving, they got along well at family gatherings with the noisy and clamorous Franklins. Since Harold was an only child, he would imagine a life with brothers and sisters and would create imaginary friends and play out adventures and scenes in the backyard of his home. This isolated world created a place where Harold felt warmth and security. However, this childhood was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939.
Harold had to leave his home in Hackney as part of a nationwide evacuation, and along with twenty four other children, Harold was sent to John Nash, a fabricated castle, from the lementary school. This was a traumatic and disturbing experience for all of the boys who were isolated from their homes and families, especially for nine-year old Harold. Some boys took advantage of this experience and were happy to be exposed to rural life. “For Harold, the disturbing experience blended with a magical eye opening encounter of rural life and his tendency to introspect blossomed” (Top Biography).
At the same time, his awareness to sounds and images developed, and these permeated his later life and work. This encounter left a mark in Harold’s life; a mark of loss and separation, stonishment, and loneliness, which are all reflected in his works. It was extremely difficult to watch other boys receive news about the death of their parents, and only wonder where his parents were. Harold had a brief reunion with his parents, but it was recklessly painful to say goodbye again and watch them leave. Along with the agonies and confusions, the evacuation had some positive affect on Harold.
Harold grew stronger and more independent because of this experience, developed a sense of self-realization, and sped up his transition from boyhood to manhood. He returned to London in 1944 at the age of 14, and enrolled at Hackney Downs Grammar School where he became interested in acting and drama and acted in many school productions. After grammar school, he studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, but soon left to undertake an acting career under the stage name David Baron.
He spent several years traveling around Ireland in a Shakespearean company before deciding to turn his attention to playwriting. Pinter started writing plays in 1957. His first play was originated as an idea hich he gave to a friend of his. His friend liked it so much that he wanted Harold to send the play to him at Bristol University, and told him if the university was to perform the play, they would need the script within a week. Harold sat down with his friend and wrote the play in four days. It was a one-act play entitled The Room.
Later this same year, Pinter would develop his style still further in another one-act, The Dumb Waiter. Harold Pinter has created “comedies of menace” in which he uses hackneyed characters and settings, and surrounds them with an atmosphere of fear, horror, and ystery. These early works were starting points and contained many of the elements that would characterize Pinter’s later works: a commonplace situation gradually invested with menace and mystery through the deliberate omission of an explanation or motivation for the action of its characters.
Pinter has been known to create his characters’ tensions based on the disorientation of language and communication. “Pinter’s particular achievement has been to sustain linguistically the sort of tensions which seem to drive his characters from within” (Hollis 442). These characters either have a problem ommunicating with others or communicating at all, causing the tension within them to result in stuttering or awkward silences, or they have trouble understanding exactly what is being told to them. Pinter has emphasized these elements in The Homecoming and The Caretaker.
These plays are noted for their use of silence to increase tension, understatement, and small talk. “These characteristics are recognized through the Pinteresque’ themes of nameless menace, erotic fantasy, obsession and jealousy, family hatred, and mental disturbance” (Books and Writers). The irregular tension he creates often is created from the long silences between speeches as well as the brief and vague speeches themselves. His plays consistently concern struggles for power in which the issues are unexplainable and the reasons for downfall and triumph are undefined.
The Homecoming has become widely considered as Pinter’s most important work. “Employing Pinter’s characteristic absurdism, The Homecoming focuses on the bizarre events that occur when a philosophy professor returns with this wife to his childhood home in a working-class London household” (Kerr 246). The play opens in he home of Max, a retired butcher, who lives with his brother Sam and his sons Lenny and Joey. This family is very aggressive and communicate in a very antagonizing tone, and it becomes apparent that Max is unsuccessfully attempting to replace the role of his dead wife, Jessie.
Teddy, Max’s eldest son, is a philosophy professor at an American university and decides he will return home to pay a visit for the first time in six years with his wife Ruth. Teddy hopes to impose his own ideas of himself on his family with the proof of his success in life and his gorgeous wife. Teddy does not receive the ttention he thought he would, however, and gets walked on and crushed by his own family. At the same time, Ruth walks over them. “Ruth’s presence evokes ambiguous emotions within Teddy’s family: alternately revered and rebuked, she is perceived as both a mother-figure and as a sexual object” (Kerr 246).
As the family makes open advances on Ruth, she not only tolerates it, she encourages them and Teddy does not even try to protect his interests. Teddy then announces he will be returning to the United States and Ruth decides to stay behind and keep her place as the role of mother and wife, nd to earn her keep by working as a part-time prostitute to the family. The main theme of The Homecoming that has been emphasized is that of physical and emotional violence. The characters struggle desperately to find identity, love, and power by dominating others.
Right away this is clearly shown with the use of derogatory and aggressive language. This apparent violent behavior is probably also caused by the nature of the professions of the characters. Max is a former butcher, Lenny is a pimp, and Joey, who is a demolitions worker, is also a boxer. According to some critics, the emotional violence and degradation expressed in The Homecoming is a manifestation of the characters’ confusion, loneliness, and spiritual emptiness as they search for a sense of belonging or homecoming’ that they cannot find in a modern industrial society. ” (Hewes 248).
The Homecoming also focuses on the powers and decisions of Ruth. Ruth’s choice to stay with the family as a caretaker and a prostitute was based on self-determination. Ruth was partly looking for an escape to her insecure relationship with Teddy and partly realizing the freedom of the different possibilities of her ersonality. Everyone in the family at home is pleased with her because she fills in the spot of Jessie, but even better. Not only does she take care of the family as a mother for the two boys and wife of the husband, but she does sexual favors for everyone as well.
Pinter makes the reader think that someone in the family will realize the bizarre crisis and corruption that is going on. Maybe Max will be humiliated by this idea of his wife being a prostitute for his sons as well, or Ruth will chose between a true wife or a true whore. Pinter, however, does not give the ending this moral thought. The reader may think that something will happen to clean this situation up, but the end is far from this. Sam has a heart-attack after he reveals to his brother that Jessie had an affair with Max’s best friend before she died, which causes Max to have a stroke. Sam and Teddy, who remain detached from their family’s aggression and emotionalism, are considered ineffectual characters. ” (Kerr 246). Teddy claims to be a scholar and brags about being a philosophy professor, but his emotional intelligence is lost in the realization of the corruption going on in his own family. This is particularly xemplified in the relationship between Ruth and Teddy. Teddy sees Joey and Ruth erotically embrace and then they run off to Joey’s room while Teddy just watches and does not do anything to stop it.
Teddy also does not object to the proposition that his brothers and father suggest by asking Ruth to stay with them to work as a prostitute. Teddy feels threatened by the situation around him and solves the problem by isolating himself and fleeing back to the United States. Sam seems to be the other outcast of the family, but in this case, that is a good thing. Sam seems to be the only moral and sensible ne in the family. What is sad is that even though he is moral, he is rejected and mocked by his family for being good. Critics have observed that Sam appears to be destroyed by his inability to act aggressively and by his attempt to uphold conventional morals in a seemingly amoral world. ” (Kerr 246). The Caretaker, like The Homecoming, features a setting that mostly takes place in a room and consists of a family with an outsider that comes seems to cause mayhem to a situation. “Now there are three characters, of about equal weight, and all are provided with quite suffering backgrounds,” (Taylor 372). Now no one character is greater or more important than the other.
Aston lives with his brother Mick, and he brings home Davies, his new friend, to share his home with him. Aston brings Davies home because Aston saves him from a cafeteria brawl and he plans for him to be the caretaker of their dwelling. Davies tries to establish himself in the household, but he ruins the balance between the two brothers and is just a nuisance. In the end, Davies drifts away from the brothers and the brothers’ connection is too much for him. “The three careworn characters of The Caretaker are at various junctures along he circuitous path of this quest for identity” (Hollis 441).
A theme that is important in this play is the sense of identity and finding the real truth of a person. In other words, these three characters are somewhat lost or confused in some way and they are trying to find themselves and in some cases, trying to find the truth in others. “There is Aston, the occupier of the room, living a more or less vegetable existence since (as we eventually learn in the play) he underwent electric shock treatment to alleviate a mental disorder. There is Davies, the shifty, opportunistic tramp he brings back to share his home.
And there is Mick, Aston’s volatile brother, whose game is more elusive, and who eventually succeeds in turning Davies’ wiles against himself, so that the long-suffering Aston is moved, of his own accord, to turn him out” (Taylor 372) Davies tends to have nothing to fall back on and no family history or identity. He has seemed to have lost his way and he has just fallen back on this “family”. Davies also seems to be lost when it comes to details and does not always understand what is going on around him. He does not communicate well with the others or always fully understand what they are saying to him.
Language is either too much for him, or not enough for him; it either bewilders him or tells him the obvious” (Brustein 266). Davies starts to understand that he is being left out through awkward silences and silent tensions with the brothers. He tries to fit in with Aston and Mick, and instead of the intruder being the threat to others, like most of Pinter’s works, the intruder, Davies, is the one feeling threatened (Hollis 442). Mick is two-sided sometimes and goes back and forth from being charismatic and friendly to being viciously violent. Mick’s success in getting Davies out of the picture an be seen from different angles.
If it really was a success in Mick’s eyes, then that obviously means that he wanted to get rid of him and he tried to do so. “If we choose to see the relationship between the brothers in this play as the first clear inkling of Pinter’s later interest in the dynamics of the family unit, then we may see the line of continuity in Mick’s behavior as concern for his brother’s health and happiness, encouragement at Aston’s relationship with Davies as a first sign of Aston’s return to the world, and mistrust of Davies as a suitable friend and support for Aston” (Taylor 372).
In this case, Mick’s task is to try and get rid of Davies, but since Davies seems to be this sort of agent of advancement for Aston’s mental condition, Mick must do so in a manner that all will be well with Aston after Davies leaves. This can be just one interpretation of this situation, and if it was the case, then it would not matter if it made sense or not considering Pinter’s theory that his plays do not necessarily have to make sense or have a clear understanding.
The Caretaker leaves some loose ends open in some ways and does not specifically conclude the situation in some ways, which makes this play bait for critics nd readers to try and analyze. This play can give so many interpretations and since Pinter does not tell us, or does not know himself, the main reasons for what happens, all of the interpretations are accepted and acknowledged. This play is sometimes considered the point where Pinter broke through and set standards for his future obscure plays.
It seemed to be the most conventional play of Pinter’s in that it was not as absurd or unclear as his plays written afterwards, but it introduced them (Brustein 266). Through his works, Pinter specifically designs to tell the reader astonishingly othing about himself, his life, or his background. Instead of using his works to create an almost autobiographical series, as a lot of writers do, “Pinter believes in covering his tracks, writing plays that are completely separated from himself to stand as independent, self-sufficient works of art. (Taylor 367). Pinter ceratinly does not correlate his life into his plays and no critics have picked out distinctive evidence from his works that specifically relate to his own life. Even after Pinter became well-known after developing the famous plays The Caretaker, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, and The Room, e still remained, and remains today, a baffling and mysterious figure, probably “because he considers that he is and ought to be irrelevant to the appreciation of his work. ” (Taylor 367).
Pinter chooses not to answer any questions about himself or his life, but it is not because he does not want to, but because he does not really know what to say, if there is anything at all. When asked in an interview if a certain scene from The Birthday Party relates to a specific event in his life, Pinter responded by saying, “I had-I have-nothing to say about myself, directly. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Particularly since I often look at myself in the mirror and say Who the hell’s that? ‘” (Taylor 367). As for interpretations of his works, Harold had even less to say.
He claims that he does not know any more or any better than anyone else to say what his plays are about and what they are supposed to mean. Pinter has also said in the past that some elements in his plays were unintentional and he unconsciously created confusing and weird interpretation. “The work is there, independent of him, to work as it may on audiences. If it works it will need no interpretation. If it does not work, all the interpretation in he world will not improve it. ” (Taylor 368). This mystery is what helps give Pinter’s plays even more attention.
The desire to interpret and analyze Pinter’s works has become a journey many critics have taken and currently are taking. Pinter has expressed that he writes plays to tell a story in series of events and happenings, and that there is no real meaning, and they only seem to have more meaning than they really do. “They must be studied with the same sort of techniques we would bring to bear on lyric poetry, or on music: they define their own terms of reference, working ot by the elaboration if ideas but by the development and transformation of themes and images, which take their value and significance entirely from their context. (Taylor 368). It has been known that Pinter, the man, and his works do not relate to each other, but they seem to have some connection, if it is a connection at all. Pinter’s works are sometimes confusing and never end by concluding or giving a real explanation and he claims this is because they are just supposed to be possible real life situations and they are series of events in chronological order. Well, Pinter’s childhood seemed pretty onfusing itself.
Pinter was always isolated from something, whether it be from the lack of feeling of love from non-existing siblings and creating imaginary friends in his backyard, or being isolated from his parents during his evacuation throughout the war. Pinter’s life was filled with significant events, but he claims that his life is and was confusing and has had no influence through his works. In this case, his plays, like his life, are just a series of events that happen in real life, but are not supposed to mean a certain thing or express a certain thought.
His most recognizable plays mostly take place n just a room filled with people dealing with a certain issue, but they mean so much more; or do they? These situations can be so awkward and silly at times that they are absurd enough to see humor in them and laugh at. This is the way Pinter wanted his plays to be looked at. He was never trying to get a message across and his plays are meant to show a situation at hand and how people deal with it. It is so easy to try and come up with a reason for his menace which causes critics to over-analyze his work. This is what makes Harold Pinter one of the greatest British dramatists of our day.
