"We have brought torture and misery in the name of freedom"

Nobel winner Pinter rages against U.S. arrogance; calls Blair 'deluded idiot'

ROBERT BARR

LONDON (AP) - Deft silences are the trademark of Harold Pinter the playwright. But thunderous, sometimes obscene, rage is his style in politics.

The newest Nobel laureate in literature has fulminated against what he sees as the overweening arrogance of American power, and belittled Prime Minister Tony Blair as seeming like a "deluded idiot" in support of U.S. President George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

He once compared his view of America with his personal nightmare of fighting cancer.

"I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare - the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world," Pinter said in 2002 when he accepted an honorary doctorate at Turin University in Italy.

Pinter's indignation reached a peak in his poem American Football, an obscenity-smeared diatribe which satirized the kick-some-butt style of American military thinking.

Surprisingly, Pinter voted for that supremely loyal U.S. ally, Margaret Thatcher, in 1979.

"I don't think I've ever done anything more shameful," he lamented in 1999. "It was idiotic, infantile on my part."

The Nobel committee has a penchant for rewarding writers who stand against power, notably in rewarding the literature prize to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1970.

There was a similar gesture last year in honouring Elfriede Jelinek. She has castigated her native Austria, as the Nobel citation said, "depicting it as a realm of death in her phantasmagorical novel, Die Kinder der Toten."

Guenter Grass, the 1999 winner, annoyed German authorities with his critiques of "barbaric" capitalism and by describing German immigration policy as racist.

The 1991 laureate, Nadine Gordimer, was a relentless critic of South African apartheid. Wole Soyinka, the 1986 laureate, was a caustic critic of Nigeria's military government.

Naguib Mahfouz, honoured in 1988, had his first novel, The Children of Gebelawi, banned as blasphemous in his native Egypt.

Pinter was rhapsodized about his love for England; its countryside, its cricket.

"And I find there is a - how can I say? - a fundamental decency in the country itself. And this is what concerns me, and I'm not alone in this by a long way, I think that it's being eroded."

And, yes, he regretted voting for Blair in 1997.

"I can't believe what I voted for," he said three years ago. And a lot of people are in my boat, I think. That's where I feel ashamed. I mean, as a British citizen, of what has happened."

As war in Iraq loomed, Pinter said he believed that "Mr. Bush and his gang do know what they're doing, and Blair, unless he really is the deluded idiot he often appears to be, also knows what they're doing."

"They are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way. And Blair goes along with it," he said.

"The idea that he has influence over Bush is laughable. His supine acceptance of American bullying is pathetic."

Nonetheless, Blair's office saluted Pinter's triumph. "Of course we congratulate Harold Pinter on the recognition that he has received," the prime minister's official spokesman said.


© The Canadian Press, 2005

A gulf in appreciation

Michael Billington
Friday October 14, 2005
The Guardian


When Samuel Beckett won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1969, his wife described the news as a catastrophe. For Harold Pinter, even though it means an inevitable invasion of his cherished privacy, the news that he is this year's Nobel winner comes as confirmation of his international status. In Britain Pinter is ritually described as an "angry old man". In the world at large he is seen as a great writer and champion of the oppressed.

The gulf between the understanding and appreciation of Pinter at home and abroad is astonishing. Travel to virtually any country in the world and you will find a Pinter play in production. And last weekend at the Gate Theatre in Dublin it was moving to see an audience spontaneously rising to honour the man and his work. At the end of an evening of readings from a lifetime's plays, poetry and prose, the 75-year-old Pinter looked visibly rejuvenated by the acclaim. Why, one wondered, was this not happening in Britain?
One answer may be that we think writers should keep out of politics. We still revive Pinter's earlier work like The Caretaker and The Homecoming. We also periodically stage mid-period plays, such as Old Times and No Man's Land, dealing with the subjectivity of memory and the uncertainty of existence. But Pinter's later, overtly political work, such as One For The Road, Mountain Language, Party Time and Ashes to Ashes, has fallen into a strange limbo. And Pinter's espousal of political causes - from his vocal protests over the Israeli government's illegal abduction of Mordechai Vanunu to his comprehensive attacks on American foreign policy - is seen by many as an unfortunate aberration.

What we fail to appreciate is that Pinter's politics are inseparable from his life and work. His early plays explore the repressive politics of sex, domesticity and marriage. His later plays explore the personal consequences of political attitudes.

For Pinter, politics and the personal are indivisible. That is what the Nobel committee seems to have instinctively understood. In its citation, it says Pinter's work "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms". Whoever wrote that has got the precise point. In Pinter's dialogue no exchange is ever innocent: there is always a battle for power being conducted on the edge of an abyss. But equally Pinter's later plays reveal the insecurity, panic and hypocrisy that lie behind the stony masks of political authority.

But what will the Nobel prize mean to Pinter? The prize-money itself - $1.3m (£723,000) - is welcome but is hardly the issue. What I suspect matters more is that Pinter's constant campaign against the devaluation of language - particularly words like "freedom" and "democracy" - and his moral opposition to the abuse of human rights, has been internationally recognised. At a time when he is in frail health after his battle with cancer, I suspect the prize will also give him renewed energy. But it's a measure of Pinter's resilience that he has already agreed to perform Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape for the Royal Court's 50th anniversary celebrations.

Luminaries applaud Pinter's Nobel

Some of the biggest names in the arts have applauded the decision to award playwright Harold Pinter the 2005 Nobel Prize for literature.
Pinter, writer of The Birthday Party and Betrayal, is widely-seen as the UK's greatest living playwright.

Fellow writer Sir Tom Stoppard said the award was "wholly deserved" while director Sir Peter Hall said Pinter was a "great and original poet of theatre".

Actor and director Sir Alan Ayckbourn said it was a "most fitting award".

Sir Alan, who appeared in a production of The Caretaker directed by Pinter, said: "I'm absolutely delighted. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person."

Pinter, who has been an outspoken critic of the US and UK governments for their decision to invade Iraq, has become an iconic figure for many opposed to the war.

'Symbol'

"Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world," said Pinter on Thursday after learning of his win.

The UK Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell also paid tribute to the writer.

"Harold Pinter has been a colossal figure in British literature for nearly 50 years.

"His work as playwright, poet and polemicist has given him a well-deserved international reputation, and I'm delighted that he's now been further recognised with the Nobel Prize."

The Nobel academy said Pinter's work "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms".

Pinter told reporters on Thursday: "I've been writing plays for about 50 years and I'm also pretty politically engaged. And I'm not at all sure to what extent that fact, that fact had anything to do with this award.

"I am both deeply engaged in art and deeply engaged in politics and sometimes those two meet and sometimes they don't. It's all going to be very interesting."

He is the first British winner since VS Naipaul in 2001.

Theatre director Sir Peter, who has worked with Pinter for more than 40 years, said the award was "a great prize for a great and original poet of the theatre".

"I'm delighted at the news," he said.

British playwright David Hare said: "I couldn't be happier. This is a brilliant choice."

The prize announcement was made by the permanent secretary of the Swedish academy, Horace Engdahl, in Stockholm.

The academy's citation said: "Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles."