Pinter’s Poison

National Review Online, September 26, 2001

The Lincoln Center's festival of plays by Harold Pinter was, the critics said, one of the highlights of that long ago Manhattan summer, that summer before, the summer of 2001. The sequence of nine pieces was a celebration and a tribute, New York's homage to England's most celebrated dramatist, a man that the city had, apparently, taken to its heart. To Newsday, the plays were "deliriously rewarding," while the Village Voice found them "a source of pleasure and contemplation." One writer in the New York Times talked of "genius," while another, gleefully anticipating the menace of a typical Pinter production, warned that "alarm sirens should be screaming at Lincoln Center. Evil has arrived…" Well, the alarm sirens did scream in New York, but not at the Lincoln Center. Evil did come to Manhattan, but it was no play. And down, down in Hell, in that wrecked abomination that they call Ground Zero, the rescuers still dig, looking for traces of people, including, quite possibly, some who might have attended a Pinter festival just a few weeks before.

With his audience in body bags, and the city that had so recently honored him torn and broken, you might expect that the eloquent Harold Pinter could find something to say, something to let us know, in words that we could never hope to find, what he thought about this tragedy.

And so, in his own fashion, he did.

On September 20th, Pinter cosigned a letter to the London Daily Telegraph that gives us his view on downtown's mass murder. It begins with a brief nod to New York's dead, but then, comes briskly to the real point. "Stop the war!" As the letter is, effectively, addressed to America, we can only assume that its authors believe that the responsibility to abandon any fight lies with the U.S., not bin Laden. Retaliation, they argue, would be pointless. A crusade against countries which "are said to" harbor terrorists will not, the writers warn, bring safety to the "cities of America and Europe."

The "are said to" betrays, I suspect, the skillful dramatist's touch, the insertion of ambiguity, where there is, in fact, none.

The greater criminals, the letter implies, are to be found in London and Washington. "In Afghanistan, four million people are homeless and scores of thousands are starving or dying…because of sanctions, imposed by the West in their attempt to force the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden." It is a new variant on that old tired theme of moral equivalence, the perverse logic once used to support the claim that there was no meaningful difference between the home of the Gulag and the land of the free.

And, as always, those making such a case need to keep clear of any awkward, inconvenient reality. Why the Taliban should want to play host to bin Laden is never discussed in the letter, and nor is there is any mention of the fact that Afghanistan's misery began long before the imposition of sanctions. There is no suggestion either that the Taliban's savagery, of a type so primitive that "medieval" would be an compliment, might have something to do with the country's current predicament. We are told nothing of the relief workers, driven out of Kabul by the Taliban's village Stalins, for being too modern, too helpful, too threatening. There is silence too about the regime's laws, cruel dictates that deny people medical care, or even the right to work, because they are, unfortunately for them, women. Widow? Well, that's just too bad. Mr. Pinter and his friends also seem to have little to say about those tens of thousands of Afghanistan's brightest who have fled, escapees from a nation where going beardless can be a crime, exiles from a country that they might otherwise have helped to rebuild.

But perhaps we should not be surprised at these omissions. Pinter's plays, renowned for their enigmatic silences, are as famous for what they leave out as for what they put in.

Equally well known, at least over in England, are Mr. Pinter's leftist politics, and it is these that place the letter to the Daily Telegraph in its real context. Now, he is, of course, a man of the theater, and these views may in part be a pose, a thrilling role, perhaps, for a dramatist who has always seemed to relish the drama of opposition and the excitement of some safely imaginary martyrdom, but that doesn't make them any more attractive. We saw this display at its self-indulgent worst during the Thatcher years, a time when the rich, successful playwright liked to portray himself as a dissident (he was a founding signatory of Britain's Charter 88, a British pressure group of which the very name was an insult to Charter 77's brave fight against the Communist system in Czechoslovakia), a fantasy Havel for Britain's alienated chattering classes.

With humbug comes hypocrisy. A self-proclaimed humanitarian (of course!) Pinter is, he likes to remind us, a campaigner against torture, and yet he is also "an active delegate" of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, an organization that likes to claim that Castro's Caribbean charnel house "is the most democratic state in the world." Good leftist that he is, Pinter is, we must presume, an egalitarian, but he is an egalitarian with a big house, a fat bank account and a ludicrously self-important website, a website where he is at pains to remind us that he is married to Lady Antonia Fraser. Don't worry comrade, we peasants know our place.

And through it all, dank and poisonous, runs a visceral anti-Americanism. It is an old European infection, still all too common and with more than a whiff of the continent's dark 20th century about it, and it is likely to cause trouble as this crisis unfolds. It is a hating, jealous assumption of moral and intellectual superiority, the wrath of the pygmy who has discovered that he is no giant. You can hear this rage in the virulence of Pinter's language over the years (the U.S.A., is a "bully," "a bovine monster out of control," its crimes are "systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless") the one-sidedness of his causes, and in his choice of favored authoritarian regimes (Castro's Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua), a curious selection that would seem to hint that the playwright is yet another European intellectual who still sees something sexy in the socialist jackboot.

Under these circumstances, Harold Pinter's signature on this letter should be seen for what it is, a particularly tasteless attack on an America he despises, whose hospitality he has recently accepted, whose checks he has just cashed and whose dead he now insults.