Harold Pinter: 1930 – 2008: “It Ain’t Nice to be Dead”

The British playwright, actor and political activist Harold Pinter died today. He was born in 1930 in Hackney, the same neighborhood I first lived in when I moved to London. Long a landing point for immigrant Jews, his grandparents had settled there from Eastern Europe. Pinter’s father was a tailor and his mother was a homemaker.

He is best-known as a prolific playwright (29 plays), poet and essayist, and many obituaries will cover his great body of work, out of which was coined the term that means “menacing”: Pinteresque. A lot of information about his writing and acting can be found here, but I want to talk about his political work.

Pinter’s political ideas were already maturing when, at 18 in 1946, he became a conscientious objector. As the decades passed, Pinter became increasingly progressive and activist. His speech on receiving the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was already too ill with cancer to deliver in person, was unrelenting in its criticism of American foreign policy. Among many memorable observations, he said, "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them."

His speech also reflected his opposition to the war on Iraq: "The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law…How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand?"

Pinter raised his voice vigorously against the occupation of Palestine by Israel, causing a stir as a signatory of the full-page ad of the British organization “Jews For Justice For Palestinians” in which progressive Jews stressed that the traditional “leadership” of the British Jewish institutions did not speak for the varied views in the community.

In March, 2007, Charlie Rose conducted a full hour interview with Harold Pinter, which you can see here.

I thought this short clip from that interview was particularly poignant in light of his death from liver cancer today.

Comments

[Ruth Deming]

I actually learned more about Pinter from your brief posting than from the Times Obit, proving that less is often more.

Pinter's comments about American aggression abroad are terribly true and eloquently spoken. Can you imagine a politician standing up in Congress and declaiming this?

Wonderful clip from the Charlie Rose Show.

Merry Christmas!

[Mia]

I just watched the clip on Charlie Rose and I fell inlove. Of course, I knew the playwright and studied him in conservatory but now I am so disappointed I never got to meet the man.