I never will forget the time I watched a Harold Pinter play. It was a light-hearted, inspiring, heart-warming and joyous little production about a widower named Steve Douglas, his three lovable sons-Robbie, Chip, and Ernie-and their curmudgeonly old Uncle Charlie.
Oh, wait a minute-that was
My Three Sons.No, the play I saw was The Homecoming, about a retired butcher named Max, his younger brother Sam, who worked as a chauffeur, and Max’s three sons. There was Joey, a construction worker with dreams of being a boxer; Lenny, who seemed to be a pimp; and Teddy, a professor of philosophy at an unnamed American University, who in the play has just returned to the family home in North London for a visit (thus ostensibly the reason for the play’s title). Teddy has also brought along his wife, an attractive woman named Ruth, by whom he has three sons of his own, whom he and Ruth have left in America for the duration of the couple’s visit.
By the time that the play concludes, however, Teddy will be returning to America alone. Ruth has agreed to remain with the family, who has decided to rent her a flat and put her to work as a prostitute. Of course, there’s a lot more leading up to this, as the play seeks to lay bare the elements hidden within what Pinter seeks to convince us is-and what he honestly seems to believe is-a typical working class family.
One of the ironies of Pinter’s plays is in that it would seem there is little evidence that he had any real contact or experience with any family from the lower or working classes. His conception of them would seem to be so cliché’-ridden as to call into question those critics who so frequently hail the genius of his insight. His information would seem to consist of second-hand gossip among the upper and middle classes as to what these families are like.
To be sure, there are families like that to some degree, but there is also a lighter, more positive side that Pinter either dismissed as irrelevant, or perhaps never considered the idea of its existence.
Still, this is not to dismiss the validity of his observations, such as they are. There are certainly darker, seedier sides to the working classes and all others, and Pinter captures them brilliantly, leading one to conclude he must have at least done some form of second-hand research on his subjects aside from idle parlor room gossip.
In fact, I tend to look upon him somewhat as the Walter Sickert of modern drama. Whereas Sickert the Post-Impressionist artist honed his technique of portraying working and lower class subjects “through the keyhole” to display the seedier sides of life, Pinter attempted the same thing in his plays, possibly to greater effect.
Some of course do not agree. One reviewer feels that Pinter’s plays are
unlikely to survive him for long. This is more than a valid point. Sickert himself almost vanished from public consciousness after his death and became an unknown to all but a small circle of art experts. It was not until the last couple of decades that interest in Sickert and in his art revived, though this was due mainly to author Patricia Cornwall’s insistence that Sickert was in reality Jack the Ripper.
Nor was Sickert the only great artist to suffer this kind of indignity, aside from perhaps the wild accusations of maniacal crime sprees. Herman Melville, the renowned author of Moby Dick, went through a similar period of obscurity after his passing. It is very possible that, as the author of the piece at the previous link said, Pinter’s work will fade from memory for two reasons. For one thing, his work no longer has any real shock value. For another, people’s tastes are likely to veer towards a more balanced view of the human condition.
Pinter’s work eventually gained him recognition as a Nobel Laureate, and in his acceptance speech, he launched into a tirade against America, which he seemed to blame (along with the Western world in general) for every conceivable ill in the world today. His unabashed hatred of America in fact seemed to eat at him more every day, growing in proportion to the cancer from which he suffered for years, and which eventually took his life during this Christmas season.
Was Pinter always a miserable human being? He very possibly was. He seemed to hate everything about the modern Western world, particularly America, but I wonder how much of this was a projection of his own self-loathing in proportion with his own illness. He even took his political views to the extent of joining a defense of Slobodan Milosevic, probably on the grounds that Milosevic, while arguably a tyrant, was a too-convenient scapegoat for the aims of Western imperialists.
Pinter declared during his later years that he had an obligation to speak out against the excesses of Western political corruption and the excesses of capitalism. Yet, as pointed out
here, the irony of his position seems to have escaped him.
As the article puts it-
The ultimate paradox of Pinter's political agitation is that his views – anti-American, anti-capitalist and so on – far from being bravely dissident are now the new artistic orthodoxy. From the National Theatre's house bard David Hare to Turner Prize winner Brian Wallinger, the cultural champions of our time tick most of the boxes on the think-a-like-a-Pinter form.
It is other voices, and this is even more true in the Scottish cultural landscape, which now struggle to be heard. Conformity with the assumptions of a broad left consensus appears to be a precondition for securing an artistic hearing. Cultural conservatism has been driven to the margins. If you doubt me, then let me ask just one question: When was the last time a new right-wing play was commissioned to appear on a Scottish stage? If it's a question to which your only answer is silence, then remember, as Pinter knew, silence can be the most eloquent sound of all.
In any event, if Pinter does fade from public consciousness, I’m sure it won’t be for long. It almost certainly won’t be forever. In the meantime, people continue to discuss his plays and their meanings. Some of his detractors claim they lack meaning, and that Pinter’s major contribution to drama is the use of the pause for dramatic effect, something for which credit him for developing and utilizing to new levels.
At the same time, he has his
supporters and fans. This is understandable, as he could be, in real life, engaging as his works were provocative, as demonstrated in this
interview.
If I were to give an assessment of Pinter’s work, I would guess he seems to be saying that humans are by nature violent, obsessive, compulsive, and reckless, and that the lives of working and lower class peoples reveal the true core of humanity, stripped of its practiced pretenses. His plays bring it all out, laid bare to the surface.
In the Homecoming, Max waxes poetic about his long-lost friend MacGregor. It’s not until near the end that we learn MacGregor had been carrying on an affair for years with Max’s beloved late wife, the mother of his sons, facilitated by brother Max the chauffeur, whom Max consistently berates and feminizes as consistently as he continually tries to infantilize his sons, whom he delights yet in tucking into bed at nights. Sam eventually falls to the floor, a victim of an apparent heart attack, though it’s unclear if he is dead or dying. The remainder of the family looks upon this as an inconvenience. Teddy, the oldest son, is distressed mainly at losing a ride to the airport back to the US. Nor does he seem particularly distressed that Ruth has decided to remain with the family. Slightly bemused, but not deterred from changing or even delaying his return to America, he seems to have considered this from the beginning of his trip.
Ruth you see was a prostitute before her marriage to Teddy, and Lenny seems to remember her as such from some time past. The Homecoming then is hers. She has dropped the pretenses of civilized culture at last. She was not happy then. She will still not be happy, perhaps, but at least she will be what she always was, and what she will always really be. She can at least pretend to some level of personal fulfillment.
Teddy, whom Ruth tells not to be a stranger, can finally cut away from the totality of his past. We know somehow that he will never see any of them again. He has his own niche inhabited by those pretenses of his own construction, and has no room for those of the past. Yet, we see in time that he will be the same kind of father to his three sons as Max was to he and his brothers. His break from the past is an exercise in futility. It will almost certainly come around full circle.
All the others will continue to live their lives as always. Ruth will be their mother, sister, daughter, and lover. She will fill a void, but that void will doubtless swallow her up inside it, over time. We can easily assume of course that she and Joey eventually go “the whole hog”.
I have to wonder whether Pinter ever watched an episode of My Three Sons. I can easily imagine that he did, and that wholesome picture of family life inspired to write this as a cynical response. In its own way, however, The Homecoming is, though grittier and harsh, funnier, more compelling, and ultimately more satisfying as an artistic endeavor. Unfortunately, it is every bit as realistic as a view of humanity from the opposite extreme as that portrayed by those old time situation comedies. That in itself if anything should give us all pause.
