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OLD FRIENDS: IRVING WARDLE ON HAROLD PINTER

One day in 1958 Irving Wardle received a letter from Harold Pinter. It was the beginning of a bittersweet friendship between a star writer and a leading critic ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Autumn 2009

Early in 1958 I landed the job of filling a fortnightly slot on the London theatre in the Bolton Evening News. For cub reviewers at that time it went without saying that the West End was beneath contempt. Self-respect demanded that you find something off the beaten track; and in June a play came up that flashed not only those credentials but also an outstanding set of notices from the leading critics of the day. So I booked into the last matinée of “The Birthday Party” at the Lyric, Hammersmith, and took my actor father along. Afterwards he said he hadn’t had such a thrill since his first encounter with Pirandello—a big thing for him to say, as translating Pirandello was his main purpose in life. I couldn’t wait to get back to the typewriter; and the following week, a few days after Harold Hobson’s celebrated fanfare in the Sunday Times, readers of the Sancho column were introduced to the name of Harold Pinter.

Soon a letter arrived, forwarded by the paper and addressed to “Dear ?”. I glanced at the signature and saw that it was from Pinter. He had read my comments and thought them “most penetrating”. He wondered why “in heaven’s name” I hadn’t published a review in London, where there had been “a marked absence of such intelligent and perceptive comprehension”. He wanted to know who I was, and to express his pleasure at my “assured assessment”.

That, as I found over the years, was a typical Harold letter. For good or ill, it was as though he had driven round to your house and emptied a ton of bricks in the drive. Every one of his letters was an event. It left you in no doubt of the message he had to deliver, and it unfailingly transferred his physical presence to the sheet of paper. I had a good idea of how he would sound before I ever heard his voice. 

I wrote back saying I had chosen my pseudonym in a panic as the subs wanted to call me Top Hat, and yes it would be great to meet as he only lived ten minutes away on the Chiswick High Road. We made a date at a riverside pub. As it was a sunny Saturday the place was packed, but I spotted him straight away. He was the most visible person I’ve ever met. It wasn’t any particular detail—the pugnacious chin, or the dark, searching eyes—so much as the sense of power and intention that he transmitted. In comparison with Harold, other people looked blurred. His speech was the same: forceful, terse, and with a spin on the words that charged them with personal energy. “This is the life!” he would bark, and the eyes would sparkle; and it was as though no one had ever said such a thing before.

One thing I learned from our first conversation was that you didn’t talk theory to Harold. Writing was something that happened in the dark inside his head. No visitors got into that kitchen. The only glimpse he gave me through the forbidden door was to say he’d been influenced by Beckett, Kafka and American gangster movies. Also that I’d uncovered one of his secrets in my piece on “The Birthday Party”. “You were right,” he said, jabbing his index finger at me, “about me doing it backwards.” What I’d written was: “Pinter is an actor and his method of composition is the reverse of embodying a theme in action. He begins with the intrinsically theatrical and lets it work its own way back towards common sense.” I quote this as one of the rare occasions when he admitted anything about the working of his imagination. He then suggested a game of bar billiards, which of course he won.

We saw one another quite a lot after that, either by the river or in each other’s flats. He liked my wife Joan, who was Canadian-Jewish and amused him with her lunatic recollections of the Montreal psychiatric scene (she’d been taught by Donald Hebb, the founding father of sensory-deprivation techniques). I liked his wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, who came from my part of Lancashire and offered to give me driving lessons. At their place we met Daniel, who was four months old and often in tears. Harold and Vivien had a game for dealing with that. While one picked him up, both would roar with laughter, and they would race round the living room passing him from hand to hand like a rugby ball. I think the idea was to shock him out of his tantrum, on the principle of extinguishing a burning oilfield with dynamite.

The impression I got was that both of them, to an unusual degree, needed to be in control. When we went out driving, Vivien was always telling me to keep an eye on the near-side mirror “so you can use all the lanes”. During her career in the provinces, most unusually for the time, she’d had her own car, and had relished the self-sufficiency of zooming from one weekly rep to another, using all the lanes. In return for the driving lessons I took her through the notes of Noel Coward’s “A Talent to Amuse” on my old upright piano when she was auditioning for a revue. She didn’t find it easy, and talked apprehensively about the “powerful girls” who were also up for the job. Until then I’d seen her as a powerful girl; but now she was friends enough to show me her defenceless side. Later she told me about the birth of Daniel which she remembered like something out of a horror film with a ghoulish obstetrician, goggled like a blood-stained frog, doing things to her with knives. After that, she said, it was unthinkable for her ever to have another child. Unthinkable ever again to lose control.

When Harold asserted control, you just got the unconditional statement without any idea of how he’d reached it. It would have been impossible for him to have done National Service, he said. Impossible for him to have stuck it out at drama school—he had to skive off to Lord’s instead. That was the life!

Although I didn’t realise it, this was a transitional moment in their marriage. When they first came together in Bristol Vivien had been professionally the dominant partner. In London she was stuck in the flat with Daniel while Harold was getting television work and poised for a career that would shortly propel him into world fame. In spite of the “Birthday Party” flop a buzz of promotional interest was collecting around him, and he knew it. “Beckett is a master. I’m just a minor talent” he would say, not expecting you to believe him. His double identity was inscribed on a card by the front doorbell: “Baron Pinter”—his stage name was David Baron. It became increasingly significant that Vivien addressed and referred to him as David. 

Meanwhile our meetings continued. Harold periodically showed me typescripts of other early pieces like “The Room” and “The Dumb Waiter”, which I would return with glowing comments, to be rewarded with cryptic phone calls, saying things like, “You will go far!” Once I broke the rules by asking his opinion on a play I’d written, settling old scores with a bullying stepmother.  “I can see how hard you’ve worked on this material,” he said, unsurprisingly, as the thing was an inde­cipherable mass of spidery interpolations and xxxxings-out.  “The only thing is—it bleeds.” He didn’t need to say another word, and I never made that mistake again. But I remained in the dangerous situation of a critic who has adopted a new talent; the danger being that either you become a spokesman for your protégé and lose your own voice, or you build him a prison from which he is certain to escape.

I fell for the second option. As Harold never explained himself, I would do it for him. I devised a genre called “comedy of menace”, and wrote an article about it for Encore, the little magazine of the new drama movement. Eventually this theory blew up in my face, but for the moment it seemed to fit the short plays he was producing up to and including “The Caretaker”. He first mentioned this masterpiece to me during a pub lunch. He was in a state of high excitement but I couldn’t make sense of what he was telling me, as his way of describing the play was to string bits of dialogue together without saying who the characters were. “So he goes to this monastery and they tell him to piss off…He tells him he wants the place done up in oatmeal weave, and furniture in afromosia teak veneer.” That struck a bell, as Joan was always directing Harold’s attention to her prized afromosia escritoire. Then there was some gibberish about Sidcup. I had to go, but Harold followed me down to my tube platform, still machine-gunning dialogue at me until, as the doors were closing, he said one thing I fully understood: “It’s got me by the balls.”

By this time I was subbing on the Observer. Harold wanted to come in and see Ken Tynan’s notice of the play on the day before publication. I took him down to the stone, where the pages were made up, and introduced him to Mr Lucas, a tortoise-like compositor who seldom spoke. Harold promptly engaged him in conversation. “You must have had a few critics through your hands.” Amazingly, Lukie opened his mouth. “Yes,” he said, “the best was J.C. Trewin. What clean copy that man had! He once gave me a book he’d written, about Cornwall. Very good. Boring. But good.” Not only had Harold got him talking, he had conjured him into delivering a Pinter speech.

Then the page-proof arrived. Ken never had much idea of what Pinter’s work was about, and he’d cooked up an implausible rigmarole reducing the play’s three irrepressible characters to the super-ego, the ego and the id. Harold read through it with a face of thunder, and handed it back. “It’s too long,” he said.

I too reviewed “The Caretaker”. I noted with appro­val that it measured up pretty well to the rules of comedy of menace, and said so in a proprietorial piece in Encore. Next time I saw Harold he jabbed his index finger at me. “You were wrong”, he said, “believing what that tramp says; you were entirely wrong.” He went on to complain about the casting of a camp actor as the brain-damaged Aston, and shortly had him replaced by the red-blooded Robert Shaw. I then interviewed Shaw, who confided that when he had seen the original production he thought Aston’s speech on the horrendous experience of electric-shock therapy alien to the rest of the play; but that as soon as the speech was his it became a thing of beauty and he would have fought to the death to defend every word. When this appeared in print, Harold was instantly and belligerently on the line, trying to sort out which of us had betrayed him.

He overlooked my lapses to the extent of inviting me to the subsequent filming of “The Caretaker” at a derelict house in Hackney. This was a perfectly chosen site. With memories of the play, trudging through the winter slush and entering that abandoned property was like coming home. Inside, voices were hushed. Filming that day consisted of repeated takes of a leaky ceiling disgorging raindrops into a bucket at a rate of one every 12 seconds. Robert Shaw, deeply in character as Aston, was slumped in a degutted armchair. Donald Pleasence, whom I’d seen begging in the street without recognising him, much less realising he was limbering up as the tramp, crept in like a rat stealthily patting his sodden mittens together. Then Harold breezed in, seemingly insensible to the atmosphere his script had created. He, of course, was coming home, and lighting up at the sight of his boyhood haunts.

He walked over to the window. “Ah, the bandstand,” he said, peering into the grey fug over Hackney Marshes. “You can’t quite see it today. I used to take girls into the bandstand. I was once there with a girl and we heard feet coming. Then they stopped and a voice said, ‘I see the bandstand’s still here. Many’s the good shit I’ve had in that bandstand.’ I didn’t go there again.”
 

By now it was the mid-Sixties and we were no longer neighbours. The Pinters had moved, first to Eastbourne (“Why Eastbourne, Harold?” “There’s this house. You can put things in it”), and then to a palatial address in Hanover Terrace,
Regent’s Park. Here they occupied separate floors, and (so I was told by Martin Esslin, then head of BBC radio drama), it became Harold’s practice, on completing a play, to dispatch it from the top floor to his agent, who would pass it to Vivien’s agent, who would finally return it to floor two at Regent’s Park, with a note asking whether Miss Merchant would be interested in the attached role for which she had been suggested by Harold Pinter. She became famous in some of these television roles, such as that of Wendy, the toilet tycoon’s secretary in “Tea Party”, for which she reinstated the neglected art of audi­ble underwear, much enriching the fantasies of the nation’s stocking-enthusiasts. Conversely, she was not getting famous for anything else (the film career came later), so the more she flourished in Harold’s imaginative world, the more she became his prisoner. She was in danger of losing control.

I met them one evening after rehearsals for a play he was directing at the Arts Theatre, and we went to some fly-by-night Olde English eatery. “So what are you going to do,” Harold barked, “when the moment comes?” “When the moment comes, I shall do what I like.” “What?” “I shall do whatever I like.” “I see,” he said through his teeth; then loudly to the assembled diners, “You hear that? She says she’ll do what she likes. What would I like? I’ll have—Mr Pickwick’s Boiled Dinner!”

Then, in 1965, came “The Homecoming”. Harold was very big by now, while I had moved from Encore to become theatre critic of the Times—a job involving a nightly dash back to the office with 40 minutes or so to find a typewriter in working condition and heave up 500-600 words which next morning would hit the reader like a proclamation from the Wizard of Oz. I’d qualified for this role because my boss thought I wrote like a man of 90, but I didn’t mind about that if the institutional façade allowed me to hide the backstage panic. And if that meant cutting down on the gushing admiration, that was also ok where Harold was concerned. So long as he’d stayed in place as a cult artist I was happy to champion him, but when he rose to eminence I didn’t want to join his court—a classic reaction of the critic who wants to remain in control. It was coupled with the naive idea that if I spoke my mind honestly, no friend on the receiving end would take offence.

Not that I was all that honest. In the first ten minutes of the show I realised that he had flown the cage I’d designed for him and taken off to somewhere I couldn’t follow. But instead of saying I didn’t understand it, I blamed the play, which forthwith ascended into the world repertory. I didn’t think he’d mind. Then came his production of Robert Shaw’s “The Man in the Glass Booth”, which I dismissed in the Times as “childish”, followed by Vivien’s Lady Macbeth at Stratford, which I described as a well-drilled elocution exercise. I didn’t think they’d mind.

The next year my friend John Lahr, who was in London collecting interviews and essays for a “casebook” on “The Homecoming”, was called back to New York and asked me to mop up the remaining interviews. Partly to oblige him and partly in the hope of finally fathoming this perplexing work, I contacted the missing interviewees. Like a long-festering abs­cess at last breaking open, a letter from Harold arrived.

“Dear (Mr, scratched out) Irving,” it began. He had been “astonished” to hear that I had asked Ian Holm for an interview about “The Homecoming”, as I had given the play “very short shrift indeed”. He wondered how I could “legitimately associate myself” with the “weighty body of critical and public interest in the play” that lay behind Lahr’s book. “I am talking”, he finished, “about sensitivity.”

I wrote back saying that I’d taken on the job to help Lahr and no money was changing hands. Also that I would like to salvage our friendship if possible. Harold replied by return, saying that the rubbed-out Mr was his secretary’s error and conceding that he had misunderstood my role, which made his complaint “more dubious”. Then he struck a personal note: “I’ve always ‘cared’ about what you wrote…You say you’ve always liked me. I’ve always bloody well liked you. Christ!”

He wound up by saying there had been “something rumbling” in him, and he’d like to spit it out. We met and it turned out to have nothing to do with his work; it was what I’d said about Vivien’s Lady Macbeth. This had been her bid to break out of theatrical dependence on him. And I had helped crush it.

I’d hoped to make amends with “Old Times”, in which she was terrific; but unhappily I referred to her perm as well as her performance, and this detonated another letter. “I wash my hair myself —it dries itself, and is completely untouched by what I presume, as you are still in the age of talking of ‘perms’, you would call ‘curlers’…For a woman, such personal remarks can be most hurtful and I am most hurt.”

I did not see her again for several years, by which time the marriage was over and she was resolutely drinking herself into unemployability. “This mortal house I’ll ruin”—Vivien had appropriated that line from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, another woman who never let go of the steering wheel.

When I next met her, during a theatre interval in the late 1970s, she was smiling broadly and telling everyone within earshot how she and Rachel Roberts were getting through filming some costume drama by smuggling gin into rehearsals in water bottles. Finally I came face to face with her on a winter’s day walking up Haverstock Hill. Her eyes were unfocused, her coat open and flapping in the wind. Perhaps I should have spoken.

Harold and I fell into a routine of occasional lunches. The continuing thread in the conversation was the progress of Daniel, of whom he was intensely proud. He assured me that whatever he had achieved as a writer, Daniel would leave him behind. “I envy him,” Harold said when Daniel got a place at Oxford. He went on to describe Gielgud and Ralph Richardson rehearsing “No Man’s Land”:
“Richardson has more authority than any actor since Wolfit. I’ll tell you—he’s standing here, never moves, and he looks downstage at Gielgud.

‘Why are you there?’ he asks, ‘you’re usually here.’

‘Am I?’ says Gielgud; ‘I was improvising.’

‘Is that what you were doing? Improvising. Instead of being where you usually are?’

‘Well, Ralphie, I can be over here, or up here, down there or wherever you like,’ he said, dancing over the stage like a butterfly with the runs, while Richardson stood where he was. Like a rock.”

Authority was Pinter’s own ruling stage characteristic; he could never have played an underdog or a butterfly.

Later I hit the critical jackpot again as the only London reviewer who liked his production of Simon Gray’s “The Rear Column”. The lunch we got out of that was not so festive as I had expected, as some unnamed calamity had befallen Daniel and he had left Oxford. The next meeting was even gloomier, overshadowed as it was by the news that Daniel had returned to live with Harold and his second wife. So what was he doing? Writing music. “I didn’t know he was a musician as well. What kind of music does he write?”

Harold gritted his teeth. “The kind you write with machinery,” he said. Subsequently Daniel left the house and took up the life of an alienated recluse.

The lunches came to a stop. I didn’t care for Harold’s later plays or angry poems, and had nothing to offer that I thought would be of any interest to him. I sent cards when I heard he was ill, and got cards back saying things like “I am still afloat”. For years that was all, until 2002 when I saw he was giving a public interview at the Barbican before a screening of “The Caretaker”. This was a chance to introduce him to my eldest son, who loved Pinter’s writing. After the usual wild-goose chase through the bowels of the Barbican, we stumbled on the group where Harold was holding court.

There was handshaking and the baring of teeth, and the fortissimo bark of Harold’s indestructible baritone. This is a bit formal, I thought; and, presuming on the liberties of friendship, dredged up the memory of the Hackney film set, and asked if he remembered his story about being in the bandstand with a girl, and hearing the approaching feet. I heard my voice babbling on while the rest of the group had gone quiet, and Harold was looking down at me as if from an immense, unbridgeable distance. I did not see him again.

Picture Credit: Topham, Simon Harriyott (via Flickr)

(Irving Wardle was theatre critic of the Times from 1963 to 1989.)