MUCH has been written about Harold Pinter since he lost his battle with cancer on Christmas Eve. Not all of it has been glowing praise and he has been heavily censured for his support of Slobodan Milosevic. Despite his flaws, the Pinter I knew during my time at PEN remains, for me, a staunch defender of writers’ freedoms and an eloquent critic of some of the world’s harshest regimes.
Pinter was already closely involved with English PEN in the early 1980s when I began helping out with the speakers’ dinners and serving in the club bar at its premises in Chelsea. I learned very quickly that he liked his white wine to be well-chilled – to the extent that he contributed a fridge to PEN – and that, much to my disappointment, he didn’t like to be questioned about his plays; because I was young and earnest, studying theatre and bursting with curiosity about the implied misogyny of The Homecoming.
But my most important realisation was that he was indispensable in raising the profile of numerous lesser-known writers, journalists and human rights activists around the globe by lending his name or wielding his pen. In fact, Pinter took on many of the world’s tyrants through his defence of the rights of those who were being harassed, imprisoned and tortured for their work.
And for someone hailed in his lifetime as one of the world’s greatest playwrights, Pinter could also be remarkably self-effacing about his choice of causes – however big or small. One of these was Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds. Pinter visited the country with Arthur Miller in 1985 to investigate allegations of the torture and persecution of writers there. Three years later, he brilliantly expressed Turkey’s alienation of the Kurdish language and culture in his short, brutal play Mountain Language.
When I joined PEN’s writers in prison committee, my first major campaign was on behalf of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and advocate for the Ogoni people. Pinter and his wife, the historian Antonia Fraser, came to all the demonstrations we mounted. When our efforts to free the outspoken writer failed, Pinter condemned in the strongest possible terms the execution of Saro-Wiwa on the orders of General Abacha. He also supported the campaign to free the Iranian dissident Faraj Sarkohi and Pinter the actor took part in a staged reading at the Almeida to publicise Sarkohi’s plight. Following Ayotallah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, it was Pinter who led a delegation of writers to Downing Street, demanding that Margaret Thatcher’s government take action over “an intolerable and barbaric state of affairs”.
As well as giving freely of his time, Pinter was generous with his own writing to help a cause. He often gave PEN an evening during a run of one of his plays in order to raise funds for beleaguered writers. I remember using what I have always thought of as the interrogation scene from The Birthday Party at a gala performance in aid of PEN. It was a particularly apt choice; on a psychological level it is as disturbing as some of the nightmarish scenarios I’ve heard from dissident writers hauled before the courts.
I was in Mexico when Pinter died, so I had the unusual experience of watching a rerun of a television interview with Silvia Lemus (the wife of Carlos Fuentes) which must have dated from the early 1990s. Pinter didn’t suffer fools gladly so I was surprised at his patience in dealing with some of her rather facile questions. He was more relaxed than other times I have seen him before the camera and answered everything she threw at him with due care and consideration. He patiently reiterated that politics was taking up more of his time and that this was why he had not been writing any new plays. He was at his most effusive when talking about human rights in El Salvador and Nicaragua.
Politics took over from theatre as Pinter’s main passion and, in later years, he used his poetry to rage against injustices in the world. He was a relentless critic of US government policy; as quick to denounce “American gulags” as he was to condemn the labour camps of Russia or China. Pinter may often have been motivated by rage, but in his plays and his politics it was an anger that had a purpose and that he channelled to great effect.
Since his death, I have reconnected with various writers that Pinter helped or inspired and what they remember most is how his words or presence helped an individual, a cause or indeed a people. For me, as for them, the playwright’s championing of freedom of expression far outweighs the inevitable criticism that will be levelled at Pinter the activist now that he is no longer here to confront his detractors.
Lucy Popescu
