Chapter 2 Two Perspectives Formed in Pinter's Early Years

I

Authorship has been a controversial topic in the literary criticism of the last century. In 1968, with his highly influential article, “The Death of the Author” published, Roland Barthes succeeds in “exiling” the author from the text, abolishing the concept of the author as the creative origin and owner of his own writing. Another important anti-subjectivist in the modern literary theory is Jacques Lacan, who declares that a linguistic unconscious determines all utterance, statement and text, and therefore, “the subject does not think; rather language thinks and speaks the subject.”

Significantly, while theorists like Barthes and Lacan argue for the banishing of the author from the text, there are far more critics emphasizing the presence of the author in the text. Harold Bloom, for instance, highly affirms author over language in his theory of revisionism in which he suggests that an author has to overcome the influence of his precursors in order to find his own voice and map out a seat for himself in the great tradition. However, as Sean Burke notices, Bloom is “author-centered but largely non-biographicist, ” for he is “insistent on division within the creative authorial psyche between the consciousness of the poet and the unconscious influence of the precursor.” By contrast, Jacques Derrida admits that an author's intension does generate its area of significance, but he also insists that intension cannot encompass the full range of textual signification. Concerning authorship, a more dramatically changing view can be found in Michel Foucault. In his early essay, “What Is an Author? ”, Foucault defines the author as a discursive function, “to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within a society.” It is only later that he came to affirm the biographical presence of author in the text:

I believe that it is better to try to understand that someone who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books, in what he publishes, but that his major work is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books …. The work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work.

By the time Foucault wrote these words, he had thoroughly recognized the biographical nature of his own writing. As he states, “Each time I have to do theoretical work, it has been on the basis of elements from my own experience—always in relation to processes that I saw taking place around me.”

Similar affirmation of an author's private voice is particularly found in the Argentine poet, Jorge Luis Borges: “I am told of a man who set out to make a picture of the universe. After many years, he has covered a blank wall with images … only to find at the moment of death that he has drawn a likeness of his own face. This may be the case of all books.” Even the commonly regarded objective text of philosophy cannot be free from the subjective voice of its author. Like Foucault who finally accepts the presence of biographical authorship, Friedrich Nietzsche also admits:

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown …. In the philosopher … there is nothing whatever impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided and decisive testimony to who he is—that is to say, to the order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relative to one another.

Besides these theoretical views, the experience of the celebrated literary critic and theorist Paul de Man might throw a special light on the particular issue of author and text. As a deconstructionist, Paul de Man declares that the writer's life in any way bears no effect upon the interpretation of his or her work, thereby rejecting author-centered criticism, refusing to believe that there is a stable subject of writing in any guise. Instead, he suggests “a forgetting of the personal self for a transcendental type of self that speaks in the work.” In 1987, a short article revealed a shocking discovery concerning Paul de Man: he was found to have collaborated in writing a number of anti-Semitic and ProNazi articles between 1940 and 1942. This discovery about de Man's personal history during the Second World War immediately brought the issue of authorship to the focus of the public attention. The event and the following occurrence—the change that the discovery of the new autobiographical fact about de Man brought to people's re-judgment of his literary work—proved ironically the undeniable connection between a writer's life and his work. It caused people to re-read and re-assess his deconstructionist theory, particularly, his views about authorship. As Burke summarizes the effect of the event on people's response to de Man's theory,

De Man's post-war texts are read either as the work—autobiographical in spite of itself—of a man who is attempting on a theoretical level to obliterate his own history; or for his defenders, as a disguised confessional narrative, the attempt by de Man to construct a method of rigorous textual critique that would guard against the ideological mystification to which he had succumbed in his youth.

The irony lies in that the very change of the biographical fact about de Man, who denies the connection between the author's life and his work, alters the meaning of his work. The re-evaluation of de Man's work caused by the discovery of the historical fact proves the correctness of Derrida's statement: though de Man is dead, “we have concerns regarding him more than ever without his being here.” The whole event turns out to be like what Burke stresses: “The voice of de Man is also the voice of authorship itself.” The Paul de Man event illustrates most vividly how any revelation of new facts about one author might “re-write” the meaning of his text. Even in a theorist like Paul de Man—who declares “a forgetting of the personal self for a transcendental type of self that speaks in the work”—his work cannot avoid the fate of being wholly re-evaluated by his autobiographical fact. This is because, as Burke says, “The work is more than the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work; ” therefore, any shift of the “texture” of the subject would mean the reshaping of the textual structure of the meaning.

Interestingly, Pinter rejects as firmly as Paul de Man the attempt to associate immediately his life with his work, declaring to have never drawn any materials directly from his own life. As he writes at the beginning of “A Note on Shakespeare” (1950): “The mistake they [critics] make, most of them, is to attempt to determine and calculate, with the finest instruments, the source of wound.” This line betrays how repugnant the dramatist is against the attempt to trace the biographical origin or dynamic of an author's writing. In the same essay, Pinter says, “Shakespeare writes of the open wound, and through him, we know it open and know it closed.” However, he emphasizes that it is forbidden to trace the origin of that wound: because it would be traced eventually to the author, who “himself is trapped in his own particular order” and who “belongs of course, ultimately, to a secret society, a conspiracy, of which there is only one member, himself.” He suggests that this is forbidden not only because the “source of wound” is sacred, but also because it is totally impossible for anyone else to “calculate”the ineffable fabric that belongs to the author himself. So, Pinter's refusal to explain or to seek the roots of his inspiration originates from his “lifelong aversion to attempts to reduce the irreducible.” This is the reason why Pinter declares, “I don't write about myself”—what he means is, he never writes about himself consciously.

The fact is that few dramatists have such an intimate relationship with their words as Pinter does. The most distinguished feature in Pinter is his emphasis on the highly subjective nature in his dramatic writing. As early as in 1961, he had declared, “The last thing I would attempt to do is to disassociate my characters from myself … as far as I'm concerned, my characters and I inhabit the same world. The only difference between them and me is that they don't arrange and select.” In the speech when he received the German Shakespeare Prize in Hamburg, Pinter expressed again his feeling about the words he wrote on the paper:

I have a particular relationship with the words I put down on paper and the characters which emerge from them which no one else can share with me. And perhaps that's why I remain bewildered by praise and really quite indifferent to insult …. I know the plays, but in a totally different way, in a quite private way.

Here, Pinter clearly expressed what an exclusive and private world he shared with his words, which could never really be accessible to others. He said, this is the reason why he could remain unmoved either by people's criticism or praise of his work. So, by the end of the speech, Pinter said: “I am writing nothing and can write nothing … but I must say I want more than anything else to fill up a blank page again, and to feel that strange thing happen, birth through fingertips. When you can't write you feel you've been banished from yourself.” This speech summarizes explicitly Pinter's emotion towards his own words. The sentence of “I am writing nothing and can write nothing” implies the essential feature of subjectivity in his writing: all his original impulses to write plays lie hidden in the flux of words, and haunt the lines invincibly like the nameless ghosts in the album of his character,Hirst,in No Man's Land.Only the dramatist alone knows what is in that world, “in a quite private way.” Any interpretation imposed on his works with such labeling words as “Pinteresque” will be a rude intrusion into the sanctuary of his dramatic realm. This is why he insists that there is “nothing” in it (i.e., nothing of what people think to be in it). By claiming that “When you can't write you feel you've been banished from yourself, ” Pinter suggests that it is the voice from his subconscious that runs through his fingertips—few dramatists claim such an intimate relationship between “I” and the text.

Pinter can be said to be one of the most private dramatists, whose creative power flows energetically from the experience of his past. Examining his interviews over the forty years of his dramatic career, people may find that, except the topic of writing and politics, what Pinter had talked about most is his past, particularly, his early life—his traumatic experiences of evacuation and conscientious objection during and after the war, the Hackney years of youth. Whenever a play is mentioned, it is always found to be concerned with something in the past, originating from certain images or moods that had been kept in his mind for years or even decades. In the biography of the dramatist, Billington makes such a reference to Peter Hall's comment on Pinter:

“There's a very interesting quality in Harold, ” said Hall, “both as a man and a writer. He will say, ‘That's a poem I wrote when I was fifteen, ' or ‘That man taught me at school, ' or ‘This is a friend from the past and we used to run around Hackney Recreation Ground together.' There's an almost mystic quality about things and people from his past.”

Therefore, Peter Hall said that staying with Pinter, he felt “I was in some strange time-warp.” This feeling can also be found in Pinter's own prose work in 1975, “The Coast.” As he writes in it,

I saw him again today. He looked older….

We took the path we always took, wetter than ever along the cliff. Seems wetter than ever here, he said, uproar in the Channel? …. Do you still have nightmares? He asked. I smiled, into the wind. I haven't had a dream since 1956, I said….

But he had stopped talking. He was looking down at the sea, the sea he had known so well, the roar of our youth.

The third person, “he, ” in the writing seems to be a voice from Pinter's past years of youth. The first sentence of “I saw him again today” suggests the frequent haunting of the past to the dramatist. The nightmares that troubled the narrator in youth eventually found a channel of release in drama writing (implied by the year of “1956” which stands as a milestone in the history of modern British theatre with the staging of Looking Back in Anger).

So, what makes Pinter's writing a private activity is his unusual fascination with the world of memory, which is a half real and half fantastic realm that belongs to his remote past. It is through this realm of memory that Pinter, the author, gets mingled with his text. He makes such a depiction of the origin of The Birthday Party: it“had also been in my mind for a long time. It was sparked off from a very distinct situation in digs when I was on tour …. The whole thing remained with me, and three years later I wrote the play.” To Pinter, memory is not specific events in the past, but “kinds of moods, atmospheres, general states, like grief and happiness and things like that.” That is to say,a play like The Birthday Party comes not so much from the image of a man in a boarding house,as from the sense of helplessness in “There's nowhere else to go.” Above all, it originates from the feeling of the terror that Pinter remembers about the Gestapo, which is universalized by him into a terror in the collective consciousness: “this thing, of people arriving at the door, has been happening in Europe in the last twenty years. Not only the last twenty years, the last two to three hundred.” Similar examples can be found in other plays. For instance, the nightmare world of Kafka's The Trial had been lingering in Pinter's mind for forty years; eventually he wrote it into a screenplay.Another example might be Moonlight.As Pinter describes the moment of its genesis: “On the side of my study, there is a shelf, with a lot of scripts and papers and things …. They went back to 1977. The image was of a man dying …. I had forgotten about it but it stayed with me.” As for the dying man,Andy,in Moonlight,his image(like other patriarchal characters in Pinter's works, who share the common feature of grossness) could be traced back to Pinter's impression of the post-war years: “It was during and after the war, and there was a sense of release …. It has now become, for a clear set of reasons, I think, progressively more sullen, more bewildered, more secret, certainly more aggressive and more alarming.” So, that the images of his characters come from a certain mood of the dramatist's in the past is an important feature of Pinter's dramatic writing.

As Pinter's biographer Michael Billington observes, the capacity to seize inspiration from Pinter's past—what Proust called “involuntary memory”—is one of the greatest treasures left to him by his experience during the War:

… the war also seems to have heightened in him the power of what Proust called “involuntary memory”: the idea that a fragment of one's experience, suddenly overtaking one or conjured up from the depths of one's consciousness, can convey the full quality of the past. All writing, to some extent, is memory; but Pinter's particular gift is to seize on those visual or sensory flashbacks and invest them with dramatic significance.

Pinter's own account of his writing process also confirms the mysterious effect of the past on him: writing took place only when he was seized by an ineffable and uncontrollable impulse of creation. Pinter's talk in this respect seems to suggest the force of the subconscious in shaping the initial urge of his creativity:

I think what happens is that I write in a very high state of excitement and frustration. I follow what I see on the paper in front of me—one sentence after another. That doesn't mean I don't have a dim, possible overall idea—the image … engenders the possibility of an overall happening, which carries me through.

To Pinter, writing seems to be a transparent course when something deeply buried in his mind and memory flows out spontaneously: “I know so many things hang about in one's mind, they are all there, they go down and come up and then go away and sometimes are lost forever … they do crop up and suddenly hit you out of nowhere.”

Believing that Pinter draws powerfully from his memory of certain mood, many critics read his work by associating his characters with the dramatist himself. Michael Billington, for example, makes such a comment on the two characters in No Man's Land:

I took Hirst and Spooner to be projections of Pinter's own darkest fears. Hirst … seems to be Pinter's nightmare of the kind of artist he might be….Like all Pinter's best plays,No Man's Land addresses universal issues while stemming from some deeply personal core of anxiety: Pinter's nightmares and fears become ours.

Billington's remarks here—Pinter's characters are the projections of the dramatist's own darkest fear—can almost be applied to all the works by him. The sense of insecurity and threat and the fascination with power struggles within human relations, which are first shown in his comedies of menace and later in his political plays, can find their emotional origin in the author's own personal disquietude.

When Pinter says that his plays “have more to do with my life than I know, ” the “life” he refers to here might be the sum of all the experiences in his past. But to me, the years around the Second World War and in his Hackney days are of particular importance in giving shape to what Pinter is as a dramatist: they forged and developed the double perspectives that frame the basic angles of his dramatic writing.

II

The greatest impression left by his early experiences during and after the war is the sense of terror and menace concerning human relationships. In fact, ever since The Room, Pinter has been dealing with such themes as menace, violence and torture in his plays. More significantly, when discussing these topics, he frequently recalls the Second World War and the terror caused by the Fascists. This tendency of associating the terror in the war with the menace in the present became increasingly obvious after the 1980s. In his interview with Nicholas Hern in 1984, Pinter said that the terror presented in The Birthday Party and later in The Hothouse is reflected in another form in One for the Road,for all“these considerations were alive in my mind over those years, 1957-60 or so.” Comparing the difference between the early and later political plays, Pinter added,“in 1957, the concentration camps were still an open world which it was impossible to ignore, whereas now it's only too easy to ignore the horror of what's going on around us.” Then he talked again about his experience as a conscientious objector in 1948. In fact, almost every time he talked about the origin of his political motifs, he mentioned this experience. In the later 1980s, when Pinter became increasingly involved in political activities, the topic of the Second World War emerged even more frequently in his talk. In a 1988 interview by Mel Gussow, Pinter said, “The idea of the knock came from my knowledge of the Gestapo. I'll never forget: it was 1953 or 1954. The war had only been over less than ten years. It was very much on my mind.” Then he spoke of the three scripts he wrote in the four years before 1988, and stressed that two of them had been about the War:

Reunion…about a Jewish boy and a German boy who were great friends … his parents committed suicide and his best friend became a Nazi….The other one is an adaptation of The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen. It deals with a British officer who is working for the Germans; he believes the Germans are right.

The memory of the terror left by the traumatic experience of war works like a seed, a creative dynamic that fosters two perspectives in him—the social and the psychological—in presenting human relationships.

On the one hand, this fearful memory of the war years generates Pinter's life-long interest in the psychological phenomenon of torture, betrayal and guilt, which is exemplified by the Gestapo and Holocaust. This might owe partly to Pinter's identity as a Jew, and partly to his writer's conscience. Though Pinter declares that he has never been a religious Jew, yet, he does feel identified with the Jewish suffering in the War. As his talk with Barry Davis in 1991 (in which Pinter accounted his experience of fighting with a man who insulted Jews) showed:

HP: … my fury with him [the man who said that Hitler didn't go far enough] came from some part of my being which I didn't consciously analyze or think about.

BD: A reaction against what you see as the oppressing personality who wants to deny other people's suffering?

HP: Absolutely.

BD: In the final analysis you feel a Jew when you feel beleaguered? HP: It is to identify with Jewish suffering.

BD: That's when the emotional side comes out, but the connection, if it's not in religion, is it in culture?

HP: I think so, particularly in relation to the Holocaust ….

However, Pinter's identification with the Jewish suffering is not in the narrow sense as his parents-generation had been. He feels the Holocaust strongly not merely because he is a Jew, but also because it is “the most appalling thing that has ever happened, ” and “because it was the product of advanced civilization in Germany.” Thinking about that part of history, he is fascinated with the psychological reality of the Nazi tortures: “I don't think we'll ever get to the bottom of the actual guilty, of the actions of the German people. But there's also the question of complicity.” In another interview Pinter tried to make such an explanation of why he presented the image of Nazi Germany in Ashes to Ashes:

The Holocaust is probably the worst thing that ever happened, because it was so calculated, deliberate and precise, and so fully documented by the people who actually did it. Their view of it is very significant. They counted how many people they were murdering every day, and they looked upon it, I take it, like a car delivery service. How many cars can you make in one day, how many people can you kill on one day? And there's the whole question of how many people knew what. In the recently published Hitler's Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen claims that the majority of the German public was well aware of what was happening. It's certainly true, for example, that in the early days when they were killing people by gas in trucks, the engineers had to work out a way to do it which was practical and effective. These trucks weren't doing very well because they were lopsided, so that when the gas started to go in people would rush to the back of the truck, which could fall over. They had to readjust the structure of the truck so that people would be killed without bothering the driver.

What Pinter is shocked at is people's indifference to or total unawareness of the nature of the atrocity they carried forth—the fact that they knew what was happening, but still did it. What Pinter tries to explore here is the secret realm at the bottom of the hearts of the Germans who killed so many humans in such well-planned ways, what was their psyche then and their possible guilt now, as well as the psyche of the people who watched the disaster happen in a cold-blooded detachment of complicity.

This fascination with the psychological reality of the Nazi Germans had once made Pinter hunt for an answer through reading:

I don't read many modern novels, but I do find my reading goes back to Nazi Germany. I read a lot about Nazi Germany. At the moment I'm reading a biography of Heidegger. It's not my field, but I take an interest. Before that, I read a biography of Wittgenstein, which just came out. Heidegger became a Nazi apologist. He was a Nazi.

Pinter says that he also read the FO memos of the time, talking about the“wailing Jews” when they were dying. From Pinter's words, people may find that his interest is not so much in the historical facts of the war as in the mind of the people (both the Nazis and the sufferers) involved in that particular period of history.

This interest in the psyche of the torturers permeates his dramatic writings. The year of 1989 seemed, to Pinter, to be a time of his war complex of torture and threat, for that year saw Pinter acting a scene in The Hothouse and performing the entire One for the Road,playing all the leading roles in both plays. The central idea expressed in these two plays is the feeling of persecution and intimidation. It is also this feeling that links Pinter's memory of the Nazi years with his views about the present political situation, and connects his early comedies of menace with the later political plays.When explaining why he wrote The Trial at that time, Pinter explained,“I read The Trial when I was a lad of 18, in 1948. It's been with me ever since … and I've had a whale of time over the last few months entering into Kafka's world. The nightmare of that world is precisely in its ordinariness. That is what is so frightening and strong.” The story of“This man in The Trial is arrested one morning in his bed by two people” was a typical situation in the Second World War. What engaged Pinter particularly here is how the man fights all the way along the line: the desperation to escape from the endless trials might remind Pinter not only of the Gestapo years but also of his own horrible experience of the trial for his conscientious objection. The terror of interrogation and futility of escape in The Trial seems to be a universal subject running through his plays from The Birthday Part to The Hothouse and One for the Road.It eventually builds up to a climax in Ashes to Ashes with the portraying of a human killing factory. Clearly defining the play as one “about the images of Nazi Germany, ” Pinter told his interviewer in 1996:

… the woman [the protagonist in the play] is simply haunted by the world that she's been born into, by the atrocities that have happened. In fact they seem to have become part of her own experience, although in my view she hasn't actually experienced them herself. That's the whole point of the play. I have myself been haunted by these images for many years, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

The connection of the woman's nightmare in his play with the confession of “I have myself been haunted by these images for many years” once again proves the penetration of his early experience into the dramatist's creation. The shadow of the war and post-war years has followed Pinter for so many years that it develops into a fascination with the psyche of the Nazi German, which appears in various forms of characters as fascist torturers.

This sense of horror during and after the war not only generates his internal perspective to the psychological reality in the characters, it also develops his social sensibility to the external reality of power relationship and violence. Nearly all his early comedies of menace and later political works are filled with brutal violence: the Negro being kicked to death in The Room, the verbal interrogation and spiritual torture in The Birthday Party,the physical attack on the tramp in The Caretaker,the raping and killing in One for the Road, and the horrifying cry in the blackout in Mountain Language.In his interview with Lawrence M.Bensky in 1966, when the interviewer asked him whether these ideas of everyday battles or violence came from any experiences he had had himself, Pinter answered,

Everyone encounters violence in some way or other. It so happens I did encounter it in quite an extreme form after the war, in the East End, when the Fascists were coming back to life in England. I got into quite a few fights down there. If you looked remotely like a Jew you might be in trouble. Also, I went to a Jewish club, by an old railway arch, and there were quite a lot of people often waiting with broken milk bottles in a particular alley we used to walk through ….

Here, Pinter traced the origin of his sense of violence to the anti-Semitic mood in the post-war Britain. Pinter's account is verified by the recollection of his close friend, Henry Woolf. “We did grow up at the nastiest time

ever, ” Woolf says, “and the general nightmare became an accepted human fact. As we became young men, atrocity had become our daily fare, and it has remained an unacceptable barb in Harold's consciousness.”

In another interview by Steve Grant (1993), Pinter spoke more explicitly of the violence he met at that time. When explaining why his early plays were actually political ones, he explained to Grant:

I was brought up in a pretty violent world. Not only was the war itself violent, and I gradually started to know what was happening to the Jews in Europe. But after the war—and few people know this—the fascists came out of prison, many people came back, and there was a violent attack, a revival of fascism in 1945 in England. Oswarld Mosley came out of prison and off they went again. I was living in Hackney and Dalston Junotion and Ridley Road market were rough places. And the police did nothing, and the Labour government of the time believed in freedom of expression. It was all very ironic. And I used to get into an awful lot of aggravation down there.

As his words suggest here, Pinter naturally associated the revival of fascism in the later 1940s with the government failure:

I mean we'd just fought for six bloody years to defeat, at the cost of millions of people, the Nazis and yet the Government allowed these groups of Fascists to congregate in the East End of London and beat people up … elderly Jewish people and so on. Extraordinary contradictions existed in that society.

Pinter's comment on violence in these interviews reflects his social perspective in addressing this issue. It is no wonder that he declares his plays as living things: “Violence has always been in my plays, from the very beginning …. We are brought up every day of our lives in this world of violence.”

But Pinter's internal and external perspectives on life are never really separable; instead, they are frequently found to be the two sides of the same thing. In the passage quoted above, Pinter's words—“Not only was the war itself violent, and I gradually started to know what was happening to the Jews in Europe”—exemplifies how the initial personal experience of violence in the post-war years started his reflection on the universal phenomenon of torture and suffering in the War. It is in the transformation from the external experiences of violence to the internal suffering and terror of the Jews and human beings as a whole that his social anger gets mingled with his psychological perspective in the power relations. His social sensibility to violence and interest in torturers' psyche work together, developing into his theme about politics. In 1988, Pinter told Mel Gussow,“I cannot say that every work I've written is political …. But I feel the question of how power is used and how violence is used, how you terrorize somebody, how you subjugate somebody, has always been alive in my work.” In 1996, when talking about The Caretaker, The Hothouse and The Dumb Waiter,Pinter further articulated his points of view:

The violence is really only an expression of the question of dominance and subservience, which is possibly a repeated theme in my plays. I wrote a short story a long time ago called “The Examination, ” and my ideas of violence carried on from there. That short story dealt very explicitly with two people in one room having a battle of an unspecified nature, in which the question was one of who was dominant at what point and how they were going to be dominant …. A threat is constantly there: it's got to do with this question of being in the uppermost position, or attempting to be. That's something of what attracted me to do the screenplay of The Servant,which was someone else's story,you know.I wouldn't call this violence so much as a battle for positions, it's very common, everyday thing.

Both of the two speeches reveal Pinter's double perspectives in viewing the human relations: the social one of “how power is used and how violence is used, ” and the psychological one of how people are terrorized and intimidated. To Pinter, violence is a social phenomenon for it is “the question of dominance and subservience, ” but it is also a non-political“battle for positions, ” a consequence of universal desire for power in human psyche.

Paralleling with the two perspectives, two seemingly contradictory responses (attitudes) to social affairs appear in Pinter: while his social perspective results in his moral anger and makes him a non-conformist, the inner perspective leads to his apolitical tendency and breeds his stance of non-commitment.

When Barry Davis asked Pinter in 1991 what it was that forged his political views, Pinter suggested that the rebellious seed had been long buried in his youth:

… don't forget I was a conscientious objector [1948] when I was eighteen, and that wasn't because I was afraid of going. It was a political act …. I had two tribunals and two trials and the magistrate fined me, but the fact is that it was a political act on my part and I've been political.

Pinter's repeated depiction of the conscientious objection as a political act is of no exaggeration, for it is indeed his first conscious political action and the most traumatic one.As Pinter stated his reasons why he objected to the army service,

I said something to the effect that the recent war had killed millions of people. I made a big point of the fact that there wasn't enough food in the world and that to cultivate another war meant that millions of more people were going to starve. I was also questioning—since we'd just had this damn war—what the point was of preparing for another one. Who were we going to fight and why?

That event proved to be a bold challenge made by the young man against the political (and moral) authority represented by the court and the government. It turned out to be indeed, as Billington said, a landmark in Pinter's life for several reasons:

It led to his first serious rupture with his parents. It gave him his first decisive experience of the conflict between individual determination and social conformity. It also bred a lifelong suspicion of the Kafkaesque workings of bureaucracy. Put simply, it was his first conscientious political act.

The core of this “political act” lies in Pinter's refusal to conform to the voice of the social and patriarchal authority. This non-conformist stance followed him throughout his life, permeating all aspects and stages of his experiences: in his relation with his parents, with the acting company and with Mrs. Thatcher's government, and particularly, in his hatred for the U.S., which, in the eyes of Pinter, is the cardinal embodiment of injustice. It is eventually turned into the famous sentence of “Stanley, don't let them tell you what to do”in The Birthday Party.As Pinter says,“I've lived that line all my damn life.” So, when the interviewer went on to ask him, “Are you very much embedded in some of the relationships you made in your youth and some of the ideas that you formulated then? ”, Pinter's answer is: “Yes, but I think I've entirely changed in the way I've presented the ideas, though I don't think I've changed very much in my political views.”

Actually the moral indignation shown in 1948 had never left Pinter. Besides his conscientious objection, he had another unusual record in his life: the fight in a bar with a man who said that Hitler hadn't gone far enough in killing Jews. The result is that both Pinter and that man were brought to the police station. Before they left, the man asked Pinter if he was a Jew. Pinter said that he was. Then, that man said, “Well, I can understand why you hit me, but why did you hit me so hard? ” Recalling that event several decades later, Pinter told Barry Davids: “The answer to your question and why I am telling you this story—and why I hit him so hard—is because he wasn't just insulting me, he was insulting lots of other people.”

Pinter's anger towards the unfairness in the world is later found to be directed towards the hypocrisy of the self-righteousness in the West. His fury at the lies of the western governments resembles the burning flame. When Pinter talked in 1966 with Lawrence M. Bensky about the politicians lying to the people, he said,

The other night I watched some politicians on television talking about Vietnam. I wanted very much to burst through the screen with a flame-thrower and burn their eyes out and their balls off and then inquire from them how they would assess this action from a political point of view.

Entering the 1980s, Pinter's major resentment became increasingly focused on America: “it's not Americans, it's the heavy American idea of itself that I find pretty offensive, ” because “if ever there was a national ego, there it is … they'll use their power however they feel they want to.” In the last three decades of his life, Pinter had taken the USA as the image of the greatest political injustice, and called it “the most dangerous power the world had ever known—the authentic ‘rogue state'” and the typical example of the state of injustice. According to Pinter, “The United States has in fact—since the end of the Second World War—pursued a brilliant, even witty, strategy. It has exercised a sustained, systematic, remorseless and quite clinical manipulation of power world wide, while masquerading as a force for universal good.” Articulating his views in such an unyielding way, Pinter knows well that he has “a reputation of being a real pain in the arse over the last few years.” But he shows no sign of retreat;instead, he declares,

... if they have contempt for me, it is as nothing to the contempt I have for them,and I really mean that.Not because they are insulting me, but because they are insulting standards of truth and seriousness, which I believe should obtain in any civilized society. There was a time when I was attacked by everyone in sight, and I've survived that.

He even declares proudly, “I can't be sacked, because I haven't got a job. Therefore, I'll continue to say whatever I like.”

Significantly, the experience of conscientious objection not only engenders Pinter's fury against all kinds of social injustice, but also paradoxically cultivates his apolitical tendency of non-commitment. Passionate as he is in his fighting for moral truth, Pinter is very pessimistic in his political views. This might result partly from his life-long distrust in politicians. Pinter said in 1967, “Politics do bore me.” Even when he became profoundly involved in politics, he was still very pessimistic about the social effect of art. As he stated, “To engage in politics seemed to me futile.”

…reason is not going to do anything.Me writing One for the Road…voices raised here and there, people walking down the road and demonstrating. Finally it's hopeless. There's nothing one can achieve. Because the modes of thinking of those in power are worn out, threadbare, atrophied. Their minds are a brick wall.

According to Billington, Pinter's pessimistic standpoint at that time owed much to the 1948 traumatic experience. One reason for this is that what Pinter underwent in the court results in his life-long cynical views about politicians and government. When Pinter recalls what happened to him in the military tribunal for the objection event, Pinter says:

One of the judges had written that, in the event of war, I wouldn't defend my sister. I was on record as having said something which I never said and which I didn't believe …. It was a terrible distortion of the truth and an early example of the corruption of a certain kind bureaucracy.

This experience led to Pinter's total disillusionment with the government. To Pinter, the Western governments who “are dropping the Atom Bomb to keep the world clean for democracy” are just like the two men torturers in his story that say, “I don't know, I feel so pure.” So, it is this early experience that made Pinter lose his faith in the politicians: “We were pretty skeptical and suspicious of the powers-that-were, and it remains the case now, as far as I am concerned.”

The other reason is that the conscientious objection left such psychological scar on Pinter that it transformed the dramatist's political fury into a fascination with the inner reality of tortures and suffering. As Billington records in the biography, when Pinter followed the dictates of conscience and refused to hide under the convenient shelter of pacifist or religious principles, the dramatist did admit that “becoming a conscientious objector was quite a lonely thing to do. The pressure to conform was enormous.” What is more, the very process of repeated trials and the medical examination and the arrest must have given Pinter a real experience of psychological nightmare: “The whole process might have been endlessly repeated had not the Board of Conscientious Objectors recently won a court agreement putting a stop to the Kafkaesque cycle in which you were tried, sent to prison, released, asked to attend a medical and sent to prison again.” The very experience is like what happens in Kafka's The Trial,in which a man being arrested one morning in his bed undergoes a series of seemingly endless trials till eventually being executed. The hellish trials in Kafka's book must have reminded Pinter of his own. More significantly, the event of conscientious objection and his reading of The Trial took place in the same year of 1948. This may explain, to a certain degree, why“It's been with me ever since” till he eventfully adapted the book into a screenplay in 1989. This personal experience, together with all his memory of the Gestapo years, unravels partially the reason why Pinter is always fascinated with the inner world of the torturers and persecutors when he is filled with moral scrutiny against their atrocities.

Pinter's paradoxical stance of non-conformity and non-commitment leads to constant contradiction between his declaration of “I'm not conscious of any particular social function” and his faith in that “theatre has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live.” This contradiction between Pinter's moral indignation and his disillusion with the futility of drama's social effect makes it impossible for him to become a socially committed dramatist like Edward Bond or Arnold Wesker of his time.

III

Besides the war years, the days of the Hackney group stand as another source of Pinter's contradictory perspectives on human relations. It makes him aware of two points: psychologically, power desire does not merely exist in the torturers but in everyone; socially, a “club” not only works as a source of shelter to its members, but also imposes its force of confinement on them. While the psychological discovery here suggests an apolitical tendency, the social perception leads to a stance of moral injustice. In this way, the experience of his Hackney days further strengthens his dilemma between non-commitment and non-conformity.

The very image of the “room” in Pinter's plays shown in his early comedies of menace—both as a place of spiritual shelter from outside threat and that of inside tension—originates from his experience in the Hackney group. Socially speaking, the group, like the image of the “room, ” works as a “club” to its members. In one aspect, the Hackney gang is a replacement of the paradise lost in Pinter's childhood: it gives him the long-desired friendship and is a fulfillment of his early childhood fantasy and adolescent longing for intellectual masculinity. The Hackney group is an isolating group sealed by male exclusiveness and shared class background. It is composed of school fellows from Hackney Downs Grammar School with whom Pinter still kept in contact till his death: Moishe Wernick (a retired teacher in Ontario now), Mick Goldstein (a retired computer programmer and musician living in Australia), Henry Woolf (a former actor and drama professor at the University of Saskatchewan, who now lives in Canada). Concerning this group, Billington writes,

What bound them together was … a passion for intellectual discovery and argument about ideas. “It was that, ” says Pinter, “and the sense of all being of independent mind. Not one of us adhered without question to any given, to any state of affairs or systems of thought. Not one of us. That was what we all recognized in each other.”

Besides this shared passion for intellectual discovery, another thing that brings them together is an absolute refusal to accept handed-down truths as well as a fascination with a richer life beneath the ordinary one.As Billington observes, “talk and a passion for ideas were what fuelled and animated the group; they were more like a gang of European café intellectuals than the kind of residually philistine young men you find in most English public schools.” Staying together mainly for their intellectual interest, Pinter and his friends formed a highly binding and exclusive group.In a 1991 interview by Jewish Quarterly,Pinter told Barry Davis of an early journey he had with Henry Woolf to Chelsea:

We got on the bus, just made it to Chelsea. We had a few coppers with us and we walked about in another world. We were isolated, mainly through lack of money, of course. In Hackney we knew where we were, so other places were very strange and alien …. We'd stay where we were. We spent most of our lives, those days, in Hackney, walking about. And when I first went to RADA, about 1948, I was quite lost.

This speech shows clearly the isolating nature of the group life then. It is just like the sense of the “room, ” which works as a spiritual shelter distancing them from the commonplace life around them.

But, there is another reason that makes the Hackney gang sacred to young Pinter: the violence of the society they were in, and their confrontations with the itinerant Fascist gangs that Pinter frequently mentioned in his interviews. That is to say, the group not only satisfies his masculine longing for the intellectual superiority, it also guarantees his sense of integrity against the external social violence. When being asked about the group in 1997 by Ian Smith, Pinter said,

… in fact there was a contradiction: on the one hand, one was somewhat deeply intimidated and alarmed and depressed by the world around one, and by the power in that world and the illegitimacy somehow of that power. On the other hand, we were really excited and moved and illuminated by art …. Shakespeare dominated our lives to a great extent …. I remember Sartre left a great impression, as did Kafka. I was myself moved and taken with Hemingway and Joyce, but of course in the very early 1950s I suddenly came across Beckett, and that was a real eye opener to me.

Here, Pinter points out clearly the two forces that bind them together: their shared intellectual interest in Shakespeare and Sartre as well as the harsh social circumstance. As Billington accounts in the biography, violence and menace were sucked into the atmosphere at that time, and Pinter and his friends were frequently involved in confrontations with itinerant Fascist gangs. Pinter's friend, Goldstein makes such a recollection of one incident of being followed by a gang of thugs:

Harold and I trailed the others—Henry, Moishe and Jimmy—by several yards …. I grabbed Harold by the arm to lead him quickly to catch up with the others but he shook me off and turned to face the thugs. I ran to the others and called out that Harold was in trouble. By the time we got back to him he was surrounded by about six of them.

But significantly, the Hackney group means not only the delicious enjoyment of male intellectuality, friendship and unity against outside threat, but also a certain kind of moral demand to its individual members as the price of the membership. In Billington's words, it “concealed a strong ethic. Any violation of the unwritten code, as Pinter was one day to discover, was greeted with severe punishment, which helps to explain the psychological origins of his obsession with betrayal.” So, while Pinter enjoyed the satisfaction of mental masculinity, he may also have painfully felt the necessity of the compromise of the individualism. That is to say, from his Hackney experiences, Pinter learned another lesson about the individual/club relationship: one has to sacrifice his individual will in order to gain a shelter in the group. Pinter once depicted on Radio 4's Kaleidoscope an act of sexual betrayal that led to an extraordinary consequence to him:

I suddenly recalled a thing which happened to me, not to Mark in the book[The Dwarfs]but to me in real life.I had a group of friends, of which these people in the book are actually included. And I …how can I put this? … I took one of my friend's girlfriend for a walk down to the River Lea one summer evening which I shouldn't have done, you know. This was found out, naturally, and I was invited one day by two men—I know this sounds like The Birthday Party, but I happened to know these people, they were very close friends—and they said, “We're going for a walk, Harold.” We got on a bus…silence … dead silence … got to the Victorian Park, which is a big park on the way to Bethnal Green in East London. They walked me in silence right into the middle of the park, turned and left me there. I saw them walk away and I felt absolutely desolated. I can't think of a more powerful chastisement really. They had no need to say anything and didn't. That was humiliation and I realized I had betrayed the whole group of people ... not only one friend, but the idea of friendship and that was not going to be tolerated by them. I don't think I've recovered since.

As Pinter confessed here—“I don't think I've recovered since”—the influence of such Hackney experiences on the dramatist is lifelong: the motif of the individual/club relationship and that of betrayal become one of the principal themes in his plays. The complicated feeling around the image of the “room” prevailing in his plays originates from this unique experience of the dramatist's Hackney days. So, to Pinter, youth not only means excitement of stimulating intellectual adventures, but also “[all] that grief and anguish when you're an adolescent … it's too painful.”

The mixed senses about Hackney group both as a shelter from a violent external world and a constraint to his individual will work together, influencing the social perspective in Pinter. But, like the image of “room, ”the Hackney group has another effect on Pinter. As Alan Frank comments on Pinter's idea of a “room, ” “there may also be different presences beyond the walls, and a greater preoccupation with the outside from within. But the matter that perplexes the occupants, and, via them, us remained the same:what the hell is going on in here? ” In what is going on within the walls lies the psychological reality of power relations that Pinter is interested in. He finds that in spite of the Hackney members' sense of loyalty towards each other, there exists a power desire in all its members, which works as the root of mutual internal tensions.

Pinter talks little in life about the inner relationship in the Hackney group, but he articulates it clearly in his autobiographical novel, The Dwarfs, which surrealistically portrays the power struggle among three young men: Len, Pete and Mark (like the Hackney youths). According to Paul Taylor, this novel “has been called the key to the Pinteresque enigma, the early piece that contains—in an almost blatant fashion—a striking number of the seeds that bloomed in the more fully achieved work.” The dramatist himself gives a similar affirmation of the autobiographical nature of the only novel by him:

... it had great value, great interest for me. From my point of view, the general delirium and states of mind and reactions and relationships in the play—although terribly sparse—are clear to me. I know all the things that aren't said, and the way the characters actually look at each other, and what they mean by looking at each other. It's a play about betrayal and distrust.

He even admitted that “it was autobiographical, to a certain extent, based on part of my youth in Hackney.” He is none of the protagonists, but in each of them we can perceive the shadow of his Hackney years: their intellectual games of debates, their exclusivity against the only female character, Virginia, and above all, their struggling for dominance in their group.

In the book, though all the three young men regard their masculine friendship as something sacred, nevertheless, each of them is bent on obtaining a predominance in the “room.” Len tries to impose his influence on others through his intellectual superiority represented by the image of the lens of his glasses and Bach he plays. The first long dialogue between Len and Pete has set up the pre-dominant tone of the book. By reminding Pete against wearing glasses, Len insists on a leading role in the “room.” So, he tells Pete, “You see, there's always a point of light in the center of the lens, in the center of your sight. You can't go wrong. You can't miss your step.” Len's ambition is, as Pete discerns, to be God in their group. By contrast, Pete tries to exercise his influence through power manipulation, i.e., using one person against another within their group. Mark, the third figure in this group, has made such an accusation of Pete in the novel:

—You've been using me as you use every bugger. In actual fact you don't give a fuck for any of us.

…

—You're twofaced, [Mark said.] You've treated me as one thing to my face and behind my back it's been quite a different matter. (170)

Differing from Len and Pete, Mark has his own voice heard in the “room”mainly through rebellious actions. Sitting with his feet upon the table, spitting in the fireplace deliberately, and finally sleeping with Pete's girlfriend, he demonstrates his own strength physically rather than intellectually within the group. It is he who gives the final hit to the collapse of their masculine friendship. So, the central image of the dwarfs in Len's mind is the very symbol of the inner corruption within the group: they “are an index that there is something rather rotten in the state of Hackney.” As Pinter writes, “The dwarfs have emerged out of Len's imagination as the truth of the relationship between himself, Pete and Mark. He sees a savage, predatory and disgusting world which is his truth.” This perception of the universal existence of power desire among the characters in the book evolved later into the psychological perspective (besides the social one) in Pinter's examination of human relations in his plays.

And significantly, the Hackney days also saw the shaping of Pinter's views about gender. Actually, even in his childhood, Pinter had possessed some privileged views of the male friendship from which girls are excluded. As he recalls his early fantasy life in imagination in childhood, he says that he creates a small body of imaginary friends in the back garden,“[they] were definitely all boys.” But at the same time, Pinter also admits that he is a precocious child. He remembered two things had happened to him at a very early age: falling in love and finding the cinema. One experience that Pinter reminisced frequently is that his father found him at the age of fourteen, sitting up very late one night in the kitchen tearfully writing some love poetry. What Pinter felt grateful about his father is that, instead of sending him to bed, he encouraged him to go on with writing. This early feeling towards the female developed into a patriarchal attitude during the Hackney days. Hamlett, one of his early lovers, once recollected how Pinter was furious when she danced with another actor at a university theatre party. In the Hackney group, all the members took the females as offensive intruders into their intellectual masculinity.

What made Pinter's feeling about women intricate was that he found women could become a source of disastrous disturbance to the balance and integrity of male exclusivity. According to Pinter's own story, a secret date outside their group activities would be considered as a kind of slight “betrayal” in the mock-outraging eyes of his male friends. Pinter realized in this period that women could somehow become the cause of destruction and pain in the exclusive circle of men. In the highly selective and intellectual Hackney circle, any heterosexual date is seen as a betrayal to the male friendship. Moreover, having the experience of being punished by the group members in the “Pinteresque” way because of his secret walk with a friend's girlfriend, he identified women as dangerous creatures with highly destructive potentiality. This perception seems to be confirmed by his personal experience with Hamlett. As Hamlett accounts how she and Pinter got separated:

I was also very stubborn and Harold had a strong possessive streak. At one point we were going to set up in a flat together and I just chickened out. I also remember asking him if I could go out with anyone else if I felt it was finished. A few weeks later, at a Christmas Party, I met Caspar Wrede who was on the production course at the Old Vic School and within eight weeks we were married. I think, with the cruelty of youth, I gave Harold a great deal of pain …. I didn't see him after that for fifteen years, when my own marriage broke up, but even now we remain good friends.

Hamlett might be the first woman who gave Pinter the bitterness of being shattered. As Pinter recalls the agony he had when he first heard of the news of Hamlett's marriage from his friend, “I remember I dropped my coffee cup …. And we sat there. It must have been afternoon. We sat there for some time in silence …. He finally said, ‘I'm thinking of walking over to Toynbee Hall.' It was a hell of a long walk …” Hamlett's way to end their relationship of love and the pain her action caused to Pinter may let people understand why Pinter could create such female figures as Virginia in The Dwarfs,Ruth in The Homecoming and Emma in Betrayal. One common feature shared by all these women is that no matter how vulnerable they look in the male-dominated society, they all turn out to be an undermining force to the male integrity in the plays.

These contradictory perspectives shaped in Pinter's early years eventually worked as creative dynamics in his future dramatic writings.