The Sinister Mediocrity of Harold Pinter By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Harold Pinter's early writing for the stage was correctly described -- with no objection from him -- as "the theater of the absurd." But it has been left to the selectors of the Nobel in literature to make that definition postmodern and thus to drain it of all irony. Their choice of Mr. Pinter is a selection of absurdity quite detached from drama: a straight and philistine preference for the grotesque. "I have no idea why they gave me the award," said the playwright when the news was brought to him. This justified incredulity showed a brief flash of his old form.
But in point of fact, any thinking person knows precisely why he was this year's Laureate at a moment when a person of even average literacy might have lit upon Rushdie, Roth or Pamuk. Just as with the selection of Jimmy Carter for the "Peace" Prize, where the judges chose to emphasize the embarrassment they hoped thereby to visit on the Bush administration, the ludicrous elevation of a third-rate and effectively former dramatist is driven by pseudo-intellectual European hostility to the change of regime in Iraq.
Mr. Pinter's work, according to the clumsily-phrased Nobel citation, "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Let us agree that his early plays -- he has not produced anything worth noticing since the 1960s -- do indeed show an uneasy relationship between the banal and the evil. But let me offer you a stave from a poem he wrote in January 2003, titled "God Bless America": "Here they go again,/ The Yanks in their armored parade/ Chanting their ballads of joy/ As they gallop across the big world/ Praising America's God."
This, and other verses like it, were awarded the Wilfred Owen prize by a group of English judges. When re-reading Owen on "the pity of war," I invariably find that it is difficult to do so without tears. When scanning Mr. Pinter on the same subject, I cannot get to the end without the temptation either to laugh out loud or to throw up. The sheer puerility of the stuff is precisely a combination of banality with evil: a preference for dictatorship larded with obscenity and fatuity. (And scrawled, I might add, by a man who helped found the International Committee for the Defense of Slobodan Milosevic.) One has had more enlightenment, and been exposed to more wit, from the walls of public lavatories, such as those featured so morbidly in Pinter's early effort "The Caretaker."
The Nobel committee allowed Borges and Nabokov to go to their graves unrecognized, while choosing writers who it is difficult to remember without wincing. Last year's selection, of a mediocre Austrian Stalinist named Elfriede Jellinek, caused a few winces even in Stockholm. And Dario Fo? What can one possibly say -- except that the theater of the absurd is apparently always on the road. Jose Saramago can certainly write -- just as Frau Jellinek can certainly not -- but one is compelled to suspect that without his staunch post-1989 membership of the unusually degenerated Portuguese Communist Party he would not have been considered. As with the Peace Prize, the award of the laureateship for literature has come to approximate the value of a resolution of the U.N. Special Committee on Human Rights. The occasional exceptions -- I would want to instance Sir Vidia Naipaul in spite of his own toxic political views -- only throw the general sinister mediocrity into sharper relief.
And sinister mediocrity has become Mr. Pinter's stock-in-trade. Is it really believable that a conclave of righteous Scandinavians should have honored a man who said, in loud terms, that the mass murder in New York in September 2001 was a justified "retaliation"? A man who described the genocidal war-criminal Milosevic as the true leader of the "Yugoslavia" he had subverted and cleansed and destroyed? A man who said that George Bush and Tony Blair were "terrorists," while Saddam Hussein was not?
Even in his increasingly lame and slovenly literary output, Mr. Pinter always married politicization to illiteracy. His useless play "Mountain Language," extruded about a dozen years ago, drew attention to the plight of the Kurdish people but lost interest in them as soon as the subject crossed the border of the NATO alliance: Turkish Kurds were fine but Mr. Pinter would fight like a madman against any attempt to liberate their brothers and sisters in Iraq. Mildly rebuked by the American ambassador in London for "calling the U.S. administration a blood-thirsty wild animal" (I quote from Mr. Pinter's own narrative here) he replied: "All I can say is: Take a look at Donald Rumsfeld's face and the case is made." All he can say? Alas, yes. I have my own differences with the secretary of defense but this rhetoric is pathetic and nasty at the same time.
A luxurious literary/political salon, established by Mr. Pinter and his noble wife Lady Antonia Fraser to protest the Gulag-like character of the Thatcher regime, is often said to have dissolved because of unkind media ridicule. To the contrary: I know many people who used to attend that "salon," and I can tell you that it dissolved because of the irrational rages and hysterical harangues of its host, now garlanded for his services to the high calling of letters.
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Is this depressing? I happen not to think so. The Nobel judges have again given their approval to a writer of doggerel; a very poor man's Beckett, a man most celebrated for the long silences that punctuated his stage "dialogue," who would have no reputation of any kind if it were not for the slightly unbelievable character of his public statements. Let us hope, then, that the day when the Nobel Prize is a local and provincial event has been brought closer. Especially in their opinions about peace and literature -- two matters that ought to concern all serious people -- the judges have brought absurdity upon themselves. Let us withdraw our assent from their fool's-gold standard, and see what happens. Let us also hope for a long silence to descend upon the thuggish bigmouth who has strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage for far too long.
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Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" (Eminent Lives, 2005).