Harold Pinter - Nobel laureate for literature - 2005... Being a sort of writer and occasional poet I should be more aware of the work of others than I am. I would like to sit down with a good book more often, but the distractions around here are many. The kids show no mercy to an adult with a nose in a book. Sometimes I've complained that I have had to restart a reading the same paragraph about a dozen times because of interruptions, but nobody cares.
There are lots of famous writers I have never read. Harold Pinter, last week's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature is one example. Mr Pinter is English and is well known as a playwright, actor, director, screenwriter, poet, fictional author, and critic of the Iraq wars. "Is that all?" I asked myself.
I was interested in what had attracted the Nobel Academy's attention. I did a Google search and discovered innumerable accolades, including the committee's citation - plus Mr Pinter's official web site. His list of past works is immense. One would have thought too many titles for any other individual to research in a single lifetime. He has been a darling of the BBC too, and they have an impressive list of credits with his name.
He was born in 1930, according to the
Svenska Akademien biography he was the son of a Jewish dressmaker. It doesn't indicate if this was his father or mother. Another biography at
Books and Writers says he was the son of Jewish tailor. It also has some juicy bits not mentioned by the Nobel people. One omission is particularly curious because it confirms he has been a long-time pacifist. Pinter was hauled before a British magistrate in 1949 for being a conscientious objector. Maybe the Swedes are a bit shy in publicising this, lest it similarly inspire their own youthful conscripts?
Alas Mr Pinter might have been a smoker. He has cancer, and from what I heard of his voice in an interview, it could be throat cancer. If not, it is something else serious to do with his pneumatic department. The fat Nobel cheque from Sweden will buy a few packets of lozenges, but his personal event-horizon is probably looming.
The accolades during the week have frequently mentioned that his writing style has been memorialised in dictionaries with the word pinteresque. My computer spell checker has never heard of it, but that's no surprise. I checked my
Concise Oxford Dictionary but there was nothing there either. It should have been between pinta, as in pinta beer, and pintado, a pigeon sized petrel of the southern seas. No hang on - a,b,c,d,e. It should have been after pintado.
Apparently the term refers to his use of the pregnant pause... He used it as a device to connote menace - and also save a lot of typing... The word minimalist has been applied to his material. There are said to have been over the years themes of threat and injustice, dominance and submission. Could there be a dash of neuroticism beneath it all?
Because of the Nobel recognition I had the urge to read some of his work. No, not so much an urge, more perhaps more due to an uncomfortable awareness of my own ignorance. Being stingy, naturally I tried a search the web for free pirated downloads. Regretfully, I am not very good at finding such things. Maybe his stuff is so boring and lacking public demand that the pirates simply don't bother?
I looked at
his website too. I thought that perhaps a man of such publicised values might make available to the lesser plebes some of his earlier literary works which have long gone out of print. Obviously he must have made a lot of money from his writing, but obviously not enough to be charitable in this respect.
There were some downloads of his post male-menopause rants about the Iraq war, but I'm wasn't in the mood for such depressing head-hammering ideology.
Somewhere along the way I found a few of his poems. I thought them all a bit short - short changing even. Must be his minimalist outlook. Gimmicky even. For example the one he got the
Wilfred Owen prize for. My guess is that anything he puts on paper now has an adoring readership - provided he has signed it.
Undeterred in my quest for a free read, I checked into the online Melville City Public Library system. Its huge, with many interlinked branches scattered through the southern suburbs of Perth. Three items came up flagged with his name, two videos, and a book, which I ordered. My local library will retrieve it and send me an email when it's in.
I think it intriguing that the latest Nobel laureate was represented by only one book in our entire community library system, and that three days after the prize was announced, I was the only person to request it - and now I've forgotten its name. Duh!
Our state library system had more entries, but they appeared mostly to be plays, and there were many duplications. Nowhere near the number of individual works cited in the Nobel bibliography. I feel sure there will be a better selection in the university libraries, but I no longer have borrowing rights to them.
© MMV Paul R. Weaver.
About the writerCheck out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days.
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