Reading between the pauses

Harold Pinter wearing his Legion d’honneur medal of 2007

It is more than a decade since the original version of Various Voices: 60 years of Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2008 (Faber, £14.99) — Harold Pinter’s writings, musings and meanderings — was published. Since that time, some major things have happened in the life of probably the greatest English-language playwright of the last century. For one, he became a Nobel laureate, so this book contains the full, remarkable Nobel lecture. For another, Pinter died.

It says something about the energy of the man that the book had to be updated three times over those last 10 years to keep pace with the work. And, as this was a period during which a cancer-riddled Pinter had mostly given up writing plays, Various Voices, covering 60 years of creativity, serves as an essential record.

The collection confirms the good and the bad about Pinter. There can be little doubt that much of the material here would be of much less note were it not for those extraordinary plays. Whereas the dramas were energised by forensic language and imagery, much of the politics and poetry is saddled with anger, a lot of it directed at the United States.

So much of what Pinter said or wrote outside his drama has the whiff of self-importance. Or is that conviction? Or dogma? His account of visiting torture victims in Turkey with Arthur Miller in 1985 is one of a few honourable exceptions, not just because Miller gave him some socks after one of Pinter’s suitcases was lost in transit, but because of Pinter’s fearless encounter with the American ambassador.

But if the violent poetry overreaches, Pinter’s prose just as emphatically reveals an impressive — and prescient — grasp of his subject. In a letter written to his friend Mick Goldstein, Pinter sets out a wonderfully eloquent defence of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot.

True, this should come as no surprise, until you consider that it was written in 1955 and Pinter was in Ireland when Godot opened. The letter, which effortlessly echoes the rhythms of Beckett, was written before Pinter had even seen the play.