Pinter’s self-vandalising

Let’s think about it. How did Harold Pinter write his masterpieces? And why are they praised so much more lavishly than the scribbles of his contemporaries?

Let’s think about it. How did Harold Pinter write his masterpieces? And why are they praised so much more lavishly than the scribbles of his contemporaries? Moonlight, his 1993 play, has been slickly revived at the Donmar and it opens with a dying pensioner sprawling luxuriously in a double-bed and ranting at his wife. Across stage his sons engage in madcap vaudevillian banter. Other characters wander in and speak fluent nonsense. A girl, who is also a ghost, articulates charming drivel about moonshine and memory. The characters fail to communicate and the dramatist fails to communicate why they fail to communicate. Typical Pinter.

He adopted this uneasy, audience-intolerant method because he reached his creative maturity in the mid-20th century when literature had generated a shadow industry, academia, which was more powerful and prosperous than the art it elucidated. Shrewd writers like Pinter and Beckett copied the techniques of conceptual painters: withdraw detail, blur clarity, obfuscate meaning.

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Literary critics and biographers responded by giving these mystifiers pride of place over the clarifiers. Why? Simplicity and definition are less amenable to academic study than allusiveness and obscurity. A boffin who lectures about a lucid, unequivocal play soon runs out of words. But one who expounds the meaning of a smudged hieroglyph can keep rabbiting on till pension day. So the exaltation of withholders like Pinter and Beckett over entertainers like Rattigan and Simon Gray has nothing to do with artistic merit. It’s about economics. Members of the lumpen commentariat can harvest a richer crop of tracts and monographs from an abstruse dramatist than from a plain-speaking one.