From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
Another Left Turn in Stockholm
An America-hating playwright wins a Nobel. Surprisingly, he deserves it.
NEW YORK--Nothing could have been less unexpected than the news that Harold Pinter had won the Nobel Prize for literature. The only surprise was that he deserved it--which probably wasn't why he got it.
That Mr. Pinter is a distinguished writer is beyond doubt. To be sure, we haven't seen much of his work on Broadway in recent years, but the Roundabout Theatre Company's 2003 revival of "The Caretaker" (1960), a dark comedy about a tramp and two brothers who share a rundown house, served as a valuable reminder that while his opaque, elliptical style has long since hardened into mannerism, Mr. Pinter really did earn his reputation as one of the key voices in postwar British drama. Even Noël Coward, who had no use whatsoever for trendy theatrical innovation, was impressed by his ability to stir up profoundly unsettling emotions through the simplest of means. " 'The Caretaker,' on the face of it, is everything I hate most in the theatre--squalor, repetition, lack of actions, etc.--but somehow it seizes hold of you," he wrote in his diary. "Nothing happens except that somehow it does."
Alas, I must confess to suspecting the motives of the members of the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy, which awards the literature prize each October. For while they had ample reason to give the award to Mr. Pinter solely because of the quality of his work, it has lately been their wont to honor second- and third-rate authors known less for their writing than their hard-left political views.
Among such laureates is the Italian playwright Dario Fo, the 1997 winner whose subsequent response to 9/11 was verminous: "Regardless of who carried out the massacre, this violence is the legitimate daughter of the culture of violence, hunger and inhumane exploitation." As for last year's winner, Elfriede Jelinek, I need only point out that Knut Ahnlund went so far as to resign from the Academy on Tuesday after publishing an essay in Svenska Dagbladet, a major Swedish newspaper, in which he flatly stated that giving her the prize had caused "irreparable damage" to its reputation.
Now Mr. Pinter's own political views are--to put it mildly--no secret. He is a Castro-loving America-hater of long and virulent standing who went off the deep end when the U.S. and Britain decided to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He later described this country as "the most feared, most powerful and most detested nation the world has ever known" (worse even than Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, in other words) and proclaimed the invasion of Iraq to be "an act of state terrorism. So it is Bush and Blair who are in fact the terrorists. I believe they must be arraigned at the International Criminal Court of Justice and tried as war criminals." Also noteworthy in this regard is the last stanza of "The Special Connection," his 2004 poem about Messrs. Bush and Blair: "A man bows down before another man/And sucks his lust." If that's Mr. Pinter's idea of poetry, he needs to brush up his Shakespeare.
Yet I hasten to point out that Mr. Pinter's politics are no reason for him to have been denied the Nobel. Some conservatives seem to think otherwise. Within minutes of the announcement, I received this email from a friend: "Do you believe that big phony Pinter won the Nobel?" But Mr. Pinter is no phony--at least not when he's writing plays--and you don't have to be completely convinced by his fill-in-the-blanks style to admire his uncanny knack for portraying the myriad ways in which people talk past one another, never quite managing to say what they mean. Moreover, the Nobel Prize for literature isn't exclusively reserved for politically correct America-hating lefties. It's also gone to the illustrious likes of Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, V.S. Naipaul, Octavio Paz, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, none of whom comes remotely close to filling that bill.
Granted, I can think of a number of other authors at least as deserving (starting with Tom Stoppard, an even greater British playwright whose politics are more or less the inverse of his older colleague's). Even so, I have no problem whatsoever with Mr. Pinter's having copped the medal this time around. If the author of such richly ambiguous studies of failed communication as "The Caretaker," "The Birthday Party" (1957) and "The Homecoming" (1964) doesn't deserve a Nobel, who does?
All this notwithstanding, it's clear that the Nobels are frequently given for purposes less aesthetic than political, though more often it's the peace prize with which the Nobel committee gets stuck on stupid. (Two words: Yasser Arafat.) And so I wouldn't be at all surprised if one of the reasons why Harold Pinter was deemed especially worthy of this year's literature prize was because his political views were so closely in sync with those of the rest of Old Europe's chattering classes.
Maybe I'm wrong. I wish I were. But by now it doesn't much matter. A prize that has been indiscriminately bestowed upon V.S. Naipaul and Dario Fo, after all, can no longer be taken very seriously, no matter who gets it after that.
Mr. Teachout, The Wall Street Journal's drama critic, writes the biweekly "Sightings" column for the Journal's Weekend Edition and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
