Pinter, Harold, 1930- fromLiterature Online biography Published in Cambridge, 2000, by Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company) Copyright © 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company. All Rights Reserved. WhenAlan Bennettwas asked for a fitting tribute toHarold Pinter(1930-2008) on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, he suggested two minutes' silence. If silence became the most famous element of Pinter's writing, then it was chiefly because he made it contain so much: confusion, rage, bemusement, humour and suffering. It was one of the principal aspects of a style that earned him a place in theNew Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: 'Pinteresque: of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the British playwright Harold Pinter'. His elisions and silences, along with his surreal borrowings from everyday speech, his use of slang and his demotic poetry, made him one of the most influential dramatists of the late twentieth century. With his unique and memorable style, he was able to summon up a world in which confused, displaced characters (usually male) struggle pointlessly against the dead weight of family, class, religion, work, romantic convention and the past. Profoundly influenced byBeckett, but also byJohn Webster, KafkaandDostoevsky, Pinter blended terror and absurdity to expose the unspeakable futility at the heart of existence. The more this is appreciated, the less his characters can acknowledge it: 'The more acute the experience, the less articulate the expression', as Pinter put it. In his depiction of words as obstructing or confusing meaning, he was like his contemporariesOrton,OsborneandStoppard. But his work lacked the intellectual relish of Stoppard, the seedy mischief of Orton and the superficial intelligibility of Osborne. He was more interested in leaving dilemmas unresolved and unexplained. His commitment to 'uncomfortable' theatre had an inestimable effect on late twentieth-century playwriting: notably onSteven BerkoffandDavid Mamet, but also on younger writers such asPatrick Marber,Mark RavenhillandSarah Kane. Pinter was born at Hackney, in London, on 10 October 1930, the only child of Hyman Pinter, a tailor, and Frances Mann. Although his background was solidly working-class, the extended families of his parents offered him sharply contrasting responses to poverty and want. His father's relatives immersed themselves in music and culture: they had a keen appetite for art and literature. His mother's relations were borderline criminal, prizing the virtues of adaptation and survival. Pinter's maternal uncle was a bare-knuckle boxer who eventually severed all links with his family. These conflicting attitudes -- refinement and crudity, courtesy and aggression, writing and fighting -- would be detectable in all of Pinter's later work.
