Harold Pinter was a born letter writer. In later years his communications, at least to me as his biographer, largely took the form of cryptic postcards. Often they accompanied the text of a new play, or poem, and would simply say, in his boldly assertive hand, “Here it is.” But, in his 20s, Pinter wrote long letters to the close friends of his Hackney youth and a tranche of them has been acquired by the British Library from Henry Woolf and the estate of the late Mick Goldstein. From a brief sampling of them several things emerge: Pinter’s enduring capacity for friendship, his instinctive appreciation of Samuel Beckett and his passionate love of cricket.
None of this may surprise us, but it is fascinating to have it so richly confirmed by the letters; and the mere fact of their existence is testament to Pinter’s life-long devotion to his Hackney pals. In the immediate postwar years, a gang of them – including Pinter, Woolf, Goldstein and Moishe Wernick – would sit in Hackney cafes, endlessly argue and exchange ideas and go on whatever cultural jaunts they could afford. Although it was a democratic group, Pinter instinctively assumed the role of leader of the pack. As Woolf wrote in a moving essay in the memorial volume of the annual Pinter Review: “Without a penny in his pocket, he still lit up the world like a glow torch: when he wasn’t introducing us to Beckett or Henry Miller, he was dragging us off to see avant-garde movies like Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and we roamed around Hackney spouting Dylan Thomas or John Webster’s The White Devil.”
Even when the Hackney gang went their separate ways, they remained in close touch. I get the feeling they were trying to recapture the intellectual excitement of their youth, their delight in shared discoveries and even the competitive edge to their friendship. It’s all there in Pinter’s autobiographical novel, The Dwarfs, the original typescript of which has now turned up among Mick Goldstein’s possessions. But that sense of indissoluble mateship is always present in the letters. At one point Pinter writes to Woolf: “Henry, my dear, when I am a great, successful actor we shall form a company.” Pinter envisages different roles for Wernick and two other members of the gang, Jimmy Law and Ron Percival. He goes on: “It will be a great success. And will give us all something to live on. The theatre is one of the good things of civilisation.”
But if there is a binding factor to the letters, it is Beckett; and what is impressive is Pinter’s understanding of, and enthusiasm for, the great writer well before he was known to most British readers or theatregoers. Pinter once told me that the moment of discovery came when he was working as an actor in Ireland in the early 1950s and stumbled across a fragment of Beckett’s novel, Watt, in a magazine called Poetry Ireland. Pinter desperately tried to find out more about this unknown writer and, when he got back to London, persuaded the Westminster Library to disgorge a copy of Murphy which he kept to his dying day. As Pinter said: “I suddenly felt that what his writing was doing was walking through a mirror into the other side of the world which was, in fact, the real world.”
Like all disciples, Pinter became faintly possessive about a writer whom he had personally discovered. He also became hungry for any scraps of information about the man himself. While acting in Ireland in the summer of 1955, Pinter chances to meet a woman who has worked as Beckett’s secretary in Paris. He immediately pumps her for information and writes back excitedly to Goldstein: “Beckett, it seems, though many years in Paris, speaks English with a Dublin accent. Where she expected a curious lunatic fish she found a sincere, unassuming man, modest and straightforward. When she informed him he was being compared with Joyce, as he is in Paris circles, he answered with ‘Ah no, no, not at all.’ Beckett does not mix with Paris literary types.”
To his dismay, Pinter was still working in Ireland when Waiting for Godot had its British premiere at London’s Arts theatre in August 1955. But he badgers Goldstein to go and see it, begs him to go to Zwemmers bookshop in Charing Cross Road to get a copy of it, along with Molloy, and, very amusingly, takes proprietorial exception to Harold Hobson’s enthusiastic review in the Sunday Times. Ironically, Hobson would be the one national critic who, three years later, championed Pinter’s The Birthday Party when virtually everyone else trashed it.
But in 1955 Pinter wrote to Goldstein objecting to Hobson’s description of Watt as “wildly comic” and claiming, which was undoubtedly true, that he knew far more about Beckett’s fiction than the famous critic.
The whole relation of Pinter to Beckett is complex. Pinter loved the work and adored the man, but it is significant that he objects, in one of the letters, to Patrick Magee’s description of his own first play, The Room, as “imitation Beckett”. There is little doubt that Pinter absorbed a good deal from Beckett, especially the realisation that drama was under no compulsion to supply audiences with a resolution. But, as dramatists, they also strike me as very different. Beckett’s plays, with the notable exception of the radio work, All That Fall, are rarely rooted in an observably realistic world. Pinter’s plays, for all their imagistic power and multiple possibilities, gain much of their zest from their intense specificity.
If discovery of Beckett binds the Pinter letters, so too does Pinter’s love of cricket. It is well known that Pinter was a zealous cricketer in his youth, would play hookey from drama school in the early 1950s to go to Lord’s. In later life, both presided over his own team, the Gaieties, and wrote occasional pieces about the game: a friend maintains that a sentence of Pinter’s – “That beautiful evening Compton made 70” – is one of the most evocative ever written about cricket. But the letters show that, in the month of July 1955, when Pinter was excited about the imminent premiere of Waiting for Godot, he was no less stirred by the news that a young Yorkshireman called Doug Padgett, who for a time was thought to be in the mould of Pinter’s beloved Len Hutton, had scored a century against Warwickshire.
We also get from the letters a sense of the difficulties and joys facing a young playwright. Working flat out as an actor in weekly rep, Pinter despairs of ever being able to finish in time the play Woolf has asked him to write for the Bristol University drama department: “Sorry about the play. Not possible,” Pinter writes of The Room that would, in fact, be produced in May 1957. And no sooner has Pinter written The Room than he starts feverishly working on The Birthday Party and announces that “playwriting just now has got me by the balls”. Thankfully, it was to maintain its grip for the rest of his career. But, although the public image of Pinter derives from his mature years and has been ludicrously distorted by the media stereotype of him as a man in a state of permanent anger, these letters reveal the quality that always struck me, and that Woolf avidly seized on in his tribute in the Pinter Review: his “appetite for life”.
• For further details of the British Library Harold Pinter archive see bl.uk.
