Филолошко уметнички факултет

HAROLD PINTER (1930-2008), The DEATH OF A BEAUTIFUL DREAMER

Harold Pinter died on December 24, 2008, after a long battle with illness.  A week before his death I had sent him a video clip of the ceremony held in his honor six months earlier, on June 6, 2008, at the University of Kragujevac.  As part of the celebration the students of the English department performed a scene from his Ashes to Ashes, and music student  Bojan Bulatović sang Stephen Foster's song Beautiful Dreamer, which he dedicated to Pinter and which all the participants spontaneously joined in, to send him their love and best wishes.

I promised him the clip during our lunch meeting at the restaurant Essenza in London on September 11,^, 2008, because he expressed great eagerness to have it.  At the meeting we talked about the honorary degree awarded to him by the University of Kragujevac, and the texts Professor Ljiljana Bogoeva-Sedlar and I had written about him, (both printed in this issue). Later, when he had read Ljiljana’s essay on ‘consent or concern’, Pinter wrote ‘’I would be glad if you would tell her how impressed I am by it. I found it extremely acute and undoubtedly accurate.’’ And when he read my paper Pinter commented: ''I was very moved by your presentation'' (read full text of the presentation).

My interest in Pinter started about twenty years ago when, under the supervision of Professor Bogoeva, I decided to write my doctoral dissertation on Pinter and Albee. The dissertation was completed in 1996 and arranged for publication in 1998 as a monograph Drama in the Age of Irony. Thus, the idea to award Pinter an honorary degree of the University of Kragujevac came, first and foremost, from my profound understanding and appreciation of his dramatic art. The great displays of personal integrity and courage by Pinter-the-political-activist came later.

I had travelled to London that September 2008 in order to take part in a two day theatre conference scheduled to take place in the British Library. The topic was The Golden Generation, New Light on Post-War British Theatre 1945-1968, with Pinter announced as one of the 'witnesses'. We all held our breath when, helping himself with a cane, Pinter walked into the lecture hall, climbed on to the platform and seated himself opposite Harry Burton. The interview lasted a full hour. Pinter talked about the first productions of his plays in 1957, remembering his fellow playwrights and actors. He was particularly grieved by the death of his friends - his favourite actor Allan Bates, and his favourite fellow playwright Simon Gray.  He singled out Michael Gambon, who was then playing in his No Man’s Land, just about to be transferred from Dublin’s Gate Theatre to London’s The Duke of York’s, as  the one great actor who could compare with the likes of Allan Bates and his generation. During the conversation with Burton, Pinter said that he had always been a rather solitary figure in literary circles, never a member of a group or a movement. But, he added, he does meet and exchange views with other writers from time to time. Such an occasion had recently been provided by the traditional gathering of young new writers from China, India, Cuba and other countries from around the globe, organized by The Royal Court Theatre. While the interviewer wanted to know whether the writers talked about the oppression in their countries, Pinter flared and pointed out that it was necessary to speak of Britain, his own country, and the hypocrisy of its leaders who protested, on moral grounds, against the Russian invasion of Georgia. ‘It stinks to high heaven’, he exclaimed, and reminded his country’s leadership that they had invaded Iraq in 2003, and that as a consequence a million people had died, including hundreds of thousands of children. He would continue to insist on truth, knowing that he was not alone, and that thousands of people around the world shared his views.

When the interview was over, visibly exhausted, Pinter withdrew to the back room but reappeared soon to take his seat in the hall. His wife, Lady Antonia, who had sat next to me during the interview, mentioned me to him and introduced us. Although we had agreed, in our earlier phone conversation, that I would ring him up the following morning, Pinter asked me straightforwardly: “Are you free for lunch tomorrow?’’ Quite surprised I replied: ''Well, yes, if that is the only time that suits you.''  Surprised in return, Pinter inquired whether I had planned something else.  ''The conference continues until tomorrow evening,'' was my explanation! What a loss it would have been if I had failed to respond properly to his kind lunch invitation! Who would have thought that he would leave us so soon. 

As a matter of fact I had caught Pinter’s attention during the conference break, while talking to the actress Auriol Smith who had played in the historic first performance of Pinter’s Room in 1957, and was now putting up a Vaclav Havel play at the theatre in Richmond. She compared Vaclav Havel to Pinter, but I protested that Havel had lost much of his 'dissident' integrity since he became a fervent supporter of America’s many recent wars, including the NATO air attacks on Serbia. At this point I saw Pinter nodding his approval.  Our conversation at Essenza two days later went along similar lines. ''I heard what you said about Havel and it is true. We still meet occasionally but never speak about politics. I have known him for thirty years, and when you have known someone for thirty years, it is difficult to stop liking them. And besides he was in prison, he was ill. I was ill'', he said, suddenly, with emphasis. I took that to mean that he believed himself no longer ill, and was glad he considered himself healed.

We had many topics to discuss, in the first place the recent degree award to him by the University of Kragujevac. Pinter repeated how honoured he was. His wife had earlier said that he was very proud of it. The University had sent him the diploma with the video recording of the whole ceremony (in Serbian), but he said he could not  view and remember all the material he received, daily, from all over the world, as his eyes sometimes betrayed him. (As his legs did too, I thought, but not his head, luckily. He seemed so mentally fit and hale.) He said that he would, indeed, like to see the closing part of the ceremony when the students play the last scene of Ashes to Ashes and then sing to him. Since I did not have the recording with me I promised to send it. We talked about the city of Kragujevac, the first capitol of Serbia, liberated from Turkish rule in the 19^th century, and of the first Serbian theatre, opened in Kragujevac in 1835, still very much in use. We could not avoid mentioning the plight of Kragujevac in World War II, and in the NATO air-attacks in 1999. On October 21, 1941, Nazi German command in Kragujevac executed at least 2.000 people, including high school children, in retribution for the actions of the partisan resistance fighters. The massacre was in line with a directive Hitler issued to the Wermacht High Command, that for each dead German soldier 100 local residents would be killed, and that for every wounded German soldier at least 50 Serbs must die. In 1999 Kragujevac was heavily bombed, its industry completely destroyed. Pinter repeated his indignation.

I thanked him again for his support for Serbia during the NATO military intervention, and he repeated what a terrible shame it was. I told him about our first meeting in Leeds in 2007, which was not exactly a meeting because we were never introduced. He was not feeling well and could only attend the award ceremony, and the performance of his Monologue by Henry Woolf. Just before the play began, after the lights had dimmed, Pinter entered the auditorium accompanied by his wife, and sat silently behind us.

As we lunched I told Pinter of the strange impression which the circumstances of the Leeds conference left on me. We were all affected by his ill health and the visible sadness, even fear, in his eyes, and were displeased by the distance from him the organizers asked us to keep. The topic of my presentation were his plays The Birthday Party, Party Time and Celebration, and  the documentary Counterblast, as well as several April anniversaries which I wished to mark (and others 'celebrate'): three Easter bombings of Belgrade and Serbia - by the Nazis in 1941, the Allies in 1944, and NATO in 1999. Just thinking of these cruel and unjust events produced strong emotions in me so that, towards the end of my presentation, when I was about to read my closing tribute to Pinter – ‘for your invaluable contribution to the art of drama, as well as your intellectual honesty and courage THANK YOU HAROLD PINTER once again’, I broke into tears that I could not stop for half an hour. There was a silence of embarrassment in the audience. 

I told Pinter that my desperation was partly caused by the continuous labelling of the Serbian people as an epitome of evil, to the point that many in Serbia are beginning to adopt and internalize this ugly image of them. "No, no, no", Pinter was shaking his head in disapproval. "This must not be allowed." From one of the most well liked and esteemed nations in the world, I told him, we have become the most hated. My generation felt the full weight of this shift, and few could bear it. Pinter said that he understood these extremities very well. ‘I am unpopular too’, he said. Indeed, there was some truth to his claim. Twice that week, in London, when I mentioned meeting Pinter, the comments were strange:  one comment was ‘Did he behave himself?’, and the other ‘What did he have to say for himself?’

During our meeting Pinter displayed wonderful freshness of spirit and curiosity, for a man who had already been several times at the point of dying. After all the topics we had discussed he wished to hear from me about my theatrical experiences in London, especially Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch and Ann Jellicoe’s Western Women. A full twenty minutes passed between the moment he called a taxi and announced that he had to leave to have his afternoon rest, and the moment of our actual departure. The taxi driver was so displeased for having to wait, that later he wouldn’t help Pinter get out of the car and Pinter swore.

In so many ways he was so incredibly active and alive that September. He invited me to a couple of theatrical events; we talked about arranging an interview with Radio Belgrade. He obviously wanted to be a charming host and make a good impression. You have only to take a look at the photograph taken at  Essenza (on the cover page of this issue): he is leaning in a leisurely fashion  on his arm, behind the bottle of wine which he had ordered before I came, out of which he would later gallantly pour for  me. A girl at the restaurant took the photos. The first one showed too much of a white wall between us, I asked for another from a slightly different angle. ‘You should become a director, you have a sense of space’, Pinter told her with a disarming smile, and she beamed with satisfaction. The taxi driver was a handsome dark man of about 60 with huge black eyes and grayish hair. ‘This is Gabriel Garcia Marques’, said Pinter mischievously. Indeed the man did resemble Marques, and I laughed.

Yet, when we parted in the taxi and Pinter put his hand over mine, saying warmly ‘Look, I am very glad to have met you. I am indeed very glad. Take care', it sounded somehow like goodbye. I understood, later, after the news of his death had reached me that he was a man who existed between two worlds and tried to live in this one to his full, despite the pain he was under. We planned to meet again in two days in the National Theatre where his two plays premiered, Landscape and A Slight Ache. He invited me to the VIP lounge for a cocktail during the break, but he did not attend these events after all, and I left London with a bad premonition.

It was a great privilege to have met Harold Pinter, and the news of his (in my view) premature death, brought great sadness to all of us who had known and appreciated him. This issue of Heritage, dedicated to Harold Pinter, was planned immediately after the award ceremony in June 2008 as another tribute to Pinter’s extraordinary dramatic artistry and civil courage.

Radmila Nastić, Kragujevac 2009