Mark Steyn sur Harold Pinter (Prix Nobel de Litterature 2005)

Depuis la disparition du socialisme, la gauche progressiste s'est rabattue
sur la culture pour poursuivre le combat "anti-impérialiste". Chaque année,
les Nobel confirment la tendance : l'économie aux libéraux, la littérature
et la paix aux belles âmes orphelines de la Gauche, quitte �* récompenser
des nullités littéraire (Dario Fo...) ou politique (Carter...).

Pinter, qui admire les dictateurs Fidel Castro et Slobodan Milosevic,
Pinter lui-même n'est pas dupe, et soupçonne que c'est son
anti-américanisme ("mass murderers", "new Nazis"...), sa nostalgie du
Labour marxiste (Anthony Blair ? "a deluded idiot", "Blair is a war
criminal and a murderer. He is living a deluded life. While he's smiling
and grinning at everybody, he's responsible at the same time for the murder
of thousands of civilians. He has their blood on his hands") et aux
libérations de l'Afghanistan (contre les Talibans) et de l'Iraq (contre
Saddam Hussein) qui ont motivé la décision du comité Nobel : "I suspected
that they must have taken my political activities into consideration. Since
my political engagement is very much part of my work. It's interwoven into
many of my plays." (The Guardian,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/...592153,00.html)

Faisons mieux connaissance avec ce M. Harold Pinter, le prix Nobel de
littérature 2005. Relisons donc Mark Steyn, le célèbre éditoraliste des
journaux britanniques The Spectator et The Daily Telegraph.

---
(*) Mark Steyn, Pinteresque & Pooteresque,
http://www.steynonline.com/pageprint.cfm?edit_id=69

* (Harold Pinter has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, an oddly timed
award for someone whose literary endeavors have played a back seat to his
political ones for many years. Below I consider various aspects of his
theatrical work, from which I believe he's now formally retired. Instead,
he writes poetry, after a fashion - mostly war poems. One of them I
discussed in this 1999 column from The National Post at the time of the
Kosovo war. See how Nobel-like it sounds to your ears:)


On the letters page of The Guardian, Britain's most distinguished
playwright, Harold Pinter, denounced U.S. foreign policy as "Kiss my arse
or I'll kick your head in." After three further references to arse-kicking,
he concluded: "The U.S. is now a highly dangerous force, totally out of
control". The great American mouth-organist-that's Larry Adler, not
Monica-wrote back to protest this slur on his country: U.S. foreign policy
is, of course, "Kiss my ass or I'll kick your head in." But that's just the
sort of Yankee cultural imperialism Harold's been railing against all his
life: an "ass" is some ghastly Disneyfied airbrushed depilated
silicone-pumped pert DiCaprionic thing bobbing along the beach on
"Baywatch", quite different from the good old sagging, pasty, pimply
British arse.

Actually, now I think about it, Pinter does not entirely eschew American
posterior vernacular. Eight years ago, he wrote a poem to "celebrate" the
U.S. victory in the Gulf:

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit right out of them
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.

You have to sympathize with Harold. In the darkest day of the Thatcher
junta, he and his lovely wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, ran the 20th June
Group, a dissident salon whose membership included Salman Rushdie and which
met at the Pinters' home in Holland Park: Among those who turned up to take
tea with the men of letters and the socialist earl's daughter was
Nicaraguan pin-up boy Daniel Ortega, in his best-pressed Sandinista
fatigues. "We are going to meet again and again," declared Pinter, "until
they break the windows and drag us out." But, instead of breaking the
windows, those ruthless Tory thugs just fell around giggling. It must have
come as a shock, after the '97 liberation, to discover that Mr Blair was
even more into Yank arse-kissing than Thatcher. Worse than that, since this
war started, the new prime minister keeps calling the Iron Lady for advice
on, among other things, how to stop Bill Clinton wimping out. No sooner has
poor old Pinter finally got Maggie, Maggie, Maggie out, out, out than Tony,
Tony, Tony keeps inviting her back, back, back. (The National Post, April
29th 1999)


---
* (I don't think anyone will be paying any attention to Pinter's poetry a
century from now. I've written about his stage work several times over the
years. This piece is from The New Criterion in 1996:)

Harold Pinter likes to tell a story against himself. A year or two back, he
was flying to Miami, and, as a ferocious scourge of the United States
government, expected trouble at immigration. "But I was ready for them, I
was ready for them," he says. He handed over his British passport and the
immigration officer examined it intently.

"Pinter," he said, slowly, and paused. "Would that be the dramatist
Pinter?"

"Yes!" snapped Pinter, aggressively, preparing to launch into a diatribe on
how outrageous it was that a country that claimed to be a democracy should
attempt to impede his passage.

"Well, welcome to the United States, Mr. Pinter," said the officer,
cheerily. "Enjoy your stay."

The most striking thing about the anecdote is how un-"Pinteresque" the
exchange is-save, of course, for the pause, and even that, at least as
Pinter tells the story, falls somewhat short. Over the years, he must have
had many similarly pleasing encoun ters in America-in cabs, in restaurants,
at check-in counters-and yet none of them has caused him to revise his
opinion of the Great Satan: the best you could get from him during the Cold
War was a surly assertion that there was an equivalence of evil between
America and the Soviet Union. It's not that you'd expect a genial
immigration officer to cause Pinter to alter his view of U.S. foreign
policy, but you're surprised that he doesn't take it into account: if
America is an Evil Empire, then surely there is drama to be made in the
contrast between its outwardly perky, wholesome, have-a-nice-day appearance
and its dark soul.

Instead, in his new play Ashes to Ashes (a Royal Court production at the
Ambassadors' Theatre in London), we are in familiar territory: a land of
murky, nameless horrors, whose language is explicitly brutal in character
yet determinedly elusive in meaning. It is a duologue: Lindsay Duncan plays
Rebecca, a terrorized woman; Stephen Rea is Devlin, the man who does the
terrorizing, both of her, sexually, and of her country, politically. "I can
sum up none of my plays," Pinter has said. "I can describe none of them,
except to say: That is what happened. That is what they said. That is what
they did." His recent work has perfected the abstraction of violence. In
traditional forms, when someone says, "I was seized by a nameless dread!"
it usually transpires there's a vampire outside the window or the wicked
Sir Jasper is riding across the heath. But, in Pinter, the dread stays
nameless. For Stephen Rea, this presents certain difficulties. He has
played explicit terrorizers, most famously in The Crying Game, as the IRA
man who throws up on discovering his girlfriend has a penis-a scene
subsequently parodied by both Leslie (Naked Gun) Nielsen and Jim (Ace
Ventura) Carrey. But, in Pinter's nebula of non-specifics, his charm has
nothing to play against, and you feel you're watching a man who doesn't
quite believe in his character, or, indeed, isn't too sure whether there's
a character at all. The dialogue chugs along like a slow-motion Abbot and
Costello cross-talk routine-"Who's on first?" but without the ruthless,
propulsive logic: "When?" "Now." "No?" "Really?" "Why not?" "Who by?" "By
me." "You?" etc.

Pinter suffered from writer's block for much of the Eighties, and he seems
to be recovering ten minutes at a time: some plays are short enough to be
performed without an intermission; Pinter's comeback piece, Mountain
Language, can be played within an intermission-it lasts about 17 minutes.
By contrast, Ashes to Ashes is the equivalent of a Robert Wilson: it lasts
an hour. I'm glad Pinter's pen is beginning to stretch itself again, but I
wonder if there isn't a very basic reason for his difficulties: at heart he
knows that people are not like this, and, after forty years, it requires
increasing effort to act as if they are.

In the wake of Ashes to Ashes , there was a flurry of comment in the
British media about the word "Pinteresque": he is the only modem dramatist
to have passed adjectivally into general currency. The official line can be
summarized by Carole Woddis, former theater editor at the "radical"
magazine City Limits, and Trevor R. Griffiths, Chair of the Department of
Language and Literature at the Polytechnic of North London, in their
Bloomsbury Theatre Guide: "'Pinteresque' has come to mean the dialogue of
evasion." Grifliths, as a Chair of Language, must be aware that that
definition is itself an evasion. To most people, "Pinteresque" means a
pause followed by a non sequitur. Down at the pub, when they're discussing,
say, the popular footballer Gazza and there's a slight lull and then
someone says absentmindedly, "I've always fancied the Greek Islands
meself," they knowingly nudge each other and say, "Oh, very Pinteresque." A
couple of commentators have suggested recently that, in fact, "Pinteresque"
is virtually indistinguishable from "Pooteresque"- an adjective deriving
from the hero of The Diary of a Nobody and its assemblage of random
lower-middle-class suburban banalities. But what's interesting is that, out
in the real world, "Pinteresque" has nothing to do with evasion or menace,
but is strictly a novelty turn, applied only to those weird disjunctions
when normal human communication breaks down. Indeed, even theater folk use
it in this sense. I once went to a conference of American producers at
which, during the introductions, a lady from the San Diego Civic Light
Opera stood up and proudly declared that, being a mile from the airport,
they were the only theater with a plane spotter on staff. "When one's
approaching, the amber light goes on. On the red, the performers freeze
until the spotter gives them the green. Each freeze lasts about eight
seconds, and on average there's 29 planes during each show." A fellow
producer called out, "You should do Pinter plays. Then no one would
notice."

It is when Pinter applies himself to something specific that you begin to
find yourself pining for the dialogue of evasion, the fraudulence of
memory, and all the rest. Last October, I discussed the London production
of Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides, directed by Pinter, and starring Daniel
Massey as Wilhelm Furtwängler, the great conductor who chose to stay in
Berlin during the war with his beloved orchestra. Pinter had cast, as the
American major called upon to interrogate Furtwängler under the
de-Nazification process, the British actor Michael Pennington, and what
emerged knocked the play off balance: While Harwood's text declined to take
sides, Pinter's staging did: Pennington's character was a coarse philistine
cartoon, whose dramatic purpose seemed to be less to nail Furtwängler than
to foreshadow the world's descent into the vulgarity of American cultural
pre-eminence. The play has now come to Broadway (at the Brooks Atkinson),
with Pinter replaced as director by David Jones, and Ed Harris taking the
role of the major. Jones's production restores the balance: Harris is
slier, warmer, more human: he and his director do not patronize the
character. He is still coarse and philistine, a man whose cultural
boundaries are defined by Bob Hope and Betty Grable, whose interest in
music extends no further than a bandleader he saw in New Jersey called Dix
Dixon. But, shorn of Pinter, the play's evenhandedness comes through: yes,
he spews obscenities, but you're more aware now that he's the only one who's
actually seen the concentration camps; similarly, his young American
assistant is the only one who had relatives in the camps. As I walked up
the aisle after an early preview, one guy said, "T'hat Furtwängler-he sure
comes over as an asshole"; another theatergoer said, "I think the play's
rather hard on Furtwängler."

There's a lesson in all of this, especially for so-called "political"
theater. lago is the greatest villain in all drama, but productions of
Othello work better the more charming and beguiling the actor playing him
is. If he's transparently evil, where's the drama? Unfortunately, most
political theater in New York at the moment takes the same approach as
Pinter and Pennington to that American major: they patronize their
characters, and thereby their audience. Thus, your average abortion drama
promotes the line that a woman has "a right to choose," but a theatergoer
does not: a theatergoer cannot be expected to absorb fully delineated
characters of opposing views and to thread his way through the ambiguities
in between. The result, alas, is that most political theater may be good
politics but it's almost always bad theater. (The New Criterion , November
1996)

---
* (Finally, a couple of satirical jabs at the great man. This one's from
just before the Iraq war when Pinter had written "The Pong Of The Dead"
only to find that every other two-bit versifier in town was also chipping
in with the anti-Bush jingles. I wondered why they didn't all get together
for a big Live Aid poetic supergroup single:)

How many poets does it take to stop a war? All of them! In the wake of
Harold Pinter's new poem "The Pong Of The Dead", his latest savage
indictment of American imperialism, you may be having difficulty keeping up
with all the savage indictments of American imperialism that seem to be
around these days. Well, now you don't have to. This week, I went down to
London's world-renowned Abbey Road studios to sit in on a recording session
for the savage indictment of American imperialism to end them all.

Yes, Harold, Andrew Motion, Tom Paulin and dozens of other superstar poets
have teamed up to record Harold's all-time great savage indictment charity
single, "Bomb The World (Let Them Know It's Killing Time)". Stanza To
Reason, as the group calls itself, marks the first time Britain's top
versifiers have worked together, as I could tell by the lines of stretch
limos backed up to Primrose Hill, all filled with A-list poets and their
entourages.

"Minor poets to the back!" yelled Harold, instantly taking charge of the
session. "That doesn't include you, Andrew," he sniggered, as the Poet
Laureate crossed the floor.

"I was just getting a coffee," muttered Andrew.

"But it does include you, Tom, chum," said Harold. A reluctant Tom Paulin
squeezed into the back row between a couple of poets-in-residence from
Welsh prisons. "Typical," he grumbled. "I'm in Jenin, and Harold's up front
playing Ariel Sharon."

But I have to say Harold was impressive. He bellowed out the first verse -
"It's bombing time/ There's no need to be afraid" - and then went on to
reveal a subtle, more reflective Pinter than we're used to:

And your head'll soon be smashed in
And your eyeballs poked out, chum
'Cuz the Yanks are on their way.

".To kick some, er, bum," said Andrew Motion on cue. "Marvellous grasp of
the American vernacular, Harold."

"OK, and then we cut to Alfred." He scanned the room. "Alfred? You're still
doing the searing couplet about the Iraqi womenfolk struggling home after
getting raped by the Yank bastards?"

"Sure," said Lord Tennyson. " 'Come into the garden mauled/ For the B15 has
flown'."

"Lovely," said Harold. "See how it's done, Andrew? Then the girls come in."
And, to my amazement, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
and Pam Ayres lit up the room with their background vocals on the "Bomb The
World" chorus. Afterwards, Harold beckoned yet another top celebrity
rhymester forward.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud," began William Wordsworth.

"A mushroom cloud?" said Harold. "No wonder you're lonely, chum. Bloody
Rumsfeld."

"No," said William. "Just an ordinary cloud, that floats on high o'er vales
and hills."

"I don't get you," said Harold.

"Well, all at once I see a crowd ."

"Of dead human shields from Scandinavia and the Low Countries?"

". A host of golden daffodils."

"A host of golden daffodils?" scoffed Harold. "You mean, Alan Titchmarsh
with Flowerwatch Update? Bit bloody fey, isn't it?"

"Well," said William, shuffling his papers, "it's just that oft, when on my
couch I lie in vacant or in pensive mood..."

"Ever heard of writing to the brief, chum?" roared Harold, and tore the old
boy's manuscript in shreds. He turned a deep red and wandered lonely off to
the gents.

There was a palpable tension in the room, but fortunately Rudyard stepped
forward. "If," he started, "you can keep your head when all about you/ Are
losing theirs. . ."

"Yes?" said Harold.

"Er, it's only because the Americans haven't blown it off yet. Whoops,
there it goes! Biff! Off in a jiff!" Harold's good humour seemed to be
restored and he and Andrew duetted merrily through the bridge:

"There's a world outside your window," rasped Andrew.

"And it's a world of dread, old chum," growled Harold.

"Where your arse just won't stop leaking..."

"From depleted uranium."

"Whoa, yeah, tonight thank America's God it's them, not you! Take, it
Will!" The gritty voice of the West Midlands working-class Will Shakespeare
leapt in with a bitterly mocking sonnet contrasting the shallowness of
Texan culture with Iraq's deep roots as the birthplace of civilisation,
"Shall I compare thee to old Sumer's day?"

By now the poetic groove was really cooking. Harold and Andrew were just
riffing on the whole vibe. "Whoa, the oil is very viscous," wailed Andrew.
"Yeah, our politics is Robert Fiskous," Harold responded. You could feel
the electric buzz. And then the familiar voice of Lewis Carroll came
booming in:

Beware the Jacchirac, my son!
The jaw-jaw with the slithy catch
Beware the mimsy Blix and shun
The Princely Bandar, natch.

There was an embarrassed silence.

"Well," said Lewis. "I think I'll just go to the dressing-room and
photograph some of the younger groupies before Scott Ritter gets to them."

It took Philip Larkin to get us back on track:

They f--- you up
George Bush and dad. (The Daily Telegraph, January 25th 2003)

---
* (At Christmas 2002, an Anglican vicar was reported to have terrified the
children in his congregation by revealing that Rudolph and the other
reindeer weren't real and, if they were, they'd be dead for various
reasons. Around that time, Harold Pinter wrote an hilariously fevered piece
for the Telegraph called The American administration is a bloodthirsty wild
animal
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../11/do1101.xml)
and somehow in my mind the poet and the vicar got conflated into the
Reverend Harold Pinter:)

Youngsters at a Christmas carol service were devastated this week after the
vicar told them Santa Claus was dead and his reindeer had been vaporised
shortly after take-off.

Preaching at the church of St George of the Galloways, the Reverend Harold
Pinter informed his young flock that the real Santa had been assassinated
on Christmas Eve 1977 by the Shah's secret police, using
Washington-supplied cruise missiles and that the present "Santa" was a CIA
stooge with an obvious false beard.

Children as young as two covered their ears and ran screaming from the
church as the vicar explained at length how the "holidays" were now just a
front for US foreign policy.

"George W Bush says he's dreaming of a white Christmas," sneered Mr Pinter.
"But for the rest of us it's a nightmare. I wake up feeling like a man
trapped in a snowy knick-knack with his face pressed up against the glass
howling, 'Let me out of here', only to be buried under another ton of
artificial flakes."

While parents glanced nervously at each other, the vicar continued with his
homily. " 'If you are not with us, you're against us,' declares Bush. He
says he's making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out who's naughty or
nice. Quite right. Look in the mirror, chum. Which side of the list do you
belong on? It's George Bush in all his festive hysterical ignorance who
loads up his weapons of mass distraction and insists on dropping them down
every chimney in the world. Come on, it's lovely weather for a slay ride
together with you, chum."

Although many toddlers had to be escorted from the church, older boys and
girls shrugged off the vicar's horrific catalogue of seasonal gore. "He
does this sermon every Christmas," said Cameron, the eight-year-old son of
television favourite Ulrika Jonsson. "And most months in between, too. The
best bit is when he describes how the Easter Bunny had his throat cut on
the orders of Don Rumsfeld in 1983 and that he's now just Ferdinand Marcos
in a protective rabbit suit."

"You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen?" Mr Pinter asked
rhetorically. "Forgotten. No longer referred to. Millions of dead reindeer
slaughtered, their blood streaking the ice all around Santa's Workshop.
Never mentioned. Millions of elves born without genitals. But you never
hear about them.

"Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose," he continued, "and,
if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows. You know why that is?
Depleted uranium. Oh, yes, don't worry, he can still guide your sleigh
tonight. It's not hard to follow a reindeer whose rectum is leaking
radioactive blood across the sky, is it?"

"I think I'll just pop out for a cup of tea in the church hall," said
Ulrika, squeezing along the pew. "See if the trauma counsellors have
arrived yet."

"But people don't forget," roared Mr Pinter. "The seven Iraqi children not
yet killed by America and Britain jumping up and down in the street
shouting, 'Death to the Great Santa', they don't forget. They don't forget
the torture and mutilation of the Tooth Fairy. When they wake up one
morning and find Frosty the Snowman standing in the front garden, they know
it's Dick Cheney, watching them. Things like that don't just happen in
Holland Park."

A faraway look came into Mr Pinter's eyes. "Santa Nista. Now there was a
Santa. The people's Santa. He came to tea at the vicarage with Antonia and
me. He wore military fatigues, not blood-soaked red so your big saggy
American arse looks like the world's most genetically modified tomato."

Then, in a passage that stunned even hardened primary schoolchildren, the
vicar savaged the man he called "Washington's lickspittle", Bob the
Builder.

"Can you fix it?" he cried. "Better believe they've fixed it, chum.
Everybody's talking about a poison gas attack on the Underground, but
nobody mentions Scoop and Bob have been digging up the road in front of Mrs
Potts's. If there is a gas attack, millions of you children will die
agonising deaths. Ho-ho-bloody-ho. Needless to say, Bob the Builder does
not travel on the Underground himself. Oh, no, he's up on top riding around
with Wendy in Muck the Bulldozer, like Ariel Sharon about to level Jenin."

At that point, Mr Pinter gave his traditional performance of "Silent
Night", in which he stands perfectly still with an enigmatic look for three
minutes while from the wings come faraway shrieks of political prisoners
being tortured.

Afterwards, the vicar agreed he'd made a catastrophic error of judgment. "I
didn't realise there were so many young children present," he said.
"Otherwise I'd have launched a blistering attack on the Teletubbies. The
one with the aerial is a Pentagon mole. And why are they wearing
decontamination suits?"

Just then, his lovely wife, Antonia, arrived to say that The Daily
Telegraph had rung and that they'd like to reprint his sermon. "That
Right-wing Condi Rice fishwrap?" he scoffed. "If I appear in there, people
will just write it off as a pathetic CIA psy-ops dirty trick to discredit
the anti-Bush movement by making it look ridiculous. You don't think I'm
that gullible, do you?" (The Daily Telegraph, December 14th 2002)

(suivi �* : fr.soc.politique)