How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  In this respect, these overtly political plays—One for the Road, Party Time, Mountain Language, and Ashes to Ashes, the latter of which combines the domestic duologue with the political outrage—resemble the poems that Pinter has written, inspired by his sensitivity to the world’s injustices. (However much it’s overshadowed by his plays, Pinter’s poetry is clearly very important to his sense of himself as a writer. “I’m essentially, shall we say, a poet,” he told Charlie Rose when he was in New York for the festival. His fans agree. “An intuitive rather than a conceptual writer, a poet rather than a peddler of theses,” Michael Billington concurred in the Times.) One clearly political poem is called “The Old Days,” from 1996:

  Well, there was no problem,

  All the democracies

  (all the democracies)

  were behind us.

  So we had to kill some people.

  So what?

  Lefties get killed.

  This is what we used to say

  back in the old days:

  your daughter is a lefty

  I’ll ram this stinking battering-ram

  All the way up and up and up and up

  Right the way through all the way up

  All the way through her lousy left body….

  The political plays, with their heated indictments of tyranny, may be said to be the theatrical analogue of this clanking brand of writing. Unfortunately for Pinter, in order to engage seriously with politics, you have to have “peddled” in theses—you need a rigorous and subtle theoretical grasp of what the issues are, and of what’s at stake, in order to make valid judgments of complex issues. Pinter’s political plays, by contrast, tend to flash angry images of oppression, and that’s that. After you’ve seen two or three in swift succession, and see how much of a muchness the political work is, it’s hard not to wonder whether what they’re really about is Pinter, excellently showcasing his anger, his frustration with corrupt democracies, and so on. “I wrote One for the Road in anger,” he told Rose. “It was a catharsis…. I felt better after having written it, certainly.” Catharsis, as we know from Aristotle, is an emotion that serious theater may legitimately aim at; but of course, Aristotle was talking about the audience’s emotions. However admirable his feelings may be, and however urgent his need for catharsis, the catharsis is meaningless, from the point of view of successful art, if it is reserved to the playwright but denied the spectators. Because the characters in these works are rarely more than stick figures—those abusive men and noble, suffering women—your concern for the victims in Pinter’s political plays tends to be abstract; you can’t be moved to political insight, because you’re not moved at all.

  So the tendency in these plays is to bully rather than to argue. In his Charlie Rose appearance, the playwright talked primarily about his political convictions, and about the cynicism and corruption of the United States and Great Britain, which he has frequently denounced in interviews and editorial pages; but, significantly, he never really engaged Rose’s objections to some of his points. After Pinter dramatically declared, apropos of the NATO-backed bombings in the former Yugoslavia, that Clinton was morally indistinguishable from Milosevic, Rose raised the quite reasonable objection that whereas the two leaders had used force in Yugoslavia, those uses stemmed from distinct political and moral motivations. Rather than responding, however, Pinter changed the subject, and went on to flourish another indictment—as if merely to have denounced were enough. This is appropriate for activists, but not for artists.

  As we know, questions of motivation have never had much allure for Pinter; but while the apparent absence of traditional motivations may have made for some striking theater, the failure to come to grips with intent and motivation in forming moral and political judgments is a serious limitation in someone who wants to be taken seriously as a political dramatist. Pinter’s convictions can be laudable, and his support for oppressed East Bloc writers such as his friend Václav Havel was admirably fierce; but the “political” plays unhappily reflect the lack of subtlety of thought that you saw in the Rose interview. In them, we’re much closer to Waiting for Lefty than we are to Waiting for Godot.

  There is an irony here. When he was in his early thirties (still in his hermetic, apolitical phase), in his speech to the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol, the newly famous playwright warned against

  the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be. What is presented, so much of the time, as a body of active and positive thought is in fact a body lost in a prison of empty definition and cliché.

  It would be hard to find a better description right now of Pinter and his later, patently political work. However much he may profess to be outraged by his villains, Pinter has come in some strange way to resemble them. Like the fictional Robert in The Comfort of Strangers, he’s a man in a position of considerable power whom you begin by trusting, someone who’s pulling all the invisible strings, who lures you with the promise of a rich and enjoyable evening, who will even make you laugh with his stories (few playwrights combine humor and horror as disconcertingly as this one) and yet ends by making you watch images of disturbing, sometimes horrifying actions, without ever explaining them. Without, perhaps, being able to explain them, either explicitly or implicitly, because his ultimate concern is his own feelings, his own gratifications. Your only option is to sit there, immobile and mute, and take it.

  In view of the way in which the Lincoln Center tribute exposed Pinter’s weaknesses and pretensions as much as it did his strengths, it was a gratifying surprise to witness the New York première of his most recent work, Celebration. First presented in London in the grand millennial year of 2000, this, at last, was a work that brought together all of the playwright’s well-known preoccupations, modes of expression, and theatrical tropes. Yet it managed to create something very new for him, and for his audiences—something, finally, that was deeply and movingly political.

  The play takes place in an upscale restaurant. There are two sets of diners, each of which is spotlighted in turn until the end, when it evolves that they have an uneasy connection to each other and they begin to communicate directly. There’s a quiet couple, Matt and Suki, playfully talking about their romance, about sex. The larger, more boisterous group consists of a quartet of sozzled vulgarians out for a celebratory night on the town: two brothers, Lambert and Russell, married to two sisters, Julie and Prue. These four may be wearing expensive (if a tad cheesy) togs, but they’re essentially working-class—not all that different, beneath their suits and cocktail dresses, from the grim couple in The Room (which was presented with Celebration as a double bill). Lambert and Julie, Russell and Prue are cheerfully, loudly ignorant (they don’t know whether they’ve just been to the ballet or the opera), coarse (“they don’t want their sons to be fucked by other girls,” one of these aging girls cries out, apropos of mothers-in-law), and wholly unconcerned if everyone else in the restaurant knows it. The men are clearly rich and smug about the success they’ve snatched from the Nineties glut. (Russell’s a banker, and Matt and Lambert are “strategy consultants.”)

  Appearing onstage from time to time to disrupt these two groups are three members of the restaurant’s staff: the maître d’, who’s very solicitous of his customers’ pleasure; his assistant, Sonia, a young woman who chats with the two parties and can’t help revealing intimate things about herself (she’s a hilarious parody of stereotypical British insularity: “You don’t have to speak English to enjoy good food,” she says, with some incredulity, after telling a story about a trip abroad); and, finally, a young waiter, who constantly interrupts both parties. “Do you mind if I interject?” he’ll ask, each time, and then launch into stories about his now-dead grandfather and all the famous people he’d known and all the world-hist
orical events he’d been grazed by. At one point, it’s Hollywood in the Thirties; at another, it’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of the First World War. The sheer, loony excess of these fevered riffs generates its own kind of hilarity:

  He knew them all, in fact, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, George Barker, Dylan Thomas, and if you go back a few years he was a bit of a drinking companion of D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, W. B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Hardy in his dotage. My grandfather was carving out a niche for himself in politics at the time. Some saw him as a future Chancellor of the Exchequer or at least First Lord of the Admiralty but he decided instead to command a battalion in the Spanish Civil War but as things turned out he spent most of his spare time in the United States where he was a very close pal of Ernest Hemingway—they used to play gin rummy together until the cows came home.

  Funny as this almost Homeric name-dropping is, it’s the waiter and his heedlessly eager, puppy-dog attempts to interject, to insert himself, however inappropriately, into the proceedings that give the play its tension, poignancy, and meaning. Without him, the interactions among the two sets of diners would constitute a typical Pinter “drama.” Their vacuous, self-important chitchat and boasting and flirting would be entertaining—this is by far the funniest play Pinter has written; even if there had been those silences, you’d never have heard them, the audience was laughing so much—without being anything beyond a static parody of the avarice and greed that flourished in the last decade of the century. (Here again you think of Peter Greenaway, with whose The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, that vitriolic send-up of Thatcher-era greed, the new Pinter work shares a certain mood and style.)

  But as the waiter keeps trying to catch the attention of his self-important, superficial charges, it’s hard not to start noticing which names he drops. The eponymous celebration in this rich play may be an anniversary party—that’s what the characters think, at any rate—but it soon becomes clear that what Celebration is celebrating, or at least marking, is the passing of the twentieth century. What this waiter keeps interjecting is, in fact, an endless string of references to gigantic swaths of twentieth-century culture: books, film, the Hollywood studio system, Mitteleuropa, Kafka, the Three Stooges, and so on. It’s his third and final speech, with its reference to the assassinated archduke, that clues you in: before your eyes the whole twentieth century passes, from its beginning (the outbreak of World War I), to its middle, and right through to its tawdry end. But of course the diners don’t really listen, because they’ve been blinded to the culture, to the century itself and its meanings, by their own narrow greed—by the kind of success that the century and its culture have, ironically, made possible, if not indeed inevitable.

  Most of Pinter’s work shows you evil things, and for that reason can upset you in some way, but precisely because he so often stacks the dramatic deck, so often tries to make up your mind for you, the plays are depressing without being the least bit tragic. What makes Celebration so provocative is the way in which it tantalizes you, as real tragedy does, with the specter of missed opportunities. The fact that its subject—what it is that its characters are talking about, even if they can’t hear each other—is world-historical, and has a great deal to do with this specific postmillennial, post-ideological moment, gives this short, vivid work a deep political gravity that none of the more obtuse “political” plays can match. You feel, for the first time, as if something’s at stake here—something, that is, other than the playwright’s feelings. In the week and a half of the Pinter Festival, with its nine plays and numerous showings of the films, its onstage valentines posing as discussions, all accompanied by the endless drone of ongoing press adulation, you feel that here, at last, was something you wouldn’t mind being forced to watch.

  —The New York Review of Books, October 4, 2001

  PART FIVE

  War

  Theaters of War

  The early spring of 431 B.C. witnessed, at Athens, the beginning of a great war, the commencement of a great book, and the première of a great play.

  The war was the culmination of fifty years of simmering tensions between two superpowers: the Athenian empire and the Spartan alliance. It was, naturally, advertised by each side as a war of liberation (each of the antagonists claimed to be freeing some injured third party), but it was really a struggle for total domination of the Greek world. Like some other world wars, it began relatively small—a diplomatic crisis involving Corinth, a Spartan ally; some low-level combat in a small town near Athens—but it eventually metastasized into a conflict that lasted nearly three decades, involved numerous states both Greek and non-Greek, and resulted, finally, in the defeat and disarmament of Athens and the abolition of her democratic institutions. Because Sparta and her allies dominated the large southern peninsula called the Peloponnesus—and, more to the point, because the men who wrote the best-known histories of the conflict were Athenians—the war would come to be called the “Peloponnesian.” The Spartans, as the Yale historian Donald Kagan dryly points out in The Peloponnesian War, his brisk if tendentious new history of the war, probably thought of the conflict as the “Athenian War”; but then, there were no Spartan historians to call it that.

  The book was the work of an affluent young Athenian who, on the hunch that the conflict just getting under way that spring would be “a great war and more worth writing about than any of those which had taken place in the past,” began taking notes “at the very outbreak” of hostilities. About the life of the historian we know relatively little, apart from the crucial fact that he himself commanded troops in the war—something you might have guessed anyway, since an officer’s crisp lack of sentimentality informs nearly every page of his work, which would come, in fact, to be valued above all for a scrupulous insistence on getting the story straight, on allowing readers to “see the past clearly” for themselves. This soldier-historian gives his name in the first line of his book, which had no official name and which is generally referred to as the History. He was called Thucydides.

  The play was by an Athenian citizen in his mid-fifties who’d been writing for the theater since the age of thirty. Like the war, the play involved trouble in Corinth and some minor violence that eventually came home to roost in Athens; as with the war, it would be some time before people appreciated its magnitude. (The year the play was entered in the annual springtime dramatic competition at Athens, the year the Peloponnesian War began, it took third prize.) The playwright’s name was Euripides. The play was called Medea.

  Thucydides’ History is the only extant eyewitness account of the first twenty years of a war that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen up until then—what he called “the greatest disturbance in the history of the Hellenes, affecting also a large part of the non-Hellenic world, and indeed, I might almost say, the whole of mankind.” The war lasted so long that the author didn’t live to finish his manuscript; it ends in midsentence during a description of the aftermath of a naval battle in 411. (We do know, from references in his text, that he lived to see Athens’s ultimate surrender, in 404.) But such was his achievement that others who wrote about the war—for instance Xenophon, whose Hellenica covers the final decade of fighting—began where Thucydides left off.

  Until the Peloponnesian War, warfare among the various Greek city-states had for centuries been a regular, predictable, and unsentimental affair—part of the rhythmic cycle of seasons. You planted your crops in the spring, went away to do battle with this or that enemy in the summer, and (hopefully) came back in autumn for the harvest. Wars were decided by the outcome of a single pitched battle on a single day, after which the victorious army set up a victory trophy and headed home. Then the whole cycle would repeat itself the next year.

  The war that began in the spring of 431, however, represented what Kagan rightly calls “a fundamental departure” from this tradition—not only in scope, and complexity, and
length, but also in savagery and bitterness. It began, that night early in 431, with a nocturnal sneak attack by the Thebans, allies of Sparta, on a small Athenian protectorate called Plataea—a sordid violation of the norms of Greek warfare that set the tone for things to come. As the conflict roiled on over many years, on many fronts, from the Hellespont to Sicily to the coast of Asia Minor, and under the banners of many Spartan kings and many Athenian governments, with many victories and defeats for both sides, none of which signaled a clear resolution to the conflict, it began to seem frustratingly unwinnable—not that it was any longer clear just what “winning” might consist of. The result, as Kagan emphasizes at the outset of his own retelling of it, was a cycle of cruelty and reprisal, ending, ultimately, in a “collapse in the habits, institutions, beliefs, and restraints that are the foundations of civilized life.” The anomalous treachery that led to that first nocturnal attack would devolve, by the end, into the kind of atrocity that had never before featured as part of Greek warfare: schoolboys murdered in their classrooms by mercenaries, civilians slaughtered, suppliants dragged from (or burned at) altars, the war dead left to rot on the battlefield. All this was symbolized by the unimaginable collapse of the great standard-bearer of Greek civilization itself: after nearly three decades of fighting, bankrupt, imploded by civil strife, crushed from without by an unholy alliance between Sparta and the Greeks’ old enemies, the Persians, Athens finally surrendered in 404.

  It was impossible to foresee any of this in the spring of 431. Athens was at her peak: the mistress of a far-flung empire of subject-allies stretching all across the Mediterranean, commander of a huge and well-trained navy, her special national character—raucously democratic with yet an aristocratic esteem for the finest products of high culture—emblematized by her leader, Pericles, an aristocrat of what Kagan calls “the bluest blood” who had, nonetheless, a populist appeal. (Teddy Roosevelt, say, rather than JFK.) It was Pericles who advised his countrymen, during the first few years of the war, to follow an unusual—and unusually difficult—defensive strategy: to remain within the city’s walls (which included the so-called Long Walls, a pair of parallel structures that connected Athens to her strategically crucial port, Piraeus, eleven miles away) as the Spartans came each summer to burn their crops, and to put their faith in the sea.