On Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter died yesterday at the age of 88. He was one of my favorite writers.

I came to know about Pinter about a decade ago when I traveled from Bucharest to New York. I am a vegetarian and the cabin crew had mixed up my food with something I do not eat. The perceptive Israeli woman sitting next to me remarked that such stupid errors cannot happen in her country. That was the beginning of an interesting talk about kosher food, Jewish institution of kibbutz and Jewish contribution to human civilization. We also talked about the place in the history of mankind of great Jewish names such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Henry Bergson, Franz Kafka, and other timeless celebrities.

She asked, “What do you think of Pinter?” Like an ignoramus, I blurted, “Pinter? Who is that?” That was the beginning of my acquaintance with Harold Pinter. She gave me a brief oral backgrounder on Pinter. From that day on, I grabbed any book written by Pinter. The more I read his works, the more I fell in love with them. My admiration for the great writer grew exponentially as time passed.

Pinter had a lower middle class ancestry. He spent the formative years of his life in a London Grammar school. The friends he made in those days, like Henry Woolf, Mick Goldstein and Morris Wernick remained an integral part of his emotional life.

This is not an obituary of Pinter. It is a just my personal tribute to one of the greatest literary figures of 20th century. In his acceptance speech of Nobel Prize in 2005, he said “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”

That was perhaps the essence of wisdom coming from this great man. It placed him along with Kierkegaard, Sartre and other great existential thinkers.

He was as fond of Noam Chomsky as Chomsky was of him. And like Chomsky he was fearless, formidable and utterly honest. He was a leading critical voice against violation of human rights all over the world. His defense of Kurdish people against the Turkish repression will remain memorable in the contemporary history. He talked in simple language and spoke the truth with devastating effect. Nobel Prize did not add any additional glamour to his name. It only served to make his name heard repeatedly at the dinner tables of bejeweled high-society ladies.