The playwright Harold Pinter died on Wednesday after a long
bout with cancer of the esophagus. There were long obituaries in the
New York Times and elsewhere. I'd seen perhaps six or seven of
his plays and read two of them besides. There was no question as to
why he merited the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him in
2005.
But Pinter also thought of himself as a political person, a very much
political person. Here he was a little bit not on the edge but much
off the edge. One of his heroes was Slobodan Milosevic. He
detested Israel. And, for that matter, America. Yes, he was
Jewish but, of course, very enlightened Jewish.
Anyway, the papers didn't know what to make of his politics. So,
while inferring that they were more a bit weird, they glossed them
over.
So we are indebted to Oliver Kamm, a writer for the Times of London, who
published today in his own paper on Friday a piece explaining
Pinter's politics which can be summed up as hostility to western
democracy. But, then, Knut Hamsun was a fascist novelist and he
also won the Nobel Prize for Literature.