Harold Pinter Archive Blog

Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize

On 13th Oct 2005, three days after his 75th birthday, it was announced that Harold Pinter had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Harold Pinter archive contains many letters that chart the reaction to this announcement and Pinter’s subsequent Nobel Lecture. The main body of letters are dated 13 October 2005 to 28 January 2006 and either congratulate Pinter on his prize, or echo or condemn sentiments expressed in his lecture. The letters come from all over the world and from people of all walks of life, friends and strangers alike. There is also a scrapbook of newspaper clippings showing international press coverage of the announcement and ceremony. The clippings come from the newspapers of Britain, Spain, Egypt, France, Greece, India, Italy, USA and Japan.

Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture was entitled ‘Art, Truth and Politics’. The lecture was pre-recorded and was delivered via video at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, on 7 December 2005. The archive holds many handwritten and typewritten drafts of this speech, which detail the changes made to lecture at each stage, including how the title was changed from the original ‘Art and Politics’ to ‘Art, Truth and Politics’.

I have spent the last few days sorting through this material, arranging the correspondence into chronological order and writing a basic list of what is there.

Pinter's personal correspondence II

The cataloguing of Harold Pinter’s personal correspondence continued this week. Today I have been working through the Rushdie-Spiegel correspondence file, which includes sections of letters relating to Salman Rushdie (author), Dr Oliver Sacks (neurologist and author of ‘Awakenings’, which inspired the writing of Pinter’s ‘A Kind of Alaska’), Alan Schneider (director) and Sam Spiegel (film producer).

For each of these files I check that they are in chronological order, take out any staples or other metal fastenings and quickly read through the letters to ensure that there are no data protection issues involved. I then write a brief description of what the file contains, for example: Correspondence with Philip Larkin [poet and writer]. Includes letters from Andrew Motion; 11 Feb. 1967-5 Aug. 1992. I also try to indicate if the file includes other items not covered by the general description, for example, the Arthur Miller file contains a copy of the prose piece ‘Arthur Miller’s Socks’ by Harold Pinter and the Joseph Losey section contains letters from Patricia and Joshua Losey, his wife and son respectively.

I hope to have finished all of the correspondence files by the end of this week so that I can move onto sorting and cataloguing Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature materials next week.

Pinter's personal correspondence

I have started the description of Harold Pinter’s personal correspondence files this week. There are two series of these personal files. The first series is arranged chronologically and covers subjects such as condolence letters, invitations, birthday wishes and, most importantly, cricket. The second series is arranged alphabetically by surname. These files contain either significant runs of correspondence from individuals, or correspondence from significant people in Pinter’s life. People including life-long friends Mick Goldstein, Moishe Wernick and Henry Woolf, who met Pinter as boys in Hackney; Joe Brearley, Pinter’s English teacher and mentor; and writers who have inspired, or been inspired by, Pinter, such as Sam Beckett, W S Graham, Philip Larkin and George Barker. In the section for Mick Goldstein there are typed copies of letters written by Pinter that cover the early 1950s, when he was touring Ireland with Anew Macmaster’s repertory company. In one, Mick describes attending the London premiere of Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, summing-up the play as ‘there are two tramps who do nothing very much but spend their time either arguing or protesting about nothing in particular’, to which Pinter replies ‘your letter does make me gnash at my teeth that I can’t see it’.

Lights, camera, action!

This week has seen the cataloguing of the film correspondence files. The letters mostly relate to Harold Pinter’s adaptations to film of other people’s work, although some cover Pinter’s acting roles on the silver screen. Letters about his own plays that have been produced as films are filed with the series of correspondence that relates to the ‘arts world’. In addition to the films that have been produced, the correspondence covers films that have never been made, such as ‘The Tragedy of King Lear’, ‘The Dreaming Child’, ‘Proust’ and ‘Victory’. It also covers those films that Pinter wrote a screenplay for, but which, for various reasons, the final version used was not his. These films include ‘Lolita’ and ‘The Remains of the Day’.

The letters come from a wide range of luminaries of movie land. Represented in the correspondence are actors including Al Pacino, Laurence Olivier, Meryl Streep, John Cleese and Lauren Bacall (who signs as her real name, Betty) and directors including Stanley Kubrick, Karel Reisz, John Schlesinger, Adrian Lyne and James Ivory. There are also several letters from the authors of the novels that Pinter is adapting, including LP Hartley (‘The Go-Between), John Fowles (‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’), Margaret Atwood (‘The Handmaid’s Tale’) and  Ian McEwan (‘The Comfort of Strangers’). Atwood expresses how pleased she is that Pinter is tackling her novel, writing ‘it is exactly right. If anyone can solve the problem of translation to screen it is you’ and McEwan writes of how he felt after seeing the finished film, ‘I liked the script, but I wanted to say that seeing the script performed, fulfilled, made me like it even more’.