‘Tender the dead, as you yourself would be tendered…’

A few days after Christmas, I gave a paper at the MLA as part of a panel organised by the Harold Pinter Society. Although organised many months ago, news of Harold’s death on Christmas Eve lent the panel a reflective air, which did not stop the papers –in their variety of approaches and subjects- celebrating the life and work of a writer who meant so much to us all in so many ways.

Harold was a great friend of the British Library over many years, and we were very grateful to him for agreeing to talk here last September as part of our Theatre Archive Project conference  (an interview that has been picked up by many commentators in the recent days.

It had been a pleasure and a privilege for me to show Harold his papers in their new ‘home’, and to see the delight he got in looking back over his own past through these documents (including photograph albums). In the face of personal tragedy, consideration of manuscripts and archives seems beside the point … a poor substitute for their living, complex, and multi-facetted creators. Yet, in its own –small- way, the preservation of a writer’s papers, among those of friends and colleagues (and the occasional enemy), is one way of ‘tendering the dead’, and helping to ensure that the works and ideas live on.

I saw No Man’s Land just a few days before news of Harold’s passing, and was already carrying the lines and images around in my head when I read of the use of Hirst’s monologue as part of the funeral. As always with Pinter, there’s a certain ambiguity to Brigg’s swift response ‘They’re blank, mate, blank. The blank dead’. Personally, I’m with Hirst who, after a trademark ‘silence’, ripostes quite simply: ‘Nonsense’.

Comments

[MostEmailedNews.com]

He will be missed, even by us Americans who he liked so much :)

- T

http://mostemailednews.com

[darkfall gold]

As always with Pinter, there’s a certain ambiguity to Brigg’s swift response ‘They’re blank, mate, blank.