From Michael Billington: The Life and Work of Harold Pinter

When Ten Early Poems - work rediscovered by chance - was published by Greville Press Pamphlets in 1992, David Vilmure rightly pointed out that these early poems were not Pinter1s plays in seed but Îfruit from a different vine altogether1. They are, in fact mostly strenuous, word-drunk, alliterative stuff suggesting a writer passionately in love with language but not yet fully in control of it. Just occasionally, however, a line will leap out that arrests one by its resonant simplicity. In 'A the Palace of the Emperor at Dawn1, for instance, a cluster of dense and often impenetrable images (ÎAt Martinmas November stoat/ In nightmare claws lover1s thighs./ Eyes gnaw the hedge's coat) is followed by a last line (ÎAn now we hear the distress of silence1) this is both prophetic and eloquent. But mostly these early poems have a knotty verbal virtuosity as if designed to impress the reader rather than to include her or him in the experience.

The black little crab women with the long
Eyes, lisp and claw in a can of chockfull stuff.

And in this gaudy, bawd-filled Midlands pub one even wonders if there is a glimpse of Pinter himself in 'the clamping/ Red shirted boy, ragefull, thudding his cage.' What is certain is that Pinter's literary debut pleased his parents, who decided it should be made known to their most affluent relation.

'There was only one member of my family,' recalls Pinter, 'who appeared to be at all well-off, my great-uncle Uncle Coleman who was "in business." He always wore felt carpet slippers and skull-cap at home, and was a very courteous man. My father proposed that I show Uncle Coleman my poem in Poetry London when we next went to tea. I agreed, with some misgivings. My poem was called "New Year in the Midlands" and was to do with a young actor's vagabond life in rep. It was heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas. It contained the following lines:

This is the shine, the powder and blood and here am I
Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town,
Or such

My father and I sat in the room in silence while Uncle Coleman read this poem. When he reached those lines he stopped, looked over the magazine at us and said, "Whitbread shares are doing very well at the moment. Take my tip."'

Also published in ths same edition of Poetry London was 'Chandeliers and Shadows' that comes prefaced with a tag from The Duchess of Malfi ('I'le goe hunt the badger by owle-light: 'tis a deed of darknesse') and shows a pre-occupation with Jacobean decadence, a gift for pictorial compression and a delight in archaisms (words like 'deliberate' and 'stomacher'), which suggests Pinter has swallowed the plays of John Webster and the dictionary of Noah Webster. Still, the poem has an undeniable haunting, crepuscular power:

Enwrapped in this crust, this crumpled mosaic,
Camphor and rosefall stifle the years,
Yet I, lunatic from lunatic spheres,
Shall run crazy with lepers,
And bring God down the chimney,
A tardy locust,
To plunder and verminate man's pastures, entirely.

These two published poems indicate a writer with, in the first example, a mercilessly observant eye and, in the second, a baroque imagination and in both cases a capacity for verbal mimicry; what they don1t reveal, unlike the remarkable, as-yet-unseen Kullus, is someone who also has a distinctive voice of his own.

For futher discussion by Michael Billington, on Kullus and other poems, Click here

Harold Pinter was often, especially early on in his career, out of work as an actor and spent some time in casual temporary work as a caretaker, a waiter, a street hawker, a doorman at a dance hall, a door-to-door book salesman, a dishwasher and a snow-shoveller. Some aspects of this experience have been used in plays such as The Caretaker, in which the titular role is painstakingly defined by the leading characters, and The Homecoming which contains Lennie's snow-shovelling story. In some of his early poetry Pinter hints at the low quality of life he experienced as a repertory actor:

Now here again she blows, landlady of lumping
Fellows between the boards,
Singing "O Celestial Light" while
Like a T-square on the Flood swings her wooden leg.
This is the shine, the powder and blood, and here am I
Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town, or such.

Of his experience of the various kinds of repertory he writes, in a somber vein,

So March has become a museum,
And the April curtains move.
I travel the vacant gallery
To the last seat...
The actors pitch tents..
Their cries in the powdered dark
Assemble in mourning over
Ambassadors from the wings....
I move to the interval,
Done with this repertory.

In another poem, "The Second Visit", Pinter compares a childhood recollection of a seaside place with the more painful adult experience of it:

My childhood vampire wallows in those days,
Where panting sea threatened and surf was flint,
And consummate doves flanked the eyes.

Now an actor in this nocturnal sink,
The stray of lip is toothed away,
And flats and curtains canter down.

The latent violence that is somehow implicit in the life of the struggling actor was to manifest itself in an outburst of violence when Inter was in London working as a repertory actor. Pinter has described a fight he has in a Chelsea pub after being racially insulted:

"I laid into him, forgetting who he was and what the whole thing was about entirely. I just kept on and on. Afterwards I thought one has a lot of physical energy...I wasn't insulted personally but I was insulted on behalf of someone or something..."

Pinter's excessive display of violence was recalled later by a witness, the playwright Alun Owen, who at the time of the incident - 1957-8 was in a similar situation: "We were both acting and writing when we first met." Owen retells the incident as Pinter remembered it and adds, "When things calmed down, this bloke said to Harold: "Are you a Jew?" He said yes and the other fellow said curiously "In that case I can understand why you hit me. But why did you go on hitting me?" Pinter, however has recently affirmed that the man actually said,"But why did you hit me so hard?" and has suggested that the incident has little to do with himself as an actor but more with himself as a man. Nevertheless, from these reminiscences and recollections, poetic and otherwise, one receives a picture of the tensions and frustrations Pinter felt, and the tough, rather squalid conditions he often endured as a repertory actor. It might be fairly assumed that generally Pinter was not at his happiest in this period of his life, although he is not prepared to state anything unequivocal on the matter."When I was a failure I wasn't a failure to me. When I'm a success, I'm not a success tome, I'm not gloomy about it. I'm not a gloomy person...but in some ways I am."

When he emerged as a dramatist in 1957 Pinter was twenty-seven years old. But he had published poems since before he was twenty. Two poems, 'New Year in the Midlands' and "Chandeliers and Shadows', appeared in the August 1950 number of Poetry London . Unfortunately the ends of the two poems got confused in the printing. Poetry London tried to make amends by publishing 'New Year in the Midlands' again in the following number (November 195o), while "Chandeliers and Shadows' had to wait till 1968 to appear in its correct form in the slim volume of Poems published by the Enitharmon Press. 'New Year in the Midlands', although couched in a Dylan Thomas-like idiom of concentrated exuberance, already contains Pinter's sharp eye for the dreamlike quality of the world in all its sordid reality:

... and here am I,
Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town,
Or such.
Where we went to the yellow pub, cramped in an alley bin,
A shoot from the market,
And found the thin Luke of a queer, whose pale
Deliberate eyes, raincoat, Victorian,
,Sap the answer in the palm. . . .

The thin, pale queer in the raincoat is already a Pinter character in embryo.'Chandeliers and Shadows'on the other hand with its motto from The Duchess of Malfi (I'le goe hunt the badger by owle-light: 'tis a deed of darknesse")- omitted in the 1968 reprint - contains its intimation of the baroque, fantastic Pinter of plays to come:

... Yet I lunatic from lunatic spheres,
Shall run crazy with lepers,
And bring God down the chimney,
A tardy locust
To plunder and verminate man's pastures, entirely

("You verminate the sheet of your birth") is one of Goldberg's accusations against Stanley in The Birthday Party"). There is much adolescent love of unusual and archaic words in this and others of Pinter's early poems ('floodlit empires' Palsied stomacher', a 'necromantic cauldron of crosses' in this one poem alone), but the imagery is strong and haunting; it betrays the author's grasp of the poetic quality of the situations his imagination thrusts upon him. For these poems are clearly written in a state of obsession with words, under the spell of an irresistible impulse. Hence some of them are so private in their surrealist automatic writing that they scarcely yield a meaning to the outsider. 'One a Story, Two a Death!, for example, a longish narrative poem which appeared in the Summer 1951 issue of Poetry London, and was not reprinted in the collected volume of 1968, starts with the cryptic stanzas

Brought in a bowl of flaming crocuses
In an ebon mirrorless age,
Let fall to her face
Till her cheeks lit in tongues.

Who would laugh and call Zello,
See how scorched is the boy,
;Who would laugh
at the arrow should plunge in her eyeS‚

There is a dead girl in the poem who is visited by the poet; but little more can be discerned in the darkness of its whirling images.
Yet here too some of the images of the plays already appear -
The giant Negro tones in ether his flute -

foreshadowing the symbolic death figure of the Negro in The Room
Where in his cape the Negro,
Growing flowers on his groin.'

In another poem from Poetry London, not reprinted in the collected edition, 'European Revels', we meet one of the destructive females of the later Pinter as well as violent men, reminiscent of the killers in The Dumb Waiter, the terrorists in The Birthday Party-

Her men lovers plasterlads,
who Felled rich women in the moon1s Zodiac.

There is in these poems, as indeed in the early and hitherto unpublished novel The Dwarfs, the recurring character of a young man, who like Len in The Dwarfs, like Aston in The Caretaker, has a tendency to talk too much and too intensely and rears the moment when society ,the outside world, or his growing up, will put a stop to this stream of exuberant, mad talking:

Only the deaf can hear and the blind can understand
The miles I gabble.
Through these my dances of dunce and devil,
It1s only the dumb can speak through the rubble.
Time shall drop his spit in my cup,
With this vicious cut he shall close my trap.

And gob me up in a drunkard's lap
All spirits shall haunt me and all devils drink me;
O despite theu dark drugs and the digs that they rib me,
I1ll tear off my terrible cap.'

(Note the use of assonant rhymes, alternating between a and u sounds: gabble/rubble; cup/trap.) The parallels, particularly to Aston's situation, seem difficult to overlook. The same is surely true of the short poem 'The Anaesthetist's Pin, (1952) which introduces that instrument linked to "the amputator1s saw' and ends:

At that incision sound
The lout is at the throat
And the dislocated word
Becomes articulate.

Which seems to indicate that the operation is - as in the case of Aston in The Caretaker concerned with curing an excess of speech (the dislocated word'), hence the 'amputation' and the anaesthetist's pin, may well stand for a lobotomy or electric shock treatment. The earliest text in the volume of Poems is dated 1949 and had remained unpublished until that volume appeared almost twenty years later. This is the dialogue prose poem 'Kullus' which has already been discussed in the previous chapter and contains the motif of the room and the intruder which pervades Pinter's work from The Room to The Basement. Kullus, a character who dearly played a considerable part in the young Pinter's imagination also makes an appearance in the poem 'The Task' (1954). And again he is linked to the image of the room:

The last time Kullus, seen
Within a distant call,
Arrived at the house of bells.

The leaf obeyed the bud,
I closed the open night
And tailormade the room.

The three following stanzas are variations on the key words - house, night, leaf, bud, open, night, and room: the house of bells, for example, becomes the house of night; the leaf, which obeyed the bud, now alarmed the bud, etc. Thus the poem anticipates the kaleidoscopic effect of the changes in the furniture and situation in the room which is the scene of The Basement. The character of Kullus makes a third appearance in the short story 'The Examination', feat published in the review Prospect in the summer of 1959. Here the narrator is engaged in a contest of wills with Kullus which takes the form of some sort of examination. As one or the other of the contestants attains a position of dominance over the other, the room in which the contest takes place becomes his property.
There is nothing surprising in the re-emergence of early preoccupations and imagery in the mature work of a writer. Yet the presence of these basic motifs helps to show us some of the genesis of the author's world and its particular, highly personal atmosphere after 'the dislocated word' had become articulate.

The poems which lend themselves most readily to concrete interpretations, which allow the reader to visualise clearly a given situation, afford the clearest proof of Pinter's technical skill and capacity for projecting a new view of ordinary life, of universalising the essentially local. 'New Year in the Midlands' published in 1950, is much more mature than his earlier school poems and remains his best single poem. On the localised surface, we have a raucous, brawling pub in the Midlands on New Year's Eve, dominated by one of those landladies who lump 'Fellows between the boards' in the typical poor lodging house with which provincial actors ('on the boards') are very familiar. We have the usual homosexual, the 'crawing brass whores', and the 'clamping/ Red shirted boy' who has sexual relations with the women. As 'well-rolled' sailors, having been robbed while drunk, curl up to sleep on the sidelines, the speaker of the poem himself becomes progressively drunk to the point of entering into conversation with Freda, the 'wansome' landlady. All the sordid life of the place comes through to us in a scene very familiar to anyone who has been in such a spot at such a time.
Pinter misses no detail in this surface picture, be it the hands that grip beer cans of sensual pleasure with the force of claws, the simple brand-name 'Whitbread Ale', or the fumbling, impatient hands ('luminous' with spilled ale) of the townspeople, preparing for sexual pleasures or urination.
But the poet takes us beyond this description of rollicking public madness which grows more and more lively and lascivious as the poem progresses, straight into the hands of Death. In a universalist interpretation, Freda, this 'landlady of lumping/Fellows between the boards', whose own 'luminous hands/Unpin the town's genitals', represents Time, her hands the hands of a clock that defeats sexuality and exposes the naked heart of man, 'the clamping/Red shirted boy, ragefull, thudding his cage'. When seen in this light, 'boards' become coffins. At the start of the New Year, the Christ story, alluded to in this poem in lines which echo the Book of Luke in the New Testament, should assume a new and awesome significance for mankind, but is not heeded. Instead of 'the power and the glory' that heralds the coming of Christ's chariot, we find the Christ-like 'spluttered' speaker, 'Blessed with ambrosial bitter weed' drunkenly returning from exile into 'the shine, the powder and blood' of the cheap pub. Luke appears as the homosexual with 'pale/ Deliberate eyes' whose repulsive answer to inquiries is 'sap' in the palm of the seeker. The 'glassy bawd' of a landlady sings 'O Celestial Light', ironically referring to the return of Christ, while the bar fills with 'crush, camp, burble, and beer'. Yet her leg appears over the edge of her stool like a 'T-square on the/ Flood', implying a judgement near at hand for sinning mankind, which will be stripped naked and measured by Time. Like Epstein's 'Christ', this poem reveals a Jew's powerful vision of the failure of Christianity to control and heal the suffering that man inflicts upon himself. In an interview with the Paris Review, Pinter stated that 'For me everything has to do with shape, structure, and overall unity,' and we find this concern in his orthodox technical approach to this poem. His use of run-on lines, alliteration, and internal rhyme forces the mind of the reader into the mad dance in this pub in a 'Whitbread Ale town', another echo of the Christ story (Whit Sunday) which illustrates again the way in which Pinter can infuse, a tangible and mundane reality with more than ordinary meaning. In the first two lines and throughout the entire poem, we find a profusion of 'l' sounds, which prepare for and continually chime the echo of 'Luke' in our mental ears and hold the poem together. The poet carefully controls the rhythm of our journey through the growing hilarity. In the first long sentence of five lines, an unaccented syllable at the end of nearly every line forces the reader on to the heavily-accented syllable beginning the next line:

Now here again she blows, landlady of lumping
Fellows between the boards,
Singing 'O Celestial Light', while
Like a T-square on the
Flood swings her wooden leg.

The trochaic rhythm of 'Straddled, exile always in one Whitbread Ale town' enforces the sad echo, the feeling of loneliness and isolation of the Christ figure, of the ordinary man in the Midlands, of Pinter himself in exile from London.
The speaker feels strongly the need to define precisely the location of this 'yellow pub, cramped in an alley bin, /A shoot from the market', to set the background for the equally sordid and estranged figure of the queer Luke, who is likewise pinpointed in a typically Pinteresque description of the internal and external being: 'the thin Luke of a queer, whose pale/ Deliberate eyes, raincoat, Victorian, / Sap the answer in the palm.' The long word 'Deliberate' conveys its meaning through the slow movement of its sounds. By breaking the lines of description with caesuras-a technique which in his plays results in 'pauses' and silences'-Pinter conveys a sense of sharp movement, a catalogue of the action and ornament which fill the pub, as well as the quick, heavy breathing of the speaker. Our attention is constantly directed to sharp, tawdry details: 'black little crab women', the 'beetle glance' of young and old men interested in the 'crawing brass whores'. In this vicious, verminous world of naked sexuality, perceived in the fragmented (sprinkled and diced') loneliness of the indirect lighting, the drunken Christ stirs Time in the form of the landlady to call men to a reckoning. In 'New Year in the Midlands we have an intimation of the possibility of moral judgement usually totally absent from Pinter's vision. Another of his early poems, 'Stranger' (I953), express" his more usual sense of the impossibility of such judgements as well as the themes of the intruder and memory reflected in the early one-acters such as The Room and A Slight Ache. A careful reading also reveals the same concern with technique. Once the reader manages to construct a situation to fit the poem, it snaps clearly into focus, and the full force of the mood it conveys becomes evident. In this way, much of Pinter's poetry is characteristic of modern works which present realistic situations which are, however, dissociated from any immediately recognisable by the reader, because these situations are seen from a unique angle. As in Wallace Stevens' 'The Emperor of Ice Cream', which appears meaningless until the reader realises that Stevens is describing the funeral of a prostitute, much of Pinter's poetry appears obscure until one manages to adjust one's own view of it, to realise just which situation the poet is describing or analysing. Pinter's ability to project a mood and to infuse a sharp realistic detail with meaning remains constant throughout his production, both in the poetry and in the plays.
In 'Stranger', the situation involves a dead speaker who is using his wife's or mistress's new lover. The intruder is accused is, of starting a relationship with her; of entering where the speaker was 'unechoed', or into the mind and perhaps body of the woman who had almost forgotten him; and, most obviously, of conditioning 'Her widowhood on'. 'That you did cajole/ When the pendulum hung', refers to the idea that the stranger triumphantly assumed the dominant role with the woman when the speaker's time had stopped, that is, when he died. 'That you interposed in her curious dram' accuses the intruder of coming between the dead one and his former lover's 'curious dream' or half-erased memory of him. 'That you did instruct/From your alphabet home' implies that the newcomer is verbally slick and thus controls the mistress. 'That you did confusion/Her eyelid to stone' refers to the moment of sexual climax in which the fluttering eyelids of' the woman closed in pleasure, or to a simple, steadfast look of' love. The reader should notice that the entire poem is written its the past tense-like much of Pinter's work-and that the use of' feminine rhyme and the repeated 'That you' refrain work to emphasise the echoing of this threatening memory in the mind of the speaker. Most important is the one-foot last line, Îno case1 which reveals in an abrupt and absolute manner the speaker1s knowledge that he has 'no case' against the intruder in spite of' his many accusations, that the intrusion must be as a normal part of life which allows no moral judgement or outrage.
Two other poems which describe inescapable conditions that must be accepted and cannot be judged in a moral sense are 'The Error of' Alarm' (1956) and ÎAfternoon1 (1957). Though published one year apart, these poems appear to be companion pieces, describing the sexual condition of woman and man respectively. In 'The Error of Alarm', a woman explains her predicament with relation to men. She is described only as ca woman', indicating a general application. In the first stanza, it appears that she has confronted irresistible sexual feelings ('A pulse in the dark/I could not arrest'), felt a misgiving about this, but was unable to appeal to any social institution for help. ('A witness to that bargain/I could not summon'). No matter what she does, the man in the situation will accuse her of' weakening or castrating him during the sexual act. If she only looks at him or kisses him, he takes possession of her; if she puts him off sexually, he stops caring about her; and of she tries in her turn to possess him, he grows cold. He does not share her need for some feeling beyond the purely sexual, 'alarm' at loveless love. 'Thus, even the act, in which she acquiesces finally, this 'dear ritual', becomes a funeral for her. (Here the seventeenth-century meaning of the word 'die' to describe the consummation of the sexual act receives a fresh application). Alarm at loveless love is a 'fault' or an terror' because it leaves her vulnerable to male coldness and lack of understanding. The first, longest stanza sets forth the situation, the predicament. Now the first line of each group of two lines in succeeding stanzas contains her reaction to this predicament, and the second line a clipped condemnation of her reaction. The last, shortest stanza appears to contain a final capitulation; there is no argument against and no exit from her situation except compliance with the wishes of the male. The simple rhymes (blood/dread, made/bride, care/bare, share/bier, occur in the second and fourth lines of the last four stanzas, those lines she attributes to the male, and indicate a cold and pat response to her situation, which becomes more cold and insistent as the poem draws to a conclusion. 'M' sounds throughout provide a soft, murmuring undercurrent. The other side of the coin, the condition of the male, is rendered in 'Afternoon'. Men are brought from 'stews', or houses of prostitution, without genitals, castrated. Like dogs, they nose about, burrowing 'for their loss' of their 'articles of faith' as the speaker sardonically puts it, deaf to the 'smell of heat', or women's voiced or unvoiced sexual needs. One of these 'blind men' (a simple Freudian symbol for castration which Pinter employs throughout his work) has thrust upon him a seeing-eye dog, a 'bitch that had eaten the loot', or devoured his genitals. The dog 'became his mastiff at night', that is, his wife who arouses him sexually. Paradoxically, this wife, his closest partner, upon whom he is dependent, is the one who castrates him-'His guardian the thief of his blood' . Thus in these poems the situations of both men and women appear a matter of sexual struggle in which both are dispossessed by one another's needs. Men and women are locked in a mad dance which they are doomed to carry out until death, as expressed in the poem 'Jig' (I952):