Harold Pinter by Bernard F. Dukore (review)

Book Reviews work. Carson devotes fourteen and one-half pages to View, sixteen pages to Crucible, sixteen pages to Salesman , fifteen pages to Price. yet only twelve pages lDAfter the Fall, which Carson calls "Miller's most experimental, subtle and profound work," Why six pages on The Creation of the World (a play this reviewer must confess he has always liked) and only one five-sentence paragraph on Incident at Vichy? Why only five sentences on A Memory o/Two Mondays in the introduction and little or no mention of it in the chapter treating View? This anomaly is distracting, because Carson quotes heavily from the onc-act version of the latter play. An author-critic, like any artist, has the right to selection and emphasis, but this book raises questions about Carson's method. Why completely neglect Miller's version of Ibsen's An Enemy afthe People and almost entirely ignore Incident at Vichy? Ifthe book is an introduction to Miller, and the first two chapters make it eminently clear that it is, why omit Enemy and Vichy from the discussion? If, on the other hand, the essays are aimed at another, more sophisticated audience, why then include the unneeded and superficial introductory biographical matter? The book is uneven, in part, because the author appears not to be clear about his audience. The book falls between two stools, and that is a shame, really, because several of the individual chapters are interesting and inteiIigent. Finally, while any reviewer appreciates the fact that an author does not always see the illustrations before a book is in print, he would expect the editors to see them. Not to pick a nit: but someone ought to suggest how A Viewfrom the Bridge might be played on the set pictured in Figure 6a. - with the caption ''The set of A View from the Bridge. New York, 1956" - when the photograph reproduces the set of A Memory ofTwo Mondays. Those two onew act plays, by the way, were first presented at the Coronet Theatre on 29 September 1955. not 1956. Perhaps, for the reviewer, that one picture is worth his thousand words. JAMES J. MARTINE, ST. BONAVENTURE UNIVERSITY BERNARD F. DUKORE. Harold Pinter. New York: Grove Press 1982. Pp. x, 139, illustrated. $7.95 (PB). What the world needs now is not another introduction to the playwright Harold Pinter. So, those of us who anxiously await new critical approaches to Pinter's work (at times almost as much as we await new works by the author himself) will find ourselves initially disappointed in learning that the new book about this author is mainly an introduction. directed toward "new spectators and readers who feel puzzled and disoriented, and to those older oncs who. while absorbed. remain mystified" (p. 2). Although the editors for this Grove Press series on major and significant nineteenthand twentiethwcentury dramatists insist an introduction is forthcoming, Bernard F. Dukore's probing mind will not allow this. Hence, as readers we largely become the recipients ofa truly creative effort in assimilating recurrent concerns through twentyw one years of Pinter play-writing in a mere 139 pages of text. Although introducing Pinter to his reader with a biographical survey -: mainly derived from the fIrst chapter of Martin Esslin's Pinter: A Study of His Plays, William Baker and Stephen Ely Tabachnick's Harold Pimer, and Pinter's prefaces to the volumes of his Collected Works - Dukore 390 Book Reviews augments that easily accessible material with less readily available infonnation from production data, theatre programs, and newspaper indexes. ]t is from this performancerelated material, combined with his own personal responses, that Dukare makes some unique contributions which are likely to expand OUT structural perceptions of Pinter's work. This result is particularly evident in his discussion of the repetitive echoes in Betrayal. While organizing his study of Pinter's dramatic art so that each chapter focuses on a discussion of one play (The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, The Homecoming. Old Times. and Betrayal), Dukare supports that discussion with serious and fruitful analyses ofother plays that are related by. what he calls, "convenient rubrics that convey different stratagems and emphases rather than mutually exclusive themes" (p...