Harold Pinter by Walter Kerr (review)

1968 BOOK REVIEWS 345 the non-Ibsenite sense-failed to survive the continual intrusions of the witty or ironic real." Mr. Mayne's book is one that no Shavian can ignore. He may be irritated by its compressed, elliptical nature and by the critic's failure to extend his discourse. He may feel that, in some sense, this book is the skeleton of the fully fleshed book that did not get written. And yet the cogency of many of Mr. Mayne's conclusions is great. The book is, at the least, worth the hard work involved in coming to terms with it. No one can say of it that it is superficial. FREDERICK P. W. McDoWELL University of Iowa HAROLD PINTER, by Walter Kerr, Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, 1967, 45 pp. In this thought-stirring essay Walter Kerr attempts to put his finger on exactly what makes Harold Pinter different from other modern playwrights, and he begins by calling him "the only man working in the theater today who writes existentialist plays existentially." To summarize his preliminary definition of the term: The existentialist view of creation is the opposite of the traditional Platonic view. Plato assumed that all creatures were derived from an ideal concept of their species existing in the abstract, and that each strove to fulfill its potential by approaching that ideal as far as its individual make-up permitted. Accordingly there existed a concept of a human being from which all humans were more or less imperfectly patterned, and so they could at least know what they were supposed to be doing when they tried to realize their nature. "Essence precedes existence ," as Kerr puts it. Existentialism, on the other hand, is modern man's expression of his disbelief in any such design. He asserts that he has been told nothing, that he can find out what he is only through what he does. "Existence precedes essence." He is nothing until he becomes something, and he has no idea what that may be until it is accomplished. There is no law, no limit for what may determine his nature. He can only construct it through his process of living. This is a widely-accepted argument of our time, but Harold Pinter, Kerr claims, is the only playwright who is really using it as a technique. Beckett, although he treats "existentialist themes," is really relying on the old-fashioned way of employing characters and situations to represent concepts-slave and master, for example. Furthermore, Kerr shows, his characters do not act. They do not become slave and master; they are already such. Many are incapacitated from the start by being buried in urns or ashcans or sand piles. They are not explorers of the possible or builders of essence. The real existentialist character, Kerr explains, should have unlimited freedom to act. He might do anything. These distinctions are clearly drawn and valid enough in principle, but one feels that they become artificial when playwrights are categorized by them, and that in fact the plays are construed to fit the theory. Pinter's characters, Kerr finds, move forward from action to action without knowing what they are going to do or be next. A good wife and mother, happily fulfilling herself in a university community, turns suddenly at the end to become a prostitute in a sordid situation. Another wife of high station makes her husband exchange positions with a wretched match-seller, whom she takes in his place. An old tramp is treated capriciously by two brothers. Two thugs, on an assignment to do a killing, get distracted by an irrelevant dumbwaiter which descends to their hide-out with mysterious orders. Married couples and lovers become involved with each other in a baHling way. And so on. 346 MODERN DRAMA December It is true that Pinter's characters engage in some unexpected behavior, but perhaps at second look it is not really so tangential. Perhaps, for instance, the wife in The Homecoming who deserts husband, children, and an enviable life to become a prostitute is only reverting to former urges and sympathies, as the title suggests. Perhaps, far from doing the unpredictable, she is only doing the...