Harold Pinter by Alrene Sykes, and: The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter-Its Basis in Ritual by Katherine H. Burkman (review)

486 MODERN DRAMA February of the artist for a human predicament he could personally identify with." Clearly we need a full account of Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop. Behan wrote little in the six years he lived after completing The Hostage: O'Connor describes the unpublished, incomplete Richard's Cork Leg, mostly irreverent jokes fired off at random. He does not attempt much criticism; rather, he gives facts and quotes texts and reviews. The atmosphere is often rich as O'Connor guides us through the various phases-years of jail, Paris in the late forties with such acquaintances as Camus, Beckett, James Baldwin, and Terry Southern, New York in the sixties for TV talk-shows and McSorley's Old Ale House. But O'Connor knows Dublin best, and his book is full of anecdotes about pubs, singing, and eccentrics. Sometimes all the characters seem stage Irishmen-or out of Donleavy's novel, The Ginger Man. Through it all, we wonder why an artist should meet this fate: is it a morality about. the corruption of success, or the handicap of a near-slum childhood ? O'Connor is responsive to the personal tragedy in the final pages, but at times chatters on brightly through the suffering. He entertains more than he interprets. MALCOLM PAGE Simon Fraser University HAROLD PINTER, by Alrene Sykes. New York: Humanities Press, 1971. 135 pp. cloth $6.50, paper $3.75. THE DRAMATIC WORLD OF HAROLD PINTER-ITS BASIS IN RITUAL, by Katherine H. Burkman. Ohio State University Press, 1971. 171 pp. $8.00. The manuscript of Harold Pinter by Alrene Sykes has evidently been a long time at the printers: the bibliography ends in 1967 (with one article from 1968) and her discussion finishes at The Homecoming [1965] and mention of the text of Landscape [1968]. Such delays are not unusual but in this case it matters. The publishers write on the back cover that here is a book "packed with information relevant to Pinter's work, much of it culled from ephemeral or almost inaccessible sources, so that the book is not likely to be replaced for a long time." In fact, Miss Sykes suffers from a lack of information; thus, she opens the book by describing the shower scene in The Servant but fails to connect it with her mention of Hitchcock on page 2, while on page 4 she seems unaware that The Basement was written as a film script (related to Beckett and Ionesco) and not a television play; and so on. But these are details. As far as information goes Martin Esslin's book The Peopled Wound, although published in 1970, is more complete. Some books, though very few, are definitive, and as a summary of Pinter's developing dramatic art, Esslin's book, with timely additions, is likely to be so. Which leaves us with Miss Sykes's lively, readable book already striking a note of deja vu. This is a great pity for if the path is well trodden Miss Sykes makes a good companion and her treatment of the plays, to my mind, is more stimulating than that offered by Dr. Esslin who labours too long at explanation and finally produces description rather than analysis. But the sad truth remains that this '135-page survey should have come out of Australia in 1967. Professor Burkman, in her book The Dramatic World of Harold Pinter, shows a way of being neither definitive nor superseded and possibly indicates the only kind of way future cirtics will be able to write, profitably, about Pinter. Where Lois Gordon appealed to Freud's "seething cauldron" (in Strategems to Cover 1972 BOOK REVIEWS 487 Nakedness [1969]) Professor Burkman offers us The Golden Bough. She begins by looking at the dual content of Pinter's plays, the exact portrayal of surfaces and the evocation of forces beneath, characters who speak vividly in the idiom of the streets but seem to live in a kind of dream, or more appropriately, nightmare: surface detail and mysteries beneath. She suggests, however, that Pinter is not trying to puzzle us, that he is a poetic dramatist rather than a writer of thrillers, and by "poetic dramatist" she means that...