Pinter: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Arthur Ganz (review)

212 BOOK REVIEWS a humanitarian. Both ignore what Agnes says about Brand (and she should know best): "Oh, what a wealth of love is contained in that strong soul." Even Bernard Shaw could not tolerate Ibsen's vision of the truth, and when Ibsen allowed Agnes to die "in radiant joy," Shaw suppressed the truth and wrote that Agnes dies "broken-hearted." It is still the bane of English and American criticism that all too often we do not see Ibsen face to face but through Shaw darkly. EVERT SPRINCHORN Vassar College PINTER: A COLLECTION OF CRITICAL ESSAYS, edited by Arthur Ganz (Twentieth Century Views Series). Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972. vi & 184 pp. $1.95; in Canada $2.20. Arthur Ganz praises his anthology of previously published Pinter criticism because it follows the dramatist's career from the start to its present holding position. So, he argues, a reader can trace the "development of Pinter's art and our understanding of it." But the price of this is a series of references to The Room, The Dumb Waiter, The Birthday Party, and Look Back in Anger which becomes wearisome. The Homecoming was first performed as long ago as 1965 so that the editor might have insisted that all articles took at least that play into account. There are problems enough in compiling such an anthology without lumbering it with a study of the study of the book's subject. Could it be that Pinter truly has his critics on the run, and that there just isn't enough material without reprinting early work? From this sampling of published work there is still more to do. I would welcome a comparison with Beckett that went beyond quick references to Waiting for Godot (illustrated several times in this volume), and including a study of Beckett's novels, which are arguably a more basic influence than his plays. A study of the quality of Pinter's humour is also needed: his delight in the phrase that sticks, marks, reveals, and often seems in danger of stopping the drama; his use of adroit comic business; the effect of correct timing and lightness of touch in performance; the "game" that often lies behind the drama. (Bert O. States's account of some ironies in this volume suggests one way of approaching Pinter's humour.) For a study of Pinter's dramaturgy a full .comparison of the plays and film-scripts is overdue, as a brief account here of The Servant by John Pesta amply demonstrates: I suspect Accident and The Go-Between are equally formative. R. F. Storch's article from The Massachusetts Review on "Harold Pinter's Happy Families" suggests there may be more to discover through psychological explication, but Storch himself warns against simplification in this approach. The editor's own emphasis of a lesbian theme in Old Times does not seem to me to release this play's energy at all fully, its concern with arrangements, artifice, privacy and the creative and would-be free mind; it even tends to diminish its presentation of the effects of time. As an anthology for students in universities this volume should be BOOK REVIEWS 213 welcomed, although Esslin and Russell Taylor are now so readily available in paperback editions that the large quotations from these critics' major books might well have been exchanged for something less easy to find. I would have welcomed a frankly astringent piece, like Nigel Dennis on "Pintermania." I would also wish to have a fuller bibliography of Pinter's own works that noted the two published versions of The Caretaker and the three versions of The Dwarfs (comparison of these texts often leads a student to grapple both with style and structure). The 1971 edition of the Poems should also have been noted, since it adds nine poems to the 1968 edition, including six not previously published. And I'd gladly exchange the Paris Review interview (which is available in book-form elsewhere) for the most revealing one with Mel Gussow in The New York Times Magazine, 5 December 1971. This brings me to further reaction to this volume. Pinter has given few interviews and made few...