Conservatives are outraged once again that the Nobel Prize for Literature has gone to a stark, raving, drooling moonbat. British playwright Harold Pinter is the latest old time socialist to receive the prestigious award and righty web sites are full of examples of Pinter’s outrageous and unreasoning hatred of the US.

Yes, the Nobel Committee is made up of a bunch of Anti-American jackasses who apparently live for sticking it to the United States with their selections – especially in the arts and the over-hyped “Peace Prize.” The poorly named award has gone recently to some of the most clueless denizens of the fever swamps as well as some of the most anti-peace thugs around. In the last 15 years, the prize has gone to Yassar Arafat (baby killer), Kofi Anan (corrupt, cynical exploiter), Jimmy Carter (No. Words. Necessary), and Mikhail Gorbechev who received the prize the same year that 10,000 Russian citizens were incarcerated in lunatic asylums not because they were mentally ill but because they disagreed with him.

But I would say to my righty friends that when it comes to awarding a prize to Harold Pinter, the Nobellers have hit the jackpot for once.

Pinter’s politics have nothing to do with the way the man revolutionized the English speaking stage. His sparse use of dialog and frequent pauses as well as the sheer ordinariness of his characters which sometimes masked a degeneracy of unfathomable depth, shocked audiences in the 1950’s. Here is critic Martin Eslin:

“Every syllable, every inflection, the succession of long and short sounds, words and sentences, is calculated to nicety. And precisely the repetitiousness, the discontinuity, the circularity of ordinary vernacular speech are here used as formal elements with which the poet can compose his linguistic ballet.”

Pinter achieved this effect by doing some unusual first hand research. As a young, struggling playwright in the 1950’s, he would spend countless hours in the park just sitting on a bench and listening – really listening to the way people talk. He was especially fascinated with the wordplay between older couples whose monosyllabic questions and responses held much deeper meaning than just the words themselves. The result was sheer brilliance, a combination of free verse and dialog so bitingly ordinary that the incongruity between the situations the characters found themselves in – usually something dark, menacing, and unknowable – and the spare, barest of bones language made for a sometimes shocking, sometimes sublime night of theater.

More than most, Pinter’s plays are best judged when performed rather than simply read. This is because of the playwright’s deliberate use of “the pause.” In many plays where stage directions are written into the script by the author, the results are desultory or, more likely logical outgrowths of dialog between characters (ex.: “Mary looks at paper, frowns, then looks at Mark”).

Pinter’s frequent and planned use of pauses – actually writing into the script “short pause” or “long pause” – establishes a rhythm for the actor that allows the unnatural dialog to flow. The pauses are as much a part of character development as anything else in the script and, at the time, was truly innovative.

His characters are simple, lower middle class Brits usually with family “issues” – some of them bizarre or surreal. In The Homecoming (1963) we find a long lost son coming home to a father and two brothers ( a boxer and a shadowy low life). He brings his enigmatic wife with him and by the end of the play, the father and the low life are negotiating with the woman to become a quasi-prostitute/mother to the dysfunctional group. When performed well, the play is both laugh out loud funny and shocking in its implications.

Critics at first were universally negative. But theatergoers both in Britain and the United States were starved for something different than the relentlessly up-beat musical comedy and the boilerplate dramas and melodramas of the post war period. As a result, Pinter’s plays were like a splash of ice cold water on a hot day – a bracing and sometimes exhilarating experience. As the years went by, Pinter dramas have gone Hollywood (with uneven results) and the playwright himself has written some screenplays such as The French Lieutenant’s Woman. But in the end, Pinter’s brilliant originality and revolutionary use of language established the playwright as one of the most dynamic forces of the English speaking theater in the 20th century.

Is Pinter worthy of a Nobel Prize? For the totality of his work, yes. In the last 20 years however, Pinter has become something of a caricature of himself and his plays and other writing output (he has published an anthology of rather insipid and obscure poetry) have degenerated into political screeds against capitalism, the west, and especially the United States. But I can’t imagine what the theater would be like today without his contributions from the 1950’s to the 1970’s.

The question arises should we condemn authors and artists for their politics even if their work is a cut above brilliant? I find such a construct puzzling. Just because John Updike is a loony lefty that doesn’t make Rabbit Run any less of a joy to read. And Joan Didion’s essays are achingly well written despite a political content that runs to the left of Marshall Tito. Can we accept talent and beauty in art despite disagreeing with the artists personal politics?

I would think that this would be the essence of artistic expression and criticism. Although a good case can be made that the more conservative authors and artists – or at least artistic endeavors that express conservative themes – are deliberately censored and given short shrift in a world dominated by liberal purveyors and critics of many artistic forms, should this lessen our enjoyment and appreciation of artistic expression even by people whose extremist views are totally at odds with ours?

Personally, I would find such a world very limiting and boring. Consequently, we should pity liberals who refuse to see the brilliance of a Tom Wolfe or even Ayn Rand, whose books have inspired several generations of conservative thinkers and writers. By rejecting art based on the artist’s politics, we are only hurting ourselves.

And so, I congratulate the Noble Committee for recognizing the brilliance of Harold Pinter. However, I wonder if for next year’s peace prize, we couldn’t actually get someone who, you know, actually works for “peace” and not “surrender” or the “peace of the grave” like Yassar Arafat. Maybe they should consider a liberator, someone who has freed 25 million people from the clutches of two of the most bloodthirsty and oppressive regimes in history. Do you think it’s possible…

Maybe when hell freezes over.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin rounds up reaction to Pinter’s Nobel Prize on the right with a link to an interesting Roger Kimball piece in The New Criterion. I think Roger speaks for a lot of conservatives who are simply sick and tired of the relentless anti-Americanism, especially in international organizations.

Joe Gandleman agrees with the award although his support is more tepid and more the result of resignation that the prize was in fact awarded for Pinter’s virulent anti-Americanism.

Roger Simon also believes the award is “well deserved” and makes the same point I did about the body of Pinter’s best work decades behind him.