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Harold Pinter: Nobel Prize Winner is a Conscientious Objector and Fierce Counter-militarism Advocate
From Draft NOtices, November-December, 2005
—Glen Motil
The Swedish Academy says playwright, poet, and polemicist Harold Pinter “uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”
An East London boy, son of working-class Jewish immigrants, is sent away to rural England on a traumatic separation where he immerses himself in reading. The reason for his sojourn is to escape bombs falling from the sky; it is the Battle of Britain and the Nazis are terrorizing the civilian population of London. The boy returns to find a devastated urban landscape. This experience would forever impact and alter the consciousness of this boy named Harold Pinter.
When he turned 18 in 1948, as World War II was being mythologized as the so-called “Good War” and the Cold War age of nuclear horror was just beginning, young Harold simply said, “No.” He confirmed his stance as a conscientious objector to British conscription, was brought before a court twice and fined for refusing to perform military service. He cited his cursory but traumatizing knowledge of war as his reason for refusal. According to Peter Marks of the Washington Post, “Pinter told an interviewer in 2002 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, ‘I didn’t actually see anybody killed, but I saw where bombs had fallen and I was part of that world of bombs dropping.’” Because of this, Pinter acknowledges that “out of one’s consciousness and out of one’s recognition of other people’s reality” one begins to see and feel “what death means to other people.” This knowledge made it impossible for him to take part in what he viewed as barbarism. Less than a decade later, Pinter rose to international fame with his plays of absurdist bent — originally misunderstood and critically lambasted but ultimately widely embraced and hailed as genius.
