Their Date with Each Other from the Beginning: Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter

Near the end of 1961, just as The Night of the Iguana had gone into rehearsals, Tennessee Williams gave an interview to Lewis Funke and John Booth. It was a pivotal time, and he was feeling the accumulated weight of his successes and failures since the debut of The Glass Menagerie almost exactly seventeen years earlier. He had recently turned fifty; his relationship with Frank Merlo had entered its final, rocky period; and he was feeling, as he told the interviewers, that his kind of writing - long and "pseudo-literary"1 - was on its way out. He felt invigorated by a new generation of European and American playwrights including Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Jack Gelber and Edward Albee. He singled out one for special praise: Harold Pinter and his new play The Caretaker.The Caretaker's spare language and ambiguity of character made Williams, he admitted, "... crazy with jealousy. I love it. While I'm in the theater I'm enthralled by it and I say, Oh, God, if I could write like that."2 If he felt an Ibsenesque fear of being overtaken by the younger generation, he never showed it. Although he could be mean-spirited towards some of his contemporaries, such as William Inge, he was only full of praise for the young playwrights whose critical stars were rising while his was soon to begin its long eclipse.In recent years, scholars have looked at Williams in the light of these playwrights. Given that Williams frequently denied the influence of anyone on his work other than Chekhov, what could be said of his relationship between Pinter's and his plays? Was there influence, despite Williams' denials? Was there just an occasional similarity? There are several angles from which one could explore this question, including their depictions of women, the waxing and waning of humor, the growing visibility of politics, as well as the decreasing length of their plays as both got older. In this essay, I will limit these angles to three: the worlds of their plays, their use of ambiguity and the ways in which they employed language.The worlds of their playsThe constant factor in Pinter's world is danger: his universe is a place of a struggle, for control of territory and people. The sound of a knock at the door may be a death knell for the person inside. A character will be dominated, physically or psychologically, if he does not dominate his opponent first. That is the understood if unspoken fact of Pinter's world.In Pinter's second play, The Birthday Party, Stanley resides in a seaside boarding house. As the lone boarder in this house run by Meg and her husband Petey, and as the reluctant object of Meg's affections, which can be characterized as somewhere between maternal and obscene, Stanley is in effective control of the house until the arrival of Goldberg and McCann - two men who hover between the comic and the deadly. After a night devoted to celebrating Stanley's birthday - a landmark the veracity of which, like so much else in the play, is in considerable doubt - Stanley, broken and unable to speak anything but sounds such as, "Uh-gug" and, "Caahh", is removed from the house by the two intruders and driven away. In Pinter's next play, The Caretaker, the intruder, Davies, attempts to come between two brothers but ultimately is cast out. In The Homecoming, the battle is for control of Teddy's wife Ruth, as well as for the North London home ruled over by her father-in-law Max. In Old Times, Deeley and Anna vie for possession of Deeley's wife Kate; in Mountain Language, a government dominates an ethnic group by outlawing its language.No matter the victor, this battle for power recurs in almost every play Pinter wrote through to his last one, Celebration, of 1999, as if the world of his plays emerged fully grown with The Birthday Party. In 1988 he told theatre critic Mel Gussow that the story of The Birthday Party, written in 1957, was the same as that of One for the Road of 1984: "It's the destruction of an individual, the independent voice of an individual. …