Freedom

sparrowrose

Pinter and the odd literary law of geniuses with crazy politics
Minette Marrin

Harold Pinter was the greatest English playwright of the 20th century. That is as near to a fact as one gets in such matters. It is quite likely that, in the future, he will be seen as one of the greatest English playwrights in history. Pinter’s early plays are what is meant by creative genius.

Pinter needs no attempts at cheerleading from me or from anyone else. I idolised him from the moment I saw, as a teenager, a production of The Birthday Party, or possibly from the moment, at about the same time, when I saw a photo of him on the back of a copy of the play. He wasn’t just a genius; he was dark and handsome and he could be charming. However, as time wore on, some of the spell began to wear off.

It wasn’t just that his plays began to seem so much less inspired. He had written so many great ones that nobody could complain if he didn’t have any more arrows left in his quiver.

What amazed me, more and more, were his enraged political outbursts. However critical one might be of US policy, his furious anti-Americanism – “the most dangerous power that has ever existed” – was unworthy of an intelligent man. It is simply silly to compare American foreign policy with Nazi imperialism, as he did, and to insist that western governments are as evil as any of the worst in the world.

To give his public support to the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic was unforgivable. Naturally, Pinter won the Nobel prize.

Wondering about Pinter’s dotty political positions, I began to understand an odd natural law of literature: creative writers are often silly political commentators. This is puzzling, because we tend to turn to creative writers for wisdom and understanding of the world. However, it is surprisingly often true that they have nothing sensible to say outside their fiction.

The most obvious example of this literary law is Tolstoy, one of the most understanding and observant of novelists. However, about politics he was simply silly. I am not talking about the astonishing gulf between his subtle writing about women’s feelings and his vicious treatment of his own wife; that disjunction is so common that it seems almost to be necessary to the creative mind. What I mean is the nonsense of his pamphlets and his public posturing.

Jean-Paul Sartre is another glaring example. His novels and plays may be out of fashion but there’s no doubt that he was a creative writer of talent. However, his politics were ludicrous. In his loathing of America, he supported the mass murderers Stalin and Mao, as – to my amazement – did the great poet Pablo Neruda, another Nobel laureate.

On the other silly side of the political spectrum, there is V S Naipaul, one of my favourite writers and a man of infinite subtlety in his creative work who, in public pronouncements on the state of the world, descends into nasty right-wing ranting that distresses all his admirers. The best and the worst of the 19th-century romantic poets also had daft political ideas. Graham Greene supported the Soviet Union, as did Bertolt Brecht. Martin Amis, one of the most gifted novelists since the war, found his political views parodied (very cleverly) by Bernard Levin for their childishness.

We probably shouldn’t count Ezra Pound, T S Eliot’s much-admired “better craftsman”, because he was probably mad, but as well as an inspired poet he was an active fascist in Mussolini’s Italy. Nor should we count Céline, the notorious French antisemite, who was probably mad as well. But there are plenty of sane writers, good and adequate, who confirm the rule. Of course there are writers to whom it doesn’t apply – such as Chekhov – but that may be because many of them simply chose to say little in public about politics. Perhaps there could be a New Year’s Eve party game – spot the writer without any silly political views.

If my rule holds, and there are certainly plenty of individual instances of it, the question is why. One answer is that there may be no necessary connection between creativity and intelligence. That’s not such a difficult idea to entertain about music or sculpture but, when it comes to words, it does, I admit, sound odd. What I mean is that creativity need not necessarily be related to analytical, logical intelligence or to that mysterious and complex form of general intelligence called common sense.

One of the most interesting changes in ideas about the mind in my adult life has been the realisation, driven by science, that intelligence comes in many different forms. An aptitude for critical, logical analysis is not the same as the aptitude – the specific kind of creative intelligence – that enabled Mozart to write music as if taking dictation from eternity or that enabled Pinter to write dialogue that sounded like dictation straight from our shared unconscious.

It struck me as a child that people with a way with words often sounded much cleverer than they actually were. Lots of upper-middle-class ladies, born to articulacy and witty banter, sounded witty and wise, when my childish experience suggested otherwise.

Contrariwise, people who could hardly string two words together were often much more generally intelligent than their inarticulacy suggested. Verbal articulacy is in part, I believe, rather like the gift some people have for languages: I feel sure now, having known and worked with lots of polyglots, that the gift for articulating foreign words and phrases – and, indeed, one’s own – is a specific kind of cognitive aptitude that may have little to do with logic, argument or judgment.

Someone close to me, much to my annoyance, has for years insisted that the same applies equally to writers who lay claim to logic, argument or worldly judgment. Writing – any writing – is like knitting, he says. It’s an unintellectual knack that some people have naturally, and which develops astonishingly with practice, but which lots of clever people can’t do.

This has always annoyed me profoundly, as it is meant to, but I feel forced to agree that there may be something in it. We should be careful, both readers and writers, of the bewitchment of language: it can often mean less than you might think.

minette.marrin@sunday-times.co.uk