Jack Engelhard

They could have picked a number out of a hat, like Bingo, and come up with something better than Harold Pinter for this year’s Nobel in Literature.

But we come not to bury Pinter, but to praise him, more or less - though, as in Bingo, door prizes are awarded to contestants who check in with credentials that avow hatred for America and loathing for Israel. Bad writing also helps. Elfriede Jelinek was last year’s winner.

So why am I so indebted to Harold Pinter?

Off we go to a time when we were young and there I was, just coming off a job as doorman at the Bitter End nightspot in Greenwich Village. Ten bucks a night, but Bob Dylan had been making even less at the nearby Café Wha?, passing around the hat for nickels and quarters. Anyway, we were all broke in those days.

I wasn’t married, not even close, but I was dating this girl, Carol I think her name was, and Carol was an ice skating princess. She traveled around the globe with a group of fellow ice champions and checked back with me when they got back to New York.
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had not seen her for about a year when she phoned to say she was in town AND she had tickets for a Broadway show. Yes, Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming.” People were talking about Pinter and this marvelous play. Carol was excited.

We agreed to meet in the lobby of the Music Box Theatre and it turned out she had reservations all right but that I had to pay for the tickets.

The curtain went up, the play got started, and I got finished. I don’t need car chases but I do need dialogue, actual words, when I go to a play. I tried, I really tried, but fifteen minutes into the performance I told Carol “I’ve got to get the hell out of here.”

In fact, the aisles were clogged with people rushing for the exits. Soon, we had the theater pretty much to ourselves. But Carol insisted we stay. Something is bound to happen up there on stage. She said I ought to appreciate the “heated silences” between the characters.

Heated silences? That’s when you’re sitting in the living room with your mother-in-law watching a movie that suddenly veers into porn.

I told Carol that I’m off to the lobby for a smoke and that I’ll meet her in the lobby at halftime, or intermission, as they say. At intermission I said let’s leave and she said no, something is still bound to happen in the second half of the play. She went in, I went out, and that was the end of Carol.
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f not for Harold Pinter, I may have ended up with this girl, yes, Carol I think her name was. I would not have gotten as lucky as I did, years later. As it turned out, Pinter’s “The Homecoming” got mostly raves. The highbrow reviewers called him “another Beckett.” Still today, that’s what they say about Pinter-- another Beckett.

Really. If we already have one Beckett, why do we need another Beckett? What was wrong with the first Beckett?

At the time, I only knew that Pinter was a terrible writer. I did not know that he was so political. I did not know that he hated America and that he also, of course, hated Israel (although that came later), despite being the product of Jewish parents (as we say of Jews who would rather abstain).

Accordingly, abstainers such as Amos Oz, David Grossman, and A.B. Yehoshua have a shot for next year’s Swedish Bingo - writers who have made the honey bitter and turned the milk sour. But thank you, Harold Pinter. They gave you the Nobel but that can’t compete with what you gave me.

Jack Engelhard’s most recent novel, the newsroom thriller The Bathsheba Deadline is running as a serial on Amazon.com His novel, The Days of the Bitter End is being prepared for movie production.