When he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, Harold Pinter famously said that writers should cast an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and show a ‘fierce intellectual determination… to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’. Few writers could be more deserving of recognition for their ‘unflinching’ commitments than David Hare and Roberto Saviano who, as a mark of solidarity, were both awarded this year’s PEN/Pinter Prize – an accolade established three years ago in memory of the late playwright.
What better venue to award this prize than the British Library which, as its chief executive than Dame Lynne Brindley said, ‘represents freedom to think and create new knowledge without hindrance or restriction’. Praising Pinter for his ‘great generosity’ for giving so much archived material (including 50 of his awards and, his crowning achievement, the Nobel Prize) Brindley said Hare had exemplified Pinter’s ‘intellectual honesty and freedom of speech’. And, as Gillian Slovo, President of English PEN, reminded us: ‘We are all here tonight in the memory of a great man and writer.’
Pinter (who on this day would have celebrated his 81st birthday) was first introduced to PEN by his widow, Lady Antonia Fraser. ‘His experience of campaigns influenced his writing and what it means to be a writer,’ she said. It was when in Turkey he met Arthur Miller and Orhan Pamuk, who famously said: ‘When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free. This, indeed, is the spirit that informs the solidarity felt by PEN, by writers all over the world.’ It is in tribute to that solidarity, Fraser explained, that the prize is shared between two writers. ‘Harold was a great admirer [of PEN] and would be delighted,’ she said. In fact, one of her last conversations with Pinter was apparently on the subject of the reader and Hare’s screenplay.
While Slovo conceded that the judging process for the prize remains ‘shrouded in mystery’, Michael Billington, the author and critic, explained why he and fellow judges (Hanif Kureishi, Antonia Fraser, Gillian Slovo and Claire Tomalin) deemed Hare the worthy winner. With a career spanning 40 years and 28 stage plays, Hare was, according to Billington, ‘constantly engaged with events [and] felt a moral compulsion to attack the thorniest subjects’. He alluded to Hare’s play, Brassneck (written in collaboration with Howard Brenton) which attacked ‘the cravenness of the British establishment’. Alluding to the recent Murdoch saga, Billington noted how subsequent events show the play was ‘not so much antiquated but easily prophetic’, adding wryly: ‘Hare and Brenton had the nous to make the hero charismatic… unlike his real life counterpart.’
In Secret Rapture, Hare explored Thatcherism and the inner workings of the church and the Labour Party, while A Map of the World shows Hare as the internationalist. ‘It is typical of Hare when asked to write a mandate on Palestine that he writes on Israel,’ Billington said, adding that it is also ‘typical’ of Hare to sift through the origins of the Iraq war to offer a ‘coherent account’ in Stuff Happens.
‘In short, we are all impressed by his ungovernable urge to attack the issues of his time,’ Billington concluded. ‘The nub of the matter is his ability to really write! There’s one thing to engage with limitations on human freedom but another thing to write about it. It has to provide images and put flesh on ideas otherwise we get dogma not drama. Hare’s art is out of confrontation with the world we inhabit.’
David Hare then came to the podium to accept his prize (a cheque and a framed cartoon by Martin Rosen) from Antonia Fraser. He said the pleasure of being asked to give a talk in Pinter’s name is that that the number of appropriate subjects is ‘refreshingly large’, from theatre, politics and pacifism to poetry, sex and, ‘most certainly’, human rights.
He argued that, ironically, it was Pinter’s ‘good fortune’ in 1957 to have his first full-length play ‘comprehensively trashed’ because it freed him from ‘the tyranny of the world’s opinion’ and left him ‘in the grip of a wild, exhaustingly consummate love affair with his own.’
‘From the off,’ Hare surmised, ‘Harold got the basic point. There is no purpose in being a writer unless you contribute something which no one else can.’ And, ultimately, as Hare suggested, the best question to ask of any dramatist is, ‘Would it matter if he or she had not lived?’
As such, some plays have seemed at first sight ‘too new to be beautiful.’ One need only think of Waiting for Godot, The Birthday Party or Saved, which each opened to what was, in the main, ‘an uncomprehending and hostile reception’. But, Hare asked, why do we not imagine that the same reception is awaiting contemporary work of similar quality? ‘What is it in human beings which makes them think that they must necessarily be more intelligent and discerning than those who lived fifty or a hundred years earlier? Does it never occur to us that one day we will be mocked for our ignorance and stupidity in exactly the same way that we now mock others?’
He argued that our standpoint, our ‘platform of beliefs and prejudices from which we choose to view both life and art’, is no more discerning than that of many cultures that we (for some reason) feel ‘qualified to extend facile disdain’. The only real entitlement we enjoy (in terms of taste and morals) over previous generations, he argued, is that fact that we are alive and they are not. ‘We are very happy to smugly ask, “How on earth can the W. A. Darlingtons and Milton Shulmans of the mid-century have been so blind, so conventional and so ignorant as to disregard the very plays which we now rate above all others?” […] Why do we consider ourselves immune from the same crashing artistic misjudgements? […] Why do we think of ourselves as some kind of norm, the fully evolved sensibility of a fully evolved race?’
Hare gave a wonderful anecdote about the moment he experienced ‘a profound moment of revolt against this kind of certainty’ when he visited a painting exhibition in Chicago of the ‘hugely expensive’ Jasper Johns. Finding the ‘penance of piety’ demanded of gallery-going suffocating at the best of times, there was nothing to do but read the instructional legends which the curator had provided beside each painting. It was at this point he encountered one that read: ‘It must be seen in the context of John’s 1955 painting Flag.’ Hare was enraged. ‘Surely, yes, it might be acceptable to say of a painting that it can be seen in the context of some other. You might even say it may be seen. You might even at a pinch […] tolerate the idea that some expert had ruled that it should be seen in such a context. But what conceivable arrogance is it in anyone to insist that one work of art must be seen in the context of another?’ He came to the conclusion that a great deal of art commentary, when not actively misleading, is more commonly ‘a struggle for control […] a blanket thrown deliberately to muzzle the work’s power’.
Since that moment, Hare has noticed this stance everywhere, from the worlds of politics, banking and the media to criminal and social issues. ‘The salaries of bankers are an offence against civil society, but they “must” go on receiving them […] The politicians go into elections with one agenda, and then immediately implement another, but they “must” be free to do so for the sake of democracy […] Newspapers in the past have broken the law with joyful impunity, but for the sake of press freedom, they “must” continue without restraint […] We have endured urban looting, but the looters “must” be treated as criminals and criminals only.’
He said times are changing faster than we are. ‘Few of us in the West can recall a time when we had so little confidence in the way our societies were organised. But nor can we remember a time when we had so little imagination about how they might be organised differently.’ He alluded to the occupation of France in the early 1940s, when, offered the difficult choice of a collaborative regime in Vichy or joining the Resistance to fight the Nazis, the majority chose the third course: simply to wait and see which way the wind would eventually blow, an activity known as ‘attentisme’ (in English ‘sitting it out’). Hare believes this attentisme is ‘the defining philosophy of our day’. He warned that the West is living in a ‘perverse, aimless time’ in which it has no constructive policy for the future beyond ‘crossing its fingers and hoping for the best’.
And so this celebration of Pinter and Saviano ‘two people who are both famous strangers to attentisme’ marks a defiance to the prevailing mood. ‘We may ask the question:” Would it matter if [Saviano] had not lived?” in the certainty of receiving the emphatic answer: “Yes.”‘ He then quoted Saviano’s bold theory on the purpose of literature: ‘By combining imagination with reporting, literature speaks directly to the reader. It invades his space. [I am determined to] allow no polemics, sentimentality or simplification.’
‘For obvious reasons,’ Hare concluded. ‘I hesitate to say that at this moment in human history, we “must” listen to those writers who care enough both to report and to imagine, and who ask us to take sides. But we “may”, we “can”, and we “should”.’
Jonathan Heawood, Director of English PEN, praised writers like Saviano for their refusal to ‘turn their eyes away from the abuse and hypocrisy, whatever price they may pay’. However, as he explained, Saviano was not able to be here to receive his prize. ‘The Metropolitan police don’t feel able to offer him level of protection he needs. We may ask why that is.’
But a former colleague of Saviano, the Italian journalist Annalisa Piras, came to speak on his behalf. ‘I am honoured to call myself a friend,’ she said. ‘Robert’s work has never been as important. We think he is the bravest Italian in modern history.’ Piras met Saviano four years ago when his novel Gomorrah, had come out in English. ‘I read the news in the papers and was very excited to see Roberto was finally big, his words loud. The amazing thing is he manages to use his imagination and reporting skills to really touch. But I was surprised to hear that he was not going to speak in London. He was not protected; there was a danger to the public; insurance costs… I felt outraged. If he could not speak in London, then where?’ At the time, Piras was president of the Foreign Press Association. ‘To cut a long story short – including conversations with the secret services – we managed to get him to London for an extraordinary event.’
But since writing Gomorrah, Saviano now wears, as Piras put it, ‘a wooden coat’, that is to say a coffin. ‘They [the mafia] will get you one way or another.’ She explained that, once you challenge the mafia, you can never survive. And, while even a fatwa can be forgotten or renegotiated, with the Camorra (a Mafia-type organisation) people can be killed even 50 years after. ‘Most people think that if he is out of the limelight they will kill him, but not while he’s listened to. He is a great writer forced to be a hero. Roberto cannot walk free. He said thank you for bringing his words to London.’
Piras then read a message from Saviano. He said how grateful he was to PEN to have been awarded this prize. But he added: ‘By now, I am so accustomed to the life I lead; I no longer know what it means to be a free man. [Italy is] not China, it does not openly repress dissidence but the mechanism is more insidious as it is not immediately recognisable. The government is trying to exert authority by any means. While giving me a way to exist, to silence my words is a mistake.’
Under constant protection from bodyguards and travelling in an armoured car, Saviano said he has changed house ten times in the last two years, each one small and ‘infernally dark’. ‘This is how it is for people in my situation. The minute the landlord recognises you, the answer is the same: “I really admire your work but…” They were people who didn’t want to take sides.’
But, even for people in Saviano’s predicament, there is one last freedom: the freedom to write. ‘You have to write. You have to and you want to. What you have to avoid is the cynicism that is the mark of many professional writers, barely concealing a disdain for anything that does not have a specific goal or plan,’ he said. ‘To write is itself a way out, a way of passing my words on, a clandestine message. Writing is a form of resistance; writing is resisting. This prize goes to my readers. When you feel so many need to see, know, change and not just be entertained and consoled, why should you have such suspicion and fear? I’m asked, “Aren’t you afraid?” The question obviously refers to the fact I might be murdered. “No”, I reply and stop there. But it is true. I had – and still have – a lot of fears, but I rarely feel the fear of dying. In reality the worst of my fears is day they destroy my credibility and drag my name through the mud.’
He alluded to Truman Capote who once said: ‘We shed more tears for prayers that are answered than for those that go unanswered.’ ‘If I ever had a dream,’ Saviano said. ‘It was to carve out a space with my words, to show literature can still have weight and change the world. In spite of everything that has happened to me, my wish has been granted. But I also became a different person to the one I imagined I would be. And this has been painful and difficult to accept. Then I realised that no-one chooses his destiny. You can, however, choose how to live your life, As far as I’m concerned I want to do it in the best way possible, because I feel I owe it to the readers who have sustained me.
‘The mafia is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it has a beginning and will have an end.’ He then quoted Albert Camus, who said: ‘Hell can endure for only a limited period and life will begin again one day.’ Saviano concluded: ‘This is what I believe.’
Report by Alex Masters
Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/events/reportsonrecentevents/penpinterprize2011/