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menacing evasions. All too often, these procedures degenerated into
cheap mystification and portentousness.
Pinter has not entirely renounced these methods in
The Home–
coming,
but he does distinguish much more sharply between the sub–
ject matter from which he starts and the esthetic materials he is inter–
ested in manipulating. The hectoring speech of Teddy's father Max is
precisely rendered, but his persistence in violent self-contradiction makes
it clear that Pinter is not engaged in realistic characterization. Ruth may
ignore her children back in the States, but the important point is that
Max's wife, Julie, also abandoned three children. Pinter's tale estab–
lishes its own logic and its own standards of relevance, and he permits us
the refined satisfaction of watching it unfold. It should be no surprise
that the absent Julie is at the play's center. She was, as Max tells us,
a good woman, but also a slutbitch of a wife; the mother of three fine
lads, whom he suspects are bastards. Julie's withdrawal upsets the
natural order and Pinter records the attendant dislocations; domestic,
sexual, generational. The decisive action of the play is the "homecom–
ing" of the Julie figure, the contradictory female, at once mother,
mistress and whore, in the person of Ruth. As in a Shakespearean
comedy a "marriage" is arranged, and the natural order restored.
Unfortunately, it is of purely formal interest that Max suffers the
pangs of childbirth, calls his brother Sam a "tit," and wishes to "cuddle"
his fully grown son. We do not understand the psychological basis of
these disorders, or feel their moral pathos. We simply recognize their
esthetic function. Nor does the resolution have any real resonance.
The TDR critics are surely wrong in claiming that the play constitutes
a deep "probe" of the male psyche. Ruth does not strike us as the in–
evitable, or even as a plausible, manifestation of the
ewig weibliche.
She
is an esthetic contrivance, a mere
dea ex machina.
If
Pinter's large
design is abstract and austere, he does not hesitate to exploit the realistic
thrust of his materials along the way. Often this is only to open murky
perspectives on the largest possible topics: body and intellect, morality
and nature, being and nonbeing. But he often demonstrates some special
fact with remarkable skill: language is an instrument of evasion; morality
is the vehicle, not the arbiter, of power. And his most remarkable achieve–
ment is in recording subtle fluctuations of feeling, decisive alterations
of power. He can find the "objective correlative" of a feeling in a
trivial situation, or invest an utterly commonplace object with an over–
whelming significance. These objects are the arbitrarily chosen props
of studio improvisations and Pinter, an actor turned playwright, can
make them tick in the night, like Lenny's clock. Teddy steals Lenny's
