The Chaotic Energies of Youth
The Dwarfs Faber and Faber
Harold Pinter wrote a novel called The Dwarfs in his mid-twenties, before he had the better idea of writing plays. In 1960, he stripped it down and converted it into a radio drama, and three years later adapted it further for the stage. Now, to fill the regrettable absence of important new dramatic work from Pinter, the original work has been published as his ‘first and only’ novel. ‘The text is fundamentally that written over the period 1952– 56’, he says in a curt note, but admits to axing five chapters and reorganizing some of the rest in preparing it for the press. This dabbling sacrifices one potential interest of the book: we can’t make definite com- parisons between the text of the novel and the play that came out of it (not even to speculate on trivial matters such as why Euston becomes, on second thoughts, Paddington. Perhaps Paddington has become Euston.) But while the revisions don’t go far enough to upset the careful balance of owning and disowning in Pinter’s stance towards the work, they do indicate that he wants it to be read as a novel rather than as a curiosity, as a novice work of art rather than the débris of a false start. As novels go however, it is not much like one, or not much of a good one. The bulk of it consists of the interplay between three mentally ener- getic (not to say bonkers) young Jewish men in indistinguishable East- End rooms and pubs. The narrative is so sparse that it takes us many pages to know the characters: Mark Gilbert, an occasional actor and incorrigible seducer; Pete Cox, a chilly, inward intellectual who works in the city; and Len Weinstein, a gabbling fantasist, musician and loser whose latest odd
150 Harold Pinter job is as a railway porter. There is also Virginia, Pete’s passive girlfriend, the catalyst of the minimal plot. (Her role was excised from the play, which as a result is almost entirely abstract.) Pete’s mental breakdown sunders their relationship. She then has an affair with Mark; and what she tells him about Pete brings the two men into their first and last honest confrontation. In a long, stylized exchange (fourteen pages, which the play sensibly trims to about thirty seconds) Mark and Pete wind up their friendship and so conclude the ‘action’. Len, meanwhile, has absconded to Paris (if we are meant to believe him) and returned with Camembert poisoning (we are hardly meant to believe him). In a poetic resolution, Len’s voice slips into authorial mode to lament the dwarfs: a running symbol of the chaotic energies of youth, which at the close have departed the yard with their shit, rats and garbage and left a lobotomized spick-and- spanness:
Now all is bare. All is clean. All is scrubbed. There is a lawn. There is a shrub. There is a flower.
Pinter himself noted (in 1961) how his unpublished novel ‘incorporated too many styles, so that it became rather hotch-potch’. Passages of embryonic Pinter are interspersed with exercises after Joyce. Alongside exaggerated plainness, there are eye-catching epiphanic inversions (‘By the tray of flowers the nurses talked’); and whole chapters are given over to experiments in the presentation of disordered consciousness. Pete stares into a canal:
Glass how can you to the grit? Eyeball sum up in wax. To say so. To say no. To pull and parley I chat I am swabbed to now. God and his leak. Cocaine Christ. Now bolt.
This is especially frustrating from Pinter, whose best work embodies the lessons that words have to be chosen most carefully when any words will do. Elsewhere, verbal patterns are assembled for their own sake. In one scene, Pete meets an old schoolfellow, Derek, whose unwelcome face is said successively to be ‘shining’, ‘spreading’, ‘breaking’, ‘folding’, ‘shutting’, ‘foaming’, ‘scalding’, ‘grinding’, ‘flaking’, ‘singing’,
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‘chanting’, ‘sprouting’ and ‘ceasing’. But there is no reason why Derek – who has no other part in the novel – should have a face at all, let alone such a superfluously expressive one. The overall effect of The Dwarfs, however, is of a novel written by someone striving to write plays. The narrative with which the book begins is only a series of stage directions rendered into the past tense:
Len unlocked the front door and pushed it open. A pile of letters lay on the mat. He picked them up and put them on the hall table. They walked down the stairs. Pete opened the living-room window and took a packet of tea from his pocket. He went into the kitchen and filled the kettle …
We don’t read this; we watch it. When the dialogue takes over, as it impa- tiently does, it is punctuated with speech tags rather than quotation marks (as though speech was the substance); the odd ‘Len said’ is there to make up for the lack of a name in the margin; and it is up to the reader to inter- pret how and why the words are spoken. The dialogue predicts Pinter’s characteristic rhythms, but as yet it is mostly without comic spark or the strange portent he will later wring from the dullest speech:
− Give me the tea − Without milk? − Come on. − Without any milk? − There isn’t any milk.
It’s no wonder that Pinter was able to transplant most of the best things in the novel – i.e., Len’s exuberant fantasies – almost verbatim into the play; so these are already familiar (or at least available) in a tighter form. But one or two other elements in the ‘hotch-potch’ give warning of unusual powers. In particular, there is a tremendous scene, lost from the play with the character Virginia, in which Pete berates her at incredible length for daring to offer opinions on Hamlet in front of his friends. Pinter’s budding instinct finds a chilling end to the chapter: Virginia apologizes quietly, Pete manfully forgives her (‘No … it’s all right. It’s all right’), and the monstrous rant is displaced by the silence of the last, unhappy tenderness between people who have finished with each other.