AT LAST, A NOBEL LAUREATE I'VE ACTUALLY READ. The logic of Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize is inescapable, though it is not the same logic as that used by sad clowns incapable of comprehending literature as anything but another objective correlative for their drab politics.

Pinter picked up a few things from the last British-born* playwright to win the Prize, Samuel Beckett. The insistence on dinginess, for one thing: the household of Hamm and Clov in Endgame might also serve as the bedsit in The Room. And there is a superficial resemblance between Pinter's and Beckett's dialogue which was probably emulative -- if you were a young and serious playwright back then, teetering between realist and absurdist tendencies, I'm sure Beckett's pointless colloquies and earthy references must have been hard to get around. Not to mention the pauses.

While Pinter internalized some of Beckett's style, his best plays are much more conventional than Beckett's, and pitched a good deal lower -- not addressing the great issues of life, but the everyday behavior and appetites of men. Pinter's famed ellipticism comes from his style (lots of pauses, tendency to talk around the subject or refer to it as something other than what it is) rather than from his structures. Pinter's plots are pretty tight. The Birthday Party might be just be The Killers reworked by a pseud who has just read some Kafka.

But Pinter discovered a wonderful secret: if you have an old-fashioned dramatic conflict and leave out a few important details, the audience becomes annoyed. But if you have an old-fashioned dramatic conflict and leave out a few details with elliptical dialogue helping to moot the issue of credibility, then the audience is intrigued.

In The Birthday Party Stanley has been hunted down because of an unnamed offense. What did he do? We haven't got a clue. But the characters' intentions are strong -- we can tell from the dialogue and (hopefully) the playing. What are we missing? It's like an overheard fragment of conversation -- why is that man so afraid? Why does that woman insist it's his birthday when he says it isn't? This might be bunk, but it's extremely playable and, more important, watchable bunk that's been holding audiences for forty years.

And some of his stuff is demonstrably much better than bunk. In The Collection, a man thinks his wife has had an affair; she refuses to dignify his suspicions. He becomes quite sure of the identity of his wife's lover. The problem is, the alleged lover is involved with another man -- an older one, with money. Because the characters haven't been running around screaming "You're a liar!" and "I'm gonna get to the bottom of this!" -- they are people of the middle class (though each is from a different and subtly-conveyed species in that genus, and one, it is made clear, is only a provisional member), and not so eager to put a foot wrong -- the husband and the gay man come to some sort of an understanding. Of what sort, we're not sure. By the play's end we don't know whether anyone has actually cheated on anyone else -- but we do know that everyone in the play is seething with jealousy at everyone else. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Final sidenote: A teacher of mine once pointed out, to illustrate the role of social tension in forming artistic temperment, that all the great British playwrights after the Restoration -- Sheridan, Beckett, Shaw, Wilde, Synge -- were Irish. "Except Pinter," I said. "Even better," said my teacher. "He's a Jew." (More on Pinter's Jewish roots here.) I note with interest that the menacing duo in The Birthday Party are named Goldberg and McCann.

UPDATE. Pinter's prize brings out the worst in some people:

"The Nobel Prize for Literature." Right. I mean Left... Mark Steyn once defined the "Pinteresque" as "a pause followed by a non sequitur." That's good, as far as it goes, but it is important to note that with Pinter the "sequitur" is always trailing in one direction: leftward.

Why don't Kimball and Steyn go make a Thatcher Prize medal out of paperclips and a yogurt lid and give it to Tom Clancy?

UPDATE II. It appears this is the new schtick: pretend the Prize is for Pinter's silly poetry, rather than for his major plays, to make the award look silly. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you have no scruples at all.

UPDATE III. Of course, the above tactic is beyond some guys, so from them plain yahooism will have to suffice. "The Nobel Prizes in Peace and Literature long ago fell into the hands of hateful Leftys," says Peace Like a River. "Don't pay any attention to them." He recommends you read Michelle Malkin (!) instead of Pinter, which is like telling someone to put down the Peter Luger steak and go eat shit. Amazing how many people will follow that advice.

UPDATE IV. This one's priceless. He announces that Pinter won the "Nobel Prize for anti-American politics" -- then adds sheepishly, "Mea culpa: I am a huge fan of the film of Pinter's play Betrayal." Is he ashamed that he can't write any better than he does, or that he admires the work of a double-plus-ungoodnik?

*UPDATE V. Every time someone intelligent links me (BTW, "come out swinging" would make a great title for a movie about Billy Strayhorn), I get a lot of smart guys spoiling to tell me how wrong I am. And this time they're right! It is a stretch to call Beckett, born in Dublin's fair city, a Brit. Let us say rather that Harry and Sam are British Islanders and have done.

UPDATE VI. As my old grey-haired ma used to say to me: remember, whatever you try to do, someone else will always do it better. (Actually she still says that.) Acephalous has a great post on this topic, and my new favorite response to the Pinter prize, from Little Green Footballs:

Nobody takes this stuff seriously anymore. I can't remember the last time I read a literary novel by a living writer or attended a play by a living playwright.

What! Not even Warren Bell? He out-Babbitts Babbitt! Someone give that man a job teaching law in Tennessee, if he doesn't already have one.