But Harold did something which I've never managed to do: he was never self-deprecating. He never pretended for one second that he had read books which weren't worth reading. And I edited a book in the 1970s to try and raise a bit of money for public lending right so that we actually got some money back from books being lent in public libraries which in those days happened quite a bit. And I asked a number of famous writers, including Harold and Arthur Koestler and Iris Murdoch and who all else, to tell me what books they would be made of if, so to speak, they were a stack of books. And some people answered one thing and some people answered another. And Maurice Cranston said that he had been totally besotted with Racine when he was young. And there were... there were sort of interesting and uninteresting contributions.
And Harold Pinter had, of course, to be Pinteresque because that's what Harold Pinter had to be. And he began his very short, terse account of what he would be if he were a library by saying, 'In my teens, I read Jules Laforgue'. Now Harold Pinter was brought up, as far as I know, if not in the East End, certainly in some not greatly favoured part of London. And the idea that Harold Pinter in his 20s read Jules Laforgue is, to say the least, very unlikely. Or, as Jules Laforgue might say, et ta soeur, mon vieux– what a load of bollocks.
[Q] In his teens not his 20s.
What? In his teens he read Jules Laforgue. I don't think Jules Leforgue was translated in Harold Pinter's teens. So he not only apparently read Jules Laforgue to the exclusion of, whether it was Biggles or anything else that people might read in their teens, he also read it in French. How could I possibly doubt that this was true? I don't doubt it's true. But get off.
Of course, the fact that Harold couldn't take himself anything but extremely seriously is not the only reason that he is renowned, but it don't half help. I don't think TS Eliot spent a lot of time pretending that he was actually a bit of a clown, which he in some ways quite definitely was and rather a displeasing one at that, actually. Funny, all that. Willie Maugham, however, who was a bit of an outsider, was perfectly capable of being somewhat self-mocking and I'm afraid that I caught some of that from him and I'm sure it's done me no good. But there we are.
