14 - Pinter as celebrity

Summary

Harold Pinter's artistic achievements and political activities have made him a celebrity. Like most processes of enlargement or amplification, fame can distort that to which it draws attention, and, as early as 1971, Pinter was making distinctions between his own perception of himself and his public image:

I must admit I tend to get quite exhausted about being this Harold Pinter fellow . . . He's not me. He's someone else's creation. Quite often when people meet me and they shake me warmly by the hand and say they're pleased to meet me, I have very mixed feelings - because I'm not quite sure who it is they think they're meeting.

Pinter’s complaint recalls a more recent observation of Salman Rushdie’s, that, ‘There’s a fictitious version of me. I’m conscious that when I meet people, I can see them erasing the tape. They’re erasing a whole bunch of things they’ve read in the papers’. Nor is this phenomenon apparent only to those affected; the journalist Robert Cushman has written that Pinter’s fame has created ‘this thing in the public consciousness – this cryptic, aloof, uncommunicative thing called ‘‘Pinter’’ . . . [which] seems to have little to do with the man himself’. This apparent gap between public perception and reality is one of several problematic aspects to the dramatist’s celebrity.