--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb <no_reply@...> wrote:
We went the other night to see the Pinter play, The Caretaker, which has been so much praised. It was entertaining in a light way but then from the half way mark boring. The theme is his usual one: the id emerging in some decrepit, disgusting vindictive form and threatening the isolated dried-up ego. This is really the English subject at present, the national malady being the awful inadequacy of the public school ego-kit, the do-it-yourself perfect gentleman kit, its point-of-death isolation, and the corresponding shrinkage and forlorn rottenness of the national id so that the whole outfit resembles the stuffed head of a white walrus mounted on the tail of a bad herring. The failure of Pinter's play, as far as I am concerned, lies in his utter lack of any imaginative dimension, the obviousness of the Jungian ego-id formula, and the triteness of his language, or rather the triteness of the experience of his characters. The wit is very sharp in a drawing room comedy way and you laugh at it readily—flattered to know that something very ominous is intended also. Afterwards you go off with an impression of the lightest entertainment. Ted Hughes to W.S. and Dido Merwin June 1960 > What's goin' on Bob? What are you doing spending your time > outwitting KB and Vaj and others that shall not be named? And who obviously don't care what he thinks of them, if they even bother to read it. :-) > We want to hear from you Bob. How's it going from your > authentic self. Have you considered the possibility that he has none? Think about it. How much do *any* of the folks who seem to live to rag on me and Vaj and Sal *ever* have to say, except when they're doing the ragging rag? I guess what I'm suggesting is the same thing you seem to be suggesting above -- that there is a possibility that they don't actually *have* anything to say when they're not playing "Gotcha." It's just a suggestion. There is a simple way to prove it wrong, whether the suggestion comes from me, or from you, or from anyone else. But that would involve any of them saying something new, or original. I'm betting that isn't going to happen because the capacity for doing it simply isn't there.
