The correspondence of Harold Pinter and Henry Woolf

Blog series English and drama

Author Christopher Beckett, Manuscripts Cataloguer

When did Vivien Merchant first sport her new ‘boyish’ haircut? Which Saturday afternoon in the 1950s was it when Frank Worrell scored a hundred and more for the West Indies? And which evening did Pinter listen to Patrick Magee reading from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies on the Third Programme?

There are questions of greater import which exercise Pinter scholars, but these are some of the questions that gave me pause for thought when working through a double collection of Pinter-related papers – and poorly-dated letters – donated by his lifelong friend and theatrical colleague, Henry Woolf (Add MS 89094 and Add MS 89731). 

Henry Woolf was, as he describes himself in his largely unpublished memoir (Barcelona is in Trouble), a member of Pinter's 'Hackney gang'. A portion of Chapter 31 ('Harold') was published in The Guardian in 2007 as 'My 60 Years in Harold's Gang'. Pinter and Woolf corresponded throughout their lives, particularly in the 1950s which was a formative decade for them both.

Pinter’s letters to Woolf begin in 1948 when Pinter attended R.A.D.A. It was during this unsettled time – he was unhappy at R.A.D.A. – that on grounds of conscientious objection Pinter refused to undertake National Service. Subsequently, in 1951, he joined the Anew McMaster Repertory Company, touring Ireland, and spent the remainder of the decade in repertory in English provincial theatres, from Whitby to Torquay, and from Huddersfield to Bournemouth. In the autumn of 1952, Pinter wrote from County Kerry: ‘Since my return I’ve been working like a horse. We’ve put on Oedipus, The Importance & Priestley’s The Inspector Calls, and this week Macbeth’. In another letter from the same season, he refers with bravado to Taming of the Shrew: ‘I put in a bit of bawdy business as Hortensio the other night, & six people crossed themselves in the front row’. In October 1953, he is in Galway: ‘Last week I played Iago in the city of Galway & got a good notice. In a fortnight we play at the Opera House, Cork. My Iago becomes more & more interesting.’ The following month, he is in County Mayo, appearing in Rope (the 1926 play by Patrick Hamilton, released on film by Hitchcock in 1948): ‘I play Brandon & with it do probably the best work I’ve done on stage’. Pinter’s ‘interesting’ Iago and his amoral Brandon were not only part and parcel of an actor’s well-rounded apprenticeship but perhaps also served to nourish the creation of characters of menace yet to be written. In November 1954, he wrote from Huddersfield: ‘Good part this week – playing a razor boy.’

One thread that runs through the letters to Woolf is a shared enthusiasm for cricket, thanks to which several letters – without envelopes and sometimes dated by no more than the day of week – can be placed in sequence. One letter dated only ‘Saturday’, which clearly refers to The Room, can be more precisely dated by Pinter mentioning that he is listening ‘with this wife of mine’ to the cricket commentary as Worrell completes his century. The ‘Saturday’ can only be 6th July 1957, when England played the West Indies at Nottingham, and Worrell scored 191 not out.

Another thread is Samuel Beckett. A letter dated only ‘18 June’ can be safely said to be from 1958 because Pinter closes the letter: ‘Shall listen tonight to McGee [sic] reading from Malone Dies’. Patrick Magee was broadcast reading from Malone Dies on the Third Programme on Thursday 19th June 1958 (suggesting that if Pinter started his letter on 18 June, he didn’t finish it until the following day). Another poorly dated letter (‘Nov 1 and Sunday 6’) must be from 1955, to judge from the reference to Waiting for Godot as the first English production opened 3rd August 1955: ‘The intellectual climate has been typhooned by Mr Samuel Beckett. His play, Waiting for Godot, has hit London in that guise. I know all about him, & have for a long time’. 

Woolf was an important sounding-board for the poetry and prose Pinter wrote in the 1950s. On 8th November, 1956, he wrote: ‘I’m glad you liked The Examination, mate […] Kullus is an old oppo of mine. I met him in a billiardhall in Stoke Newington in the days when spring onions were a pound a penny […] It was all an effortless fiddle then […] But Kullus seemed to know his way about so I stuck to him […].’ Later that month, Woolf visited Pinter and Vivien Merchant in Torquay where they were appearing together at the Pavilion Theatre (they had just married in Bournemouth on the 14th of September). Woolf had enrolled at the University of Bristol as a postgraduate student of theatre direction. ‘Scrub that idea right out,’ wrote Pinter. ‘It’ll only give you aggravation in the cobblers and cause severe upsets in the old membrane & you’ll get kidney trouble’. But Woolf was not deterred by Pinter’s mock admonishments. He’d heard them before. The story of Woolf’s subsequent encouragement of Pinter to write his first play, The Room, and its immediate production by the Drama Department at Bristol University (in May 1957), is well known. In January 1957, Pinter had resolved that the schedule was impossible. ‘I was highly chuffed & excited by your comments on the situation. But Henry! Do you realise that the end of February is only a month’s time?’ Pinter estimated he needed ‘six months’. The letter concludes: ‘Sorry about the play. Not possible.’ Meanwhile, the Hackney gang listened attentively to the first broadcast of Beckett’s All That Fall (Third Programme, 13th January 1957). 

In 1978, Woolf moved to Canada, to the University of Alberta, and in 1983 he joined the Drama Department of the University of Saskatchewan, retiring as Professor in 1997. Alongside his academic career, Woolf continued to pursue a varied and successful career in theatre, television and film.

As Pinter and Woolf’s correspondence grew more infrequent in later life, their preferred mode of communication was by fax. In January 2000, Woolf faxed to Pinter several pages from a letter he had received many years ago from a mutual friend, photographer Joyce Edwards, who had at one time been Woolf’s Hampstead landlady. Edwards recounted attending a Beckett reading that Pinter gave in Dulwich. ‘Inside the pub was an almost solid block of people.’ She made her way upstairs through the crowd to find a row of reserved seats, joining Mick Goldstein and wife, John Kershaw, Joe Brearley (Pinter’s teacher and mentor at Hackney Downs Grammar School), Gerry Brehony, Barry Foster and wife, ‘and finally Vivien’ who ‘had her hair shorn to such an extent that I thought it was a boy’. Word came through that ‘Harold didn’t like all his friends sitting in the front row, would we change with the people behind?’ The people behind were not amused – some had brought sandwiches and wouldn’t budge. He then wanted the windows closed (noisy traffic) and the door closed (a request that was physically impossible as the packed audience had crammed the staircase to listen). ‘Eventually Harold appeared looking very tense […] guiding a raised glass of whisky through the crush’, a smoke-filled oxygen-less room holding two hundred people instead of forty. Like Magee before him in 1958, Pinter read from Malone Dies. (For Vivien Merchant’s short hair, see Cecil Beaton’s mid-1960s portrait.)

In a fax from 2005, Woolf reminded Pinter of his youthful advice: ‘Your name came up. The story the students love (the staff too) is your writing to me thus when I said I was going to be an actor: “What do you want to go into this shit-house of a profession for? You’ll meet very few people you’ll want to have a drink with.”’ But Woolf would also not have forgotten Pinter’s rather different sentiments from a letter he wrote on the 6th of September 1948, a vision of the future in which the Hackney gang form an acting company. Woolf is to be ‘artistic adviser and director. It will be a great success. And will give us all something to live on. The theatre is one of the good things of civilization.’

Cricket should have the final word, an extract from a little poem that Woolf faxed to Pinter on his 75th birthday. If life is an innings at the crease, a defiant 75 not out ‘on a crumbling wicket’ isn’t a bad knock:

He could have settled in,
Played for a draw,
Still top of the averages after all.
But that was never his style.
No, down the wicket,
Hammer the loose ones.

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