Who is upstairs?

“Who is it upstairs?” Gus repeatedly asks (145). We are. Although Pinter never directly proposes this, and would likely contend that the

“facts” seem to contradict such an assertion, yet The Dumb Waiter, dramatizing choices that contrast with Pinter’s decision to seize power in his own life, seems to indicate the opposite: that is, we all have power, but only a relative few choose to claim or exercise it.

The enemy within in The Dumb Waiter proceeds both from a failure to claim power and to develop the “other” in the self. Clues to understanding Ben and Gus proceed from Pinter’s own staunch refusal to grovel as the men in The Dumb Waiter do and his insistence on never taking No for an answer. For example, when Harold’s own father slapped his face for showing disrespect to his boss when the boy delivered his lunch, this slap was heard round the world in dramatic insights into such action in his plays and his refusal to accept public humiliation. Unlike Ben and Gus, Pinter leads his life by his own lights and persistence. At the London production of one of his plays, he described wanting desperately, early in his career, to get the attention of a certain agent to represent him, but said he could never

get an appointment. At last he waited outside her office before it opened and when she arrived he slipped in behind her. She sat at her desk, looked up at him, her only words: “No. No. No.” Obviously, Pinter did not take No from the world. More recently, in an attempt to get a script to a director he had it hand delivered as the director waited to board a plane so he would be forced to read it en route.⁵

Unlike Pinter, Ben and Gus seem unable to seize any control over their own lives nor to direct the lives of others to better ends, because they possess almost no sense of what they might attain if their own lives had better direction. However much Gus fleetingly wishes for a bit of a view, he quickly abandons that desire. Instead, both men remain content to hold on to, even shore up, the parameters set by others in blind obedience to a status quo grown out of the old world feudal system. We see in the Dumb Waiter’s two, underground outsiders, free men not far in their evolution from serfs.

In Pinter’s work, the desire to participate in the larger, public sphere comes into play in his first full-length plays, Homecoming and The Birthday Party. In the latter, Stanley’s thwarted (perhaps self-thwarted) aspiration, is one shared with every artist: to reach the widest possible audience even as the one-time piano player proclaims what we know to be false: “They were all there” (16). Gus, too, wishes for a window on the world while Ben remains content with second-hand newspaper reports. For the ancient Greeks, the term

“idiot” referred to someone who did not participate in the polis.

Similarly, Ben and Gus’s knowledge of the larger world is restricted to human interest and sports on the public playing fields, events that are viewed in retrospect in their claustrophobic work place. In The Dumb Waiter, lack of self-awareness results in failure to take command of the self “upstairs:” literally they refuse to think, which allows an unseen person upstairs to command their lives. Harold, in contrast, Pygmalioned himself into the Pinter we know, launching a star high school student-actor-athlete-writer into a man of the world, encouraging multitudes in countless plays, political speeches, papers, letters, protests, and, as a Noble Laureate, addressing world leaders on the great conflicts threatening the world at large. Sadly, Ben and Gus remain consigned to a purgatory of the unconscious out of a failure of simple desire. Granting Pinter his greater gifts, his desires to be better, to know more of the world, which requires knowing one’s self, we can acknowledge the obvious contrasts with Gus and Ben who

desire neither of these goals.⁶

Insights in The Dumb Waiter, as in any of Pinter’s plays, appear in those choice moments -- those often seemingly small, inconsequential moments where irrevocable choices lead with apparent inexorable inevitability toward or away from that courage without which there can be no love or justice in life, potentially one of life’s most prized possessions. Ben follows orders no matter what to

“prove” himself, and, like ordinary citizens during the Holocaust who claimed they “didn’t know,” or were “only following orders,” Gus follows the order Ben receives and follows from above.

As a child in World War II, Harold witnessed the terror of bombings in his own backyard, and consequently developed an abiding compassion for those people whose homes and streets were bombed, a sympathy he extends to civilians and children of war around the world. Even during a recent life-threatening setback, he scrupulously continued to oversee, albeit at arms’ length, major productions of his work in the world that daily require his attention.

In a New York Times’ interview, he admits it is action and close attention to work that keeps him from sinking into despair. Similar to soldiers’ bonds with one another (a quality which Gus and Ben lack), a caring for one’s mates that facilitates warfare bravery, Pinter developed compassion for torture victims he met visiting Turkish prisons with Arthur Miller on behalf of PEN.⁶ Meeting men whose lives were irrevocably destroyed by seemingly irrational conflict, awakened him to public political engagement with the larger world.

In contrast, Ben and Gus, scarcely caring for themselves or one another, let alone anyone else, remain ruled by fear, above all for the tenuous self. When fear rules all else, an organism has no positive reason to go on living. In The Dumb Waiter, the need to belong to an organization they both value and reflexively fear allows apprehension to make dumb waiters of the men in all senses -- dumb as in ignorant and silent, waiters as in those who wait, no less than waiters/servants, deferring equally to the demands of customer, manager and owner.

The Dumb Waiter’s second act complications begin when Gus observes that the toilet is faulty. Ben reflexively counters that it is a faulty ballcock (116-17). Gus’s evidence mounts as he uncovers more signs that their status is slipping: “this place:”

It’s worse than the last one. Remember that last place we were in?

… At least there was a wireless there. No, honest. He doesn’t

seem to bother much about our comfort these days (119).

By glibly dismissing Gus’s observations, Ben quells his own anxiety and distracts himself by burying his head in the newspaper. Despite their comic actions, however, we realize that our laughter is evoked at a flash point of insight illuminating their path toward dissolution. The awaited “orders” arrive in the envelope, but the situation, fraught with tension becomes terrifying when what is revealed are not orders, but, inexplicably matches (123).

First, Ben and Gus act equally in concord as they try to make sense of the matches. But Ben can agree with Gus only when Ben is not anxious. “Well, they’ll come in handy” (124). Yet, again, they remain equally dumb: both wait rather than act. Ben as, top dog, and Gus as follower, are bonded by a symbiotic need to retain the

“other’s” approval, but they do so from differing perceived vantage points with regard to who is upstairs. Wilson, who is assumed to be more powerful, may not be much more so than the unseen Wizard of Oz, revealed as a smoke-and-mirrors power. Still Ben and Gus fight most tenaciously not for something better but to maintain what little they have, and, though the kill order is momentarily suspended in their flurry of activity to fill impossible food orders, they choose to follow orders blindly, never allowing the question of evil and subsequent destruction to surface.

Asking why they do not jump ship is like asking why the recluse Stanley in The Birthday Party does not simply leave. Pinter’s question remains laser focused on real, complex core characteristics on both sides of seemingly opposite temperaments, as he represents two opposite personalities with different signature characteristics, polar strengths and weakness that cover the spectrum of the human question: Why do people fail to act in their own best interest? The terms “foreigners” or “them blacks” uttered by other Pinter characters in The Room or The Caretaker, which refer to perceived lesser beings apart from one’s own sphere, remain resonate also in The Dumb Waiter, as Ben and Gus have as few choices and freedoms as these other outsiders.

4. Retrospections

With the privilege of viewing The Dumb Waiter retrospectively

through the lens of Celebration, we hear the recluse Waiter describe all who attain international celebrity or power as in bed together: from movie stars and moguls, world leaders, Mussolini and Churchill through the ordinary citizen -- a perspective obtained on the authority of his grandfather whom the young man claims knew them all. This Waiter, neither silent nor dumb, comes full circle with The Dumb Waiter’s male characters. His riffs on the powerful and famous put in perspective the invisible power of the celebrants -- delivery boys for the guns, drugs, and money, ruling the world -- a noisy, salacious bunch of loveless destructors revealed, nevertheless, as a species of dumb waiters -- enjoying a more comfortable level of privilege than the boys in the basement..

Celebration’s nameless Waiter cannot be silenced while enumerating his grandfather’s personal acquaintance with major Western leaders and dictators. How different is the Waiter’s reported acquaintance with the world’s famous once removed from ours in fantasy or through media news? How different is his vicarious brush with power from Ben and Gus’s identification with well-known sports teams while waiting dumbly in The Dumb Waiter’s basement without the ability to seize individual power or possibly even to survive?

From The Room through Celebration and Apart from That, Pinter’s work holds little truck with Milton’s “They also serve who only stand and wait.” The young Waiter, so paralyzed into inaction he cannot leave the restaurant’s premises, is no different from Ben and Gus ordered to remain in a basement, or from fearful Rose in The Room, or the recluse Stanley in The Birthday Party, imprisoned in a hovel, and paralyzed by fear of the world beyond. Ironically, no one in Pinter’s work, who merely waits, can also serve any good purpose.

Yet The Dumb Waiter, within the context of Pinter’s life, explodes the notion that humans, like dogs, are mere herding animals with a pecking order that places Alpha males at the top for survival of the herd and allows for no change. Where a top dog’s endowments are partially honored (as in a hierarchical military model) for the protection he offers the pack in terms of strength, experience and wisdom, Pinter’s dominant characters display no protection for the survival of the partnership or pack; instead they value only defense of the self’s position and organization, both of which are threatened by the very power structure that sustains it. Unlike the good commander, good teacher, writer, parent or actor, who out of care, concern and love wishes to develop others placed in her charge rather than to

destroy those best qualities, Pinter’s dominant characters such as Ben and Goldberg squelch those subservient to them out of fear that they might attempt to transform themselves or may transcend a given status that might be regarded as a threat to their position.

Those so-called qualities of “other” in the self, where other is taken to be the undeveloped, discarded, and shunned, is embraced by Pinter’s successor to the Nobel Prize, Orhan Pamuk in his novel Snow, through what he terms his non-judgmental narrator Ka, a poet journalist like the author himself. Pamuk feels proud of Ka’s assiduous refusal to take a stance on the head-scarf issue (Ka has come to Kars to investigate young women committing suicide because they are not permitted to wear them). Pamuk believes that his non-judgmental character Ka allows a reader to come into contact with his own “other” and the lives of many “others.” Through the novel, readers may come to admit certain qualities as part of the self, qualities which they may not admire, and in acknowledging and embodying those differences grow in consciousness toward peace.

There are similarities between Pamuk’s characters’ and Ben and Gus. Ka, for example, whose inaction lands him in the same camp as Pinter’s ineffectual subservient characters, investigates little and concludes less; thus, in the end, he commands neither himself nor others, but instead is led around by the “loveliest eyes.” When asked what he himself thinks about the veil issue, Pamuk readily admits that the head-scarf is a male issue imposed upon women. Nevertheless, Pamuk sees taking any position as a step toward being part of the problem, and claims the best way to handle the issue is to ignore it.⁸

In contrast to Pamuk’s ideas, Pinter, by inhabiting what halls of power that it took him and his characters a lifetime to enter, sustains an abiding quest to understand, dramatize and enlighten. His work illuminates the dilemma of the spectator’s fear and cowardice, exposing the audience to sources of courage, rendered in terms of a gift that we can keep only by giving away, by seizing power and taking action for good. Precisely the opposite happens in The Dumb Waiter’s grand finale, which allows only for destruction. Yet again, Pinter’s own choices contrast to Ben and Gus’s and offer insight into their subtle failure to see and seize choices, without which The Dumb Waiter might be reduced to fatalistic, melodramatic naturalism.

Ben, who scarcely questions anything, can do or agree with nothing except what ratifies the organization and his position in it.

Yet at the conclusion of the deadly “light the kettle/light the gas”

battle, Ben misremembers which side he first took (because it does not matter), and, in the end, he elaborately opts to defend Gus’s earlier assertion that the correct term is “light the kettle.” Without consciousness, fear can overwhelm all else, as Ben and Gus demonstrate each time they allow minutia to overwhelm what matters (semantics versus survival), and together they fail to arrive at obvious conclusions based on observation and evidence that certainly would lead to productive action or even to basic survival. What remains are equally wounded egos. Yet, Ben’s unwavering loyalty never questions the organization while Gus’s almost unstoppable questions remain unanswered because he, too, falls habitually in line with system -- Ben and the organization.

Pinter depicts such destructive acquiescing as on a par with bullying intimidation. He, like his American counterpart Edward Albee, remains an exemplar of challenging destructive authority. But Pinter also dramatizes how unbridled fear summons what one most shuns. In Ben and Gus’s unchecked anxiety, their fear to challenge authority may cost them their lives. Like Stanley’s obvious tragic choice to sit rather than to leave in defiance of his attackers he himself provokes, Ben and Gus ironically allow a fear-driven bravado to lead to the possibility of both being taken out. If The Dumb Waiter reveals consciousness as a beginning source of courage, then the worst is not cowardice or even despair, but cowardice masquerading at courage.

That is what Ben’s bullying dramatizes in the guise of doing things for Gus’s own good.

One great beauty of Pinter’s work is that his insights that apply to the individual also apply to the state. While The Dumb Waiter reveals a writer trying to make sense of Hitler’s Germany holding Europe hostage with the horrifying holocaust still as freshly in mind as the bombs in the author’s childhood back yard, the play dramatizes the origins of such violence at the individual level. Pinter brings Ben and Gus to the precipice, where, with a single misstep, they are next in line. In a sense to destroy themselves is to destroy the organization they serve, and, on a larger level, perhaps the state. It is no wonder that Pinter currently expresses outrage against America, a democratic country that presently seems to be rescinding fundamental tenants of democracy, and worse, seems to be attempting to institute a return to old world hierarchy in the name of democracy. In the guise of security -- requiring for its safety a fearful citizenry with a lack of

consciousness and its attendant consequences writ large -- ironically we see the state sowing the seeds of its own destruction unless it changes course. In his Nobel Lecture, he accused the United States of

“systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless” crimes: cowardice assuming the guise of courage. Pinter says: “You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good” (15).

Just as characters from The Dumb Waiter through Celebration and Sleuth dramatize, here Pinter describes those who are unaware that they are driven reflexively by ignorance and fear: paralyzed even to see choices, wish for better, or to act to save their own or others’ lives.

If, as I have argued, courage that proceeds from the heart is a just love, and those who inspire love inspire courage, the questions and answers provoked by Ben and Gus already in this early play bear fruit with enormous consequences in Apart from That, where for the first time two men who have faced the worst find unspoken sympathy eliciting the best and bravest in one another. The action they choose is a mutual silence.⁹Unlike the dumb waiters before them beset by unnamable, unrecognized fears expressed in niggling conflict, the characters in Apart from That are fully conscious of the unspeakable they face. In deciding to keep good cheer by giving it to the other, they stand as exemplars of courage, helping to acquaint us with our own.

Penelope Prentice, D’Youville College, Buffalo, New York

Notes

1 Author in conversation with Pinter, London, January 2006; his most recent brush with death reported most recently May 30, 2008, in telephone conversation on his delight with The Birthday Party’s fiftieth anniversary production.

2While some could legitimately argue that Gus does not want to know the answer to the questions that point to his demise, whether or not we are a herding animal, easily herded by the dictates of this season’s current shade of beige with which fashion designers and politicians wish to color our bodies, few of us as teenagers, the height

2While some could legitimately argue that Gus does not want to know the answer to the questions that point to his demise, whether or not we are a herding animal, easily herded by the dictates of this season’s current shade of beige with which fashion designers and politicians wish to color our bodies, few of us as teenagers, the height