Master's silence is golden

HE IS, of course, not just a man, not just a dramatist and poet, not just a passionate political activist, but an adjective as well. Does any other living writer claim a place in The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary - "Pinteresque... of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the British playwright Harold Pinter"?

And yet it's a word that conveys much, even to those who've never gone to see The Birthday Party, or skimmed a paperback copy of The Caretaker. "Pinteresque" conjures up a certain view of life: slightly bleak, apparently inconsequential, but with great meaning lurking behind the inconsequence, disconnected and fragmentary like an old box of photographs and forgotten letters. Ultimately, though, the NSOD is absolutely right. It's a word that only really applies to a body of work, one which began its public career with the first production of The Room in 1957, and which continues today, albeit diverted into poetry rather than the stage.

Like "Orwellian" or "Kafkaesque", it's useful critical shorthand, not just for the work of two generations of followers, but for Pinter's own highly personal, constantly elusive imaginings. It takes us to a place as instantly recognisable and as disturbingly alien as "Greeneland". The obvious difference is that Harold Pinter has now won the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Graham Greene, famously, did not. There are literary and philosophical reasons for this. Contrary to the assumption that the Nobel merely rewards literary quality that communicates at an international - or maybe supra-national - level, its citation is quite clear: the prize is given for work of an "ideal" persuasion. Greene certainly didn't have it. Harold Pinter equally certainly does.

He is often compared to fellow-playwright John Osborne, but Pinter's biographer Michael Billington shrewdly pinned down the difference when he wrote that Osborne was routinely seen as "romantic, impassioned, and [a man] who left his emotional scars exposed for all to see", while Pinter "to many people, seems objective, detached, ironic, even slightly cold".

Whatever else, Pinter is a deeply personal writer. Though he grew up at a time and in an environment when it was perfectly acceptable for the author's proxy to walk to the front of the stage and deliver a moral or political homily, there is no Pinter spokesman in any of the plays. There are autobiographical characters in some of the fiction, like Mark in an early version of The Dwarfs, but these fulfil a different function. Just as Samuel Beckett's plays and his fiction look at the universe from the same humane point of view but with radically different perspectives, so do Pinter's.

He is, above all, a personal, even autobiographical, writer. He has written directly about his East End of London childhood in an unpublished memoir The Queen of All the Fairies, which will doubtless appear after his death, but in a real sense, the story has already been told in the work.

Pinter's acutely vivid recollection has never added up to a smooth life story, but it is there nonetheless. It comes closest to the surface in something like The Homecoming, where a Jewish boy bumps up against the contradiction of wanting to live and prosper in a gentile world while still loving his parents.

Born in 1930, Pinter was old enough to see and remember fascist actions in the East End and, of course, to be around when fascism stopped marching and started dropping bombs and launching doodlebugs. It was an experience that hard-wired Pinter with a hatred of prejudice and injustice. The campaigner of recent years was shaped in short trousers, probably made by Jack Pinter, though he was basically a ladies' tailor, but undoubtedly washed and pressed by Frances Moskowitz Pinter.

They were Ashkenazi, rather than Sephardic, Jews and carried with them an indomitable spirit grounded in even more vicious injustices in Europe. Pinter rarely addressed that background directly, but he certainly never forgot it.

Other recollections are more deeply embedded. His 1982 play Betrayal has often been seen as a thinly disguised version of his affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, for whom he left the deeply troubled actress Vivien Merchant; it actually relates to an earlier liaison with television presenter Joan Bakewell. The Birthday Party, arguably the best of his early plays, has its origins in personal experience. Pinter saw more than his share of damp and dingy rooming houses when he toured with Anew McMaster's theatre company. McMaster helped shape him as an actor and Pinter was a formidable actor, using the name 'David Baron'. He could still steal a scene in later years, as with his tiny cameo as Uncle Benny in The Tailor of Panama.

Illness has reduced him since then, but hasn't in any way dampened his passion. A lifelong activist, Pinter has little truck with the Anglo-American liberal establishment. Though he became a Companion of Honour in 2002, he declined a knighthood. An opponent of the Iraq war, he has likened George Bush's America to Nazi Germany and the Bush regime to a "bloodthirsty wild animal". His verdict on Tony Blair? A "deluded idiot". He is a long-standing supporter of Castro's Cuba, and a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, lending his name to the claim that the Hague proceedings are little more than a Stalinist show trial.

Of, pertaining to, and characteristic of Harold Pinter, then, is not such a vacuous definition. No other writer of his time has embedded his work so deeply in the politics and science of his time. Later plays such as A Kind of Alaska (about sleepy sickness and L-Dopa), Mountain Language and Party Time demonstrate his profound engagement.

Few writers of any period - however "autobiographical" or "confessional" - have more bravely mined their own experience. No one since his friend Beckett has made the theatre seem so relevantly important. And no one who has followed has made the stage seem so subversive or so affirmative. "Pinteresque" may have become an easy out, but it belongs in the language forever.