A Director of Classics, Focused on Conscience By ROBERT BERKVIST

A Director of Classics, Focused on Conscience By ROBERT BERKVIST

Sidney Lumet, a director who preferred the streets of New York to the back lots of Hollywood and whose stories of conscience — “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “The Verdict,” “Network” — became modern American film classics, died Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.

His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said the cause was lymphoma.

“While the goal of all movies is to entertain,” Mr. Lumet once wrote, “the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.”

Social issues set his own mental juices flowing, and his best films not only probed the consequences of prejudice, corruption and betrayal, but also celebrated individual acts of courage.

In his first film, “12 Angry Men” (1957), he took his cameras into a jury room where the pressure mounted as one tenacious and courageous juror, played by Henry Fonda, slowly convinced the others that the defendant on trial for murder was, in fact, innocent. (Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court said the film had an important influence on her law career.)

Almost two decades later, Mr. Lumet’s moral sense remained acute when he ventured into satire with “Network” (1976), perhaps his most acclaimed film. Based on Paddy Chayefsky’s biting script, the film portrays a television anchorman who briefly resuscitates his fading career by launching on-air tirades against what he perceives as the hypocrisies of American society.

The film starred William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch as the commentator turned attack dog whose proclamation to the world at large — “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” — became part of the American vernacular.

“Network” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best film and best director, and won four: best actor (Mr. Finch), best actress (Ms. Dunaway), best original screenplay (Mr. Chayefsky) and best supporting actress (Beatrice Straight).

Honorary Oscar

Yet for all the critical success of his films and despite the more than 40 Academy Award nominations they drew, Mr. Lumet (pronounced loo-MET) never won an Oscar for directing, though he was nominated four times. (The other nominations were for “12 Angry Men,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Verdict.”)

Only in 2005 did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences present him with an honorary Academy Award. Manohla Dargis, writing in The New York Times, called it a “consolation prize for a lifetime of neglect.”

In 2007, in an interview that was videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Mr. Lumet was asked how it felt to receive an Academy Award at long last. He replied, “I wanted one, damn it, and I felt I deserved one.”

That he was more a creature of New York than of Hollywood may have had something to do with his Oscar night disappointments. For Mr. Lumet, location mattered deeply, and New York mattered most of all. He was the quintessential New York director.

“Locations are characters in my movies,” he wrote. “The city is capable of portraying the mood a scene requires.”

He explored New York early on in “The Pawnbroker” (1964), the story of a Holocaust survivor, played by Rod Steiger, numbed and hardened against humanity by the horrors he has endured, who deals with racketeers in his Harlem pawnshop until his conscience is reawakened by a vicious crime on his doorstep.

‘Serpico’

The city loomed large in Mr. Lumet’s several examinations of the criminal justice system. Police corruption particularly fascinated him, beginning with “Serpico” (1973). The film, based on a book by Peter Maas, was drawn from a real-life drama involving two New York City police officers, David Durk and Frank Serpico, who told David Burnham, a reporter for The New York Times, that they had ample evidence of police graft and corruption.

Publication of their story led to the mayoral appointment of a commission to investigate the charges and ultimately to major reforms. Both the book and the film concentrated on Detective Serpico, played by Al Pacino, and his efforts to change the system. Mr. Pacino’s performance brought him an Oscar nomination.

Mr. Lumet returned to the theme in 1981 with “Prince of the City,” for which he shared screenwriting credit with Jay Presson Allen. Based on the book by Robert Daley, the film dealt with an ambitious detective, portrayed byTreat Williams, who goes undercover to gather evidence for an investigative commission and who winds up alienated and alone after being manipulated into destroying the lives and careers of many of those around him.

Mr. Lumet focused on criminals, rather than the police, in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), telling the story (again, based on fact) of a botched attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank. Mr. Pacino again starred, this time as Sonny, the leader of an amateurish gang of bank robbers whose plans go awry and who winds up taking hostages and demanding jet transport to a foreign country. It turns out that Sonny, although he has a wife at home, had planned the robbery to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. In 2009, the film was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

New York, or at least a fantasy version of it, was even the backdrop for Mr. Lumet’s most uncharacteristic film, “The Wiz,” his 1978 musical version of the “The Wizard of Oz” starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. Roundly panned, it was also a box-office failure.

By the time he finished shooting “Night Falls on Manhattan” in 1996, Mr. Lumet had made 38 films, 29 of them on location in New York City. That film, written by Mr. Lumet and based on another Daley novel, “Tainted Evidence,” once again looked at the justice system as it moved from a shootout with drug dealers into a revealing courtroom trial.

The courthouse was one of Mr. Lumet’s favorite arenas for drama, beginning with “12 Angry Men.” He returned to it again in “The Verdict” (1982), with a screenplay by David Mamet and a cast led by Paul Newman as a down-at-the-heels lawyer who redeems himself and his career when he represents a malpractice victim in a legal battle with a hospital.

But Mr. Lumet’s concerns could also range more broadly, to issues of national survival itself. One of the most sobering films of the cold war era was his 1964 adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel, “Fail-Safe,” a taut examination of the threat of accidental nuclear war, with Henry Fonda as the president of the United States and a young Larry Hagman as his Russian-speaking interpreter. The film concluded with a harrowing suggestion of an atomic blast on American soil, rendered as a series of glimpses of ordinary life — children playing, pigeons taking wing — simply stopping. The scenes were from the streets of New York.

Sidney Lumet was born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia to Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, both actors in Yiddish theater. His father was born in Poland and moved his family to New York when Sidney was a baby and joined the Yiddish Art Theater. By the time he was 4, Sidney was appearing onstage with his father, and he went on to make his Broadway debut in 1935 as a street kid in Sidney Kingsley’s “Dead End.” He appeared in several more Broadway shows, including Maxwell Anderson’s “Journey to Jerusalem” in 1940, in which he played the young Jesus.

After wartime service as a radar technician in the Far East, Mr. Lumet returned to New York and started directing Off Broadway and in summer stock. His big break came in 1950, when he was hired by CBS and became a director on the television suspense series “Danger.” Other shows followed, including the history series “You Are There.”

His career soared in 1953, when he began directing original plays for dramatic series on CBS and NBC, including “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90” and “Kraft Television Theater,” eventually adding some 200 productions to his credits. He returned to the theater to direct Albert Camus’s “Caligula,” with Kenneth Haigh as the Roman emperor, and George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” among other plays.

Among the highlights of Mr. Lumet’s television years were a full-length production of Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh,” with Jason Robards as the salesman Hickey, and “12 Angry Men,” which he directed for television before turning it into his first film.

Some of Mr. Lumet’s early films had their origin in the theater. He directed Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in “The Fugitive Kind” (1960), an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play “Orpheus Descending”; he traveled abroad to film part of Arthur Miller’s “View From the Bridge” (1962) in Paris, with Raf Vallone, Maureen Stapleton and Carol Lawrence, completing the film on the Brooklyn waterfront; and he returned to the world of O’Neill to film “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson as the tormented Tyrones. His 1968 adaptation of Chekhov’s “Sea Gull,” however, was generally deemed uneven despite a stellar cast that included James Mason, Simone Signoret and Vanessa Redgrave.

A trainload of stars turned out for Mr. Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” a project that took him abroad again, this time to Britain, France and Turkey, to film the famous whodunit in which the detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) must single out a murderer from a crowd of suspects that included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery and John Gielgud.

There was a run of less-than-successful films, including “Running on Empty” (1988), with Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti as ’60s radicals still in hiding from the F.B.I. 20 years after participating in a bombing; the police drama “Q & A” (1990), with a screenplay by Mr. Lumet, about a racist New York detective (played by Nick Nolte); and “Critical Care” (1997), a satiric jab at the American health care system.

Return to Television

In 1995, Mr. Lumet published a well-received memoir, “Making Movies,” in which he summed up his view of directorial style: “Good style, to me, is unseen style. It is style that is felt.”

He returned to television in 2001 as executive producer, principal director and one of the writers of a new courtroom drama for cable television, “100 Centre Street” (the title was the address of the Criminal Court Building in Lower Manhattan). The series, which ran for two seasons on A&E, had an ensemble cast, with Alan Arkin as an all-too-forgiving judge known as Let-’Em-Go Joe.

The director seemed immune to advancing age. Before long, he was behind the camera again. “Find Me Guilty” (2006), which starred Vin Diesel, was a freewheeling account of the events surrounding the federal prosecution of a notorious New Jersey crime family.

And he marked his 83rd year with the 2007 release of his last feature film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” the bleakly riveting story of two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) propelled by greed into a relentless cycle of mayhem. The film drew raves.

Mr. Lumet’s first three marriages — to the actress Rita Gam, Gloria Vanderbilt and Gail Jones, the daughter of Lena Horne — ended in divorce. He married Mary Gimbel in 1980. She survives him. Besides his stepdaughter, Ms. Gimbel, he is also survived by two daughters he had with Ms. Jones, Amy Lumet and Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter; a stepson, Bailey Gimbel; nine grandchildren and a great-grandson. Mr. Lumet also had a home in East Hampton, on Long Island.

Ms. Dargis called Mr. Lumet “one of the last of the great movie moralists” and “a leading purveyor of the social-issue movie.” Yet Mr. Lumet said he was never a crusader for social change. “I don’t think art changes anything,” he said in The Times interview. So why make movies? he was asked.

“I do it because I like it,” he replied, “and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.”

My Dog Days Are Over By DOREE SHAFRIR

March 23, 2011, 9:30 pm


My Dog Days Are Over By DOREE SHAFRIR



Townies is a series about life in New York.



Tags:

death, Dogs, New York City, Pets





I was in a rush that morning and so our walk was shorter than usual. As I brought Lee back inside our building and fed her and put water in her bowl and put her pills between two slices of salami, I told myself that her dog walker was coming in the afternoon and, in any case, the day before we had gone to Fort Greene Park and I had let her off her leash and she had scampered around.



It was the beginning of November and when I got home that night, it was dark and getting cold and I was tired, and I had to take Lee out for another walk. She ran up to me and barked as I came through the door, but then, when I went to get her leash, all of a sudden she couldn’t get up at all.



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Lee was everyone’s favorite dog in part because she didn’t make it easy for you to like her. She was stubborn and needy and scared of almost everything: kids, loud noises, basketballs and footballs, dancing — any sudden movement, really — and cats. She wouldn’t fetch. She barked, loudly, when people were having sex. When friends came over she would insist on being petted and if they stopped she would nudge them with her head, sometimes so hard that people who were holding glasses of wine spilled it on themselves.



But she was also silly and loyal and had a perfect round tan spot on her white back, and she wiggled her behind when she walked, and when you let her off the leash in the park she would bound toward the dogs who still hadn’t been neutered and flirt shamelessly with them, even if they were a fraction of her size. When she finally trusted people she would let them play with her and rub her tummy. She once stole a carrot cake off the back of a kitchen counter and ate the whole thing.



Ping Zhu

In the eight years I had her, Lee was my only constant: I lived in seven apartments in two cities; I am on my fourth job, not counting internships and freelance work; I went to two graduate programs, one of which I finished, one of which I didn’t; I dated a bunch of guys, some for a while; I made and lost friends. And knowing I had to take care of her meant I couldn’t do certain things that people do in their 20s, like take spontaneous trips or stay out until dawn.



Even though I knew on a rational level that she wouldn’t always be there, I sort of assumed that she would be. I couldn’t picture a world of mine in which she wasn’t.



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The first thing I did when it seemed like Lee couldn’t get up was try to make her get up. Maybe, I thought, she just needed a little help. She was almost 14, after all, and she had had arthritis for the last three years. Lately her feet had been dragging on her walks, and sometimes she would collapse on the sidewalk, or fall as she went up or down the four steps leading into our building. But she had always managed to make it back up, and so I assumed this time would be no different: I put her collar and leash on and tried lifting her hind legs while simultaneously pulling up her front half with her leash. She just stared at me. She didn’t seem aware that her back half wasn’t working.



Related Anna Holmes: We Were Kittens Once, and Young

I grew up, but my cats, my steadfast companions, got old.





I didn’t know what to do, so I called Sam. We had broken up over the summer — I’d moved out of the Carroll Gardens apartment we shared and back to Fort Greene — and we were friendly, but distant. He hadn’t seen Lee since the breakup, but a few weeks before I had run into him at a party and promised him that if it looked like things were getting bad he could see her one last time. I wasn’t sure if things were in fact getting that bad but I knew I wanted him there.



I got his voicemail. I left a message asking him to please call me. I called my friend Emily, who lives nearby and had dogsat for Lee many times. She seemed to know right away that something was wrong; I rarely talk on the phone, to anyone, and it was 11 on a Thursday night. “Lee can’t get up,” I blurted, and then I realized I was crying. “I don’t know what to do. She can’t get up,” I repeated.



“Oh no,” Emily said.



“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”



Emily said she’d be right over. Then Sam called back. He was at a work party in Manhattan. He asked if I wanted him to come over. I said no. Then I said yes, and so by 11:30 the three of us were sitting in my living room. Lee didn’t seem particularly perturbed; she was happy to see two of her favorite people, and she was still able to drag herself backward around the apartment. I gave her some food and she ate it quickly, and she drank some water. “See? Maybe she’s O.K.,” I said. Sam and Emily looked at each other, then at me.



I learned that night that there is a pet ambulance service, and it is based in Astoria, Queens, and when you call them they ask what kind of animal you have and how much it weighs and what the problem is and where you want to take it, and 45 minutes or so later a burly man shows up with a bag and a muzzle and carries your pet downstairs, and you sit in a van with the back seats taken out and the driver tells you that it is illegal, in New York State, for an ambulance that does not transport humans to have a siren but that the police are usually lenient if he is forced to run a red light.



It was close to 2 a.m. when the veterinarian at the 24-hour clinic offered a prognosis. She was reasonably sure that Lee had had a spinal stroke. X-rays, she said, would at least rule out cancer; if I wanted a more definitive diagnosis, she’d have to get an M.R.I., and even then it wasn’t guaranteed they’d know exactly what was wrong. In the meantime, they were going to keep her in the hospital for two days.



When I went to pick her up that Saturday, she seemed disoriented, but happy to see me. The vet tech had to show me how to use the sling that would hold up her back half, which was basically paralyzed, and hold the leash at the same time, which was tiring and awkward; then she gave me a bag of medication and told me that I was to lie her down on her side and rotate each hind leg, backward and forward, for 20 minutes three times a day. If she was going to get better, the vet said, I would see progress in a few days.



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Watching a dog age comes with its own set of daily, incremental choices and changes. Her tan spots have mostly faded; she is grizzled and gray, and her eyes have the same film over them that I remember seeing in my great-grandmother’s eyes when I was a child. One day she can get up on the bed; the next day she falls, whimpering, when she tries to leap onto it, and no amount of coaxing can get her to try again. One day she stops barking when I turn the key in the lock and that is when I realize she’s losing her hearing, and at the park, when I’m not directly in front of her, she seems panicked and lost and I know she can’t see as well as she used to. She can’t make it up three, then two, then one flight of stairs.



Lee getting old reminds me of my own mortality; in her I see what it is to become elderly, to not be able to do the things you used to be able to do, to have things happen slowly, seemingly forever, and then very and irrevocably quickly. And for this I am irrationally and deeply jealous of people whose dogs die suddenly and young, because although they feel a different kind of pain, this is something they never have to face.



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The night I decided to put Lee down, I sat alone in my apartment at my computer for hours, mindlessly listening to music and reading Twitter and Tumblr, and sobbing, those deep kinds of sobs where you can’t breathe and you can’t control the tears, which just keep coming, even when you think you don’t have any left. It seemed unjust and yet fair that she had no idea what was to happen the next day, and every time I thought about that I cried more.



Lee almost never slept in my bedroom — she would usually either sleep in the living room or in the bathroom — and especially since she stopped being able to walk, getting around the apartment meant she had to drag herself. But when I woke up in the morning she was lying on the floor next to my bed.



That afternoon, when it actually came time to go, it was almost impossible to be somber because nearly everything seemed to be going comically wrong: She peed in the hallway as Sam and I, grim-faced, were trying to get her outside, and so he took her downstairs and put her in the car while I cleaned up. In the car she couldn’t get comfortable, and struggled to sit up, then lie down, then sit up again. And then we parked too far away from her vet and so we had to hustle her down Atlantic Avenue, Sam hoisting her up by the sling and me leading her with the leash.



We finally got to the vet and they led us to a cozy room that felt like a therapist’s office. Sam and I sat down on the couch while Lee lay on the floor on a blanket. Her butt was stained with urine and I noticed how red the joints on her front legs were, from where she had been licking them. We were alone in the room. We looked at each other. “What happens now?” I said. Sam shrugged. “No idea,” he said. Lee was quiet.



Her vet came in and knelt down on the floor next to her. “So what’s going to happen is a technician is going to come in and give her an injection that will make her go unconscious,” she said. “That will take a few minutes. Once we’re sure she’s unconscious, I’ll come in.”



“So you’ll actually … do it?” I said.



She nodded. “So I’m going to leave the room now — the tech should be in soon,” she said. “But we can do this as quickly or as slowly as you want.” I nodded.



I just remember certain images from the next 20 minutes: the bandage with stars on it that the vet tech put on her leg after he injected her, me caressing her head and stroking her side. The way her tongue hung out of her mouth and stuck, immobile, to the floor as she drifted off to sleep but how one ear stayed up, and how I thought that maybe this meant she was still awake and there was still time to save her. The way her vet said simply, “She’s gone.”



•



All this winter, when I looked outside I thought of her bounding through the snow, flakes on the end of her snout, so excited just to burrow back and forth through the drifts.



Doree Shafrir has contributed to New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Awl and The New York Observer, where she was a reporter. She is a senior editor at RollingStone.com.

Gwathmey’s Death Further Diminishes ‘New York Five’ By ROBIN POGREBIN

August 11, 2009
Gwathmey’s Death Further Diminishes ‘New York Five’ By ROBIN POGREBIN

More than 40 years ago, a group of young Manhattan architects with a shared interest in the aesthetics of old-fashioned Modernism began getting together to talk about their work, their lives and the state of the field. And in the decades that followed, even as their styles grew apart — and as they became celebrities in and beyond the world of architecture — they continued talking.

But now the group, long known as the New York Five, is shrinking: After losing its first member, John Hejduk, in 2000, a second, Charles Gwathmey, died last week.

Following the news of Mr. Gwathmey’s death, at 71, friends and colleagues from within and outside the group spoke about his weekend houses on the East End of Long Island — especially one he designed for his parents, completed in 1966 — and his additions to public buildings, like the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art & Architecture Building at Yale, by Paul Rudolph.

But they also remembered his beginnings as one of the New York Five, or the Whites, as the group was also known because of its proclivity for white buildings inspired by the purist forms of Le Corbusier. Along with Mr. Gwathmey and Mr. Hejduk, the group included Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier.

The five men, who knew one another through the architecture schools they attended and taught in, were living in New York in the mid-1960s, just starting out as practicing architects and teachers.

“We were all involved in teaching and in practice and we respected each other’s work,” Mr. Meier recalled. “We decided to have a sort of Saturday morning discussion of what we were doing at the time. Each person brought one work.”

Mr. Graves said the meetings were also a way to continue the educations they had begun in architecture school. “We were all recent graduates,” he said, “used to juries and conversations with colleagues. And suddenly you’re out on the street and you’re not talking to anybody.”

“What united us was a need to convene with each other, to be self-critical, to talk about each other’s work,” he added.

Members of the Five also participated in a larger architectural group organized by Philip Johnson around 1970 that included the architect and historian Kenneth Frampton, then teaching at Princeton; Colin Rowe, another influential architectural historian and theoretician, from Cornell; and Arthur Drexler, then the curator and director of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.

Somewhere along the way, the five architects started taping the sessions and decided to turn the transcripts into “a little pamphlet,” Mr. Meier said, that would feature two houses by each of them. They couldn’t come up with a title (though the book came to be known as “Five Architects”), so they just put their last names on the white square cover in alphabetical order.

“We didn’t think anybody would read it,” Mr. Graves said.

The book, published by George Wittenborn in 1973, became a sensation. “It was a cause célèbre,” said the architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of Yale’s architecture school. It was not so much that the five architects shared an aesthetic, Mr. Stern said; they had “a shared camaraderie and belief that the Modern movement of the 1920s and 1930s was worth revisiting.”

All of the five were surprised by the book’s impact, particularly “among students of architecture — in America and Europe as well,” Mr. Meier said. (Young architects in Italy knew them as “I Five di New York.”)

Mr. Graves said: “I think people were probably hungry for something other than commercial Modernism. We cared about urbanism and we cared what was said about architecture.”

Mr. Eisenman thought that architects with different sensibilities should review the book, and suggested the idea to Mr. Stern, who assembled a group that included Jaquelin T. Robertson and Charles Moore to do just that. Their responses to the book, a series of essays called “Five on Five,” were published in the magazine Architectural Forum; this second group came to be known as the Grays.

After the five Whites, along with some of the Grays, rose to various versions of architectural stardom in the 1980s, some critics argued that they were too concerned with the formal aspects of architecture.

“What was all the fuss about?” Paul Goldberger wrote of the White-Gray debate in The New York Times in 1993, on the occasion of an exhibition and lecture series called “Five Architects: Twenty Years Later” at the University of Maryland. “It was apparent to only a few people then that all these architects, Whites and Grays alike, had more in common than they had dividing them: at the end of the day they were all profoundly elitist, concerned mainly with the aesthetics of the single-family house, and determined to make architecture in a fairly traditional way.”

The architects had reunions of their own. “We continued our friendship, and that’s all it was, was a friendship,” said Mr. Graves, who recalled that Mr. Gwathmey called him “Gravesy.”

Mr. Gwathmey had an office three floors below Mr. Meier’s on 10th Avenue at 37th Street, in Manhattan. The two collaborated — along with Mr. Eisenman and Steven Holl — on a proposal in the 2002 competition to redesign the World Trade Center site. Their scheme featured five glass towers joined by interconnecting horizontal floors.

“This is the one people are going to be fighting about,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in The New York Times in 2002. “Superficially, the design ignores the lessons that postmodernism was supposed to have taught us about context, scale, accommodation and reassurance. It may strike some as a throwback to the megastructural superblocks of the 1960s. So what? The project makes its own kind of statement. Continuity with the epic ethos of the Modern era is part of what it has to say.”

When the architects were collaborating on the proposal, Mr. Gwathmey was always the first to arrive. “He was really into it,” Mr. Meier recalled. “It was the only thing we did as a team, and everyone really took part in an equal way — it wasn’t: ‘This was my idea.’ ”

Mr. Meier, who said he had known Mr. Gwathmey for 50 years, has particularly fond memories from the time when Mr. Gwathmey was first courting his second wife, Bette-Ann Damson, and they all picked corn for dinner in a field adjacent to a barn Mr. Meier was renting on the East End of Long Island.

“Charlie was a sweetheart,” Mr. Meier said.

Indeed, Mr. Gwathmey’s fellows say the architect’s occasionally gruff manner — he was known for firing off angry missives to critics and colleagues — was only on the surface. “He had a real rough exterior and told it like it was but was a real marshmallow inside,” Mr. Eisenman said.

Of the letters and e-mail messages, Mr. Eisenman said that Mr. Gwathmey’s friends often counseled him, “Write ’em, but don’t send ’em.” But sometimes Mr. Gwathmey couldn’t help himself. And when one of his buildings was panned by critics, he took it hard — particularly the recent harsh reviews of his Yale addition and of his glass residential tower at Astor Place in Manhattan. “They say architects have thick skins,” Mr. Graves said. “We don’t. It affects not just your well-being but it affects your practice.”

The last time Mr. Graves saw Mr. Gwathmey was at a meeting of the Philip Johnson group just a few months ago, at the Four Seasons restaurant. (Their usual location, the Century club, was under renovation.) The two sat next to each other.

The talk was mostly about the economy and how it was forcing them to let go of employees for the first time in memory. “We were all shocked that we were laying off 10 percent or more,” Mr. Graves said.

With Mr. Hejduk gone and now Mr. Gwathmey, Mr. Graves said he realized that “the New York Five” was bound to diminish over time. “It’s going to happen,” he said. “As we get older, the group will get smaller.”

“It was a great group,” he added. “Still is.”

John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

John Updike, a Lyrical Writer of the Middle-Class Man, Dies at 76 By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
John Updike, the kaleidoscopically gifted writer whose quartet of Rabbit novels highlighted a body of fiction, verse, essays and criticism so vast, protean and lyrical as to place him in the first rank of American authors, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Farms, Mass.

The cause was cancer, according to a statement by Knopf, his publisher. A spokesman said Mr. Updike had died at the Hospice of the North Shore in Danvers.

Of Mr. Updike’s many novels and stories, perhaps none captured the imagination of the book-reading public more than his precisely observed tales about ordinary citizens in small-town and urban settings.

His best-known protagonist, Harry Rabbit Angstrom, first appears as a former high-school basketball star trapped in a loveless marriage and a sales job he hates. Through the four novels whose titles bear his nickname — “Rabbit, Run,” “Rabbit Redux,” “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” — the author traces the funny, restless and questing life of this middle-American against the background of the last half-century’s major events.

“My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class,” Mr. Updike told Jane Howard in a 1966 interview for Life magazine. “I like middles,” he continued. “It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.”

From his earliest short stories, he found his subject in the everyday dramas of marriage, sex and divorce, setting them most often in the fictional town of Olinger, Pa., which he described as “a square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to deviate from the grid.” He wrote about America with boundless curiosity and wit in prose so careful and attentive that it burnished the ordinary with a painterly gleam.

Here he is in “A Sense of Shelter,” an early short story:

“Snow fell against the high school all day, wet big-flake snow that did not accumulate well. Sharpening two pencils, William looked down on a parking lot that was a blackboard in reverse; car tires had cut smooth arcs of black into the white, and wherever a school bus had backed around, it had left an autocratic signature of two V’s.”

The detail of his writing was so rich that it inspired two schools of thought on Mr. Updike’s fiction: those who responded to his descriptive prose as to a kind of poetry, a sensuous engagement with the world, and those who argued that it was more style than content.

The latter position was defined by James Wood in the 1999 essay “John Updike’s Complacent God.”

“He is a prose writer of great beauty,” Mr. Wood wrote, “but that prose confronts one with the question of whether beauty is enough, and whether beauty always conveys all that a novelist must convey.”

Astonishingly industrious and prolific, Mr. Updike turned out three pages a day of fiction, essays, criticism or verse, proving the maxim that several pages a day was at least a book a year — or more. Mr. Updike published 60 books in his lifetime; his final one, “My Father’s Tears and Other Stories,” is to be published in June.

“I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles, if I had to,” he told The Paris Review in 1967. “The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.”

His vast output of poetry, which tended toward light verse, and his wide-ranging essays and criticism filled volume after volume. Among them are “Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf” (1996), “Just Looking: Essays on Art” (1989), “Still Looking: Essays on American Art” (2005) and “Self-Consciousness: Memoirs” (1989). One famous article was on the baseball star Ted Williams’s last game, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” (1977), which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1960.

As his fiction matured, Mr. Updike’s novels sometimes became more exotic and experimental in form, locale and subject matter. “The Coup” (1978) was set in an imaginary African country. “Brazil” (1994) was a venture in magic realism. “Toward the End of Time” (1997) was set in 2020, after a war between the United States and China. “Gertrude and Claudius” (2000) was about Hamlet’s mother and uncle. And “The Terrorist” (2006) was a fictional study of a convert to Islam who tries to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

Mr. Updike never abandoned short stories, of which he turned out several hundred, most of them first appearing in The New Yorker. It was here that he exercised his exquisitely sharp eye for the minutiae of domestic routine and the conflicts that animated it for him — between present satisfaction and future possibility, between sex and spirituality, and between the beauty of creation and the looming threat of death, which he summed up famously in the concluding sentence of “Pigeon Feathers,” the title story of his second collection (1962).

The story is about a boy, David, who is forced to shoot some pigeons in a barn and then watches, fascinated, as their feathers float to the ground. “He was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.”

Philip Roth, one of Mr. Updike’s literary peers, said Tuesday: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

Growing Up

John Hoyer Updike was born on March 18, 1932, in Reading, Pa., and grew up in the nearby town of Shillington. He was the only child of Wesley Russell Updike, a junior high school math teacher of Dutch descent, and Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, who later also published fiction in The New Yorker and elsewhere. His was a solitary childhood made more so by his family’s move when he was 13 to his mother’s birthplace, on an 80-acre farm near Plowville, Pa. From there both he and his father commuted 11 miles to school in town, but the isolation fired the boy’s imagination as well as his desire to take flight from aloneness.

Sustained by hours of reading in the local library and by his mother’s encouragement to write, he aspired first to be either an animator for Walt Disney or a magazine cartoonist. But a sense of narrative was implanted early, perhaps nurtured by summer work as a copyboy for a local newspaper, The Reading Eagle, for which he wrote several feature articles.

After graduating from high school as co-valedictorian and senior-class president, Mr. Updike attended Harvard College on a scholarship. Although he majored in English and wrote for and edited The Harvard Lampoon, he continued his cartooning. In 1953 he married Mary Entwistle Pennington, a Radcliffe fine arts major.

Graduating from Harvard in 1954 summa cum laude, he won a Knox Fellowship at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford. In June of that year, his short story “Friends From Philadelphia” was accepted, along with a poem, by The New Yorker. It was an event, he later said, that remained “the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life.”

Following the birth of his first child, Elizabeth, the couple returned to America, and Mr. Updike went to work writing Talk of the Town pieces for The New Yorker.

Two years later, with the arrival of a second child, David, the couple, needing more space, moved to Ipswich, Mass., an hour north of Boston, where Mr. Updike kept his ties to The New Yorker but concentrated on his poetry and fiction. In 1959, a third child, Michael, was born, followed the next year by a fourth, Miranda.

Early Works

The move to Ipswich proved creatively invigorating. By 1959 Mr. Updike had completed three books — a volume of poetry, “The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures,” a novel, “The Poorhouse Fair” and a collection of stories, “The Same Door” — and placed them with Alfred A. Knopf, which remained his publisher throughout his career. From 1954 to 1959, he also published more than a hundred essays, articles, poems and short stories in The New Yorker.

The move to a small town also seemed to stimulate his memories of Shillington and his creation of its fictional counterpart, Olinger. All his early stories were set there or in a neighboring city modeled on Reading, as were his first four novels, “The Poorhouse Fair,” “The Centaur,” “Of the Farm” and “Rabbit, Run.” “The Poorhouse Fair” (1959), avoiding the usual coming-of-age tale of most beginners, established Mr. Updike’s reputation as an important novelist. Based on an old people’s home near Shillington, the novel explores the homogenization of society among members of the author’s grandfather’s generation.

“The Centaur” (1963), more autobiographical, welds the Greek myth of Chiron, the wounded centaur who gives up his immortality for the release of Prometheus, to the story of a mocked Olinger high-school science teacher who sacrifices himself for his son. It won the 1964 National Book Award for fiction.

“Of the Farm” (1965), set not far from Olinger, focuses on the mother of a farm family who fears she will die before her son, gone into advertising in New York, will fulfill her dream of his becoming a poet.

With “Couples” (1968), his fifth novel, Mr. Updike moved his setting away from Pennsylvania to the fictional Tarbox, Mass. There he explores sexual coupling and uncoupling in a community of young married couples who, as Wilfrid Sheed wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “wanted to get away from the staleness of Old America and the vulgarity of the new; who wanted to live beautifully in beautiful surroundings; to raise intelligent children in renovated houses in absolutely authentic rural centers.” “Couples,” which became a best seller, was for its time remarkably frank about sex and became well known for its lengthy detail and often lyrical descriptions of sexual acts.

With the Rabbit quartet, Mr. Updike cast his keen eye on a still wider world. Where “Rabbit, Run” plays out its present-tense narrative in domestic squalor, its three sequels, published in 10-year intervals, encompass the later 20th century American experience: “Rabbit Redux” (1971) the cultural turmoil of the 1960s; “Rabbit Is Rich” (1981) the boom years of the 1970s, the oil crisis and inflation; and “Rabbit at Rest” (1991), set in the time of what Rabbit calls “Reagan’s reign,” with its trade war with Japan, its AIDS epidemic and the terror bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Rabbit lies dying in a hospital at the end of the last volume, overweight, worn-out, felled by a coronary infarction during a one-on-one basketball game. With his life over, many critics judged that Rabbit had entered the pantheon of signal American literary figures, joining Huck Finn, Jay Gatsby, Holden Caulfield and the like.

“Rabbit Redux” was considered the weakest of the set, but “Rabbit Is Rich” and “Rabbit at Rest” both won Pulitzer Prizes and other awards. Reissued as a set in 1995, “Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy” was pronounced by some to be a contender for the crown of great American novel.

As a small-town businessman of limited scope, Rabbit is obviously very different from his creator. Yet the two of them share a middle-American view of the world, with the difference that Mr. Updike was exquisitely self-conscious. Against the grain of his calling and temperament, he strove, like the German writer Thomas Mann, for a burgherly life.

He took up golf, which he played with passionate enthusiasm and also a writer’s eye, noting the grace notes in others’ swings and tiny variations in the landscape. He was a tall, handsome man with a prominent nose and a head of hair that Tom Wolfe once compared to “monkish thatch.” It eventually turned white, as did his bushy eyebrows, giving him a senatorial appearance. And though as a youth he suffered from both a stutter and psoriasis, he became a person of immense charm, unfailingly polite and gracious in public.

As a citizen of Ipswich, he participated in local affairs, serving on the Congregational Church building committee and the Democratic town committee and writing a pageant for the town’s 17th-Century Day. For a while he worked downtown, in an office above a restaurant. Although politically liberal, he was virtually alone among American writers to declare himself in support of the Vietnam War.

In 1974 he separated from Mary and moved to Boston, where he taught briefly at Boston University. In 1976 the Updikes were divorced, and the following year he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard, settling with her and her three children first in Georgetown, Mass., and then in 1984 in Beverly Farms, both towns in the same corner of the state as Ipswich.

In addition to his wife, Martha, he is survived by his sons David, of Cambridge, Mass., and Michael, of Newburyport, Mass.; his daughters Miranda, of Ipswich, and Elizabeth, of Maynard, Mass.; three stepsons, John Bernhard, of Lexington, Mass., Jason Bernhard, of Brooklyn, and Frederic Bernhard, of New Canaan, Conn.; seven grandchildren, and seven step-grandchildren.

A Book a Year

With the storehouse of his youthful experience emptying and his material circumstances enriched — the bestselling “Couples” put its author’s face on the cover of Time magazine — he nevertheless determined to keep publishing a book a year.

“Writing’s gotten to be a habit,” he told Michiko Kakutani in an interview with The Times in 1982, a year after “Rabbit Is Rich” was published. “Sometimes the books do seem kind of silly and very papery, but there are moments when a sentence or a series of sentences clicks.”

Among the dozen or more novels he brought out in the next quarter century, some clicked, like “The Witches of Eastwick” (1984), celebrated by some as an exuberant sexual comedy and a satirical view of women’s liberation. It was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer.

He returned to the witches in another novel, “The Widows of Eastwick,” published in October, portraying them as widows revisiting the town. No longer preying on men as they once did, they are now “ordinary women,” Ms. Kakutani wrote in her review, “haunted by the sins of their youth, frightened of the looming prospect of the grave and trying their best to get by, day by day by day.”

Other later Updike novels seemed schematic, like the author’s three takes on Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”: “Roger’s Version” (1986), “S” (1988) and “A Month of Sundays” (1975). “Memories of the Ford Administration” (1992), linking personal guilt to history; “Seek My Face” (2002), an improvisation on the life of Jackson Pollock; and “Villages” (2004), about small-town adultery, also found lukewarm receptions.

Some readers complained about his portrayal of women. In an interview with The Times in 1988, Mr. Updike acknowledged the criticism that “my women are never on the move, that they’re always stuck where the men have put them.” His “only defense,” he said, “would be that it’s in the domesticity, the family, the sexual relations, that women interest me. I don’t write about too many male businessmen, and I’m not apt to write about too many female businessmen.”

Yet in trying to address this criticism by creating what he called “active and dynamic” women in “The Witches of Eastwick” and “S,” he may have made things worse. Some reviewers detected behind the author’s apparent respect for these female dynamos more ambivalence than anything else.

Meanwhile, the essays, book reviews, art criticism, reminiscences, introductions, forewords, prefaces, speeches, travel notes, film commentary, prose sketches, ruminations and other occasional jottings poured forth inexhaustibly, as if the experiences of his five senses only became real once recorded on paper.

The novelist Martin Amis sketched Mr. Updike plausibly in a 1991 review of a collection for The Times Book Review: “Preparing his cup of Sanka over the singing kettle, he wears his usual expression: that of a man beset by an embarrassment of delicious drolleries. The telephone starts ringing. A science magazine wants something pithy on the philosophy of subatomic thermodynamics; a fashion magazine wants 10,000 words on his favorite color. No problem — but can they hang on? Mr. Updike has to go upstairs again and blurt out a novel.”

Nonfiction Works

Over the decades, the assorted nonfiction filled six thick volumes, “Assorted Prose” (1965), “Picked-Up Pieces” (1975), “Hugging the Shore” (1983), “Odd Jobs” (1991), “More Matter” (1999) and “Due Considerations” (2007). The impression they left most indelibly was their author’s vast range in time, space and discipline as a reader, and his deep capacity to understand, appreciate, discriminate, explain and guide. As he once said: “I think it good for an author, baffled by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is, how hard it is to keep the plot straight, let alone to sort out one’s honest responses.”

And whatever his flaws as a novelist, his mastery of the short-story form at least for a time continued to grow. Reviewing Mr. Updike’s sixth collection of stories, “Museums and Women and Other Stories” (1972), Anatole Broyard wrote in The Times, “His former preciousness has toughened into precision.” He concluded, “His language, which was once like a cat licking its fur, now stays closer to its subject, has become a means instead of an end in itself.”

Not incidentally, it was in a story collection — his fifth, “Bech: A Book” (1970) — that Mr. Updike created a counter-self living a counter-life in the character Henry Bech. Bech is an unmarried, urban, blocked Jewish writer immersed in the swim of literary celebrity — “a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times,” as Bech himself put it in the third volume devoted to him, “Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel” (1998), which followed “Bech Is Back” (1982).

As Mr. Updike’s opposite, Henry Bech not only entertained his readers in a voice very different from his creator’s — world-weary, full of schmerz and a touch of schmalz — he also undertook certain tasks that Mr. Updike avoided, like attending literary dinners, tsk-tsking over a younger generation’s minimalist prose and maximal tendency to write memoirs, working off grudges, murdering critics and interviewing John Updike for The New York Times Book Review.

Bech even wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, something that Mr. Updike never did, to the consternation of many Western writers and critics.

By contrasting so sharply with his creator, Henry Bech also defined Mr. Updike more distinctly, particularly his determination to stick to the essentials of his craft. As Mr. Updike told The Paris Review about his decision to shun the New York spotlight:

“Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, have them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano’s, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf.”

Samuel Huntington and the Positivity of Power Thinking By LEE SIEGEL

January 4, 2009
Samuel Huntington and the Positivity of Power Thinking By LEE SIEGEL

Standing at the beginning of a new year, two weeks before a new president is inaugurated, and amid expectations of major political and economic change, we are, you might say, at a Huntington moment.

Samuel Huntington, the political theorist who died on Dec. 24 at the age of 81, was a power thinker, one of the breed of “big idea” men whose major works didn’t just explain historical transformation but seemed to crystallize it — in ways that altered how the rest of us looked at the world, for better and also for worse.

In provocative books like “Political Order in Changing Societies” and “The Clash of Civilizations,” Mr. Huntington’s talent — some would say weakness — for the grand synthesizing theory is most strikingly on display. In 1968, when “Political Order” was published, most political scientists held that the key to democracy was modernization. As backward societies caught up with the more advanced ones, they would also develop more inclusive political systems. But Mr. Huntington made a contrary argument: since modernization often brought chaos, the actual sine qua non of a successful society was order. It alone could contain the demons set loose by social change and also create the conditions for gradual political reform. By this calculation, any system that imposed order, even authoritarian order, was legitimate.

In the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States, “the government governs,” Mr. Huntington wrote. All three “have strong, adaptable, coherent political institutions: effective bureaucracies, well-organized political parties.”

Published at a time when efforts to build a democratic nation in South Vietnam had proved disastrous, Mr. Huntington’s book changed the debate.

His later book, “The Clash of Civilizations,” published in 1996, also captured its moment, though with an altogether different argument. The unifying drive for order that had been at the center of Mr. Huntington’s analysis of the cold war — a period in which democratic and authoritarian regimes could coexist, however uneasily — now gave way to a dark vision of a world irreconcilably divided. Surveying the post-cold-war landscape, Mr. Huntington described radically different civilizations with radically divergent values — most specifically, those of the secular West and of the Islamic world. After Sept. 11, 2001, “The Clash of Civilizations” acquired something like a prophetic authority.

In these two books, Mr. Huntington seemed to have calibrated his responses to a particular moment — to history as it was happening. As events changed, so did his interpretations. This was to be expected. The adaptation of theory to reality is the essence of the power thinker’s métier.

It was not always so. In the classical age, when wars lasted for many years, even decades, and technology evolved at a snail’s pace, historians like Thucydides and Polybius took a longer view. To them, no single historical event mattered more than any other. All unfolded within endlessly recurring cycles dominated by the deep currents of human nature. This view might seem archaic — yet its lessons remain relevant. Bernard Madoff is accused of bilking an estimated $50 billion from investors by executing the same scheme Charles Ponzi used in 1921. Wall Street’s financial “instruments” have undergone a revolution in the last nine decades, but people are driven by the same appetites — envy, greed, fear.

It was in the modern era, with its belief in human progress, that thinkers began to interpret the world in a different way — not as a record of human folly but rather as an enactment of changing or evolving historical forces.

The 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico argued that all civilizations pass through three stages: the age of the gods, in which divinities directly ruled humankind; the age of aristocratic heroes, in which superior individuals reigned over lesser individuals; and finally the age of ordinary humans, in which men and women govern themselves in the spirit of equality. This last phase eventually gives way to decadence and disintegration characterized by brutish manners (see: reality television). At that point, the gods return (Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Dark Knight), and the three-part cycle starts again.

Meanwhile French thinkers like Voltaire, Condorcet and Turgot converted the Christian idea of spiritual progress into a vision of rational human improvement unhindered by religious superstition. This Enlightenment belief in human perfectibility is, among other things, a great illusion-producing machine. You could draw a steady line from 18th-century optimism to the sugar plums of fantastical mortgages and overdrawn credit in 2008.

In the early 19th century, one of the true giants of power thinking, G. W. F. Hegel, tried to reconcile reason with religion through the logic of the “dialectic.” Even terrible events might represent advances for human society. For example, the French Revolution had descended into irrational cruelty, but its “necessary” violence had led to a rational and humane backlash against that very barbarism.

Today, Hegel’s pendular historical motion continues to shape political debate — for instance when some argue that the Democrats’ deficit spending will lead to Republican retrenchment, which will then lead to more Democratic deficit spending.

The most influential of all 19th-century historical theorists, Karl Marx, adopted Hegel’s dialectic but revised it to suit his own theory of historical materialism, which was rooted in class struggle and economic competition. For Marx, the “dialectic” meant that political systems plant the seeds of their own destruction. In his day the triumph of bourgeois capitalism fostered economic injustices that would, Marx predicted, give rise to an emerging class, the proletariat, which one day would topple the bourgeoisie.

It is possible to see the past 15 years through a Marxist lens. Prosperity and success sowed the seeds of the current economic crisis, which in turn has nourished growing anger at the “class” of Wall Street financiers. In the larger sense, of course, Marx’s vision of a class revolution was discredited.

So, for that matter, was Mr. Huntington’s theory about “modernizing authoritarianism.” In his foreword to a recent edition of “Political Order in Changing Societies,” Francis Fukuyama, a former student of Mr. Huntington’s and a consequential big-idea man in his own right, observed that the Soviet system was by no means the effective government Mr. Huntington claimed it had been.

Mr. Huntington’s idea about the inevitable clash of civilizations also looks different today — its harsh view of the world disconcertingly similar to the thinking behind the Bush administration’s crusading war on political Islam, though Mr. Huntington was himself skeptical about what he called America’s “imperial” mission in Iraq. Mr. Huntington got many things right — and his theories included major insights. But in their very largeness they veered toward oversimplification.

“Perhaps,” as Mr. Fukuyama wrote, “all grand theories are ultimately doomed to failure.”

Why should this be? Probably because in their desire to explain so much, big thinkers tend to skip over complicating factors and counterevidence. Painting in broad and often brilliant strokes, they often miss the shadows and crevices. The very seductiveness of power thinking — its promise that everything fits together or can be made to seem so — is also the source of its danger. It offers something irresistible, the possibility that we can change, or at least control, our lives by means of ideas, even though those ideas are themselves abstract inventions.

Still, as long as there is private and public history, human beings will try to think their way around it. For better. And for worse.

Lee Siegel’s most recent book is “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” He lectures on cultural criticism at Rutgers University.

Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Pause, Dies at 78 By MEL GUSSOW and BEN BRANTLEY

December 26, 2008
Harold Pinter, Playwright of the Pause, Dies at 78 By MEL GUSSOW and BEN BRANTLEY

Harold Pinter, the British playwright whose gifts for finding the ominous in the everyday and the noise within silence made him the most influential and imitated dramatist of his generation, died on Wednesday. He was 78 and lived in London.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, said Thursday.

Mr. Pinter learned he had cancer of the esophagus in late 2001. In 2005, when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was unable to attend the awards ceremony at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm but delivered an acceptance speech from a wheelchair in a recorded video.

In more than 30 plays — written between 1957 and 2000 and including masterworks like "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker," "The Homecoming" and "Betrayal" — Mr. Pinter captured the anxiety and ambiguity of life in the second half of the 20th century with terse, hypnotic dialogue filled with gaping pauses and the prospect of imminent violence.

Along with another Nobel winner, Samuel Beckett, his friend and mentor, Mr. Pinter became one of the few modern playwrights whose names instantly evoke a sensibility. The adjective Pinteresque has become part of the cultural vocabulary as a byword for strong and unspecified menace.

An actor, essayist, screenwriter, poet and director as well as a dramatist, Mr. Pinter was also publicly outspoken in his views on repression and censorship, at home and abroad. He used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy, saying that the United States had not only lied to justify waging war against Iraq, but that it had also "supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship" in the last 50 years.

His political views were implicit in much of his work. Though his plays deal with the slipperiness of memory and human character, they are also almost always about the struggle for power.

The dynamic in his work is rooted in battles for control, turf wars waged in locations that range from working-class boarding houses (in his first produced play, "The Room," from 1957) to upscale restaurants (the setting for "Celebration," staged in 2000). His plays often take place in a single, increasingly claustrophobic room, where conversation is a minefield and even innocuous-seeming words can wound.

In Mr. Pinter's work "words are weapons that the characters use to discomfort or destroy each other," said Peter Hall, who has staged more of Mr. Pinter's plays than any other director.

But while Mr. Pinter's linguistic agility turned simple, sometimes obscene, words into dark, glittering and often mordantly funny poetry, it is what comes between the words that he is most famous for. And the stage direction "pause" would haunt him throughout his career.

Intended as an instructive note to actors, the Pinter pause was a space for emphasis and breathing room. But it could also be as threatening as a raised fist. Mr. Pinter said that writing the word "pause" into his first play was "a fatal error." It is certainly the aspect of his writing that has been most parodied. But no other playwright has consistently used pauses with such rhythmic assurance and to such fine-tuned manipulative effect.

Early in his career Mr. Pinter said his work was about "the weasel under the cocktail cabinet." Though he later regretted the image, it holds up as a metaphor for the undertow of danger that pervades his work. As Martin Esslin wrote in his book "Pinter: The Playwright," "Man's existential fear, not as an abstraction, but as something real, ordinary and acceptable as an everyday occurrence — here we have the core of Pinter's work as a dramatist."

Though often grouped with Beckett and others as a practitioner of Theater of the Absurd, Mr. Pinter considered himself a realist. In 1962 he said the context of his plays was always "concrete and particular." He never found a need to alter that assessment.

Beginning in the late 1950s, John Osborne and Mr. Pinter helped to turn British theater away from the gentility of the drawing room. With "Look Back in Anger," Osborne opened the door for several succeeding generations of angry young men, who railed against the class system and an ineffectual government. Mr. Pinter was to have the more lasting effect as an innovator and a stylist. And his influence on other playwrights, including David Mamet in the United States and Patrick Marber and Jez Butterworth in England, is undeniable.

The playwright Tom Stoppard said that before Mr. Pinter: "One thing plays had in common: you were supposed to believe what people said up there. If somebody comes in and says, 'Tea or coffee?' and the answer is 'Tea,' you are entitled to assume that somebody is offered a choice of two drinks, and the second person has stated a preference." With Mr. Pinter there are alternatives, "such as the man preferred coffee but the other person wished him to have tea," Mr. Stoppard said, "or that he preferred the stuff you make from coffee beans under the impression that it was called tea."

As another British playwright, David Hare, said of Mr. Pinter, "The essence of his singular appeal is that you sit down to every play or film he writes in certain expectation of the unexpected."

Though initially regarded as an intuitive rather than an intellectual playwright, Mr. Pinter was in fact both. His plays are dense with references to writers like James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. The annual Pinter Review, in which scholars probe and parse his works for meaning and metaphor, is one of many indications of his secure berth in academia.

Politics Inside the Plays

While it was not immediately apparent, Mr. Pinter was always a writer with a political sensibility, which became overt in later plays like "One for the Road" (1984) and "Mountain Language" (1988). These works, having to do "not with ambiguities of power, but actual power," he said, were written out of "very cold anger."

He and his wife hosted gatherings in their Holland Park town house for liberal political seminars. Known as the June 20th Society, the participants included Mr. Hare, Ian McEwan, Michael Holroyd, John Mortimer, Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer. In their discussions Mr. Pinter expressed the great struggle of the mid-20th century as one between "primitive rage" and "liberal generosity," Mr. Hare said.

Through the years Mr. Pinter became known, especially to the British news media, for having a prickly personality. "There is a violence in me," Mr. Pinter once said, "but I don't walk around looking for trouble." The director Richard Eyre said in a testimonial book published for Mr. Pinter's 70th birthday that he was "sometimes pugnacious and occasionally splenetic" but "just as often droll and generous — particularly to actors, directors and (a rare quality this) other writers."

Harold Pinter was born in Hackney in the East End of London on Oct. 10, 1930. His father, Jack, was a tailor; his mother, Frances, a homemaker. Mr. Pinter's grandparents had emigrated to England from Eastern Europe. His parents, he said, were "very solid, very respectable, Jewish, lower-middle-class people."

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Harold, an only child, was evacuated from London to a provincial town in Cornwall. His feelings of loneliness and isolation from that time were to surface later in his plays. When he was 13, he returned to London and was there during the Blitz when his house was struck by a bomb. He rushed inside to rescue a few valuable possessions: his cricket bat and a poem — "a paean of love" — he was writing to a girlfriend.

Sports, poetry and his relationships with women were to remain important to him. Vigorously athletic, he was a fierce competitor in cricket and tennis. Ian Smith, an Oxford don and cricket teammate, equated Mr. Pinter's art with his bold style of playing cricket. "Everything is focused," he said. "It's about performance and economy of gesture."

Poetry and Pacifism

Mr. Pinter grew up on a diet of American gangster movies and British war films. From the first he was a great reader and a hopeful poet, with strong political judgments. When he was called up for military service at 18, as a pacifist he refused to serve.

In diverse ways he remained a conscientious objector in the years to come, echoing a line in "The Birthday Party," in which Stanley, a lodger in a seaside boarding house, is suddenly taken away by two strangers to some ominous future as a friend cries out, "Stan, don't let them tell you what to do!" Years later, Mr. Pinter said he had lived that line all his life.

Mr. Pinter's first poem was published in a magazine called Poetry London when he was 20. Soon afterward he completed a novel, "The Dwarfs." After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the Central School of Speech and Drama, he signed on with a repertory company and, performing under the name David Baron, toured Ireland in plays by Shakespeare and others, often in villainous roles like Iago.

In 1955, at a party in London, Mr. Pinter was struck by what he referred to as "an odd image." A little man, who later turned out to be the writer and professional eccentric Quentin Crisp, was making bacon and eggs for a large man who was sitting at a table reading the comics. Mr. Pinter told his friend Henry Woolf about the incident and said he thought he might write a play about it. The next year Mr. Woolf, then a graduate student at the University of Bristol, asked him if he could write that play for a group of drama students.

The resulting work, "The Room," was Mr. Pinter's first play. And with its story of mysterious intruders and its elliptical speech, it showed that Mr. Pinter had already found his voice as a dramatist. It opened in Bristol on May 15, 1957, and was restaged three years later at the Hampstead Theater Club in London.

In 1956 Mr. Pinter married Vivien Merchant, an actress in the company. After their son, Daniel, was born in 1958, they moved to the Chiswick section of London. He wrote "The Birthday Party," his first full-length play, drawing on his memories of touring as an actor in Eastbourne, on Britain's south coast.

The Pinters, who were temporarily unemployed and desperately poor, had an offer to act in Birmingham, and Ms. Merchant wanted to accept it. But Mr. Pinter said: "I have this play opening in London. I think I must stay. Something's going to happen." She replied, "What makes you think so?"

They turned down the acting offer. "The Birthday Party" opened in the West End in 1958 and received disastrous reviews. Then, prodded by the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay, Harold Hobson, the eminent critic of The Sunday Times of London, came to see it at a matinee. What he wrote turned out to be a life-changing review.

"It breathes in the air," Hobson wrote. "It cannot be seen, but it enters the room every time the door is opened." He continued: "Though you go to the uttermost parts of the earth, and hide yourself in the most obscure lodgings in the least popular of towns, one day there is a possibility that two men will appear. They will be looking for you, and you cannot get away. And someone will be looking for them too. There is terror everywhere." He concluded, "Mr. Pinter, on the evidence of this work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London."

Despite that review the play closed that weekend. By contrast Mr. Pinter's next full-length play to be produced, "The Caretaker," which opened in London in 1960, was a dazzling critical success. "Suddenly everything went topsy-turvy," Mr. Pinter said.

In that play two brothers live in a seedy house in London and, for inexplicable reasons, invite a homeless man named Davies to share their quarters and to act as a kind of custodian. Michael Billington, a critic for The Guardian and Mr. Pinter's biographer, has called the play "an austere masterpiece: a universally recognizable play about political maneuvering, fraternal love, spiritual isolation, language as a negotiating weapon or a form of cover-up."

Mr. Pinter's next play, "The Homecoming," opened in London in June 1965, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Mr. Hall. The story of an all-male family headed by a Lear-like father and the woman (Ms. Merchant, who starred in many of his plays) who enters and disrupts their domain scored a major success in London. Though it received a mixed reception in New York, "The Homecoming" won a Tony Award as best play and had a long run on Broadway.

A Shift of Focus

After these first three full-length plays — all stories of raffish characters in shabby environments — Mr. Pinter shifted his focus. His next three dramas were set in the worlds of art and publishing: "Old Times" (1971), "No Man's Land" (1975) and "Betrayal" (1978), all studies of the unreliability of memory and the uncertainty of love. In "Old Times" a husband and wife encounter a woman they may or may not have known in the past.

In "No Man's Land" a faded poet visits a wealthy patron for an evening of recollection and gamesmanship, roles played in the original production by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who repeated their performances in New York the next year. The elegant "Betrayal" is a play about marriage and duplicity and, despite its use of reverse chronology, is among Mr. Pinter's most accessible works. It was made into a 1982 film starring Jeremy Irons, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Hodge.

During the run of "No Man's Land" Mr. Pinter began an affair with Lady Antonia Fraser, the biographer and historian, who was then married to Hugh Fraser, a conservative politician. In 1980 Mr. Pinter and Lady Antonia were married, with Mr. Pinter becoming the substitute paterfamilias of an extended family.

In addition to his wife, his survivors include his son, Daniel, and his stepchildren, Benjamin, Damian, Orlando, Rebecca, Flora and Natasha. Years ago his son changed his last name to Brand, his maternal grandmother's maiden name. He had been estranged from his father, living as a recluse in Cambridgeshire.

After "Betrayal" Mr. Pinter's plays became shorter (like "A Kind of Alaska") and then, for about three years, they stopped. "Something gnaws away," he explained, "the desire to write something and the inability to do so." He added, "I think I was getting more and more imbedded in international issues."

At the same time he continued his involvement in films, highlighted by his close collaboration as screenwriter with the director Joseph Losey, which began in 1963 with "The Servant," a depiction of class relations in Britain. That was followed in 1967 by "Accident," about a professor infatuated with a student (Mr. Pinter and Ms. Merchant each had minor parts), and "The Go-Between" (1971), about a boy's complicity in an adult affair in turn of the century Britain, with Julie Christie and Alan Bates.

His many screenplays for other directors include "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), about a woman (Anne Bancroft) drifting through multiple marriages, directed by Jack Clayton; "The Last Tycoon," Elia Kazan's 1976 adaptation of the Fitzgerald novel; and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" (1981), a Karel Reisz film with Meryl Streep and Mr. Irons.

With his plays "Moonlight" (a portrait of family relationships undermined by years of divisiveness) and "Ashes to Ashes" (a story of "torturers and victims" reflected in a typically uncommunicative marriage), Mr. Pinter returned to the longer, somberly meditative form.

His final work, "Celebration" (2000), is a wry look at power-conscious couples dining in a chic restaurant that bears a striking resemblance to the Ivy, a famous theater gathering place in London. "Celebration" was inspired by the playwright's early days as an unemployed actor, when he took a job as a busboy at the National Liberal Club. Because he dared to intrude on a conversation among several diners, he was fired.

The Writer as Director

He often directed plays by others, especially those by Simon Gray ("Butley," "Otherwise Engaged"), and occasionally his own work. Increasingly and with greater zeal he appeared as an actor — onstage with Paul Eddington in "No Man's Land" and in films like "Mojo," "Mansfield Park" and "The Tailor of Panama." Throughout his life he specialized in playing menacing characters, including several in his own plays ("The Hothouse," "One for the Road").

In July 2001 the highlight of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York was the presentation of nine Pinter plays, including a revival of "The Homecoming," and a pairing of his first and last plays, "The Room" and "Celebration." Mr. Pinter participated as a director and also acted in "One for the Road" in the role of a dapper and sadistic government interrogator.

The Pinter festival was the capstone of a season that, in London, featured the premiere at the National Theater of a stage version of his film script for "Remembrance of Things Past." Late in 2001 he directed an acclaimed revival of "No Man's Land," starring John Wood and Corin Redgrave at the National Theater.

In December 2001, during a routine medical examination, he was found to have cancer of the esophagus. In January 2002, while undergoing treatment, he acted in his brief comic sketch "Press Conference" at the National Theater in a malicious role as a minister of culture who was formerly the head of the secret police. In 2006 he appeared in a weeklong, sold-out production of Beckett's one-man play, "Krapp's Last Tape," at the Royal Court Theater.

"Pinter looks anxiously over his left shoulder into the darkness as if he felt death's presence in the room," Mr. Billington of The Guardian wrote. "It is impossible to dissociate Pinter's own recent encounters with mortality from that of the character."

Revivals of Mr. Pinter's work have become increasingly frequent in recent years. Last December an acclaimed production of his "Homecoming" opened on Broadway.

Mr. Pinter said he thought of theater as essentially exploratory. "Even old Sophocles didn't know what was going to happen next," he said. "He had to find his way through unknown territory. At the same time, theater has always been a critical act, looking in a broad sense at the society in which we live and attempting to reflect and dramatize these findings. We're not talking about the moon."

Speaking about his intuitive sense of writing, he said, "I find at the end of the journey, which of course is never ending, that I have found things out."

"I don't go away and say: 'I have illuminated myself. You see before you a changed person,' " he added. "It's a more surreptitious sense of discovery that happens to the writer himself."

Few writers have been so consistent over so many years in the tone and execution of their work. Just before rehearsals began for the West End production of "The Birthday Party" half a century ago, Mr. Pinter sent a letter to his director, Peter Wood. In it he said, "The play dictated itself, but I confess that I wrote it — with intent, maliciously, purposefully, in command of its growth."

He added: "The play is a comedy because the whole state of affairs is absurd and inglorious. It is, however, as you know, a very serious piece of work."

Mel Gussow, a critic and cultural reporter for The Times, died in 2005.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/theater/26pinter.html?pagewanted=print

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