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Harold PinterA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The opening scene establishes the play’s one-room setting in “an old house in North London” (6). It is a summer evening. The house in question has no back wall and is instead outlined by a “square arch” (6), a visible staircase, and a hallway. The room is furnished with “odd tables, chairs” (6).
Max, the household’s aged patriarch, and one of his sons, Lenny, bicker about the location of a pair of scissors. It should be a trivial matter, but the chat is barbed and laced with an undercurrent of violence. “Why don’t you shut up, you daft prat?” (7), says Larry. His dad later boasts, “You think I wasn’t a tearaway? I could have taken care of you, twice over” (8). Max goes on to refer to his now dead wife, Jessie, as a “bitch” with a “rotten stinking face” (9). Max also recalls how he used to work at a racetrack and had a knack for picking winners. Lenny has little interest in his dad’s anecdotes and changes the subject—only to pour scorn on Max’s cooking.
Max’s brother, Sam, arrives home and interrupts this escalating argument. Sam is returning from his job as a chauffeur. He has just driven an American client to the airport and done such a good job that his passenger rewarded him with a box of cigars. Max begins picking on his brother, insinuating that Sam is not that good a driver and almost certainly uses the car he drives (a Humber Super Snipe, a sought-after car at the time) for trysts with women. “What you been doing, banging away at your lady customers, have you?” goads Max (14). Sam denies the accusation and largely shrinks away from Max’s bullying.
Joey is the next family member to return. He is Lenny’s younger brother and has been training at the boxing gym. Lenny invokes a time when Max was a gentle father to them, but Max sneers at Lenny’s remarks. Max then goes on to belittle Joey’s boxing skills: “You don’t know how to defend yourself, and you don’t know how to attack […] Once you’ve mastered those arts you can go straight to the top” (17). Joey retreats upstairs.
Max continues to dish out abuse, even threatening to throw out Sam if he ever stops working and bringing home money. Max bemoans his lot in life, the family he is left caring for: “Look what I’m lumbered with. One cast-iron bunch of crap after another. One flow of stinking pus after another” (19). His tone changes radically as he remembers his own father, who seems to have treated him lovingly. The scene ends with Max caught up in nostalgia, remembering his father tending to him, passing him to family and friends, and throwing him up into the air and catching him safely.
Night descends on the household. Max, Sam, Lenny, and Joey are all sleeping. The last member of the family, Lenny and Joey’s older brother Teddy, lets himself in with his old key. Accompanying him is his wife, Ruth, whom the rest of the family has never met. They are both “well dressed” and carrying suitcases (19).
Teddy says they will be staying a few days, as they previously agreed. Ruth worries that their children, at home in the US, may be missing them. Both of them are restless and struggle to agree on what to do. Teddy encourages Ruth to go to bed, but she doesn’t want to. Neither does Teddy, really. Ruth steps out to get a breath of fresh air, and Teddy resolves to wait up for her to return.
Lenny appears, interrupting Teddy’s vigil. Lenny has been sleeping in a downstairs bedroom. Teddy apologizes for waking him, but Lenny says it was a ticking noise in his bedroom that woke him. Teddy suggests it might have been a clock. He turns down a glass of water from Lenny and heads to bed.
Ruth returns from her stroll. She encounters Lenny and introduces herself as Teddy’s wife. The pair discuss Lenny’s clock quandary, but their chit-chat veers quickly towards the flirtatious. At one point, Lenny points out his state of relative undress: “Isn’t it funny? I’ve got my pyjamas on and you’re fully dressed?” (29).
Ruth lets the remark pass, instead filling in Lenny on her six-year marriage to Teddy and their trip to Venice. Lenny interjects and asks to touch Ruth’s hand. When Ruth asks him why he wants to, Lenny embarks on an anecdote about a thwarted recent encounter with a sex worker:
…She was falling apart with the pox […] so I clumped her one. It was on my mind at the time to do away with her […] But…in the end I thought…Aaah, why go to all the bother…you know, getting rid of the corpse and all that […] So I just gave her another belt in the nose and a couple of turns of the boot and sort of left it at that (31).
Ruth is unperturbed.
Lenny claims he wishes he were more sensitive, like his brother Teddy, but recounts another story (about being imposed upon to move a heavy mangle) that again ends in violence, this time to the old woman who asked him for help. Ruth is again unperturbed. In fact, she seems to want to seduce or tease Lenny, daring him to take her water glass or at least drink from it. “If you take it…I’ll take you” (34), she says. Lenny bridles at the suggestion, and Ruth goes even further: “Lie on the floor. Go on. I’ll pour it down your throat” (34). Ruth laughs at Lenny’s confusion before retiring to bed. Lenny shouts after her, waking Max.
Instead of letting on about Ruth, Lenny shocks his dad by asking him about how Max and Jessie conceived him. The pair bicker before Max storms back to bed, and the lights go out on the scene.
It is morning in the house, and Max complains bitterly about Sam’s fussing in the kitchen. Joey shadowboxes around him. Max invites Joey to join him for a football (soccer) match, the first of the season, but Joey says he has too much training to do at the gym. Sam enters, and he and Max argue about how Sam failed to follow their dad into the butchery business.
Before things get too heated, Teddy and Ruth enter the living room, surprising most of the family. Max is shocked, especially by Ruth’s presence. “Who asked you to bring dirty tarts into this house?” (41), he asks his son. He goes on to call Ruth a “smelly scrubber” and “stinking pox-ridden slut” (41). He also calls Teddy a “bitch” (42). Even after Teddy explains he and Ruth are married, Max wants Joey to throw them out. Lenny joins the group. Joey refuses to throw out his brother and Ruth. A fight ensues: Max hits Joey, winding him, before battering Sam with his walking stick.
This show of force placates Max. He becomes suddenly affectionate and makes up with Teddy: “…Why don’t we have a nice cuddle and kiss, eh? Like the old days?” (43). When Teddy accedes, Max is thrilled and announces to the room, “He still loves his father!” (44), as the curtain falls on the first act.
Something is awry with the family (and home) in The Homecoming. The play’s staging is the first sign to the audience that Pinter might not be dealing strictly in realism. For all the trappings of normal, postwar London (evident in the living room’s furniture), the room’s back wall is missing, replaced by an abstract arch. Teddy offers Ruth an explanation for this when they arrive that links its physical state with the absence of his mother: “We knocked it down…years ago…to make an open living area. The structure wasn’t affected, you see. My mother was dead” (21). Teddy might be underestimating how radical a change took place, with the absent wall a symbol of the actually very different household that emerged after the death of its matriarch, Jessie. The wall’s absence raises the question of what the living area is now open to, literally or figuratively. Despite Teddy’s claims, it’s unclear how a structure could be unaffected by the loss of something as anchoring as a wall, or a mother/wife.
The behavior of the family’s remaining men, who threaten and beat not only each other but innocent women, implies that the loss of Jessie has badly impacted their lives. At the same time, the speed with which their behavior swings from rational to irrational might suggest that they are not fully in control of their faculties anymore—that outside forces and pressures are creeping into their lives through their exploded home, replacing Jessie’s steadying influence as they tumble into crisis.
Pinter’s characters invoke family roles in this act, but they do so either with sarcasm or to outright reject them, as when Lenny mocks his ailing father in Scene 1: “Oh, Daddy, you’re not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh? Don’t use your stick on me, Daddy” (11). The same character bridles when Ruth calls him “Leonard” in Scene 2: “Don’t call me that please […] That’s the name my mother gave me” (33). Even Max’s simpering behavior at the end of the first act makes a mockery of genuine father-son affection. Pinter depicts a world in which family bonds have frayed, if not outright snapped. Naked self-interest (like Max’s threat to evict Sam if he stops earning a paycheck) has replaced love and loyalty.
Not only family but also gender roles are at the fore of this act. Max and Lenny in particular ooze misogyny despite (or because of) lacking a strong sense of themselves as men. Max spews insults, even about his dead wife, while Lenny casually recounts episodes of violence towards women—in one case a sex worker, in another, a helpless old woman. All the while, they invoke other men, other eras, alongside which their current predicament seems pitiful. Max cites his old pal MacGregor, for example, as the kind of hard man he aspires to be (and by extension the kind of man his family members should be trying to emulate): “[Mac and I] were two of the worst hated men in the West End of London” (8). Mac was intimidating, and his almost homonymic name (“Max” versus “Mac”) suggests he represents the other side of the coin to the now ailing and faded family patriarch—some archetype that has become corrupted and curdled in Max’s present.
Real men, the characters also suggest, played heroic roles in World War II. Lenny and Sam, for example, indulge in a fantasy about Sam’s moneyed American passenger:
LENNY. He was probably a colonel, or something, in the American Air Force.
SAM. Yes
LENNY. Probably a navigator, or something like that, in a Flying Fortress. Now he’s most likely a high executive in a worldwide group of aeronautical engineers.
SAM. Yes
LENNY. Yes, I know the kind of man you’re talking about (14).
The American passenger even gifts Sam phallic cigars, ostentatious symbols of virility that imply the recipients (hitherto lacking them) are in some way emasculated. Sam will dole these same cigars out to his family in Act II.
In Act I, Scene 2, Lenny is again wistful when imagining what he might have done during the war. He tells Ruth: “…if I’d been a soldier in the last war—say in the Italian campaign—I’d probably have found myself in Venice” (30). Lenny’s lack of wartime experience haunts him and is a defining difference between his generation and older veterans of the fighting. Peacetime has not given Lenny the same opportunities. Instead, his sense of himself as a man has been bound up in his treatment of women; he has fought women, not Nazis, in his bid to prove his manliness. After fantasizing about the war, he presses himself on Ruth, as if conquering her compensates for his thwarted military ambitions. “Do you mind if I hold your hand?” he says (30). However, Ruth is not the willing submissive Lenny hopes for and turns the tables on him. His distress at this situation hints at a masculinity in crisis in Pinter’s world of 1960s Britain—a wellspring for the violence that bubbles beneath the play’s surface.
By Harold Pinter
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