The Homecoming

. “LENNY. Oh, Daddy, you’re not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh? Don’t use your stick on me, Daddy. No, please. It wasn’t my fault, it was one of the others. I haven’t done anything wrong, Dad, honest. Don’t clout me with that stick, Dad.

Lenny mocks his father Max as the pair argue. Here, Pinter’s “Silence” gives the audience a moment to let Lenny’s sarcasm register and his impertinence to fester. This is not a family as most people know it; rather, it is one where traditional filial loyalties are fast eroding. Since Max’s walking stick is a phallic symbol, Lenny’s mockery of it is a challenge to both his manhood and his position as family patriarch.

“…I told this man today I was in the second world war. Not the first. I told him I was too young for the first. But I told him I fought in the second.”

Sam recounts with pride how he forged a connection with a passenger he drove to the airport. World War II provides a shared experience for the men in Pinter’s world to bond over, but when referenced in retrospect, it also becomes a class signifier. Sam invokes it to bridge the gap from his driver’s seat to the passenger employing him.

“MAX. When you find the right girl, Sam, let your family know […] You can bring her to live here, she can keep us all happy. We’d take it in turns to give her a walk round the park.

SAM: I wouldn’t bring her here.”

This moment foreshadows Teddy’s predicament. Max announces exactly how he would treat Sam’s wife, were he to find one. Unfortunately, although Sam knows better than to bring a partner to the house, he is unable to warn his favorite nephew; Max will get to enact his intentions on Ruth instead.

“Stop calling me Dad. Just stop all that calling me Dad, do you understand?”

Max disavows his role as father during his back-and-forth with Lenny—another sign (or symptom) of the crumbling family ties in the play. The characters resist naming their family roles in order to also shirk the kind of compassion they might have to offer one another if they accepted them.

“MAX. Our father? I remember him […] He used to come over to me and look down at me. My old man did. He’d bend right over me, then he’d pick me up. I was only that big. Then he’d dandle me. Give me the bottle. Wipe me clean. Give me a smile. Pat me on the bum. Pass me around, pass me from hand to hand. Toss me up in the air. Catch me coming down. I remember my father.

BLACKOUT.”

Just a generation ago, family ties looked different. The contrast between Max’s relationship with his own father and his disdain for playing the role of father himself is stark. Pinter emphasizes it by placing it right at the end of the scene—a technique he repeats several times in the play, leaving the audience time to ponder moments of familial crisis or parody.

“I mean, it’s a fine room, don’t you think? Actually there was a wall, across there…with a door. We knocked it down…years ago…to make an open living area. The structure wasn’t affected, you see. My mother was dead.”

Teddy explains the living room’s appearance to Ruth when they first arrive. Pinter’s use of ellipses mimics the way people (in his view) grasp for fluency when talking in real life. Teddy ends up revealing more than he might have wanted to through the apposition of the house’s structure and his mother’s death. Although Pinter is working with the unspoken here, Teddy’s words suggest that the structure of the home (i.e., not just the building) wasn’t affected because the damage had already been done: Jessie died, leaving a vacuum at the heart of the family.

“[TEDDY.] We’ve come to stay. We’re bound to stay…for a few days.

RUTH. I think…the children…might be missing us.”

This exchange shows the kind of character motivation one might normally expect from a realist drama. Teddy vocalizes the obligation he feels they have to visit his family while he and Ruth are in Europe. Ruth, the (apparently) good mother, feels some reluctance to do so and appeals to Teddy’s paternal instincts to keep the visit to a minimum. This is noteworthy, because it is the kind of recognizable motivation that fades the longer the pair stay at the house, the family’s strange behavior engulfing them both. That said, the pauses in Ruth’s speech hint at her dissatisfaction with her life in America; though she ostensibly expresses a desire to return home, she seems to be grasping at reasons for doing so.

“It’s just that something keeps waking me up. Some kind of tick.”

Lenny’s insomnia not only supersedes the kind of interaction one might expect between newly reunited brothers, but it also nods towards the influence of external forces on this household. If the tick is indeed coming from his clock, the pressure on him might be economic: the need to rise and work symbolized by the intrusive time piece. However, Pinter leaves things ambiguous. Lenny concludes that the ticking noise could be coming from some other source, whether another outside intrusion or something inside the house, which is settling down into its patterns of betrayal and exploitation. Finally, the ticking might be in Lenny’s head—an imagined noise or an omen that he and the family are sliding towards some crisis, the seconds to it ticking steadily away.

“You know, I’ve always had a feeling that if I’d been a solider in the last war— say in the Italian campaign—I’d probably have found myself in Venice. I’ve had that feeling. The trouble was I was too young to serve, you see. I was only a child, I was too small, otherwise I’ve got a pretty shrewd idea I’d probably have gone through Venice. Yes, I’d almost certainly have gone through it with my battalion. Do you mind if I hold your hand?”

Lenny’s fantasy about serving in World War II is almost a soliloquy, the redundancy of his words more akin to the way one talks to oneself rather than to someone else. The final sentence explains why he might be talking to himself about imagined glories: Lenny sees war talk as a way of burnishing his masculinity before making a pass at Ruth.

“Well, this lady [with the pox] was very insistent and started taking liberties with me down under this arch […] 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, getting yourself in a state of tension. 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.”

After starting with the war, Lenny’s flirting moves on to a tale of violence towards a sex worker. Pinter lets Lenny’s behavior speak for itself here, showing how troubled an idea of masculinity he must have to perceive this as a positive story. Ruth’s casual reply is notable, however: She asks how Lenny knew the woman was sick rather than questioning his near-murder of her. Perhaps Ruth thinks Lenny’s claims are exaggerated; by ignoring them, she undoes his attempts to inflate his machismo.

“I had a good mind to give her a workover there and then, but as I was feeling jubilant with the snow-clearing I just gave her a short-arm jab to the belly and jumped on a bus outside.”

Lenny follows the story of the sex worker with another tale demonstrating his twisted sense of generosity (and ultimately his violence towards women). Ruth again lets the moment go, her unexpectedly blasé attitude an indication that the audience should prick up their ears and register the surprise that Ruth does not. What passes for horrific in the comfort of the theater happens every day outside it, where audiences might be as guilty as Ruth of ignoring it.

“LENNY. Don’t call me [Leonard], please.

RUTH. Why not?

LENNY. That’s the name my mother gave me.”

Lenny again brushes away family ties, though in a more anguished way. Lenny would rather treat Ruth as a “whore” than a “Madonna,” not yet having hatched his plan for her to be both. It is to Ruth’s credit that she uses Lenny’s full name; she is already a step ahead of The Homecoming’s men, refusing to pigeonhole herself in any particular misogynistic role.

“RUTH. Lie on the floor. Go on. I’ll pour it down your throat.

LENNY. What are you doing, making me some kind of proposal?

She laughs shortly, drains the glass.

RUTH. Oh, I was thirsty.

She smiles at him, puts the glass down, goes into the hall and up the stairs.

He follows in the hall and shouts up the stairs.

LENNY. What was that supposed to be? Some kind of proposal?     

Silence.”

This passage is notable for Pinter’s use of the unspoken as Ruth ignores Lenny’s angry pleas to spell out the subtext of her actions. It makes for heightened sexual tension between the two since the reader or audience member must parse the characters’ interaction and guess at what Ruth is thinking. It also shows just how uncomfortable Lenny is with a woman taking the lead in this kind of charged back-and-forth.

“MAX. We’ve had a smelly scrubber in my house all night. We’ve had a stinking pox-ridden slut in my house all night.

[…]

MAX (to JOEY). Chuck them out.”

Max shows his contempt for women by immediately assuming Ruth is a sex worker and slinging insults in her direction. He orders Joey to throw out Teddy and his wife, turning violent when Joey hesitates. By the end of the scene, though, he has pivoted to an exaggerated show of affection towards Teddy. This is one moment where the term “comedy of menace” seems appropriate: a grim threat from Max that mutates in a way he might pass it off as a joke. The ambiguity weighs heavily on proceedings.

“[Jessie] taught those boys everything they know. She taught them all the morality they know […] That woman was the backbone to this family.”

Max describes the role Jessie played in the family (though given the way his sons have turned out, there is a dark irony to his claim that Jessie “taught them all the morality they know”). In the same breath, he indicates what the men are missing now: any sense of morality at all. Whatever the causes of the decay in the household, the men certainly believe the absence of their matriarch is one of them—a realization that will lead them to pursue Ruth as a replacement.

“He didn’t even fight in the war. This man didn’t even fight in the bloody war!”

Max pours scorn on Sam’s wartime efforts in a slight that goes to the heart of what these men believe about their masculinity. It is consistent with Max’s bullying of his brother and Sam’s role as the more or less normal character in the play. Sam allows us to see how hideous Max is in comparison to him.

“LENNY (to TEDDY). Your cigar’s gone out.”

In this scene, the men are all puffing on phallic cigars. Significantly, it is Teddy’s that goes out just as Max is becoming more lecherous and obvious in his pursuit of Ruth. Teddy’s extinguished cigar symbolizes sudden impotence or bruised male ego.

“LENNY kisses RUTH. They stand, kissing.

JOEY: Christ, she’s wide open. Dad, look at that.

Pause.

She’s a tart.”

Ruth flaunts her infidelity to Teddy in front of his family, with Lenny sweeping in to kiss her while they dance. Teddy is ready to leave—desperate even—as he stands in the living room with their coats and suitcases. However, Ruth has other plans. Pinter places Ruth’s self-assurance in direct contrast to how the men wish to perceive her, and the power they desire to exert over her.

“RUTH (to TEDDY): Have your family read your critical works?

MAX: That’s one thing I’ve never done. I’ve never read one of his critical works.

TEDDY: You wouldn’t understand them.”

As Ruth peels away from Teddy, she asks what might seem like an innocent question. However, it strikes right at a point of difference between Teddy and his family, casting Teddy as a figure estranged from his own kin. Ruth’s implication is clear: Even as she seems set to stay, Teddy doesn’t belong. Beyond that, this might also be Pinter’s mild rebuke to critics, characterizing their work as aloof or self-serving; Teddy’s pompous intellectualism is an object of satire throughout the play, contributing to his ineffectualness.

“You’re just objects. You just…move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It’s the same as I do. But you’re lost in it. You won’t get me being…I won’t be lost in it.”

Teddy launches a desperate defense of his academic career that becomes something more than that. He says his family are “objects,” indicating that their agency may be constrained. His is too, but he claims to have at the very least achieved consciousness of it. This sounds like Teddy’s exile in the US has helped him see his class situation more clearly; he is loath to have the social mobility he has achieved as an academic stripped from him in the confines of his old family home.

“…I will say you do seem to have grown a bit sulky during the last six years. A bit sulky. A bit inner. A bit less forthcoming.”

Lenny indulges in a long diatribe against Teddy for stealing his cheese roll, but this part of it makes clear the class conflict that has developed between Teddy and his family; Teddy, Lenny snidely suggests, should be enjoying the abundance of postwar America and the perceived ease of academic life. Pinter’s writing here is also comedic: He allows Lenny to go on a lengthy, exaggerated rant accusing his brother of selfishness only to reveal moments later that Teddy has in fact consented to share his wife with his brothers.

“[LENNY.] What do you think of that, Ted? Your wife turns out to be a tease. He’s had her up there for two hours and he didn’t go the whole hog.

JOEY. I didn’t say that she was a tease.”

This moment reveals Joey’s relative innocence. It is Lenny who leaps to the conclusion that Ruth is a “tease”—something Lenny sees as a stain on her character. Joey is more circumspect. While Lenny’s own fragile masculinity sees him resort to violence against women, Joey might have found a different way to address any question marks about his manliness. In the two hours he spends with Ruth, he might have let her take the lead in their lovemaking or he might simply have talked to her. These and other options remain open because of the way Pinter lets any certainty slip through the cracks in what is said. This same silence also allows Lenny to leap to a conclusion that characterizes him more richly.

“You know something? Perhaps it’s not a bad idea to have a woman in the house. Perhaps it’s a good thing. Who knows? Maybe we should keep her.”

Max hits on the solution to the family’s woman problem: Ruth should stay with the family and fill the void left by Jessie. The idea generates its own strange momentum, with Teddy offering only the feeblest resistance. He senses that leaving Ruth might be his best way out of the poisonous home.