PAST MASTERS: V. S. PRITCHETT

MARCHING LIFE

Always alert to oddity and happenstance, V. S. Pritchett, who died last March, at the age of ninety-six, often mentioned the linked, double ticking of his own life and the clock of the century, but he must have sensed also that this shared distance of time had become a distraction, almost a disservice, to him near the end. The same proviso applies to the massive accumulation of his writings—fifteen collections of stories, nine works of criticism, three biographies, five novels, seven travel books, and two classic works of autobiography—which led to the near-universal bestowal of the title First Man of Letters upon him, once he had reached his mid-seventies. The honorific never quite fitted. Pritchett was aged at the end, to be sure, but not ancient. He was non-monumental. He was not literary—not in many senses of the word, at least. He was not a stylist, for instance, and he liked to point out that he had been a hack long before he became a critic. Even his knightly robes kept slipping askew. The moment that he and his wife, Dorothy, got back to their house from Buckingham Palace, in 1975, where the Queen had dubbed him Sir Victor, they called up their friends to tell them what tune the Guards regimental band had played as he approached the kneeling bench: Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.” They were shouting with laughter.

Pritchett will be remembered by everyone who knew him for his curiosity—a tourist’s eagerness that had left its stamp upon his expressive face and was never far removed from his writing. His eyes, always alert, and his mouth, which often showed a skewed half smile, seemed ready on the instant to flower into delight but could change just as quickly to a thoughtful, deeply inward look of consideration, with his domed head and large jaw somehow forming an apparatus for either procedure. A short, strong-looking man, with thick shoulders and an uptilted gaze, he appeared at times to be standing behind an invisible pub counter, or perhaps about to oversee the unloading of a shipment of crocuses or greyhounds. There was a strain of workaday London practicality about him, and the surprise was that this avidity should be directed toward books and stories and ideas, instead of the tradesman’s ledger. His cheerfulness—friends and relatives and other writers (writers in particular) could be seen standing near him whenever the chance came along, as if they were warming themselves at an old-fashioned coke-burning fireplace—no doubt derived from a resiliency developed during an unpeaceful childhood, but later on it bore an unmistakable air of relief: the look of a writer who has found a way to keep at it, to write all the time, and thus not to miss any part of himself in the end. He had freed himself of the occupational self-pity that makes so many writers so much less fun to meet than one expects.

I was an editor of his for almost fifty years, starting at Holiday, for which he wrote vigorous, impeccable travel essays, and continuing, over a longer period, with his stories for The New Yorker, and we wrote each other ceaselessly back and forth, and talked about everything—well, maybe not his neckties. In time, I came to understand that the amiable attention he gave to even the smallest suggested cut or rephrasing in his text was not a sign of politeness or modesty but came from the intense, almost sensual pleasure he took in every part of the writing business. He is the only writer I have known who would thank you for a rejection; he would be disappointed when it happened, to be sure, but eager to learn what had seemed to go wrong, and then you could hear in his murmuring, diminishing tones over the telephone the processes of revision already at work in his mind. “The Fig Tree,” one of his most celebrated and satisfying longer stories (it runs well over ten thousand words), was sent back twice in its early form. In the first revision, Pritchett had followed some suggestion of mine about a different direction for the ending—a notion that clearly made matters worse. He thanked me once again and went back to work. The third version, which came in almost a year after the first, was a major restructuring, front to back, and required nothing from this end except gratitude: he had got it right, and there was almost more pleasure in that than there would have been in a perfect first manuscript—of which he was also capable, of course. Writing is hard work, and Pritchett was a practitioner who didn’t resent its ditch-digging days. “I am really just a daily journalist,” he said once. “I sit down every day to do it, because I have to do it, and now I know how to do it. [I] actually do enjoy the act of writing, and it is that which means the most to me.”

Pritchett’s fame, whatever its eventual dimensions, will probably rest upon his two-volume autobiography, “A Cab at the Door” and “Midnight Oil” (published in 1968 and 1971, respectively), and upon the “Complete Collected Stories” (1990), a handsome, corner-of-the-bookcase volume of eighty-two stories, which, taken together, present a mixture of weight and shimmering human complication, and a unifying Chekhovian continuity. Readers may also avail themselves of “The Pritchett Century,” a new anthology, selected by his son Oliver, who is a Sunday Telegraph columnist, which combines excerpts from the autobiography; thirteen stories; parts of the novels “Dead Man Leading” and “Mr. Beluncle”; selections from Pritchett’s biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov; eight samples of travel writing; twenty-one critical essays; and a posthumous appreciation, by John Bayley, that was first published in the London Review of Books. Any presumed anticlimax here is inappropriate, for the absorbing, well-written, and joyful obituaries that followed Sir Victor’s death would make a lively little anthology all on their own.

I think the obit writers took their tone from “A Cab at the Door,” Pritchett’s detailed account of his semi-impoverished, bounced-about Edwardian childhood, and the means for survival he devised while he was in the toils of a dramatizing, self-destructive floorwalker-and-salesman father, whose repeated scruffy business failures and the family’s furtive decampings explain the book’s title; a derisive, emotional mother (“her greenish grey and fretful eyes quick and full of lies,” as he puts it); and a family regimen built upon eccentricity and worry. I remember Pritchett, at dinner one night, telling us that no one had been invited to a meal at his house when he was a boy; and that if someone rang the doorbell unexpectedly at mealtime his mother would keep the visitor waiting outside until every crumb and vestige of the meal had been hurriedly swept off the table. “There was something shameful or sexual about being caught eating,” he said. “I never understood it.”

Young Victor made his escape not by the common route of scholastic achievement but through a precocious self-immersion in reading. The “Children’s Encyclopedia,” a collected “International Library of Famous Literature,” and the complete Shakespeare, Dickens, Ruskin, Marcus Aurelius, Hardy, Cervantes, Thackeray, Wells, Coleridge, Marie Corelli—all flowed into him, on the quiet, when he was at an early age, and fixed him for life. “That I understood very little of what I read did not matter to me. I was caught by the passion for print as an alcoholic is caught by the bottle,” he wrote. “In prose, I found the common experience and the solid worlds where judgements were made and in which one could firmly tread.”

Apprenticed to a Bermondsey leathermonger at fifteen (there wasn’t enough money to keep him in school), he read and took writer’s notes on the sly, and at twenty, having finessed upper school and university altogether, found himself on his own in Paris. Within five years, he had become an itinerant journalist—on the Continent, in Ireland, in Appalachia—and a full-time student at the U. of V.S.P. While still in his twenties, he became a contributor to the New Statesman (he served as its literary editor later on), and began writing novels, short stories, and foreign pieces at the same time. His first travel book, “Marching Spain,” recounts his solo journey, at twenty-six, across that country by foot (and without Spanish). There is a sturdy, incautious energy to a life conducted on these terms—a state of mind from an earlier time, but with more Fielding than Dickens in its nature—and his enormous lifelong reading, as well as his critical writings, seems to have come from the same place. “My purpose has always been the same: to explore the writers and their intentions,” he wrote in “Lasting Impressions.” He went on with this procedure in “Midnight Oil”: “I have always thought of myself—and therefore of my subjects—as being ‘in life,’ indeed books have always seemed to be a form of life, and not a distraction from it.” Instead of being awed or made uneasy by the great authors of the past, or giving way to anxiety about his better-placed, more assured contemporaries, he remained curious and generous, and gave his considering, sightseer’s mind full rein. I like to think of him as someone who went through his century on foot, gaining by attentiveness whatever he had lost by passing up its speed and lightning arrivals, and I recall suddenly seeing this view of him come to life in a passage from one of his later stories, “On the Edge of the Cliff”: “From low cliff to high cliff, over the cropped turf, which was like a carpet where the millions of sea pinks and daisies were scattered, mile after mile in their colonies, the old man led the way, digging his knees into the air, gesticulating, talking, pointing to a kestrel above or a cormorant black as soot on a rock.” And: “The old man was a strong walker, bending to it, but when he stopped he straightened, and Rowena smiled at his air of detachment as he gazed at distant things as if he knew them.”

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AS A CRITIC, PRITCHETT was a descendant, or perhaps a cousin once removed, of non-academic practitioners like Gissing, Wells, and Priestley, who brought an unflagging, sparrowlike attention and precision to the experience of letters. He wrote about classical authors and young arrivals with an equal degree of respect, and took up French and German and Spanish not only to read writers in their own languages but as preparation for travel. Russian and Russia itself eluded him, but he was not disconsolate about that. “I have an imaginary Russia in my mind that I owe entirely to Russian writers,” he once said. “How splendid and kind and generous writers are in their intellect, in spilling over in this way and in carrying us into their minds and into their experience.” Something of his usefulness and his range is conveyed when one runs an eye down the seventy-seven reviews he contributed to this magazine from the fifties to the late eighties, and finds pieces about Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, Edmund Wilson, Picasso, George Sand, Swift, Flann O’Brien, Borges, Rushdie, Lewis Carroll, Betjeman, Turgenev, Rebecca West. A secret about Pritchett, I think—and perhaps not enough of this has been made in the recapitulations—is that his own bottomless reading (“I am appalled by the amount I have read,” he cries in “Midnight Oil”) did not dull the eagerness of his mind. Never lofty, he was able in his critical work to convey his excited participation in this three-part agreement—writing to reading to writing again—and, in turn, to link on the next reader, the one now taking in his review, as an indissoluble part of the process. And he could write. Again and again, he is capable of the acute perception, the absolutely convincing illumination of thought, that can transform the eye’s journey down a page into a sensual and startling experience. In a piece about Mark Twain he says, “The peculiar power of American nostalgia is that it is not only harking back to something lost in the past, but suggests also the tragedy of a lost future.” Writing about John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, he takes note of the attention Updike pays to television commercials, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, vinyl car seating, and the like, and ventures, “It has always seemed to me that in his preoccupation with the stillness of domestic objects Updike is a descendant, in writing, of the Dutch genre painters, to whom everything in a house, in nature, or in human posture had the gleam of usage on it without which a deeply domestic culture could not survive its own boredom.”

It is riveting to read him on Wilson, another non-academic who had a long, work-stuffed life as a writer, and was another venerated contributor to this magazine. They could not have been more different. Wilson, a mandarin in every sense, was an intellectual aristocrat and snob, an indefatigable partygoer, and a daring solo voyager into scholarship. Pritchett never produced anything on the order of Wilson’s obsessive studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois, Pushkin, or revolutionary history, nor did he possess the gossipy, alcoholic sociability that went into Wilson’s five decades of diaries. But Wilson, who was impatient with strangers and scornful of the sort of people who went to the movies, could never have written a Pritchett story.

Here, in any case, is Pritchett looking back to “To the Finland Station,” a work that he believed was perhaps the only book on the grand scale to come out of the thirties: “[Wilson] was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book…. He is a critic in whom history is broken up into minds. And despite the awkwardness of his prose, he is a coherent artist in the architecture of his subject. I mean that he is an artist—this is evident in so much of his writing—in the sense that he is a man possessed. The effect is all the stronger because he is not exalted; he is, indeed, phlegmatic, as if his whole idea were a matter of grasp…. An egotist himself, he understands that the egotism of his conspirators is a passion and a fate.”

What in the world would Edmund Wilson have made of this? He is called an awkward, phlegmatic, egotistic writer but at the same moment becomes the recipient of a rush of world-class compliments that say things about him which even he himself has perhaps not perceived. He can’t complain, because he has been taken seriously and originally; the contract has been observed, and he will never be quite the same again.

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PRITCHETT BELIEVED THAT HE had portrayed himself best in his critical works, but for me the stories convey a richer sense of the man, and perhaps more of his unconscious self. They are crowded with sexual passion and an almost pagan happiness in the unexpected turns of life. His characters tend toward the eccentric; they are all elbows and attitude, and puffed with hysterical self-regard. They share an off-center British strain that connects with the Ealing comedies, those weird interviewees on “Monty Python,” and the wrangling families in a Mike Leigh movie. Pritchett had a fondness for British middle-to-lower-middle-class professionals and survivors—hairdressers, landladies, landscape gardeners, rag-trade merchants, butchers’ widows, decorators, club stewards—and their gabble and confidence contribute to the thick impasto of talk and distracting side events which makes his fiction surprising and familiar at the same time. He drew on everything he knew for the stories, down to the smallest prop or gesture. “Just a Little More” gets its title from the murmur of its gluttonous old gentleman as he helps himself to another serving of beef—the same greedy catchphrase that Pritchett’s plump, self-indulgent father says at table in “A Cab at the Door.” A temperamental fig tree that used to stand in the back garden of Pritchett’s house in Regent’s Park Terrace—I can recall Victor complaining about having to sweep up its huge yellow leaves each November—also droops and drops its leaves in “The Fig Tree”; and a Victorian glass case full of stuffed birds which I remember in their first-floor sitting room turns up in the Noisy Brackett trilogy. “Cocky Olly,” a story about a fourteen-year-old girl falling in love with a bohemian, art-suffused family next door, takes its name from an invented, dash-about indoor game that the children of the house play—the same game, as Oliver Pritchett has pointed out in his foreword to “The Pritchett Century,” that he and his sister, Josephine, sometimes played as young children. Nothing odd or distinctive has been forgotten; the same opulent memory that illuminated “A Cab at the Door” works to dress the sets and write the dialogue in this unreeling vivid show of fiction.

Pritchett was eighty-eight when he wrote “Cocky Olly,” which shares with his other late stories a strain of penetrating affection while omitting the imperious, world-well-lost exclusivity that the young require when they are in love. In “On the Edge of the Cliff,” a pair of elderly former lovers have met again by accident but quickly agree not to see each other anymore: each is clinging to a much younger lover, and though they know that these arrangements can’t last they don’t want to hurry the process by throwing the young people together. The former lovers part without regret, almost blithely, each recognizing the stratagems and kinds of acceptance that are necessary to keep hold of such luck. Pritchett’s lovers aren’t particularly lovable: the middle-aged, long-since-abandoned wife and the shouting, preposterous widower who are park neighbors in “Did You Invite Me?” have every conceivable reason not to get together, including their two dogs, who fight. We don’t like the pair enough to want a happy ending, but they know what they have seen in each other, and must have. Almost apologetically, Pritchett tips us off at the end: their houses are up for sale, one of the dogs has a new owner, and the other has disappeared somewhere.

Summing up fiction is a losing game, of course, and if I persist here it is only to suggest the exuberant disorder that blows through the Pritchett stories. “Cocky Olly” puts two children on the wrong train—a huge mess, involving misunderstandings, lies, the police, and a headline murder case. We can barely follow it, but the children don’t care. They love every minute because this is what life is like to them at its best; they are at home in muddle. In one of his last stories, “A Change of Policy,” a brainy, grownup couple—he an art publisher, she the recent editor of an intellectual journal—are almost too busy to fall in love. He has a wife who has been in a deep coma after an accident, and a young son; the woman, Paula, is uneasy—it’s all too much for her. In delayed, glancing, elegantly circumstantial fashion, they do become lovers. Then he is killed in a horse-riding accident, which we hear about, disbelieving, through a garbled overseas telephone call. There is a shift, a little pause of years, and then a quiet ending that contains a turnabout. It’s almost an O. Henry–esque surprise. “Come on,” we want to say, but something holds us back. Fiction need not always confirm our knowing, irony-abraded wariness; sometimes we need it to motor along life’s outer possibilities, to provide the jolts and swerves that keep us awake, against all odds, and up for the next part of the trip.

The almost visible sweetness that surrounded Victor Pritchett in his later years flowed from a happy sixty-one-year marriage, and the glances and flashes of attention that he and Dorothy directed toward each other in the company of friends were a caution. She was his amanuensis and translator—he wrote in a squiggly, mystifying private Cyrillic—and his most trusted editor. I remember the look of blissful pride that overtook him one night when some extroverted Welsh topers in a London pub we were in spotted a Cymry strain in Dorothy’s calm, intelligent face and coaxed her into the inevitable singalong.

I can’t quite place the London restaurant where Carol and I had our last lunch with the Pritchetts, but I remember a little swatch of afternoon sunshine lying across our table as we finished our coffee, and the happy, unstopping flow of talk: about absent friends (my splendid colleague Edith Oliver); about Wimbledon (Dorothy was mad for Navratilova); books (Trollope, I think); and times gone by (the broiling-hot July in the mid-sixties when, by coincidence, they had ended up subletting the walkup apartment directly over ours, on East Ninety-fourth Street, and how the odd, bumping footsteps we kept hearing overhead were finally explained when they told us that they stayed cool up there by going naked all day). Perhaps this was also the lunch when Victor told us about calling upon Yeats, years and years before, in Dublin, and about the great man’s coming out onto Merrion Square wearing only one sock; he drew its mate out of his pocket and, leaning on his young visitor, pulled it on. So we ended another meal with laughter, and did not linger long, much as we wished to. Pritchett never showed the dazed, half-there look of the mid-book author—he was too considerate for that—but it was understood by everyone who cared about him that his main engagement always awaited him. After our goodbyes and their cab ride home that day, there might be a nap for him, but soon he would climb the four flights of stairs to his top-floor study, fire up his pipe, and pick up his book or writing board. He was back on the road.

Books, December, 1997