Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Read online

  V. S. Pritchett

  Victor Sawden Pritchett, the extraordinarily prolific and versatile man of letters widely regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the English language, was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, on December 16,1900. His father, whom he recalled in the enchanting memoir A Cab at the Door (1968), was a boundlessly optimistic but chronically unsuccessful businessman whose series of failed ventures necessitated frequent moves to elude creditors. These uprootings interrupted Pritchett's formal education, yet he was a voracious reader from an early age. Apprenticed in the London leather trade at fifteen, Pritchett alleviated the boredom of a menial clerical job by delving into the classics. At twenty he left for Paris, vowing to become a writer. He later reflected on his experiences there in Midnight Oil (1971), a second volume of autobiography that endures as an intimate and precise record of an artist's self-discovery.

  Pritchett began his writing career as a contributor to The Christian Science Monitor, which, in addition to sending him on assignments in the United States and Canada, employed him as a foreign correspondent in civil-war Ireland and then Spain. Marching Spain (1928), his first book, recounts impressions of a country that held a lifelong fascination for Pritchett. His other travel writing includes The Spanish Temper (1954), The Offensive Traveller (1964; published in the U.K. as Foreign Faces), and At Home and Abroad (1989). In addition, he collaborated with photographer Evelyn Hofer on three acclaimed metropolitan profiles: London Perceived (1962), New York Proclaimed (1964), and Dublin: A Portrait (1967).

  While continuing a part-time career as a roving journalist, Pritchett increasingly focused on writing fiction, living with his Anglo-Irish first wife in Dublin, and then in the bohemian London of the mid to late 1920s. Clare Drummer (1929), the first of his five novels, draws on his experiences in Ireland, while Elopement into Exile (1932; published in the U.K. as Shirley Sanz) again reflects his enthrallment with Spain. He also wrote Nothing Like Leather (1935), a compelling saga about the rise and fall of an English businessman, and Dead Man Leading (1937), an allegorical tale of a journey into darkness reminiscent of Conrad. Pritchett's best-known novel, Mr. Beluncle (1951), is a work of Dickensian scope featuring an endearing scoundrel-hero modeled after his own father.

  Yet it is widely acknowledged that Pritchett's genius as a storyteller came to full fruition in the short fictions which he began to publish in his early twenties and continued to write up to his nineties. “Pritchett's literary achievement is enormous, but his short stories are his greatest triumph,” said Paul Ther-oux. From The Spanish Virgin and Other Stones (1930) right up through Compute Collected Stories (1991), Pritchett published fourteen volumes filled with masterful tales that chronicle the lives of ordinary people through a flood of details and humorous, kindhearted observations. His other collections, all of them published during his long second marriage to Dorothy-a working partner as well as an adored wife-include: You Make Your Own Life (1938), It May Never Happen (1945), The Sailor, Sense of Humor, and Other Stones (1956), When My Girl Comes Home (1961), The Key to My Heart (1964), Blind Love (1970), The Camberwell Beauty (1974), Selected Stories (1978), On the Edge of the Cliff (1980), Collected Stones (1982), More Collected Stones (1983), and A Careless Widow (1989).

  “We read Pritchett's stories, comic or tragic, with an elation that stems from their intensity,” observed Eudora Welty. “Life goes on in them without flagging. The characters that fill them-erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves-hold a claim on us that is not to be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in their revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view.” And Reynolds Price noted: “An extended view of his short fiction reveals a chameleonic power of invention, sympathy and selfless transformation that sends on back as far as Chekhov for a near-parallel.”

  The acclaim lavished on Pritchett for his short stories has been matched by that accorded his literary criticism. “Pritchett is not only our best short story writer but also our best literary critic,” stated Anthony Burgess. In My Good Books (1942), The Living Novel (1946), Books in General (1953), and The Working Novelist (1965) contain essays written during his long association with the New Statesman and also, after the Second World War, The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. Pritchett continued his exploration of world literature in George Meredith and English Comedy (1970), The Myth Makers (1979), The Tale Bearers (1980), A Man of Letters (1985), and Lasting Impressions (1990). His magnum opus of literary criticism, Compute Collected Essays-which reflects, too, his central association with The New York Review of Books, from the journal's earliest days-was issued in 1992. In addition he produced three masterful works that artfully meld criticism with biography: Balzac (1974), The Gentle Barbanan: The Life and Work of Turgenev (1977), and Chekhov: A Spint Set Free (1988).

  “Pritchett is the supreme contemporary virtuoso of the short literary essay,” said The New York Times Book Review. As Gore Vidal, who deemed him “our greatest English-language critic,” put it: “At work on a text, Pritchett is rather like one of those amor-phic sea-creatures who float from bright complicated shell to shell. Once at home within the shell he is able to describe for us in precise detail the secrets of the shell's interior; and he is able to show us, from the maker's own angle, the world the maker saw.” “It would be very nice for literature,” Vidal added, “if Sir Victor lived forever.”

  From the 1950s on, Pritchett was increasingly in demand as a distinguished visiting professor at American universities, from Princeton to Berkeley, Smith to Vanderbilt. But in spirit he always remained a freelance writer. “If, as they say, I am a Man of Letters I come, like my fellows, at the tail-end of a long and once esteemed tradition in English and American writing,” Pritchett once said. “We have no captive audience…. We write to be readable and to engage the interest of what Virginia Woolf called 'the common reader.' We do not lay down the law, but we do make a stand for reflective values of a humane culture. We care for the printed word in a world that nowadays is dominated by the camera and by the scientific, technological, sociological doctrine. … I found myself less a critic than an imaginative traveller or explorer … I was travelling in literature.”

  Contents

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  INTRODUCTION by Dann Strauss

  MR. BELUNCLE

  READING GROUP GUIDE

  Introduction

  Dann Strauss

  1.

  V. S. Pritchett, in one of his many pleasing, unpedantic mid-century essays, wrote that “no one reads Scott now,” and by the end of the first paragraph he managed, insightful critic that he was, to explain why that was so-Sir Walter Scott's language “nags and clatters,” for one thing-but who could explain why no one reads Pritchett now?

  “He is by such a margin the greatest English writer alive that it hardly seems worth saying”; “No one alive writes a better English sentence”; “In the variety of his powers? think he is now unrivalled”-Pritchett drew all this rowdy applause and more in 1982, with the huge success of his Collected Stones, the 1,926,172nd most popular book on Amazon at the time of this writing.1 What's more, Pritchett's been dead less than eight years, and until now, you couldn't find mention of his most famous novel-the hilarious book you hold in your hands-anywhere on the Amazon website, not even with the out-of-print titles, the unvisited hardcovers deemed undeserving of graphics. It's as though one of the great comic novels of the 1950s had never been written.

  And it's not just Amazon. Pritchett, knighted for services to literature in 1975, may have been a favorite of Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, Willia
m Trevor, A. S. Byatt, John Updike, Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis, Salman Rushdie, etc., and yet I know a score of young (and not so young) American fiction writers who have never read him. And for silly reasons! One novelist told me recently: “He seems too aristocratted out, Pritchett-the stodgy name.” Another said, “It's stupid, but I always get him confused with V. S. Naipaul. [So] I never bothered.”

  Of Pritchett's forty books of fiction, nonfiction, biography, and literary criticism, exactly one is in American print at the time of this writing (not counting the posthumously published The Pritchett Century. With that book, and Modern Library's publication of this novel and also Pritchett's Essential Stones, one hopes that Pritchett's star will again rise).

  The speedy decline of Pritchett's fortunes is puzzling; he's as accessible a titan as ever lived-generous, witty, impossible to dislike: “One of great pleasure givers in our language,” to quote Welty. Check out the opening of Mr. Beluncle, with its mischie-vousness, its sly reference to the devastation that awaited 1940s England; check out the music of the prose:

  Twenty-five minutes from the centre of London the trees lose their towniness, the playing fields, tennis courts, and parks are as fresh as lettuce, and the train appears to be squirting through thousands of little gardens. Here was Boystone before its churches and its High Street were burned out and before its roofs were stripped off a quarter mile at a time. It had its little eighteenth-century face-the parish church, the alms-houses, the hotel, the Hall-squeezed by the rolls and folds of suburban fat. People came out of the train and said the air was better-Mr. Beluncle always did …

  Isn't this just what we want in a first paragraph, a fresh way of seeing the familiar? What a jolt it is to read a writer like Pritchett today, when so many books plod along efficiently but never try to take off flying.

  Because of those lower-middle-class Londoners whom Pritchett so often drew, the antique dealers, morticians, and homeowners who peopled his stories, he was called a “narrowly and definably” British writer,2 but in his prose, at least, he was pretty un-British-and by that I mean he was a stylist unlike the sort of wholly conventional, stout writer that Britain was so adept at producing in Pritchett's heyday. The devilishness, the turmoil and forward rush of his language (“As he says this he gives a lick of glee to his lips and his hands jump”3), the cheerful loose risky metaphors, locate Pritchett closer to a homespun maximalist like Isaac Babel than, say, to John Galsworthy, Had-don Chambers, or W. Somerset Maugham-authors who share a kind of received flatness in tone.

  (I think it's relatively uncontroversial to argue that, at least until recently, most vibrant English-language prose came from outside England, from authors who brought external rhythms to the language: Joseph Conrad, who grew up in the Polish Ukraine and for whom English was a third tongue; the Irishman James Joyce; American expatriates Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, two stylized experimenters influenced by the painter Paul Cezanne and the particular cadences of American English; Saul Bellow, an American Jew, whose writing style is built of Eastern European inflections and Chicago slang; the transplanted Russian Vladimir Nabokov; and, more recently, Indo-English authors such as Salman Rushdie. There were a few exciting Anglo-Saxon English stylists who were Pritchett's contemporaries, including the strange and spirited Henry Green and, some would argue, Virginia Woolf. Moreover, contemporary English authors-Martin Amis, most notably-have picked up the vitality of these earlier writers, and today's England has its share of vibrant stylists. But enough of this; we're hcre to talk about Pritchett.)

  An example of Pritchett's vitality, more or less picked at random:

  [London is] like the sight of a heavy sea from a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic…. One lives in it, afloat but half submerged in a heavy flood of brick, stone, asphalt, slate, steel, glass, concrete, and tarmac, seeing nothing fixable beyond a few score white spires that splash up like spits of foam above the next glum wave of dirty buildings.4

  But if his sentences are crowded and more often than not carry a barb of surprise, a little razzle-dazzle, Pritchett was rarely a showy writer and never a lofty one, even in his literary criticism. In fact, he's probably the most unassuming great lyrical stylist you can think of. There's a casualness about his language, for all its inspired metaphoricity-an offhanded air you'll never find in, say, Nabokov, to name another notable stylist. Pritchett, for example, would often repeat words with seeming haphazard (“He sourly began to ruin the line of his poem that never progressed beyond this line”5) and make use of unpolished colloquialism (“Through all the towns that run into one another as you might say, we caught it”6). Of course, he had an enormous technical proficiency-and so what appeared to be prosaic chattiness was really a chosen element of his painstaking craftsmanship. His style never trumpets its own great stylishness, and I'd venture that this casualness is not only the core of Pritchett's famed equanimity but also a theory of aesthetics in itself, a lesson to other writers: Develop an artful style-”the distinctive voice which is indispensable to the short-story writer and the poet,'”7 as the man himself put it-but all the same, don't get too caught up in formal perfection; never torpedo a story for the sake of its prose.

  2.

  V. S. Pritchett was very funny. His is the comedy of ordinary lives meticulously observed, and his eye is keen in Mr. Beluncle.

  Comedy of close surveillance is reliant on context; Mr. Beluncle is full of laughs that, like shadows, would die if I were to shine a light on them; also, to quote any of the best lines here would spoil your fun later.

  I will tell you, though, that like most great comedy, Mr. Beluncle makes sport of the Stuffed Shirt, the Hypocritical Pious Gentleman, and the Tyrant, as well as the Big Spender-and all these descriptions fit a single character: Mr. Beluncle himself. A furniture manufacturer as plump as a scone, egotistical, super-religious when it suits him, despotic, a miser whose taste runs to expensive houses, childish nearly all the time, a world-class bull-shitter, and one of the more haunting characters of twentieth-century fiction, Mr. Beluncle dominates the novel as he does his wife and three children. He is Pritchett's grand, comic, and heartbreaking invention, and he is derived, at least in part, from the author's own father.

  Walter Pritchett, often on the threshold of financial ruin, had a habit of always relocating his family on a whim, to avoid creditors. That's true for Beluncle, too:

  The furniture van would be at the door…. The taxi arrived. Mrs. Beluncle would be sobbing; Mr. Beluncle would be catching two trains-one to put his family into and one for some business errand of his own. In the taxi, if Mrs. Beluncle was still crying, Mr. Beluncle would sing: “ Tell me the old story” and go on with warmth, putting his arm around Mrs. Beluncle, to the second verse: “ Tell me the story simply, for I forget so soon” ('Yes, you forget, you forget. I remember,” Mrs. Beluncle called out.) Or, if the removal was especially disastrous, Mr. Beluncle would sing a song to remind her of their courtship, like “Oh dry those tears, oh calm those fears-Life will be better tomorrow”

  Pritchett duplicated this scene almost to the letter-with his father singing the very same lyrics to calm his mother-in A Cab at the Door, his autobiography.

  There are more similarities between Beluncle and Pritchett's father, more convergences of the author's life and his fiction. Pritchett's father tried on and discarded religions time and again, never giving thought to how this might distress his family.

  Likewise, in the Beluncle family, God is always changing His mind.

  Once God had been a Congregationalist; once a Methodist. He had been a Plymouth Brother, the several kinds of Baptist, a Unitarian, an Internationalist; later, as Mr. Beluncle's business became more affluent, he had been a Steiner, a Theosophist, a New Theologian, a Christian Scientist, a Tub-bite, and then had changed sex. … to become a follower of Mrs. Crowther….

  Mr. Beluncle's search for a creed that will jibe with his own feelings of omnipotence leads him to the Church of the Last Purification, Toronto-a religion �
�dedicated to the belief that evil and therefore pain of all kinds are illusions of the physical senses.” The local chapter worships in a rented dance hall next to a run-down movie theater. But the religion flatters Mr. Beluncle. Everything he does is according to the will of God.

  Although this Church of the Last Purification, Toronto, springs from Pritchett's imagination, it bears many similarities to the real-life religion the Church of Christ, Scientist, the sect the author's father eventually settled on.

  Pritchett tells us that his Church of the Last Purification, Toronto, was founded by a Mrs. Parkinson; the Church of Christ, Scientist, was established by Mary Baker Eddy, who argued that given the God's perfection, He never would have created sin, disease, and death; those blights, therefore, weren't a part of God's reality. The material world was a deceptive combination of spiritual truth and material “error” that could be transcended through a more perfect spiritual understanding. “Error,” not coincidentally, is the bugaboo that vexes Pritchett's Church of Last Purification, Toronto. And on it goes.

  Pritchett plays screwball doctrine for laughs, but not only for laughs. Given his own past, he was hung up on unpopular religions and how they're seen by the majority. In one of Mr. Beluncle's funniest and most excruciating passages, Beluncle's oldest son Henry-something of a stand-in for a young V. S. Pritchett-has to defend the Church of Last Purification to a skeptical teacher named Mr. O'Malley, in front of a full classroom.

  “How dare you contradict me, Beluncle!” said Mr. O'Malley. “Do you stand there in your idiocy and tell me that if you fell out of that window, three floors into the street, and broke your neck, you would say it was a false belief and hadn't happened?”