The Pritchett Century Read online

  Pritchett has a delicate sense of the way people live inside clichés, and only come out to give them a fresh emphasis. Gurov, in “The Lady with the Dog,” reflects on the beauty of life in the peaceful aftermath of a successful seduction, and Chekhov contrives not to “place” him in the course of those reflections but to merge them into the space and meaning of the tale. In “The Diver” Pritchett performs a similar operation, mingling cliché with symbol—on two national levels—to produce a work which dives almost involuntarily into the texture of different lives.

  He once said about Hemingway, whom he much admired, that he discovered other people in his stories by a process of stylisation based on a single unitary fantasy: the Hemingway version of living. Pritchett himself learnt how to be stylish without drawing attention to it—making style an observed indication of other people. In Hemingway’s story “Indian Camp,” a traumatic birth and suicide, preceded and ended by an evening and dawn voyage across water, leave the narrator knowing that he “would never die.” Other people have that effect on the hero of the “eternal moment,” as fixed in such a tale. Pritchett, by contrast, leaves a plurality of existences to run on apart, after they have come together for the duration of his story.

  Pritchett was an admirable critic as well as a superb novelist: novels like Mr Beluncle and the studies of Balzac and Turgenev are made to last But the stories are of a wholly superior and indeed a unique manufacture. Like Kipling and Chekhov, he was interested in how people do their jobs, and what they think about them, but unlike the other two, he never drew attention to the fact. He was an expert at showing how love and obsession usually go with the nature of a job, or the daily grind; and his characters, like Mr and Mrs Fulmino in “When My Girl Comes Home,” never have to be displayed in the standardised light of emotion. Poetry is an invisible asset, suffusing lives which have no sense of it, and no conscious knowledge of what gives to living a space and a relish; but at the same time Pritchett never paraded oddities for our inspection—as a showman like Dickens does—or gave the impression of seeking out the “colourful” aspects of human nature. On the contrary: his great gift is a beautiful accuracy and sobriety, as much in relation to people as to the events which determine their essentiality. Even Chekhov manipulates—the specifications of “The Lady with the Dog” are openly unconvincing if we pay a strict attention to them; and they are set up as arbitrarily as a magazine scenario. Isaac Babel, whom Pritchett admired and on whom he wrote a shrewd critique, can be shameless in his exploitation of consciousness in relation to event. As Pritchett pointed out, the peasant’s goose whom the narrator ruthlessly kills in one of his most famous tales of the Red Cossack cavalry, is in its context a wholly implausible and indeed merely literary property, for why have the narrator’s murderous companions, who mock him for his lingering bourgeois scruples, not devoured the bird themselves already? Pritchett had a sharp eye, both as critic and as craftsman, for the giveaway device in a seemingly stark and brutal narrative sequence—the kind of story that had come increasingly into fashion in his own time. He never cooked his own goose by giving way to it.

  And he wrote his stories over a very long period. The earliest of them came out in England in the early twenties, published in monthlies like the Cornhill, and in the then civilised and cultivated pages of the New Statesman. Respected periodicals at that time, even if their policies were largely directed towards ideology and politics, carried short stories as a matter of course. One imagines that it was some little while before these stories were recognised as having a special quality and character of their own. And it was some years before he brought out his first collection. The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories came out in 1930; a novel, Clare Drummer, had been published the previous year. There was rather a fashion at the time for novels with women’s names as the title—a leftover from realism: Germinie Lacerteux, Thérèse Raquin and, in England, George Moore’s Esther Waters—and Pritchett followed in the realists’ wake, his novel having no great individuality of its own. But the short stories were all the better for the lack of an author who put himself forward, and in time were recognised as coming from a master craftsman’s hand. His reputation was confirmed by succeeding volumes. You Make Your Own Life came out just before the Second World War (the title again has the mildly anonymous flavour of the period) and twenty and thirty years later came further collections—When My Girl Comes Home and The Camberwell Beauty. Collected Short Stories, and More Collected Short Stories, were published both in England and in America in 1982 and 1983.

  Interspersed between were novels, memoirs, biographies of other authors, literary criticism, books of travel. Nothing if not prolific, Sir Victor’s achievement had begun already to look like that of a Victorian polycreator, a grand old man of letters. And it will be noticed, too, that his achievement begins now to take on a timeless quality, an air of belonging everywhere over a seventy-year timespan, but nowhere in particular. The manner and the subject-matter seem irrespective of age, or local taste, or the whims of the moment: there is no trademark, no logo to win immediate recognition. “No one alive writes a better English sentence,” observed Irving Howe, and there is something peculiarly just about that, for no one could be less narrowly and definably English in outlook and manner than Pritchett. Howe’s verdict suggests a time when English, as such, was well-written as a matter of course by a large number of people: before authors and poets, and the language itself, hived off into doing and being their respective things. His fellow story-writer Elizabeth Bowen, whose skills he greatly admired, is apt to invoke the notion of the good sentence too openly, to obtain an atmosphere: brilliant as they are, her stories do not perhaps in the final analysis wear as well as his, for they depend too much on a bravura felicity of style which announces that the narrative has out-soared the simple business of storytelling.

  Pritchett’s stories never do that. His style is always wholly subordinated to the tale; even its economy is unobtrusive. The poetry is entirely a matter of density of reference, a deft helping of the reader to inference, imagining whole lives and personalities in a single turn of phrase or scrap of dialogue. In this way a story like “A Trip to the Seaside,” from the 1989 collection A Careless Widow, has the redolence of a Pinter play, or a poem by Betjeman, but with these suggestions metamorphosed into the absolute originality of a short story creation. Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, California, that there was “no there, there.” In Pritchett’s tales there is always a “there,” all the more haunting and uncompromising for being so contingent.

  “A Trip to the Seaside” is a gem. From the first word to the last—and the tale is only a few pages long—the reader is gripped conclusively, compelled to participate in the experience. A widower visits a small seaside town to see his former secretary, with a view to negotiating a possible second marriage. What happens is unexpected, and yet in some way inevitable. Pritchett’s mastery of the milieu, its thought and speech patterns, crowds out any need for explanation or description. A seaside setting was one of Elizabeth Bowen’s favourite locales, but she would not have resisted the lure of a few vivid paragraphs, transfixing the scene as a visual impression. Pritchett has no need for that: the whole place is there with barely a word said, just as the “consciousness” of the secretary is made for ever visible by the note of pride in her voice when she tells her suitor that she got married to her new husband “when the divorce came through.” It is a staggering blow—the widower was hoping for a convenient marital follow-up with a docile former employee—but she has attracted another man enough to make him divorce his wife for her! No wonder when the widower leaves the resort by train in the last sentence he sees that the boats in the estuary “were flying no pennants and no flags.”

  Pritchett was fascinated by trades, and the habits they engender. The hairdresser in A Careless Widow sees his customers as “tousled and complaining,” but leaving him “transfigured, equipped for the hunt again.” “They were simply topknots to him. When they got up he was a
lways surprised to see they had arms and legs and could walk. He sometimes, though not often, admired the opposite end of them: their shoes.” That sentence has the kind of perfection which Irving Howe had in mind: but like the notes in a late Beethoven quartet it in no way parades such perfection. The stories in A Careless Widow originally appeared in magazines—The New Yorker, Ladies’ Home Journal, Vanity Fair—but there is never a hint in them of the magazine short story formula, the telling phrase, the situation worked up.

  He is a master of the odd and secretive vagaries of human nature, which emerge at defenceless or vulnerable moments. The careless widow’s eyes fill with tears when she enlarges not on the virtues of her husband but on a minor bit of irresponsibility she has long and loyally concealed. Pritchett never lost his humble passion for what occurs, a passion which makes his tales the reverse of Kipling’s. All his books are marked by a mute disinclination to present a world of his own that affects to be the real world. His Spain is not a personal fantasy, as Hemingway’s is. For the same reason he never claimed—explicitly or implicitly—to be telling the truth, as so many tellers of tales have done. He merely got on with the business of doing it. His reputation grew gradually, increasing with each book. He was not the kind of author who becomes famous overnight; and when his work became well-known it never identified or placed him. Now his stories speak for him, but they still do not claim a name for the remarkable man who wrote them.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by Oliver Pritchett

  In Memoriam: V. S. Pritchett by John Bayley

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  As Old as the Century: V. S. Pritchett at Eighty

  From A Cab at the Door

  From Midnight Oil

  TRAVEL WRITING

  The Appalachian Mountains

  From Marching Spain

  From The Spanish Temper

  From Foreign Faces

  From New York Proclaimed

  From Dublin: A Portrait

  London

  Amazonia

  NOVELS

  From Dead Man Leading

  From Mr. Beluncle

  SHORT STORIES

  Sense of Humour

  The Evils of Spain

  The Oedipus Complex

  Things as They Are

  When My Girl Comes Home

  The Liars

  The Camberwell Beauty

  Did You Invite Me?

  The Marvellous Girl

  The Vice-Consul

  The Fig Tree

  Cocky Olly

  The Image Trade

  BIOGRAPHY

  From The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev

  From Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free

  LITERARY CRITICISM

  Mark Twain

  Samuel Richardson

  Sir Walter Scott

  Charles Dickens

  George Eliot

  Honoré de Balzac

  Ivan Turgenev

  Henry James

  James Boswell

  Tobias Smollett

  Saki

  George Meredith

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Leo Tolstoy

  Gabriel García Márquez

  S.J. Perelman

  Saul Bellow

  Gerald Brenan

  Molly Keane

  John Osborne

  Salman Rushdie

  About the Author

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  As OLD AS THE CENTURY:

  V. S. PRITCHETT AT EIGHTY

  Since my boyhood I have been vain of being born just before the end of 1900 and at every birthday thinking of myself as pretty well as old as the century. I was at ease with its assumptions for fourteen years: after that, two dreadful wars, huge social changes, technological revolution, the disappearance of British power, the rise of the Welfare State, a decade or two of “peace” in the world abroad, dramatic threats once more.

  Now I am eighty I see I have been shaken up like a dice in a box, if not as brutally as people born ten years earlier than myself. Many are still alive and in voice. I am abashed by my survival rather than proud of it; there is no merit in it. The credit goes to those secretive gamblers we call the genes.

  I come of long-lived forebears among whom there were few defaulters on the Yorkshire side. Also, because of the great advances of medical science and hygiene, the average expectation of life in Great Britain has enormously increased in the past fifty years or more. The old are no longer revered curiosities; on the contrary, often a social problem. We swarm in cities and resorts, ancient mariners who square our shoulders as we pick one another out at a glance in the pubs, the shops, the park seats, the planes and the tourist buses. Our skins do not yet give off the eerie smell of senility. That glance of ours is often frisky, conspiratorial and threatening, warning you that we could a tale unfold if we should happen to get a grip on your wrist.

  Not a day’s illness—we boast—except a winter cough or a twinge of arthritis or gout; we speak of these twitches as medals we have won. Smoke like fish (we go on), drink like a chimney, pity people who do not work a twelve-hour day, who have not ducked their heads through two world wars or known the good old hard times. And as for this new thing called sex …!

  As our tongues wag and our metaphors mix we turn into actors on our conspicuous stage. We are good at pretending to be modest; we refuse to acknowledge we are ever in the wrong or incompetent. A brisk eighty-year-old electrician came to do a job at my house six years ago and serenely drove his drill clean through a hidden water pipe I had warned him of. He turned accusingly on me as the water spouted over us. Like all us oldies he congratulated himself and boasted he had never done such a thing to a water pipe. He and I still greet each other as we rush by in the street, equals in conceit and folly, and say how young we feel.

  Our acting is, of course, a defence against our fear of senility and death. What shall we be like in our nineties? Are we for the old folks’ home? We have seen so many of our friends paralysed, collapsing in mind and physically humiliated. Shall we escape? Yet, behind our acting there is also the knowledge that age does not march mathematically year by year with the calendar. One’s real age stands still for large blocks of time.

  My hair is now white and veins stand out on my temples, I have dark brown spots on my hands, my arms shrink, but to my mind I seem to be much what I was at fifty: at fifty-seven I looked despairingly bleak, ill and flaccid, to judge from a photograph, less brisk than I became in my sixties, seventies or today. Middle age was more agonising and trying than the later years have been, but perhaps my age has always gone up and down because I am one of those who “live on their nerves.” I know one thing for certain: I was far, far younger in my thirties than I had been in my twenties, because my heart was fuller at thirty, my energies knew their direction, chiefly due to a happy marriage. It has lasted forty-four years. There is nothing like a coup de foudre and absorption in family responsibility for maturing the male and pulling his scattered wits together. I became physically stronger after years of bad health. Yet I had not lost what I valued in my twenties: living for the liberation of the moment.

  Today I still go fast up the four flights of steep stairs to my study in our tall late-Nash house, every day of the week, at nine o’clock in the morning, Saturdays and Sundays included, cursing the Inland Revenue and inflation, groaning at the work I have to do, crying out dishonestly for leisure, thinking of this year’s holiday and the ten-mile walks on the cliffs of North Cornwall, complaining that surely at my age I should be able to get some time off.

  Why, even when I travel, do I still have to work? But the moment I’ve cleaned my pipe and put pen to paper the groans stop. I am under the spell of language which has ruled me since I was ten. A few minutes later—four hours’ writing have washed out all sense of time—my wife calls me down to a delicious lunch. She has spent the morning typing what I wrote the day before, laughing at my ba
d spelling, inserting sportive words when she can’t read my insectile hand—that has got smaller—and knowing she’ll have to do the whole damn thing over again two or three times because I cover each page with an ant’s colony of corrections; she is a perfectionist too. We enjoy working together; she has a better memory than I have and I depend on her criticism. It is she who charms away the swarms of people who telephone, the speculators who think I exist for reading their theses and books, for more and more reviews, for giving interviews or lectures or signing their applications for grants. She has also driven off the droppers-in, the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses and other enemies of a writer’s life. She is much younger and more decisive than I am.

  After lunch I have a nap for an hour, do some household shopping in Camden Town where I pass as an old pensioner called Pritchard—very suited to a writer’s double life—and return to take up tea and then back to work about four until seven and then a couple of Martinis, eat, try to catch up with letters and bills or in good weather go out and work in the garden. Unless we are going out we are in bed by ten. I sleep pretty well, dream wildly; the bad nights are those when I go on writing in my sleep, in English mostly but often, out of vanity, in Spanish, French or in dog-German which I stopped learning when I left school at fifteen. For Latin I have to rely on my wife.

  I am a very lucky man, of course. If our pleasant house among the old trees of the quiet terrace is too large for us now our family have grown up, after twenty-five years here where else could we go with thousands of books? Would that frozen Buddha—the freezer that has changed our lives—fit in a new kitchen? Moving would betray our furniture and new draughts often kill old men.

  I am lucky to be able to work at home, to commute upstairs instead of by train or bus. It is lucky I am still able to earn my living as a writer which I dreamed of when I was a boy. Thomas Hardy, in his old age, told Virginia Woolf that to write poetry was simply a matter of physical strength. So is writing prose. And that energy I was given by my parents: my Kentish Town mother’s energy was nervous, my father’s had the obdurate Yorkshire self-will. I cannot claim credit as an heir to this enlivening mixture of fortune which has generated in me a mixture of fantasy and wry common sense.