V.S. Pritchett : A Working Life - Hardcover

Treglown, Jeremy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 070117322X ISBN 13: 9780701173227

Publisher: London : Chatto & Windus, 2004

Synopsis

Book by Treglown, Jeremy

About this title

About the Author

Jeremy Treglown, Professor of English at Warwick University and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, is the author of acclaimed biographies of Roald Dahl and the novelist Henry Green.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Material

What a price one pays for one's material," V. S. Pritchett wrote to his best friend and fellow author, Gerald Brenan, in the mid1940s. Pritchett and his wife had just had their respective parents to stay. "My father and Dorothy's mother are a pair of very low comedy characters and they devastate us. Dorothy's mother is raucous, ill bred & suspicious, my father is vulgar, hypocritical and never stops talking. It was awful."

He was joking, but he meant what he said about material, particularly in the case of his father. "He is so vulgar, so boring, so destructive," he said on another occasion. "I must write about him quickly, turn him into cash."2 He didn't need to remind himself. Cash was important. Pritchett was a serious imaginative artist, but first and foremost he was a professional writer, one who took intense pride in managing to support himself as that. His father, the spendthrift mythomaniac and spiritual confidence trickster Walter Sawdon Pritchett, in one guise or another provided some of Victor Sawdon Pritchett's best material.

There was plenty more. V. S. Pritchett watched and listened to people with the absorption of a psychologist, the opportunism of a collector, the unconditional affection of a man to whom other humans were his sole religion. In the mid-1980s, which were also his own eighties (he was born in 1900), he told an interviewer, "The human race is almost mythological: it's a perpetuator of myths. I have no religious interests, except for the fact that religion is psychologically and historically very interesting. . . . I think that life contains its meaning unaided. I should like to think that a writer just celebrates being alive. I shall be sorry to die, but the notion of seeing life celebrated from day to day is so wonderful that I can't see the point of believing anything else."

The novelist Peter Vansittart recalled how even a private conversation with the erstwhile dockland clerk and adventurous traveler was like being in a crowd: "He seemed never far from the leather-works, the Spanish bar, Irish cabin, Corsican doss-house . . . Something about him invited confidences from shepherds, weekend Home Guards, colonels' daughters, suburban misfits on a spree, dockside boozers, aunts' lovers, sailors, malevolent or puzzled loners. . . ."

To Martin Amis, one of the things that distinguished the older writer's fiction was that he "went into ordinary people and showed us that they weren't ordinary. . . . [He] came away with their genius in all senses." However far Pritchett had moved from his social origins, "he didn't gentrify his imagination an iota. . . . Almost frighteningly intimate, he possesses his characters, he knows almost everything about them in a way that startles me when I look at him."

Pritchett was a small man with big appetites and energies. He was no glutton, but everyone who knew him well mentions his relish for good food and drink and comfortable surroundings. In his happiest years, which were many, he and his wife, Dorothy, took a Lawrentian-sometimes even a Rabelaisian-zest not only in their sex life together but in writing to each other about it. There's something of this interplay between hunger and connoisseurship in how he found material in everyone he met, everything he saw them doing or overheard them saying. They were used in the travel writing which was always an important component of his huge output, including his first book, Marching Spain (1928). They went into his novels (to be a novelist was his main early ambition, and at least one of the results, Mr Beluncle, ranks with any novel of the mid-century). They went, too, into the more than a hundred short stories which have seemed to other writers, from Eudora Welty to A. S. Byatt and William Trevor to John Updike, among the most original of their time, or of any time. A dozen of these stories, involving characters and situations closely based on Pritchett's early life, were in effect drafts for sections of the two books which made him most famous, and which will certainly last: his memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971). These portraits of the artist are also portraits of an age, a country, above all a class: the "lower middle" class. As Pritchett's career was to illustrate, in terms of creative potential that social group was the strongest-the hungriest-as well as the largest in the fluid England of the twentieth century.

Even Pritchett's literary essays are not only humane but human. He approached books as he approached people: with sympathetic and respectful curiosity, and with undoctrinaire discrimination. He was easily amused and, though not easily pleased, keen to be. In his time, he was the most influential "man of letters" in the English-speaking world, though he disliked the term (he preferred "writer"). He is as vivid, sharp, and funny a critic as Virginia Woolf, but he responded to a much wider range of writing than she did, both old and new. The reactions he recorded in his many thousands of reviews, radio talks, and lectures are still alive because, like his fiction, they are so sharply impressionistic. Despite, or rather because of, his relative lack of formal education-he left school before he was sixteen-he had read more than anyone else, while never losing touch with the environment he had come from.

The fact that it's often hard to draw a line between Pritchett's work in different forms, not least between fiction and nonfiction, points to the sheer range of his achievement. The career of this great fiction writer, autobiographer, travel writer, critic-and also, though not yet published as such, letter writer and diarist-spanned his century. He played a crucial part in the continuing growth of traditional literary forms during modernism and postmodernism, building as he did on the techniques of nineteenth-century fiction. At the same time, he carried on the supposedly fast-disappearing profession of a freelance critic, becoming an important broker in the literary exchanges between Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. In some of his responses to his social and educational formation, he both exemplified and helped to form his period. He has devoted fans everywhere in the English-speaking world, and of every age. Even so, if you mention the name V. S. Pritchett today, you have to be careful to distinguish him from V. S. Naipaul, or Terry Pratchett.

Pritchett would have been disappointed if he had known how his fame would decline in the years immediately following his death, but he wouldn't have been surprised or dismayed. Some of his best work was driven by his generous eagerness to show why this or that forgotten writer should still be read. Besides, if he saw the human race as "mythological," one of his myths of himself was that he was uninteresting. "Nothing continues to happen to me," he wrote in his early fifties. He was daunted by having just heard the English novelist Rosamond Lehmann and the American publisher Blanche Knopf discussing possibilities for Lehmann's next book. When Lehmann said, "I might write about George Eliot," Knopf replied, "Why, did anything happen to her? Is there any color in her life?"

It was an absurd question, not least because Eliot, like Pritchett, devoted so much of her career to showing that every human life is interesting. But in any case, Pritchett's modesty shouldn't be taken at face value. At the time when he claimed that nothing happened to him, he was actually going through a crisis in his personal life-one which is recorded in painful detail in his letters and notebooks. The disavowal was the equivalent of a physical gesture he had, a distinctly Edwardian one, of pulling his chin wryly and a little sideways into the folds of his neck. It was a sign which combined affability, reassurance, and mild self-skepticism. It was also comic, turning his face into a convulsion of malleable flesh. What would it become next? Would it disappear into his shoulders? And the movement had the effect of emphasizing his lips: what they were saying, how they were saying it, even what they didn't say (Pritchett sometimes seemed to use his mouth for listening). Meanwhile, though, the gentle pantomime distracted attention from the alertness of his quizzical gaze. Because one of its motives, conscious or not, was to allow him to watch better. Self-effacement was among Pritchett's professional tools as a writer, as well as part of his personal magnetism.

Both contributed to the impression he gave of unusual happiness. Overall, and in the end, V. S. Pritchett does seem to have been happier than most people. Yet the qualities that were often seen as happy in him-especially his zest and energy and humor, his innocent appetites-were, like his writing, far from simple in effect.

His emphasis on myth is important because, given how much of him went into his writing, the man has to be seen to some extent through his versions of himself. Myths are cumulative and progressive, and this was how Pritchett's repeated explorations of his family and upbringing worked. He was a performer, an anecdotalist, always improving and adding to his repertoire of self-revelation. His friend the diarist Frances Partridge said, "He was a bit of an actor, a great raconteur. . . . I see VSP always-when he was telling a story-acting movements, rather crouching ones, slightly grotesque. He wasn't a natural man. . . . I sometimes think he was an actor manqué and would have been a good comic."

So the showman in Walter Sawdon Pritchett lived on in his gifted son. In his seventies, "VSP," as he was always known, even gave readings from Dickens to audiences in America.7 This aspect of his personality sometimes bothered the writer, because he knew too well that performance could dispense with truth. He of...

Edition details

• Publisher: London : Chatto & Windus
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 070117322X
• ISBN 13: 9780701173227
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320