Essential Stories

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Pritchett is the supreme contemporary virtuoso of the short literature 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 amorphic 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 the reflective values of a humane culture. We care for the printed word in a world that nowadays is dominated by the camera and by scientific, technological, sociological doctrine. . . . I found myself less a critic than an imaginative traveller or explorer . . . I was travelling in literature.”

  Knighted in 1975 for his services to literature and made a Companion of Honour in 1993, Sir Victor Pritchett died in London on March 20, 1997. As novelist Margaret Drabble noted before his death: “Pritchett has lived as a man of letters must, by his pen, and he has done it with a freshness of interest and an infectious curiosity that have never waned.”

  2005 Modern Library Paperback Edition

  Compilation copyright © 2005 by Random House, Inc.

  Introduction copyright © 2005 by Jeremy Treglown

  Biographical note copyright © 1997 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random

  House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  The following stories appear in Complete Collected Stories by V. S. Pritchett,

  copyright © 1990 by V. S. Pritchett, and are reprinted here by permission of

  Random House, Inc.: “Sense of Humor,” “The Evils of Spain,” “The Two Brothers,”

  “The Upright Man,” “You Make Your Own Life,” “The Sailor,” “The Lion’s Den,”

  “The Saint,” “The Wheelbarrow,” “The Fall,” “When My Girl Comes Home,”

  “Just a Little More,” “Our Oldest Friend,” and “On the Edge of the Cliff.”

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Dorothy Rudge Pritchett

  c/o Sterling Lord Literistic for permission to include “The Sack of Lights”

  and “A Serious Question” by V. S. Pritchett.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Pritchett, V. S. (Victor Sawdon)

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Essential stories / V. S. Pritchett; selected and with an introduction by Jeremy Treglown.

  p. cm.

  I. Treglown, Jeremy. II. Title.

  PR6031.R7A6 2005

  823’.912—dc22 2004054682

  Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43094-6

  v3.0