by Paul Theroux
But how does a man begin to write, and live by writing alone, and earn the accolade of a knighthood? Pritchett is somewhat self-mocking about his knighthood, but he is definite about his first yearnings to write: he conceived the ambition at the age of ten, when he was a schoolboy in south London. And his grandfather was an influence. "My grandfather started as a bricklayer, but later went to a theological college. I was impressed with his air of learning. I felt a sort of kinship with him—books and words. And he impressed me because he had been poor as a boy. Learning mattered to me. I was well-taught at school and I thought, 'Why shouldn't I be Tennyson or Scott?' But that was vanity! And I was always plagued by doubts. It takes a long time to discover one's ability. Until I was twenty-five I had no certainty that I could make it as a writer."
France liberated him and taught him. "I found I could speak French well. I was an accent snob! I was passionately interested in language—language is not only useful, but enchanting. And it's awfully good to get away from one's family."
He was now able to tackle any French book. He read omnivorously, and he began to write stories and sketches. His writer's sensibilities were bound up with an urgency to discover the differences in places. He went to Spain, learned Spanish and studied the work of Pio Baroja, a writer he feels has deeply influenced his style. In time, he was writing the lead fiction review—a weekly essay—to finance the writing of his short stories. It was not easy. During the Second World War, when very few new books were being published, he concentrated on French, British and Russian classics and reminded his readers that literature had prevailed over other wars. Those essays are masterpieces, but Pritchett explains, "If you're seriously interested in writing fiction, you take too much time over your criticism."
But how else was he to proceed? "I got five pounds for most stories—I remember I got three pounds for 'The Sailor'. I had to write many reviews to be able to go on writing stories. The novel is discursive and ruminative—it takes time. The form of a story is like the form of a ballad. I'm still fond of some of my early stories—'When My Girl Comes Home'—I wish I could write like that now. I think it's rather well-done."
We were in his house, talking, as the twilight faded and turned the large lovely windows into mirrors. Suddenly Pritchett laughed. "I ought to have written a best-seller," he said. "That's the maddening thing! I may write a play—I've always wanted to. I was raking leaves yesterday, and I thought, 'When I finish raking these leaves and burn them, I'll start writing again.'"
I wondered if, at the age of eighty, he looked back and saw himself taking any other path; or was writing truly inevitable from the age of ten? His answer was surprising. "I might have been a painter," he said. "I have a small talent. I love pictures. In a daydream, I see myself at an easel and thinking, 'I could be Pissarro'—that would be satisfying." He leaned forward and laughed again. Not everyone in Britain is as fulfilled and fully employed as Sir Victor Pritchett; there are two and a quarter million people out of work, and all the talk is of retraining people for new jobs. Pritchett said, "Perhaps Mrs Thatcher would retrain me in an art school!"
Sir Victor Pritchett has been writing short stories for almost sixty years. Each of his books displays vitality, humor, and tremendous imaginative strength. He has a gift for the unexpected word or phrase. His writing is both passionate and serene. There is no hatred in it at all. Can that be said of any other writers today? The short story, Pritchett has said, "is the glancing form of fiction that seems to be right for the nervousness and restlessness of contemporary life." And in his Introduction to The Oxford Book of Short Stories (1981) he describes the form in a wonderful way: "The novel tends to tell us everything whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that, intensely." Pritchett's literary achievement is enormous, but his short stories are his greatest triumph. And one can say with perfect confidence that there is nothing like them in the language, because every short story writer of brilliance makes the form his own.
The astonishing thing about his Collected Stories is that although it is twice the size of his Selected Stories (1978), it is still incomplete. These thirty magnificent stories are only part of Pritchett's output. For example, five from his most recent collection On the Edge of the Cliff (1979) were omitted; and five from Blind Love (1969) were also left out. So Collected Stories does not include "The Spanish Bed", "The Vice-Consul", "The Honeymoon", or "The Chainsmoker". Going back even farther, two of the stories in which Noisy Brackett figures are not here—though "The Key to My Heart" is. There are a dozen more that could have been included. The point is that Pritchett has left out as many stories as he has collected—presumably for reasons of space. It is a pity he didn't have room for them all, but it is excellent to have the expectation of a further volume.
What we have here is masterful. They seem to have no echoes or influences; they are whole, bright moods—never false-sounding, never mannered—always fresh. Anyone of intelligence can spot Chekhov's luminous shadow here, but it is not a configuration of style or language; it is a quality of wisdom compounded of clearsightedness, impartiality, gentleness, an absence of malice and real love.
There are of course certain conventions in the form, but as I said earlier the greatest practitioners invented their own kind of short story. Kipling did so in Plain Tales from the Hills, and Joyce in Dubliners, and James, Hemingway, Faulkner and Katherine Mansfield in collections which proclaimed the uniqueness of their vision. This necessity for each writer to reinvent the form is as evident in Saki's The Chronicles of Clovis as it is in M. R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary or Borges's Ficciones.
It is also true of Pritchett's stories, which could not possibly be anyone else's. Typically, the Pritchett story is unhurried and somewhat rural; and there is a salesman or a cyclist or someone a little cabin crazy—a sharp-tongued spinster; nearly always, someone is distinctly out of his element, in love, or moving house, or stuck with strangers. The Pritchett story is full of interesting weather and sweet smells; and everyone has a different face. Here is Mrs Coram in "Handsome Is As Handsome Does":
... She was a short, thin woman, ugly yet attractive. Her hair was going grey, her face was clay-coloured, her nose was big and long, and she had long yellowish eyes. In this beach suit she looked rat-like, with that peculiar busyness, inquisitiveness, intelligence, and even charm of rats. People ... were startled by her ugly face and her shabbiness, but they liked her lazy voice, and her quick mind, her graceful good manners, the look of experience and good sense in her eyes.
The description is full of paradox, but so is the story, which is one of Pritchett's most powerful ones, a drama of opposites. Pritchett never lapses into stereotypes. He always scruples to differentiate between characters, and shows us what individuality means. This is not merely a literary exercise or a skillful use of language: it is a belief in human variation. Pritchett is among other things a great appreciator.
He is able to tell a great deal about someone in one sentence, as in the story "The Saint"—a serious comedy about a religion somewhat like Christian Science—where the visiting preacher Mr Timberlake is summed up: "He had a pink square head with very small ears and one of those torpid, enameled smiles which were said by our enemies to be too common in our sect." Or another perfect sentence from an almost surrealistic story, "The Fall": "Peacock felt a smile coming over his body from the feet upwards."
"He had been a bland little dark-haired pastry-fed fellow from the North," begins another portrait in "A Debt of Honour". "He was a printer but had given that up, a man full of spit when he talked and his black eyebrows going up like a pair of swallows." These are never random descriptions, word-floods through which a face appears in thé turbulence. They are lightly done and so enjoyable—making the reader's task so effortless—that it is not until the story is over that one realizes that the spell has been cast, a face has been glimpsed, a friend made. There is no moralizing, there are few symbols: these people are flesh and blood. The stories do not demand to be
studied, they offer themselves as pleasures and they are absolutely unforgettable.
Pritchett himself has outlined the difficulties facing the short story writer. He has done so with fine intelligence. In fact, I cannot think of another writer, aside from Henry James, who both writes short stories, and writes about them, with equal brilliance. The novelist is expected to be discursive, Pritchett says, and he can sustain his narrative in this sprawling fashion, but "the writer of short stories has to catch our attention at once not only by the novelty of his people and scene but by the distinctiveness of his voice, and to hold us by the ingenuity of his design."
It doesn't sound particularly difficult, does it? But in practice these are hard requirements. The best illustrations of them, of course, are in Pritchett's own openings. The first paragraph of the chirpy antique dealer in "The Camberwell Beauty" is superb but too long to quote. Here is the opening of "Sense of Humor":
It started one Saturday. I was working new ground and I decided I'd stay at the hotel the weekend and put in an appearance at church.
"All alone?" asked the girl at the cash desk.
It had been raining since ten o'clock.
"Mr Good has gone," she said. "And Mr Straker. He usually stays with us but he's gone."
"That's where they make their mistake," I said. "They think they know everything because they've been on the road all their lives."
"You're a stranger here, aren't you?" she said.
"I am," I said. "And so are you."
"How do you know that?"
"Obvious," I said. "Way you speak."
"Let's have a light," she said.
"So's I can see you," I said.
That was how it started. The rain was pouring down on the glass roof of the office.
As a reader and critic, Pritchett is the most open-minded of men; this same attitude characterizes his writing—it is not complacency but compassion. The attitude is as rare today as his kind of prose—the light touch, the suggestion of sparkle, the underlying seriousness. Reading these stories, I began to think how profitable it would be for any aspiring writer to look closely at them. I wish someone had put a Pritchett story in my hand twenty years ago to remind me that you have to be a whole person and tell the truth to write well; and you have to read everything and experience love and enjoy some happiness, for your stories to be as full of life as Pritchett's.
The Past Recaptured
[1980]
Memory often simplifies past events: the mind can be merciful. There is probably no greater burden than a capacity for total recall, but few of us are burdened this way. We tend to be content with fragments of the past—the anecdote highly polished in retelling, the once-painful vision given the soft focus (if not complete revision) of tranquil recollection—and we may smile when we are corrected and reminded that we have been betrayed by memory. It is certainly easier to reflect on experience as a monochrome or something prettified and made manageable by repetition. We might deliberately seek to uncover a complex image in our memory and find that time has turned it into a piffling snapshot. All we can do, if so much has been lost to us—so much discarded or altered—is turn our back on the past and flee it, setting our face at the abstraction of a dimly-perceived future. So we are spared reality.
History can seem as simple as our personal past, and the memory's mechanism for simplifying can mislead us into believing history to be no more than anonymous leaders and featureless emblems, and historical change having something to do with the algebra of dates or the inevitability of armies. We think of armies and we see ants. Even portraiture has been simplified into shapes, rather than the particularities in faces and clothes. Stalin is a fierce mustache and Lincoln a kindly beard and the Tsaritsa's face is squeezed between diamonds; the peasant is barefoot, the African is naked. The war-bonnet, the pigtail, the soldier wrapped in bandoliers—emblems. We may read biographies and histories and trek through museums, and still be convinced that "human history" is a bloodless phrase for an unreadable epoch.
We are left, then, with the anonymity of history—the faceless soldiers in the ant-like armies, the nameless shapes tilling the land, the politicians and millionaires distorted in glorifying busts or memoirs. Compressed and robbed of subtlety, those who acted out the past are seen illustrating the most basic emotions—fear, triumph, hope, or greed—and nothing as fragile as fatigue, boredom or compassion. Ultimately, because the past seems ungraspable, we may cease to care. Pornography is like this. It may suggest an emotion, but it cannot engage us for long, because it does not inspire anything like thought or feeling. The paradox of pornography is not only that it is unfeeling but often unphysical, an abstraction of emblems exhibiting anonymous pleasure. It gives us nothing but a reminder of our own solitude.
Photography did not kill painting ("From now on, painting is dead," the early photographers declared), but it caused its derangement into abstraction and—what seems much worse—made us unsure of realism. It made us regard realism as inartistic. What we have seen lately is photography hurrying to compete with painting's abstraction, mimicking its postures and geometry. Many painters have succeeded in conveying a sense of power with color and line, even randomly—indeed, painting has never been able to be realistic in a photographic way. But photographers, huffing and puffing after painterly effects—I am thinking of the cubism of the New York photographer or the mess his European counterpart makes of photographic impressionism or the Japanese passion for dead branches—nearly always fail. Why should the exact science of optics be turned into an instrument for examining merely a blank wall, or a girder's rivets, or a banana? The pity of it is that, almost since its inception photography has been able to give history a human face by supplying us with a crystal image.
The eye is selective, the camera lens is not; which is why photography, when it is masterful, is both an art and a science, the triumph of technology creating a luminous and symmetrical artifact. And it seems to me (though not to everyone) that what photography does best, when successful, is suggest imagination by dealing with the actual. Its subtlety is its exactitude, for in photography light is everything, and in light is its capacity for utter clarity. It is not necessary for the photographer to hedge or deal in shadows or to fudge a plain image in an attempt at poetry. Because we know how untruthful a photograph can be, the photographer's integrity is crucial (and I may say that the famous picture of the flag-raising at Iwo-Jima has always struck me as something of a phoney, a sop to jingoism—it did not surprise me to learn that it was posed). Nothing is more bogus-looking than a bogus photograph; we might linger over a mediocre painting, but no one pauses more than a few seconds after summing up a photograph as faked.
Of course, a photographer may take liberties. When Julia Margaret Cameron did her portrait of Herschel, she rumpled his crown of white hair beforehand to make him seem Jovian and astronomer-like. But her greatest photographs are those in which she practised the keenest fidelity to her subject. It was not for nothing that Tennyson called the portrait she did of him, "The Dirty Monk," but there does not exist a painting of the poet which has the smell and feel of that photograph, the grubby cape, the unkempt hair, the ragged beard. It does not diminish the poetry—on the contrary, we begin to see that Tennyson's orotund verse was written by a hand with a human smell.
We have become accustomed to photographs of photographs, pictures of pictures, overlaid with dust and dead air. In the reprinting they have become coarsened and blurred, coarsening our own vision. Technically, it is often impossible to make photographs from original negatives, and the crystal image clouds in successive reproduction. We have even made the mistake of thinking of early photography as imperfect, slightly astigmatic, a primitive craft improved and modernized only recently. This is more than merely unfair—it belittles the skill of the nineteenth century photographers and, in consequence, does violence to our idea of history.
It ought to have been apparent to us in reviewing the history of the past century that we wer
e dealing with men and not gods, with dead soldiers and not casualty statistics. But to a large degree, we were cheated, given a foreground, or a full face, and denied the background, the periphery, the detail that tells more than the man at the focal point. "Focal point" itself is meaningless here, since the large plate-camera and the long exposure allowed everything within its frame to be picked out. And it is details, particularities, that shock us, touch us, make us laugh, invite us to look closer—or, at any rate, make us understand what in the world we have lost.
I think we may have been in danger of forgetting how clear a photograph can be or how much paraphernalia it can contain. The picture of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee is a fine family portrait—four faces with a lively intensity of gaze, but notice the wooden steps in the picture. We know at a glance they have been swept, that someone has climbed them and tracked dust on them; that they will be swept again. The dust is palpable. The Chinese and Japanese photographs are chiefly remarkable for the way they let us see the weave in the cloth—velvet and silk in the case of the noblewomen, rough wool or thin cotton loosely draping the servants. The noblemen do not always look healthy or contented. In other portraits we have our share of statesmen and rulers with unreliable-looking expressions or wild staring eyes, or the symptoms of illness. The panoply, the diamonds and costumes are never anything but grand—and yet see: Those are very human animals who, until now, we have regarded as larger than life. Queen Victoria is pint-sized and pouting, and as she sits it seems that her feet do not reach to the ground.
