by Roger Angell
I think the obit writers took their tone from “A Cab at the Door,” Pritchett’s detailed account of his semi-impoverished, bounced-about Edwardian childhood, and the means for survival he devised while he was in the toils of a dramatizing, self-destructive floorwalker-and-salesman father, whose repeated scruffy business failures and the family’s furtive decampings explain the book’s title; a derisive, emotional mother (“her greenish grey and fretful eyes quick and full of lies,” as he puts it); and a family regimen built upon eccentricity and worry. I remember Pritchett, at dinner one night, telling us that no one had been invited to a meal at his house when he was a boy; and that if someone rang the doorbell unexpectedly at mealtime his mother would keep the visitor waiting outside until every crumb and vestige of the meal had been hurriedly swept off the table. “There was something shameful or sexual about being caught eating,” he said. “I never understood it.”
Young Victor made his escape not by the common route of scholastic achievement but through a precocious self-immersion in reading. The “Children’s Encyclopedia,” a collected “International Library of Famous Literature,” and the complete Shakespeare, Dickens, Ruskin, Marcus Aurelius, Hardy, Cervantes, Thackeray, Wells, Coleridge, Marie Corelli—all flowed into him, on the quiet, when he was at an early age, and fixed him for life. “That I understood very little of what I read did not matter to me. I was caught by the passion for print as an alcoholic is caught by the bottle,” he wrote. “In prose, I found the common experience and the solid worlds where judgements were made and in which one could firmly tread.”
Apprenticed to a Bermondsey leathermonger at fifteen (there wasn’t enough money to keep him in school), he read and took writer’s notes on the sly, and at twenty, having finessed upper school and university altogether, found himself on his own in Paris. Within five years, he had become an itinerant journalist—on the Continent, in Ireland, in Appalachia—and a full-time student at the U. of V.S.P. While still in his twenties, he became a contributor to the New Statesman (he served as its literary editor later on), and began writing novels, short stories, and foreign pieces at the same time. His first travel book, “Marching Spain,” recounts his solo journey, at twenty-six, across that country by foot (and without Spanish). There is a sturdy, incautious energy to a life conducted on these terms—a state of mind from an earlier time, but with more Fielding than Dickens in its nature—and his enormous lifelong reading, as well as his critical writings, seems to have come from the same place. “My purpose has always been the same: to explore the writers and their intentions,” he wrote in “Lasting Impressions.” He went on with this procedure in “Midnight Oil”: “I have always thought of myself—and therefore of my subjects—as being ‘in life,’ indeed books have always seemed to be a form of life, and not a distraction from it.” Instead of being awed or made uneasy by the great authors of the past, or giving way to anxiety about his better-placed, more assured contemporaries, he remained curious and generous, and gave his considering, sightseer’s mind full rein. I like to think of him as someone who went through his century on foot, gaining by attentiveness whatever he had lost by passing up its speed and lightning arrivals, and I recall suddenly seeing this view of him come to life in a passage from one of his later stories, “On the Edge of the Cliff”: “From low cliff to high cliff, over the cropped turf, which was like a carpet where the millions of sea pinks and daisies were scattered, mile after mile in their colonies, the old man led the way, digging his knees into the air, gesticulating, talking, pointing to a kestrel above or a cormorant black as soot on a rock.” And: “The old man was a strong walker, bending to it, but when he stopped he straightened, and Rowena smiled at his air of detachment as he gazed at distant things as if he knew them.”
—
AS A CRITIC, PRITCHETT was a descendant, or perhaps a cousin once removed, of non-academic practitioners like Gissing, Wells, and Priestley, who brought an unflagging, sparrowlike attention and precision to the experience of letters. He wrote about classical authors and young arrivals with an equal degree of respect, and took up French and German and Spanish not only to read writers in their own languages but as preparation for travel. Russian and Russia itself eluded him, but he was not disconsolate about that. “I have an imaginary Russia in my mind that I owe entirely to Russian writers,” he once said. “How splendid and kind and generous writers are in their intellect, in spilling over in this way and in carrying us into their minds and into their experience.” Something of his usefulness and his range is conveyed when one runs an eye down the seventy-seven reviews he contributed to this magazine from the fifties to the late eighties, and finds pieces about Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, Edmund Wilson, Picasso, George Sand, Swift, Flann O’Brien, Borges, Rushdie, Lewis Carroll, Betjeman, Turgenev, Rebecca West. A secret about Pritchett, I think—and perhaps not enough of this has been made in the recapitulations—is that his own bottomless reading (“I am appalled by the amount I have read,” he cries in “Midnight Oil”) did not dull the eagerness of his mind. Never lofty, he was able in his critical work to convey his excited participation in this three-part agreement—writing to reading to writing again—and, in turn, to link on the next reader, the one now taking in his review, as an indissoluble part of the process. And he could write. Again and again, he is capable of the acute perception, the absolutely convincing illumination of thought, that can transform the eye’s journey down a page into a sensual and startling experience. In a piece about Mark Twain he says, “The peculiar power of American nostalgia is that it is not only harking back to something lost in the past, but suggests also the tragedy of a lost future.” Writing about John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, he takes note of the attention Updike pays to television commercials, the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, vinyl car seating, and the like, and ventures, “It has always seemed to me that in his preoccupation with the stillness of domestic objects Updike is a descendant, in writing, of the Dutch genre painters, to whom everything in a house, in nature, or in human posture had the gleam of usage on it without which a deeply domestic culture could not survive its own boredom.”
It is riveting to read him on Wilson, another non-academic who had a long, work-stuffed life as a writer, and was another venerated contributor to this magazine. They could not have been more different. Wilson, a mandarin in every sense, was an intellectual aristocrat and snob, an indefatigable partygoer, and a daring solo voyager into scholarship. Pritchett never produced anything on the order of Wilson’s obsessive studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois, Pushkin, or revolutionary history, nor did he possess the gossipy, alcoholic sociability that went into Wilson’s five decades of diaries. But Wilson, who was impatient with strangers and scornful of the sort of people who went to the movies, could never have written a Pritchett story.
Here, in any case, is Pritchett looking back to “To the Finland Station,” a work that he believed was perhaps the only book on the grand scale to come out of the thirties: “[Wilson] was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to book…. He is a critic in whom history is broken up into minds. And despite the awkwardness of his prose, he is a coherent artist in the architecture of his subject. I mean that he is an artist—this is evident in so much of his writing—in the sense that he is a man possessed. The effect is all the stronger because he is not exalted; he is, indeed, phlegmatic, as if his whole idea were a matter of grasp…. An egotist himself, he understands that the egotism of his conspirators is a passion and a fate.”
What in the world would Edmund Wilson have made of this? He is called an awkward, phlegmatic, egotistic writer but at the same moment becomes the recipient of a rush of world-class compliments that say things about him which even he himself has perhaps not perceived. He can’t complain, because he has been taken seriously and originally; the contract has been observed, and he will never be quite the same again.
—
PRITCHETT BELIEVED THAT HE had portrayed himself
best in his critical works, but for me the stories convey a richer sense of the man, and perhaps more of his unconscious self. They are crowded with sexual passion and an almost pagan happiness in the unexpected turns of life. His characters tend toward the eccentric; they are all elbows and attitude, and puffed with hysterical self-regard. They share an off-center British strain that connects with the Ealing comedies, those weird interviewees on “Monty Python,” and the wrangling families in a Mike Leigh movie. Pritchett had a fondness for British middle-to-lower-middle-class professionals and survivors—hairdressers, landladies, landscape gardeners, rag-trade merchants, butchers’ widows, decorators, club stewards—and their gabble and confidence contribute to the thick impasto of talk and distracting side events which makes his fiction surprising and familiar at the same time. He drew on everything he knew for the stories, down to the smallest prop or gesture. “Just a Little More” gets its title from the murmur of its gluttonous old gentleman as he helps himself to another serving of beef—the same greedy catchphrase that Pritchett’s plump, self-indulgent father says at table in “A Cab at the Door.” A temperamental fig tree that used to stand in the back garden of Pritchett’s house in Regent’s Park Terrace—I can recall Victor complaining about having to sweep up its huge yellow leaves each November—also droops and drops its leaves in “The Fig Tree”; and a Victorian glass case full of stuffed birds which I remember in their first-floor sitting room turns up in the Noisy Brackett trilogy. “Cocky Olly,” a story about a fourteen-year-old girl falling in love with a bohemian, art-suffused family next door, takes its name from an invented, dash-about indoor game that the children of the house play—the same game, as Oliver Pritchett has pointed out in his foreword to “The Pritchett Century,” that he and his sister, Josephine, sometimes played as young children. Nothing odd or distinctive has been forgotten; the same opulent memory that illuminated “A Cab at the Door” works to dress the sets and write the dialogue in this unreeling vivid show of fiction.
Pritchett was eighty-eight when he wrote “Cocky Olly,” which shares with his other late stories a strain of penetrating affection while omitting the imperious, world-well-lost exclusivity that the young require when they are in love. In “On the Edge of the Cliff,” a pair of elderly former lovers have met again by accident but quickly agree not to see each other anymore: each is clinging to a much younger lover, and though they know that these arrangements can’t last they don’t want to hurry the process by throwing the young people together. The former lovers part without regret, almost blithely, each recognizing the stratagems and kinds of acceptance that are necessary to keep hold of such luck. Pritchett’s lovers aren’t particularly lovable: the middle-aged, long-since-abandoned wife and the shouting, preposterous widower who are park neighbors in “Did You Invite Me?” have every conceivable reason not to get together, including their two dogs, who fight. We don’t like the pair enough to want a happy ending, but they know what they have seen in each other, and must have. Almost apologetically, Pritchett tips us off at the end: their houses are up for sale, one of the dogs has a new owner, and the other has disappeared somewhere.
Summing up fiction is a losing game, of course, and if I persist here it is only to suggest the exuberant disorder that blows through the Pritchett stories. “Cocky Olly” puts two children on the wrong train—a huge mess, involving misunderstandings, lies, the police, and a headline murder case. We can barely follow it, but the children don’t care. They love every minute because this is what life is like to them at its best; they are at home in muddle. In one of his last stories, “A Change of Policy,” a brainy, grownup couple—he an art publisher, she the recent editor of an intellectual journal—are almost too busy to fall in love. He has a wife who has been in a deep coma after an accident, and a young son; the woman, Paula, is uneasy—it’s all too much for her. In delayed, glancing, elegantly circumstantial fashion, they do become lovers. Then he is killed in a horse-riding accident, which we hear about, disbelieving, through a garbled overseas telephone call. There is a shift, a little pause of years, and then a quiet ending that contains a turnabout. It’s almost an O. Henry–esque surprise. “Come on,” we want to say, but something holds us back. Fiction need not always confirm our knowing, irony-abraded wariness; sometimes we need it to motor along life’s outer possibilities, to provide the jolts and swerves that keep us awake, against all odds, and up for the next part of the trip.
The almost visible sweetness that surrounded Victor Pritchett in his later years flowed from a happy sixty-one-year marriage, and the glances and flashes of attention that he and Dorothy directed toward each other in the company of friends were a caution. She was his amanuensis and translator—he wrote in a squiggly, mystifying private Cyrillic—and his most trusted editor. I remember the look of blissful pride that overtook him one night when some extroverted Welsh topers in a London pub we were in spotted a Cymry strain in Dorothy’s calm, intelligent face and coaxed her into the inevitable singalong.
I can’t quite place the London restaurant where Carol and I had our last lunch with the Pritchetts, but I remember a little swatch of afternoon sunshine lying across our table as we finished our coffee, and the happy, unstopping flow of talk: about absent friends (my splendid colleague Edith Oliver); about Wimbledon (Dorothy was mad for Navratilova); books (Trollope, I think); and times gone by (the broiling-hot July in the mid-sixties when, by coincidence, they had ended up subletting the walkup apartment directly over ours, on East Ninety-fourth Street, and how the odd, bumping footsteps we kept hearing overhead were finally explained when they told us that they stayed cool up there by going naked all day). Perhaps this was also the lunch when Victor told us about calling upon Yeats, years and years before, in Dublin, and about the great man’s coming out onto Merrion Square wearing only one sock; he drew its mate out of his pocket and, leaning on his young visitor, pulled it on. So we ended another meal with laughter, and did not linger long, much as we wished to. Pritchett never showed the dazed, half-there look of the mid-book author—he was too considerate for that—but it was understood by everyone who cared about him that his main engagement always awaited him. After our goodbyes and their cab ride home that day, there might be a nap for him, but soon he would climb the four flights of stairs to his top-floor study, fire up his pipe, and pick up his book or writing board. He was back on the road.
Books, December, 1997
LONG GONE
LIFE AND LETTERS
Christmas has flown, and mail at home this week will produce shiny bargain-sale notices, some bills and invitations, an early thank-you note for a gift, and a late Christmas card or two, but perhaps not an actual letter. There’s nothing new about this, but a bit of sadness, a pang, has remained since the Postal Service announced, last month, that it will soon drop any promises of next-day delivery for first-class letters. The post office is broke, and the forty per cent of the first-class mail that currently reaches us within a day will now arrive in two, or even three. Two hundred and fifty-two local post offices are being considered for elimination, and only congressional approval is delaying the termination of Saturday mail service. We’ve done this to ourselves, of course, and done it eagerly, with our tweets and texts, our Facebook chat, our flooding e-mails, and our pleasure in the pejorative “snail mail.” Well, yes, O.K., but where’s the damage? Why these blues?
Letters aren’t exactly going away. Condolence letters can’t be sent out from our laptops, and maybe not love letters, either, because e-mail is so leaky. Secrets—an expected baby, a lowdown joke, a killer piece of gossip—require a stamp and a sealed flap, and perhaps apologies do as well (“I don’t know what came over me”). Not much else. E-mail is cheap, and the message is done and delivered almost as quickly as the thought of it. The sense that something’s been lost can produce the glimmering notion that overnight mail itself must have been a sign of thrilling modernity once. The penny post (with its stamps and its uniform rates) arrived in the United Kingdom in 1840, and in
the decade that followed Anthony Trollope, a postal inspector, was travelling all over Ireland on the swift new express trains and persistent locals, to make sure that every letter, wherever bound, was actually being delivered the next day. On those same trains, he sat and wrote novels, and in the novels dukes and barristers and young M.P.s and wary heiresses and country doctors were writing letters that moved the plot along or reversed it or tilted it in some way. The restless energy of Victorian times, there and here at home, demanded fresh news and lots of it. I myself can recall the four-o’clock-in-the-afternoon arrival of the second mail of the day at our house when I was a boy, and the resultant changes of evening plans.
If we stop writing letters, who will keep our history or dare venture upon a biography? George Washington, Oscar Wilde, T. E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Wendell Holmes, E. B. White, Vera Nabokov, J. P. Morgan—if any of these vivid predecessors still belong to us in some fragmented private way, it’s because of their letters or diaries (which are letters to ourselves) or thanks to some strong biography built on a ledge of letters. Twenty years ago, many of us got a whole new sense of the Civil War while watching and listening to Ken Burns’s nine-part television documentary, which took its poignant tone from the recital of Union and Confederate soldiers’ letters home. G.I.s in the Second World War wrote home on fold-over V-Mail sheets. Troops in Afghanistan and, until lately, Iraq keep up by Skype and Facebook, and in some sense are not away at all.
Writers can’t stop writing, and it’s cheering to think which of them would have switched over to electronics had it been around. The poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop conducted an enormous correspondence—four hundred and fifty-nine letters, between 1947 and 1977 (“What a block of life,” Lowell said), spanning three continents and, between them, six or eight different lovers or partners—but one need read only a few pages of these melancholic literary exchanges to know that the latest BlackBerry or iPhone never would have penetrated their consciousness. The best account of London under siege during the early years of the Second World War came from Harold Nicolson, a British diplomat who knew everyone in the political and literary and social scenes, kept Pepysian diaries, and wrote incessantly to his wife, Vita Sackville-West, at Sissinghurst Castle, their home in Kent. When their sons Ben and Nigel went off to war, he added them to the list. It’s my guess that the avidly busy Nicolson would have relished e-mail but would not have skipped a single letter.
