I am fortunate in these times which are hard for many workers—especially the pensioned-off or redundant—to be “in work.” Many a pensioner, forced to be idle against his will, has greater reserves of character than I have. I do have my occasional days of leisure, but for the most part I have to carry what Keats called the indispensable sense of “negative capability” about with me and then, as he also said, work makes “the disagreeables evaporate.”
I look back now at my “evaporations” with astonishment. If I spent my boyhood in the low Kippsian regions of Edwardian Britain, the British assurance and locality had given an elegance to British comedy. The “man of letters” I aspired to be was pre-eminent, if poor, in English periodical writing. Also modest families like mine were beneficiaries of the Education Act of the 1870s. Disagreeable to have education cut short at fifteen, but there had been a brief evaporation into foreign languages at a grammar school, language of any kind being my obsession.
It was disagreeable at first to be put into the malodorous leather trade, but the animality of skins fascinated me and so did the Bermondsey leather dressers and fellmongers. The smell of that London of my boyhood and bowler-hatted youth is still with me. I coughed my way through a city stinking, rather excitingly, of coal smoke, gas escapes, tanyards, breweries, horse manure and urine. Flies swarmed, people scratched their fleas. The streets smelled of beer; men and boys reeked of hair oil, vaseline, strong tobacco, powerful boot polish, mackintoshes and things like my father’s voluptuous cachous.
The smell of women was racy and scented. Clothes were heavy; utterances—in all classes—were sententious whether witty or not. Music hall songs were epigrammatic stories. “Lurve” had not yet killed them. Artful euphemism hid a secret archive of bad language. If a “bloody” broke through, people would say “Language, I hear,” disapproving as they admired. Hypocrisy was a native fruit, if then overripe.
By 1918 the skirts of the liberated girls who had worked in ammunition factories and offices were shortened a few inches. One now saw their erotic ankles and sex broke out; not as yet in plain Anglo-Saxon, but soon Latinised as copulation in the classier Twenties, for youths like myself who had moved on to Aldous Huxley. I had read enormously, most of Scott, Dickens, most of the Victorian novelists, caught up with Chesterton and Bennett and was heading for Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.
I might have stuck in leather all my life but 1918 liberated me. Travel was cheap; I “evaporated” to Paris, earned my living in the shellac and glue trade and discovered I could write sketches. I became the autodidact abroad and education was open to me at last.
It was even good luck to grow up among non-intellectual people, all in trades; better luck, to have a vocation fixed in my mind—so few boys have—to grow up in a period when the printed language was the dominant teacher and pleasure-giver. Good luck to escape, by going abroad, the perpetual British “no” to the new boy; good luck to meet the American “yes” to my first bits of writing. France, Ireland, Spain were for six years my universities. They taught me European history and the conflicts of cultures and quickly got me clear of the hurdles of the then sticky English class system. Once they have made their bid, all kinds of artists—writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, educated or not—are free of that. It is also half-native in our tribe that we can talk and listen to anyone in his language. Among writers Kipling is an exemplar of what travel does for this faculty.
Since the wilful Twenties, the committals of the Thirties, it seems to me that my life as a man and as a writer has been spent on crossing and recrossing frontiers and that is at the heart of any talent I have. It cheers me that I live on the frontier of Camden Town and Regent’s Park. Frontier life has been nourishing to me. Throwing something of oneself away is a way of becoming, for the moment, other people, and I have always thought that unselfing oneself, speaking for others, justifying those who cannot speak, giving importance to the fact that they live, is especially the privilege of the storyteller, and even the critic—who is also an artist.
And here, at the age of forty when the Second World War seemed that it would ruin my life as a short story writer, novelist and critic, I found that my early life in trade was an advantage: it prepared me for another evaporation. I had to divide my time between serious criticism in the New Statesman every week and studies of factories, mines, shipyards, railway sidings and industrial towns. I did my literary work in trains. I have always been wary of what used to be called “committal” to the social and political ideologies which numbers of my contemporaries preached and now in war my foreignness abated: I began to know once more how my own people lived: that abstraction called The People dissolved as I saw real people living lives in conditions unlike my own but with passions like mine and as proud of something unique in them.
The decisive books of the period about English life for me were Jack Common’s The Freedom of the Streets and—on the Spanish war—Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit. I found my own raison d’être in some words of Dostoevsky’s that “without art a man might find his life on earth unliveable.”
If as a storyteller I have had an ear for how people speak and my travelling, bookish nature turned me into that now fading type, a man of letters, how do I see the changes that have slowly come about in the past forty years? In a searching way these changes were predicted in the late Thirties by Louis Mumford in his absorbing book The Culture of Cities. My London has become a megalopolis. It has turned into a fantastic foreign bazaar. The Third World is replacing the traditional European immigrants.
Mumford argued that social betterment has been outstripped every decade by technology. We have become, or feel we have become, anonymous items in a mass society at once neutral and bizarre. As for technology the printed word no longer predominates in popular taste and, as Auden said, literature is now turning into “a cottage industry.” The descendants of ordinary people who read their Dickens and the Victorian and Edwardian periodicals have given up the printed word for the instant sensation of sight and sound, for pictures on the screen.
One can tell this, if by nothing else, from popular speech in which half the vowels and consonants are missing, and in which a sentence becomes like one slurred word, a telegraphic message. The schools have turned out a large number of grown men and women who cannot read or write, for machines have made this unnecessary for them. I suppose the small core of addicted readers will remain, just as Latin remained for the medieval clerks, but the outlook for prose is not good. The new generation faces the attack of spoken and visual drama which cuts out our prose.
No professional writer becomes famous until his work has been televised or filmed: the rest of us may have to live in the conceit of being like the lamenting figures in the chorus of the Greek drama. That chorus was, in its tedious, humble way, the indispensable gang of prosing human moralists chanting the general dismay as they watched the impersonal and violent passions murderously at work on a stage without backcloth. We may of course become Aristophanic fabulists mocking the ruling cliques of a State Machine. Anthony Burgess and Angus Wilson are revelling in this at the moment.
There is another danger to literary culture: it comes from the technological habits of academic criticism. Scholars have been for ages the traditional conservers of literary tradition, but under the powerful influences of technology and the sciences, linguistics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, they are now using a new and portentous verbiage. They detach themselves from life and reduce it to an esoteric game or treat it as a kind of engineering. Their commentaries are full of self-important and comic irrelevancies. Their specialised ironmongery may be good training for engineers, scientists and spacemen, but it has little relation to imaginative literature.
I speak from experience for—to my astonishment as one who had never been inside any university until I was turned fifty—I have found myself teaching at Princeton, Berkeley, Columbia and the delightful Smith College, in the United States. I suppose to give their tormented Faculties a re
st while I unloaded a chattering mind that has always read for delight. I like teaching because it wakes me up and teaches me and I am grateful to those institutions for giving me the free time an imaginative writer needs and which I get little of in England.
From my earliest days I have liked the natural readiness and openness of the American temperament and I had been brought up in childhood a good deal on the classic American writers and their direct response to the world they lived in. If American seriousness is often exhausting, the spontaneous image-making vernacular and wit are excellent. American short stories have often an archaic directness more striking than our own. I must also say that some of the most illuminating and helpful remarks about my own writing have come from American critics who, unlike so many of our own, are not out to display themselves rather than the authors they are dealing with. As for the American student—naive and earnest he may sometimes be, as I was when young; but he is continuously expectant and is without the European sneer.
At eighty I look at the horrible state of our civilisation. It seems to be breaking up and returning to the bloody world of Shakespeare’s Histories which we thought we had outgrown. But public, like private life, proceeds in circles. The Third World is reliving history we have forgotten and indeed brings its violence to our cities. I am a humanist but I do not think human beings are rational: their greeds and passions are not quickly outgrown. We have now to school ourselves to deal with danger and tragedy.
I have some stoicism but I have often thought lately of a courageous friend of mine, now dead, an adventurous explorer, mountaineer and rather reckless yachtsman. He was one of those born to test his fears. I once sailed in a wild gale with him—much against my will—and was terrified, for I am afraid of the sea and have never learned to swim more than ten yards. He was not afraid. Or, if he feared, his fears exhilarated him and, in fact, vanished in danger because (he said) he was always “thinking of the next thing to do.” (I suppose this is what I do, when I leave land for the perils of writing prose in which there have been so many shipwrecks.) In physical danger I am capable only of identifying myself with my evil: not as good a recourse as his, but it helps.
I have another friend, eighty-six years old, who has lately been hit by a tragedy in his family. He said he wanted to die at once—but not, he added, until he had seen what happened next in Poland and after that in Iran. At eighty I find myself on the lookout expectantly for the unexpected and am more than half allured by it.
Am I wiser in my old age? I don’t know. I am not yet old enough to know loneliness and that puts one to the tests of folly and rage. But I am more tolerant than when I was young. I was not an affectionate young man and indeed I was thought of as fierce—a bolting pony, someone once said. But passionate love made me affectionate. I am deeply touched by the affection I now receive. It is one of the rewards of old age. I suppose I am slowly growing up. I am not a man’s man for I owe much to women since my boyhood when my mother fascinated me by the whirligig of her humour and her emotions. And what about serenity? I see that many old women have it. In men it is more often torpor and I am drawn to activity and using myself. And to laughter, which wakes up the mind.
Strangely, laughter seems to me like the sexual act which is perhaps the laughter of two bodies. Whatever there is to be said for serenity there is not much opportunity for it in the modern world; and indeed I know by watching myself that old people are liable to fantasies of sadistic vengeance. The old should not look at the news on television at night.
The pleasures of old age are of the lingering kind, love itself becomes more mysterious, tender and lasting. The great distress of old age is the death of friends, the thinning ranks of one’s generation. The air grows cold in the gaps. Something of oneself is drained away when friends go, though in mourning for them we learn to revalue a past we had more than half forgotten, and to bring them walking back to keener life in our memory. We have been members of one another. In old age we increasingly feel we are strangers and we warm to those who treat us as if we are not.
The new sensation is that living people are a wonder. Have you noticed how old people stare at groups of talkers, as if secretly or discreetly joining them silently at a distance? This does not happen to me much for I am always on the move, but I am aware of it. I used to sit long over my beer in pubs and clubs; now I swallow a double gin and run. I don’t know why. Trying to pack more into the day? No: I just want to get home.
A sign of old age in myself is that, knowing my time is limited, I find myself looking at streets and their architecture much longer and more intensely and at Nature and landscape. I gaze at the plane tree at the end of the garden, studying its branches and its leaves. I look a long time at flowers. And I am always on the watch for the dramatic changes in the London sky. I have always liked to sketch formations of clouds. I store up the procession of headlands and terrifying ravines of North Cornwall and of all the landscapes that have formed me: the shapes of the Yorkshire Fells and the Downs in Sussex and Wiltshire, the tableland of Castile.
I have no religious faith. I am no pantheist or sentimentalist in my love of Nature but simply an idolater of leaf, hill, stream and stone. I came across a line of Camus which drily describes people like myself:
“One of our contemporaries is cured of his torment simply by contemplating a landscape.”
That, and lately falling into the habit of reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on Sunday evenings, “evaporates the disagreeables” of history that now advance on us: the irony of the learned Gibbon excites the sense of tragi-comedy and is, except for its lack of poetic sense, close to the feeling I have about the present and the past.
(1980)
FROM
A Cab at the Door
CHAPTER THREE
Such was the family I was born into. There was this cock-sparrow, my father, now a commercial traveller, dressy and expansive with optimism, walking in and out of jobs with the bumptiousness of a god. And there was our sulky moody mother, either laughing or in tears, playing The Maiden’s Prayer on the piano—she could “cross hands” too—and also The Mocking Bird which was closer to her nature. She would sink into mournful tales of illnesses and funerals, brood on railway accidents and ships lost at sea. She loved a short cry, easily went pink on her cheek-bones with jealousy or flew out into a fishwife’s tempers. She was a hard-working woman. We were in a small villa of damp red brick in Woodford. I had a brother now, Cyril, eighteen months younger than myself. My parents’ bedroom contained a large lithograph called Wedded. A Roman-looking couple are walking languorously along a city wall. The man had strong hairy legs and, I believe, wore a tiger skin. I confused him with my hairy father. In the twenties I met an Italian who had sat for the legs of this figure, one more blow to my sense of the uniqueness of our family. There was another lithograph called The Soul’s Awakening, a girl with her nightgown falling off in the wind as she was swept up to heaven. On the washstand there was yellow chinaware which had a pattern of Dutch girls and boys. Hidden behind the chamber-pot in the cupboard was a small copy of Aristotle’s “masterpiece” on gynaecology with startling pictures of the moronic foetus in the womb. In another cupboard were my father’s leather top-hat boxes; already he was buying clothes for himself in notable quantities. There were “words” if mother had not washed and ironed his underclothes or starched his cuffs and collars as well as his mother had done.
In the small dining-room there was red and blue linoleum of floral pattern. There was a small palm in a pot. There were ornaments with mottoes on them. “Dinna trouble trouble till trouble troubles you” and “Don’t Worry It May Never Happen.” Also a picture which gave me my first lesson in the “who” and “whom” difficulty. Two old men in red robes with their backs to each other, but looking with medieval grumpiness over their shoulders, held an antique parchment in their hands on which the following words were printed:
In Men Whom Men Condemn as Ill
I find so much goodness still,
>
In Men whom Men pronounce divine
I find so much of sin and blot
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two where God has not.
This poem was often bandied about and pointed at when Granda Pritchett came down to London and denounced my father’s latest religion, for Father was continually going one better in the matter of faith. The other picture showed simply an envelope on which was written:
Messrs Sell and Repent,
Prosperous Place,
The Earth.
This was the spirit of the early 1900’s. Things, as Father said, were beginning to hum.
My parents rarely stayed in one house for as long as a year. After Woodford there is a dash to Derby where Father hoped to do well with a Canadian Insurance Company, and where, in north-country fashion, we had a pump beside the sink; in a month or so we are back. We had various London addresses: Woodford again, Palmers Green, Balham, Uxbridge, Acton, Ealing, Hammersmith, Camberwell are some of them; then back to Ipswich again, on to Dulwich and Bromley. By the time I was twelve, Mother was saying we had moved fourteen times and Father went fat in the face with offence and said she exaggerated. At this, she counted up on her fingers and said she now made it eighteen.
We moved mainly to small red-brick villas, the rents running from 9s. and even to 12s. a week, once or twice to poor flats. It seemed to us that Father had genius. By the time there were four children—three boys and a girl—Father seemed as sumptuous as a millionaire and my mother was worn down. It was like a marriage of the rich and the poor. She cooked, cleaned, made our clothes and her own, rarely had the money to pay for a girl to help her and went about a lot of the day with a coarse apron on, her blouse undone and her hair down her back. Patently genius was lacking in her. For it was he who came home in the evenings or at week-ends from places like Glasgow, Bournemouth or Torquay, having stayed in hotels with names like Queens, Royal or Majestic, palaces of luxury. We learned to wait at the door and to open it for him when he came home, because he was affronted if he had to let himself in with his own key. We would often wait for an hour. When he got in he walked into the front room where we ate, sat down in an armchair and, without a word, put out his foot. Mother’s duty was to kneel and unbutton his boots until laced boots came in, when she unlaced them; eventually we squabbled for this honour. “Ease the sock” Father would say with regal self-pity. And he would tell her about the orders he had taken that week. His little order books were full of neat figures and smelled warmly of scent.
The Pritchett Century Page 3
