At Home and Abroad, V. S. Pritchett
Howard, Jennifer
AT HOME AND ABROAD V. S. Pritchett/North Point Press/352 pp. $19.95 Jennifer Howard V. S. Pritchett's status as a literary Methuselah has now lasted as long as the careers of some writers, and...
...He does offer this disclaimer: "Any foreigner who goes onto the international stage and offers a few quips and asides about the American character ought to state his qualifications...
...heck of it (or because they're paid to) and who go to places that anyone might go to if he had the whim to do so...
...The sea turned gray, and it seemed that it, too, had its forests, for when we looked out over the water, innumerable wooded islands, like schools of whales, were nosing northward with us into dirty weather...
...Degrading as these generalities feel (an American is tempted to protest that we can't be as naive and homogeneous as these figures sound), they're no less revealing for being so...
...I have only one...
...Very few writers can say of work specific to one time and place that it holds its currency thirty years or more after its genesis...
...Then, to bring this observation to life, Pritchett describes a Mediterranean buying clothes: ". . . patiently the assistant brings out all the cloth, all the shoes, and is not in the least upset if the customer refuses all...
...Any of these essays would be worth reading just for assurance that one genial master of the form still exists...
...Given the recent Free Trade Agreement between the United States and its northern neighbor, Pritchett's essay on Canada ("Across the Vast Land," 1964) has a strangely current feel to it...
...Pritchett also has a way of describing some one thing as a subtle way of tapping local roots...
...We cease to live in the future...
...No how-to practicality here...
...At Home and Abroad, in fourteen essays on locales from the Thames to the Amazon, demonstrates that Pritchett is an adept of the travel piece as well as the literary critique...
...But to point this out at all seems almost quibbling, given Pritchett's fine sharp eye for the little events of life that reveal people most honestly...
...Its particular nastiness is that it comes violently out of a clear sky and leaves the sun naked, wild, without heat...
...Last year, at the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Philadelphia, I was mistaken for the governor of Texas, to whom apologies...
...One hears of the driver who shoots a man who keeps him waiting for gasoline...
...That is the huge difference . . ." Moving eastward to "Europe's Mediterranean Coast," Pritchett in 1966 crossed from southern France over into Italy, ending at Trieste on the Yugoslavian border...
...Not only has he climbed over the fences separating essayists from novelists from short-story writers, but as an individual he has crossed from one twentieth-century era to another and as a writer has set down the differences between each time bracket and between those who people each one...
...Not all Spaniards in the south of France in 1966 could possibly have been resigned, indifferent, or dejected...
...This traveling Pritchett dates back to the twenties and forward into the sixties...
...Bodies are thrown into the Rhone...
...Pritchett characterizes and orders that world without turning it into so many specimens to feel quaint about, as eighties travel writers so often do so annoyingly...
...His arguments for these pronouncements are several "American prototypes"—bits of characters he found represented in many Americans...
...Rather he enjoys those sometimes politically inexpedient points at which one people, one nationality, one way of life ends and another one picks up...
...His travel essays go by frontiers as well—not necessarily political frontiers, though Pritchett is well aware of the definitions and struggles that those detail...
...It breaks the cypresses, drives the dust, plays intolerably on the nerves and the eyes...
...Having made a loop down through all the countries of the continent—via old Spanish Peru, into isolated Chile and back up into melting-pot Brazil—and having seen South America's two overpowering natural features, the Andes and the Amazon, Pritchett takes away with him a feeling of luck...
...Ontario," he suggests, "could be southern England except for one thing: a certain staidness...
...The mistral is blamed for the violence in the south of France...
...T o sort out these ends and begin- 1 nings Pritchett has to do what travel writers of a more "modern" stamp shudder to do: assign and describe what is whisperingly called (and rarely in public) "national character...
...In the south of France, it is the mistral, the wind that comes down the Rhone Valley, that catches him: It makes the vineyards toss and the trees look mad...
...Pritchett sees, in America, a nation "kept together by a paradox: a deep emotional sense of freedom," based on the abstraction of the American tradition, created in the eighteenth century, which must reconcile with "the standardization of human beings...
...The real Canadian nightmare, he writes, "is not fear of economic swamping by the rich neighbor with whom he has so much in common, but the old fear of disintegration...
...From the runway Nature lowered stormily on the city and looked stupendously rock-thighed and high...
...Landscape, people, local tales—and humor: all this in two short paragraphs...
...several essays take apart the "island nation" that he lives in, from London on up the Thames...
...On the contrary, the assistant admires the discrimination...
...Luck, he says, because to be in South America THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 47 in 1956 was "to see a continent at the moment of its awakening...
...Travel writing, though in fashion now in a way it hasn't been for years, certainly didn't begin with the current throng of travel magazines trying to make a glossy go of it...
...All the better for him that his work has been as varied as his years are numerous...
...And to be fair, Pritchett doesn't exempt his nation from scrutiny...
...This group doesn't include explorers, missionaries, imperialists, or visionary crackpots...
...until, in a sudden vertical mix-up of mountain, cloud, sea, forest and long, straight streets of bungalows and green lawns, we bumped down into Vancouver...
...the Spaniard turned against him...
...Pritchett abroad doesn't make any show of traveling light (though he may have) or penetrating deep into the outback or into the minds of some undiscovered indigenous tribe...
...But it's also comforting to be persuaded that the human brain can make sense of the entropic multitude of impressions that form the world...
...Reading At Home and Abroad is something like taking a very long plane ride that skims along a continent or world: an overview of brief but lingering scenes...
...Nor are the young gadabouts who write books detailing strange and comic journeys through foreign places (preferably hard to reach or very culturally backward) the first or best practitioners of vagabond writing...
...In an essay on Portugal written in 1956, Pritchett opens with a vignette: a Spaniard shouting in a Portuguese square, to the amusement of patient obliging locals...
...It was at Saint-Remy that Van Gogh walked into the asylum after cutting off his ear...
...Of going to the Pacific Northwest he writes: From San Francisco we flew north: out of the sunny city into the struggle with Nature...
...He has ingeniously invented an invisible apparatus for shooting arrows into himself...
...These threads of information, tangled together almost comically, become the rope by which Pritchett's impressions of the south of France hold together and latch onto a reader who wasn't there to overhear the overwrought waiter or see the cypresses being cut by the wind...
...B ut often Pritchett will light out into a stretch of pure, beautiful description, its layers of color and image and form as pleasurable to climb through as they must have been to lay down...
...Modernization may have had its effects, but "the sun, the wind, the matchless light, the fruitfulness of the soil, do not change...
...People who have read Pritchett's literary essays tend to think admiringly of him as a well-read man who follows his instincts about literature instead of some academic or critical rulebook, and whose style is as welcome in its candid craftsmanship as the witty presence of a raconteur at a chancy social event...
...C'est le mistral...
...He remembers a Catalan battling to have a window opened in the dining car of a French train but being rebuffed ("The French are great lawyers when it comes to the rules") and then refusing to pay his bill and getting hauled away for his defiance—one story, well chosen (and in At Home and Abroad they always are), enables Pritchett to say more about the national personalities involved than pages of detailed geographical description could...
...The sea turned sallow and then rank ocherish where the Fraser River stained it far beyond its delta with the silt of the Rockies...
...The essays in At Home and Abroad don't offer restaurant and hotel recommendations, best routes to and from, cautions about local water or weather, or suggestions about provisioning and clothing yourself for the trip...
...19.95 Jennifer Howard V. S. Pritchett's status as a literary Methuselah has now lasted as long as the careers of some writers, and so it is expected that any discussion of him should begin with the mention that he was born in 1900 and has been actively writing for most of the intervening time...
...The wish is everything, and for that, patience is indispensable and life is timeless...
...we start to live in the present hour...
...In a 1982 essay, another travel writer, Jonathan Raban, quoted Pritchett on Pritchett: "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...
...People get "nervous" and quarrel...
...that is why his venerability belongs to a timeless order of things, and why he and it have endured so long...
...Sometimes this assigning of character seems more like accidental assassination, going too far with too little provocation...
...Pritchett's west-east sweep from Vancouver to Halifax, cutting through the French and Anglo-Saxon hearts of the country, demonstrates this visibly...
...Among them: the American Pilgrim ("independent, religious, a ruthless old cuss"), Hiawatha ("the hero who can do anything"), and Sebastian, new world version of the saint ("He is a technician...
...Pritchett is as much at home abroad as he is comfortable in England, and complacent and dull in neither place...
...This is truest of his mammoth essay on South America, broken up country by country and written in 1956, before debt crises and Amazonian devastation superseded all other South American images...
...Instead of answering immediately from his (English) vantage point, he presents an Iberian answer: "It is a question which puzzles Spaniards but the Portuguese not at all...
...part of this time was spent as a correspondent for Holiday magazine (an early version of Conde Nast's Traveler...
...I t's strange to read Pritchett on America and see him turning an eye to one's own country ("The Americans in My Mind," 1963...
...Nor is he a connoisseur or gourmand, out to satisfy his belly around the world (which isn't to say that he travels on a spiritual plane alone...
...To see the Mediterranean, he writes, changes the northerner who comes south...
...Having so embodied a difference, he then asks (almost naively), "Why are Spain and Portugal separate...
...he has been saluted as a writer of short stories, hailed (albeit less enthusiastically) as a novelist, and, maybe most warmly of all, applauded as an essayist, the last of that near-extinct, nonacademic band called "men of letters...
...Pritchett falls somewhere between the glossies and the gadabouts...
...it simply consists of people who travel for the Jennifer Howard is an editorial assistant at the New York Review of Books...
...Only in the next paragraph does he give the Pritchett answer: "The westward-looking Portuguese turned by need to the sea and the foreigner...
...Clouds bowled over Oregon, darkened over Washington, the rainstorms began and, below, the forests came tramping down in endless wet armies to meet us...
...how easy is it, really, when 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 in Marseilles, to "pick out the Spaniards at once by their look of resignation, indifference and blank sadness...
...We are changed by the clarity of the light—and this is important to us who live either in mists or in a northern light so hard that it illuminates nothing—because the Mediterranean light makes us see each thing, each stone, wall, house, tree, separately, so that we accept it—as Mediterraneans do, for itself...
...Worst of all for strict individualists, universal humanists, or those whose parents told them never to judge people on short acquaintance, Pritchett's assessments are not based on long obvious study of each place—though it's reassuring that he can produce a piece of local linguistic or mythological information whenever he feels a need to—but always to back up some point, never to impress...
...He isn't an explorer or a risk-taker (which isn't to say that he lacks intrepidity...
...The waiter announces he is going to shoot his wife...
...But in Montreal, "an elderly man came out of a taverne near the Place d'Armes, having wined rather well, andhe made a fine flourish with his hand and shouted, `Vive la France!' at us, with all the esprit moqueur of his people...
...The essays in At Home and Abroad sometimes have the opposite effect, as though Pritchett designed them to freeze a piece of history...
...They have (they say) been able 'to imagine themselves as a people,' in spite of their similarities of history...
...What Pritchett is, as he himself has suggested, is a frontiersman...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
