Last Call: Perfect Pritchett
Carnegie, Marc
LAST CALL by Marc Carnegie Perfect Pritchett T O THE AMERICAN EAR THE CRISP British elegance of his name —V.S. Pritchett—sounds almost comically upper-crust; and you could be forgiven for...
...His sense of craft came, he thought, from having grown up among "nonintellectual people, all in trades...
...41490 May 1997 • The American Spectator...
...and you could be forgiven for mistaking it for the name of some down-at-heel swell out of Wodehouse or Waugh, a hapless and dissolute fellow who never recovers from having been born to the manor and the silver spoon...
...He was more ambivalent about America itself, especially its writers...
...He left London for Paris in 1921, just 20 years old and in possession of only 20 pounds, distributed between the three pockets of his one set of clothes...
...In Midnight Oil, a memoir of his early writing years in France, Ireland, and Spain, he recounted his own initiation into the mating ritual...
...The modest Pritchett would never have called himself valiant...
...At the time of his death in late March, the 96-year-old Pritchett had published more than forty volumes of fiction, criticism, journalism, travel essays, biography, and memoir, and was generally thought to be the greatest prose craftsman of his time...
...Said the esteemed critic Frank Kermode once: "He is by such a margin the finest English writer alive that it hardly seems worth saying so...
...He wanted to write, and did...
...In America," he told Paul Theroux, "the writer's ego is allowed to expand...
...his own favorite, "Sense of Humour," relates the tale of a love affair between a silly hotel receptionist and the son of an undertaker...
...After he dies in a horrible crash, his body is taken to burial—in a hearse driven by the undertaker's son and the girl...
...Here are two perfect sentences from his well-known short story "The Diver," set in 1920'S Paris: "I would set off in the morning and see the grey, ill-painted buildings of the older quarters leaning together like people, their shutters thrown back, so that the open windows looked like black and empty eyes...
...This attitude doubtless grew from personal experience...
...His two-inch-thick Complete Collected Stories includes more than eighty of them...
...Shaking with anticipation he opened the pharmacy package to discover a supply of liver pills...
...The idea of a writer as a conscientious, deliberate maker of durable goods appears rather quaint these days...
...As they drive off into their new life together, her ex, the man realizes with a kind of morbid fascination, is still following them: "behind us in the coffin...
...In any other country he would be forced to know his own literature...
...stories are by comparison rather like swimming trunks, in which the excess cannot be hidden or disguised...
...And loyal they remained: every year the New Yorker signed afresh a contract giving it first rights to new Pritchett stories...
...Presently the manager was summoned...
...He had encountered the "perpetual British 'no' to the new boy," but American publications sided with him from the outset...
...In its obituary the New York Times misquoted his mocking self-description: "his fattish face is supported by a valiance of chins...
...yet against the shoddy manufacturing that has overtaken his vocation his prose stands in almost wild defiance...
...METICULOUSNESS OF CONSTRUCTION led Pritchett naturally to the short story...
...The exacting craftsman would have found that funny...
...At 15 he was forced to leave school, and took a job as a clerk in a tannery...
...IT EXCITES ME TO WORK HARD," Pritchett declared, and until a stroke this winter he wrote every day...
...Thus prepared, Pritchett months later found himself somewhat surprised to have invited to his rooms a fat Dutch girl...
...This clash of comedy and terror is the essence of the Pritchett style...
...In the morning the bedding was thrown over the sills to air and hung out, wagging like tongues about what goes on in the night between men and women...
...He had decided the first step was to purchase some condoms, but he stammered so in embarrassment at the pharmacy counter that the young clerk could not divine his request...
...It is still there...
...By age 12 his family had moved eighteen times, always but a step or two ahead of the creditors...
...What he wrote was a "valence" of chins—a fringe of plumpness...
...His father, a salesman, went bust...
...In fact Pritchett inherited a silver tongue, priceless for a story-teller, but little else...
...It was sloppiness that he could not abide, and in literary and journalistic America there was plenty...
...IN LATER YEARS HE MODESTLY CLAIMED that when starting out he had had the "good luck to meet the American 'yes' tc my first bits of writing...
...Like all good observers he was neither a moralist nor a sentimentalist, and often as not he found the subject of sex a source of dark comedy...
...Novels are loose like robes...
...The older man recognized his customer's shyness, and presented him with a discreet package, neatly wrapped as is still the custom in France today...
...WHAT GOES ON IN THE NIGHT BETWEEN MEN and women was a theme Pritchett returned to frequently in his work...
...The girl's old boyfriend jealously trails them everywhere on his motorcycle...
...The images startle with their freshness, and it is typical of Pritchett that they are not gratuitous adornments but essential to the story: the narrator is, for the first time, about to go to bed with a woman...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
