The Tireless Author
BERMEL, ALBERT
The Tireless Author V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life By Jeremy Treglown Random. 352 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Albert Bermel Playwright, critic; author, "Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing...
...On spring nights, Pritchett wrote to friends, he and Dorothy heard the hippos in the nearby park zoo "mating and roaring...
...What confronted us on those cramped but clarifying pages of the New Statesman was nothing ha-ha funny...
...Clough's weakness as a poet comes from shortness of imagination, from the logician's determination not to see beyond his subject...
...Yet see how he amplifies in his essay on Arthur Hugh Clough, "The Poet of Tourism": "What is a tourist...
...He performed reading and proofing chores for publishers and gave lectures galore on BBC radio and television...
...Over a career of eight decades, he had meticulously tapped out close to 200 dancing, gliding, intoxicating pieces about memorable authors: a great-hearted assortment of men and women from just about every age and era, working in a multitude of tongues...
...keeps alive a perpetual sense of comedy...
...Is this observation not prophetic...
...A comic character, of course, for he is a fish out of his proper waters...
...Pritchett finds those words evocative enough to need no further elaboration...
...He is good, homely, friendly and decent...
...How he keeps himself to himself...
...Gulliver is sane...
...Pritchett's Complete Collected Essays, compiled in 1992, five years before this deathless writer died...
...We were drawn to his writing not only by his fund of information and historical (and geographical and social and cultural) knowledge, and his superb stylistic playfulness, but even more by his endearing personality...
...Belimele—hundreds of short stories, and letters dashed off or pondered over at all times of the day and night...
...That it continues to glow in his work surely reflects his healthy responses to the good and bad in life...
...This is Gulliver himself...
...He even managed to tarn out the infrequent love poem...
...Perhaps we were looking for something more imposing, like grand theoretical statements...
...He edited the London Times Literary Supplement from 1982 to 1990...
...Reviewers seemed to take it for granted...
...author, "Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies" Before embarking on this biography I revisited VS...
...Jeremy Treglown has written two previous studies, Roald Dahl: A Biography (1994) and Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (2001), which won the Dictionary of Literary Biography award...
...His income was further fattened by literary awards on both sides of the Atlantic, a prolific output of short stories, and republication of his work in collections...
...He preferred to treat the peculiarities he found in their work as characteristics worth thought and an extended discussion in a mode Treglown astutely refers to as impressionism—it might also be considered pointillism—for the text hops from one topic or color to another...
...Jeremy Treglown's subtitle, A Working Life, captures the essence of the biography: Pritchett could not pull back from writing until he was into his 90s...
...The boy left school as a young teenager and from thereon taught himself as he went along...
...He now teaches English at the University of Warwick in England, and at Princeton and CalTech in the U.S...
...He assumed, without knowing it, Dickensian roles...
...It remains a secret how he found (or made) time to write so copiously, let alone correct his first drafts...
...He also composed novels— among them the delectable Mr...
...When in 1975 he became Sir Victor Pritchett, his knighthood initially occasioned genial joking by his two children with Dorothy, Josephine and Oliver, and some of his longtime friends...
...A watered-down Hamlet, perhaps...
...But if in isolating a theme, we drain the overflowing spirit from it, there are the advantages of freshness, truthfulness and exactitude...
...He put together at least one known patriotic pamphlet for the British government during World War II, entitled "Build the Ships...
...His interwoven chapters on the life and magnitude of Pritchett, including his relationships with friends, editors, relatives, and significant others, cohere in a sympathetic and symphonic whole...
...Encountering pieces today that I read years ago, I see with surprise how frequently Pritchett refers to "good humor," a phrase he actually employed as the title of one of his stories...
...IN MY LAST two or three years at high school in London, we would hurry to a newsstand whenever the New Statesman had solicited a Pritchett article...
...The world is mad, grotesque, a misanthropic Irishman's self-destructive fantasy...
...Treglown writes affectionately, and when informal touches seem required for, say, Pritchett's impassioned wooing of Dorothy and one of his mistresses, the American Barbara Kerr, he is convincing, not obtrusive...
...and the parrots, monkeys, seals screaming with love...
...Altogether, the cash flow kept him just about solvent for most of his life and in time made him well-to-do, but only so long as he wrote at a persistently high speed and quality...
...Apropos of Saul Bellow, Pritchett tells us, "The habit of seeing things askance or out of the corner of his eye...
...the short fiction brought comparisons with Chekhov, Eudora Welty and others at the supreme levels of written artistry, as did his writings on travel and political tides and currents...
...And here are a few words about Jonathan Swift and Gulliver's Travels: "There is one more country in [Lemuel Gulliver's] story which is the counterblast to Laputa, Lilliput and the whole list...
...They range from the comic to the melodramatic, tragic and farcico-pastoral— more categories than Polonius dreamed of...
...His second, more passionate marriage to Dorothy was also endangered by love affairs, yet the partners succeeded in keeping their relationship animated for the rest of his life...
...He refrained from mocking writers he disagreed with...
...This was not a trait particularly associated with him, but neither was bad humor...
...He was one of the most prodigious travel writers of his century...
...In an essay called "Club and Country," Pritchett remarks that the father of Evelyn Waugh "talked aloud to imaginary people continuously...
...He ended up the most subtle and admired critic of the several generations he outlasted...
...He deceived the petite Evelyn with Dorothy Roberts, who was bigger and much younger than he was—19 to his 3 3. Sour, drawn-out divorce proceedings ensued...
...Colleges and culture merchants at home and abroad coaxed him into delivering talks, some formal, some relaxed and personal...
...but Gulliver is not...
...Rather, it was quiet and impish...
...His oceanic output was prompted at first by assignments from the daily Manchester Guardian (as it was originally known), and subsequently from weeklies of the Left like the New Statesman & Nation, as well as American glossies and weighty payers like the New Yorker...
...As a child, he often followed his debtridden family out of their front door in southeast London and into a waiting taxi—recalled in the memoir A Cab at the Door (1968)—that took them to new places where they could accumulate fresh debts...
...But essays display only one of Pritchett's skills...
...Anyone who has tried to survive financially by catering to the freelance market discovers swiftly that disappointments lurk for unpredictable reasons: editorial queries that call for rewrites, deadlines that can prove fatal, restaffing, squabbles over content and style, and—most distressing—one's own shortcomings...
...Although short, he liked large, well cushioned women...
...His novels won him acclaim...
...Treglown tactfully reports that after a dozen years Pritchett found his first wife, Evelyn Vigors, incompatible...
...By then an illustrious commentator worldwide, he had moved upscale to what Treglown describes as "a run-down but potentially still elegant terrace between Regent's Park and Camden Town...
...When Alfred Hitchcock requested a critique of The Birds, Pritchett answered the call...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
