Nine Decades of Delight : COMPLETE COLLECTED STORIES, <i> By V. S. Pritchett (Random House: $35; 1,220 pp.)</i>

Pritchett--by now Sir Victor--has never made a secret of his personal delight in having been born late in 1900, giving him a sense of growing up with the century and saluting it in various ways with the advance of the years.

His first volume of autobiography, “A Cab at the Door,” taking him to the age of 20, includes his schooling and his learning the leather trade, and at the end finds him scratching out a living in Paris, declaring that he had become a foreigner. “For myself that is what a writer is--a man living on the other side of a frontier.”

His second volume, “Midnight Oil,” opens with “This is the year of my seventieth birthday, a fact that bewilders me.”

It is fitting, then, that this collection of 82 of his short stories, “complete” only in the sense that they are those he wishes to preserve out of a considerably greater number, should salute the close of his ninth decade. And that haunting early definition of “what a writer is” provides, at least for me, the key to reading Pritchett’s short stories. In each of them, no matter how commonplace and even familiar the characters may appear on first meeting, by the end the reader has indeed been led across a frontier.

The two volumes of autobiography eventually will provide, probably to Pritchett’s annoyance, a good bit of scholarly commentary on the short stories, which will remain his literary monument together with his direct, no-nonsense collections of literary criticism. One can recognize Sir Victor’s ne’er-do-well father in more than one character, and many stories cut close to the bone of Pritchett’s lower-class to lower-middle-class youth. For an American reader, especially, this is all to the good, not for the knowledge of “sources” but for a realistic view of what English life lived at those levels and at those times actually meant in physical human terms.

I say to his annoyance because Pritchett, widely read though he is in both English and European literature, always has proudly declared himself an autodidact, and as such lucky enough to have escaped the “literary culture” with its currently “technological habits of academic criticism,” allowing him to “read for delight.”

Delight is the prevailing spirit of these stories, delight in the variety of human eccentricities and fixations, the unsuspected secrets by which we all live.

Though it is close to futile to attempt expounding Pritchett’s individual stories, each is so sufficient unto itself that I can safely say that the great favorites all are here: “The Saint,” with its tolerant mockery of evangelical faith and dignity; “The Sniff,” in which a leading character is brilliantly characterized as “one of those men who like to see other people promoted over their heads”; “The Camberwell Beauty” with all its knowledge of dealing in antiques and the obsessions collectors live by, long misunderstood by the narrator; “The Chestnut Tree,” an account of what happens in an all-male business office when it takes on two women; and--Pritchett’s own favorite--”When My Girl Comes Home,” in which Hilda Johnson, who has left her staid English home and eventually reached Tokyo, where she married a Japanese, returns after the war, an exotic who has been misrepresented by the press.

That Pritchett always has enjoyed a considerable American following has sometimes puzzled me. I may have stumbled on the answer in an essay Pritchett wrote for his 80th birthday:

“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. . . . 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.”

We thank you, Sir Victor, and may you continue to thrive and win through to your century and beyond.