His ‘nothing’ life was quite something

The biography “V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life” says that he emerged during World War II “as not only Britain’s leading ‘man of letters,’ but the greatest writer-critic since Virginia Woolf.” “Writer-critic” -- as opposed to “critic-critic” or theorist -- is an apt expression for what Pritchett did and was not alone in doing. There were two V.S.’s on the New Statesman in the 1960s, Pritchett and Naipaul -- Victor and Vidia -- and Naipaul is another writer-critic for whom high claims can be made. He reviewed novels in the paper for a while; Pritchett had been reviewing a multitude of books there for 30 years. Naipaul is not much in evidence in the present book, but his early novel about a South London officeworker, “Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion,” reads like a homage to Pritchett. (Pritchett was familiarly known as VSP; I doubt whether Naipaul was referred to as VSN. Both became knights of the realm.)

Jeremy Treglown’s portrait explores the view that Pritchett’s fiction and his criticism were one pursuit: Both are based on story and on character, as well as on physiognomy, where his genius might be felt to lie. Writer-criticism was challenged in the 1960s by exponents of a more argumentative or theoretical approach -- by readers of F.R. Leavis and William Empson among the university graduates who had become an enlarged presence in the book pages of journals.

As literary editor of the New Statesman, I was sympathetic to this approach and was therefore unsavory to Bloomsbury survivors around the paper. My relations with Pritchett were at first uneasy, as Treglown recounts. But they soon improved.

Pritchett grew up in a struggling middle-class environment, beautifully described in his two-part autobiography and in many of his stories. His father, a Christian Scientist, is celebrated, and keenly resented, in “Mr. Beluncle,” a novel of 1951. Beluncle is a sacred monster, a bullying fantasist who makes furniture, whose son hates furniture and whose wife’s wardrobe is forever being wrestled from one house to another as their fortunes changed. Pritchett’s fiction is a mansion of many wardrobes, not all of them stationary.

Pritchett did not go to a university and left school at 16 to work as a clerk in the Bermondsey leather trade. His writing life began with essays and travel pieces for the Christian Science Monitor. Treglown sees Pritchett in his middle years as a tweed-hatted, pipe-smoking professional man, with the look, perhaps, of a wine merchant, and as a devoted husband and father who went to live in the country for a while, where he was friendly with members of a branch of the Bloomsbury survival, and who then went back to the relished fumes and rains of London.

His work has been seen as a late accession to the achievements of upper-class-bohemian Bloomsbury, as a jewel in that crown. But his humble beginnings were not deserted. They were his favorite subject. No gentrification took place of the sort that affected Ivy Compton-Burnett. In 1939, Pritchett called himself “a crypto Tory, anarchist Free trade liberal with strong Socialist bias.” The New Critic R.P. Blackmur agreed, shouting from the audience at a Princeton lecture of Pritchett’s: “VSP is like me: He’s a Tory Anarchist.”

Meanwhile, the New Statesman, where Bloomsbury continued to matter around the paper, was no refuge of the humble. From its start earlier in the century, the paper had been a fusion of the political and literary front and back half of the paper, and of left- and right-wing attitudes. Its writers came from the public schools and the ancient universities, as British writers have often done. Not a few of them were snobs -- liberal or socialist snobs. Treglown’s book has a diverting story about how a Bloomsbury friend wrote to Pritchett to say that she’d journeyed by the Thames in a train while admiring his “Marching Spain” and had been startled to look out and spot “a single oarsman, & some louts knocking about a football in the softest of green fields” -- all very different from Spain, and she just knew they were louts.

Pritchett’s fiction has a heredity in which Dickens, above all, and H.G. Wells, both of them London writers, if not Cockneys, are prominent. He has Dickens’ sixth sense for the corporeal, and his writing runs, as Dickens’ does, to an Expressionist exaggeration, an El Greco elongation, which has been mischaracterized as caricature. This sense extends to the inanimate. Furniture comes to life. There’s a malign, animalistic wardrobe in the story “Our Wife,” in which a man is in bed with his shrill new wife, Molly, when the door of the armoire he’d been trying to mend comes “groaning open like a hound.” The ghost of Molly’s previous husband? he unwisely suggests. It really is a spooky story.

“The Camberwell Beauty” has the same lifelike realism of the eccentric and the delicately surreal, and the same poetry of furniture. It is set among auctioneers and abounds in wardrobes. The story seems to speak, as do other of his stories, of a past time. An auctioneer is banged in the stomach by the handbag of a vigorous blond, for emphasis: This no longer happens in England, though Margaret Thatcher, a famous handbagger, did her best to revive the practice. In “The Diver,” a gawky English youth is sexually aroused by a French businesswoman: This arousal is termed, as if by Edward Gibbon, “my impromptu disorder.” For all their ring of the past, neither effect in these two stories comes across as backward-looking. The character of Madame Chamson, in fact, is corporeally evoked in a way that is elliptically modern, wholly up to date.

Pritchett was a poet, too, of sexual attraction and of the sex hatred and grotesque breakaway religions of the old England. The New Yorker had a terrible time rooting out the lubricious touches. These could be judged to be irrelevant to the stories -- a woman’s legs should not be fancied, and characters should not be gay. Do certain words indicate “a confession of homosexuality on the part of Wilkins”? the editors asked of the submitted story. “If that is what you do mean, we do earnestly hope that you will consider dropping that theme.” He was not always considerately treated by his two main magazines.

The American publisher Blanche Knopf appears to have asked someone who wanted to write about George Eliot: “Why, did anything happen to her? Is there any colour in her life?” Pritchett seemed a happy man and thought, or said, that he was an uninteresting one. “Nothing continues to happen to me,” he said in the 1950s. He lived for 100 years and spent many of them producing 1,000 words a day. It was, for its time, a fairly sheltered life. But it was not a featureless one, for literary reasons and for others. In 1936, he joyfully married a second wife, Dorothy Roberts, from the Welsh border country, whose later difficulties with drink almost broke the bond, and at that period he had an affair with a Manhattan magazine editor, Barbara Kerr.

It is a measure of the trouble caused that at the end of the 1950s, when nothing is supposed to have happened to Pritchett, this kind man sent to New York a distancing letter of painful severity: “I have no news that you would understand.” The marriage was eventually restored and became happy again. Dorothy died in 2001, four years after her husband. Treglown’s shrewd and efficient biography deals well with the difficulties he has found in Pritchett’s wardrobe. *