`A Kind of Judgment Day'

A good critic’s foremost prerequisite is the ability to write well. With every ill-written sentence, critics sabotage whatever middling authority they possess. Why trust the judgment of writers unable to join language to thought and feeling with precision, wit and style? Why waste time on lousy prose in the first place, except as a lesson in what to avoid?

The binding of In My Good Books remains an impressively vivid shade of Delft blue, given that Chatto & Windus published it in 1942. The pages have turned buff, not brown, and the judgments they contain have likewise weathered well:

“We turn to literature not only for respite, relaxation or escape from the boredom of reality and the gnaw of suffering, but to get away from uncertainty. And certainty is in the past. There, so it seems to us, things have been settled. There we can see a whole picture. For to see something whole becomes a necessity to people like ourselves whose world has fallen to pieces. Perhaps, we think, the certainty of the past will help our minds to substantiate a faith in the kind of certainty we hope for in the future.”

“People like ourselves” refers specifically to the common readers of England, civilians under Nazi attack, but V.S. Pritchett addresses all who inhabit a world under siege. So much criticism, from newspaper book reviews to academic door stops, attempts to usurp the provinces of philosophy, sociology and political science. We welcome Pritchett’s common-sense reminder of literature’s proper domain: humanity. Often I read reviews and litblogs whose authors give the impression of disliking their fellow humans, and we can already hear them going after Pritchett’s “there…things have been settled,” blithely ignoring his strategic “so it seems to us.” Pritchett’s tone, here and elsewhere, is measured and mature, never snotty or condescending. He’s not showing off but nevertheless impresses us with his reliable assessments, comprehensive reading and animated prose. He relies on sound judgment, not theory.

In My Good Books collects 25 essays (they are more substantial than most reviews) first published in the New Statesman and Nation. All are devoted to writers of the past, with Hardy and Synge the most recent. In his preface, quoted above, Pritchett describes himself as “bookish but uneducated.” He means he never attended a university. Born in 1900, he was apprenticed at 15 in the London leather trade. His mother was illiterate. His father, limned memorably in one of Pritchett’s novels (Mr. Beluncle) and a memoir (A Cab at the Door), was a comically unsuccessful businessman. Pritchett, among the best-read men of the age, a model for book critics, whose short stories are the best written by an Englishman since Kipling, would not be admitted to a creative writing program today and he probably, poor fellow, never read Blanchot. He was a professional amateur who weighed books against life and other books. Whitney Balliett ranked him, with A.J. Liebling, among his “non-musical heroes.” In the preface, Pritchett notes how printers, publishers, bookshops, libraries and readers suffered during the Blitz:

“The wise reader is one who prepares himself for the awful moment, a kind of Judgment Day, when only he and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together; when he will, so to speak, be stranded in the highest society.”

He’s no nostalgist wallowing in the after glow. He is shrewd about books and men, past and the present:

“The past is not serene. It is turbulent, upside down and unfinished. When we look into the lives of the authors of the great wise (or unwise) books, when we glance at the erratic outline of their times, we find that those men and those times were as uncertain as we are, and the picture they saw was by no means complete to their eyes. They lived – our hackneyed phrase is repeated throughout the history of literature – in `a period of transition.’ Every one of them had one foot in the old, the other in the new.”

In My Good Books includes pieces on, among others, Gibbon, Constant, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Peacock and Dostoevsky. On the last, as with his other subjects, Pritchett pays us the compliment of familiarity:

“I have been reading Dostoevski again: The Possessed. You know the sensation. You are sitting by the fire reflecting that one of the things which reconciles you to life, even at its most tragic, is the low clear daily monotone of its voice. Suddenly comes a knock at the door, there are cries. A man has been murdered at a house down the street. Dostoevski again.”

And he does something else: He makes a persuasive case for rereading a writer I don't much care for.