`Eloquent, Cunning, Unremitting Words'

“Eccentricity is, in fact, practical madness. It is resorted to, Henry Adams said in his severe and shrewd New England way, by those who are up to something shameful or stupid or muddle-headed. And, in England, most of us are.”

That’s the late V.S. Pritchett ostensibly writing about Laurence Sterne. Pritchett was so generously gifted with memory, humor and human feeling he could craft an aphorism, throw in a pertinent wisecrack from Adams and self-deprecatingly generalize about a nation’s character – all on deadline, in 40 words, in a putative review of a new study of an 18th-century novelist. That’s why he’s my favorite critic and one of my favorite story writers. When I think of Pritchett, I think of a phrase he used in a story he wrote, I believe, when already in his seventies. I no longer recall which one but the phrase is “dreary Methodistical town.” As with the passage cited above, much is compacted into little.

By happy coincidence, I had taken The Maias by José Maria de Eça de Queiroz out of the library on Wednesday, wanting to reading the new translation by Margaret Jull Costa. It was on Pritchett’s recommendation that I first read his novels more than 25 years ago. Before that I knew almost nothing of Portuguese literature. On Thursday, Nige wrote about finding a collection of Pritchett’s essays which included the gem on Eça de Queiroz. I sometimes feel, in this age of alienation, a disturbing kinship with Nige. He writes:

“Pritchett is not exactly collected. Nor, I imagine, is he much read - which is a great pity, as he was a very good writer, with a sharp eye and mind, a sense of humour and (which probably did for his reputation) the common touch. He's immensely readable - try his memoirs, if you haven't -- and his work is pitched at that species now deemed extinct, the 'common reader'.”

Lovely. Pritchett was born with the last century and died in 1997. His Complete Collected Essays, at 1,320 pages, tips the scale at almost five pounds, and his Complete Short Stories is comparably beefy. He wrote one wonderful novel, Mr. Beluncle, two of my favorites memoirs (A Cab at the Door, Midnight Oil) and several travel books (The Spanish Temper is perfect), but it’s as an essayist, a journalist among books, that I most cherish Pritchett. His reviews are learned but without pedantry or axe-grinding. They have nothing in common with the plot-summary-plus-superlatives that pass for reviews in newspapers and magazines. Pritchett never intrudes egotistically in his essays, yet his sensibility suffuses them – skeptical, humorous and seasoned by the world. If he had politics, they were the only politics worthy of a man of letters, a mingling of intelligence and enthusiasm. What follows is a Pritchett sampler drawn from the 203 essays in his Complete Collected volume. I've chosen from among his pieces on some of my favorite writers, starting with Beckett:

“Why is Beckett interesting as a writer? As a contemporary phenomenon, he is one more negative protest against the world going to the slaughterhouse, one more protest on behalf of privacy, a voice for myopia. He is a modern Oblomov, fretful and apathetic, enclosed in private fantasy, dropping off into words instead of sleep. They are eloquent, cunning, unremitting words.”

On Flann O’Brien:

“When, a year before he died, I was told I’d probably meet him somewhere on the street between O’Connell Street and Trinity, he seemed to me to be a vapour. We stood in the usual drizzle. His voice was soft and courteous, he had a look of pride and shy appeal in his small reddened eyes. Then he vanished: goodness knows where; down the Quays or into oblivion among his illnesses?”

On Henry Green:

“[He] loved the obstinacy, the strangeness, the monotone of the deeply emotional [working class] culture which ran alongside his one cool one. Human repetitiousness was a sort of poetry for him. It also defined the inner territory of obscure rights, wrongs and blind stubbornness to which our devious self-interest or our waywardness cling like creeper.”

On Isaac Babel:

“In story after story Babel worked until he hit upon the symbol that turns it from anecdote into fives minutes of life. He was not a novelist. By 1937 he was being semi-officially questioned about not writing on a large scale like Tolstoy or the very bien vu Sholokov. It was being insinuated that he was idle and not pulling his weight. Poor devil! Short story writers are poets.”

On Ford Madox Ford:

“He succeeded in only three remarkable stories – The Good Soldier, the Fifth Queen trilogy and Parade’s End. They vindicate his happy yet tortured incapacity to go straight from a starting-point, for he had none. They put his lack of self-confidence, his shortness of spiritual breath, his indolence, to use. They brought out and exploited with full resource the price he had to pay for his extraordinary cleverness; the emotion of anguish.”

On Chekhov:

“Like a great many, perhaps all Russian writers of the nineteenth-century, Chekhov caught people at the point of idleness and inertia in their undramatic moment when time is seen passing through them and the inner life exposes itself unguardedly in speech. He caught people in their solitudes.”

It would be great fun to go on quoting Pritchett but here he is, finally, back with Eça de Queiroz:

“The making of this novel [The Illustrious House of Ramires], and indeed all the others, is the restless mingling of poetry, sharp realism and wit. Queiroz is untouched by the drastic hatred of life that underlies Naturalism: he is sad rather than indignant that every human being is compromised; indeed this enables him to present his characters from several points of view and to explore the unexpectedness of human nature.”