“At
Rosendale Road School I decided to become a writer. The decision did not drop
out of the sky and was not the result of intellectual effort. It began in the
classroom and was settled in the school lavatory. It came, of course, because
of a personal influence: the influence of a schoolmaster called Bartlett.”
His
classmates consisted of “working class and lower middles, with a few foreigners
and colonials.” Here is Pritchett’s portrait of his schoolmaster:
“Mr.
Bartlett was a stumpy, heavy-shouldered young man with a broad, swarthy face,
large brown eyes and a lock of black hair wagging romantically over his
forehead. He looked like a boxer, lazy in his movements, and his right arm hung
back as he walked to the blackboard, as though he was going to swing a blow at
it. He wore a loose tweed jacket with baggy pockets in which he stuck books,
chalks and pencils, and by some magnetism he could silence a class almost
without a word. He never used the cane.”
This
might have been lifted from one of Pritchett’s short stories. He learned much
from Dickens, but moved on. Mr. Bartlett introduces the young Pritchett to Ford
Madox Ford’s English Review. Pritchett
describes the effect on the scruffy, working-class, proto-writer who would
become the foremost literary critic of the century:
“For
myself, the sugar-bag blue cover of the English
Review was decisive. One had thought literature was in books written by
dead people who had been oppressively overeducated. Here was writing by people
who were alive and probably writing at this moment. They were as alive as
Barlow Woods. The author was not remote; he was almost with us. He lived as we
did; he was often poor.”
Best
of all, and right out of Dickens, is Pritchett’s Uncle Arthur, who taught
himself to read as an adult, relying on a highly unlikely text:
“A
passion for education seized him. He took to learning for its own sake, and not
in order to rise in the world. He belonged – I now see – to the dying race of
craftsmen. So he looked for a book that was suited to his energetic, yet
melancholy and quasi-scientific temperament. At last he found it: he taught
himself to read by using [Robert] Burton’s Anatomy
of Melancholy. This rambling and eccentric compendium of the illnesses of
the brain and heart was exactly suited to his curious mind. He reveled in it.
`Look it up in Burton, lad,’ he’d say when I was older. `What’s old Burton
say?’ He would quote it all round the house. Burton came into every argument.
And he would add, from his own experience, a favorite sentence: `Circumstances
alter cases.’”
Pritchett’s
friend Gerald Brenan was a Hispanist, translator of St. John of the Cross and author
of South from Granada: Seven Years in an
Andalusian Village (1957). Like Pritchett, he was a gifted portraitist. In his
autobiography, Personal Record (1975),
Brenan devotes two pages to his friend, describing him as “the best company
imaginable – alive to his fingertips, amusing, sagacious, always in good spirits
and of course very intelligent.” He writes of Pritchett:
“To
meet he is the most friendly and genial of men. Though highly strung, one
cannot imagine him ever being angry or impatient. No one has ever been snubbed
by him, no one brushed off in a review. He is completely without bad feelings
or malice. Then his conversation
is very stimulating - witty and full of fantasy yet also balanced and judicious.
The hard struggle he had to survive in his early years caused him to mature
early and it also rubbed off the rough corners so that he has no
eccentricities, but is always sanity itself. One can sum him up as a man who
keeps down to earth, a man without false hopes or illusions, an accepter and
recorder of things as they are. Yet the imagery in his writings often betrays a
half-buried sense for poetry.”
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