'A Proliferation of Brilliant Detail'

“Since Chaucer was alive and hale,

No man hath walkt along our roads with step

So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse.”

After thinking about V.S. Pritchett on Thursday, I went back to one of his later essay collections, Lasting Impressions (1990), because it’s easier to hold than The Complete Collected Essays (1992), which, at 1,319 pages, tips the scale at four pounds plus. At random I picked an essay – “Pioneer,” which ostensibly started life in 1974 as a review of a Robert Browning biography. Those who have reviewed biographies know the hazards. One is reviewing two lives: The subject’s and the subject’s as rendered by the biographer. The review risks getting clogged with one or the other, and then there’s a race to see who gets bored first, the reviewer or the reader. Pritchett deftly handles the dilemma by choosing facts – I won’t use that hideous word “factoids” -- that illustrate his evolving theme:      

“At twenty, the young Browning proudly refused to clerk or go into the law and decided to live by writing epics of introspection, and the parents—living on £257 a year—submitted and supported him. They even raked up money to send him to Italy and Russia. He dressed with elegance and never left the house without white gloves: they were a lifelong obsession. Why? Unclean, unclean?”

Pritchett at this point avoids Freudian vaporing, though he skirts it: “At most Browning was displaying the histrionic vanity that Jung associates with introverts.” He lets us know Browning is an odd duck but doesn’t presume to sermonize or psychoanalyze. When Browning and his wife exchange love letters, Pritchett says they “seem to be trying to get into a future story by Henry James.” He’s the wittiest of critics. Even better, Pritchett, the great hungry consumer of novels, gets Browning:

“In short his gifts were those of the novelist or the poet of monologue. There is a proliferation of brilliant detail, so that the small things and psychological dilemmas become more dramatic than the main drama. He adopts the point of view of characters unlike himself, and this putting on of another’s voice and life depends on a certain bouncing abruptness and on an acute sense of the mind’s sensations.”

About that flirtation with Jung and his theory of introversion. Thanks to Micah Mattix’s Prufrock I read a poem on Friday by a writer new to me, James Valvis. In the author’s note that accompanies the poem he writes: “I have this theory writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun.”

The four lines quoted at the top are from Walter Savage Landor’s “To Robert Browning.”