'He and the Hundred Best Authors'

“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.” 

A little context: V.S. Pritchett is writing in the early years of World War II. Hitler owned Europe. England stood almost alone. He is writing in the preface to In My Good Books (Chatto & Windus, 1942), his first collection of reviews. Its twenty-five essays date from the immediately preceding years, the grimmest of times when only a fool would forecast with certainty a happy future.

 

Two sorts of books, Pritchett observes, are published at such times: the “topical” and the “classics.” He points out the obvious: “Of these the topical is the unhappier.” Look at our own bestseller lists: topical trash is reliably popular. “Nothing dates so quickly as the latest news,” he writes, “and its lack of perspective becomes very soon intolerable.” I associate such books with the drunk at the end of the bar spewing opinions with the regularity of a well-fed jukebox. Pritchett’s judgment here is stirring, almost noble:

 

“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.”

 

Pritchett’s thinking shouldn’t be mistaken for cheap nostalgia. The “classics” are time-tested and reliable. Smarter, more sturdily literate generations of readers have stamped them with their imprimatur. Who does Pritchett review in his first collection? Gibbon, Gogol, Zola, Constant, Lermontov . . . “Classics.” Out of love, yes, but Pritchett reminds us of the Blitz:

 

“The works of printers are bombed, books by the thousand are burned in the shops, stocks of paper are destroyed by fire or go to the bottom of the sea. Such incidents – to use the current euphemism for catastrophe – empty the purses of publishers, who may be forgiven for noting that living authors are expensive, and that the dead, on the contrary, are cheap.”

 

Call it cynicism, if you wish. I call it a bonanza for English readers in wartime. That’s how Pritchett looks at it:

 

“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.”

 

Putting a good face on catastrophe? Probably. Let’s learn from Pritchett’s experience. The U.S.A. 2022 is not England 1940, though ours is an aggressively aliterate, verging in some quarters on illiterate, age. The future of reading, writing and publishing is far from certain. The other day a reader sent me a delightful morsel: a photo and brief text in which a “celebrity” I had never heard of was bragging that he has never read a book, even in school.