'Packing a Great Deal Into a Very Little Space'

“The book is written not for the mass of readers but for a friend.” 

To induce in strangers the sense of being confided in, singled out for trust and understanding, is a rare writerly gift. Plenty of great ones never had it. We don’t read Swift or Nabokov for their warm and fuzzy bonhomie. V.S. Pritchett, in part because he was an autodidact and never attended university, established an avuncular relationship with readers, though he was never cloying or patronizing. He seemed to have read everything but never came off as a know-it-all. I can’t recall an instance of literary snobbery in all of Pritchett’s sprawling body of work. He consistently shows respect for readers by writing well, whether in fiction or essays. (Careless, mediocre writing insults us.) He enjoyed sharing enthusiasms.

 

The sentence quoted at the top is from “Kinglake’s Eothen: A Nineteenth-Century Travel Classic,” the introduction Pritchett wrote for a 1970 reissue of Alexander William Kinglake’s Eothen (1844), an essential volume of travel writing, a genre in which Pritchett also worked. For four years in his twenties (and the twentieth century’s), Pritchett lived away from England, in France, Spain and Ireland, places he called, collectively, “my university.” That’s where he started writing, in 1923, for the Christian Science Monitor. Pritchett’s first book was Marching Spain (1928), based on his three-hundred-mile walk across that country. More than twenty years later he returned to Spain, and in 1954 published The Spanish Temper. This most English of writers came alive as a writer elsewhere. He had a reporter’s appetite for gossip, landscape, history and conversation, coupled with a non-cloistered bookishness.

  

Pritchett seems to have identified with Kinglake, “this fervid and laughing young man,” whose book recounts his travels in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. From the Greek, the title means “from the dawn” or “from the East.” Kinglake and Pritchett are kindred spirits, relentlessly curious and open to experience. “In its spontaneous gaiety,” the latter writes, “Eothen is above all a personal and private book, very much the work of a man who hides resolution under a play of wit and nonchalance and candour.”

 

Pritchett never worked far from the comical. Of Kinglake he writes: “His laughter and irony cover strong feeling and a love of risk” and “Kinglake’s eye for comedy is very fine.” The same is true in many of Pritchett’s stories and his finest novel, Mr. Beluncle (1951). Here he might be describing his own fiction: “Eothen is continuously alive with daily incident. It marvelously catches the rippling surface of life; and because Kinglake is alive everything comes alive.” Like his nineteenth-century forebears – Balzac, Dickens, Chekhov – Pritchett fueled his imagination with books and the great pulsing surge of life itself. In the second volume of his memoirs, Midnight Oil (1971), he writes:

 

“[P]resently I saw that literature grows out of literature as much as out of a writer’s times. A work of art is a deposit left by the conflicts and contradictions a writer has in his own nature. I am not a scholarly man; and I am not interested for very long in the elaborate superstructures of criticism. Some of my critics speak of insights and intuitions; the compliment is often left-handed, for these are signs of the amateur’s luck; I had no choice in the matter. Anyone who has written a piece of imaginative prose knows how much a writer relies on instinct and intuition.”

 

In the same book, this master of comic realism in his short fiction explains the attraction of writing stories:

 

“There is the fascination of packing a great deal into a very little space. The fact that form is decisive concentrates an impulse that is essentially poetic.”

 

Pritchett was born on this date, December 16, in 1900, and died in 1997 at age ninety-six.