'An Accepter and Recorder of Things as They Are'

It has been a good week for the satisfaction of knowing that a book I recommended has been read and enjoyed. A reader in New York City tells me the title character of V.S. Pritchett’s 1951 novel Mr. Beluncle reminds her of her late father, a man she describes as “feckless.” And the book made her laugh. Pritchett was by temperament a literary sprinter, not a marathon man, and Mr. Beluncle is his only first-rate novel. His sensibility is adapted to short forms. Among English short-story writers, he is second only to Kipling, who also wrote a single great novel, Kim. Among twentieth-century English book critics and reviewers, he is supreme. 

Pritchett is one of the few writers whose work, even the minor stuff, I have tried to read in toto. His memoirs and travel books are worth pursuing, especially Marching Spain (1928) and The Spanish Temper (1954). I remember in 1979 reading Pritchett’s essay in The New York Review of Books on a writer unknown to me, his longtime friend Gerald Brenan. Both men loved Spain. The country has interested me since I first read Unamuno, and Pritchett and Brenan sustained my interest. Thanks to Pritchett I read Fortunata and Jacinta (1886), a great novel by Benito Pérez Galdós. How good it is to remember reading his review and eventually reading Brenan, including The Spanish Labyrinth (1950), South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village (1957) and and his study of St. John of the Cross (1973). Here is how Pritchett begins his Brenan review:

 

“There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances. We grow tired of seeing our experience choked by the vegetation in our sentences. We opt for the pithy, the personal, and the unapologetic. For years we have had a crowd of random thoughts waiting on our doorstep, orphans or foundlings of the mind that we have not adopted: the moment of the aphorism, the epigram, the clinching quotation has come.”

 

Which reads like a near-definition of blogging. Like Pritchett, Brenan 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, making him sound like a variation on a writer he loved, Anton Chekhov:

 

“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.”

 

Long ago I added Pritchett to my rollcall of surrogate teachers, along with Joseph Epstein, Guy Davenport and Robert Alter.