'A Half-Buried Sense for Poetry'

It’s easy to mistake geniality for prevarication. So rare a quality seems suspicious or naively unprofessional, a mask worn to conceal the shark within, especially among literary types. Of course, critics are born to be severe, nobody’s pal. How many critics can you name whose virtues include friendliness on the page and off? First in line is V.S. Pritchett, whose longtime friend and fellow lover of Spain, Gerald Brenan, writes in one of his memoirs, A Personal Record, 1920–1972 (1975): 

“To me 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.”

 

Readers like myself who never met Pritchett but grew up reading his stories and reviews readily recognize him in Brenan’s snapshot. About Pritchett’s poetry, which among prose writers most often reminds me of Dickens’, try this:

 

“To those who are in danger of reacting too violently against the great botanists of our hidden flora, I recommend the cure offered by the works of Italo Svevo. He is laughter at last. Here Hamlet raises a smile, Oedipus is teased away from his fate . . .”

 

And of Ford Madox Ford’s finest works – The Good Soldier, the Fifth Queen trilogy and the Parade’s End tetralogy – he writes:

 

“They vindicate his happy yet tortured incapacity to go straight from a starting-point, for he had none. They put his lack of self-confidence, his shortness of spiritual breathe, his indolence, to use. They brought out and exploited with full resource the price he had to pay for his extraordinary cleverness: the emotion of anguish.”       

 

The American edition of Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991) is 1,321 pages long. With the 1,221-page Complete Collected Stories (1990), his novel Mr Beluncle (1951) and his memoirs (A Cab at the Door, 1968; Midnight Oil, 1971), they constitute the essential core of his writing. But the books on Spain, the biographies of Turgenev and Chekhov and other odds and ends are all worth pursuing. Like any good critic, Pritchett is a generous teacher who wishes to share with students what gives him pleasure. From him I first learned of the great Portuguese novelist José Maria de Eça de Queiroz and the Spaniard Benito Pérez Galdós. Pritchett closes his essay about the latter, “A Spanish Balzac,” with words that read like an epitaph of praise and perhaps his final judgment on his first literary love, the great nineteenth-century realistic novels: “The fact is that Galdós accepts human nature without resentment.”

 Pritchett was born on this date, December 17, in 1900, part of the generation of English writers that included Evelyn Waugh, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell and Henry Green. He died on March 20, 1997 at age ninety-six.