V.S. Pritchett - Essential Stories

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Jeremy Treglown

V. S. Pritchetts stories leave you with unforgettable glimpses of movement: Charlie, in The Two Brothers, running his hands over his dog, feeling the strange life ripple under the hair and obtaining a curious strength from the tumult; or the sailor in the story named for him, on a wet day in a busy London street, lifting his knees high and putting his hand up... as if, crossing the road through that stinging rain, he were breaking through the bead curtain of a Pernambuco bar. Its no accident that Pritchetts letters and notebooks were filled with cartoons. These are intensely visual stories: verbal animations.

Then again, they leave you with haunting echoes of talk: Spanish men arguing over where to sit in a restaurant, contradicting themselves and each other and forgetting to order their meal in an amiable fury of anecdotes; or the aging parents in The Lions Den, nervously competing for the attention of their visiting grown-up son:

Oh, there you are, thats it, dear, said the mother, timidly clawing her son out of the darkness of the doorway and kissing him. You got here all right.... Have you had your tea? Have a cup of tea?

Well, lets see the boy, said the father. Come in here to the light.

Ive had tea, thanks, Teddy said.

Have another cup. It wont take a tick. Ill pop the kettle on...

Leave the boy alone, old dear, the father said. Hes had his tea.... Now.... Would you like to wash your hands, old chap?...

Yes, go on, said the mother, wash your hands. They did the water yesterday.

Pritchett grew up in a singing family, and his ear was alert to the idiosyncratic rhythms and theme tunes of his characters. Their clichs, too, which so often gave him his titles: A Serious Question, Just a Little More. These are intensely aural, and oral, fictions.

Another of their lasting traces is an indelible impression of the fantasy life of the most ordinary people. The mother in When My Girl Comes Home has convinced herself and her neighbors that her daughter has been interned in wartime in Japan, when in factthat is, so far as there are any facts in this tale of self-deception and role-playingthe girl self-preservingly married a Japanese man. The bombastic father in The Lions Den turns out to have a room full of aspirational possessionsriding boots (though Hes never ridden in his life), redundant silverwarethe props, theatrical as well as supportive, of his mythomania. Fictions of self, Pritchett knew, are among the defining activities of being human. In the phrase of the anecdotal barber which gives another story its title, You make your own life. He partly means, you make it up. Among other things, these are stories about the importance of stories.

The visual, the aural, the fictive: all are anticipated in one of Pritchetts earliest published works, The Sack of Lights. It appeared in the magazine Outlook, in 1928, when the author was twenty-seven, and again, a couple of years later, in his first collection, The Spanish Virginand Other Stories. Yet in common with everything else in that book, he later suppressed it. Pritchett was among other things a great literary critic, but he was much less generous to his own work than to others. Forgotten for three quarters of a century, The Sack of Lights poignantly encodes the artist himself in the character of a deluded andexcept by the storyneglected vagrant Cockney woman, with her song of another world, Valencia, land of oranges, her mysterious mission to git me [get my] lights, and her mad yarn of rockets and a general:

No one else could hear what her mind heard. No one else could see what her eyes saw. Alight with it, she walked from her room at the back of Euston to Piccadilly Circus with a sack on her backthe sack which she always carried in case there was anything worth having in the guttersand Valencia, land of oranges... twiddling like a ballroom of dancers in her head.

No one noticed her as she stood on the curb of Piccadilly Circus, nor guessed that at that moment she could have died of laughter, she was so happy. She wanted to shout to see what would happen, but she laughed instead. A miraculous place as high and polished as a ballroom. The faades of the buildings were tall mirrors framed in gold, speeding lights. Chucking it about, she cried out. The crowds did not even hear her in the roar.

Pritchett had the tenderness for eccentricity that has characterized so many of the greatest English writers. In his daily walks through London, he watched and listened to people as a naturalist observes wild creatures and birds. He knew that oddity is the norm, not the exception. The man who likes to show off his stage fall, in the story ambiguously titled The Fall, is based on an actual encounter of Pritchetts at a party. James Wood has argued that his attention to such little billowings of pride and egotism influenced Harold Pinter, William Trevor, Alice Munro, J. F. Powers.1 Martin Amis, who worked with Pritchett on the New Statesman toward the end of his fifty-year association with the magazine, saw it as an investigative process, and also a profoundly egalitarian one. Pritchett went into ordinary people, Amis said, and showed us that they werent ordinary.... [He] came away with their genius in all senses.... Almost frighteningly intimate, he possesses his characters, he knows almost everything about them in a way that startles me when I look at him.2 You have only to read The Wheelbarrow to see what he meant. Pritchett understands so much about the two people on whom he intensely focuses: the fact that in clearing out the house of her recently dead aunt, Miss Freshwaters niece has to face something about losses in her own life; and that in employing an opportunistic Welsh taxi driver and part-time evangelist to help her, she is risking an intimacy all the more powerful for being temporary; and that the mans very Welshness involves a colonial element, and with it a resistance to colonization; and that if he has designs on his new employer, he has equally strong designs on her wheelbarrow... the list could go on. By not straying too far, Pritchetts imagination goes very deep. He always worked exceptionally hard, writing draft after draft, distilling his materialsometimes initially of novelistic dimensionsuntil it combined astonishing density with superficial lightness. As Thoreau pointed out, a good story neednt be long, but it will take a long while to make it short. 3

Pritchetts habits of imaginative recording began in his childhood. Many of his stories fictionalize a real early experience. The Lions Den is almost straight autobiography: Pritchetts own father was a fantasist like the one in the story, and the son returned to him often for fictional copy, most ambitiously in his 1951 novel, Mr. Beluncle, and later, with a more forgiving poignancy, in his cameo of a recent widower, Just a Little More.

Pritchett Senior was a Christian Scientist. While the vagrant woman in The Sack of Lights embodies both the liberating irresponsibility of the imagination and its consoling privacy, in The Saint V. S. Pritchett takes a simultaneously sterner and funnier line on self-delusion through the character of Hubert Timberlake, the self-important leader of a fictional sect very like Christian Science. Mr. Timberlakes belief that he knows how to manage a punt has to contend with the empirical reality of a low branch:

... he put out a hand to lift it. It is not easy to lift a willow branch and Mr. Timberlake was surprised. He stepped back as it gently and firmly leaned against him. He leaned back and pushed from his feet. And he pushed too far. The boat went on, I saw Mr. Timberlakes boots leave the stern as he took an unthoughtful step backwards. He made a last minute grasp at a stronger and higher branch, and then, there he hung....