Jeremy Treglown
V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life.
Random House. 322 pages, $25.95
The subtitle of Jeremy Treglown’s brief and near-perfect biography V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life is deliciously pointed. In the sixty-odd years of his career, Pritchett (1900–1996) wrote four novels, eight volumes of literary essays, six travel books, three biographies, two volumes of autobiography, ten collections of short stories, and book reviews beyond counting. Not many writers have sustained so high a level of achievement for so long; among the peaks are the novels Dead Man Leading (1937) and Mr. Beluncle (1951), the meditative travel book The Spanish Temper (1954), the autobiographical works A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), and such short stories as “Sense of Humour,” “The Voice,” “When My Girl Comes Home,” “Did You Invite Me?,” “On the Edge of the Cliff,” “The Fig Tree,” and “Cocky Olly”—the first story published in his thirties and the last in his eighties. This prodigious diligence and regard for quality even as the pot was boiling—Pritchett took great pride in earning his living from writing alone—point up the moral of labor handsomely rewarded with fame and material comfort, even as the supreme reward was the labor itself. Pritchett never wrote the ambitious books he thought he should have written, and from financial need he produced more ephemeral journalism than he wished he had; still, as he writes in the final sentence of Midnight Oil, not only the accomplishment but also the activity was satisfying: “I have done, given my circumstances and my character, what I have been able to do and I have enjoyed it.”
His characteristic modesty bespoke both the acceptance of what life has handed him and the delight with which he made everything he could out of it. The art of living well, of getting along contentedly within his intellectual and emotional means, is of a piece with his writing: generous, amused, grateful, sensible. Treglown is plainly smitten with his subject, in a discreet and understated fashion, and long before the end of the story the reader is, too—perhaps less discreetly.
Unrelenting good humor can have that effect. This is, intermittently, an uproarious book; again and again Treglown hits upon the choice gag lines with which Pritchett studded his correspondence and conversation. Travels in America were especially suited to the manufacture of casual hilarity. Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Pritchett tried his hand at a screenplay, made him think of “a ripe Victoria plum endowed with the gift of speech.” When a lovely American girl told him she was an English major, he “decorated her with moustaches and gave her gout.” After tea with the distinguished dean of a distinguished graduate school, he observed, “The Princeton voice I can only describe as the low, polite gurgle of an in-growing toe-nail if it could talk.”
Pritchett earned his laughter the hard way; in his works, especially in Mr. Beluncle and the autobiography, tragic possibility sometimes veers directly into the path of broad comedy and threatens to smash it—though one suspects it was in fact comedy that veered into the path of tragedy and engulfed it, softly. Pritchett’s childhood was hard. His businessman father’s addled scheming invariably led to distress and even disgrace: the cab was perpetually at the door to hustle the family off in the middle of the night to another house and another venture sure to go wrong. At his father’s insistence that he start earning a living, Pritchett left school at sixteen. The leather trade, clerking in shops, newspaper reporting, and turning out reviews for the back of the book were Pritchett’s Oxford and Cambridge.
Pritchett, young and expectant, married an aspiring actress, but they were sexually incompatible—archaically delicate, Treglown does not pry—and divorced in due course. His second marriage, to Dorothy Roberts, survived her alcoholism and both their passing infidelities, and lasted over sixty years; after she successfully took the cure, with the help of his loving solicitude, their happiness together thrilled everyone who knew them. One friend remarked, “When I think of them I just think of laughing. We were always laughing.” Another said that Pritchett “seemed the only person I’ve known of distinction who was happy. Happy in his children and his wife, in his career, in his work—in his life.”
The single serious fault to be found with this biography is that Treglown, who admirably does devote more attention to the subject’s works than writers’ biographers tend to do these days, fails to note the essential connection between the great theme of Pritchett’s writing and the triumph of his life. No idea of what life ought to be, Pritchett teaches, can capture the vital force and complication of life as it actually is. Pritchett’s father, whom he skewers in the autobiography, is a Christian Scientist zealous to the point of mania, and Mr. Beluncle, the fictional version of the father, insists on the undeniable Truth propagated by the Church of the Last Purification, Toronto; this lunatic paternal fervor has no regard for reality, and the son finds his own way in the world in revulsion from it. That revulsion extends to a variety of oppressive religious and political creeds. In The Spanish Temper, for instance, Pritchett blasts the murderous rectitude of a nation besotted with a supreme idea of imaginary purity, which he traces from the Inquisition to revolutionary anarchism inspired by Bakunin.
The antidote to this high-minded poison is the old school English liberalism that Pritchett celebrates in London Perceived (1962), his tribute to his beloved native city: “London talk has a horror of conclusions,” London architecture is “the expression of an ebullient individualism,” and London contrariness boasts “a love of our rebellions and heresies.” And a 1946 essay titled “The Crank” locates the Great Good Place in the England of the eighteenth century, where a sober, reasoned moral license permits each person his unconstrained growth, even if that means the proliferation of odd excrescences—indeed, the more of those, the merrier: “The notion of the sufficiency of man in himself encouraged the growth of peculiar character. The century enjoyed its fantastics. It allowed people to grow as they willed.” To take in the plenum of human reality, sometimes noble, sometimes jolly, sometimes sordid, always fascinating, is to school oneself in the acceptance of one’s own nature. That acceptance is the beginning of fulfillment. There are of course limitations to this genial humanism, as one readily sees in our tolerant age—which propagates not only diverting fantastics but also willful monsters—but it served V. S. Pritchett well, and one is grateful for his contribution to the tradition of unassuming English moral heroism.
Algis Valiunas is the author of Churchill’s Military Histories (Rowman & Littlefield).
