by Paul Theroux
He is the only hero in his books. Gore Vidal remarked (in a review of Black Spring) on how people are constantly saying, "You're wonderful, Henry!" and "How do you do it, Henry?" and never once does someone say, "Did anyone ever tell you you're full of shit, Henry?" Rumbustiousness was his watchword and his ego was all that mattered. From Tropic of Cancer to the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy it is all Henry Miller, calling attention to himself. He attempted to write about Greece in The Colossus of Maroussi, but his cacophonous meditation obscures the ruins. His unfinished book on D. H. Lawrence was crowded with Miller on Life and Sex. In the early forties he applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to write a book about America. He was turned down for the fellowship but wrote the book all the same— The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, cross-country in a purring old car: Miller at large. By then he had just about stopped writing sentences such as "O glabrous world, O glab and glairy—under what moon do you lie cold and gleaming" and turned his attention to American bread, which he found disgusting and full of chemicals.
At the end of that trip he settled in what is certainly one of the most beautiful parts of America, the California promontory known as Big Sur, and wrote Remember to Remember, The Books in my Life, and his memoirs of the 'twenties, Sexus, Plexus and Nexus.
In his later years he moved to Los Angeles and found fulfillment playing table tennis with naked Japanese girls, which was one of his versions of paradise. I suspected he was gaga when he championed Erica Jong as a great writer. His judgement had not always been so bad. His literary friendships—Lawrence Durrell, Alfred Perles—were wide-ranging and generous; he was besieged by would-be writers hoping for his bear hug.
I first read him in school, the smuggled Tropics and then The Henry Miller Reader. I was shocked and uplifted by what seemed to me great comedy and the rough and tumble of exuberant language. I had never read anything so deflating to pompousness, so manic or irreverent. It loosened something in my adolescent soul and helped me begin to write. I did not know that it was mostly fakery, using words for their sound alone, posturing and booming. It was a tonic, and it was only later that I discovered its ingredients to be piss and vinegar.
Earlier this year, a biography of Miller described that wonderful, hilarious life he claimed he had led to be totally imaginary. His life had been rather dull, he had been hen-pecked, he always did the washing-up. But this makes him, for me, a better writer—perhaps one of our more imaginative novelists instead of a noisy memoirist.
We are lucky to live in an age when books are seldom suppressed or banned—I speak of Britain and America, not Singapore or Paraguay or Iran. For this alone, our debt to Henry Miller is considerable. Walt Whitman wrote, "Unscrew the locks from the doors. Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!" Miller was not a very subtle carpenter. He kicked that door down, and allowed many writers to pass through.
V. S. Pritchett
[1980]
We live in an age when a book called Modern Men of Letters would be as thin as Great Chinese Comedians or Famous Women Composers, and yet there are exceptions. The finished copies of his biography of Turgenev had just arrived; his essay on Gabriel Garcia Marquez was in the current issue of the New Statesman; the previous night the usually punctual Ten O'Clock News started fifteen minutes late to allow extra time for the TV adaptation of his story "Blind Love," and that morning the London Times had described the author in a review as "truly venerable."
He entered the restaurant in his Russian-style fur hat and was intercepted by waiters and diners—handshakes and salutes, "So good to see you," "Wonderful play"—and as he sat down, a man at a nearby table whispered admiringly to his companions, "Why there's Victor Pritchett!" It was the sort of entrance Chesterton might have stage-managed, but Sir Victor Pritchett takes it in his stride. He doesn't like to be made a fuss of, he writes every day ("it excites me to work hard") and he loathes being called venerable: "It makes one feel rather like a dean, someone who expects to be bowed to—with my hands clasped behind my back and walking very slowly, muttering and moralizing."
At the age of seventy-seven he has a hiker's obvious health, a downright manner, an exuberant curiosity and the sort of twinkle that puts one in mind of a country doctor—that spirit-boosting responsiveness that works cures on malingerers. He looks lovable, he writes with a vigorous flair, bringing insight to appreciation; and he has done so for fifty years—his first book, Marching Spain, appeared in 1928. The broadcast of "Blind Love" was a satisfaction. The first time he saw it he wept he was so moved by it. The second time he winced and concluded that the adaptation—not his—wasn't much good. The story, which is almost certainly a masterpiece, was rejected by an American magazine editor who said, "When I see a swimming pool at the beginning of a story I know someone's going to throw himself into it."
Although he has written six novels, four books of literary criticism, six of travel, two volumes of autobiography and two major biographies, the short story is his real love, as he has demonstrated in eight collections. In his prize-winning memoir, Midnight Oil, he described his first attempts to write. Apart from a few years at Alleyn's School he had no formal education. "Out of an old-fashioned conviction about wanting to be a writer," he told me, "I went to Paris in the 'twenties. I didn't know of other writers, though I met Man Ray and I chatted a number of times with him and his mistress. It wasn't until I went to Spain and Ireland that I met writers and serious intellects, and of course by going abroad I completely by-passed the English class system. In Ireland I wasn't bound by any code. You must know the saying—nothing is lower than an Irish aristocrat.' I never missed not having an English education. I used to feel sorry for the Eton-Oxfofd chap—business, friends, golf, the grind. 'God, what a life,' I used to think. 'I suppose he's not going to be a writer—that's hard luck on him.'"
Pritchett is, to my mind, not only the complete man of letters but also the ultimate Londoner, as familiar with club life as with the routine in the outer suburbs of Peckham and Heme Hill. He has seen Yeats and Wells rolling penny pieces down the ballroom bannister of the Savile Club and launching them into the hall outside the snooker room, and schoolchildren in South London in 1910, confronted by their first motorcar, rushing into the street and chanting,
Old iron never rusts!
Solid tires never bust!
In his most famous novel, Mr Beluncle, he satirized the émigré lower-middle-class Londoner, and in many of his stories, most notably in the volumes Blind Love and The Camberwell Beauty—depicted minutely the people of the city, antique dealer, interior decorator, barrow-boy. "Every story causes me agony—trying to find out how to write it," he says. "I can't think. That's the real trouble. I need a piece of paper." His writing, like his reading, is vast: "I read for the pleasure of learning how to write." At the age of sixteen he admired Belloc ("Don't read Conrad, I was told. He writes very bad English and he's a hopeless romantic. Yeats thought very poorly of Shaw and they said Proust was on the way out"), Anatole France, and later Liam O'Flaherty, the Spaniard Pio Baroja ("I liked his terse style") and Chekhov, "though I identified myself unavailingly."
Here are two openings:
The leaves fly down, the rain spits and the clouds flow like a dirty thaw before the wind, which whines and mews in the window cracks and swings the wireless aerial with a dull tap against the sill; the House of Usher is falling, and between now and Hogmanay, as the draughts lift the carpets, as slates shift on the roof and mice patter behind the wainscot, the ghosts, the wronged suitors of our lives, gather in the anterooms of the mind.
A cloud of dust travels down the flinty road and chokes the glossy Kentish greenery. From the middle of the moving cloud come the ejaculations of an unhandy driver; the clopper of horses' hooves, the rumble of a wagonette or trap. One catches the flash of a top-hat or a boater. One smells horse manure and beer. And one hears that peculiar English spoken by the lower middle class ... the accent is despairing, narrow-voweled yet truculent, with something of the cheap-jack and Sunday League
in it, and it is broken by a voice, not quite so common, which says things like 'We're not the finished thing. We're jest one of Nature's experiments, see. We're jest the beginning.' And then—I don't quite know why—there is a crash. Over goes the wagonette ... Most surprisingly a nearby house catches fire...
You might mistake these for stories. They are, in fact, the openings of essays, the first on the Irish ghost-story writer, Sheridan LeFanu, the second on the scientific romances of H. G. Wells. Both are from Pritchett's The Living Novel (1946). I asked him about his style of writing, which brought the vividness of fiction to literary criticism. It is almost inconceivable that any critic today—apart from Pritchett himself—would take this trouble in an essay review; Pritchett was knocking off one of these a week throughout the Second World War for the New Statesman. "It never occurred to anyone at the time to write in an academic way," he said. "Now practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience."
I wondered what Pritchett thought of the American literary character. It is common enough knowledge that we do not have a Pritchett, and since the death of Edmund Wilson have not had a literary critic of any real eminence. We have ambitious academics, either using the review as a means of gaining tenure, or else thirty-grand-a-year men who crave the doubtful glamor of a by-line; we have a handful of curmudgeons, who cross the year's books with a heavy tread, and habitual odd-jobbers.
"In America, the writer's ego is allowed to expand," says Pritchett. "In any other country he would be forced to know his own literature. And circumstances would impel him to review. I don't think I could have made my living otherwise. I do it out of interest, duty—and there is the temptation of taste. It has always been a tradition in England. In the nineteenth century, most writers did it for nothing. This wore off in the Gissing period—when Gissing was a literary hack. I don't know whether Hardy ever reviewed books. Meredith did his whole life. Bennett of course, and Belloc, and Chesterton. T. S. Eliot turned it down as a waste of time—an interesting decision—very American."
Pritchett has experienced American life—hiking across Tennessee and lecturing at Princeton, Smith and Berkeley. "It's no disgrace not to have money in England. It's hopeless in America. If you go broke you're not supposed to appear at parties, and American writers expect to make an enormous amount of money. If they teach at universities they are paid handsomely. But job status is so important in your country—the title on the door, the something on the floor—how does it go?
"American life is so much more serious than English life. Your seriousness is always a way of gaining status, too. I gave a lecture at Princeton and someone stood up in the audience and said, 'Surely that contradicts something Aristotle said.' I told him I hadn't read Aristotle—although I had—and I thought, 'Good God!'"
"I felt terribly lonely in American academic society. The first time in my life I was in a university building was in Princeton (in 19 5 3). They were so busy! It was like a monastery."
"Aren't monasteries quiet contemplative places?" I said.
"No, no," said Pritchett. "Very busy. These academics were at prayer constantly—one praying about 'The Esthetics of Conrad,' another doing 'The Rhythms of Proust'. But the students at Berkeley were very enjoyable, and at Smith I had only one class. I had a lot of leisure, and I got over my initial loneliness by writing. I started my autobiography while I was at Smith."
"Americans are so gregarious," he said a moment later. "In and out of each other's houses. They say the English are reserved. I don't think we are reserved, but we value our privacy. Americans are remorseless. They invite you to a party. You can't say, 'I've got a splitting headache'—they'll send the doctor around."
So, in spite of his travels to Spain and South America, New York and Ireland—all of which he has written about—Pritchett has always returned to London, moving from the dim precincts south of the river to Regent's Park, where he now lives. His work is there, his books, his sources of inspiration. And just as he had earlier written a masterful essay about Balzac and returned to write a biography of him, he did the same with Turgenev. The essay on Turgenev's Rudin is in In My Good Books (1942), the biography is just appearing.
"I would like to have done Chekhov," he said. "But he's been done well, and anyway there is no life you can seize. It's all in his writing. As a biographical subject he's rather shallow. With Turgenev I was on firmer ground—there has been no definitive biography. And Turgenev is an attractive figure—he was the first to introduce the Russians to Europe or America. At the time, they saw him as the perfect gentleman—he lived on an estate and shot birds. He had a rapport with English literature. And he had a curious position in Russian society. His situation vis-à-vis the Russian problems was similar to our own upper middle class to reform. He is now in-date as opposed to out-of-date. We are dealing with the kind of revolutionaries he knew—that was his situation. When the Russian craze began in England in 1900 all they cared about was the Russian soul, but Turgenev has entirely come back to us as a man of the moment."
I asked whether he felt any identification with his biographical subject.
"I feel strongly on the side of his detachment. He was cultivated and greatly influenced by literature. He was much more civilized than Tolstoy, for example, and probably the most westernized Russian writer."
The restaurant had emptied. It was time to go. I chanced a question about Orwell. Pritchett said, "Orwell had an ecstatic side. If he was in this room he'd come over and sit down, order a lot of brandy, start out by being mildly insulting to us and then he'd get terribly friendly."
On went the overcoat, the Russian hat, and we walked down Charlotte Street. Fifty years earlier Pritchett had a room on this street, over a tailor shop. He was writing then, he is writing today—three reviews to do, a story he has worked on for several months, some traveling to plan. He continued chatting all the way to the corner, about the country ("Wiltshire's full of delinquent peers"), his knighthood ("I have no power, no influence. I'm the freak there, I tell them they're all right"), and just before we parted I mentioned that I might be off to South America soon. "Try the Dutch parts of Brazil, Peru is wonderful, and Ecuador—well, Ecuador is nice in its tiny way."
"A man my age is a social problem," Sir Victor Pritchett said three years later, and then he laughed. He has a rich, resonant pipe-smoker's laugh, and the lively curiosity of a man who has traveled in fifty countries. He had rambled in and written about both New York City and the hinterland of peckerwood Tennessee—in fact, he has just returned to Tennessee, to lecture at Vanderbilt. He is small, soft-spoken and sees everything.
He is not indifferent to his achievement, but neither is he vain. Vanity is the egotism of the idle, the self-regarding, the lingerer at mirrors. But Pritchett says in baffled tones, "One of the great surprises to me—and I mean this—is that people think I am eminent. Is it that everyone else has died, and I am the last one left?"
His bafflement has something to do with the fact that he associates eminence with leisure—the pontificating oldster in a country house, making trenchant or scandalous remarks, boasting about his impotence and—deaf to any reply—dropping off to sleep by the fireside, while a whole seminar of Guggenheim Fellows genuflect in his study and fish card indexes out of their phylacteries. Pritchett has no leisure. He works alone. He gives flatterers and foot-in-the-door biographers the kindly inattention he extends to Jehovah's Witnesses. "I am one of the non-striking self-employed," he says.
In 1980, he wrote, "Today I still go fast up the four flights of steep stairs to my study in our tall late-Nash house, every day of the week, at nine o'clock in the morning, Saturdays and Sundays included, cursing the Inland Revenue and inflation, groaning at the work I have to do, crying out dishonestly for leisure ... complaining that surely at my age I should be able to get some time off." But he was smiling when he wrote that. He has no wish to move ("Moving would
betray our furniture and new drafts often kill old men") and he is delighted that, at his age, he still has work to do. He believes himself to be a very lucky man.
Luck shines in his face like good health. The first time I met him he seemed to me like an English country doctor, the sort of man who rides a bike and eschews antibiotics, who smiles if you claim you have 'flu and orders you outside for some fresh air. Was it his healthy complexion and his talk of having spent time in really pestilential places? More likely it was his handwriting. It is certainly a medical man's script. It looks like Sanskrit, and one of the few persons who can read it is Dorothy Pritchett, who types everything he writes (usually four or five times: he is a perfectionist) and who is the complete writer's wife—lover, amanuensis and boon companion.
Now I have come to see Sir Victor as the magician that all great writers are. It is not such an extravagant idea—Thomas Mann's family called him a magician, and he signed his letters to them with a "Z"—Zauberer. The magician conjures wonders out of thin air and makes you believe in him. You try to repeat the trick privately, and fail. Sir Victor's writing has enchanted millions of people, and his stories go on being reprinted. He is not only the finest living short-story writer, but the greatest literary critic of our day. He has been at it a long time. Decades ago, he gave Graham Greene his first good review, and Greene felt, with Pritchett's praise, that he was at last a writer.
Pritchett denies his magic quality, but he is emphatic about his luck. His mother was a Cockney, his father a salesman from Yorkshire—neither was educated. But Pritchett says that it was his good luck to have grown up among "non-intellectual people, all in trades" and "better luck to have a vocation fixed in my mind—so few boys have ... Good luck to escape, by going abroad, the perpetual British 'no' to the new boy; good luck to meet the American 'yes' to my first bits of writing. France, Ireland, Spain were my first universities. I grew up in the time of great British power and influence. The French were Frogs, the Spanish something else. The dominant feeling was British. But by being uneducated I did not have this conceit. I recognized the cultures and inherited differences."