The Pritchett Century

by V. S. Pritchett

  “Oh, that filthy war,” she would say again and again. “My husband would have been the chief mechanic at the garage if he had not been killed.”

  Paris was a wicked city of heartless people, she would groan, as I tried to cover myself with the little wet towel. And there was a good deal of “Such is life,” in my mother’s fashion. Madame Chapin worked for a rich cocotte up the street.

  “A life of luxury—but with women like that, a false step, a suspicion, and the man who keeps them throws them into the gutter.”

  On Sundays she dressed in her best black and now her face would seem rounder and her yellowish eyes would become warm and seductive. Her pale, dressed-up little boy would stare at me.

  “Ah, my son,” she often said to him. “Look at the gentleman. He works. Work—follow his example, my son.”

  And they would go off to Mass. I got to know Madame Chapin very well.

  “I feel safe with you,” she said after a month. “It was not the same with my Polish lodger. I never felt any confidence with him, but with you it is different.”

  I was hurt. One Sunday, when Christmas came, she came in dressed up in her black as usual with her boy. She was going on her annual visit to her sister who had come to stay at the Ritz. This sister was a kept woman and lived with a motor car manufacturer. The rich sister gave her discarded dresses to sell and the boy was given a book or a toy. When Madame Chapin came back she fell back on her stock epitaph, standing still as stone in the doorway, in her mournful voice:

  “With those women, one false step …” She seemed more like a man than a woman to me.

  It did not occur to me until forty years later that this annual visit would make a good story. I moved the two sisters to London and, in the manner of writers, changed or added to what I could guess of their characters. I gave Madame Chapin a husband. I think that what prevented me from writing the story before was my knowledge of her real life. It was not until I had given her an imaginary husband and transferred her to another place that she took on the reality of a fiction that I think dignified her. It is part of the function of the novelist to speak for people, to make them say or reveal what they are unable to say, to give them a dignity, even the distinction of being comical though she was not comical in my story. But in those Paris days I could not easily think of what to write about, and I did not know that the creative impulse is often ignited when scenes and people from the almost forgotten past are struck like a flint against something from the present. Her one happiness was knowing the “saintly Brothers” who took charge of her son.

  At lunch-time I usually ate a crusty roll and butter, and by six o’clock, after the long wait in the queue at the Post Office with the parcels, I was torn between hunger and the whole of Paris. I walked down to the Tuileries, crossed the Pont des Arts into the Latin Quarter and then began a torturing study of the grocers, the butchers and the menus of restaurants. I was reading Rabelais by now and his joy in the belly, his lists of sausages and pâtés and his cries of “A boire,” half fed me. The sight of snails, cheeses, garlic sausages and the oily filet d’hareng, worked on me until I had to give in. In the next two years I ate my way through the cheap streets of Paris. I sat alone, read or watched people. I was no longer a shop assistant when I left at six o’clock. I became a gifted student, a writer, a painter “studying life.” The noise of these restaurants made me happy. I had no friends, but the crowd seemed to be my friends. There was a stout, shouting fellow in a place in the Rue de Seine whose voice was rich and greedy: he had a peg-leg and when he came in he used to unstrap it and hand it to the waitress who stood it in the corner. Now where in London, I thought, would you see a sight like that? Afterwards I sat in cafés in the Boulevard St Michel and watched the students at their game of squirting soda water at one another and joined in their singing:

  Ton honneur sera perdu

  Commes les autres

  Tu feras ma pauvre fille

  Comme les autres font.

  One day a sewage cart passed and the students rushed from the café, took off their hats, and with bowed heads walked in funeral procession behind it.

  I discovered that the artists met in the Rotonde and Dôme at Montparnasse, and there I sat over a glass of coffee or beer for the rest of the evening, hoping that some of their genius would rub off on me. Once, there was a violent thunderstorm. I had switched from Rabelais to Plato. What with the lightning, and the wine inside me, I was exalted. After these speechless evenings I would walk across that part of Paris, through Grenelle, to the room in Auteuil, and I would either go exhausted to bed or sit up trying to write, while my landlady groaned in her sleep in the room next door.

  Most writers begin by imitation. I had the examples of Stevenson, Chesterton, Belloc, and—for his practical hints—the clever short sketches of Barrie. In French there were the essay-like writings of Anatole France. Naively I supposed that these writers were all learned men who had read enormously at the university and that until I had read pretty well as much, I would not be able or even entitled to write at all. I passed my Saturdays looking over the bookshops of the Boulevard St Michel or the boxes of the bouquinistes. I saw that I had not only English literature but the whole of French literature standing between me and the act of writing. Books were cheap. I was used to going without a meal, if necessary, to buy them. I bought indiscriminately. I had got a history of French literature; then the Rabelais; Balzac with his gluttonous appetite for the names of pieces of furniture, door knockers, lamps, the names of trades and products, pushed me to the dictionaries, but the Contes Drolatiques were cheerfully licentious; at any rate, in print, I would be a sexual adventurer. I read Lamartine, Vigny and witty Beaumarchais: out of duty to my dead cousin Hilda I read Victor Hugo and the Pléiade; I mixed the sermons of Boileau with the titillations of Manon Lescaut; Chateaubriand was given up for the adulteries and seductions of Maupassant, or the ballads of Villon. What could I possibly get out of such chaotic reading? How far did my understanding reach? Not far at all, but I did seize the nature of these writers in some of their pages, for something stuck in the confusion of my mind as I sat reading by the light of Madame Chapin’s oil lamp. The row of books along the high fly-blown mirror over the marble mantelpiece in my room got longer and longer and the smell of the lamp was made aromatic by the smoke of Gauloises.

  There was another reason for hesitating to write: a love of painting, the old hang-over from Bartlett’s days at Rosendale Road School, and Modern Painters. I spent afternoons in the galleries and stood unnerved by the pictures of the Post-Impressionists in the shops. The smell of paint itself excited my senses. I gazed with desire at the nudes. The attraction of painting was that a work could be instantly seen—no turning of the page—and each brush stroke “told” to the eye. I lived by the eye: the miles I walked in Paris fed the appetite of the eye above all, so that I could imagine everything in the city was printed or painted on me. One warm Saturday I took my water colours to St Cloud and sat down to paint a group of trees. Other painters, stout men with beards, were painting Cézanne-like pictures of Prussian blue avenues. I squeezed and dabbed my paints and after a couple of hours got up to study the running muddle I had made. I was angry with my incompetence. I sneezed. The grass was damp and within an hour I was down in a café trying to kill a heavy cold with hot rum and lemon. It lasted a dreadful fortnight in which I moved to Russia and read Anna Karenina. My career as a painter was over; but, all the more, pictures seemed to tell me how I ought to write.

  The question was—what to write about? I found I simply wanted to write anything. I used to go and look at the Sorbonne: obviously I was not a man of learning. I gazed at Racine’s face: dramatic verse was beyond me. I had read that one writes because one has something to say. I could not see that I had anything to say except that I was alive. I simply wanted to write two or three sentences, even as banal as the advertisement on a sauce bottle, and see them in print with my name beneath them. I was at the bottom rung.

&nb
sp; Suddenly I had a stroke of luck. I saw in the Paris New York Herald a note asking their readers to send in jokes. I realized I had been giggling for some weeks over one. After an hour or so of struggle I wrote it out. I had been standing outside the Opera with a young Englishman I had met, studying the playbills. He said: “Let’s go there tomorrow night.” I said: “We can’t. There’s nothing on.” He pointed to the notice. “Yes, there is,” he said, “they’re doing Relâche.” I sent this to the paper. The next day it was published with my full name and address underneath it. (I resented that they put in my address, exposing me as an amateur.) They did not pay me. This was my first published work. I kept it a long time. It taught me one thing. If one had nothing to say one could at any rate write what other people said.

  I was unable to progress from this point. I went back to the English writers I then admired: the Georgian poets, people like Stevenson, Chesterton, Belloc, Max Beerbohm. What was their common characteristic? It was obvious. They walked. Even Max Beerbohm had walked one morning. Walking started the engine inside them and soon came the words: but they walked on the “open road,” not simply about city streets.

  So, when the weekend was fine I took to the road. Paris was small in 1921. It ended at the fortification where the Metro stopped. There were not a great many cars about and I often walked out to Saint-Cloud, to Saint-Germain, to Versailles, and to Marly; and once, on a longer holiday, to Chartres, to see the blue glass and the withered kings. I came back white with dust and with a full notebook. I was being Stevenson without the donkey, or The Beloved Vagabond, with knapsack, garlic sausage to eat in a field by the roadside or at some cheap restaurant where, sweating and tired, I found my head spinning with the wine I drank. (A boire!) I think I was never happier. On longer journeys—to Pontoise and Poissy—I came back by train. Later on I found a young Englishman who came into the shop one day and talked about a writer called Lytton Strachey. My friend worked at the Bourse; we went on a tramp in the Bellocian tradition. We made a vow. We vowed we’d cross the Loire. We walked to Orléans and crossed the river. The country was dull, the pavé roads were straight and monotonous, the villages were not pretty: in the nights the bullfrogs barked in the pools of the plain; the wide river bed of the Loire, when we came to it, was all stones and the water had dwindled to little pools between them. We were twice pulled up by astounded gendarmes who thought we were tramps and asked us why we didn’t take a train. We said it was “pour le sport,” a phrase that was just coming in. “You are mad,” they said as they got back on their bikes, with that heavy swing of belts and leggings, and continued the interminable moralizing of the gendarmerie.

  This young man was intelligent. He too felt liberated by being in Paris and hated that he had to go back into the family stockbroking business in London. He was a more sensible reader than I: he introduced me to the works of the new writers: Keynes, Roger Fry and Clive Bell. I envied him because he had been to an English Public School; he envied me for wanting to be a writer. I said if I could not manage to be a writer I would still not return to England. He said I was right. He added he had an uncle who owned a mine in Morocco and that the uncle might give me a job as a Labour Manager there. On and off, after that, I would see myself dressed in breeches, gaiters and open-necked shirts by the lift of some rattling mine. I was always weather-beaten in these pictures. This dream became so real to us that he wrote to his uncle who wrote back and said, alas, he had sold his mine. Another fantasy of ours arose because he had acted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at school: we called ourselves Pyramus and Thisbe, a joke that seemed side-splitting to us. When he laughed his wide mouth curved up almost from ear to ear and his eyes closed into long curving slits. He was very shocked by the screaming greedy frenzy of the brokers at the Bourse, a noise that could be heard streets away, even in the Boulevard des Italiens. After we had been friends for some time, an American at the Christian Science Meeting said:

  “I suppose you know he is Jewish? I thought I ought to warn you.”

  This was my first meeting with anti-semitism. I did not know he was Jewish; but it made me reflect that, especially in my school life, the only boys who took my desire to write seriously were Jewish.

  But what was I to write about? My collected works were on the little bamboo table at Madame Chapin’s. There was my major work, done three or four years back: three pages on the Reformation and Renaissance meeting in the works of Milton. There was half a page describing the clock in our dining-room at home. There were two more half-pages on my brother’s hairy friend and another two on a man in the leather trade who was always quoting Shakespeare as we turned over the sheepskins on the warehouse table. And there was my latest work: the joke. I must hurry. I have already told how I had read in Barrie’s When a Man’s Single, that the thing to do was to write on the smallest things and those near to you. There is a straw caught on the window ledge. Will it fall or will it stay? There was an essay, he said, in things like that. What was nearest to me? My room, Madame Chapin groaning next door. Nothing there. And then, by a trick of memory, my mind went back to my first room in Paris. There was a barracks near my new room and at night I would hear the bugle, as I used to hear the bugle at the Champ de Mars. The beautiful word cinquième sounded at once in my head. My nights there came back to me. I set about evoking the rough blue cloth on the table, the attic window, the carpet worn by so many predecessors till it was as thin as a slice of ham, the bugle call, even the notices on the door: “No strangers in the room after eleven,” and “After eleven a supplement for electricity will be charged:” and how the light flicked off at that hour. I began to write. Madame Chapin’s groans supplied a tenant for the room next door at my old hotel. I wrote for two hours. On other nights I re-wrote several times. I added some sentimental moralizings.

  At the photographers I stayed late and typed the thing. I sent it to a London paper and not to lose time I finished two more and sent them. They went to two weekly reviews—the Saturday Westminster and Time and Tide—and to the Christian Science Monitor. There were weeks of iron silence. Then, within a month or two of each other, the three papers accepted them. There! It was easy to be a writer. Outwardly cool and with a curious sense of being naked and exposed, I hummed inside with the giddiness of my genius.

  I cannot describe my shame-faced pride. There was no more “I want to be a writer.” I was a writer. Editors thought so, I told the boys and the Scot at the shop. The Scot had his nation’s regard for the written word. The wet-mouthed Breton gaped and punched me in the back. Pierre astonished me. He was always picking up Montmartre songs and about this time his favourites were one about the rising price of Camembert, and a topical one about Deschanel, the Prime Minister who had fallen out of the train on his way to the lavatory, a song with a chorus of innuendo:

  Il n’a pas abîmé ses pyjamas

  c’était épatant, mais c’était comme ça.

  He stopped and put on a small act:

  “M. Shwep, the great Balzac,” he sang and danced around me. He had picked up the name from the street. At this age boys knew everything.

  I told Madame Chapin. She congratulated me, but hers was a face of little expression. Mournfully, after reflection, she said the man who kept the woman for whom she worked was a journalist. I could not tell her how her groans had helped me to write and I felt, when I saw her, how strange it was when she stood bringing in my shirts, that part of her led a ghost life in what I had written. She asked to borrow the first article. She wanted to show it to the priest who came on Saturdays with her boy.

  A week later the priest returned it.

  “Ah,” he moralized. “At that time you were on the cinquième. Now you are on the ground floor.”

  There was, to judge by the amusement in his eyes, another meaning to this sentence; like every Frenchman he loved a nuance. I read and re-read this article again and again and then, as happens to writers, I was impatient with it and disliked it. I had my first experience of the depression and sense
of nothingness that comes when a piece of work is done. The satisfaction is in the act itself; when it is over there is relief, but the satisfaction is gone. After fifty years I still find this to be so and that with every new piece of writing I have to make that terrifying break with my real life and learn to write again, from the beginning.

  CHAPTER SIX

  On a misleading sunny day on the first of February, 1923, I took the train from London to Holyhead. In a heavy leather suitcase I carried a volume of Yeats’s poems, an anthology of Irish poetry, Boyd’s Irish Literary Renaissance, Synge’s Plays and a fanatical book called Priests and People in Ireland by McCabe, lent to me by a malign Irish stationer in Streatham who told me I would get on all right in Ireland so long as I did not talk religion or politics to anyone and kept the book out of sight. Unknown to myself I was headed for the seventeenth century.

  The Irish Sea was calm—thank God—and I saw at last that unearthly sight of the Dublin mountains rising from the water, with that beautiful false innocence in their violets, greens and golden rust of grasses and bracken, with heavy rain clouds leaning like a huge umbrella over the northern end of them. My breath went thin: I was feeling again the first symptoms of my liability to spells. I remember wondering, as young men do, whether somewhere in this city was walking a girl with whom I would fall in love: the harbours of Denmark gave way to Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Hills. The French had planted a little of their sense of limits and reason in me, but already I could feel these vanishing.

  Once through the Customs I was frisked for guns by a Free State soldier with a pink face and mackerel-coloured eyes. I got out of the local train at Westland Row, into that smell of horse-manure and stout which were the ruling Dublin odours, and was driven on an outside car with a smart little pony to (of all things, in Ireland!) a temperance hotel in Harcourt Street. It was on this first trot across the city that I had my first experience of things in Ireland not being what they seem. I have described this in a book on Dublin which I wrote a few years ago. The jarvey whipped along, talking his head off about the state of the “unfortunate country,” in a cloud of Bedads, Begobs, God-help-us-es, but turned out to be a Cockney. The Cockney and Dublin accents are united by adenoids. Cab drivers are, perhaps, the same everywhere.