In Praise of Pritchett

• On the Edge of the Cliff by V.S. Pritchett
  Chatto, 179 pp, £4.95, February 1980, ISBN 0 7011 2438 5
• The Tale Bearers: Essays on English, American and Other Writers by V.S. Pritchett
  Chatto, 223 pp, £6.50, April 1980, ISBN 0 7011 2435 0

V.S. Pritchett’s short stories are retrospective, provincial, formless and feminine. His is an art that does not care how peripheral it sometimes seems. There are no twists, payoffs, reverses, jackpots or epiphanies. Pritchett never rubs life up the wrong way, and is happy to leave only a faint shine on its fur. He uses the forms and addresses of minor art, yet there is no one quite like him – no one alive or male, anyway. ‘He is proof,’ Frank Kermode has argued, ‘that an older tradition could survive the importunities of the modernist Twenties and stay modern, respond finely to the world as it is.’ I am not sure how true this is, or in what ways it might turn out to be true: but it is clearly the central critical question posed by Pritchett’s quietly extraordinary way of looking at life. Of course, the answer to this question may in the end not be very relevant or even interesting, assuming as it must do that an art of such freakish fragility is pierceable by criticism in the first place.

Luckily, Pritchett the explicator is on hand with a new collection of essays to provide oblique guidance. All artist-critics are to some extent secret proselytisers for their own work; they are all secret agents. As Pritchett says of Graham Greene’s Collected Essays, ‘let the academics weigh up, be exhaustive, or build their superstructures – the artist lives as much by his pride in his own emphasis as by what he ignores; humility is a disgrace.’ Pritchett’s judgments are emboldened by this ‘artist’s necessity’, but his professional fair-mindedness always keeps the picture steady. As in his stories, he has the curious ability to let art shine through him, helplessly. Pritchett is a mirror, not a lamp. He goes at criticism the old way, creeping up on a writer through the life, the letters, the creative temperament on offer. When he interrupts a biographical account to put forward his own view (‘I find this too simple; her religiosity was an assertion of pride’), he is not presenting a rival piece of evidence but merely exerting his artistic confidence. The New Critics tend to look at classic texts as if they were contemporary and anonymous; with Pritchett, criticism is always busily attentive to history, character and random human traffic.

Pritchett’s fiction is like this too – inevitably. He does not feel at ease with the stylised and the exemplary. In his essay on Borges – reprinted in another recent collection, The Myth Makers – Pritchett responds finely to Borges’s wit and elegance of mind, but is quickly dislocated by his panoptic coolness, the liberties Borges takes with the shape of life. As a result, Pritchett makes several fruitless attempts to humanise stories like ‘Emma Zunz’ and ‘The Aleph’, and simply misreads the irreducibly abstract fable, ‘The Circular Ruins’. If fiction is imagined as a globe, with realism as its equatorial belt, then Borges occupies a spectral citadel in the North Pole, while Pritchett sweats and smarts in the tropics. When one artist writes about another, the reader is doubly rewarded by this reverse-barometer effect. We enjoy Pritchett’s culture shock – and note, too, the minor adjustments and time-lags he undergoes when he visits writers who live much nearer home.