Customer Reviews

V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An outstanding biography, and a worthy successor to Jeremy Treglown's previous books on famous English novelists. Pritchett wasn't much of a novelist, but as a short story writer he attained the sort of sterling reputation that nearly went out with Queen Victoria. Even as he grew older and older (he died at age 96) his skills and powers grew and grew, and the books he wrote in his seventies are probably his best.

Pritchett married twice; his first marriage, to Evelyn, collapsed after years of bitterness, and later he married Dorothy, the "marvellous girl" of his fiction. Unfortunately their fifty year union was often marred by him having numerous affairs and her being a heavy drunk who, finally, turned to this newfangled thing called AA in 1957 and it really helped her. And finally when he got too old to cheat, they attained their happiness all over again. Some of their early letters have that obscene James Joyce-Nora Barnacle tone to them--very rousing.

You wouldn't believe how many women wanted to have sex with him! For he was not very attractive--a little man, round as a billiard ball, with funny teeth and a total narcissist who would, of course, being a writer, make life difficult for you afterwards by writing you cutting letters or painting horrid portraits of you in his fiction.

There's a lot of high-toned gossip passing for insight: "At the Vienna Hilton, Victor and Dorothy were kept awake by violent quarrels in the adjacent bedroom between the playwright Eugene Ionesco and his wife."

And some of the most amusing contretemps in the biography arrive from the differences in American and British usages of our common tongue. When an earnest coed at Smith College confided that she was an "English major," Pritchett did a double take, telling a friend that mentally he "decorated her with moustaches and gave her gout."

Hitchcock fans will go bananas when they learn of the extent that Pritchett changed the script of THE BIRDS, when a disgruntled Hitch asked the visiting English prose master for some revisions to Evan Hunter's script. Treglown claims that at least one major scene was written entirely by Pritchett, and any number of smaller script changes and character developments. Annie, the school teacher played by Suzanne Pleshette, given more grit to make her less "goody goody," and Melanie Daniels now makes references to a childhood with unsatisfactory parent figures in order to balance out the (possibly over-Oedipal) relationship between Rod Taylor and Jessica Tandy. In addition, Hitchcock apparently toyed with the idea of making a film version of one of Pritchett's 50s short stories, "The Wheelbarrow." Or was he just toying with Pritchett to get him to produce more pages on THE BIRDS script? Hard to say. But anyhow I've read dozens of books on Hitchcock and THE BIRDS and never once heard anything about the involvement of V.S. Pritchett so this was a real coup for Treglown if you ask me.

Elsewhere Sir Victor doesn't come off so heroically. Treglown details a trip the British Council paid for, sending Pritchett and Vladimir Nabokov to India in 1960. The awful truth is that neither great master could tolerate Indian people, their soft-spoken voices, which could so easily be mistaken by the lordly ones for obsequiousness. Nabokov shouted out in the hotel bar that "there is a Russian phrase for their [Indians'] writhing whispering manner which, translated, is 'working your finger up your arse without soap.'" Of course both VN and VSP had a vulgar streak and their trip to India brought it out of both of them in a thoroughly unpleasant way.

Treglown states that Harold Pinter learned his way of sketching out mood and character from similarly oblique strategies of Pritchett's, but gives no evidence of why he says this.

His relationship with THE NEW YORKER in the 1950s and 1960s is fairly grim, though one hand washed the other, and Pritchett became known as a British writing genius through his association with the magazine. Roger Angell, the New Yorker editor, totally censored all the sexuality out of Pritchett's stories, and the magazine's policy precluded any favorable allusion to homosexuality, so odd when you consider the parade of gay men and lesbians who worked so hard for the magazine, putting their queer shoulders to the wheel. It's a lesson in social history I suppose, but it makes for difficult reading.

The only reason I don't give this one five stars is that he never really convinces me that Pritchett is anything other than a fair to middling writer. It seems as though, since his death, Pritchett's reputation has diminished. I'll try some of the books and make up my mind myself. That much Treglown has done for his subject, aroused the curiosity of a new generation of putative readers.