A Clarity of Mind, a Clarity of Heart

By R.Z. Sheppard

ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF by V.S. Pritchett Random House; 179 pages; $8.95

Hemingway wrote his stories as if he were clotting curds, squeezing the runny adjectives and opaque sentiments from his prose until action became an essence of feeling and moral. It is a style well suited for revealing character, especially that of the author. For when the passion for essences is spent, the substitute is often self-parody.

This has never happened to V.S. Pritchett, who, on the threshold of his 80th year, writes as passionately as ever. Talent, discipline and enjoyment keep the juices flowing; recognition helps. Knighted hi 1975, Sir Victor is generally regarded as the best literary journalist working both sides of the Atlantic. His two-volume autobiography, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, are quiet marvels of English prose and self-appraisal, and his stories have accrued into a body of major work.

The laconic, seemingly impersonal surfaces of Pritchett's stories give off a surprising amount of animal heat. It is a matter of design, craftsmanship and, as the author has written, "the supreme pleasure of putting oneself in by leaving oneself out." The technique requires the placement of the precise detail at the exact emotional distance, and it gave his autobiography the immediacy of his fiction. Here, for example, is that extraordinary passage from Midnight Oil in which Pritchett describes one of the more dramatic consequences of his father's exasperating personality: "He had no notion of what to do; some bewilderment at the fact that other people existed, independently of himself, made him cling to the idea that events had not happened ... He invented excuse after excuse for delaying the funeral, one of the mad reasons being that Miss H. would be put out by his absence from the office. Perhaps the reason lay in a sort of Tolstoyan anger at the fact of death; it is certain also that he loved his mother passionately. There the body lay in the house. The result was horror. The dead woman's body burst in the coffin and was borne dripping from the bedroom."

Many Pritchett fictions deal with styles of preserving one's dignity. How does an aging botanist confront the energies of his lovely 25-year-old companion? Carefully, as the author illustrates in the title story of his latest collection: "There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game." Love, of course, is never a game, especially in a December-May romance where the older party keeps one eye on the clock and the younger does not have to. In addition, real suspicions are too easily come by.

The narrators of The Accompanist and The Fig Tree must deal with the doubts of the husbands they have cuckolded. In the first story, a pianist leaves a package of apple tarts at her lover's apartment. She arrives home dessertless for a dinner party to which her lover is invited. The husband clowns around, sings bawdy songs and regrets the missing tarts which, he is told, were left at a rehearsal studio. How much does he know? How much does he want to know? There are no answers, only a delicate tension created by Pritchett's great talent for dialogue. Again, it is what is left out that counts.

The husband in The Fig Tree knows the truth and exacts an ironic revenge. He is a businessman who spends much time away from home while his wife putters in the garden and eventually with the nurseryman. Instead of staging a showdown, the husband sends his daughter to boarding school and his wife to work for the nurseryman. The professional association is fatal to the affair. Laments the nurseryman: "The roles of Duggie and myself were reversed: when Duggie came home once a week now from Brussels it was he who seemed to be the lover and I the husband. Sally grew very sharp with both of us and Duggie and I stood apart, on our dignity."

Not all Pritchett's characters are articulate about their-- predicaments. Zuilmah Bittell in Tea with Mrs. Bittell is an affluent widow whose wits have been slowed by gentility. With a head "clouded by kindness and manners and a pride in her relics," she befriends a shop clerk whose companion attempts to plunder her expensive furnishings. That the pair are probably homosexuals escapes Mrs. Bittell; that embarrassment moves her to brave action provides the reader with an unexpected insight into motivation: "She had often, in her quiet way, thought of what she would do if someone attacked her. She had always planned to speak gently and to ask them why they were so unhappy and had they forgotten they were children of God. But a terrible thing had happened. She had wet herself, like a child, all down her legs." Red with shame, she bashes the thief with a brass lamp. To make this moment believable requires the sort of mastery that moved one critic to say Pritchett was the Segovia of the short story. A good many other critics wish they had said it first.

--R.Z. Sheppard

He is not what one might expect in a British literary lion. Chatting amiably in the sitting room of his house near London's Regent's Park, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems more like a rural school master. There is a comfortable, unstudied eclecticism about him. His checkered trousers, striped shirt and plaid jacket have an odd camouflaging effect, especially when he stands against a large glass case containing a Victorian bouquet of stuffed pheasants, birds of paradise and a platypus. He offers no sharp opinions, no bulletins on the state of the arts.

"I don't write for a public," says Pritchett. "I write to clear my own mind, to find out what I think and feel." He pursues this Socratic labor seven days a week, nearly 52 weeks a year, writing with a fountain pen on sheets of strong, white paper that he holds on a pastry board. It has been his lap desk for 40 years.

A man of letters? "It is an old-fashioned term that irritates me," he says. "I didn't set out to be a man of letters. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, because of the travel. But I had no sense of news; I would miss it by divine instinct."

Instincts and circumstances have allowed Pritchett to come to eminence in his own way and in his own time. He was born in Ipswich in 1900, son of a businessman who had big ideas and often bigger debts. The first volume of Pritchett's autobiography is called A Cab at the Door because the family moved a lot. He developed a taste for reading and skepticism but when he failed a scholarship exam, his formal education ended. It was a disguised blessing: "If I had passed I would have stayed at school until I was eighteen and would surely have got another scholarship to London University; probably I would have become a teacher or an academic. I had had a narrow escape."

At 16, Pritchett was sent off to learn the leather business. By 1921 he was an expatriate, earning a slender living selling photography supplies, ostrich feathers and shellac in Paris. It was the Paris of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, but Pritchett knew little of it. He recalls a winter evening in 1922 when he watched people walking up the Boulevard du Montparnasse carrying a large blue-covered volume. It was the first edition of Joyce's Ulysses, an author Pritchett had not heard of.

Most of his time was spent with painters, trying to transliterate the impact of postimpressionism into his fledgling prose. It worked well enough that the Christian Science Monitor asked him to write an occasional mood piece about Paris. This led to assignments in Ireland and Spain, the subject of his first book, Marching Spain.

By 1927 Pritchett had returned to London to write fiction. To support himself he became a critic for the New Statesman. "I rather liked exploration books," he recalls. "They were expensive and could be sold." By World War II he was married, a father and a critic of growing reputation. Yet he still devoted half his working day to fiction. So it has gone ever since, and the rhythm shows no signs of slackening. The question of retirement seems inappropriate. One would rather know what Pritchett is working on now. "Two stories," he replies cheerfully, "at the same time."

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