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V. S. Pritchett was born on December 16, 1900. Over the past two years he has published a collection of six decades of travel essays, a biography, and his ninth volume of literary criticism. At ninety he continues to be a prolific writer, and has completed a new story collection, A Careless Widow, even in the wake of the publication of his Complete Short Stories (1990). Although he has worked in many literary genres, he is best known for his short stories and travel writing.

While his stories have been compared to those of Joyce and Chekhov, Pritchett claims it was Irish writers such as Sean O’Faolin, Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor who taught him what a short story could be. Eudora Welty has said, “Any Pritchett story is all of it alight and busy at once, like a well-going fire. Wasteless and at the same time well-fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or a magic trick, self-consuming, with nothing left over. He is one of the great pleasure-givers in our language.”

At his father’s insistence, Pritchett left school when he was fifteen to work in the leather trade—an experience that provided him with material for his early novel Nothing Like Leather(1935). At twenty Pritchett went to Paris, where he “lived an abysmal bohemian life and wrote a terribly pretentious and mannered prose.” He supported himself working as a salesman in shops, and later as a correspondent on the Irish rebellion for The Christian Science Monitorand a journalist in Spain. His first book, Marching Spain, published in 1928 and like many of his works long out of print, was a travel book about his tour of that country.

Along with eight volumes of critical essays, many written at the rate of one a week for The New Statesman, where Pritchett eventually became literary editor, he has written critical biographies of Balzac (1973), Turgenev (1977), and Chekhov (1988). He has no interest in scholarly doctrines—his aim is to illuminate a writer—and in the end, his biographies send one back to the authors’ books themselves.

Pritchett, a former president of English PEN and International PEN, is the president of the London Society of Authors, and was knighted in 1975. He lives with his wife of fifty years, Dorothy, near Primrose Hill, London, in a narrow Georgian house. His drawing room overlooks the green canopy of Regent’s Park. It was here that this interview was conducted on two separate occasions in 1990. In person V. S. Pritchett is a small, energetic man, with a lively luminous face and a lopsided grin that makes him seem years younger. Words come out of him quickly, easily, and precisely. He has about him the eagerness and intelligence of a man who enjoys talk and enjoys people. When at the end of one rainy-day meeting Pritchett began to recount a story he was working on, he stood up in his book-lined sitting room and was transformed into a ventriloquist. Chortling as he spoke, hands in the pockets of his cardigan, he suddenly took on the voices of all the characters, and brought his story to life. Irving Howe once said of him that “no one alive writes a better English sentence,” and at ninety, V. S. Pritchett is still making his sentences into stories. As he puts it, “intervention invents itself.”

 

INTERVIEWER

Your career as a writer has been so long and distinguished that we could spend hours on every aspect of it. But let us start from the beginning: you are the first member of your family, which you have classified as lower middle class, to become a writer. Where do you think your talents come from? 

V. S. PRITCHETT

I don’t really know. My father was a businessman but artistic. He designed textiles and sold them to Liberty’s. I remember seeing him feel and stroke silk, and wondering what he was doing—he was assessing its quality. My mother was a Cockney and a good storyteller and mimic. She used to go out shopping and come back imitating people she had seen, with their different voices and accents. She read me stories by the humorists of the time. One of her favorite books was The Tales of The Night Watchman by W. W. Jacobs. They always started with: Well, as I was saying the other day, said the night watchman,” and went on from there. They had very good dialogue and were wildly funny. My mother used to be hysterical with laughter. My grandfather was a Congregationalist minister working up in Yorkshire. He was a good working-class boy, but in those days—towards the end of the nineteenth century—there was a feeling that you could rise in the world through education. He had a good voice and spoke with precision and eloquence. Some lady in the neighborhood sent him to theological college for a year at her own expense, and he became a Congregationalist minister. I was often sent to stay with him for holidays and enjoyed his company. He was an ardent walker over the fells and moorlands of Yorkshire, and he took me with him. He would say to me, But you haven’t learnt Greek and Latin? then take a coin out of his pocket, show me the Latin inscription on it and try to initiate me. Or he would say, You must read Macaulay at once! or, Have you not read Ruskin? You must start straight away! I was about nine or ten. 

INTERVIEWER

You have also mentioned a W. W. Bartlett, your schoolteacher. How was he an influence?

PRITCHETT

I went to a state primary school in Dulwich, where we lived. Mr. Bartlett was very unconventional. He never kept to the curriculum, and he broke all the rules and regulations of the educational authorities. He disorganized us very well. He used to spend a whole day on history, for example, instead of the regulatory forty-five minutes, or send us out into the surrounding countryside to draw wild flowers. This was perfect for a future writer, but not for ambitious boys who wanted to pass exams and get good jobs. Eventually Mr. Bartlett left and became an important figure in the world of education; he was replaced by a woman teacher who was also very good. She once told us to go the Horniman Museum nearby and draw something, anything we liked. I brought back a picture of an amulet, which she liked, and for which she gave me a prize—a pocket edition of Ruskin in three volumes! I still have it. I had been to the Dulwich Art Gallery and looked at pictures by David and Poussin and so on, not knowing anything about those artists. And there they all were in Ruskin. I was about twelve, and it was a struggle reading him, but I got to volume three, of which the first fifty to seventy pages are on the pathetic fallacy in literature. He argued that it was incorrect to assign human feelings to inanimate objects. He picked on Homer and showed where he had gone wrong. The book was about how to write criticism, and I worked hard to understand it.

INTERVIEWER

What were your very earliest influences?

PRITCHETT

My first passionate reading, I suppose, was Walter Scott, which I started reading when I was five. I was picking my way through “Scottland” a long time, until the old lady next door came over and said, Why waste your time on all this trash? I was a tremendous prig.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that from the age of ten you knew you would be a writer. Did you start writing then?

PRITCHETT

There was a children’s encyclopedia in our house, and I read an article on the Alhambra in it and decided to write a novel about the war between the Castilians and the Arabs, full of battle scenes and romance. I sat down and wrote a hundred pages of it; then my father found it and mocked my use of pretentious words and made me burn it. For a long time I harbored a great resentment against him for that.

INTERVIEWER

You left school at fifteen, presumably because you could not afford it. But there were scholarships for bright pupils like you. Did you try to get one?

PRITCHETT

With his eccentric teaching method, Mr. Bartlett had ensured that I would never get one! The scholarship exam questions were on Noah’s Ark, and what they wanted was historical knowledge, with facts and figures and dates. I thought the story was rather dull, but the voyage was thrilling, and I made up a fantastic account of the voyage—what people were doing on the boat, with animals and the dove coming in and all of that. Naturally I failed the exam. So I was sent to work in the leather trade.

INTERVIEWER

Why leather? What kind of work did you do?

PRITCHETT

Someone told my father there was a future in leather. At first I was an office boy, but soon I became a messenger, taking documents to the docks and the warehouses and so on. This was tremendous, because instead of being cooped up in an office all day I could get out. At the same time, people in the higher echelons of the trade were very well-educated. They read a lot and were intrigued by the idea that I really wanted to be a writer. That’s when I began to write little sketches. But what encouraged me particularly was going to some local lectures; one of the subjects was Milton, and as it happened I had read Paradise Regained, though not Lost. I wrote an essay on it and the lady lecturer publicly proclaimed it to be the best. This was marvelous! I sent it to two papers in the country, and although no one published it, I had got the fever. 

INTERVIEWER

So how did you get out of the leather trade? 

PRITCHETT

At school I had started learning German and French, and I was good at them. Afterwards I worked on my French fairly hard and read a great deal. So after four years the firm gave me money to take a year’s leave of absence to go to Paris—I think it was about twenty pounds. The money was soon finished, and I got a job in a photographic shop. It was very boring, but I met all sorts of people, artists and photographers, who were not big names, but interesting. They all wore hats and scarves and colorful clothes. At the same time, I began writing. I had formed the notion that if you want to write, you should write about what you know and what you are doing, exactly. So I wrote a sketch about living on the fifth floor of a cheap hotel in Paris, and sent it to The Christian Science Monitor. To my delight it was accepted and published.