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V. S. Pritchett Complete Collected Essays
The essayist, critic, novelist, short story writer, and biographer presents 203 essays on such writers as Gibbon, Cervantes, Balzac, Flaubert, Woolf, Shaw, Twain, Garci+a7a Lorca, Updike, Rushdie, and others.
- GenresEssaysLiterary Criticism
1319 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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206 people want to read
About the author
V.S. Pritchett
158 books71 followersVictor Sawdon Pritchett was the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (née Martin). His father, a London businessman in financial difficulties, had come to Ipswich to start a shop selling newspapers and stationery. The business was struggling and the couple were lodging over a toyshop at 41 St Nicholas Street where Pritchett was born on 16 December 1900. Beatrice had expected a girl, whom she planned to name after the Queen. Pritchett never liked his first name, which is why he always styled himself with his initials; even close friends would call him VSP.
Pritchett's father was a steady Christian Scientist and unsteady in all else. Walter and Beatrice had come to Ipswich to be near her sister who had married money and lived in Warrington Road. Within a year Walter was declared bankrupt, the family moved to Woodford, Essex, then to Derby, and he began selling women's clothing and accessories as a travelling salesman. Pritchett was soon sent with his brother Cyril to live with their paternal grandparents in Sedbergh, where the boys attended their first school. Walter's business failures, his casual attitude to credit, and his easy deceit obliged the family to move frequently. The family was reunited but life was always precarious; they tended to live in London suburbs with members of Beatrice's family. They returned to Ipswich in 1910, living for a year near Cauldwell Hall Road, trying to evade Walter's creditors. At this time Pritchett attended St. John's School. Subsequently Pritchett attended Alleyn's School, Dulwich, and Dulwich College but he stayed nowhere for very long. When his father went to fight in World War I, Pritchett left school. Later in the war Walter turned his hand to aircraft design, of which he knew nothing, and his later ventures included art needlework, property speculation, and faith healing.
Pritchett was a leather buyer from 1916 to 1920, when he moved to Paris, where he worked as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for the Christian Science Monitor, which sent him to Ireland and Spain. From 1926 he wrote reviews for the paper and for the New Statesman, which later appointed him literary editor.
Pritchett's first book described his journey across Spain (Marching Spain 1928) and Clare Drummer (1929) was about his experiences in Ireland. Whilst in Ireland he met his first wife, Evelyn Vigors, but it was not to be a happy marriage.
Pritchett published five novels but he claimed not to enjoy their creation. His reputation was established by a collection of short stories (The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories (1932)).
In 1936 he divorced his first wife, and married Dorothy Rudge Roberts; they had two children. The marriage lasted until Pritchett's death, although they both had other relationships. His son is the journalist Oliver Pritchett and his grandson (son of Oliver) is the cartoonist Matt Pritchett.
During World War II Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information whilst continuing to submit a weekly essay to the New Statesman. After the war he wrote widely and he started taking teaching positions at universities in the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962), Columbia University and Smith College. He was fluent in German, Spanish, and French, and published successful biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev (1977) and Anton Chekhov (1988), although he did not know Russian and had never visited the Soviet Union.
Pritchett was knighted in 1975 for his services to literature and became Companion of Honour in 1993. His awards include Heinemann Award (1969), PEN Award (1974), W.H. Smith Literary Award (1990), and Golden Pen Award (1993). He died of a stroke in London on 20 March 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Pr...
Pritchett's father was a steady Christian Scientist and unsteady in all else. Walter and Beatrice had come to Ipswich to be near her sister who had married money and lived in Warrington Road. Within a year Walter was declared bankrupt, the family moved to Woodford, Essex, then to Derby, and he began selling women's clothing and accessories as a travelling salesman. Pritchett was soon sent with his brother Cyril to live with their paternal grandparents in Sedbergh, where the boys attended their first school. Walter's business failures, his casual attitude to credit, and his easy deceit obliged the family to move frequently. The family was reunited but life was always precarious; they tended to live in London suburbs with members of Beatrice's family. They returned to Ipswich in 1910, living for a year near Cauldwell Hall Road, trying to evade Walter's creditors. At this time Pritchett attended St. John's School. Subsequently Pritchett attended Alleyn's School, Dulwich, and Dulwich College but he stayed nowhere for very long. When his father went to fight in World War I, Pritchett left school. Later in the war Walter turned his hand to aircraft design, of which he knew nothing, and his later ventures included art needlework, property speculation, and faith healing.
Pritchett was a leather buyer from 1916 to 1920, when he moved to Paris, where he worked as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for the Christian Science Monitor, which sent him to Ireland and Spain. From 1926 he wrote reviews for the paper and for the New Statesman, which later appointed him literary editor.
Pritchett's first book described his journey across Spain (Marching Spain 1928) and Clare Drummer (1929) was about his experiences in Ireland. Whilst in Ireland he met his first wife, Evelyn Vigors, but it was not to be a happy marriage.
Pritchett published five novels but he claimed not to enjoy their creation. His reputation was established by a collection of short stories (The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories (1932)).
In 1936 he divorced his first wife, and married Dorothy Rudge Roberts; they had two children. The marriage lasted until Pritchett's death, although they both had other relationships. His son is the journalist Oliver Pritchett and his grandson (son of Oliver) is the cartoonist Matt Pritchett.
During World War II Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information whilst continuing to submit a weekly essay to the New Statesman. After the war he wrote widely and he started taking teaching positions at universities in the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962), Columbia University and Smith College. He was fluent in German, Spanish, and French, and published successful biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev (1977) and Anton Chekhov (1988), although he did not know Russian and had never visited the Soviet Union.
Pritchett was knighted in 1975 for his services to literature and became Companion of Honour in 1993. His awards include Heinemann Award (1969), PEN Award (1974), W.H. Smith Literary Award (1990), and Golden Pen Award (1993). He died of a stroke in London on 20 March 1997.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Pr...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 23, 2022
Books have secondary uses. A pamphlet or book of poems is the perfect size and thickness for swatting wasps. A bonkbuster makes a useful paperweight. This book, a complete collection of VS Pritchett's essays, is handy for clubbing bulls to death. But I doubt any other book holds more wisdom per square inch than this one. Reading it is like a software update for the IQ.
Pritchett is not a scholar but as a working writer he often makes intuitive leaps that can leave the academy wheezing miles behind. A lesser critic generalising about an entire nation through its writers would look absurd. Not Pritchett. The best essays are all on the Russians - Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, Solzhenitsyn, Turgenev and above all Chekhov. They also supply the key to Pritchett’s thinking. The Russian writers, he says, captured reality best because they captured the day as it passed through their characters. He detects this quality in a select band of writers - Henry Green, Bruce Chatwin - bestowing his insight like a teacher's gold stars.
Pritchett finds authors from the American South theatrical but nourished by the most fertile literary soil in the world. Irish writers receive similar praise because they have the gift of writing 'close to the skin of life.' He seems to find plot-driven short stories inherently inferior, like powdered milk next to a pint of full-fat. It's a notion that, in less gifted hands, has filled reams of literary pages with aimless mood-music. When a story has no plot, Pritchett avers, it must have a point.
I don't think Pritchett's eye for a phrase receives enough credit - his own phrases, or other writers. His essay on Samuel Beckett - the trilogy, not the plays - is aptly titled 'A Modern Oblomov'. Pritchett’s quotes from other writers are mounted like prize exhibits. He quotes from Rabbit is Rich, celebrating John Updike as the 'poet of physical motion', and you see exactly what he means. DH Lawrence's weakness was also his strength, because he seized life 'with both head and hands', forging a style clumsy and vigorous all at once. He sees a throwaway phrase in a Camus essay ('One of our contemporaries is cured of his torment simply by contemplating a landscape') and finds in it a key to the writer’s entire oeuvre. He is informative about authors best known for their short stories - Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Guy De Maupassant.
There are some exceptions to this rule. I don’t find his attempts to humanise Jorge Luis Borges - especially the story ‘Emma Zunz’ - at all convincing. The Orwell essay is skimpy, which is surprising given Pritchett actually knew him. The Kafka piece is thin to the point of transparency. Pritchett sees him as a sham saint and a martyr to 'alienation' (the inverted commas are Pritchett's). But it’s plain these are minor lapses in a major volume.
Pritchett is not a scholar but as a working writer he often makes intuitive leaps that can leave the academy wheezing miles behind. A lesser critic generalising about an entire nation through its writers would look absurd. Not Pritchett. The best essays are all on the Russians - Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov, Solzhenitsyn, Turgenev and above all Chekhov. They also supply the key to Pritchett’s thinking. The Russian writers, he says, captured reality best because they captured the day as it passed through their characters. He detects this quality in a select band of writers - Henry Green, Bruce Chatwin - bestowing his insight like a teacher's gold stars.
Pritchett finds authors from the American South theatrical but nourished by the most fertile literary soil in the world. Irish writers receive similar praise because they have the gift of writing 'close to the skin of life.' He seems to find plot-driven short stories inherently inferior, like powdered milk next to a pint of full-fat. It's a notion that, in less gifted hands, has filled reams of literary pages with aimless mood-music. When a story has no plot, Pritchett avers, it must have a point.
I don't think Pritchett's eye for a phrase receives enough credit - his own phrases, or other writers. His essay on Samuel Beckett - the trilogy, not the plays - is aptly titled 'A Modern Oblomov'. Pritchett’s quotes from other writers are mounted like prize exhibits. He quotes from Rabbit is Rich, celebrating John Updike as the 'poet of physical motion', and you see exactly what he means. DH Lawrence's weakness was also his strength, because he seized life 'with both head and hands', forging a style clumsy and vigorous all at once. He sees a throwaway phrase in a Camus essay ('One of our contemporaries is cured of his torment simply by contemplating a landscape') and finds in it a key to the writer’s entire oeuvre. He is informative about authors best known for their short stories - Isaac Babel, Flannery O'Connor, Guy De Maupassant.
There are some exceptions to this rule. I don’t find his attempts to humanise Jorge Luis Borges - especially the story ‘Emma Zunz’ - at all convincing. The Orwell essay is skimpy, which is surprising given Pritchett actually knew him. The Kafka piece is thin to the point of transparency. Pritchett sees him as a sham saint and a martyr to 'alienation' (the inverted commas are Pritchett's). But it’s plain these are minor lapses in a major volume.
January 31, 2021
V.S. Pritchett's Complete Collected Essays is 1300+ pages of some of best literary criticism ever written.
Pritchett manages the rather neat trick of approaching the critic's task in a janus-faced manner: on the one hand, as an author himself, he addresses his subjects as fellow practitioners of the art of fiction (including those authors who are long dead). On the other hand, he also writes as a reader who, like most of us, is concerned primarily with the immediate experience of reading, unmediated by theories and critical fashions. This places him in the tradition of Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, C.S. Lewis, etc.—critics who also managed to find that delicate balance in their criticism between their roles as authors and readers.
To my mind, no other critic communicates the pleasure of reading so well as Pritchett. Other critics might pay lip service to that pleasure (Roland Barthes obviously comes to mind) but Pritchett enacts it for us and in doing so he makes us fall in love with books we have never read, books we may never read. He does this, furthermore, without reaching for the language of sexual passion, a banal commonplace in literary criticism at this point.
Despite containing essays written across five decades or so, the contents of Complete Collected Essays feels remarkably consistent in tone. Whether expounding on the joys of classics like Gil Blas in the 1940s or reviewing Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in the 1980s, the same agreeable, even-tempered tone persists. While this might sound like faint praise, the iconoclasm and polemical fireworks that one tends to associate with a lot of famous critics is not missed. The meal Pritchett offers might not not be as exciting and full-flavoured as some, but it is a lot more nourishing.
Highest possible recommendation.
Pritchett manages the rather neat trick of approaching the critic's task in a janus-faced manner: on the one hand, as an author himself, he addresses his subjects as fellow practitioners of the art of fiction (including those authors who are long dead). On the other hand, he also writes as a reader who, like most of us, is concerned primarily with the immediate experience of reading, unmediated by theories and critical fashions. This places him in the tradition of Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, C.S. Lewis, etc.—critics who also managed to find that delicate balance in their criticism between their roles as authors and readers.
To my mind, no other critic communicates the pleasure of reading so well as Pritchett. Other critics might pay lip service to that pleasure (Roland Barthes obviously comes to mind) but Pritchett enacts it for us and in doing so he makes us fall in love with books we have never read, books we may never read. He does this, furthermore, without reaching for the language of sexual passion, a banal commonplace in literary criticism at this point.
Despite containing essays written across five decades or so, the contents of Complete Collected Essays feels remarkably consistent in tone. Whether expounding on the joys of classics like Gil Blas in the 1940s or reviewing Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in the 1980s, the same agreeable, even-tempered tone persists. While this might sound like faint praise, the iconoclasm and polemical fireworks that one tends to associate with a lot of famous critics is not missed. The meal Pritchett offers might not not be as exciting and full-flavoured as some, but it is a lot more nourishing.
Highest possible recommendation.
January 4, 2023
A charming, motivating collection. Pritchett's excitement for his subjects is contagious.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews