A long and happy life.(V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life)(Book Review)

A long and happy life

Jeremy Treglown V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life. Random House, 322 pages, $25.95

The subtitle of Jeremy Treglown's brief and near-perfect biography V S. Pritchett: A Working Life is deliciously pointed. In the sixty-odd years of his career, Pritchett (1900-1996) wrote four novels, eight volumes of literary essays, six travel books, three biographies, two volumes of autobiography, ten collections of short stories, and book reviews beyond counting. Not many writers have sustained so high a level of achievement for so long; among the peaks are the novels Dead Man Leading (1937) and Mr. Beluncle (1951), the meditative travel book The Spanish Temper (1954), the autobiographical works A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), and such short stories as "Sense of Humour," "The Voice," "When My Girl Comes Home," "Did You Invite Me?," "On the Edge of the Cliff," "The Fig Tree," and "Cocky Olly"--the first story published in his thirties and the last in his eighties. This prodigious diligence and regard for quality even as the pot was boiling--Pritchett took great pride in earning his living from writing alone--point up the moral of labor handsomely rewarded with fame and material comfort, even as the supreme reward was the labor itself. Pritchett never wrote the ambitious books he thought he should have written, and from financial need he produced more ephemeral journalism than he wished he had; still, as he writes in the final sentence of Midnight Oil, not only the accomplishment but also the activity was satisfying: "I have done, given my circumstances and my character, what I have been able to do and I have enjoyed it."

His characteristic modesty bespoke both the acceptance of what life has handed him and the delight with which he made everything he could out of it. The art of living well, of getting along contentedly within his intellectual and emotional means, is of a piece with his writing: generous, amused, grateful, sensible. Treglown is plainly smitten with his subject, in a discreet and understated fashion, and long before the end of the story the reader is, too--perhaps less discreetly.

Unrelenting good humor can have that effect. This is, intermittently, an uproarious book; again and again Treglown hits upon the choice gag lines with which Pritchett studded his correspondence and conversation. Travels in America were especially suited to the manufacture of casual hilarity. Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Pritchett tried his hand at a screenplay, made him think of "a ripe Victoria plum endowed with the gift of speech." When a lovely American girl told him she was an English major, he "decorated her with moustaches and gave her gout." After tea with the distinguished dean of a distinguished graduate school, he observed, "The Princeton voice I can only describe as the low, polite gurgle of an in-growing toe-nail if it could talk."

Pritchett earned his laughter the hard way; in his works, especially in Mr. Beluncle and the autobiography, tragic possibility sometimes veers directly into the path of broad comedy and threatens to smash it--though one suspects it was in fact comedy that veered into the path of tragedy and engulfed it, softly. Pritchett's childhood was hard. His businessman father's addled scheming invariably led to distress and even disgrace: the cab was perpetually at the door to hustle the family off in the middle of the night to another ...