Pritchett's Precision

In preparation for a post I’m planning called “Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 – 2011,” I’ve been rereading some of V. S. Pritchett’s work. Between 1949 and 1988, he wrote seventy New Yorker book reviews. They are among the glories of the art of book reviewing. I don’t think it’s correct to say, as Roger Angell said, that Pritchett “was not a stylist” (“Marching Life,” The New Yorker, December 22, 1997). I think he was a great stylist. Maybe what Angell meant is that he didn’t write fancily. And that’s true, he didn’t. His style was plain, but it was clear and sharp – “sharp as horseradish,” as he himself said about Chekhov’s humor (in his brilliant essay “A Doctor,” included in his 1979 collection The Myth Makers) – sharp in terms of both precision and pungency. Here are a few examples of what I mean:

On Camus: “His senses responded to the harsh mountain landscape, the stony plateau, and the desert that was another sea; to the clear sunlight, the brassy heat, and the seductive silence of the evenings. The deep sense of “indifference” in him responded to the indifference of nature, but not in a Northern, Wordsworthian way; there was nothing “deeply interfused” here. Each stone or tree was an object: his visual sense of the “things” of landscape is intense in all his writing. Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock.” (“Albert Camus,” The New Yorker, December 20, 1982)

On Tolstoy: “He is the absolute patriarch. He toils as an artist, as a teacher, as a farmer, and in bed. His family toils for him. His wife obeys – and also learns from him the deadly habit of diarizing and counter-diarizing. His intellect growls away, and he exacts as much from himself as he exacts from others.” (“Two Bears in a Den,” The New Yorker, August 21, 1978)

On Byron: “Byron is a good letter writer because whether he is scoffing, arguing, or even conducting his business affairs, he has a half-laughing eye on his correspondent; although he can turn icily formal, he has mainly a talking style of worldly elegance and is spontaneously the half self of the moment, for not only he but everyone else knew the duality of his nature. The whole person can be deduced from what he dashingly offers. His character is a springboard from which he takes a dive into what he has to say about himself for the moment, bringing other people to half life in the splash.” (“Byron,” The New Yorker, June 2, 1980)

On Henry James: “The spell of the letters really lies in their idiosyncrasy. They are communings with himself as much as with friends. They are also talking letters. They are written in his dictating period, and he writes as one listening to his own voice as it leads him on, watching his words float on the air, and delighting in the studied mischief of his hesitations and parentheses. He always evokes the friend to whom he is writing. His enormous privacy flowers. His lonely room fills up with voices; he carries his friends down the happily rambling stream of consciousness.” (“The Last Letters of Henry James,” The New Yorker, August 20, 1984)

Lean, simple sentences composed of concrete, precise words that evoke vivid images and sensations – “stony plateau,” “brassy heat,” “his intellect growls away,” “his enormous privacy flowers,” “icily formal,” etc. - govern the style of the above-quoted passages, and are among the hallmarks of Pritchett’s brilliant way of writing. The sentence “Mortality was a presence as unanswerable as a rock,” in the Camus passage above, is exemplary of that clear, sharp quality I mentioned earlier.

Credit: The above photo of V. S. Pritchett is by Cecil Beaton; it appears in The New Yorker (December 22, 1997) as an illustration for Roger Angell’s “Marching Life."