Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #9: V. S. Pritchett's "A Form of Conversation"

V. S. Pritchett was a voracious, omnivorous, ingenious book reviewer. From 1952 to 1988, he wrote seventy “Books” pieces for The New Yorker. He reviewed everything – novels, stories, memoirs, diaries, studies, notebooks, travelogues, letters - on and on. I enjoyed his pieces immensely and looked forward to reading them in the magazine. The ones I relished most were his reviews of writers’ letter collections. The deep pleasure he took from exploring a thick volume of, say, Lord Byron’s Letters or Tolstoy’s Letters was readily apparent in the verve and piquancy of his prose. I want to include one of Pritchett’s letters reviews in my “Top Ten,” but I confess I’ve had difficulty choosing from such an embarrassment of riches. There are at least six candidates: “Two Bears in a Den,” a review of Tolstoy’s Letters (The New Yorker, August 21, 1978); “A Form of Conversation,” a review of “The Letters of Evelyn Waugh” (The New Yorker, December 22, 1980); “Turgenev” (The New Yorker, August 8, 1983); “Conrad” (The New Yorker, January 9, 1983); “E. M. Forster” (The New Yorker, April 2, 1984); “The Last Letters of Henry James” (The New Yorker, August 20, 1984). By the way, none of these six excellent reviews is found in Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays (1991). In fact, of the forty-nine reviews that Pritchett contributed to The New Yorker in the period April 26, 1976 to March 21, 1988, only sixteen are included in the Complete Collected Essays. The Complete Collected Essays’ claim that “Collected here are all the literary essays V. S. Pritchett has written over his long and brilliant career” is incorrect. Pritchett’s Complete Collected Essays is glaringly incomplete.

In the end, I settled on “A Form of Conversation” as the representative Pritchett review on my “Top Ten” list. What decided me is the extraordinary “Easter sense” passage from one of Waugh’s letters that Pritchett quotes in his piece:

One must distinguish between uses of “new.” There is the Easter sense in which all things are made new in the risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art. Every work of art is thus something new.

I read that quote (thirty-one years ago!) and it carried straight into my memory. I’m not at all religious, but I’ve never forgotten it. I don’t agree with it. It’s a conservative view, positing that only art that’s continuous with tradition is “true art.” But in its expression – that “Easter sense in which all things are made new” – it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s a wonderful quotation, the clinching detail in a magnificent review.

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.