Fresh Air Fiend (65 page)

Dry dreams and nocturnal omissions—perhaps this is the key to Greene, that he was not tormented at all and that his libido had ample latitude. The book is a personal selection of Greene's best dreams from 1965 to 1989, listed under general topics, such as Travel, Reading, Science, Animals Who Talk, and of course Brief Contacts with Royalty—it has been said that there is not a man, woman, or child in Britain who does not at some time dream of the queen. Greene's royal dream seems fairly standard: "Then Prince Philip entered. I was not surprised at all that he was wearing a scoutmaster's uniform, but I resented having to surrender my chair to him. As I moved away the Queen confided to me, 'I can't bear the way he smiles.'"

Early in his life, on the suggestion of one of his psychoanalysts, Greene jotted down the details of his dreams. Later on, he resumed the practice for his own amusement and edification, accumulating over this twenty-four-year period (he says) eight hundred pages of dreams. You would have thought Greene's dreams would be highly enlightening. On the contrary. If anything, I know less about him than before. Greene, it seems, is just blowing smoke.

I have always felt that the story Querry tells his lover in
A Burnt-out Case
to be one of the weakest parts of the book. The story was a dream that Greene had while writing his novel, and he says that much of his work was derived from dreams. "In dreams begin responsibilities," said Delmore Schwartz, who perhaps first got it from Yeats.

The trouble is that Greene in these dreams spends such a lot of time hobnobbing with popes, with dead writers (Henry James, T. S. Eliot), with Edward Heath ("an agreeable evening"), Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Oliver Cromwell. I think it might be true to say these dreams reveal a distinct power mania, but nothing serious. He meets Hitler. They talk until the cows come home. But "I can't remember the subject of our conversation." His memory seems to fail him in other dreams. This is Greene's entire dream entitled "D. H. Lawrence": "It was the Duke of Marlborough who introduced me to D. H. Lawrence. I found him younger and better groomed than I had expected. He was quite friendly towards my work."

All the words that have been written about Greene since his death have made him seem to me a simpler and more remote figure. And here is the man himself, indulging in one of the most revealing and intimate activities anyone can attempt, and the result is a startling banality. There is a little comedy in the dreams, some satire, a touch of paranoia, a smidgen of
folie de grandeur,
but none of the tragic, harrowing, horripilate experiences that visit the average person—me, for example—in dreams. Greene is never chased, never pursued at all. He is never naked. Never seriously injured. Never regretful. Never guilt-ridden. After finishing the book I decided that, on the basis of his dreams, Greene was the most normal man in the world. And then I reflected on what was missing and thought the opposite.

Y
OU HAVE TO DO
only a little arithmetic to see that V. S. Pritchett, who recently died at the age of ninety-six, was older than George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, a year younger than Hemingway, and an impressionable teenager (and young adult) during the First World War—old enough to read Henry James while James was still alive, and the same for Joseph Conrad, Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, and Joyce. Pritchett was middle-aged when H. G. Wells died in 1946; indeed, he knew Wells, and his lower-middle-class background on the shabby-genteel fringes of London was also similar. As with Wells, these suburbs were the origin of his frustration, which found release in his clearsighted satire.

As perhaps the last writer on earth who could accurately be called a man of letters, Pritchett wrote insightfully about his numerous literary contemporaries in his five collections of essays; he also wrote of his literary forebears (and heroes Turgenev and Chekhov among them) in biographies. His criticism was as inventive and as witty as fiction. But if you asked him about his influences, he smiled and named the Spanish short story writer Pio Baroja (whom he knew), or said how important it had been to him to have skipped almost all formal education (he left school at fifteen) and learned the leather business. Afterward, he sold glue and shellac in Paris. "I half wished I had spent my life in an industry," he wrote. "The sight and skill of traditional expertness is irresistible to me."

Small and sturdy—he had walked across Spain, he had traipsed through the American South—he was half Londoner, half Yorkshireman, "as old as the century," he often said, the title of a poignant essay he wrote on turning eighty. He liked his initials—his wife referred to him as "VSP"—and hated the name Victor, hated being photographed wearing glasses. He smoked a pipe his whole life. He drank wine; he had been denied the pleasure by his unpredictable father. He worked six days a week for most of his life. He called himself "one of the non-striking self-employed." V. S. Naipaul once told me that Pritchett's happiness and productivity were signs of his second-rateness, but that's contemptuous and, being an English judgment, probably envious. Pritchett worked slowly, and he was confident. Like Joyce and Nabokov and very few others, he knew he was a wonderful writer.

It is impossible to tell V. S. Pritchett's story better than he told it himself in his two volumes of autobiography,
A Cab at the Door
and
Midnight Oil,
probably the only books of his you'll find in an American bookstore. It is equally impossible to paraphrase his short stories, many of which are masterpieces of the form—and not just the early and middle stories, but ones from his later years ("The Camberwell Beauty" and "Blind Love," written when he was in his seventies, come to mind). His novels, too, defy summary, because they are not at all plotty and their structure is so subtle it is hardly apparent. But all his work is of a piece. Read it and you know him and his world, this whole century.

England might have been a trap for him. It has been for many others who tried to emerge from his social class, who had a similar lack of education. The disorder of the Pritchett family (Micawberish failure-prone father, excitable gabbling mother) was both comic and grotesque—hilarious in the telling, but hell for the poor soul who had to endure it. A classic way to succeed in England, if you come from the wrong class or have a bad accent, is to leave the country and go far away. That was Pritchett's solution, and it worked for him as it has for many other English writers.

Pritchett's first success as a writer came when, in his early twenties, he was working in an office in Paris. France gave him a second language and inspired his short stories. Travel in Spain came soon after. He learned Spanish, met Baroja, and published his first book,
Marching Spain,
which he ended up hating. He rectified this with his superb study
The Spanish Temper.
His first foreign travel was crucial, because he had no money and could not go back home until he had realized his literary ambition. "I became a foreigner," he writes at the end of
A Cab at the Door.
"For myself that is what a writer is—a man living on the other side of a frontier."

There is more about writing, less about family, in
Midnight Oil,
in which he describes a writer as "at the very least, two persons. He is the prosaic man at his desk and a sort of valet who dogs him and does the living."

The morning I heard that Pritchett had died, I picked up his 1951 novel,
Mr. Beluncle
(like most of his books, out of print), and reread it with intense pleasure. Pritchett said that it concerned his "obsessive subject," Christian Science, but it is also about the semi-detached weevil life of the inner suburbs of London: the secrets, the hurts, the whispers, the stifled lust; the almost Asiatic obliqueness of English middle-class manners; the pompous vacuity of organized religion; the savagery of the workplace; the eternally twitching curtains. It is impartial: no villains, no angels in Pritchett, only English people peeking out the window and sizing up their neighbors.
Mr. Beluncle,
like
Dubliners,
is also about suffocation, and it is full of Pritchett's precise description: "Then Ethel appeared in their rooms, with her hair dividing over her cheeks, and looking out from it like a savage peeping in terror from an old tent."

Mr. Beluncle is a version of Pritchett's father, young Henry Beluncle is a version of Pritchett as a boy, and Mrs. Parkinson is a version of Mrs. Eddy. Beluncle lectures his son on Divine Love as adumbrated by Parkinsonian creed: "Love was getting up when you were called, not making a mess in the bathroom, coming when you are sent for, being prompt, punctual, tidy; not shutting yourself up unsociably with books ... getting to know nice people, seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven ... not kicking the furniture..."It is the lower middle class at prayer.

Smiling at rather than mocking Christian Science, Pritchett wrote in his autobiography, "Insofar as Shakespeare or Homer approached Christian Science beliefs they were considered good, yet sadly lacking. It was disappointing to see that Christian Scientists were quick to 'give up' things. They gave up drink, tobacco, tea, coffee—dangerous drugs—they gave up sex, and wrecked their marriages on this account, and it was notoriously a menopause religion: they gave up politics; they gave up art but, oddly, they did not give up business."

During World War Two, when he was too old to go soldiering, he worked on
The New Statesman.
Newly published books were rare because of the paper shortage, so Pritchett reread the classics—English, American, Russian, French, Spanish—and wrote a weekly essay for the magazine. He had kept on writing short stories, and after
The New Yorker
began publishing them, he had some money. He lived precariously by his writing, on that respectable little cul-de-sac off Grub Street, the address of literary quarterlies, political weeklies, and poetry magazines where a writer can get by, writing like a grown-up. Twenty years ago, Pritchett told me that one of the things he liked about England was that money was fairly unimportant—it was a measure of nothing, it bought nothing, and few people had it. That had been true for most of his life, though he survived to live in a greedier, more money-conscious age. It is still a mystery to me how Pritchett, who ultimately lived at the edge of Regents Park, kept body and soul together. If I had ever been so discourteous as to raise the matter, he would have laughed and said, "That's an American question!"

When I lived in London, I saw Pritchett whenever I could. He was a repository of literary history. He was the most widely read man I have ever known, and he had been personally acquainted with many of the great writers of the twentieth century. He wasn't social. He seldom went to parties. Happily married, he was always home, writing or reading.

Pritchett wrote in a small room at the top of his tall house. I know this. He is the only great writer I have ever seen in the act of writing. I was delivering something to him, and his wife, Dorothy, said, "Go up," and waved me upstairs. I climbed three narrow flights of stairs, came up behind him, and looked over his shoulder. Even then I was thinking,
I have never seen this before!
He was at a tiny desk, canted back in a chair, holding on his knee a clipboard with piece of paper that was a muddle of blue ink—not much text, mostly blobby balloons and crosshatched lines and words struck out, like a demented message, layers of it on the page, almost pictorial in its density. He was chewing his pipe, struggling with his pen, yet he smiled when he saw me, seemingly very happy. He had once described writing as "a labor delightful because it is fanatical." He was happy and he was also fanatical.

W
ILLIAM SIMPSON
, the first war artist (it was the Crimea), was born poor (in 1823) and raised in a Glasgow slum, but he was one of those indestructible Scots whose life was shaped for the better by his disadvantages. The man never stopped working, and he was brilliant at what he did. Unlike most self-made men, he had a sense of humor, and he was modest—not a ranter, not abrasive. He seems to have been tolerant and easygoing, rare qualities in someone who was obviously a workaholic. He started life with nothing—he had no standing, no influence, and he got little help. His education lasted just over one year. This condition gave him a peculiar hunger and curiosity. The Victorian age produced many wonderful artist-travelers, and Edward Lear was the best of them, but Simpson (who ranged farther afield) came very close—truthful, intrepid, and very talented. He took nothing for granted.

If he had a fault, it was his intense sense of privacy, but this is not unusual in someone who seemed to come virtually from nowhere. Such people often develop a habit of secrecy, for why should anyone want to know of the dullness, the sadness, the humiliation of having nothing? The habit is unhelpful for anyone writing about Simpson, because there is so much in the foreground and so little in the background—and come to think of it, his pictures are a bit that way, too.

Of course, starting nowhere with nothing is impossible. Although he says little about them, the details he lets drop must convince us that his family was loyal and kind, that his father inspired him, and his grandmother taught him. In a very likable appendix to his autobiography he describes life in a Glasgow "land," or tenement, in the 1820s—his friends, his fun, the children's songs and games. One can see that he had close friends and that people were kind to him, and all this helped give him a good beginning.

The fact that he gave instructions for his autobiography to be published after his death is evidence of his judiciousness, and it can only have been an unnecessary delay: the book covers the high spots of his career—nothing personal and no revelations. Yet this in itself is revealing, for who is more welcome as a friend and fellow traveler than a person of tact and discretion? He did not mutter, did not whisper, did not dine out on his stories about the grand and the glorious—and he could easily have done so, because he traveled in the close company of aristocrats and royalty, and most palaces were open to him. Nothing is more revealing of character than the experience of travel. For example, just after the Crimean War he journeyed through Circassia with the duke of Newcastle, but typically he tells us only about Circassia and the Circassians. No gossip, no trivia, no broken confidences, no froth. That decency he had brought from the Glasgow tenement.