Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (35 page)
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Authors: Martin Amis
A Pritchett story has two ways of announcing itself. The first way can only be described as thrillingly unpromising:
It was the evening of the Annual Dinner. More than two hundred accountants were at that hour changing into evening clothes, in the flats, villas and hotel rooms of a large, wet, Midland city.
—
where
wet
has never worked so hard, and done so much. Or the second way (more characteristic of the earlier work), with a glare of poetic revelation:
The X-ray department of the hospital is reached by tepid corridors. A swing door admits the noises of the street and with a gulp swallows you and rejects them. You are cut off from the world. Stairways lead upwards to the regions of pain, six floors carefully labelled and distributed; yet, passing the open doors of laboratories, seeing instruments and retorts, smelling ether which excites the nostrils, the body begins to feel important. It is bringing its talent of pain to the total.
— where 'atmosphere' is suddenly condensed into a frightening truth. With a Pritchett story you are seldom going anywhere in a linear sense. Things happen; there are unitings and sunderings; deaths act as codas. You are not going anywhere but you are travelling mentally, and at speed. You are entering the writer's coherent version of reality.
It is a world lashed by weather and emotion. The city, in the blackout, where the siren sounds 'like all the dead cats of London restless beyond the grave'; or in fog, engulfed by 'moist horn-coloured vapour, with its core of weak pink or lilac light where the arc lamps hung. The corners of buildings were smudged and broken off in the upper air and, in the lower, the fog was like a damp sand, the vapour of a million individual breaths.' The rural winter, where 'the roads are like slugs', the horses move off 'like hairy yokels', and the frost has 'its teeth fast in the ground': 'Winter in England has the colourless, steaming look of a fried-fish shop-window.' Or the sea, sometimes 'as quiet as the licking of a cat's tongue', or else forming 'a loose tottering wall, green, wind-torn, sun-shot and riotous . . . The lighthouse on the red spit eight miles across the bay seemed to be racing through the water like a periscope.'
Character is fixed by an adverb (the waiter comes forward, 'feebly averting his nose from the mess he was carrying on his dish'), by an adjective (' "I couldn't sleep — and when I can't sleep I scratch," said Margaret in her wronged voice'), or by the arrangement of epithets ('Frederick [the barman] stood upright, handsome, old, and stupid'). Like Auden, Pritchett loves to impact language, and run the cadences up the wrong way: 'He had a moustache of sweat, a hard, factory mouth, and blue, unwilling eyes.' Larger than life (and sometimes smaller, too), his creations never lose the delicacy of their lineaments. He is the heir of Dickens:
Rogers and Mr Pocock had come together not because of their minds or tastes, but because of their bodies. They were drawn will-lessly together by the magnetic force of their phenomenal obesities. There is a loneliness in fat. Atlas met Atlas, astonished to find each saddened by the burden of a world. Rogers was short and had that douce, pleading melancholy of the enormous. His little blue eyes, above the bumps of fat on his cheekbones, looked like sinking lights at sea; and he had the gentle and bewildered air of a man who watches himself daily getting uncontrollably and hopelessly fatter . . . Mr Pocock's pathos was fiery and bitter. A pair of stiffly inflated balloons seemed to have been placed, one under and one above Mr Pocock's waist-line, and the load forced his short legs apart on either side of the chair, like the splayed speckled legs of a frog ... At night they met like lovers. They were religious drinkers. Whisky was Mr Pocock's religion, beer was the faith of Rogers. An active faith ranges widely. After the public-houses of the village there were two or three on the main road. The headlights of cars howling through the dark to the coast picked out two balloons in coats and trousers, bouncing and blowing down the road. Dramas halted them. 'What's that, old boy?'
'Rabbit.'
'No, old boy, not a rabbit. It was a fox. I know a fox.'
'I reckon it was a stoat.'
The point became intricate under the stars.
Nevertheless it is Pritchett's women who define the true extent of his powers. For his sensibility is itself feminine, undissociated, like Eliot's Metaphysicals: in him, thought and feeling are congruent, not opposed. Pritchett's women loom magical and multiform. 'Mrs Tagg jostled her various selves together within her corsets and stared.' Or: 'She had several chins. The small chin shook like a cup in its saucer.' They 'swell with shame' and 'sit vast in nervous judgment'. Crucially, Pritchett is a poet of female tears. This lady has been drinking, and recalling a lost love: 'Mrs Forster's cheeks and neck fattened amorously as she mewed and quietly cried and held her handkerchief tight.' The warmth of the detail (the gripped hanky) is delightful; and yet it is also pointing beyond itself, to a larger mystery.
To something like this:
Gran's life was filled with guilt towards the living, whom she looked at slyly, and her tears were not tears of sorrow, but issued to conceal this guilt. She was guilty because she forgot the living and neglected them in her absorption with the dead.
And finally, at the end of the same story, to this:
And then [Aunt Gertrude] saw the crack in the mirror and tears came into her eyes, large tears like the pearl buttons in her blouse. To me they were not like the tears I had seen before, for her common tears were hardly personal, but a general oblation to the unexplainable coming and going of woe in the world.
From this coming and going, this woeful rhythm, the male writer - the male himself - has long been excluded, or exiled. But it is always available to Pritchett, and deeply informs his universality.
'I found people were telling stories to themselves without knowing it,' he said, when I asked him about his habit of inwardness, his telepathic entry into ordinary minds. 'It seemed to me that people were living a sort of small sermon that they believed in, but at the same time it was a fairy tale. Selfish desires, along with one or two highly suspect elevated thoughts. They secretly regard themselves as works of art, valuable in themselves.'
'But in life they are silent. Until you come along . . .' 'Yes. I do think it is a kind of duty to speak for them.' 'He just
does
it,' said Dorothy. 'That story about the antique dealer. People think he did months of research. But all he did was go into an antique shop in Wiltshire and spend five minutes buying a dining-room chair.'
Morally Pritchett's people inhabit a Biblical world (displaced and of course vulgarised), a world of shame, pride, guilt, temptation, and fear of ruin. They may be weak or sinful, but they are never judged; Pritchett never arranges for their conversion or punishment. 'I'd much sooner they go on unpunished. I think the incurable side of human nature is what appeals to me.' ('He's like that', said Dorothy,' — even about his own family.
I
can rage about them, but he never does.') Pritchett never judges, yet his style serves as a moral instrument. The slant of his prose and his comedy is a strict apportioner of guilt and innocence. He himself strikes you as innocent, and also terribly knowing.
Seen as a writing life,
The Complete Short Stories
describes the arc of ascension and inevitable decline. After the long crescendo, the long decrescendo. Formal artistry continues, but what it has to handle becomes less volatile. Now the cataract has become an unregarded mountain stream. It appears to be his only sadness.
'I haven't done anything for - how long? Several weeks?'
Dorothy: 'Several months. He's
longing
to write another short story.'
'I have jots of things which I think are no good. Start always again. Have another go at it ... As one gets older one becomes very boring and longwinded to oneself. One's thoughts are longwinded, whereas before they were really rather nice and
agitated.
The story is a form of travel. As I go across the page my pen is travelling. Travelling through minds or situations which reveal their strangeness to you. Old age kills travel. Things don't come suddenly to you. You're mainly protecting yourself. Stories come up on you almost by accident. And now one tends to live a life in which there are no accidents . . . It's nothing to do with that really. It's just being older.'
Powers fail. But Pritchett's presence is still a testing one. I came away from Regents Park Terrace feeling heartened and relieved, as if after a psychiatric check-up; I had survived the stare of the benign basilisk. The great writers do something specific to their readers. They heighten and transfigure the world you see, for ever: 'like the clot of a spirit level to be steadily carried'. Parkway and Camden Town were busy and wet, entirely everyday in their anti-travel of errands and hurry. But Pritchett was filling these streets for me with theatre. He makes the world strange, humorous and dreadful, appallingly overpopulated with passions and fears. The queue at the bus-stop suddenly resembled the crowd at a stage door, their faces no longer vacant but full of fever and cunning. 'No two stories' - meaning no two people -'are quite alike,' he had said. And 'I'm always anxious to speak the truth, you know.'
From 'The Upright Man', written sixty years ago:
Clerks flung their lives about and committed follies. One married to a voracious wife drank on Thursdays a glass of stout. One who copied weighing slips gave imitations of the voice of the cashier. One who was bald put his hand down the blouse of his secretary and was slapped in the face. One would absent himself for twenty minutes in the morning to read the newspaper in the lavatory. One going deaf turned to an Oriental religion. One made use of the office telephone to communicate with a bookmaker. One told the Port of London Authority of an error in demurrage; it was his own. One staying after six lit his pipe.
And then later, after the War:
One who had come to suspect Divine Justice took to games of chance. One who was bald consummated love with a telephone operator and was presented with a clock on his marriage; one saddened by an adding machine took drugs which gave him visions; one moved into a town whose train service had been electrified; one who could imitate the voice of the cashier played in an orchestra; one sold his house at a profit; a typist given to the circulation of religious pamphlets had a week's leave to serve on a jury; many grew flowers and had newborn children.
Independent on Sunday, 1990
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NUCLEAR CITY: THE MEGADEATH INTELLECTUALS
THE ROLLING STONES AT EARLS COURT