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| V.S.Pritchett and the
War-Time Reader |
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James Fenton
copyright © 2005 |
Originally published
in The Guardian
17 September 2005
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There is no copyright in titles, and the title
of this new column is taken from a collection of essays by V.S.Pritchett,
published in 1942. "Its paper and binding," my copy
informs me, "conform to the War Economy Agreement of the
Publishers' Association." Cheap and yellow, in other words,
published for members of the Readers' Union book club (a year
after the first edition by Chatto and Windus.)
The essays are on literature, but the war is
the unmistakable context. "Our contemporaries," writes
Pritchett, "have almost ceased to write and, even if they
begin again, it becomes every week more doubtful whether paper
will be found to print them. The works of printers are bombed,
books by the thousand are burned in the shops, stocks of paper
are destroyed by fire or go to the bottom of the sea."
Given that publishing had ground to a near
halt, the literary editor of the New Statesman, Raymond
Mortimer, had encouraged Pritchett to write a series of essays
taking the literature of the past as his theme, and it is these
short works, which replaced the regular lead book reviews in
that magazine, which were adapted and collected for In My
Good Books. Pritchett, who calls himself "bookish but
uneducated," tells us: "I am an unsystematic reader
and the subjects of these essays have been chosen at random.
They make no case. The accident of finding an author on the
shelf has usually decided me."
He was not "uneducated" but had left
Alleyn's School, Dulwich in 1915 at the age of fifteen, working
in the leather and photographic trades before turning to journalism
and fiction. What he depicts as random choice is of course an
expression of his taste, which was very good, and that of his
period. A strong interest in the Russians (at the age of 77
he produced a book about Turgenev) is characteristic both of
the man and of his age. An intense religious background, which
he escaped (his family were Plymouth Brethren), gives him an
interest and authority when writing about, for instance, George
Fox's journal.
The circumstances of Second World War book
reading could hardly be more different from our own (except,
of course, that there is a war on). Our publishing industry
is quite gaseous, and we are -- or at least we feel -- very
far from the situation imagined by Pritchett when he says that
"The wise reader is one who prepares himself for the awful
moment, a kind of Judgment Day, when only he and the hundred
best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake
down together; when he will, so to speak, be stranded in the
highest society."
One thinks of a damp cottage in the black-out,
with a few shelves mainly of Everyman and the little hardback
Oxford World's Classics. Or one thinks of all the readers on
active service, making do with whatever volume came their way.
One thinks perhaps of prisoners of war.
Today it is possible to buy more or less any
book on impulse through the internet. Take the little Pritchett
volume for example. When I purchased my copy years ago, it felt
like a great find, and cost 75p. Checking on abebooks.com the
other day, I noted more than a dozen copies for sale at prices
ranging between £3.50 and £75. This spread of prices
is typical of Internet book buying, and favours anyone interested
in finding a decent reading copy of any title. Whether it also
favours the booksellers is another matter. One of them told
me that the Internet had made the cheap books cheaper, and the
expensive yet more expensive.
If cheap books are cheaper, one might as well
make the most of it. Pritchett in his lifetime was considered
an essayist of the first rank. He is not as idiosyncratic as
D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf, but it is not ridiculous to
think of him in such "ill-educated" novelistic company.
Perhaps it is not good to be told by him that these essays "make
no case." One case made at the outset is that "A work
of art is an act of cooperation, often of reluctant cooperation
like an awkward marriage, between the author and the kind of
society he lives in. When we know something of the character
of this aggravating partner, that which was once stiff and monumental
becomes fluid and alive." In the case of these essays,
the aggravating partner was the war, deprivation, shortage,
destruction, suffering. The companion volume, appearing in 1946,
was called The Living Novel, in which Pritchett decided
to look at each classic novel as it came along, as if it were
"a new just-published book."
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