A History of the Novel in Two Hundred Essays

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The Paris Review:

As an undergraduate, I gave up trying to write fiction (my only completed story bore the decidedly unpromising title “Growing Marijuana”) and realized I wanted to write literary criticism instead. Troubled by the cavernous gaps in my reading, I sent a fan letter to James Wood, whom I didn’t know personally but whom I admired deeply, and asked him what he thought an aspiring young critic ought to read. He generously recommended the Complete Collected Essays of V. S. Pritchett. “Try to find this big book,” he wrote, “it has hundreds of essays in it, covering essentially the history of the novel. I learned a lot from it.”

Without online retailers, however, finding the book would not have been easy. Though published as recently as 1991, when its author was ninety-one, the Complete Collected Essays has since gone out of print, and seems unlikely now to be reissued. It’s a massive tome, over thirteen hundred pages, and weighs about the same as a cast-iron skillet. It is impossible to bring anywhere. It is also, admittedly, a rather hideous object: my Random House edition, with its faded teal and lilac hues, suggests not so much a literary work as an elaborate cookbook.

When I was an undergraduate, a cursory glance at the table of contents filled me with despair—I hadn’t read even a third of the writers Pritchett reviewed—and so for months the book gathered dust on a groaning and increasingly concave shelf above my desk. When I eventually had to remove it for safety reasons, I opened the book to an essay on Samuel Beckett, whose novels I was then pretending to understand:

[Beckett’s novels] are lawsuits that never end, vexations, litigations joined with the tedium, the greyness, the grief, the fear, the rage, the clownishness, the physical miseries of old age where life is on the ebb, and nature stands by smiling idiotically. Why was I born, get me out of this, let me live on less and less, get me to the grave, the womb, the last door, dragging this ludicrous, feeble, windy broken old bag of pipes with me.

This was not just a radical departure from the standard Beckett criticism I was then reading.

. . . .

Though he is remembered primarily for being one of the most prodigious and best-loved short-story writers of the twentieth century, Pritchett was a tireless book critic, contributing frequently to the pages of The New Statesman, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. His literary essays were once cherished by writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Anthony Burgess. Susan Sontag discovered Pritchett’s reviews when she was a graduate student at Harvard, and later described the encounter as “a revelation”: “I didn’t know you could write about literature in such a way, that you could be lyrical and precise and not carry a huge burden of judgment.” Gore Vidal called Pritchett “our greatest English-language critic.”

The Complete Collected Essays amounts to a history of literature, not by design but by gradual accumulation: there are 203 essays in total, ranging from Cervantes, Rabelais, and Richardson to Borges, Rushdie, and Nabokov. Almost every major French, English, Spanish, and Russian novelist is accounted for, as are various Italian, Brazilian, Portuguese, and American writers.

. . . .

Like his near contemporary Virginia Woolf, Pritchett had no formal education. He left school at fifteen and entered the leather trade as an apprentice. In the 1920s he worked as a shop assistant in Paris and later as a newspaper correspondent in Ireland and Spain, before eventually returning to England, where he wrung out a living as a family man, fiction writer, and professional critic.

In his memoir Midnight Oil (1971), Pritchett wrote of his chaotic reading as a young man in Paris, skipping meals to pay for volumes of Anatole France or Guy de Maupassant, greedily and hastily devoured. “How far did my understanding reach?” he wondered. “Not far at all, but I did seize the nature of these writers in some of their pages.”

In a way, that is all Pritchett ever did: he became the master of seizing the natures of other writers, just as he was a master of seizing the nature of people in his fiction. Jeremy Treglown, Pritchett’s biographer, felt that other people were Pritchett’s sole religion.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

Here’s a link to Complete Collected Essays of V. S. Pritchett on Amazon. There appear to be a lot of used copies for sale.