British Fiction
The Sailor, Sense of Humour, and Other Stories
By V. S. Pritchett
Knopf. 369 pp. $4.50.

Anglo-Saxon Attitudes
By Angus Wilson
Viking. 410 pp. $4.50.

V. S. Pritchett is an anomalous figure in recent British literature, though perhaps the most interesting thing about him is how little he permits that fact to show. Lower middle class in origin, he never attended the university, moving on from an early career in business (he was, among other things, a traveling salesman) to journalism. And he has remained a professional writer, producing his novels, travel books, critical essays, and short stories while working as a foreign correspondent, broadcaster, and literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation. He has, however, never permitted his class differences from the writers (Graham Greene or Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh or Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster or Christopher Isherwood) who have determined the tone and tenor of the contemporary English novel to induce in him the surly defiance, the ostentatious rough surface of other occasional outsiders like D. H. Lawrence or even Wyndham Lewis.

I do not mean that he has avoided the world in which he began, the world of religious dissent and the hunger for money—far from it. A novel like his Mr. Beluncle is rooted in precisely such class experiences, while his stories return again and again to the lower levels of a rigidly structured society, whose fixed distinctions he makes the very substance of his work. In style, however, in air, he has adapted to the prevailing upper-class modes; he has “passed.”

It is this refusal to reject good literary manners which will, I suspect, isolate Pritchett, for all his excellence, from the newer generations of British writers, the Wains and the Amises and those who will follow, though he might otherwise have provided for such anti-mandarin writers a guide and example. It is as a critic that Pritchett’s force is chiefly felt; and the essays in The Living Novel are, many of them at least, full of genuine insight and revelation rendered with grace and wit; but the whole is so unremittingly amateurish and off-hand, so resolutely relaxed as to be finally a little annoying—an attempt to demonstrate that the professional journalist out of Ipswich can beat Lord David Cecil at his own polished game. The point is never (and here Mr. Pritchett has taken on the central pose of the early 20th-century British upper middle class) to appear too much in earnest lest one appear underbred.

The limitations of Pritchett are never more clear than when he confronts such underbred masterpieces as Ulysses, examples of a “serious” avant-garde tradition that baffles him; or when, on a lower level, he is brought face to face with a Continental “serious” treatment of politics as in Koestler. He has aspired to and achieved membership in a society in which gentlemen converse humanely and wittily about books and events: an anti-academic world in which the professor’s organized (and grubbily vocational) interest in art seems heavy-handed and dull. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Mr. Pritchett has been deploring lately the tendency, now strong on both sides of the Atlantic, for young writers and critics to enter the universities in search of jobs and security; though as phrased, his objections have a more ingenuously old-fashioned ring, referring to the academy as a place of isolation and refuge from the outer world of real experience. However true this may have been of the university world of Mr. Pritchett’s youth, or however true it may continue to be of Oxford and Cambridge, it is quite impertinent to the facts of the case, at, say, the University of Nebraska or the North Carolina College for Women in our country, or the “red-brick” universities of Reading or Sheffield or Swansea in England.

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In such provincial cities, the new declassed professional, writer or not, lives a life of petty-bourgeois squalor that does not separate him from but rather presses him down into the new hyper-bureaucratized world. Here he finds not the menace of isolation but the threat of a too great involvement with a milieu all diapers and modern jazz and science fiction and the squabbling for small promotions and minimum security.¹ To this milieu and to the New Men who inhabit it, Mr. Pritchett remains immune; and the apparently unlimited social range of his character portraits breaks down here. The sailor and the pawnbroker, the country doctor and the hard-drinking gentry he treats play roles that seem already a little dated, almost historical. Some of the stories in the present collection were written in the 30’s, others just before and during the Second World War; some appear to be quite recent, but all look backward for setting and in manner as well as in scope and ambition; so that not merely such accounts of the business world of Mr. Pritchett’s youth as “It May Never Happen,” or evocations of a Europe of pre-Hitler tourism like “Handsome Is as Handsome Does,” but the whole body of his work is in effect nostalgic.

I do not mean this placing of Mr. Pritchett’s work to seem a total evaluation. I find his stories (to him “the only kind of writing that has given me great pleasure”) the most impressive part of his work. His novel Dead Man Leading remains in my memory as an especially successful and moving attempt to explore the kind of mind that itself likes to explore unmapped territories; but I do not have a sense of Mr. Pritchett as a real novelist. He seems to me most at home in such longish fictions as “Handsome Is as Handsome Does,” or “The Spanish Virgin,” a very early story not included in the present selection—I suppose because its occasional gaucherie or its “experimental” air are no longer congenial to Mr. Pritchett.

Mr. Pritchett’s stories are generally characterized by the tension between a certain sense of confidence and good humor which persists in almost all of them and their themes, which are concerned with the failure of love and trust, the betrayal of the heart by the flesh, our mutual inscrutability. The melancholy aspect of Mr. Pritchett’s donnés is emphasized by the descriptive metaphors which claim attention everywhere in his prose, sometimes violently enough to threaten the ideal of balance and ease he otherwise proposes: “The roads . . . like slugs, oozy and gleaming in the cold”; “he stood there . . . like a man drowning and screaming for help in two feet of water and wondering why the crowd is laughing”; “my first sight of Mr. Phillimore suggested the frantic, yelping, disorganized expression of a copulating dog.” If there is a comic note in this, it is the note of grotesquerie in the manner of Faulkner or Dostoevsky or Dickens. Where Mr. Pritchett’s vision is most particular and precise it is most grim; where it is most general it approaches the benign. If he finally is a humorous writer, it is perhaps because he nurtures a special sort of sentimentality, a faith in the over-all goodness and strength of people, though he portrays them individually as inevitably blind or spiteful or weak. Sometimes it is hard to believe what he is saying against what his story is trying to say; but he rejects the tragic because he is afraid of being betrayed into the bitter— and bitterness he tells us, in his remarks on Orwell, is likely to be untrue. There is real justification in ending the present volume with the story called “Sense of Humour,” which closes on a couple wreathed in grins as they drive together in the hearse that contains the body of the man their love has driven to his death.

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Angus Wilson deals with precisely the world that escapes Mr. Pritchett, which is to say, a world very like my own. Indeed Mr. Pritchett, hailing Mr. Wilson’s book, speaks of him as seeing England with “a foreign eye.” Actually, the mode of seeing and rendering in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, as in Mr. Wilson’s earlier novel Hemlock and After and in his short stories, is by no means “foreign,” continuing a native English tradition of nervous, over-bred, effete malice, which goes back to the early Huxley and Waugh, and beyond them to Ronald Firbank and Oscar Wilde. In Mr. Wilson, as in some of his literary ancestors, a special degree of this malice and of the wit it engenders is reserved for marriage and especially for women. “They did not seem the two women with whom he was most intimate, but rather two repellent black shapes from a nightmare,” Mr. Wilson writes, betraying the horror behind the satire that makes of Inge Middleton, wife of the central character of this sprawling novel, a monstrous travesty of female charm and flesh, a gross caricature of all that is silly and cruel in the maternal.

There is, then, nothing new, much less “foreign,” in the style of Mr. Wilson or in his angle of vision; it is all “camp” of the sort to which British literature has accommodated itself for decades now. But what Mr. Wilson sees, as opposed to how he sees it, is a world quite different from that entered by, say, Mr. Waugh’s Basil Seal; and his cast of characters is the product of quite special and recent events. It is precisely the crumbling world of upper middle class culture at the moment of its decisive encounter with mass culture that Mr. Wilson renders, a world which he had ample opportunity to observe with an amused and charmingly spiteful eye during his years in charge of the reading room of the British Museum. In the four hundred pages of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, the New Conservative, the New Factory Manager, the New (“red-brick”) Academic, the New (mass-communications) Politician weave their way among the survivors: a handful of gentlemen-Dons, a cracked lady Professor of Medieval History, a standard-model German pedant, a female historical novelist, a would-be grande dame organizing the village for Christmas festivities. Around these cluster the ghosts of the recent past, Freud and Marx and Neville Chamberlain and T. E. Hulme; and nurtured by them flourish the parasites proper to their weaknesses: tough homosexual boys; juicy, intellectualoid secretaries aspiring to become Someone’s mistress; a charlady out of Dickensian stock; even an American Ph.D. candidate looking for inside gossip to eke out a thesis: “I am devoting the major part of my thesis to D. H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis . . . whose work in retrospect, appears, to my generation at least, to reflect a seriousness and a final significance which criticism today teaches us is the only criterion of literary merit. . . . I am a graduate of Minnesota University and North-Western University. I have majored in aesthetics, music and literature. . . . I have attended courses in creative writing.”

The point beneath the satire is a familiar one, the upper-class contempt for the “seriousness” and the thirst for “significance” of the disinherited, American or lower class, now moving into the universities to claim their share in a culture formerly reserved for gentlemen. The final joke is that Mr. Wilson is himself betrayed by the temper of the times (when even Waugh has fallen into straight-faced piety) into his own pursuit of “seriousness” and “significance.” In this novel he has attempted to go beyond the scope of his early work, those acid and delicate vignettes as charming as intelligent gossip, to create a major novel—complete with a list of the numerous characters in order of appearance, a couple of pseudo-historical appendices, indeed, all the outward symbols of the Victorian thickness of texture for which he is apparently trying. Beyond satire and grace, Mr. Wilson has obviously told himself, the moment demands a fully articulated plot with the traditional reversals and recognitions. Was the phallic image in the tomb of Bishop Eorpwald planted there by the sadistic son of its discoverer? Did that discoverer know of the hoax and conceal it? Should Gerald Middleton years later betray the memory of that discoverer, his former teacher, by telling the truth?

In the end, it all seems factitious, a manufactured frame not quite counterfeiting a full vision of life, despite the attendant swarm of clergymen, old retainers, civil servants, parliamentary scandals, wives and mistresses. And at the moment of the Happy Ending (even this Mr. Wilson has not been able to eschew) it becomes not only factitious but false; we cannot quite believe in the baffled, aging Professor breaking finally from his cannibalistic wife and being restored to life as editor and scholar, while his dipsomaniac former mistress is improbably reclaimed by Alcoholics Anonymous, Not the logic of life or even of the plot demands such a denouement, but only the interests of the sentimental point: that in the old-fashioned academic gentleman, the scholar-aesthete, there resides still a respect for fact, an abstract commitment to truth quite capable of bringing some order and coherence to a society given up to lies and opportunism. Interestingly enough, not only the businessman and the TV rabble-rouser, the ambitious clergyman and the peasant out to get rich, but the artist, too, is exposed as shoddy beside the academic touchstone of Gerald Middleton. Three of the blindest characters in the book are writers, and though two are mere purveyors of popular entertainment (and, besides, one a woman, the other French—which is to say, not quite human for Mr. Wilson)—the third is a poet of the school of Eliot.

Such denouement-juggling and moral-mongering are not really Mr. Wilson’s forte; but I am pleased to say that around and above plot and point the amiable nastiness we know and admire in his stories continues to play. Especially when we are introduced to the world of Vin Salad and Larrie Rourke, male tarts of various degrees of refinement on the make in a world left wide open by the collapse of class, one has the sense of a scene and talent matched at last. There is a ferocity and a pity behind the portraits from this milieu, a true humor and honesty that fail to function in the intended big scenes of moral decision and regeneration. I suppose that is why one remembers Vin Salad calling out, “It won’t take a sec.,” as he stands on a flight of steps “in black crepe-de-chine pajamas, a jade-green silk dressing gown, held tightly round him . . . his face . . . covered in vanishing cream,” while the figure of Gerald Middleton, his back stiffening slightly, is lost in the mists of his imputed nobility.

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¹ See Richard Chase’s “Middlebrow England” in the September 1956 number.—ED.

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