Word: pritchett
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...LIVING NOVEL (256 pp.)-V. S. Pritchett-Reynal & Hitchcock...
...literary critic-and he is one of the best of them-Victor Sawdon Pritchett came to his job late and without having his head stuffed with literature courses. He had very little formal education. The result is that he reads books in his own way, and writes about great authors as though he were the first to read them...
...Admired Unread. As a sampler of vintage literature, Pritchett has excellent taste. These 32 brief essays (many of which have appeared in London's New Statesman and Nation) restore the grandeur of such unvisited landmarks of English fiction as Humphrey Clinker, Middlemarch, Heart of Midlothian, Edwin Drood. They reduce to scale some modern writers-Wells, Bennett, D. H. Lawrence-while adding to the dimensions of several continental Europeans and two Americans: Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane...
...Pritchett is most at home writing about the English tradition of picaresque heroes and prurient heroines. The 17th and 18th Centuries, he believes, produced literary techniques which later novelists have been wise to adopt. Smollett developed the physical realism and "chamberpot humor" which characterizes much of Joyce. Richardson introduced the "principle of procrastinated rape [which] is said to be the ruling one in all the great best-sellers." Fielding, Pritchett says, is the granddaddy of them all: in his work the reader can not only "pick out the perennial characters of the main part of English fiction, but . . . many...
...Disaster of Lawrence. A fellow critic has called Pritchett "the most humane of critics . . . not looking for perfection but for the essential life in a book." The "essential life," for Pritchett, is usually blunt and British. With such novelists as Lawrence, Wells and Conrad he is less humane. Wells, he writes, lived in a "new world of agitating chemicals, peculiar glands, and obliterating machines. . . . He did not attribute anything but an obstructive value to human personality." Conrad had a feeling for real life, but obscured it with a "dubious Romantic over-world." Lawrence's "phallic cult was a disaster...