Word: pritchett
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Many Pritchett fictions deal with styles of preserving one's dignity. How does an aging botanist confront the energies of his lovely 25-year-old companion? Carefully, as the author illustrates in the title story of his latest collection: "There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game." Love, of course, is never a game, especially in a December-May romance where the older party keeps one eye on the clock and the younger does...
...which her lover is invited. The husband clowns around, sings bawdy songs and regrets the missing tarts which, he is told, were left at a rehearsal studio. How much does he know? How much does he want to know? There are no answers, only a delicate tension created by Pritchett's great talent for dialogue. Again, it is what is left out that counts...
...Pritchett's characters are articulate about their- predicaments. Zuilmah Bittell in Tea with Mrs. Bittell is an affluent widow whose wits have been slowed by gentility. With a head "clouded by kindness and manners and a pride in her relics," she befriends a shop clerk whose companion attempts to plunder her expensive furnishings. That the pair are probably homosexuals escapes Mrs. Bittell; that embarrassment moves her to brave action provides the reader with an unexpected insight into motivation: "She had often, in her quiet way, thought of what she would do if someone attacked her. She had always planned...
...what one might expect in a British literary lion. Chatting amiably in the sitting room of his house near London's Regent's Park, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems more like a rural school master. There is a comfortable, unstudied eclecticism about him. His checkered trousers, striped shirt and plaid jacket have an odd camouflaging effect, especially when he stands against a large glass case containing a Victorian bouquet of stuffed pheasants, birds of paradise and a platypus. He offers no sharp opinions, no bulletins on the state of the arts...
...write for a public," says Pritchett. "I write to clear my own mind, to find out what I think and feel." He pursues this Socratic labor seven days a week, nearly 52 weeks a year, writing with a fountain pen on sheets of strong, white paper that he holds on a pastry board. It has been his lap desk for 40 years...