Word: pritchett
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...time, much of this seemed sheer perversity, a quixotic desire to be history's odd man out. But the truth of Orwell's observations slowly vindicated him. The writer was first characterized as a crank, then as an apostle of common sense, and at last, in V.S. Pritchett's phrase, "as the wintry conscience of a whole generation...
...century England. But Snow is closer to Trollope (whose biography he is now writing) than to Dickens. For he is finally interested in showing how the system works, rather than in asking why or making a fuss about it. His wariness makes for low-level emotions. What Critic V.S. Pritchett said of Trollope could be said of Snow: "Reading him is like walking down endless corridors of carpet...
...book called Why Do I Write?, published in 1948, Graham Greene and V.S. Pritchett exchanged views on the writer's relation to society, and came to the conclusion that there were no hard and fast rules to follow, beyond their own personal interpretations of a writer's social obligations. Greene came off a little more preachy in these letters than even a Catholic novelist can pretend to be. And in his new book, Greene betrays some of the very obligations he believes a writer owes to society...
...letters to Pritchett, Greene said, "one of the major objects of his craft (I speak, of course, of the novelist) is the awakening of sympathy." He demonstrates that same kind of sympathy in Lord Rochester's Monkey but it is overbearing. And as Leon Edel says in his book Literary Biography, "There enters into the process a quality of sympathy with the subject which is neither forbearance nor adulation." Edel describes a certain form of the biographical genre that, in its rejection of chronological order, can "borrow from the methods of the novelist without, however, being fiction." Here again Greene...
...though, Pritchett disappoints. Too often the narrative is only a recital of debts, contracts, mistresses, houses and more debts without a sense of the relish with which this complicated and violent genius conducted his messy life. It may be that as a biographer Pritchett is too much of a smart, admiring English shopkeeper to do justice to this Napoleon of the pen. A little awe might have helped. ∙ Martha Duffy