Word: pritchett
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There are novelists that almost nobody reads and almost everybody feels guilty about. Then there are novelists that nobody reads-and what's more, nobody feels he has to. On this non-must list, the Victorian George Meredith ranks high-unfairly high, argues V.S. Pritchett, an expert craftsman of satirical short stories and, at 69, still Britain's best practicing critic...
...Even Pritchett may not be able to start a Meredith revival. He has, nonetheless, brilliantly made Meredith a man who had something to Say to Our Times -although he did not quite know how to say it. In Pritchett's critique, Meredith emerges as a writer trapped in a literary no man's land: he kept raising modern questions but ended up with Victorian answers...
...German education. He complicated his life-style even more by affecting a Regency appearance and manner. A halfhearted stab at law, a simultaneous enthusiasm for poetry and boxing-nothing in Meredith's early life seemed to go together. By the time he was ready to write his novels, Pritchett implies, he had become a one-man, multi-role social comedy in himself. The ordeal of self-discovery-sorting it all out-became the theme of his books. Meredith was always trying on egos for size in front of his readers. Other novelists became their characters. Meredith's characters...
Aggressive Prudery. Meredith was divided, above all, on the subject of sex. Like every Victorian author, he suffered, in Pritchett's words, "from the aggressive prudery of his readers." Much as he might have liked to strip down to bare revelations, Meredith, a tailor's son to the end, settled for a costume change, etherealizing passion and abstracting love into a distant, chaste project. Still, it can be argued that no novelist of the 19th century had more to tell about the destructive and self-destructive impulses that coexist with love...
...ruined bust of Euripides, Meredith held court. When no one else was around, he talked to his dogs. In art, as in life, he was a nonstop talker, and it is the rhetorical, aphoristic Meredithian grand manner that finally puts off today's readers. Reading Meredith in quantity, Pritchett concedes, is like "a continuous diet of lobster and champagne," leading him to speculate whether writers with poor stomachs compensate with rich prose. (Meredith, a would-be gourmet, was afflicted by dyspepsia and had to survive at one time on vegetable juice...