First Reader

THE LIVING NOVEL (256 pp.)--V. S. Pritchett--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75).

As a 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.

"Except to the bookish," he writes, "many of what are called the Standard Novelists have the set air of an officially appointed committee. We had fallen into the error of believing that they [wrote] for critics, for literary historians, for students or for leisured persons of academic tastes; and people who read only the best authors usually let one know it. We had easily forgotten that the masters . . . stood above their contemporaries and survived them, because they were more readable, more entertaining, more suggestive and incomparably more able than the common run of novelists."

The 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 of its idiosyncrasies and limits. Sociable man, social problems, middle-class humor, the didactic habit, the club culture, the horseplay, the gregarious rather than the single eye."

The 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 to descriptive writing." "The world is not saved by novelists," Pritchett concludes. ". . . No one could possibly believe what Lawrence believed, and Lawrence hated people if they tried. . . . One day when Lawrence and [his wife] Frieda were out riding in Mexico, Frieda cried out, 'Oh, it's wonderful, wonderful to feel his great thighs moving, to feel his powerful legs!' 'Rubbish, Frieda,' Lawrence shouted back. 'Don't talk like that. You have been reading my books. You don't feel anything of the sort.' "

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