The Making of a Writer

By Martha Duffy

MIDNIGHT OIL by V.S. PRITCHETT 271 pages. Random House. $6.95.

This is the second and apparently the final volume in the autobiography of Britain's best literary critic as well as one of its wisest and sanest men of letters. Pritchett's elegant prose and range of knowledge might suggest that he is a product of a proud public school and Oxford. But in Volume 1, A Cab at the Door, he wrote of a decidedly lower-middle-class upbringing as the child of feckless and eccentric parents.

Midnight Oil begins with the story of how he became a writer without benefit of higher education, literary mentors or even good advice. Instinct made the 20-year-old Pritchett leave the leather trade in London and set off for Paris in 1921. He saw his first pepper mill, ate his first omelet, became an accent snob and--so far as he could afford a fop. In a more gradual way, "the orderliness of the trees, the gravely spaced avenues, rearranged my mind."

He held a couple of selling jobs, but set about writing at once. The embarrassing question was: Write what? He had read some Stevenson, Chesterton and a few Georgian poets. "What was their common characteristic?" he pondered. "It was obvious. They walked." So young Pritchett took to the roads and returned dusty with full notebooks. Soon the Christian Science Monitor began publishing his word sketches.

The poignancy of Pritchett's early career lies in his utter isolation. Any kill he acquired was the product of reading or laborious trial and error. Joyce, Hemingway and Stein were in Paris when Pritchett was. He had never heard of them, nor had he any notion of what they were trying to do. After two years in France, he signed on as Monitor correspondent in Ireland--during the Troubles--and later went to Spain. He was so ignorant of journalism that for a while he was unaware that he could even approach government or political figures for interviews. Later he admitted, "In my heart I despised news and was confused by opinion."

Midnight Oil is written in lucid, supple prose--exactly suited to a testing and savoring memory. At first one naturally brushes past the author's frequent avowals that as a young man he wrote very badly. But late in the book he quotes a description of the Great Smokies written in 1926, and sure enough it is just awful: "From their highest elevation bannered a stilly chrome wash of startled light."

"A Little More." Pritchett can smile at his youthful self. More important he is able to set down the gradual growth of his mind. After the early Paris period when he thought his feet could take him farther than his head, he entered a blurry "transcendental" phase culminating in the Irish sojourn. In that "Victorian lagoon," even the fighting seemed unreal. He arrived at Cork terrified by a hail of machine-gun fire, only to be reassured by the urchin carrying his bag: " Tis only the boys from the hills." In Ireland he met his first true writers--Yeats and O'Casey among others--and he dreamed of becoming an "artist" whose art could be determined later.

The harsh landscape of Spain and the poverty of its people changed all that. Ten years before the Civil War, the country seemed proud, destitute and challenging. "There was a sense of the immediate and finite, so much more satisfying than the infinite, which had really starved me. Here one began to see exactly." Now his walking tours were taken with less naive goals. His first book, Marching Spain, appeared and the mental rearrangement begun beneath the trees in Paris was complete.

The last part of the book returns to England and in a way to A Cab at the Door. Pritchett's blustering father and droll mother come onstage for a final turn, somewhat better off financially but still squabbling, buying and selling inappropriate property, defying the blitz by moving into London. Both died in their 80s after the war. Probably out of modesty, he sketches his later life very lightly, discussing his novels and short stories briefly and barely mentioning both his career as critic for the New Statesman and the major study of Balzac he has worked on for years. Now approaching his parents' great age, Pritchett looks at himself: "A bald man, his fattish face supported by a valance of chins. I am seventy, and in my father's phrase, 'I would like a little more.' " Is it too greedy to ask for one more volume of memoirs? -Martha Duffy

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