Professional to his fingertips

Perhaps not uniquely, I was discouraged from reading V. S. Pritchett by nothing more than the old Penguin cover of his 1982 Collected Stories. It was simply a photograph of the author, wearing a suit, holding a pipe, with an expression of mild elderly benevolence. To callow youth, that was not what genius was supposed to look like, and I didn’t get round to him for years. Big mistake. Pritchett is a writer who delineates a unique world, and the vivid genius of his voice, encompassing so many other voices, seedy, lush, excitable, takes only a line or two to make itself felt.

August’s? On the Bath road? Twice-five August — of course a knew August: ivory man. And the woman who lived with him — her name was Price. She’s dead.

That is from ‘The Camberwell Beauty’, about rival antique dealers. Or this wonderful, confusing, immediate evocation of a London party circuit from ‘Did You Invite Me?’:

Rachel first met Gilbert at David and Sarah’s, or it may have been at Richard and Phoebe’s — she could not remember — but she did remember that he stood like a touchy exclamation mark and talked in a shotgun manner about his dog.

Pritchett is, like Chekhov, at heart an extravagant writer, his extravagance bursting out in the observed oddity of ordinary life. His world is one of small businesses, of respectable back streets, of provincial towns. These apparently ordinary settings are filled by actions and characters of the utmost oddity; Pritchett knows these people, and knows how very peculiar they can be. Followers of religious cults, sexual obsessives, communists, failed suicides; their relations may be kept women, Japanese collaborators, famous actors, great artists, and their lives are coloured by the experience.