The Pritchett Century (102 page)

In his attitude to love, Saleem is very much the ever wilful, inventive, teasing Scheherazade, prolonging the dreams of his people and puncturing them at the point of success. For example, his Aunt Pia, notorious for making emotional scenes, may be seen wantonly going through the motions of seducing Saleem—who is only ten at the time—but the act is physical charade: her extreme sexual provocation is put on as a “scene” in which she rids herself of a private grief. Love is a need and custom, sexuality is play-acting. Towards the end of the book, Saleem will refuse to consummate his marriage to the witch Parvati (who has saved his life and who loves him), but not because she is pregnant by another man—in fact, his brother and opposite, the womanising Shiva. Saleem pretends he is impotent. Why this self-love? Is it possible that—too entranced by his fantastic powers of invention—he is the artist in love with storytelling itself? Or do such episodes spring from a fundamental sense that India is a chaos in which no norm can be realised? What a Westerner would call Saleem’s self-pity is the egoist’s devious and somehow energising passivity and resignation. It is, at any rate, the obverse of Shiva’s grossly self-seeking attitude to life. Shiva is not a man to spend himself in a breathless stream of words.

All this is brought to life by Rushdie’s delight in ironies of detail,
which is entirely beguiling, because the smallest things, comic or horrible, are made phenomenal. But when we come to the war in East Pakistan the narrative takes on a new kind of visionary power. Saleem is a soldier, and in defeat and flight he leads a tiny group of men into the jungle—see the sorcerer’s prophecy!—where he sometimes calls himself “I,” sometimes “he” or “buddha,” and maybe also Ayooba, as if desperation had become a fever that burns out his identity. The soldiers are diminished by the rain forest, which has become a phantom personage who arouses in them all the guilt they have hidden, and punishes them for the horrors they have committed.

The forest permitted a “double-edged” nostalgia for childhood, strange visions of mothers and fathers; Ayooba, for example, sees his mother offering her breasts, when she suddenly turns into a white monkey swinging by her tail high up in a tree. Another lad hears his father telling his brother that their father had sold his soul for a loan from his landlord, who charged three hundred per cent—“so it seemed that the magical jungle, having tormented them with their misdeeds, was leading them by the hand towards a new adulthood.” But there are worse tests to come: in a ruined temple the soldiers are deluded by lascivious dreams of houris, evoked by a statue of a savage multi-limbed Kali. The men wake up discovering the meaninglessness of life, the pointless boredom of the desire to survive.

The experience of these very ordinary men is a purgation but not a salvation. As in an opera—and perhaps that is what
Midnight’s
Children
really is—the next grand scene is of comic magic. The conquering armies enter Dacca, led by a vast company of ghetto minstrels, conjurors, magic men. Marching with the troops come the entertainers:

She was rolling her magic basket along as she marched, and—would you believe it?—eventually helped Saleem to escape by popping him into it. After her magic, the allegory: it is Shiva who seduces Parvati and deserts her, and Picture Singh who makes Saleem marry her, in the ghetto where Picture Singh draws the crowd with his snakes while Saleem, the man of conscience, shouts political propaganda. (Mr Rushdie has already told us that the magicians are all Communists of every known hue and schism.) This episode, like so many others in the book, is almost delicately touching, but, of course, there is disaster in the next act. Back in India, Saleem is a political prisoner and is forced to submit to vasectomy. The man who lied to Parvati when he said he was impotent is now truly impotent as he dictates this long story to Padma, the working girl, who has got him a job in the pickle factory. He loves inventing chutneys—they have the power of bringing back memories.

The novel is, in part, a powerful political satire in its savaging of both political and military leaders. The narrator’s hatred of Mrs
Gandhi—the Widow (that is to say, the guillotine)—is deep. But I think that as satire the novel is at variance with Mr Rushdie’s self-absorption and his pursuit of poetic symbols: the magic basket in which one can hide secret thoughts, and so save oneself, is an example; another is “the hole,” which recurs, and suggests that we see experience falsely, because in a little over-excited peep at a time. These symbols are rather too knowing; he is playing tricks with free association. Padma, the not-so-simple factory girl to whom the ruined Saleem dictates the book, pities his wretchedness but often suggests that he is piling it on, and is suspicious of his evasiveness. So much conjuring going on in Saleem’s imagination
does
bewilder us. But as a
tour de force
his fantasy is irresistible.

(1990)

The Modern Library Editorial Board

Maya Angelou

•

Daniel J. Boorstin

•

A. S. Byatt

•

Caleb Carr

•

Christopher Cerf

•

Ron Chernow

•

Shelby Foote

•

Vartan Gregorian

•

Charles Johnson

•

Mary Karr

•

Jon Krakauer

•

Edmund Morris

•

Michael Ondaatje

•

Elaine Pagels

•

David Remnick

•

John Richardson

•

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

•

Carolyn See

•

William Styron

•

Gore Vidal

Victor Sawdon Pritchett, the extraordinarily prolific and versatile man of letters widely regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the English language, was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, on December 16, 1900. His father, whom he recalled in the enchanting memoir
A Cab at the Door
(1968), was a boundlessly optimistic but chronically unsuccessful businessman whose series of failed ventures necessitated frequent moves to elude creditors. These repeated uprootings interrupted Pritchett’s formal education, yet he was a voracious reader from an early age, devouring the novels of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy as well as the complete works of Shakespeare. Apprenticed in the leather trade at fifteen, Pritchett alleviated the boredom of a menial clerical job by delving extensively into the classics. At twenty he left for Paris, vowing to become a writer. He later reflected on his experiences there in
Midnight Oil
(1971), a second volume of autobiography that endures as an intimate and precise record of an artist’s self-discovery.

Pritchett began his writing career as a foreign correspondent for
The Christian Science Monitor
, which sent him on assignments in Ireland and Spain.
Marching Spain
(1928), his first book, recounts impressions of a country that held a lifelong fascination for Pritchett. His other travel writing includes
The Spanish Temper
(1954),
The Offensive Traveller
(1964; published in the U.K. as
Foreign Faces
), and
At Home and Abroad
(1989). In addition, he collaborated with photographer Evelyn Hofer on three acclaimed metropolitan profiles:
London Perceived
(1962),
New York Proclaimed
(1964), and
Dublin: A Portrait
(1967).

After his career as a roving journalist, Pritchett returned to London and started writing fiction.
Clare Drummer
(1929), the first of his five novels, draws on his travels in Ireland, while
Elopement into Exile
(1932; published in the U.K. as
Shirley Sanz
) again reflects his enthrallment with Spain. During this period he also completed
Nothing Like Leather
(1935), a compelling saga about the rise and fall of an English businessman, and
Dead Man Leading
(1937), an allegorical tale of a journey into darkness that is reminiscent of Conrad. Pritchett’s best-known novel,
Mr. Beluncle
(1951), is a work of Dickensian scope featuring an endearing scoundrel-hero modeled after his own father.

Yet it is widely acknowledged that Pritchett’s genius as a storyteller came to full fruition in his short fiction. “Pritchett’s literary achievement is enormous, but his short stories are his greatest triumph,” said Paul Theroux. Beginning with
The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories
(1930) right up through
Complete Collected Stories
(1991), Pritchett published fourteen volumes filled with masterful tales that chronicle the lives of ordinary people through a flood of details and humorous, kindhearted observations. His other collections include:
You Make Your Own Life
(1938),
It May Never Happen
(1945),
The Sailor, Sense of Humor, and Other Stories
(1956),
When My Girl Comes Home
(1961),
The Key to My Heart
(1964),
Blind Love
(1970),
The Camberwell Beauty
(1974),
Selected Stories
(1978),
On the Edge of the Cliff
(1980),
Collected Stories
(1982),
More Collected Stories
(1983), and
A Careless Widow
(1989).

“We read Pritchett’s stories, comic or tragic, with an elation that stems from their intensity,” observed Eudora Welty. “Life goes on in them without flagging. The characters that fill them—erratic, unsure, unsafe, devious, stubborn, restless and desirous, absurd and passionate, all peculiar unto themselves—hold a claim on us that is not to be denied. They demand and get our rapt attention, for in their revelation of their lives, the secrets of our own lives come into view.” And Reynolds Price noted: “An extended view of his short fiction reveals a chameleonic power of invention, sympathy and selfless transformation that sends one back as far as Chekhov for a near-parallel.”

The acclaim lavished on Pritchett for his short stories has been matched by that accorded his literary criticism. “Pritchett is not only our best short story writer but also our best literary critic,” stated Anthony Burgess.
In My Good Books
(1942),
The Living Novel
(1946),
Books in General
(1953), and
The Working Novelist
(1965) contain essays written during his long association with the
New Statesman
. Pritchett continued his exploration of world literature in
George Meredith and English Comedy
(1970),
The Myth Makers
(1979)
, The Tale Bearers
(1980),
A Man of Letters
(1985), and
Lasting Impressions
(1990). His magnum opus of literary criticism,
Complete Collected Essays
, was issued in 1992. In addition he produced three masterful works that artfully meld criticism with biography:
Balzac
(1974),
The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev
(1977), and
Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free
(1988).

“Pritchett is the supreme contemporary virtuoso of the short literary essay,” said
The New York Times Book Review
. “His essays are sketches of an author’s life, times and works. Always the short-story writer, he is fascinated by people, by characters. He has the lower-middle-class Londoner’s quick eye and sharp tongue and appetite for comedy. He’s quick to spot pride, the cover-up, flummery, snobbery, cant. From his work he appears to be an emotional, intensely curious man—plucky, blunt, generous.… Pritchett is informal but never clubby, witty but never snide or snobbish, precise and always full of gusto.” And Gore Vidal, who deemed him “our greatest English-language critic,” remarked: “It would be very nice for literature if he lived forever.”

“If, as they say, I am a Man of Letters I come, like my fellows, at the tail-end of a long and once esteemed tradition in English and American writing,” Pritchett once said. “We have no captive audience. We do not teach. We write to be readable and to engage the interest of what Virginia Woolf called ‘the common reader.’ We do not lay down the law, but we do make a stand for the reflective values of a humane culture. We care for the printed word in a world that nowadays is dominated by the camera and by scientific, technological, sociological doctrine.… I was not a product of Eng. Lit. I had never been taught and, even now, I am shocked to hear that literature is ‘taught.’ I found myself less a critic than an imaginative traveller or explorer … I was travelling in literature.”