Micawber and Family
We seem to be in the middle of a literary season in which the autobiographical impulse is as catching as a virus. In recent months there have been, for example, The Double Helix, Making It, North Toward Home, Stop-Time, and The Armies of the Night, books of varying purposes and qualities but whose lines of inquiry rely heavily on self-documentation. Meanwhile, the contemporary novel has been taking on more and more subjective cargo as the realism of character and place gives way to the spontaneities of improvisation and fantasy, and contact with the world flows mainly across the arc of the novelist’s obsessions.
Why there should be this sudden traffic in the revelations and imagery of the self is anybody’s guess. Mine is that the faith in common, objective experience, in what one might call certified public reality, has reached an all-time low. This has opened the way to the belief that the only truths worth communicating about human affairs are those perceived in a personal, even idiosyncratic way, the more candid the point of view, the more unconditioned and therefore valid the report.
Regularly conned as we all are by the agents and media of public reality, which is already difficult enough to grasp as it is, it is not surprising that writers should fall back on personal candor as the ground of truth. Autobiography gives direction to the enterprise, and witnessing, in both senses of the word, confession, and other modes of individual testimony are brought to bear. Directly behind cant, writers seem to be saying, lies the truth. Although such writing often develops its own cant, a ready esteem for the offensive and daring, the aberrant and perverse, no one loses readers on that count since it then ministers to the kind of psychic voyeurism which, thanks to pop psychiatry, we confuse with insight.
All of this is prologue to my admiration for V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door, the best 250-odd pages of autobiographical writing that I know of by a living author. What makes it so good is that Pritchett is, first of all, a great writer: a master of the natural, direct style, charged with imagination and integrated by a quietly personal tone. As with Thoreau or Shaw, open any page and you are immediately in touch with a man. Or as Pritchett has said of E. M. Forster, when he begins to speak the machine stops.
A Cab at the Door is written with plenty of candor, but it is also written with something even better, which is artistic tact. Reversing the customary procedure in contcmpo-
A Cab at the Door
by V. S. Pritchett (Random House, $5.95)
rary autobiography, Pritchett places at the center of his memoir a solid and deliciously detailed commentary on lower-middle-class English life in the first two decades of the century, based on his family, educational, and early business experience; meanwhile he modestly lays around the rim the account of his own troubled development as a person and of his inchoate intentions as an artist.
The effect is a beautifully sustained priority of interests in which the depiction of concrete social conditions and forces, of manners and mores stands by itself as a portrait of an age and a class, while serving as the ground that outlines the formation of his character. This not only places the emphasis where most readers would wish to see it — on the way things were rather than how they felt, on the individual life seen less through its accidents than as common experience — but also enables Pritchett, both as writer and as subject, to exist naturally and unselfconsciously among his interests and feelings. The result is a splendid montage of persons and places fixed in their individual being, casting their representative light, and suggesting the evolving personality of the author through his relations to them. By this kind of artistic strategy, mediating deftly between figure and ground, an autobiography turns into a life.
In his criticism, no less than in his fiction or travel writing, Pritchett’s great gift has been for characterization, the overflow of relevant, vivid, surprising detail, that actualizes a person, a place, a book. Pritchett among the hallowed dead of literature is like Odysseus in Hades: a little of the blood of his critical vitality, and even as spectral a figure as Richardson immediately begins to speak again and have his being.
Still, one is unprepared for the dramatic sketches of the Pritchett family, and the full, dominant portrait of his father. Moreover, if Pritchett brings to his autobiography the gifts and aims of a social novelist, he also belonged to a family that seems especially designed for this enterprise: a veritable treasure trove of individual types. Thanks to the adventurism of his father, whose field of wild oats was commerce — “one of nature’s salesmen,” as Pritchett delicately puts it, “he was even more one of nature’s buyers” — the family lived in a good many different places and circumstances, one step ahead of its creditors. And since the boy was regularly being farmed out to relatives, he led a more picaresque youth than David Copperfield.
His formative influences began with the austerities of the north and the laxities of the south.
On mv mother’s side they were all pagans, and she a rootless London pagan, a fog worshiper, brought up on the folklore of the North London streets; on my father’s side they were harsh, lonely, God-ridden sea or country people who had been settled along the Yorkshire coasts or among its moors and fells for hundreds of years. There is enough in the differences between North and South to explain the battles and uncertainties of a lifetime.
So it proved, at least in the first twenty years recounted in A Cab at the Door. Family crises sent him frequently into his paternal grandfather’s household. A man who had pulled himself out of poverty with one mighty lunge from the army and bricklaying into the ministry, he “looked like a sergeant-major who did not drink.” His guides were Carlyle and Ruskin as well as the Gospel; a somewhat mellowed authoritarian by Pritchett’s time, he urged his iron aspirations on his grandson, and whatever will to
learning and self-improvement and independence that Pritchett was to live out began with the influence of this solitary and hardheaded Dissenter. There was also his greatuncle Arthur, a cabinetmaker in York, who had literally taught himself to read with Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and had made himself into an amateur naturalist and antiquarian. From these two resolute figures and their industrious households, one gets a feeling for the powerful religious and economic forces that had created mobility at long last in the working class and enabled it to make its first significant inroads into the life of culture.
Still, there was a long way to go, and Pritchett speaks of his grandfather as being like an immigrant, so strange to him was his place in the middle class. Exhausted by his early climb and devitalized by the vocation that had enabled it, he was eventually dominated by his fastidious and stuffy wife and by his own dream of status. Pritchett’s father inherited the dream and the fastidiousness; in full flight from the rigidity and repressiveness of the minister’s household, he became a premature gentleman, addicted to fashions and comforts that his exaggerated sense of opportunity and his superficial resourcefulness never quite earned for him and that had to be purchased at his family’s expense. A softheaded businessman, a fantasist, his mobility was mostly circular, now tilting upward toward respectability, now downward into sordidness. His religious upbringing led him into various denominations, which he tried on for style, and eventually his obstinacy, expansiveness, and self-righteousness found an abiding stay in the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, the “other woman” in his life. His relation with his wife, as Pritchett puts it, was “like a marriage of the rich and the poor.” A sly, imaginative ex-shopgirl, she vaguely followed with her four children in the turbulent wake of her husband’s career, wryly singing to herself “At Trinity Church I met me doom.”
Needless to say, Pritchett grew up with deeply ambivalent feelings toward this flashy and unreliable father who still dominated his family in good Victorian fashion (“Until 1918,” Pritchett remarks, “England was a club of energetic and determined parricides”). Early on, he can only helplessly accept his father’s nutty glory: “We have no desire to see things like the pantomime or Peter Pan; other children sec such shows, but we prefer to send Father there on our behalf; it will be one more chapter of his fantastic life.” He wears cut-down striped morning trousers to another one of his slum schools, imbibes his father’s myopic view of reality, even takes for a time to Christian Science. “No one else had (I was sure) our dark adventures. We were a race apart, abnormal but proud of our stripes, longing for the normality we saw around us.”
But eventually, he found he had his own singularities to cultivate. The first good teacher he encountered led him directly into literature and painting, a deviation which his father, hot for emulation, met with open contempt and secret jealousy. So began Pritchett’s long struggle to work himself free of his father’s ego, from commerce and religion, from the family mania for “getting on.” Visits to his more stable and enlightened relatives helped. So did his busy life in the streets and schools of London and environs, a boy’s first line of escape from a neurotic home.
His family settles for a time in Dulwiteh, Ruskin’s neighborhood, and this patron saint of lower-class aspirations beckons him on. The great novelists also begin to offer him some solid ground. One day in the peace and quiet of the countryside, a sense of purpose forms: “Money would have nothing to do with it. . . . The important thing was to be alone . . . and always walking and moving away.” Prescient but still sad. He remarks on his poor performance in school, on his being “self-burdened,” on “the dirty cunning and flightiness of my priggish nature” — that is to say, on being his father’s son and suffering from two generations of the Nonconformist vertigo. That he will grow up to be V. S. Pritchett is less surprising at this point than the fact that he is growing up at all.
Yet his brother, who adored his father and therefore remained suitably dull, springs to life once he leaves home and returns from France a success in business. Such is the resilience and toughness of the human stuff. After four years spent in the relative sanity of the leather trade — here the book rises to the most sustained and luminous level of social observation — Pritchett is ready at nineteen to begin his own life in France. His father puts him on the boat train, still self-importantly fussing over him, the elder Pritchett’s portly, almost sumptuous manner the mark of the dreamlike appetite that had seduced his own father and perverted himself. Exhausted by their anxieties, hatreds, conflicts, Pritchett has little to say to him; they watch two Italians, father and son, passionately embracing each other.
It is a moment of pure revelation: the profits and losses of the family’s long climb into the middle class registered by the contrast. In his modest, unsentimental way, Pritchett quickly passes on to other matters and feelings, but this detail in its setting leaves behind for the reader, as does the memoir as a whole, a very clear sense of the difference between writing as self-display and writing that enables the self, through the tactics and tact of art, to suggest its meanings.