Tale Bearer V. S. Pritchett

Since my boyhood I have been vain of being bom just before the end of 1900 and at every birthday thinking of myself as pretty well as old as the century," V. S. Pritchett wrote as he turned eighty. A harmless vanity on the part of a working writer who otherwise shows no trace of it. In 1975 he became Sir Victor and never paused to turn into a monument or an oracle. A new short story of characteristic oddity and vivacity has appeared since the publication of his Collect ed Stories last year, and more are promised. His reviews and literary essays (most recently collected in The Tale Bearers and The Myth Makers) continue to appear with a frequency that would be astonishing from an ambitious young man making his way up; the real astonishment is their clarity, humane curiosity, and breadth of outlook.

In two sparkling volumes of autobiography, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, Pritchett traced his lower-middle-class boyhood in London, his four-year apprenticeship in the leather trade, and his escape to Paris, where he worked as an unsuccessful salesman of glue, shellac, and ostrich feathers while trying to get started as a writer. He has never lost his cleareyed affection for the world of small trades and crafty competition: one of his late masterpieces, "The Camberwell Beauty," is a story of sexual passion and greedy acquisitiveness in the watchful, secretive world of antique dealers.

His stories and his essays may be his most lasting work, but he has also written six novels, biographies of Turgenev and Balzac, and a classic book of travel, The Spanish Temper. He has been blessed with good health and a happy marriage of nearly fifty years. "I have done, given my circumstances and my character, what I have been able to do and I have enjoyed it," he wrote at seventy. At eighty, "I am a very lucky man, of course." As he approaches eighty-three, his work is not done, and his zest is unflagging.