Dead Man Leading by V. S. Pritchett

First published: 1937

Type of work: Psychological adventure

Time of work: c. 1930

Locale: Brazil and London

Principal Characters:

• Harry Johnson, the protagonist, a timberman of independent means and an explorer
• Charles Wright, formerly a doctor, now an explorer
• Gilbert Phillips, a journalist and a member of the Brazilian expedition with Johnson and Wright
• Lucy Mommbrekke, the stepdaughter of Wright
• Silva, a Portuguese who is employed at the timber company power plant in Brazil

The Novel

Three Englishmen, Harry Johnson, Gilbert Phillips, and Charles Wright, plan an expedition to explore virgin territory in Brazil. Johnson and Wright are experienced explorers; Phillips, a journalist, is not. The initial motivation came from Wright, who had earlier made it to the edge of the territory but fell ill; his incomplete exploration has haunted him ever since. The novel opens with Johnson and Phillips on a launch going up a Brazilian river to meet Wright at a town that was to be the jumping-off point for the expedition. (The river and town are nameless, as are most geographic details in the novel.) The town is also the site of the timber business with which Johnson is affiliated. Johnson falls ill on the voyage and is still ill when they arrive and join Wright.

Through flashbacks, the reader learns that before departing for Brazil, Johnson had an affair with Wright’s stepdaughter, Lucy Mommbrekke (at Lucy’s rather than Johnson’s initiative). Not having heard from her (he checks for letters at every opportunity), he has convinced himself that she is pregnant. Although a physically powerful man and very independent, he courts self-torture; added to his guilt toward Lucy is further guilt toward her stepfather, his fellow explorer. The burden of guilt, compounded by the fever of his illness, strengthens his obsession with surviving alone in the wilderness—he has always been a loner, making the entanglement with Lucy scarcely tolerable. Johnson seeks hardship and rushes toward the seemingly impossible; going without Wright would, moreover, remove one reminder of his guilt. As the launch moves up the river on the way to join Wright, John son repeatedly horrifies Phillips by saying that they should leave the boat and strike out overland without waiting to meet Wright. Adding to his growing obsession is apparently the urge (made explicit later) to find out what happened to his father, a missionary, who seventeen years earlier disappeared in the jungle not very far from the destination of the expedition—and he had traveled alone.

Days pass at the town that was to be the launching point for the expedition, while Johnson’s physical condition improves. To alleviate the boredom, Wright and Phillips go up the river to hunt turtle eggs. Calcott, an Englishman at whose house the explorers are staying, knew Johnson’s father and was perhaps the last white man to see him alive before he plunged into the wilderness. He talks about him, fueling Johnson’s desire to find out what happened to the missionary. Calcott also introduces Johnson to Silva, an amiable but shrewd Portuguese; he and Calcott hold regular seances, at one of which communication seems to be established with the lost missionary. Although Johnson laughs at the whole thing, the seance probably adds to his growing passion to learn his father’s fate.

A storm delays Wright’s and Phillip’s return to town. With Silva offering to accompany him (partly out of boredom, but also thinking that gold might be Johnson’s objective), Johnson starts up the river, ostensibly to hunt but really to strike out on his own and search for clues to the disappearance of his father. In a day or so, Johnson falls ill again, and Phillips, Wright, and native boatmen overtake him. The embarrassment of the encounter (Johnson had deserted his companions) is superficially smoothed over; Johnson and Wright go out from camp to Johnson’s canoe to catch some small game. They come upon a jaguar (which their light guns would only enrage if they fired at it); in the ensuing excitement, Wright trips and shoots himself through the chest. After a titanic struggle, Johnson manages to get him back to the boat. Meanwhile, Phillips and Silva, hearing Johnson’s shots and seeing his fire, meet them on the river. By this time, Wright is dead; Silva assumes that Johnson has murdered him. (In a rare moment of self-revelation, Johnson had told Silva of his affair with Wright’s stepdaughter; the Portuguese misunderstood him, thinking it was Wright’s wife—hence the motive for the killing.) Nothing is said openly of this; the natives are uneasy because of the dead man and want to return; Johnson is determined to press on. At first strongly opposed to the idea, Phillips finally persuades himself that he should go with Johnson. Silva returns to town with the natives; the party is subsequently arrested in connection with the “murder”—one of the natives is wearing Wright’s boots.

Phillips and Johnson begin their journey, fighting mosquitoes, underbrush, fatigue; the trek soon becomes a test of survival as they abandon the boat and travel overland. Water is in short supply. Soon they are quarreling; laughter, delirious. The emotional relationships between the two men are further complicated by the fact that Phillips also had an affair with Lucy. When Johnson, during a lucid interval, leaves the exhausted, raving Phillips to find water for them, selflessly leaving him the gun, Phillips, thinking he is being deserted, fires at him and misses. Johnson continues in search of water, armed only with a knife. Soon there is a tropical storm, the beginning of the rainy season, which floods the countryside. After many fumbling moves, Phillips starts out in search of his companion but is soon exhausted and near collapse. He stumbles into a party of explorers, who, after a search for the missing man, carry him to safety. Harry Johnson is never seen again, presumably drowned.

Phillips returns to England and is visited by Lucy, who is now married and expecting a child. (“I must marry,” she had told herself as she waved goodbye to Johnson, “before I . . . catch the next boat and go after him.”) After some rather awkward conversation, they part to go their separate ways, each haunted by the memory of this heroic, troubled man.

The Characters

Physically impressive, Johnson “looked like a man carrying a load on his shoulders, uncomplainingly, so strong, muscular and awkward, soft in voice, and thoughtful in every word he spoke.” Yet he “appeared to know so little and observe so little of other people.” Often central to V. S. Pritchett’s thinking about character is puritanism—one critic has called him the connoisseur of English puritanism—and Johnson is no exception. “The conscience of the puritan has need of its melodrama and mythology,” Pritchett observes of his protagonist. Johnson seeks hardship, courts the impossible, is self-torturing, is a loner; when to this constellation is added tropical fever and further guilt (toward Lucy and her stepfather), as well as the driving urge to find his father (or learn his fate), his actions in the novel—including the desertion of his companions—at least approach plausibility. It should be noted that Johnson risks the lives of others in the pursuit of his obsessions. Prior to sailing for Brazil, he foolhardily takes Lucy, against her will, out in a sailboat in a gale; he himself says that he caused Wright’s death. “He would have killed any woman,” observes Lucy at the end of the novel. How successful the author is in making the protagonist a believable character, each reader must decide for himself, but it is clear that the tormented Johnson is a badly flawed hero.

In some ways, Lucy is the right woman for Johnson: She too “had grown up with a love of the difficult.... She wanted greater and greater difficulties.” Lucy is “not very tall, a soft-bodied, lazy and sensual girl.” She is “one of those women who are not beautiful, but who are illumined when they smile or laugh.” Like Johnson, she has “tortured and perverted” puritanism in her blood, giving her a measure of “single minded independence.” (Pritchett’s fascination with puritanism may have led him astray: Three pages earlier Lucy is “tired of freedom,” wishing for a “heavy chain on the ankle.”) Although they quarrel occasionally, she and Johnson get along well. Yet he does not want a woman at all: As Lucy puts it at the end, “He wanted women to be men.”

Gilbert Phillips is almost everything Johnson is not: sensitive, somewhat vain, self-conscious, often doubting his own manhood—certainly not hero material. He is drawn to Johnson as weaker men are to stronger. His decision to accompany Johnson on the final madcap trek after Wright’s death is tortured and prolonged—he is flattered to be asked and afraid to appear cowardly. His good instincts usually prevail; after he fires at Johnson when he thought he was being left, he sets out to try to find him.

Charles Wright brings a more balanced personality to the expedition; small, wiry, a seasoned explorer, his sunburn giving him the color of a “clay idol,” he “was like some small and diligent god.” His self-control when overtaking the obsessed Johnson is a remarkable tribute to his good sense and balance. His, however, is a limited role compared to those of the other two explorers, and the reader learns less about him.

The Portuguese Silva is in many ways the most successful of Pritchett’s characters in the novel. The small, fat, shrewd man had been a clerk in an English shipping office in Lisbon: He was “intelligent, imitative and simple hearted, his admiration for the English sprang from the observation that they had a lot of money and were, by his frugal standards, very careless about it.” He is a facile womanizer, “inquisitive without being offensive,” with the “art of falling on his feet wherever he went.” Although the end of the novel leaves him in the hands of the police, the reader is confident that he will not be there long. Pritchett brings his flair for this kind of out-of-the-way character to most of his work.

Critical Context

Dead Man Leading is V. S. Pritchett’s fourth novel—he wrote only one more novel, Mr. Beluncle (1951), before returning to the short stories and literary criticism that are his forte. Unlike much of his work in which the setting is the everyday, even humdrum, world, the novel offers the exotic background of the South American jungle. And instead of the quirks, vanities, weaknesses, greed, and aspirations of people in the ordinary walks of life, usually handled with humor or satire, the reader is presented with upperclass English explorers and an obsessed, but larger-than-life, hero whose struggle is presented with some sympathy and full seriousness, perhaps too much seriousness. Although Pritchett’s deft light humor flicks about the minor characters Silva and Calcott, the novelist seems to take his mission almost as humorlessly as the protagonist takes his.

The success of the novel depends largely on the believability of the flawed, Conradian hero. The desertion of his companions by a seasoned explorer with Johnson’s background, traditional loyalties, and ingrained ethical standards requires a skillful artist to appear plausible. Conrad could have written the story convincingly; for a number of critics, Pritchett did. If so, his success was limited: When the reader closes the book, Harry Johnson fades rapidly into the Brazilian jungle and out of mind, certainly not the case with some of the more typical of the author’s creations.

Bibliography

Field, L. M. Review in The New York Times. LXXXVI (September 12, 1937), p. 3.

Gibson, Wilfrid. Review in The Manchester Guardian. March 30, 1937, p. 5.

Halle, L. J., Jr. Review in Saturday Review of Literature. XVI (September 4, 1937), p. 5.

Jones, E. B. C. Review in The Spectator. CLVIII (April 9, 1937), p. 676.

The Times Literary Supplement. April 3, 1937, p. 255.