Midnight Oil by V. S. Pritchett

First published: 1971

Type of work: Autobiography

Time of work: 1921 to the late 1940’s

Locale: London, Paris, Ireland, Spain, and southern England

Principal Personages:

• V. S. Pritchett, a young writer learning his craft
• Walter Pritchett, his father
• Beatrice Martin Pritchett, his mother
• Dorothy Rudge Roberts Pritchett, his second wife

Form and Content

V.S. Pritchett wrote Midnight Oil in his seventieth year. It is the second volume of his autobiography, a sequel to A Cab at the Door, which was published in both England and the United States in 1968 while he was a visiting professor at Brandeis University. This earlier volume deals with the period between the author’s birth and his twentieth year; Midnight Oil takes up the story in 1921 with Pritchett’s arrival in Paris, armed with twenty pounds sterling and the determination to become a writer. It recounts episodes in his life until after World War II.

The young Pritchett found life in Paris intoxicating; he vowed never to leave. Language and the sound of words had been his obsessions since childhood, and his stilted school French was soon enriched by young acquaintances and fellow workers, for, after fruitless efforts to find a job, he became a photographer’s assistant. For the next two years he read voraciously and talked with people in cafes and in the streets. Then he would sit up late in his inexpensive room in Auteuil and try to write. He concluded eventually that he had nothing to say.

His first published piece was a joke, based on a remark heard in the street, which he had sent to one of the Paris papers. This success taught him that if he had nothing to say, he could at least write about what other people said. The discovery was enormously important: His best short stories are composed largely of conversation.

Looking back fifty years to the youth he was, Pritchett describes with gentle amusement his absurdities, his naivete, his burning ambition. He appears to have total recall and reproduces lengthy conversations with his various acquaintances. Now, years later, he realizes that his isolation kept him from knowing anything about Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald: He had not been aware that he was living at the center of a literary revolution. When he finally heard of Tristan Tzara he was angry because Tzara was smashing up a culture just as he was becoming acquainted with it.

After two years of struggle, Pritchett decided to return to London, where he was finally offered a position by The Christian Science Monitor’s London editor: He was told to describe the daily lives of ordinary people in Ireland as they coped with the civil war. Pritchett knew nothing about politics or journalism. His passion was for the scenery, the theater, and the Irish poets. He was able to talk with William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey, and (George William Russell). It was in Ireland that he began to write stories.

Recalled by his paper, he returned to London with an Irish bride and in January, 1924, was sent to Spain as a correspondent. He was captivated by the Castilian landscape but found life in a small dark flat in Madrid cold and cheerless and the city dull. Nevertheless, he says that meeting with agnostics for the first time and with the students and professors of the University of Madrid proved to be some of the most valuable experiences of his youth. He quickly learned the language, made friends, and was introduced to Jose Ortega y Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Pio Baroja y Nessi. Proud of being an amateur journalist, of not visiting the embassies or making friends with the English or Americans, he missed the big political news and wrote background pieces for his paper. He made many train trips in second-or third-class carriages, talking with the passengers, and he took long walks. His descriptions of the trains, the roads, the inns as they were in the 1920’s present a strong and interesting contrast with modern Spain.

Back in London after further assignments in North Africa and the United States, Pritchett eked out a precarious living at various boring jobs until he decided to walk across Spain. The resulting book, Marching Spain (1928), embarrasses him now, although he still finds that it has originality and vigor. After its publication he received two contracts for books, sold some short stories, and was indeed an author. He moved to a country cottage in the south of England, wrote novels, and suffered from severe health problems until, he says, love and success cured him.

Throughout the book there are references to Pritchett’s unhappy childhood, to family quarrels, to his long-suffering mother, a former Cockney shop girl who could still laugh after decades of subjugation, to his tyrannical, egotistical father, and especially to his father’s belief in Christian Science. The last two chapters give a sympathetic account of the pitiful old age of his parents. His father, after the failure of his business, tried without success to become a Christian Science practitioner while his mother, who had never believed in Mary Baker Eddy’s theories, spent hours a day lying on a couch and announcing that she was dying of cancer. Grieving over his mother’s death—not from cancer—Pritchett for once allows the reader to share his deep feelings.

Critical Context

The importance of Midnight Oil lies in its being a record of the making of a writer, one whose accomplishments have earned for him a knighthood, the presidency of the English PEN organization and later of the international PEN Club, an honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and honorary doctorates of literature from the University of Leeds and from Columbia University. V.S. Pritchett is an example of a vanishing species, the man of letters. He has written innumerable essays for, among other papers, New Statesman and The Christian Science Monitor, and a dozen books of literary criticism including Balzac: A Biography (1973), The Gentle Barbarian: The Life and Work of Turgenev (1977), and The Myth Makers: Literary Essays (1979). In 1969 he delivered the Clark lectures, titled “George Meredith and English Comedy,” and earlier still had collaborated on Why Do I Write? An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V.S. Pritchett (1948).

Pritchett’s five novels, although published in both England and the United States, have been less successful than his other work. His numerous travel books, on the other hand, beginning with Marching Spain in 1928, have received wide acclaim. Yet it is his short stories that are his masterpieces, his enduring claim to fame. There are more than a dozen volumes of these gems and many more that have not been collected. These books paint striking vignettes of ordinary people in London, Paris, Dublin, and Madrid, haunting cameos of individuals or groups caught in a moment of crisis. These characters are in sharper focus than their author. Despite his two autobiographies and an article titled “Looking Back at Eighty” in The New York Times magazine, it is not possible to believe that one really knows this very private, very great man of letters.

Bibliography

Allon, Dafna. “Reflections on the Art of Lying,” in Commentary. LXXXI (June, 1986), p. 47.

Baldwin, Dean R. V.S. Pritchett, 1987.

Maxwell, William. Review in The New Yorker. XLVIII (June 17, 1972), p. 94.

Nichols, Lewis. “Talk with V.S. Pritchett,” in The New York Times Book Review. LIX (April 25, 1954), p. 16.

Reid, B.L. “Putting in the Self: V.S. Pritchett,” in The Sewanee Review. LXXXV (Spring, 1977), pp. 262-285.

Sheed, Wilfrid. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXVII (April 30, 1972), p. 3.