V. S. Pritchett's first volume [of reminiscences] A Cab at the Door, takes its title from the family's habit of moving lodgings after each new failed enterprise: "A cabby and his horse would be coughing together outside the house and the next thing we knew we were driving to an underground station and to a new house in a new part of London, to the smell of new paint, new mice dirts, new cupboards." (p. 263)

The rootlessness of the Pritchetts' London life, coupled with a native hostility to rote learning, made a shambles of Victor's formal education. (p. 265)

When he is not yet sixteen the lad is abruptly removed from school and sent to work as an office boy in "the leather trade" at a large factor's in Bermondsey. Here he remained for four years. It is characteristic of Pritchett's sane realism not to treat the long interval as a waste nor to recall it with condescension or self-pity. (p. 266)

Pritchett is very frank and funny about adolescent sexuality, which torments him unbearably throughout these years. (p. 267)

It is a long serious illness in the postwar influenza epidemic that finally separates him from the leather trade and frees him to leave England and his family. His fortune consists of twenty pounds—enough, his father estimates, to keep him in Paris for a month…. On the train to Paris he tastes wine for the first time and finds it vinegary; but he is "committed" to liking it. The little transitional experiences are to be taken as premonitory.

So ends A Cab at the Door, about which one's feelings have been locally powerful but confused in sum, suspended. It is an effect, one supposes, of Pritchett's own feelings about the quality of his life in childhood and youth. The dominant impression is that of a hectic busyness, humming, hivelike, without clear direction or clear lines of emphasis: evidently the life was like that. The book like the boy is dominated by the family, and the family is dominated by the schizoid father, a small man driven by a need to be big: vain, unrealistic, tyrannical, totally undependable. The cab appears at the door too many times. It is a life without order or delicacy, in a family where, as Pritchett put the case in his second volume, "manners were unknown, where everyone shouted, and no one had any notion of taste, either good or bad. We lived without it." Yet the life has style of its own peculiar kind: the hive, especially young Victor, buzzes with energy and talent that seeks a vent and a way to work. The hive of the family is set inside the larger hive of lower-middle-class London, likewise elbowing, raucous, deprived, making do. One watches Victor defining his own nature and painfully, with heaves and lurches, pulling it free.

Pritchett writes of these matters in a style that is admirable for the level of feeling he means to allow expression. His mode is direct, clear, energetic, undecorated, dry: a sharpshooter's or perhaps a sniper's language. The vision at work is attentive and retentive, deprecatory—especially of the self, amused but sardonic, not particularly forgiving. What it sees is a comedy but not a jolly one, an ironical comedy that encloses a lot of suffering—yet the suffering is underplayed, by no means exploited. The language, the vision, one is tempted to call heartless, but that would be both uncharitable and inaccurate. Pritchett's manner is not heartless, but it is remarkably cool: call it emotionally underspecified.

The thing that is missing in the narrative is important: love. The word, or even the idea, is rarely mentioned in A Cab at the Door, and almost never in association with the family or any member of it. Like taste, love appears to be a thing the Pritchetts "lived without." It is only in middle life, and then with the help of another's insight, that Pritchett comes at last to see, for example, that his absurd vainglorious father had been a man tortured with affection and anxiety for his children. No doubt it is partly English reticence in personal narrative that makes Pritchett so wary of emotional commitment in his autobiography. But the matter seems more personal and peculiar than that; and one feels that the tendency is not only an effect of style but a fact of life, something in the man.

By ordinary literary-critical standards Pritchett's second volume, Midnight Oil, is a denser, finer, more "valuable" book than his first. Its essential subject is vocation: V. S. Pritchett making a beginning as a writer, finding direction by a mixture of purpose, accident, and necessity, reaching an established position. In all senses it is a professional book. It is full of matter and of wisdom. Within its set limits, it is actually more open, freer, warmer in expressed emotion than A Cab at the Door. Especially in its unpretentious way of presenting the self and its wise and straight way of talking about the craft of writing, it is a very winning book and an instructive one. Yet in turning professional Pritchett has become curiously less interesting. Perversely one finds oneself missing the very thing that had got on one's nerves in the first volume: the remorseless herkyjerky tension of the domestic comedy-drama. Pritchett by himself, turning literary, finding success, is a less involving figure than Pritchett beating his wings frantically in the hive of the family. The second book lacks the hectic vitality of the first, and the gain in serenity does not altogether compensate. (pp. 267-69)

Midnight Oil begins in a touching, gravely humorous way, with V. S. Pritchett at seventy years contemplating two photographs of himself. One is contemporary and shows a bald aging man writing on a pastry board …; the other shows the same man as a youth of twenty sitting on a table in Paris: he looks vague, shapeless, cocky, histrionic. Pritchett says it is the "embarrassment" he feels at that early image that forms the subject of his book. He is trying to make peace with that image, and to make sense of it: to understand, so to speak, how he got from there to here. He writes, as he puts the matter movingly, out of the general mystification of age and experience: "One is less and less sure of who one is"; and from the point of view of the cumulative anonymity, the evacuated persona of the artist: "The professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become almost nothing." (p. 270)

The comedy of Midnight Oil extends and matures that of A Cab at the Door: it is gayer, more affirmative, less embarrassed and wounded. (p. 273)

The main impressions a reader takes away from his two volumes are those of courage, vitality, clarity, reserve. Those are properties of both subject and style; one need not labor to document them: they are audible everywhere in the language. Both subject and style, furthermore, are properties of temperament. One is impressed both by what is there and by what is left out. Pritchett strikes me as a very tough and intelligent man who survived a long deep wounding. The wound and the bow: he has been to hell and come back to tell about it—up to a point. In his first thirty years Pritchett took on a great deal of scar tissue, and I suspect he chose to treat it as a protective second skin. (pp. 283-84)

[Few] writers can have been so utterly self-made. Pritchett learned to write by reading and writing. No master, no old boys, pulled him along. The whole process, in life and art, left him tight-lipped—in art: that we do not really learn how he is in life is precisely the problem. Pritchett's reticence is English but it is also profoundly personal, exceptional even for an Englishman. It strikes me not as stoicism but as a strongly developed instinct for privacy, not less prickly for being unstated. We hear, unstated, a gritty murmur: "Certain things are none of your damned business."

Revolted by the vanity and self-pity that make so much of current fiction, poetry, and even criticism unreadable, one is embarrassed to complain of reticence when it occurs. But the "laconic," the "definite," so rare and ordinarily so admirable, can turn into a dangerous virtue when the subject, inescapably, is the self. We don't need any more egos but we can use any number of lives, if they have been useful ones, like Pritchett's, and if we are allowed far enough inside to understand the working of motive and feeling. Pritchett does not allow us very far inside. His very reticence, when frankly applied to a permitted moment of emotion, such as the death of his mother, can create a stunning little point-blank effect: "She lay, a tiny figure, so white and frail that she looked no more than a cobweb. I stood there hard and unable to weep. Tears come to me only at the transition from unhappiness to happiness; now I was frozen at the thought of her life. She had been through so much and I had been so outside it." It bothers one, however, that the effect is in a significant degree an effect of style, a triumph of withheld climax allowed to shock an established reserve, taking much of its power from its rarity.

I do not think Pritchett is hostile or immune to strong feeling; but it is hard to be sure, and that is exactly the difficulty I have with the matter. Late in Midnight Oil he remarks almost in passing: "It is pretty certain that the effect of the violent quarrels in my childhood home was to close my heart for a long time." Perhaps these and other traumas in the hardship of his life really did freeze Pritchett's heart. I do not think so; I think his heart simply got so sore that he did not want to talk about it; but I do not know, and my uncertainty makes me uncomfortable. In another of his dense little throwaway lines he speaks of "the supreme pleasure of putting oneself in by leaving oneself out." One knows what he means, and honors it; but in autobiography it does make a problem. Pritchett trusts us too far to find the self in the understatement and the withholding. We come to know a personality but not really a whole person. I prefer Frank O'Connor's way of letting his heart hang out, so long as he does not caress it too much—as he does not.

None of this makes me think Pritchett's books less than superb. Nobody in years has talked so clearly and wisely about the craft of writing and what might be called the moral psychology of the writer. What he does choose to give us of his life is so rich in texture and so sharp in specification that we are glad to forgive him a willed reservation. (pp. 284-85)