Volume 12, Number 3 · February 13, 1969
Life with Father
By John Gross
A Cab at the Door
by V.S. Pritchett
Random House, 244 pp., $5.95
V. S. Pritchett opens the first installment of his autobiography (at least, one hopes that it is only the first installment) by resolutely waiving any claims to a distinguished or even a distinguishable ancestry. 'Go back two generations and the names and lives of our forbears vanish into the common grass.' But whatever the Pritchetts may have lacked by way of a pedigree they made up for in depth and tenacity of family involvement. Among the older generation this often took the form of simple stubborn clannishness: there was Pritchett's Yorkshire grandmother, for instance, passionately wrapped up in the lives of her husband and children, permanently 'right vexed' or 'disgoosted' with the rest of the world. By the time Pritchett himself was growing up, irritability had given way to wistfulness, and the atmosphere was less embattled, but the sense of having been born into an exclusive sect still persisted as strongly as ever: 'We were a race apart, abnormal but proud of our stripes, longing for the normality we saw around us.'
Review, 2266 words
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