Volume 44, Number 7 · April 24, 1997
V. S. Pritchett, 1900–1997
By Jason Epstein
Edmund Wilson insisted that a gift for impersonation is the fiction writer's sine qua non as it is the actor's. V.S. Pritchett went a step further:'Throwing something of oneself away is a way of becoming, for the moment, other people, and I have always thought that unselfing oneself, speaking for others, justifying those who cannot speak, giving importance to the fact that they live, is especially the privilege of the storyteller and even the critic—who is also an artist.' Like Wilson, V.S.P. was suspicious of general ideas: 'I have always been wary,' he wrote, 'of what used to be called 'committal' to the social and political ideologies which numbers of my contemporaries preached…. The People dissolved as I saw real people living in conditions unlike my own but with passions like mine and as proud of something unique in them.'
Feature, 404 words
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