Volume 52, Number 7 · April 28, 2005
The Pritchett Sound
By Andrew O'Hagan
V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life
by Jeremy Treglown
Random House, 334 pp., $25.95
The man of action is never the hero of English letters. Byron will always be understood to have been an orchid, or some Italianate exotic, who required sun and wine and ancient marbles to keep him writing, a circumstance which prevents him from ever entirely being loved by the English. They take their revenge by remembering his good looks better than they remember his good poems. Something similar has happened to Bruce Chatwin, another heliotrope with a well-turned heel whose prose is admired but whose journeys in search of desert configurations and hundred-year-old Chinese eggs to swallow will always, at some level, hold him outside the mahogany parlor of English satisfactions.
Review, 4310 words
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