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The Sailor, Sense of Humour, and Other Stories, by V. S. Pritchett; Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, by Angus Wilson
- Abstract
V. S. Pritchett is an anomalous figure in recent British literature, though perhaps the most interesting thing about him is how little he permits that fact to show. Lower middle class in origin, he never attended the university, moving on from an early career in business (he was, among other things, a traveling salesman) to journalism. And he has remained a professional writer, producing his novels, travel books, critical essays, and short stories while working as a foreign correspondent, broadcaster, and literary editor of the New Statesman and Nation. He has, however, never permitted his class differences from the writers (Graham Greene or Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh or Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster or Christopher Isherwood) who have determined the tone and tenor of the contemporary English novel to induce in him the surly defiance, the ostentatious rough surface of other occasional outsiders like D. H. Lawrence or even Wyndham Lewis.
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