The Pritchett Century Read Online Free PDF Page A

universities. They taught me European history and the conflicts of cultures and quickly got me clear of the hurdles of the then sticky English class system. Once they have made their bid,all kinds of artists—writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, educated or not—are free of that. It is also half-native in our tribe that we can talk and listen to anyone in his language. Among writers Kipling is an exemplar of what travel does for this faculty.
    Since the wilful Twenties, the committals of the Thirties, it seems to me that my life as a man and as a writer has been spent on crossing and recrossing frontiers and that is at the heart of any talent I have. It cheers me that I live on the frontier of Camden Town and Regent’s Park. Frontier life has been nourishing to me. 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.
    And here, at the age of forty when the Second World War seemed that it would ruin my life as a short story writer, novelist and critic, I found that my early life in trade was an advantage: it prepared me for another evaporation. I had to divide my time between serious criticism in the
New Statesman
every week and studies of factories, mines, shipyards, railway sidings and industrial towns. I did my literary work in trains. I have always been wary of what used to be called “committal” to the social and political ideologies which numbers of my contemporaries preached and now in war my foreignness abated: I began to know once more how my own people lived: that abstraction called The People dissolved as I saw real people living lives in conditions unlike my own but with passions like mine and as proud of something unique in them.
    The decisive books of the period about English life for me were Jack Common’s
The Freedom of the Streets
and—on the Spanish war—Borkenau’s
The Spanish Cockpit
. I found my own
raison d’être
in some words of Dostoevsky’s that “without art a man might find his life on earth unliveable.”
    If as a storyteller I have had an ear for how people speak and my travelling, bookish nature turned me into that now fading type, a man of letters, how do I see the changes that have slowly come about in the past forty years? In a searching way these changes were predicted inthe late Thirties by Louis Mumford in his absorbing book
The Culture of Cities
. My London has become a megalopolis. It has turned into a fantastic foreign bazaar. The Third World is replacing the traditional European immigrants.
    Mumford argued that social betterment has been outstripped every decade by technology. We have become, or feel we have become, anonymous items in a mass society at once neutral and bizarre. As for technology the printed word no longer predominates in popular taste and, as Auden said, literature is now turning into “a cottage industry.” The descendants of ordinary people who read their Dickens and the Victorian and Edwardian periodicals have given up the printed word for the instant sensation of sight and sound, for pictures on the screen.
    One can tell this, if by nothing else, from popular speech in which half the vowels and consonants are missing, and in which a sentence becomes like one slurred word, a telegraphic message. The schools have turned out a large number of grown men and women who cannot read or write, for machines have made this unnecessary for them. I suppose the small core of addicted readers will remain, just as Latin remained for the medieval clerks, but the outlook for prose is not good. The new generation faces the attack of spoken and visual drama which cuts out our prose.
    No professional writer becomes famous until his work has been televised or filmed: the rest of us may have to