It may also account for the energy and the highly personal, impassioned tone of his literary criticism. "He often said that because he had not been to university, he had no preconceptions about a literary pecking order," Treglown writes, "and that because he was a practicing fiction writer, he approached other writers in the spirit of wanting to find out exactly what they were doing, and why."
His literary criticism made a powerful impact on writers as disparate as Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal, who may have summed up its genius best. "Pritchett," he wrote, "is rather like one of those amorphic sea-creatures who float from bright complicated shell to shell. Once at home within the shell, he is able to describe for us in precise detail the secrets of the shell's interior; and he is able to show us, from the maker's own angle, the world the maker saw." With a few minor changes, this passage could apply to Pritchett's uncanny power to create fictional characters, too.
Pritchett married twice, the first time disastrously. Treglown picks through the earlier marriage with great sensitivity, linking Pritchett's rejection of his early work to his unhappy marriage. Marriage No. 2, which lasted from 1936 until his death, was also a complex relationship. He met Dorothy Roberts, then 19, through his wife (the two women worked in the same agent's office in London), and fell for her at once. Pritchett's wife, for her part, soon found love and happiness in the arms of a much younger man.
Throughout, Pritchett kept to his work schedule. He was that oddity among artists, a happy man. The stories, the essays, the travel books poured out. He became a frequent speaker on radio and a popular television guest. He also had a long, profitable relationship with American magazines like The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker.
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