PRESENTATION, by Rafel Martínez
BIOGRAPHY
Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett, was born in Suffolk, on
16 December 1900, he was the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett
and Beatrice Helena. His father, a London businessman, started several businesses,
but due to his insecurity and his tendency to credit and embezzlement, had to
close the businesses and disappear, so the family was forced to change their
address to different cities, such as Ipswich, Woodford, Essex or Derby, which
forced the children to change schools frequently, all to circumvent the
persecution of the numerous creditors of Walter, the father.
The family moved to East Dulwich and he attended
Alleyn's School, but when his paternal grandparents came to live with them at
age 16, he was forced to leave school to work as a clerk for a leather buyer in
Bermondsey. The leather work lasted from 1916 until 1920 when he moved to Paris
to work as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for The Christian Science Monitor, which
sent him to Ireland and Spain. Pritchett, along with his friend and writer
Gerald Brenan, is one of the few Englishmen who, in the early 1930s, toured the
Spanish territory. From that youthful experience, Pritchett wrote Marching Spain, which appeared in 1928.
However, it was not until 1954 that, already a consecrated writer, he published
The Spanish Temperament, an excellent
travel chronicle about our country.
In 1936 he divorced his first wife and married Dorothy
Rudge Roberts, by whom he had two children; the marriage lasted until
Pritchett's death in 1997, although they both had other relationships.
During the Second World War Pritchett worked for the
BBC and the Ministry of Information while continuing to write weekly essays for
the New Statesman. After World War II
he wrote extensively and embarked on various university teaching positions in
the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962),
Columbia University and Smith College. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, he
published acclaimed biographies of Honoré de Balzac (1973), Ivan Turgenev
(1977), and Anton Chekhov (1988).
Sir Pritchett was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 1975
for "services to literature" and a Companion of Honour in 1993, in
addition to other multiple decorations and mentions throughout his life, which
makes him the best English author of his time.
Sir V. S. Pritchett died of a stroke in London on 20
March 1997.
THE STORY
This work, written by V.S. Pritchett, like all the
other tales of him, are considered masterpieces that make their author to be
considered as the best writer in England of the 20th century.
Like all his works, these are stories of normal
people, with ordinary lives and that the author deals with that typical English
irony, the well-known English humour. In most cases the actors are put in
scenes that we all recognize as picturesque and that the author deals with his
fine vision of double meaning and irony that the reader finds so funny.
In this case it is one story of a middle-class
promiscuous man called William Cork with the pet name ‘Bunny’. He is a
womanizer, a professor at a college, a married man with children, and a
compulsive flute player. He has affairs with numerous women. The story is told
from the viewpoint of one of his mistresses from the college, a jewellery
designer called Berenice. In the story, Berenice comes face to face with
Florence Cork, the obese wife of William. Mrs Cork has come across a letter
sent to William in secret and she presumes Berenice is the sender.
The author fills with constant hints, especially
sexual, the interpretation of his actors, with comic scenes such as when
Bernice and Mrs Cork treat the theme of William's flute, one referring to her
husband's musical instrument and the other, Bernice, understanding the flute's
reference as William's penis, her lover.
ANALYSIS
I have to confess that it is my first approach to a
work by V. S. Pritchett and when I chose the title The Family Man, at first I confused it with the American film, A Family Man, directed by Mark William,
and with main actors, Gerard Butler, William Defoe, that is about a businessman
who must choose between promoting himself running a large Chicago company or
tending his family life.
After reading three times Pritchett's work, I have ended
up understanding many phrases and its double meaning that are the
characteristic of its author, where he mixes simple events of normal lives with
his fine humour and typical English irony.
Now that I have known a work by Pritchett, I promise
to look for and read other works, to confirm that in his genre he was the best
author of his time.
William Cork: appearance, personality,
job...
Benerice Foster: appearance,
personality, job...
Benerice's flat
Benerice's father
What is a Quaker?
Sexual allusions in the story
Florence Cork: appearance, personality,
job...
Benerice's talent for lying / telling
the truth
Describe the affair between William and
Benerice
When Benerice thinks about marriages
going on holiday, she imagines "the legs of their children running across
the sand". Why the legs?
Who was Rosie?
How does the relation between Benerice
and Florence progress?
What does William usually do after
making love with Benerice?
The necklace
Mrs Cork said: "Don't be jealous of
Mrs Glowitz, dear. You'll get your turn." What's the double meaning of
this sentence?
Can you tell the difference between
"swoosh her hair" and "put it up"?
SOME
NOTES ABOUT V. S. PRITCHETT
He had
a terrible handwriting and his manuscripts were so full of corrections and
blots that only his wife was capable to decipher his texts and type them. She
used an Imperial typewriter, and she typed with such a speed and strength that
it sounded exactly as a gun machine.
V. S
Pritchett was born in 1900, so he used to say that he was as old as the century,
or that the century was as old as he. He wanted to be called V.S.P. because he
didn’t like his first name Victor. His mother would rather like a girl and she
would name her after the queen Victoria, but, as he was a boy, he was called
Victor.
When he
was a child his family used to move house frequently, and he sometimes lived
with his grandparents near York. His father never lasted long in a job and
changed employment very often.
Pritchett
couldn’t go to university (his family were poor) and he had to work in a
leather company, but he could work for the firm as a clerk in Paris. However he
wanted to be an artist. He started to paint because in 1921 Paris was full of
artists. He did his first picture in two weeks, but when he looked at it he saw
was a failure, so he abandoned his painting career after fifteen days. Then he
decided to write, but one has to have something to write and he didn’t have
anything to say. However, by chance, he had a lucky strike: there was a jokes
contest in a newspaper; you had to write a joke and send it to the paper. His
joke (it was a regular joke) was published and, although he didn’t get any
money, he was very happy. Now he knew that if you don’t have anything to say, at
least you can tell what others say, and he started his career as a writer.
To
write well he thought he could imitate what writers did before him, and he
discovered that some writers used to walk a lot, and so he walked very long
walks. Also he read that Barrie (the author of Peter Pan) said the best thing
to do to start writing was to write about small things or about things that are
near you. Following this piece of advice he wrote about his room, send the text
to the newspapers and... three newspapers accepted his articles. Now he could
say he was a real author because he earned money with his texts.
He didn’t
like to reread his articles or his stories because afterwards he found them
very poor, and so he got very sad about his talent; but then he discovered that
this was a common feeling in lots of writers: it’s the depression after the
work is done. So some writers, as himself, get satisfaction in the act itself, and
not after the text is deemed finished.
After
Paris, in 1923 he travelled to Ireland (after obtaining the independence from
Great Britain and in the middle of a civil war) and became a newspaper’s correspondent.
There, in that country fond of beer and whiskey, he discovered that drinking
alcohol don’t make you write better, but exactly the other way round, and he banned
liquors forever when he wrote.
He
wrote his first short stories in Ireland, where from an Irishman he got the
inspiration for the short story Sense of
Humour, and in Spain, about where he wrote a pair of books.
The Family Man was published in 1979 in his collection of short
stories On the Edge of the Cliff.
No comments:
Post a Comment