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Contents

ENGLISH:
Max Beerbohm: A dandy
E.F. Benson: Fairy tales
Rider Haggard: Still riding
	    Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man
	who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously
	enough. (p. 25)
	    To be identified with the public is the divine gift of the
	best-sellers in popular Romance and, no doubt, in popular
	realism. E. M. Forster once spoke of the novelist as sending down a
	bucket into the unconscious; the author of She installed a suction
	pump. He drained the whole reservoir of the public's secret
	desires. Critics speak of the reader suspending unbelief; the
	best-seller knows better; man is a believing animal. (p. 25-26)
	    One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers
	depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic
	potential. (p. 28)
	    On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of
	the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly,
	unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of
	declining to give themselves away. (p. 29)
Rudyard Kipling: A pre-Raphaelite's son
	There is more magic in sin if it is not committed. (p. 36)
Joseph Conrad: A moralist of exile
T.E. Lawrence: The aesthete in war
E.M. Forster: The private voice
Graham Greene: Disloyalties
Evelyn Waugh: Club and country
	    Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious
	influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated
	Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly
	and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has
	become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious
	piety and parlour game. (p. 95)
	    Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if
	only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without
	difficulty for he has always been comic for serious reasons. He has
	his own, almost romantic sense of propriety. (p. 101)
Angus Wilson: Going downhill
Henry Green: In the echo chamber

AMERICANS:
Henry James: Birth of a hermaphrodite
	Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big
	stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and
	vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and
	scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists,
	anthropologists, topical "problem" hunters, working-parties and
	statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds
	because he rejects information. He was himself the only information
	he required. (p. 131-132)
Edmund Wilson: Towards revolution
	Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was
	an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the
	scent from book to book. He was the old-style man of letters, but
	galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him. (p. 141)
Saul Bellow: Jumbos
Mary McCarthy: A quiet American
Flannery O'Connor: Satan comes to Georgia

CHARACTERS:
Samuel Pepys: The great snail
Jonathan Swift: The infantilism of genius
Richard Burton: Ruffian Dick
Frederick Rolfe: The crab's shell

EXOTICS:
Lady Murasaki: The tale of Genji
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala: Snares and delusions
Flan O'Brien: Flann v. Finn.

Reviews

Paul Gray in TIME http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,948874,00.html

The 23 essays collected here were all prompted by the same circumstances: a
book to review and a deadline. No one can rise to such occasional pieces
better than Author V.S. Pritchett. It does not matter whether the subject at
hand is a biography or a novel, a collection of short stories or of
essays. Pritchett brings to them all the eye of a craftsman (he has written
in these forms himself) and the .sympathy of an incurable reader. He is
generous, to a virtue.

The Tale Bearers is a companion piece to The Myth Makers (1979), which
concentrated on European and Latin American literature. Pritchett's subject
now is a mixed bag of British and American writers, ranging from Joseph
Conrad and Saul Bellow to Rider Haggard and Mary McCarthy. This choice seems
random, and indeed it was largely dictated by the books that came to
Pritchett for review. The result is a sampler rather than a thesis, and none
the worse for that. It is much more fun to be treated than lectured.

Pritchett is a master of the casual apothegm. He accounts for Max Beerbohm's
cultivated eccentricities by noting the "foreign strain" in his parentage:
"Expatriation allows one to drop a lot of unwanted moral luggage, lets talent
travel lightly and opens it to the histrionic." He speculates on the
Edwardians' taste for the novels of George Meredith, for satire and high
comedy: "One can see why: an age of surfeit had arrived. The lives of the
upper classes were both enlivened and desiccated by what seems to have been a
continuous diet of lobster and champagne—a diet well-suited in its
after-effects to the stimulation of malice." His description of Haggard
captures both an individual and a class: "Like many popular bestsellers, he
was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not
seriously enough."

Such palpable hits reveal exhaustive learning. But unlike many
essayist-reviewers, Pritchett never preens. His erudition is like old money,
reassuringly there but tastefully in the background. His impulse is always to
understand rather than attack; he often acknowledges the criticism of others
so that he can temper it. He calls Edmund Wilson's plain, sometimes blunt
style "democratic, in the sense that this distinguished man will not for long
allow one phrase to be better than another." Evelyn Waugh is similarly
pardoned: "To object to his snobbery is as futile as objecting to cricket,
for every summer the damn game comes round again whether you like it or not."

Best of all, Pritchett never fails at the reviewer's most important task. He
inspires curiosity about his subjects, communicates the pleasures of
appreciation and discernment. "Being young is a quest," he writes. The old
master, 79, is still searching.