Occasions

By Paul Gray

THE TALE BEARERS by V.S. Pritchett Random House; 223 pages; $10

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.

-- Paul Gray

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