Books: A Clarity of Mind, a Clarity of Heart

ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF by V.S. Pritchett Random House; 179 pages; $8.95

Hemingway wrote his stories as if he were clotting curds, squeezing the runny adjectives and opaque sentiments from his prose until action became an essence of feeling and moral. It is a style well suited for revealing character, especially that of the author. For when the passion for essences is spent, the substitute is often self-parody.

This has never happened to V.S. Pritchett, who, on the threshold of his 80th year, writes as passionately as ever. Talent, discipline and enjoyment keep the juices flowing; recognition helps. Knighted hi 1975, Sir Victor is generally regarded as the best literary journalist working both sides of the Atlantic. His two-volume autobiography, A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, are quiet marvels of English prose and self-appraisal, and his stories have accrued into a body of major work.

The laconic, seemingly impersonal surfaces of Pritchett's stories give off a surprising amount of animal heat. It is a matter of design, craftsmanship and, as the author has written, "the supreme pleasure of putting oneself in by leaving oneself out." The technique requires the placement of the precise detail at the exact emotional distance, and it gave his autobiography the immediacy of his fiction. Here, for example, is that extraordinary passage from Midnight Oil in which Pritchett describes one of the more dramatic consequences of his father's exasperating personality: "He had no notion of what to do; some bewilderment at the fact that other people existed, independently of himself, made him cling to the idea that events had not happened ... He invented excuse after excuse for delaying the funeral, one of the mad reasons being that Miss H. would be put out by his absence from the office. Perhaps the reason lay in a sort of Tolstoyan anger at the fact of death; it is certain also that he loved his mother passionately. There the body lay in the house. The result was horror. The dead woman's body burst in the coffin and was borne dripping from the bedroom."

Many Pritchett fictions deal with styles of preserving one's dignity. How does an aging botanist confront the energies of his lovely 25-year-old companion? Carefully, as the author illustrates in the title story of his latest collection: "There are rules for old men who are in love with young girls, all the stricter when the young girls are in love with them. It has to be played as a game." Love, of course, is never a game, especially in a December-May romance where the older party keeps one eye on the clock and the younger does not have to. In addition, real suspicions are too easily come by.

The narrators of The Accompanist and The Fig Tree must deal with the doubts of the husbands they have cuckolded. In the first story, a pianist leaves a package of apple tarts at her lover's apartment. She arrives home dessertless for a dinner party to which her lover is invited. The husband clowns around, sings bawdy songs and regrets the missing tarts which, he is told, were left at a rehearsal studio. How much does he know? How much does he want to know? There are no answers, only a delicate tension created by Pritchett's great talent for dialogue. Again, it is what is left out that counts.