Storyteller

IT MAY NEVER HAPPEN (182 pp.)--V. S. Pritchett--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.50).

The habit of judging other men's books seems to dry up a critic's ability to write effective fiction of his own. But not in Victor Sawdon Pritchett's case. The 14 stories in It May Never Happen are proof that a first-rate critic may also become a fine storyteller. Pritchett's reviews in London's liberal New Statesman and Nation are highbrow; they are also incisive and discriminating. Pritchett considers his story writing "an endless chewing of the cud of experience, an effort to digest; and also a desire to fill up the unfurnished wastes of time which surround the goggling ego."

The goggling egos in It May Never Happen are mostly those of ordinary Britons: clerks, housewives, tradesmen, or casuals who drift around the periphery of fixed society. Pritchett furnishes the wastelands of their minds with the unspoken impulses, the suppressed, half-formed resentments, suspicions and despairs that shape their personalities and behavior. Outwardly nothing much happens to these people. The reader who wants his excitement laid on with a trowel, characters forced toward some unexpected twist-ending by an inventive author, will find them unrewarding. As in the stories of Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen, the excitement in these stories grows out of ordinary human tensions and becomes most intense when the explosion is an inner discovery, unspoken and unseen.

In The Chestnut Tree the deadening routine of a London business office is shattered when two women are added to the all-male staff: "Miss Browne the elder, whom we had seen, was like a swan and thought so herself. Her fair hair, she conveyed to you, was her glory. She was curving and sedate. With the sleepy smile of one lying on a feather bed in Paradise, with tiny grey eyes behind the pince-nez which sat on her nose, with the swell of long low breasts balanced by the swell of her dawdling rump, she moved swanlike to her desk. But not like a swan in the water; like a swan on land. She waddled. Her feet were planted obliquely. One would have said that they were webbed.

"Behind her came the cygnet and chaperone, her sister and protector. When I saw her I felt I had been struck in the heart by a stone. Mr. Drake frowned and drummed his fingers, Mr. Cook began biting his thumbnail and leered in fury, Mr. Porter became homely and paternal, Williams gave a scheming look at her legs, the stage-struck Hodgkin took a comb out of his pocket and ran it through his waved hair. Turpin and Sawston, who were on opposite sides of the same, high, tilted desk, looked at each other fixedly. They looked as though they were trying to hypnotize each other. Taking small hard steps, her red lips pettishly drooping, her head in a cap of short black curls, her small breasts, her hips, her waist, set off by her silk dress, the sister of Miss Browne walked as if at any moment, if she shrugged her shoulders again, she could make her clothes fall off her. Her dress had some small design of red and white daisies. She looked at us tenderly and without innocence."

What happens afterward carries little surprise but has the impact of inevitability. Most of Pritchett's people have already been pinned down by life; their momentary emotional explosions are washed over, absorbed, succeeded by the kind of existence they knew before the event. A writer who prefers a quiet parlor-pub-and-movie life to literary parties, Pritchett is too knowing to remake character and personality within the compass of a short story. Says he: "We do not tell ourselves stories only to drug ourselves for action. Like breathing, story-telling is a function before it is a stimulant."

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