Midnight Oil

New York. 1972. May 1972. Random House. 1st Edition. Very Good in Slightly Worn Dustjacket. 0394474759. 273 pages. hardcover. Cover design by Joe Tully. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The second volume of V. S. Pritchett’s autobiography, a follow-up to A Cab at the Door, finds Pritchett in 1921 with twenty pounds in his pocket. The author has arrived in Paris to commence the literary career whose development will become the subject of Midnight Oil. The youthful Pritchett - ardent, sensible, innocent - acquires a hat of green velour and a pair of fancy boots - items of bohemian gear belonging to the literary generation just past. He finds work in a photographer’s shop, then as a salesman of glue and shellac. Later he takes on a line of ostrich feathers. In his free time he searches for genius in the cafés of Montparnasse. Genius, however, has settled elsewhere - on the Left Bank, with Gertude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce. ‘I did not know,’ Pritchett writes in retrospect, ‘that I was living at the center of a literary revolution.’ This skewed connection to the cultural moment is a key to Pritchett’s special genius, a consequence partly of his unfashionable upbringing, and a source of the amazing clarity and good sense which mark his fiction as they do his critical writing. From Paris he goes to Ireland to cover the revolution for The Christian Science Monitor. There the green velour hat makes for trouble with the authorities. They take it to be part of the costume of the Irish Republican Army. In 1924 he arrives in Spain. The ingenious and sensible writer of short stories and novels, the marvelously lucid and sane critic discovers in the inwardness of Spain a counterpart to and stimulus for his own inwardness. By the midpoint of his life, the character of the writer is established. inventory #295 ISBN: 0394474759.