Investigating Angel: V. S. Pritchett as Travel Writer
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPFor the inveterate traveler many travel books date all too quickly. For the inveterate nontraveler the best travel books improve with age. A fairly specific present-time account of what has now become history is quite different from a rehashing of a longer or more generalized past by way of backdrop. A case in point is a convivial collection of essays titled The Offensive Traveller (1964) written by the splendid British man of letters V. S. Pritchett (1900–1997). It's a book not now in print in this country but well worth searching for, for it offers more geographical variety than Pritchett's previous travel books, Marching Spain (1928) and The Spanish Temper (1954). The most telling pieces in The Offensive Traveller (published in the U.K. as Foreign Faces) deal with Eastern Europe: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania; and for the early twenty-first-century reader they offer several levels of interest they did not have when first published (from the late 1950s to the early 60s). The end of the Cold War and of the USSR were not in sight, not even predictable. If there was salient evidence of incipient westernization, Americanization, or globalization, Pritchett either missed it or chose to ignore it, neither of which is likely. So he has given us indelible and invaluable impressions of these then still quite foreign countries in their last moments of relative integrity—"relative" because they had all suffered to varying degrees the ravages of World War ii and of communist rule.
The essays on Eastern Europe are balanced by pieces on Madrid, Seville, Turkey, and Iran. In the opening essay that provides the book with its title, the witty and cleverly ironic Pritchett would have us believe that everywhere he goes he rubs people the wrong way. But "I must not claim too much for my gift of offence. I could not have been born at a luckier moment. In the eighteenth century it was impossible to offend anyone. Today, more people are offendable than at any other time in the history of the world. The number increases. There are two reasons for this. . . : The first is that more people travel and annoy one another. . . . But the second reason . . . is more important. More people are offended because more are insecure. More people in the world are uprooted and unsure of themselves. There are more chips on more shoulders. It began with the Industrial Revolution."
In the essays that follow we see many similar examples of Pritchett's gift for catching and recording the essential spirit of a time and a people. The Czechs are "not a pleasure-loving people"; they "think and talk about abstract politics all day long"; and they rarely keep dogs. "'Everyone in Poland is mad,'" a young Polish friend tells Pritchett, who finds it an attractive madness: "Of [End Page 476] all the satellite countries, Poland is the largest, the poorest, the most terribly devastated by war, . . . and by far the most vital and exciting." Hungary is "a nation of more writers and intellectuals to the square mile than any other on earth"; and "they are pretty well the only intellectuals in the world who often turn out to be first-rate bankers and financiers." "Romania annoys from the beginning. With Czechoslovakia it's the most rigid of the satellite states," the Romanians being "by tradition authoritarian and harsh." When Pritchett was in Romania in the early 1960s, there were still forced-labor camps and a virulent strain of anti-Semitism.
Even if a reader did not know that Pritchett is a master of the short story, she or he might guess as much from the skill and pleasure he brings to anecdotes. One of the most amusing and touching occurs in Sofia when he is obliged to make a dash for "one of those old mountain trams where you hang on to the step as best you can": "Immediately a strong...
