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  • An Island within an IslandV. S. Pritchett during World War II
  • Jonathan Bloom (bio)

This war still has no reality for me, I keep it at arm’s length and fundamentally I don’t believe I care what happens. I live within a circle of anxiety, a circle which indeed grows smaller & smaller; but in the centre of it is myself quite irresponsible and so far unassimilable by it. I fancy that I shall always feel like that. I have always felt detached from the wheel that turns me, a sort of fly on the axle of existence.

—V. S. Pritchett to Gerald Brenan*

Although V. S. Pritchett, like many men of his generation, including some of the most prominent twentieth-century English writers, such as Graham Greene, George Orwell, Henry Green, Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender, did not serve in either of the world wars, these conflicts defined his fiction writing career: the first was responsible for his beginning while the second crystallized his choice of the common man as his central subject. Born in the Boer War and raised during the Balkan wars, he had witnessed the Great and Irish wars as a young adult, yet had been excluded by birth from all of them. In January 1941, on a day punctuated by bombing raids, Pritchett recalled in one of his unpublished war journals his father’s words “Life is a fight,” and noted the “increasingly naked struggle for power” during the first forty years of the twentieth century. When [End Page 59] the opportunity to serve his country came at the beginning of the Second World War, in his waning years of military eligibility, he was conflicted about what decision to make.

Pritchett first voiced this concern in an unpublished letter full of speculation about Hitler’s intentions and the possibility of war. He knew that at the age of thirty-eight he was yet of military age. By January 1939, with Hitler’s Germany threatening Europe, Pritchett knew he risked being called to serve, would have no choice in the matter, and was in favor of National Service. In a letter to his close friend Gerald Brenan, he wrote that “Getting out of the monastery is good for writers,” partly inspired by news of his fellow writer Rose Macaulay’s fire-brigade service (31 January 1939). Although thankful that “no real blow has been struck at me,” he realized that the war had not yet begun for him but felt increasingly resentful, victimized, and detached: “The war has frustrated me in many ways; and also impoverished me and has cut off the future. One is like a car moving forward into the dark & fog with very dim lights” (21 January 1941). Yet by February 1941 he confided in his journal that the imminent registering of the forty-year-olds depressed him with its promise of office work.

Three months later, in another entry, he remained uncertain about serving. While he knew continuing to write would enhance his growing professional reputation, Pritchett felt out of touch with his country and wanted to “get into the fight.” Though not a “cheerful prospect,” and with no desire to be bombed, he nevertheless felt he should be “in some place like Plymouth or Bristol, which gets it in the neck, in order to share that experience, and to see and feel what is happening to people” (8 May 1941). He continued to agonize over participation; seduced by the pastoral life in the country, he was convinced that he could not “take days off for the war, so to speak” and fought the interruption of his blissful but late-blooming family life. Threatened with the possibility of military service throughout the war, Pritchett was ultimately spared direct involvement by the bbc and the Ministry of Information who, by jointly undertaking his deferment in exchange for his services, enabled him to continue writing for a living, though that left him little time for his fiction. Yet in June 1944, though pleased with “all sorts of jobs lined up,” he said that “not to be in the greatest event of our time is rather awful” (VSP [End Page...

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