Look Back in Belligerence

A CAB AT THE DOOR by V.S. Pritchett. 244 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Still another totally recalled English boyhood? One more sensitive child of privilege weaning himself from old Nanny and stumbling gamely onto the fields of Eton? Not at all. V.S. (for Victor Sawdon) Pritchett's brilliantly belligerent account of his first 20 years is about as far as a memoir can get from the usual look-back-in-languor.

Heretofore, Pritchett's eminence has derived from his travel articles and books, his suavely ironic short stories and his book reviews (mostly for Britain's New Statesman), which make him a rival of Edmund Wilson as the best literary critic in the English language. Now an angry old man of 67, Pritchett vents some of the redbrick ferocity of early Osborne or Amis--though with more elegance--as he writes of the genteel poverty and violent lower-middle-class life that he survived.

Marriage for young Victor's parents was a lifelong state of war in which the children were hostages. Father was a Yorkshire lad. Mother came from London--a "cheeky cockney girl." Temperamentally they were even farther apart. Father was an optimist, a dandy "walking in and out of jobs with the bumptiousness of a god." By the time Victor was twelve, the cab at the door had moved the Pritchetts 18 times. While Mother wept, Father filled those cabs with his bland bass voice.

Oh, dry those tears

Oh, calm those fears

Life will be brighter tomorrow.

Sadistic Touch. Singing extroverts make popular parents. Victor loved his "cocksparrow" father once, and laconically concedes, "He charmed." But he delivers his prevailing opinion with icy finality "I hated my father." So deeply, in fact, that he had to hate what his father loved: "big men" (that is, those with money), nice "Things" (Father ended up in the "art needlework" business), and Christian Science.

Hating Father did not mean loving Mother. In fact, the Pritchetts were that human catastrophe, a close but unloving family. What they had instead of love was intensity. Thus Grandfather Pritchett, a minister, "looked like a sergeant major who did not drink." He beat his carpets and his sons with "a genial sadistic touch." Pritchett concludes that his own father was partly playing the pass-on-the-pain game. (Authors who have suffered Pritchett's critical thrashings may believe the same of him.)

Room at the Top. One day, sitting in a tree reading Moliere, young Pritchett made his spiritual getaway when a voice announced to him: "You are a skeptic." At 16, he happily went to work as an office boy in the leather trade. Here he adopted a surrogate father named Hobbs, who was cynical, glamorously debauched, and gauntly full of death. After four years, he went to live in Paris, and eventually moved into a writing career via journalism. Could any young man more convincingly escape a family trap? Yet just as they obsessed each other, Father and Mother still obsess their son.

A Cab at the Door has the same gritty provincialism that closes down like prison walls in the aspidistra-and--Albert Finney school of British film. Pritchett has found room at the top. Still, he is fascinatingly unable to break clean with the past. "I became a foreigner," he concludes. "For myself that is what a writer is--a man living on the other side of a frontier."

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