Distinguished Snapshots

BLIND LOVE & OTHER STORIES by V. 5. Pritchett. 246 pages. Random House. $5.95.

V. S. Pritchett, one of the best of British critics, is also the master of a less fashionable art, the short story. His tales are old-fashioned in the way that a box-Brownie snapshot of a posed family group seems to belong to some other time; they have much the same kind of truth and absurd dignity. Samples: sbBLIND LOVE. A short novel, really. Blind London banker has secretary-companion with birth mark that spreads a liver stain from below a high blouse-collar over one breast. Her husband left her after one night. Banker has house with swimming pool within easy Rolls Royce distance of London. He likes to swim, she cannot. Also on hand is a quack faith healer. These elements might have been mixed into some sort of vulgar melodrama; with Pritchett, the story becomes a parable of the things that divide and unite man and woman. Love is not blind; it is a heightened sense of knowledge and of touch.

sbTHE NEST BUILDER. Perhaps to prove that he is not hopelessly square in the old Dickensian way, Pritchett enters the homosexual scene with a funny story of two interior decorators--funny without sneers or sniggers. It offers neither tea and sympathy nor pot and empathy. Eventually, fox-hunting girl redesigns one decorator.

sbTHE SKELETON. This is Pritchett's revenge on Soames Forsyte (now, after 40 years, known to untold millions thanks to TV). In Pritchett's sly version, Soames would have been less likely to play the Man of Property with Wife Irene than permit an impropriety with Lover Bosinney.

sbTHE SPEECH. A sad study--seen from within the bosom of a lifetime New Statesman contributor--of the hatred and contempt a professional leftist holds for the "workers" she would nudge to the barricades.

Pritchett's voice is slightly cockney, a tone entirely appropriate, as it happens, to his subject. For his heart belongs to that peculiar, sprawling, provincial, shabby, comic, still Dickensian conglomeration known as Greater London. That, too, is for the best. Social comedy like Pritchett's might easily turn sour if it were not based on a heart that resists transplant.

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