I met V.S. Pritchett, who died last weekend, just once, but it was a meeting that has stayed indelibly in my memory, not simply because it was an encounter with one of the century's major critics and short-story writers but also because it was the only time I can recall interviewing someone in the back of a taxi - and with my literary editor unnervingly ensconced in the front passenger seat, listening to everything we said.
It was in the early 1970s, when I was working as David Marcus's assistant in the Irish Press. V.S. Pritchett was one of the two judges for that year's New Irish Writing awards and David suggested that I interview him for the paper. However, his flight arrival didn't permit any free time before the awards ceremony and hence the taxi conversation on the way from the airport to the reception in Mountjoy Square.
I don't remember what I asked him (the usual stuff, I suppose, about the state of Irish fiction, past and present), but I do remember feeling properly awed at being in the presence of a great man. Not that he behaved as such - he was entirely without airs and was more intent on talking about what he loved than about himself.
What he loved was good literature, and he communicated that love in every line of criticism he ever wrote. With no academic background (he left school at fifteen to work as a clerk), he relied instead on his own instincts, taste and discernment. As a result, his insights and judgments, firmly rooted in humane values, are a million light years away from academic aridity. Indeed, you learn more from six pages of Pritchett than from six hundred pages of anyone else.
If by any chance you haven't read him, Chatto & Windus brought out the Complete Essays a few years ago in a splendid edition. At £35 it's not cheap, but its 1,300 pages of clear, beautiful prose enshrine a lifetime's wisdom that you'll be reading and rereading for a lifetime. While you're at it, invest in the Complete Stories, too.
CLEM CAIRNS, the man behind the Fish Short Story Prize, writes to tell me that this year's £1,000 prize has just been won by Bostonian Karl Iagnemma. Karl recently spent a year studying in Dublin, and his winning story, "Dog Days", will lend its name to Fish's next anthology of stories, due to be published in October.
Over 1,000 stories were submitted for consideration, and Clem says that judges Emma Donoghue, Jennifer Johnston and Joseph O'Connor were mightily impressed by the overall standard. Indeed, the last-named waxes profound about the eleven stories selected for the forthcoming anthology, declaring that "fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing. Naming things, calling things what they really are, that is all that writers can do in an age where language has become debased and sterile. That is what the writers in this book do, time and again, with style and conviction and confidence."
If you think you can meet Joe's exacting requirements and if you want to enter the next Fish competition, you've got between now and November 30th to do so. Just send a stamped addressed envelope to Fish Publishing, Durrus, Bantry, Co Cork, and Clem will furnish you with all the necessary details.
THE 52nd edition of Poetry Ireland Review, edited by Liam O Muirthile, is now available and at £5 is well worth your attention. There are some fine poems here and good reviews, and an interesting interview with Pearse Hutchinson, who describes the setting up of Aosdana as "a miracle and a godsend" to him: "I was fifty-four when I was invited to become a member and frankly I was at the end of my tether. I might have carried on, but I would have been in the gutter because I would have been evicted or I would have gone mad or killed myself or both." Instead, he's enjoying a new lease of life, poetic and otherwise. So three cheers for Charlie Haughey in this regard.
Meanwhile, Poetry Ireland is launching The Stray Dog Cafe, a series of music and poetry sessions taking its name from a pre-revolution Petersburg cafe frequented by poets, musicians, anarchists and as Anna Akhmatova described in a poem "drunkards and harlots".
I don't know how many of the latter you'll encounter in its reincarnation at Project at the Mint in Henry Place (off Henry Street), but drink will certainly be taken there. On April 13th, the first of the six evenings occurs, with contributions from Fintan Vallely, Dermot Healy, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Triona Ni Dhomhnaill and Mairead Ni Dhomhnaill.
At later sessions, Ciaran Carson, The Voice Squad, Freddie White, Philip King, Rita Ann Higgins, Jimmy McCarthy and Keith Donald will feature. If you want tickets, they're available from the Project at (01) 6712321.
