The approach is the basis of Pritchard's criticism, and we are treated to 32 varied and lively examples of it in "Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews," Pritchard's tenth book and third collection of essays. The book presents a selection of pieces, some written as early as the mid 1960s, one written just last year, and their subject matter is widespread: the first section, entitled "Poetry and Poets," considers not only Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur, T.S. Eliot and others, but concludes with a chapter on R.P. Blackmur, the famed critic whose name, in the 1940s and 1950s, "was evocative of a rich and mysterious critical sensibility to be admired discreetly from afar." The chapter pays tribute to the boundaries of criticism that Blackmur's writings pushed, his ability to elucidate the artistry behind the language of a poem, how "behavior gets into the words of poetry and sings." Even to someone entirely unfamiliar with Blackmur's name, the value of his work is evinced with graceful effectiveness; and having read only the excerpts Pritchard quotes in his own chapter, one may nonetheless come to understand how Blackmur's criticism succeeds in leading us back to the poems themselves with a different awareness and an entirely new set of questions. And that, after all, is the point.
Pritchard's writing has been characterized, on more than one instance that I can recall, as being "clear and erudite;" and I can think of few adjectives as fitting, though the description omits a mention of the writing's sturdy wit that any student who has heard him open a class with an observation on, say, Britney Spears, will recognize. "Shelf Life" is, whether or not one is familiar with the works it discusses, a pleasure to read.
The middle two sections of the book are called "Novels and Novelists" and "Critics, Belletrists," and again cover a range of works. The first section opens with a discourse on D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, two writers whom Pritchard convincingly links due to a certain element in their respective voices-a self-regard as martyred outsiders, "embattled figures out of step with fashion and its wares." Three chapters later we encounter, somewhat surprisingly, ruminations on Raymond Chandler, whom Pritchard himself admits he picked up as a graduate student "partly by way of demonstrating I was no dryasdust Eng lit pedant." The chapter, "Classic Chandler," is cheerful, roundly appreciative of the enjoyment Chandler took in his tales of "practically nothing," fashioning his astonishing descriptions by plumping together startlingly incongruous thoughts and sentences.
In a subsection of "Novels and Novelists" called "First Impressions," Pritchard includes five very short essays on different novels, such as John Updike's "Rabbit is Rich," which he would later write about at greater length. The language is as fluidly readable as ever, but this chapter, like the other four, is marked by something else. There's an exhiliration evident in the writing, born of the excitement of discovering so splendid a novel. Pritchard bounds from one idea to the next with something less than his usual imperturbability. "With one or two exceptions, everything that comes to us comes through Rabbit's senses, highly tuned so as to register 'the wooden gobbling sound the cup makes when a long putt falls,' the richness of a morning in the Poconos, or the memory of Johnny Frye's Chophouse, a onetime restaurant for German Fressers 'who had eaten themselves pretty well into the grave by now, taking with them tons of porkchops and sauerkraut and a river of Sunflower Beer,'" he writes. That he has been galvanized is clear, and he expresses it with a zeal that is thrilling: "Updike's insistence here once more is in caring for what he cares about no matter how 'wrong' it may look to all sorts of deep readers or academics who wouldn't dream of taking him seriously, in the same league as Pynchon, say, or Borges, or Italo Calvino. But that anyone can finish Rabbit is Rich and not seriously be ensnared once more by the illusion that the novel is the one bright book of life, I find hard to believe."
The final section is the one students of Pritchard's may find the most interesting. Entitled "Music, Teaching, and Teachers," the seven essays it encompasses are more personal. The final four essays discuss teaching in various forms, including one chapter, "Teaching Shakespeare," in which he recalls an experience teaching a lecture class, after concern from the board of trustees that Shakespeare was not a requirement for the English major. It's fascinating to get a perspective from the other side of the desk, as Pritchard describes the "dangerous venture" he embarks upon with the class. His opening declaration that the course would focus on the power of the language, and not the plot, meaning or other aspects they were used to dealing with in Shakespeare, resulted in the class being "deep in one of those respectful-if-wary silences I unfailingly produce on opening day." He details the struggles and triumphs of the students as they grapple with the new approach, and concludes on the ultimate success of the class in reinforcing his own faith in this approach to Shakespeare by focusing on "the power of words to raise the spirit and touch the heart."
A later chapter, "The Classroom in Literature," considers the various portrayals of the profession in films and literature. Pritchard notes that "happy schoolrooms have had little interest for novelists," recounting examples of miserable classrooms in Dickens' "Hard Times" and D.H. Lawrence's "The Rainbow." He even makes allusion, though provides little clarity, to that much circulated rumor about a supposed reference to himself in Peter Weir's "Dead Poets Society:" he calls it "a sentimental travesty, and not just because the mythical textbook on poetry, which [Robin] Williams directs his students to rip to pieces, was composed by a mythical Professor Pritchard." We learn a little bit about the real Professor Pritchard in this essay, in his concluding discussion of James Guetti's novel "Action" and Lionel Trilling's story "Of This Time, Of That Place." Both, he writes, are "exceptional in conveying some of the surprise, the uncertainty, the mixed feelings about what one has done, which characterize those occasions when the teacher and perhaps some of the students can say 'That was a good class' and not be talking cant."