Years ago, in New York City, I had a friend named Tom (Tommy Tapes, they called him, because he carried his eight-tracks everywhere), who looked like Mick Jagger and lived with an intensity that was vital and fearful, like New York itself.
Review Of V. S. Pritchett's Selected Stories
“The Diver,” the first story in V.S. Pritchett’s new collection, serves as a kind of prologue to the rest. A young man who yearns to be a writer but has not yet found his subject has taken up residence in Paris and is working for a firm of leather merchants. He is an innocent, and a woman who comes in regularly to exchange bawdy stories and flirt with the men pointedly and rather contemptuously leaves him out. He in turn is put off by her. But after an accident in which he is pitched into the river, she takes him to her apartment to dry out, and there, at the most embarrassing moment possible, he is excited by her (both are embarrassed: “‘In any case,’ she said . . . as she nodded at my now concealing towel — ‘That is nothing to boast about.’”). Her flirtatious pose, as she bustled into the firm, elaborately made up, did not interest him, but her ordinary life among the banal facts of the apartment did. It was plain reality which — to follow an image the woman herself uses — caused his diver to come up.
Byron was born and raised in the City, but he was very unhappy there. He went to work every day in an office with bright lights and soft furniture, and though the people he worked with always seemed to have fun, he was usually unhappy. “I feel out of place,” he’d say, and he’d dream of the forests, rivers, and skies he had seen on camping trips to the mountains.
Some Sea Stories From The Big Deuce
Once they gave a war, and everybody came. They called it World War II, and the entire basis of this essay is that one man’s recollections of it — necessarily different from every other man’s — are worth preserving.
He is well-groomed, mustachioed, in a dress suit and dark shoes. His wavy white hair is pressed against the hard satin pillow, an uncharacteristic serenity replaces the usual flashing grin.
And where to all these highways go
Now that we are free?
Why are the armies marching still
That were coming home to me?
O lady with your legs so fine
O stranger at your whell
You are locked into your suffering
And your pleasures are the seal
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