THE CREATIVE LIFE IN OUR TIME
An Exchange of Letters*
V. S. Pritchett to Elizabeth Bowen
I haven't done much work during the last ten · days. I'm
supposed to be on holiday, and holidays have a way of pouring
into me ideas which are suspiciously like those famous ideas one
claims to have had in the bath-useless fantasies, dramatic recrimina–
tions and driftings in a big universal way. I've been "carrying on"
with Life, of course; not Life the Absolute but Life, the Christian
name, the untidy lady who comes waddling out in the summer, opens
her holiday eyes on you and steadies herself on your arm with her
warm, nice, boring hands. Her figure is going to pieces, I notice as
I get older, her ankles give, her movements are lazy, she is yawning
and unpredictable and she does not stop talking. Amiable soul-and
such a story attached to her
if
one really knew!-! have always found
it hard to resist her. Anything to drop the pen. And yet an imaginative
writer always has to strike his own kind of balance between Life
and the real thing-! mean the imagination. What a fortune of hours,
minutes and days one spends on her. And how she leads one on.
Last week, for example, she got me to Lichfield. I was staying
with a farmer on the Welsh border and he took me fifty miles down
A5, your Holyhead road, to see an Agricultural Show. He is an artist
and critic: a shire horse breeder and a judge at Shows like this.
Lichfield has always stuck in my mind since I read George Fox's
journal:
"Woe to thee, bloody city of Lichfield." A nice, dull little
place in glazed salmony Midland brick with a small, conscientious
cathedral there which was wrecked by the Puritans in the Civil War
and has the dead hand of the restorer on it. What the politicals
destroy in the name of the Higher Something or other, can never
*
This is part of a longer correspondence between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham,
Greene, and V. S. Pritchett.
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