The Fly in the Ointment Study Guide

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born to a financially struggling couple in Suffolk, England, in 1900. He disdained his given name—due to a childhood close encounter with a violent dog also named Victor—and preferred always to be referenced by his initials (V. S.) instead. He had a tumultuous childhood due to his father’s tendency to lie, cheat, and run up large debts in one get-rich-quick scheme after another. Always outrunning creditors, the family frequently had to move and split up, with Pritchett and his siblings sometimes living with their grandparents. This fraught upbringing inspired much of Pritchett’s later writing. In high school he had his first urge to become a writer, but his poverty forced him to drop out and become a leather worker. In the early 1920s, he began writing as a correspondent for newspapers, which sent him around continental Europe. By the end of the decade, he’d had his first literary success with a travelogue of Spain. He was now firmly on the writer’s path, which he followed—primarily in London—until his death in 1997. He wrote voluminously, including novels, criticism, and memoirs, but he has become best known for his many short stories. Also noted are his biographies of other writers, such as Chekhov and Balzac. He prided himself on his ability to make a living by writing, and his recognition grew to such an extent that he was knighted in 1975. In his personal life, he and his wife both had other affairs, but they remained married until his death and had three children together.

“The Fly in the Ointment” opens with a description of an economically devastated region of an English city, where the unemployed ramble aimlessly past boarded-up shops. Pritchett was not just being fanciful: in 1932, when the story was written, Britain was in the depths of the global economic depression kicked off by the US stock market crash of 1929. In this period, British world trade was halved and its industry diminished by a third, and unemployment sat at above 20%. This rapid economic downturn again seeps into the story when Harold’s father contextualizes his sudden bankruptcy by mentioning all the tycoons who have similarly lost everything overnight. The character of Harold’s father likewise has historical basis in Pritchett’s own father, Walter. Walter was a lifelong conman whose shady business schemes were constantly getting the family into trouble, upending Pritchett’s childhood and earning his lifelong contempt.

Pritchett’s style had more in common with the realist writers of the late 19th century than with the stylistically bold and experimental modernists who were his contemporaries. Pritchett was heavily influenced by authors like Henry James (1843-1916), who pioneered the kind of incisive psychological exploration in fiction that Pritchett would go on to practice. James’s Portrait of a Lady is a good example of this fictional style that focuses on realistic, mundane social situations and dives into their psychological depths. While James tended to write lengthy novels, writers like Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904, of whom Pritchett later wrote a biography) exercised the same degree of psychological penetration in the form of very short stories. Pritchett excelled at the short story form, and the influence of stories like Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog” and Maupassant’s “The Necklace” can be seen in “The Fly in the Ointment,” especially because of the realistic scenarios, irony, and understatement common to all three. Pritchett’s keen eye for human behavior is on display in other stories such as “The Saint” and in his memoir A Cab at the Door, which describes his upbringing with a father not unlike the father in “The Fly in the Ointment.” While Pritchett’s modernist contemporaries were concerned with radical formal experimentation, as seen in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Pritchett preferred to apply his talent in the more accessible style of late-19th century Realism, though obviously updated to accommodate the world of 20th-century England.