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J(ohn) B(oynton) Priestley (1894-1984) | |
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British journalist, novelist, playwright, and essayist. J. B. Priestley's output was vast and varied – he wrote over one hundred novels, plays, and essays. The Good Companions (1929) is perhaps his best known novel. During WWII, Priestley became knows as "the voice of the people" through his BBC broadcasts. A socialist by conviction, Priestley refused both knighthood and peerage, but accepted in 1977 the prestigious Order of Merit. "All right then," I said. "I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em by calling 'em the masses and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces. To me there are still just a lot of people about—too many perhaps and too much alike nowadays—but still people, not masses. The back street I grew up in might look to an outsider like a typical warren of the masses, but it didn't look to me like that, because I knew the people and they were all different." (Saturn Over the Water by J. B. Priestey, London: The Companion Book Club, 1961, p. 72) John Boynton (or 'Jack') Priestley was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. His father, Jonathan Priestley, was a prosperous schoolmaster; his mother died when he was an infant. Priestley attended Bradford Grammar School, but left his studies at the age of sixteen and worked as a junior clerk in a firm (1910-1914). Priestley began to write poetry for his own pleasure and contribute articles to local and London papers. During WW I Priestley served with the Duke of Wellington's and Devon regiments, and survived the front lines in Flanders. He was wounded several times, once in the hand by a rifle grenade, "no great matter". When Priestley took an officer's commission and returned to France in the summer of 1918, he was partly gassed during an attack; it was his last glimpse of action. "I was lucky in that war," Priestley later said, "and have never ceased to be aware of the fact." (Margin Released: Reminiscences & Reflections by J. B. Priestley, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 110) From 1919 Priestley studied literature, history and political science at Bradford and at Cambridge, receiving his B.A. in 1921. Priestley turned down the offer of academic employment. From 1922 he worked as a journalist in London, starting his career as an essayist and critic at various newspapers and periodicals, including the New Statesman. His first collection of essays, Brief Diversions, came out in 1922. "To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United A. F. C. offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you inti a critic, happy in your judgment of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by back or goalkeeper . . . " (The Good Companions, London: William Heinemann, MCMXXXIX, pp. 3-4) Priestley gained international popularity with his novel The Good Companions, published by William Heinemann The tale about the adventures of a troop of traveling players had a huge cast of characters and lots of Cockey dialogue. ""Ay, a sect better," said the other. "Did you ivver see sich a match! Ah'd as soon go and see t'schooil lads at it. A shilling fair thrawn away, ah call it." And for a moment he brooded over his lost shilling. Then, suddenly changing his tone and becoming very aggressive, he went on: "Yon new centre-forrard they've getton—MacDermott, or whativver he calls hissen—he'll nivver be owt, nivver. He wer like a great lass on t'job. And what did they pay for him? Wer it two thahsand pahnd?"" (Ibid., p. 6) In the early 1930s, Priestley was Heinemann's most popular novelist. Boris Karloff played a mad, heavy drinking butler in James Whale's film The Old Dark House, based on Priestley's novel Benighted (1927), in which a group of travelers take refuge in an isolated house inhabitated by a family of eccentrics, the Femms. The travelers have a dinner with Horace Femm, who tells each, "Have a potato." The script of this much overlooked horror comedy was written by Benn W. Levy and R. C. Sherriff (uncredited). Horace's line is not in the book. Angel Pavement (1930) depicted the people of London and what happens when an adventure comes to them in the person of the mysterious Mr Goldspie. English Journey (1934), a seminal work in arousing social conscience in the 1930s, inspired George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier (1937). "In
the early Thirties I turned from novels and essays to plays, and it
happened that from the first I took more interest in the actual
production of my plays than the average playwright does. Thus I found
myself at last leaving the quiet study, the silent rows of books, for
the bustle and confusion and the concerted effort of theatrical
production." (Letter to a Returning Serviceman by J. B. Priestley, London: Home & Thal Limited, 1945, p. 27) Priestley's first play was an adaptation of The Good Companions, written with Edward Knoblock. The adaptation ran at Her Majesty's theatre for over 300 performances. Dangerous Corner (1932), one of Priestley's most performed plays, was based on the
idea that telling the whole truth is like rounding a corner on two
wheels. It was the first of his 'Time' plays. Time and the
Conways (1937) drew from An
Experiment with Time (1927) by J. W. Dunne, who was an aeronautical inventor and philosopher. Dunne believed that the future can be seen in dreams. The third play in the series was I
Have Been Here Before (1937), inspired by theories of P. D.
Ouspensky, and the fourth, An Inspector Calls (1946), was
written at top speed in the winter of 1944-45 – Priestley finished the play
within a week. An Inspector Calls
premiered
first in Moscow and then in Britain at the
New Theatre. It also had a great success in Germany. Borrowing its form
from the crime fiction, this three-act morality tale, set in 1912,
uncovers the secrets and hypocrisy of an
upper-class family, the Birlings'. All of its members are involved in a
way or another
in the suicide of a
young woman named Eva Smith/Daisy Renton – she swallowed a strong
disinfectant, which burned her inside oout. The enigmatic Inspector
Goole, who questions the family, seems to be all-knowing. Before
leaving he says in the third act: "But just remember this, One Eva
Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions of
Eva Smiths and Johns Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their
hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all
intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don't
live alone. We are members of one body. We are
responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come
when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will ne taught it in
fire and blood and anguish. Good night." (An Inspector Calls, 'Introduction'
by Tim Bezant, Oxford: Heinemann Educational, 1992, p. 56) It
has been argued that An Inspector
Calls was one of the first plays to give a voice to the Britain
of the Welfare State. Laburnum Grove (1933), produced by J. P. Mitchelhill, owner of the Duchess Theatre, was an unmasking of hypocrisy behind a façade of respectability. Like Bertolt Brecht, Priestley also founded his own production company, English Plays, Ltd., and in 1938-39 he was director of the Mask Theatre in London. His financing of this small Westminster house was interrupted by the war. Mitchelhill became the chair of the company. As a producer, Priestley earned well, and he actively reinvested money in the theatre. Nevertheless, G.B. Shaw told him that management would ruin him, "it was a short cut to bankruptcy. He was quite wrong." (quoted in J.B. Priestley by Maggie B. Gale, London; New York: Routledge, 2008, p. 50) Altogether Priestley wrote about 50 plays. After the outbreak of World War II Priestley's broadcasts, the
Sunday night Postcripts in
1940, following the 9 o'clock news on BBC Radio, and the 1941 series Make it Monday, made him "the voice
of the common people." With his characteristic West Yorkshire accent
Priestley argued that Britain is not fighting a war in the old sense:
"It isn't a quarrel between certain nations. It isn't a matter of
frontiers or possessions. It's a desperate battle, in which the whole
future of the world is involved, between two ways of life. We don't say
that one of them, ours, is perfect. We know very well it isn't. . . .
But the other kind of life, which has spread like a foul stain over
half Europe, is simply evil." (Britain Speaks by J.B. Priestley:
New York & London: Harper's Brothers, 1940, p. 4) When some
members of the Conservative Party complained that the Postcripts were too critical of
the Government's actions, the programme was cancelled.
The listeners were disappointed and angered: "we shall have nothing
finer or more inspiring" than Priestley's broadcasts they wrote in
letters. (The Radio
Front: The BBC and the Propaganda War 1939-45 by Ron Bateman,
Cheltenham: The History Press, 2022) Evelyn Waugh, who made fun of Priestley, later quoted against him a passage from the thriller Blackout in Gretley (1942), in which one of the characters suggested, that the country should take "a firm grip on about fifty thousand important, influential gentlemanny persons," and tell them firmly "to shut up and do nothing if they don't want to be put to doing some most unpleasant work." (Blackout in Gretley, Richmond, Virginia: Valancourt Books, 2021, p. 163) At the early stage of the Cold War, Priestley became known for his support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1946-47 he was a U.K. delegate to UNESCO conferences. Priestley married three times, for the first time in 1919 to Emily “Pat” Tempest, who died from cancer in 1925, then to Mary ('Jane') Wyndham Lewis, the former wife of the biographer and satirist D. B. Wyndham Lewis. In 1953 he married the archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes, whom he had met at the UNESCO conference in Mexico City in 1947. They lived in Warwickshire in Kissing Tree House, situated near Stratford-upon-Avon. Priestley wrote with her the travel book Down a Rainbow ( 1955), which was based on a journey in New Mexico. During his career Priestley published over 120 books, usually light and optimistic in their tone. The last of his novels was Found, Lost, Found (1976), an old-fashioned fairy tale and love story in a modern setting. Priestley wrote – with his ears blocked – every morning, after lunch he took a break, and then continued after tea for another two to three hours. The Magicians (1954) showed the influence of the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung, who had read Priestley's novel Bright Day (1946) soon after its publication. This book was Priestley's own favorite among his novels. He visited Jung at Küsnacht in June 1946 and gave a talk for the BBC Radio Third Programme on Jung's ideas (Description of a Visit to Carl Gustav Jung). "I cannot say how much I enjoyed your most luminous and comprehensive talk," Jung wrote him in a letter. "It is really remarkable how you succeeded in getting your vast subject together and making a whole of it." (Letters: 1: 1906-1950 by C. G. Jung, selected and edited by Gerhard Adler in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973, p. 440) A number of Priestley's
works have been adapted into feature films and TV productions. He also wrote directly for the screen. The Good Companions
was adapted in 1974 into a London musical, the music and lyrics by
André Previn and Johnny Mercer, starring Judi Dench, John Mills and
Christopher Gable. For the Alfred Hitchcock film Jamaica Inn
(1939) he wrote additional dialogue to give more power to Charles
Laughton's role
as smuggler Sir Humphrey Pengellan. From
the age of 70 to 84 Priestley produced 21 books. The Queen made him a
member of the Order of Merit in 1977. J. B. Priestley died of pneumonia
on August
14, 1984, at his home in Stratford-upon-Avon. His ashes were buried in
the churchyard of the Church of St Michael and All Angels, Hubberholme. Mr. Quin Savory, a
popular
novelist ruined by his own success in Graham
Greene's novel Stamboul
Train (1932), was modelled on Priestley; the author recognized
himself in the less flattering portrayal and threatened legal action.
Savory had won
his fame for the epic The Great Gay Round: "Half a million
words. Two hundred characters. The Cockney Genius. Drops his aitches
when he can remember to." (Stamboul Train: An Entertainment,
London: William Heinemann, 1932, p. 34) Moreover,
Greene had suggested at the end of his novel that Savory
was a potential sex-offender. "Considering the nature of Greene's
attack, he is extremely fortunate that Priestley refrained from
carrying out any legal threats." (Graham Greene: The Man Within by
Michael Shelden, London: Heinemann, 1994, pp. 164-165) The
affair was
settled when Greene made the changes demanded. As an essayist Priestley wrote for the 'middle brow' audience.
The topics and themes are numerous. The highly enjoyable essay
'The Toy Farm' (1929) tried to answer why toys enchant even adults:
"These toys transform you at a stroke into a god, and a happier god
than any who looks down upon our sad muddle. It is, of course, the more
poetical of our activities that are chosen as subjects for these bright
miniatures of the nursery, yet there is so much poetry in the toys
themselves that even if they mirrored in little even the most prosaic
things, they would still be satisfying." ('The Toy
Farm,' in The Oxford Book of Essays,
chosen and edited by John Cross, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998,
p. 469) Concerned by the decision to test a hydrogen bomb at
Christmas Island in 1957 Priestley argued in 'Britain and the Nuclear Bomb'
(1957) for the moral superiority that unilateral nuclear disarmament
would bring. 'Disturbing' (1967) criticized contemporary playwrights
for creating works that sought to 'disturb' a reading public already
disturbed by their own problems. For further reading: J.B. Priestley: An Informal Study of His Work by David Highes (1958); J.B. Priestley by Kenneth Young (1977); J.B. Priestley by John Braine (1978); J.B. Priestley by Vincent Brome (1980); J.B. Priestley: The Last of the Sages by John Atkins (1981); J.B. Priestley's Plays by Holger M. Klein (1988); Time and the Priestleys: The Story of a Friendship by Diana Collins (1994); C.G. Jung: His Friendships with Mary Mellon and J.B. Priestley by William Schoenl (1998); J.B. Priestley by Maggie B. Gale (2008); J.B. Priestley: A Traveller in Time by R.K. Kulkarni (2011); Time and the Rose Garden: Encountering the Magical in the Life and Works of J.B. Priestley by Anthony Peake (2018) Selected works:
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