The Not-so-Beastly J.B.Priestley

I have for many years been prejudiced against J.B.Priestley. I suspect it’s mainly fashion, plus some cruelly dismissive lines in a long-ago satire by that fine poet and all-round good person James Fenton ‘Oh we didn’t like being beastly, as we showed him to the door, but when he brought in J.B.Priestley, Well it was the final straw.’

 

For those interested in really obscure lost battles, this was to do with the late Richard Crossman’s disastrous editorship of the ‘New Statesman’ magazine, in those long-lost days rather a good read and much more important than it is now. Crossman was one of several  editors who, by heavy-handed direction of the New Statesman,  drove away readers and so helped to create a vacancy for a well-written and enjoyable weekly review. This vacancy was soon filled by the Spectator , itself transformed for the better in the same era by Alexander Chancellor. It is astonishing now to recall that the NS was once far ahead of the Spectator both in status and sales.

 

Of course by then (this was the 1970s) J.B.Priestley was in his eighties, having been born in 1894, and not by then at the peak of his powers or anywhere near it, though he was  (to his credit) a spirited opponent of destructive development in his native Bradford.

 

Funnily enough, I did read and admire Priestley’s travelogue ‘English Journey’, which is still I think in print and well worth finding if you wish to know how life was lived by ordinary English people in the early 1930s.

 

But I just ignored the novels. Then, the other day, needing something solid for a journey, I finally began to read the book that made Priestley rich and famous, The Good Companions. Now, there are things about I don’t like, but many of them stem from the fact that it dates from an age of comparative innocence, when some attitudes and mannerisms were permissible or even encouraged, which we would not put up with now.

 

But there were many more aspects of it which I liked a great deal, not least an obvious very strong love of England itself, and of the North of it in particular, and of the strong, hard Pennines,  and of Yorkshire, to me the most English of the counties,  and of the West Riding above all (I’m fonder of the North and East Ridings myself, but each to his own) .

 

His descriptions of landscape are majestic, and his strong feeling for, and understanding of music is particularly telling.  He is superb at describing the gloom, shabbiness and sombreness of decayed industrial towns, rotten hotels, long Sabbath train journeys, hospitals for the poor, funeral teas and flyblown cafes.  Modern readers will be struck by the sheer presence of the police, often essential to the story, at times and in places where you'd never see them now.

 

As for the story itself, I would never have thought anyone could make me interested in an assorted  troupe of entertainers  struggling from theatre to theatre. But he does. I could see very quickly why the book had been such a large and enduring success. A lot of my readers won’t like it, or will be put off by minor aspects (Do I hear the word ‘patronising’? I’m afraid I do) , which is a pity.

 

Then I decided to try another, and chose ‘Bright Day’  a much later novel. I have not yet finished it, but it is a wonderful and poignant evocation of the generous, optimistic, and (by our standards) very well-educated happiness of English middle-class provincial  life before 1914.

 

Once again he communicates a powerful feeling for, and love of music (particularly for a Schubert passage which I am now going to have to seek out and listen to) . He is also very good about at describing the strange feeling of being on the threshold of wonder which can overtake young men and women in their late teens. There’s a wonderful brief description of what Christmas means most to a child, which I suggest you find for yourselves.  The straightforward, blunt and wholly English Christian socialism of the era is also well-described and given a sympathetic hearing. Of course, Hell is waiting just over the horizon.  I think I know how it will arrive.

 

For Priestley, though I never knew this and should have done,  fought and was wounded in the First World War. He also went to Cambridge in the 1920s (and plainly loved the town itself, as ‘The Good Companions’ makes clear, and which interests me because I have always thought that Cambridge, as a place rather than as a University town, has, or perhaps had, a special quiet loveliness, most evident on summer evenings but also in the first days of autumn, quite unlike anywhere else).