J. B. PRIESTLEY

Margin Released

A Writer’s Reminiscences and Reflections

1962

I TOOK IT FOR GRANTED that Priestley and I might not get on too well and it is safe to assume that he must have thought the same about me. Class-conscious monotonous pipe-smoking old bore from provincial Bradford meets sheltered young aesthete from smarty-boots London who is sneering only because he could never be anything like so popular. Characters in the novels Priestley wrote between the wars have names like Jess Oakroyd, Welkinghurst and Ormenroyd, they live in Coketown and Bruddersford and Brock-shire. He could speak of himself as Young Jack P. and talk about lads, or in pseudo-patois “t’folk back o’ t’mill.” He must be the last writer to sprinkle the page with expressions like “Bah!” or “Heigh-ho!” and mean them sincerely.

Socialism was buried in that vision of the country and of course it has shrunk to folksiness if it still exists at all. Its moment came in 1940 when a German invasion was a real possibility and the British nation was going to have to decide what was to be done about that. A traitor, William Joyce, was broadcasting from the Ministry of Josef Goebbels in Berlin that Nazi victory and British defeat were now imminent. Familiarized by the pitch of his voice as Lord Haw-Haw, Joyce made headway that rattled the government. Someone had to broadcast that we were all in it together. The moment called for sentimentality and sharing and Priestley was just the man for it. His war-time broadcasts on the BBC established him as a popular writer, perhaps the most popular in the country.

What worked for the British, in his view, works for everybody. The Soviet Union, he thought after a trip there in 1945, “shows a wisdom in dealing with its own peoples … the wide Soviet land glitters and hums with their dance and song.” He dismissed George Orwell as “a bit of a misery.” Reviewing The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in the New Statesman, he speculated that Evelyn Waugh was so pretentious that he had to be on the way to a mental breakdown from which he wouldn’t recover.

Priestley and his wife, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, lived in a very desirable eighteenth-century manor a mile away from Shakespeare’s Stratford-on-Avon. Socialism had not lowered their life-style. We walked up and down the carefully mown lawn and it was rather endearing to hear him say that his floppy black hat made him look like a Chinese executioner. He thought he had “a rather special public which belongs chiefly to the professional middle class. Fashionable types don’t bother with me, but because I’ve never been in fashion I’ve never been out of fashion. There’s a kind of contempt for writers, isn’t there?” Avant-garde was not a term of praise. Our pastors and masters, humbugs the whole lot of them, were imposing themselves in the name of the State or the Good Life. The letters he received, he growled, were all from the Inland Revenue. “Just because I think the lot of them have gone barmy doesn’t mean I’ve become a Tory. Soaking the rich, indeed! The only thing they’ll soak in are the waters of the Caribbean.” Harrumphing midway between boasting and complaining, he was the last man of letters with a Leftist patent of about 1910. And by the way, Phoenix, Arizona, was where he and his wife liked to spend the winter; the dry climate suited them very nicely.