J.B.
PRIESTLEY
Like Bertrand Russell,
J.B. Priestley also professed to being a Democratic
Socialist, although, unlike Russell, he was no decadent aristocrat but a petty
bourgeois who genuinely identified with Democratic Socialist criteria. I confess, in spite of this and of my own
sharp political differences, to a grudging admiration for Priestley; for he was
probably the finest, most outspoken English writer since D.H. Lawrence, and he
wrote with a similar heartfelt conviction and no-nonsense, down-to-earth sanity
of mind.
Priestley is like a breath of fresh air in a cobwebbed charnel
house, blowing over the bones of the contemporary dead with, at times, a windy
gusto that threatens to blow away one or two of the cobwebs and reclothe them in the flesh of earthly enlightenment. Such a book, for example, as Rain Upon
Godshill must put new life into many a creaking
carcass, inspiring it with contempt for its pitifully cobwebbed condition or
rage at its powerlessness. Not all the
book, of course, but certainly that part of it which points up the inveterate
right-wing bias of official Britain, against which men of Priestley's stamp
battle and battle, seemingly, in vain, all the more enraged because of the
apparent futility of it all, to be battling from such a minority standpoint.
Well, not for me to be seen to unduly sympathize with the
left-wing predicament; though I confess, Irishman that I am, to a certain
sympathy deriving from an acknowledgement of the relativity of politics from an
Irish point-of-view, which suggests that what is provisionally relevant to an
Irishman in Britain is essentially irrelevant to one in Ireland, and vice
versa. Right-wing in
Priestley, then, has my sympathy, albeit qualified, and I am
sure that if the Left don't or can't prevail in the short term, something
analogous will eventually emerge, even if it takes increased pressure from the
European Community [latterly Union] or, failing that, a revolutionary
upheaval. However, getting back to
Priestley, who, despite his anti-right spleen, lived to a ripe old age and
continued to smoke his pipe, it should not be forgotten that, besides being an
astute political commentator, he was a knowledgeable literary critic and
accomplished man-of-letters, though I confess to not having read any of his
plays, detesting the genre too much to bother, nor any of his novels right
through, since they are too English and 'Northern' for my taste, I who, in any
case, avoid novels as much as possible these days, deeming them too bourgeois.
However that may be, Priestley was another of that populous
breed of twentieth-century anti-bourgeois bourgeoisie, though doubtfully as
anti-bourgeois or, which usually amounts to the same thing, petty bourgeois as
writers like Sartre and Malraux, the English more
middle-of-the-road and urbane, as a rule, than their French counterparts. I am not really the man to comment in depth
on Priestley, but if there is a book that stands out above the five or six of
his that I've read, it must be Literature and the Western Man, which is
surely his critical masterpiece and, except possibly in the case of The
Novel Now by Anthony Burgess, a work unparalleled in its
time. Yet whereas the Burgess is really
about twentieth-century novels and, to a lesser extent, novelists, Literature
and the Western Man ranges across the entire spectrum of literature, both
past and present, and reveals a breadth and depth of reading which few men,
even when well-advanced in years, could claim to match. Priestley may be a bourgeois summing up
bourgeois literary history for a bourgeois audience, but what a bourgeois! Such works almost deserve the highest praise.
