Many abilities have been bestowed to J. B. Priestley; the ‘common-man’, the Bradford-born writer of novels, epigrams, anecdotes, short stories, biographies, travel-logs, plays, essays and journals. Priestley’s life, charged with conflicting man-making elements of physical work, politics, warfare and Cambridge-borne intellectualism, has produced the most brilliant art on human sympathy. With three of his scripts An Inspector Calls (1945), Time and The Conways(1937) and When We Are Married (1938) currently in theatres, what makes his personal tests of manhood so poignant today?
“I wished I had been born early enough to have been called a Little Englander. It was a term of sneering abuse, but I should be delighted to accept it as a description of myself.”
John Boynton Priestley, was born in 1894 to a mother who died in her son’s early years, and a schoolmaster father. He studied at Bradford Grammar School and worked as a clerk in the cotton industry, while ambitions to become a writer brewed. Priestley’s time in a cotton mill, if not ‘ard graft’, would prove to install the pride he had in the Victorian architecture of his small Northern town and more significantly, its people, as he revisited in 1933 for his book English Journey. As one in a vast number of industrial towns that have been part destroyed in the name of modernisation and progress, Bradford is an important symbol of the town pride that ebbs away from its population. Gavin Stamp, in his 2007 book Britain’s Lost Cities, angrily claims that wartime destruction was simply an excuse for the destruction of a Victorian heritage. Post WWI, “old buildings had a limited life” as “Victorian architecture was at best unfashionable,” and Priestley idiosyncratically answers on his return, that reconstructed Bradford was a “lost city…not good enough for the people that lived in it." The Nazi mess enacted a complete redesign regardless of cultural identity, and the population were habitually caught in the wave.
As the Bradford model of this common planning story has a dead ending, with Bradford City Regenerations (BCR) £3 million plan left disbanded this month, this town in left cheaply reconstructed. Perhaps something that we all can understand is this transformation of hometown, and the profound effect it can have on the old memory. Priestley, through his visits back to Bradford and his book English Journey, earnestly documents the forgotten beliefs of the people that exist in an old town. He is an icon of ‘Northern character’, and this particular part of his work helps to preserve the proud and strong attitudes of ‘home’ – a place that helps to construct you. What’s happening in your hometown?
“I thought Bradford was a bad place for rain, but it’s the Sahara desert compared to this place”
Priestley’s journey took him from home to the physical toil of trenches in an otherworldly age of conscription. Serving in WWI with the Duke of Wellington and Devon regiments, this is a part of Priestley’s life that remains the most obscure, partly due to his reluctance to talk about experiences. Only pieces can be fathomed from personal documentation, in the form of Letters From The Trenches. This collected writing from the age of 21 emphasises the passion of the writer from his practices of poetry and journalism first sparked in the cotton mill, perhaps for want of something different. Tom Priestley, James’s son, found the letters underneath his bed and he and historian Neil Hanson have published the pieces as a collection, professing the importance of the works in shaping a literary career. The voluntary choice to serve in the war deems surprising, as critics have reflected on a career staunchly Socialist or Left-wing, but as Tom Priestley reflects, his choice was purely adventurous, “Every young man needs an adventure, and it was a way for him to establish life on his own, keeping contact through letters.”
Adopting a light-hearted tone for his audience, Priestley maintains a sense of commitment to entertainment even in such terrible conditions that may remind us of video footage we see of soldiers cheerfully eating rations in Afghanistan. His enjoyment of physical training probably stirred some momentum, keeping his creative mind alert while externally bombarded. Later, however, throughout the letters what increasingly appears is cynical sentiment on the triviality of daily activities. Documentation fails to continue in 1916, after a mortar landed near his trench and he was buried alive. Emerging from the shells as a vociferous opponent of fascism, Priestley is the original champion of the ordinary man at war, dedicated to his roots of home and pushing for the rights of the people that battled. While Churchill heralded the war effort, Priestley questioned what Britain would do after the war, searching for peaceful answers and campaigning against nuclear weapons. Priestley was drowned in the horror of war, and emerged to use his position in the media throughout the Second World War to question. As the first BBC presenter without received dialect, 14 to 16 million people would listen to his radio programme before the news and hear from their boys in uniform.
“I suppose I am a man now and am certainly going through an ordeal. Perhaps it would be as well if everybody went through some test of manhood.”
John Boynton’s time of physical work fighting for his country comes to an end and broadcast halts, there spells the start of an academic refinement – realising a life that spans the class function rule. Priestley begins study at Cambridge University in 1919 and this implants the seed of experimentation. With no understanding of idleness, the young student begins to pen literary criticism that would spell the beginnings of The English Novel (1927) and Western Man(1960). Finding inspiration from philosopher J.W. Dunne, Priestley began a fascination with space and time, which would provide the content for metaphysical plays such as I Have Been There Before (1938), Time And The Conways (1964), and a novel, Man And Time (1964). This superbly active mind would approach intellectual theories, unravelling the mysteries of precognition. From daily destruction in wartime, his cerebral efforts would surely feel trivial to a shocked mind, yet Priestley seemed to have no bounds for adventure.
Many poets, actors or playwrights could be thought of in this way - never existing off the page - yet Priestley truly owned a public life in art and media. This public life unravelled with no celebrity sediment and he continued as an honest, common man, retaining his identity only tainted my personal choice. A life so startling now, would perhaps not be so modestly accepted and never so earnestly kept.
‘Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes’
In a recent Guardian review of Time And The Conways at The Lyttelton, London, it seems Priestley’s human focus prevails. Michael Billington disregards Priestley’s ‘intellectual’ efforts for honest human observation, claiming the “best performance comes from…the shy, nerdy brother who finds happiness in a decent ordinary, dullness. Finally, it is Priestley’s broad human sympathy that seems more significant that his intellectual theories.”
Although his plays, including ‘An Inspector Calls’, ‘When We Are Married’ and ‘Time And The Conways’ are socio-political dioramas that provide great insight into families and class divisions in Britain throughout the war, what is unmistakably overriding is Priestley’s focus specific human character. His work becomes more vividly psychoanalytical than much else, as much of his paranoid, jealous, possessed characters may be openly explored as if an Iris Murdoch novel. Unsurprisingly, the working classes usually portray the more agreeable sides of character and as the rather cold and calculating upper middle classes function well in a capitalist society, Priestley’s plays reinforce the attitudes that may have first taken shape in the trenches or as he campaigned for nuclear disarmament. Brilliantly, he exposes the triumphs and foibles of the rich and the poor - always effacing and displaying vanity for all its pointlessness. As he separates the rich Birlings from Eva Smith, the missing, moral, working class girl, in ‘An Inspector Calls’, he ridicules the wealthy as they are played with by mysterious puppet-master Goole. When watching ‘When We Are Married’ at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, a play that focuses on the traditions of marriage, you can feel Priestley’s resentment for anything ‘la-di-da’ as he makes panicking fools of local councillors. This is where the playwright is most experimental, where he simply calls a spade a spade.
John Boynton Priestley conveys the great beauty of the practised art of writing and significantly destroys the myth of ‘with age comes experience.’ His brilliant talent provides natural humour, stories of home, of crime, of society and of character and the precise flow and wisdom of his writing, even at an early age, portrays the importance of pen on paper to impart your version of the world. This chameleonic personality is life affirming, and begs the question - Which are your tests of manhood?
