J. B. Priestley Long Fiction Analysis
In his novels J. B. Priestley largely portrays a romantic view of life. His focus is primarily on England and the English national character, and on those aspects of people that ennoble and spiritualize them. His fiction also portrays a no-nonsense view of life, however; hard work, dedication to ideals, and willingness to risk all in a good cause are themes that figure prominently. At times, the darker aspects of humanity becloud this gruff but kindly Yorkshireman’s generally sunny attitudes. Ultimately, life in Priestley’s fictional universe is good, provided the individual is permitted to discover his or her potential. In politics, this attitude reduces to what Priestley has called “Liberal Socialism.” For Priestley, too much government is not good for the individual.
Romanticism largely dictated characterization in Priestley’s novels, and his most valid psychological portraits are of individuals who are aware of themselves as enchanted and enchanting. These characters are usually portrayed as questers. It is Priestley’s symbolic characters, however, who are the most forcefully portrayed, occasionally as god figures, occasionally as devil figures, but mostly as organizers—as stage managers, impresarios, factory owners, butlers. Priestley’s female characters fall generally into roles as ingenues or anima figures. There are, however, noteworthy exceptions, specifically, Freda Pinnel in Daylight on Saturday.
It is primarily through the presentation of his organizers that Priestley’s chief plot device emerges: the common cause. A group of disparate characters is assembled and organized into a common endeavor; democratic action follows as a consequence. “Liberal democracy. Expensive and elaborate, but best in the end,” says a choric figure in Festival at Farbridge, echoing one of his author’s deepest convictions.
A romantic view of people in space and time also dictated the kind of novels that Priestley wrote. His fiction falls easily into three main categories. The first is the seriously conceived and carefully structured novel, in which symbolism and consistent imagery figure as aspects of craft. The best of this group are Angel Pavement, Bright Day, and It’s an Old Country. The second category can be termed the frolic or escapade. This group includes The Good Companions, Festival at Farbridge, and the delightful Sir Michael and Sir George. The third category is the thriller or entertainment, which includes such science-fiction works as The Doomsday Men and Saturn over the Water as well as the detective story Salt Is Leaving. Priestley’s favorite novel, and his longest, The Image Men, published in two volumes in 1968 and as one in 1969, incorporates these three categories within a controlled and incisive satiric mode.
In many of his works, but more so in his plays than in his fiction, Priestley dramatized a theory concerning the nature of time and experience that derived from his understanding of John William Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934) and P. D. Ouspensky’s A New Model of the Universe (1931). Briefly stated, this time theory, most explicit in The Magicians, a gothic tale that presents Priestley’s characterizations of the Wandering Jew, and Jenny Villiers , originally written as a play for the Bristol Old Vic, proposes a means of transcendence. Priestley believed that Dunne’s serialism—“we observe something, and we are conscious of our observationand we are conscious of the observation of the observation, and so forth”—permitted him to deal with character “creatively.” For the ordinary individual, to “Observer One,” the fourth dimension appears as time. The self within dreams becomes “Observer Two,” to whom the fifth dimension appears as time. Unlike the three-dimensional outlook of Observer One, Observer Two’s four-dimensional outlook enables...
(This entire section contains 2037 words.)
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him or her to receive images from coexisting past and future times. From Ouspensky, Priestley refined the notion that time, like space, has three dimensions; these three dimensions, however, can be regarded as a continuation of the dimensions of space. Wavelike and spiral, time provides for eternal recurrence, but a recurrence not to be confused with Friedrich Nietzsche’s “eternal retour,” with reincarnation, or with the Bergsoniandurée. Ouspensky provided Priestley with the possibility of re-creation—that is, of intervention in space and time through an inner development of self. In other words, self-conscious awareness of self in past time can re-create the past in the present; sympathetic re-creation of self and others in what Priestley terms “time alive” can give new meaning to the present and shape the future. For Priestley, the seer—whether he or she be a painter or a musician, or the organizer of a festival or of a traveling group of entertainers, or even a butler in a country house—by looking creatively into the past, ameliorates the present and shapes a brighter future. Consequently, the organizer is Priestley’s most forceful and symbolic character, and the thematic purpose of his novels depends on an understanding of this character’s motives.
The Good Companions
Priestley’s first successful novel, The Good Companions, presents a cozy fairy tale against an essentially realistic background, the English music halls of the 1920’s. A determined spinster, Elizabeth Trant, organizes a down-and-out group of entertainers who have called themselves the Dinky Doos into a successful group renamed the Good Companions. The picaresque adventures of these troupers on the road and on the boards provide the novel with its zest and comedy.
Angel Pavement
Angel Pavement is in some ways a departure from this earlier work inasmuch as its tone appears dark and ominous. In Angel Pavement, the organizer is not a cheerful woman of thirty-seven giving herself a holiday on the roads as an impresario but a balding, middle-aged adventurer named Golspie. “A thick figure of a man but now slow and heavy,” Golspie enters the London firm of Twigg and Dersingham, dealers in wood veneers, and breathes new life into the business in a period of economic depression. With his only commitment being his daughter Lena, Golspie seems at first the firm’s savior, for he provides a supply of veneer from the Baltic at half the domestic price. Perhaps because he and his daughter are rejected by the more polite segments of London society, Golspie feels it unnecessary to play fair with his employers. Eventually, he ruins Twigg and Dersingham, putting the employees out of work. At the novel’s end, he and Lena leave London for South America and new adventure.
What most distinguishes Angel Pavement is its portrayal of the city, London, in the midst of the Depression, and of those who people it. Lilian Matfield, the head secretary, is fascinated by Golspie but refuses to accept the life of adventure he offers her, and Henry Smeeth, the bookkeeper, accepts a raise in salary, only to discover that once Golspie has abandoned Twigg and Dersingham, the company is bankrupt and he is out of work. The streets, the offices, the pubs, the tobacco stands, the amusements, all combine to present a view of human enervation and despair. A confidence man but not exactly a charlatan, Golspie locks the novel to a seemingly pessimistic view. Despite the enervation and apathy portrayed, Golspie offers freedom. Through his sinister organizer, Priestley portrays the life of romance that lies beneath the ordinary. What Angel Pavement finally achieves is a startling view of the modern metropolis as a prison from which only the romantic can escape.
Bright Day
One of his own favorite works, Priestley’s Bright Day has been justly admired by critics and readers alike. Its uniqueness lies not so much in its dexterous use of such novelistic techniques as the time shift and memory digression as in the way it looks behind and beyond its immediate focus into that sense of race and identity all people share. Although the novel deals with time, Priestley here shows a greater indebtedness to Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust than he does to Ouspensky and Dunne.
Music, specifically a Franz Schubert trio, returns a middle-aged screenwriter, Gregory Dawson, the narrator, who has taken refuge from his unhappy life in a genteel hotel in Cornwall, to a memory of youth and joy. An old couple reminds him of the boy of eighteen he was when he fell in love with a family called Alington in Bruddersford, a wool-producing northern town. The Alingtons, charming and gracious, had sentimentally attached the young Gregory to themselves and had introduced the would-be writer to their world, which he had seen as one of grace and beauty. Ironically, the old couple who trigger the middle-aged Dawson’s memories are in fact the Eleanor and Malcolm Nixey who had opportunistically intruded on his youthful idyll and brought an end to the prosperous wool business on which the Alingtons and their gracious world depended, and to Gregory’s idealism as well.
In Bright Day, Priestley, concerned with a rite of passage, presents Gregory’s initiation into a world of greed and suspicion, of appearance and falsehood; his is in fact an initiation into the modern world, and the novel symbolically spans the period of the two world wars. In the course of reconstructing the past, Gregory comes to terms with himself in the present, and it is his recognition of self in time that makes a commitment to the future possible for him. This liberation is confirmed by the stunning revelation made to him by Laura Bradshaw, who had also known the Alingtons, that Joan Alington in a jealous rage had pushed her sister Eva to her death from a cliff. The cancer of destruction had been in the Alingtons themselves; the Nixeys had merely served as catalysts.
Although Gregory Dawson is a quester for truth through self-knowledge, he is much more than a symbolic character. His psychological validity makes his growth in the course of the novel persuasive and compelling. The rediscovery of his romantic self in the present time of the novel is the rediscovery of a moment of beauty that had lain dormant in the rich soil of his memory. Many of Priestley’s novels largely describe romance; Bright Day re-creates its essence, as does Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945, 1959), with which it has much in common.
Lost Empires
Published in 1965 and representative of the novels Priestley produced in the later stages of his career, Lost Empires is in some ways a return to the world of The Good Companions, employing as it does the music hall as background. Unlike The Good Companions, however, the chief interest of which is the high jinks of the troupers on the road, the theater serves here as a metaphor for the theme of appearance and reality and allows Priestley to allegorize loosely the politics of a world destined for war.
Theprotagonist, Dick Herncastle, one of Priestley’s romantic questers here presented as an artist, is contrasted to his uncle, Nick Ollanton, the organizer, who is portrayed as a magician or mesmerizer. Ollanton and his “turn” allegorize the political activist and his propaganda techniques as he bends people to his will, much as does Thomas Mann’s Cipolla in “Mario and the Magician.” A time perspective on Ollanton’s influence on young Dick, who works as his assistant, is presented by means of a deftly presented prologue and epilogue, which encompass the action proper of the novel, set in the period of World War I. The main action ends with Dick succumbing to the illusion of a better world after the end of the war, and with Ollanton himself leaving the Old World for the United States, revealing his bag of tricks as a private escape from the “bloody mincing machine” of global war. There, he will manufacture machine-gun sights for warplanes. The novel proper, however, ends with the account in the prologue of Dick’s return from the war and his successful career as a watercolorist, an illusionist of another sort.
The charm of Lost Empires goes well beyond its symbolic dimension; it lies chiefly in the presentations of the performers and the turns they perform on the boards. The juggler Ricardo, the comedian Beamish, the ballad singer Lily Farrish, and many others add to the plot and charm of the novel. That they are logically placed within the melodramatic and symbolic structure of the novel is simply another testimony to the skill of the author.