J. B. Priestley

Called by some the last "sage" of English literature, J. B. Priestley (1894-1984) had a career which spanned more than 60 years and included authoring novels, essays, plays, and screenplays.

John Boynton Priestley was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in the North of England on September 13, 1894, the son of Jonathan Priestley, a schoolmaster. His early education was at the Bradford School, but this career was interrupted, as happened to many of his contemporaries, by service in World War I. He served with both the Duke of Wellington's and the Devon regiments from 1914 to 1919. After the war he matriculated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied history and political science as well as English literature. Already writing and publishing as an undergraduate, he was able to pay some of his university bills by selling articles to provincial and London newspapers. In 1922 he settled in London, rapidly establishing a reputation as essayist, critic, and novelist.

From his earliest writings, Priestley may be described as a comic rationalist. The contradictions and absurdities of the human situation, he wrote, could best be borne by a stance of ironic detachment. This perspective is perhaps closest to that of Priestley's predecessor, the novelist George Meredith (1828-1909). Not surprisingly, one of the best of Priestley's early critical works is a biography of Meredith in the English Men of Letters series (George Meredith, 1926). Another early influence was Meredith's father-in-law, the satirist Thomas Love Peacock, subject of another fine Priestley biography in the same series in 1927.

About this time Priestley achieved great popularity himself as a novelist through two works centering on the comic interplay of people engaged in a common calling. The Good Companions (1929) is about the joys and sorrows of the members of a repertory company in the north of England. It was a success in the United States as well as in England. The following year Angel Pavement appeared, whose characters worked in a small London business firm. Other notable and popular novels followed: They Walk in the City (1936), The Doomsday Men (1938), Let the People Sing (1939), and Festival at Farbridge (1951). All of these are fairly long novels, each with a lively balance between memorable, accurately-observed character and meticulously-crafted, suspenseful plot, featuring often rogueish heroes on the move - another recrudescence of the English picaresque in a tradition going back to the 1740s, beginning with Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews. A strain of sentimentality is often present, but it is usually corrected by the "silvery laughter" of Priestley's comic spirit. Other novels of this author combine autobiographical detail with a social criticism less bitter than Priestley's 1930s contemporary George Orwell. Examples of this type include English Journey (1934), Midnight on the Desert (1937), and Rain Upon Godshill (1939).

One aspect of all of Priestley's fiction is its theatricality - from the beginning he had a fine flair for dialogue; in fact, soon after its success as a novel he adapted The Good Companions into a play (1931, with E. Knoblock). The next year saw the debut of Priestley as a bonafide dramatist with Dangerous Corner; it was a resounding success and was performed all over the world. This acclaim encouraged the author to organize his own company, for which he wrote plays of consistently high quality. Some were comedies, such as Laburnum Grove (1933) and When We Are Married (1938). As a dramatist Priestley was influenced by the theories of time and recurrence propounded by the philosopher J. W. Dunne (1875-1949), especially as developed in Experiment with Time and The Serial Universe. Dunne's concepts are dramatized in Priestley's serious "metaphysical" plays, such as Time and the Conway (1937), I Have Been There Before (1938), and Johnson over Jordan (1939).

After World War II, J. B. Priestley took an active role in the international cultural community. He was a United Kingdom delegate to United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conferences in 1946 and 1947. He was chairman of theater conferences in Paris in 1947 and in Prague the following year. In 1949 he served as president of the International Theatre Institute. Back home he was chosen chairman of the British Theatre Conference (1948) and also served as a member of the National Theatre Board (1966-1967). In 1973, then nearly 80 years of age, he served his home city of Bradford as Freeman.

To Priestley's assets of longevity and versatility we may add flexibility - his adapting of the printed word to newer media of communication during and after World War II. During the war he became even more well known than before through his talks on radio; because of his understanding of and sympathy for the average citizen he was able to make a direct personal appeal using this medium. His film credits include screenplays for The Foreman Went to France (1942) and Last Holiday (1956). Back in the world of theater, he helped the novelist Iris Murdoch translate her hit novel A Severed Head into a successful play (1963).

Priestley had a son and four daughters through earlier marriages; in 1953 he became part of a famous husband-wife literary team when he married the archeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes. She had also worked for UNESCO and in the film industry. Together they wrote the play Dragon's Mouth (1952) and Journey Down a Rainbow (1955). A stay in New Zealand enabled him to write the travel piece A Visit to New Zealand (1974). Priestley's autobiography, Instead of the Trees, appeared three years later.

Still more evidence of this writer's versatility includes the libretto for an opera, The Olympians (1948); Delight, a book of essays (1949); The Art of the Dramatist, criticism (1957); and The Edwardians, social history (1970). J. B. Priestley died quietly at his home in Stratford-on-Avon on August 14, 1984.

Further Reading

Other books by Priestley include Ape and Angels (1928), The Prince of Pleasures and His Regency (1969), and Victoria's Heyday (1972). His essays of five decades were collected and edited by Susan Cooper in 1969.

Two excellent assessments of Priestley's work are J. B. Priestley by John Braine (1978) and J. B. Priestley, Last of the Sages by John Atkins (1980). Perhaps Priestley will be most enduringly known for his contribution to the theater. Analysis of his contribution to this genre is made by Gareth Lloyd Evans in J. B. Priestley: The Dramatist (1964).

Additional Sources

Atkins, John Alfred, J. B. Priestley: the last of the sages, London: J. Calder; New York: Riverrun Press, 1981.

Braine, John, J. B. Priestley, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979, 1978.

Brome, Vincent, J.B. Priestley, London; New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Hamish Hamilton, 1988.

Collins, Diana, Time and the Priestleys: the story of a friendship, Far Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: A. Sutton, 1994.

Priestley, J. B. (John Boynton), English journey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Priestley, J. B. (John Boynton), Instead of the trees: a final chapter of autobiography, New York: Stein and Day, 1977.

Quotes:

"One of the delights known to age, and beyond the grasp of youth, is that of Not Going."

"I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning..."

"To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own -- this is happiness."

"The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?"

"Our trouble is that we drink too much tea. I see in this the slow revenge of the Orient, which has diverted the Yellow River down our throats."

"Already we Viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate."

See more famous quotes by J. B. Priestley

For other persons named similarly, see Priestley.

John Boynton Priestley
J. B. Priestley
Born	13 September 1894(1894-09-13) Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Died	14 August 1984 (aged 89) Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
Occupation	Writer
Writing period	20th century
Official website

John Boynton Priestley, OM (13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984) — known as J.B. Priestley — was an English novelist, playwright and broadcaster. He published more than 100 novels, notably The Good Companions (1929), as well as numerous dramas. His output included literary and social criticism.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Career 2.1 Plays 3 Personal life 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Early years

Priestley was born at 34 Mannheim Road, Heaton, which he described as an "ultra-respectable" suburb of Bradford. His father was a headteacher; his mother died young; his father remarried 4 years later.^[1] On leaving grammar school, Priestley worked in the wool trade of his native city, but had ambitions to become a writer. He was to draw on memories of Bradford in many of the works he wrote after he had moved south. As an old man he deplored the destruction by developers of Victorian buildings such as the Swan Arcade in Bradford where he had his first job.

Priestley served during the First World War in the 10th Battalion, the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. He was wounded in 1916 by mortar fire. In his autobiography, Margin Released he is fiercely critical of the British army and in particular of the officer class.

After his military service Priestley received a university education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. By the age of 30 he had established a reputation as a humorous writer and critic. His novel Benighted (1927) was adapted into the James Whale film The Old Dark House (1932); the novel has been published under the film's name in the United States.

Career

Priestley's first major success came with a novel, The Good Companions (1929) which earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure. His next novel Angel Pavement (1930) further established him as a successful novelist. However, some critics were less than complimentary about his work, and Priestley began legal action against Graham Greene for what he took to be a defamatory portrait of him in the novel Stamboul Train (1932).

He wrote the travelogue English Journey in 1934, which is an account of what he saw and heard while travelling through the country in the autumn of the previous year.^[2]

He moved into a new genre and became as well known as a dramatist. Dangerous Corner began a run of plays that enthralled West End theatre audiences. His best-known play is An Inspector Calls (1946), later made into a film starring Alastair Sim released in 1954. His plays are more varied in tone than the novels, several being influenced by J. W. Dunne's theory of time, which plays a part in the plots of Dangerous Corner (1932) and Time and the Conways (1937).

Many of his works have a socialist aspect. For example, An Inspector Calls, as well as being a "Time Play", contains many references to socialism — the inspector was arguably an alter ego through which Priestley could express his views.^[3]

During World War II, he was a regular broadcaster on the BBC. The Postscript broadcast on Sunday night, through 1940 and again in 1941, drew peak audiences of 16 million; only Churchill was more popular with listeners. But his talks were cancelled. It was thought that this was the effect of complaints from Churchill that they were too left-wing; however, Priestley's son has recently revealed in a talk on the latest book being published about his father's life that it was in fact Churchill's Cabinet that brought about the cancellation by supplying negative reports on the broadcasts to Churchill.^[4][5]

Priestley chaired the 1941 Committee and, in 1942, he was a co-founder of the socialist Common Wealth Party. The political content of his broadcasts and his hopes of a new and different England after the war influenced the politics of the period and helped the Labour Party gain its landslide victory in the 1945 general election. Priestley himself, however, was distrustful of the state and dogma.

His interest in the problem of time led him to publish an extended essay in 1964 under the title of Man and Time (Aldus published this as a companion to Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols). In this book he explored in depth various theories and beliefs about time as well as his own research and unique conclusions, including an analysis of the phenomenon of precognitive dreaming, based in part on a broad sampling of experiences gathered from the British public who responded enthusiastically to a televised appeal he made while being interviewed in 1963 on the BBC programme, Monitor. Priestley managed the treatment of this potentially esoteric subject matter with warmth and competence.

Although Priestley never wrote a formal book of memoirs, his literary reminiscences, Margin Released, provide valuable insights into his work. The section dealing with his job as a teenage clerk in a Bradford wool-sorter's office manages to weave fine literature from an outwardly unpromising subject - a characteristic of many of his novels.

A special collector's edition of Bright Day was re-issued by Great Northern Books in 2006, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of this novel.^[6]

Plays

His play The Thirty-first of June was first produced in Toronto in 1957. ^[7]

• Thirty-first of June: A Tale of True Love, Enterprise and Progress in the Arthurian and AD-Atomic Ages, inspector calls

- December 1961 : Hardback; ISBN 0-434-60326-0 / 978-0-434-60326-8 (UK edition); Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd

- BBC radio dramatization; one and a half hours

- 1996 : Paperback; ISBN 0-7493-2281-0 / 978-0-7493-2281-6 (UK edition); Publisher: Mandarin

- 31 iyunya (1978) (TV) Russian film; aka 31 июня; aka 31st of June

Personal life

Priestley was one of the interviewees for the documentary series The World at War (1973), in the episode "Alone: May 1940–May 1941".

He was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958. He declined lesser honours before accepting the Order of Merit in 1977.

He had a deep love of classical music, and in 1941 he played an important part in organising and supporting a fund-raising campaign on behalf of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, which was struggling to establish itself as a self-governing body after the withdrawal of Sir Thomas Beecham. In 1949 the opera The Olympians by Arthur Bliss, to a libretto by Priestley, was premiered.

Priestley's name was on Orwell's list, a list of people which George Orwell prepared in March 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda unit set up at the Foreign Office by the Labour government. Orwell considered these people to have pro-communist leanings and therefore to be inappropriate to write for the IRD.^[8]

Priestley had three marriages. In 1921 he married Pat Tempest, and in 1922 two daughters were born. In September 1926, he married Jane Wyndham-Lewis (ex-wife of the original 'Beachcomber' Bevan Wyndham-Lewis, no relation to the artist); together, they produced two daughters and one son. In 1953, he divorced his second wife and married Jacquetta Hawkes, his collaborator on Dragon's Mouth.^[5] The University of Bradford renamed their campus library to J.B. Priestley after his death in recognition of his work. .^[5]

See also

• J. W. Dunne
• CND
• An Experiment with Time
• J. B. Priestley's Time Plays
• Time and the Conways

Notes

1. ^ Lincoln Konkle, J. B. Priestley, in British Playwrights, 1880-1956: A Research and Production Sourcebook, by William W. Demastes, Katherine E. Kelly; Greenwood Press, 1996
2. ^ Marr, Andrew (2008). A History of Modern Britain. Macmillan. p. xxii. ISBN 978-0-330-43983-1. 
3. ^ [1]
4. ^ http://cheltenhamfestivals.com/whats_on/event_detail.html?id=2545
5. ^ ^{a b c} "" Priestley war letters published"". BBC News website. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7655113.stm. Retrieved 2008-06-10. 
6. ^ "Bright Day: A special collectors' edition, by J. B. Priestley". Great Northern Books. http://www.gnbooks.co.uk/books/1905080182.shtml. Retrieved 2007-10-10. 
7. ^ http://www.doollee.com/PlaywrightsP/priestley-j-b.html Plays by J B Priestley
8. ^ The Guardian John Ezard Blair's babe Did love turn Orwell into a government stooge? Saturday June 21 2003

References

• Brome, Vincent (1988). J.B. Priestley. ISBN 0-241-12560-X
• Judith Cook (1997). Priestley. ISBN 0-7475-3508-6
• Bright Day: A special collectors' edition, by J.B. Priestley
• Works by J. B. Priestley at Internet Archive

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: J. B. Priestley

• J.B. Priestley Society
• Brief biography
• J B Priestley collection at the University of Bradford
• J.B.Priestley in the Theatre Archive, University of Bristol
• John Angerson's English Journey. Photographer Angerson retraces J.B. Priestley's footsteps 75 years after publication of Priestley's seminal travelog, English Journey. Article by Graham Harrison for the Photo Histories web site.

Political offices
Preceded by New post	Chairman of the Common Wealth Party 1942	Succeeded by Richard Acland

v • d • e Works by J. B. Priestley Novels: Benighted (1927) · Adam in Moonshine (1927) · Farthing Hall (1929 with Hugh Walpole) · The Good Companions (1929) · Angel Pavement (1930) · Faraway (1932) · I'll Tell You Everything (1932 with Gerald Bullett) · Wonder Hero (1933) · They Walk in the City: The Lovers in the Stone Forest (1936) · The Doomsday Men (1938) · When We Were Married (1938) · Let the People Sing (1939) · Blackout in Gretley (1942) · Daylight on Saturday (1943) · Three Men in New Suits (1945) · Bright Day (1946) · Jenny Villiers (1947) · Festival at Farbridge (1951) · Low Notes on a High Level (1954) · The Magicians (1954) · Saturn Over the Water (1961) · The Shapes of Sleep (1962) · Sir Michael & Sir George (1964) · Lost Empires (1965) · Salt Is Leaving (1966) · It's an Old Country (1967) · London End (1968) · Out Of Town (1968) · Snoggle (1971) · Over The Long High Wall (1972) · Found, Lost, Found (1976) Short stories: "The Town Major of Miracourt" (1930) Short story collections: The Other Place (1953) · The Carfitt Crisis (1974) Plays: Dangerous Corner (1932) · The Roundabout (1932) · Eden End (1934) · Laburnum Grove (1934) · Cornelius (1935) · Duet in Floodlight (1935) · Bees on the Boatdeck (1936) · I Have Been Here Before (1937) · Mystery of Greenfingers (1937) · People at Sea (1937) · Time and the Conways (1937) · Two Time Plays (1937) · Johnson Over Jordan (1939) · The Long Mirror (1940) · Goodnight Children (1942) · Desert Highway (1944) · They Came to a City (1944) · An Inspector Calls (1945) · The Long Mirror (1947) · The Rose and Crown (1947) · The Linden Tree (1948) · Home is Tomorrow (1949) · Bright Shadow (1950) · Summer Day's Dream (1950) · Dragon's Mouth (1952) · Mother's Day (1953) · Private Rooms (1953) · Treasure on Pelican (1953) · The Scandalous Affair of Mr. Kettle and Mrs. Moon (1956) · The Glass Cage (1957) Poetry: The Chapman of Rhymes (1918) Screenplays: Sing As We Go (1934) · Jamaica Inn (1939) · Last Holiday (1950) Non-fiction: Brief Diversions (1922) · Papers from Lilliput (1922) · Open House (1927) · Self-selected Essays (1932) · English Journey (1934) · Midnight on the Desert (1937 autobiography) · Rain Upon Godshill (1939 autobiography) · British Women Go To War (1943) · Margin Released (1962 autobiography) · Man and Time (1964) · The Edwardians (1970) · Particular Pleasures (1975) · Instead Of The Trees (1977 autobiography) Film & TV adaptations: An Inspector Calls (1954 film) · Out of the Unknown: "Level Seven" (1966 sci-fi series) · An Inspector Calls (1982 film) · Lost Empires (1986)

Persondata
NAME	Priestley, John Boynton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	English Writer
DATE OF BIRTH	1894-09-13
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
DATE OF DEATH	1984-08-14
PLACE OF DEATH	Warwickshire, England

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