AND ANOTHER THING
Missing a magical voice from somewhere east of the Pennines
PAUL JOHNSON
Such were Dr Samuel Johnson in his day or, in the mid-19th century, Dickens and Thackeray and Tennyson or, a generation or two later, Hardy and Kipling. When I first came to London, T.S. Eliot was still around to be looked up to and certainly lis- tened to attentively on the rare occasions when the oracle spoke. Then there was C.P. Snow, not necessarily to everyone's taste but someone whose background in science- politics, Whitehall and government, as well as in writing and publishing, gave his voice resonance. And, of course, there was J.B. Priestley. The centenary of Priestley's birth has served to remind us that no one has quite taken his place. It was a definite and dis- tinctive place too. Two or three times a year I used to see him sitting comfortably in it when we were guests at White Kissing Tree House, just outside Stratford. There he lived in some style. The fine wines were carefully chosen by his wife, Jacquetta Hawkes, the devoted staff served delicious food, summer shadows lingered long on the croquet lawn and the perfumed shrub- beries, and deep, leather armchairs invited you to sit in the big library where books were king and ran in thousands up to the high ceilings. Some of them, you were sur- prised to discover, concealed the entrance to a well-stocked cocktail bar. into which Priestley would retire, to re-emerge with a trayful of potent and icy martinis.
There was no attempt to play the country squire: quite the contrary. He loudly cen- sured literary men who, in his opinion, tried to do so, selecting Evelyn Waugh as a notorious example and so setting off a live- ly row. No, Priestley's models, rather, were those ancient grandees of the French liter- ary scene, who lived in haut bourgeois com- fort in their country châteaux, occasionally communicating with a deferential public by means of an essay in the Revue des Deux Mondes, or trotting up to Paris to loll splen- didly in their chairs at the Academie Francaise. It was his view that French men of letters got a much better deal than their English equivalents, carried more weight and were more carefully listened to. Why, he wondered aloud, could not people such as himself be treated more like Andre Gide or Paul Claudel or Francois Mauriac? `Would it help if I wore a skull-cap?' he pondered.
It was not that Priestley wanted honours. He was happy with his OM, having turned down offers of peerages from both Clem Attlee and Harold Wilson. Nor did he want money. Quite apart from his spectacular success with The Good Companions, he once had three plays running simultaneous- ly in the West End: he told me that, in the Thirties, he used to earn £30,000 a year from the stage alone, at a time when income-tax was two shillings in the pound. He felt, rather, that literature was the real glory of England — always had been — and that those who represented it had a duty to speak and a right to be heard. He was dis- gusted with the gross materialism of the modern world, what he called Admass. He thought that not just the Conservatives but even the Labour Party were too concerned with getting and spending and were ignor- ing the metaphysics of old England, the words, rhymes, sights and sounds which vibrated in the nation's heart and the deep, '1 can assure you, sir, that it's still the most wonderful suit of clothes the world has ever seen.' romantic emotions which occasionally shook it to its core.
Priestley could play on these emotions like no one else of his time. And, despite his grumbles, he was listened to. The Postscripts he gave on the BBC in 1940 and at other times during the war were proba- bly the most successful examples ever of the spoken word being used to raise spirits, not with tub-thumping but with gentle, penetrative philosophy. They made even Churchill jealous, and it was widely believed, though probably unfairly, that he used his power to have Priestley taken off the air.
Of course Priestley was, certainly at that period, a propagandist for the Left: years later he even did a Labour Party Political Broadcast, showing how the thing ought to be done. But he was not really a party man and never, in any sense, an ideologue. He started the campaign for nuclear disarma- ment from a posture of common sense. The essays he contributed on public matters were entirely personal. He called them `Thoughts from the Wilderness' and he saw himself as a lone voice, even in a way a reactionary one, celebrating a better, sim- pler, nobler England, prizing ancient virtues, landscapes and customs, rejecting the new varieties of Vanity Fair which, from the Sixties on, took over Admass.
He died on the eve of his 90th birthday and the peculiar chair he occupied has remained vacant since. No one speaks for literature. All we get from Kingsley Amis is the occasional bark. V.S. Pritchett is too modest, Stephen Spender and Iris Mur- doch too diffident. The phenomenon of the disappearing laureates and mandarins is not confined to England. In the United States, no one has taken the places once occupied by Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. In France Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre Malraux and Raymond Aron were the last of their line. Most of these grand voices came from the Left, and it may be that the collapse of all the old causes, such as social- ism, and the current refusal to believe in any kind of utopianism, helps to account for the demise of the public intellectual. It would certainly explain why there is no Bertrand Russell today.
But surely the world of letters, which is neither Right, Left nor Centre, just impor- tant, ought always to have an illustrious fig- ure to speak on its behalf. Who, then, is to claim the throne, nowadays a bed of nails too?
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