A Malcontent Relents
Delight. By J. B. Priestley. (Heinemann. 10s. 6d.) THE Mr. Priestley we know is something of a malcontent; he grumbles chronically, and for other people's sakes (he declares) as much as for his own; is not only a reformer, but a reformer of reforms, for even what is done at his suggestion seems never quite to reach the measure of his hopes. His new book marks a new departure. In his middle fifties, Mr. Priestley has allowed himself the pleasure of writing in praise. His theme is happiness, and the infinitely varied things that have brought it to his life. The result is wholly felicitous. An excellent book.
There are in all rather more than a hundred essays. Here—a random choice—are some of the things in which Mr. Priestley tells us he has found continuing delight : —shopping in small towns and villages, reading detective stories in bed, looking at fountains, a turn or two on a ship's deck before breakfast, the Marx Brothers, going away from New York, dreaming, giving advice, playing charades, frightening senior civil servants, and drinking mineral waters in the bedrooms of foreign hotels. Attractive ? For my part, I found I liked Mr. Priestley more with every page I read. How well, I thought, he expresses the minor pleasures I too have known ; how ingeniously he finds the explanation for them ! Not all his explana- tions would have been my own ; the delight, for example, of drinking mineral waters in the bedroom of a French hotel has always seemed to me to derive l:orn the fact that they are, unlike anything else you may drink there, cheap. Mr. Priestley has a better story:— " How delightful to escape from the cathedrals and art galleries, the laborious encounters with distinguished foreign colleagues, to take off one's coat and shoes in the plushy hermitage of the bedroom, and to receive from the waiter a bottle, fresh off the ice, of . . ea'i minerafe. . . . But not only is it good, this mineral water, it is also beautiful. It gurgles out of its green bottle like a chill and sparkling mountain stream, and arrives in the furred desert of my throat like a benediction."
Mr. Priestley has rather little to say about the pleasures of the table, but much about the pleasures of the pipe, whicji he has smoked steadily, he tells us, since 191o. He enjoys choosing a& sampling new mixtures of tobacco. A 19to practice. For in those days, Mr. Priestley recalls, tobacco was not sold by " young women lost in the myths of Hollywood, but by solid middle-aged men, pickled in nicotine themselves, who would pull down their cannisters and mix you something new . . . in a community of palates." Elsewhere Mr. Priestley describes the pleasure of smoking his pipe in a hot bath while everyone else is working. In yet another essay, he declares: " Possibly (through smoking) I have sacrificed digestion, sleep, eyesight, nerves and a final career as a Grand Old Man. I have no regrets."
There is just one essay here in which the author's mood seems one of sadness rather than delight. Its subject is " the hunger that can never be fed "—the hunger to live in some sort of Utopia. All his adult life Mr. Priestley has been " more or less a Socialist Intellectual." He grew up on the edge of industrial poverty. He saw waste, unemployment and exploitation.
" If Socialism was the way out, then Socialism we must have. If it meant more and bigger factories, then we must have more and bigger factories. If it meant larger and larger cities, more and more bungalows, cinemas, football grounds, greyhound tracks, motor roads, personal appearances of film stars, boards and committees, hostels, organisations for the right use of leisure, clinics, identity cards, radios night and day in every home, press officers and propaganda, party bosses arranging all our lives—very well, we had to have them. At the worst they were better than . . . injustice. But there was nothing here for my own secret delight."
Mr. Priestley's own ideal community would be something like the capital of a tiny German dukedom, round about 1830 ; a place with the dignity and style of a city, but reasonably small and clean, with country nearby, an opera-house, a theatre, an orchestra and a good restaurant always filled with friends. A place to work in Mr. Priestley has already found, a room of his own, high up with a view across the sea. There Mr. Priestley, we can believe, is content.
Contentment. Happiness. Delight. They are much neglected subjects at the moment. To be thought serious, significant, relevant you must write about violence, death, Angst, despair, frustration, dread. To care for happiness—or kindness equally—is to be thought flippant and superficial. Mr. Priestley might say he did not give a rap for this, and often enough, assuredly, he has gone perversely, aggressively, against the tides of literary fashion. But even Mr. Priestley's attitude is, in some respects, defensive. He is that rare being in English literature, a highbrow with a common touch, and this very singularity seems to have played tricks with his confidence.
• I suspect he lacks trust in his own sensibilities, and is a shade too sure of the common touch. At least, if there is anything at fault with his present book, it is a tendency to break a mood of poetry and tenderness with some Falstaffian eruption. Reading the book, you may wonder what, once written, has the author possibly crossed out ? And which, among the less trivial sources of delight in life, have been not even adumbrated ? Stopping short is not the same as brevity, though it is certainly a tribute to the success of this book that one reaches the end of it wishing that Mr. Priestley had gone on. MAURICE CRANSTON.
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