BOOKS

Bottom's Dream

BY JOHN MORTIMER HE was the rudest of the mechanicals. He was pompous, pedantic, and apparently earth- bound. He was solid and self-satisfied. To make him the more ludicrous he was crowned with an itching donkey's head and blessed with a braying laugh. He was then awarded a night of incredible, moonlit lovemaking with the most beautiful of the immortals. During it he behaved with dignity and charm; and what's more, she enjoyed it.

Bottom's dream has been truly understood by few and properly presented, only in my memory, by Peter Hall. When the great lumbering, soft- voiced, small-footed, shrugging, itchy Laughton encountered the golden Titania the scene was played for all its fantastic sexuality. It was then that we were made to see something which was Written about, curiously enough, only by Mr. J. B. Priestley in his English Comic Characters Published in 1925 and now reprinted.* Mr. Priestley's understanding of this scene seems to me deeply revealing of his own slightly frustrated, comic, touching but persistent pursuit of the consummation with magic. This is what he wrote:

He [Bottom] not only rises to the occasion, he

improves it. Does the newly awakened lovely creature immediately confess that she is enamoured of him? Then he carries it off bravely, with a mingled touch of wit, philosophy and masculine complacency. 'Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that : and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays: the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, 1 can gleek upon occasion.'

Mr. Priestley, himself, has more than a touch of wit, philosophy and masculine complacency. There have also been few occasions, war, peace, sex, the bomb, indeed the lot, upon which he has not been heard to gleek. But what really seems• to matter to him, is the dream. In his plays about time, in his Utopian visions of the future City to Which they all, rather disastrously, came, and in most of the six volumes of his fiction which have now been published in a paperback edition,t what he is after is the strange, idiotic, half- remembered, half-forgotten moment of consum- mation with Titania. And what is sad about Mr. Priestley's dream is that, unlike Bully Bottom's, it seems to. satisfy him so little. It is as if the night had been a rather chilly Fabian weekend, and Titania a sensible girl in a dirndl and aertex shirt, and Mr. Priestley were back to earth with a slight cold and a bad temper, more determined, even than Bottom, that the old professional show must go on.

'The nearer bank was quite close, with only a narrow strip of meadow, thick with buttercups and daisies, between it and the wall. A young man *THE ENGLISH COMIC CHARACTERS. (Bodley Head, 16s,) t THE OTHER PLACE. LET THE • PEOPLE SING. SATURN OVER THE WATER. THE DOOMSDAY •MEK JENNY VILI.IERS. THE THIRTY-FIRST OF JUNE. (Corgi

Books, 2s. 6d. each.)

was fishing down there, and lying by his side a dark young woman in a green dress. . . . [The Men] were dressed in old shirts and pants, and as brown and merry as sailors home from the sea. We drank the beer and' then went loafing on the river bank, smoking and telling tales and watch- ing the water slide by. No glass wall between us now—not on your life!' This is the Other Place, the vision of what life should be like which gives its title to Mr. Priestley's book of stories on the 'Edge of the Marvellous.' Is it perverse to find this other place so unappealing? To prefer, in fact, the wet, sullen town from which his hero escaped to this vision of solid, sun-tanned men in grey flannel bags talking good sense, smoking cooling Three Nuns? What's wrong with such a rational view of happiness? Remembering Mr. Graham Greene's other place, with the old cabbage-cooking troglodytes and the sexy beauty queen and the tinkling golden po, it seems unfair that it should be the devil in us who always has the best fantasies.

The desire to escape from our so-called grey- ness into a brighter, better world is Mr. Priestley's constant theme. It's the motive behind his best work (Johnson over Jordan) and his worst (Let the People Sing). It's what makes him so likeable, so perpetually productive, and so energetic a writer. But what he rarely gives us, again with the exception of Johnson over. Jordan, is the feeling that the dream is his own personal, hallucinated vision. More often it's as if he feels it's what he ought to want, or what would be good for him to want or, worst of all, what it would be good for us to want.

In its crudest form the romantic dream appears in Jenny Villiers, a novel about the theatre. A middle-aged author with a heart condition, a filthy temper and a very real and understandable feeling of boredom with the theatre, has written a play with what is known in the trade as a 'downbeat' ending. 'Cynical and bitter and- and—hopeless,' is how one of the characters describes it. He goes to sleep in the green room of a provincial theatre and the ghost of Jenny Villiers, an early Victorian actress, appears to him. He watches her, her rise to fame, her rehear- sals, her unhappy but extremely conventional love story, and her devotion to the Theatre. -By the time he wakes up he's been given Hope. He changes the ending of his play and has new faith in what—and the sentence, solid, jocular, disap- proving but envious, might be taken to describe his whole work- he calls the 'rum business of make-believe.'

Rum business indeed ! Almost as rum as sex, about which Mr. Priestley lately wrote an article, and to which he has the same tolerant, crusty old approach. 'Not without experience in the field, differing from most of my fellow countrymen in not regarding women with a strong mixture of contempt and fear.' 'I refuse to believe that any- thing published in Paris and confiscated in Dover must be a work of genius.' 'There is the fatal

attraction of the woman on whom the man has projected his own magical anima image. That is the basis of all reckless and seemingly inexplic- able infatuations.' There it goes, the deep, dis- turbing, Jungian dream; Titania in the woods. Certainly a rum business; but with any luck she can be caught, corralled and fitted into the good, bright, free-speaking, pipe-smoking, rational world, . . . 'across the breakfast table, in one good year after another, the face smiling at him still carries some trace of his original anima projection, and so is both dearly familiar and yet still magical.'

The anima at the breakfast table is undoubtedly what would be good for us. Like all writers who want to improve and rationalise our condition, like Wells with his scientific future and Shaw with his long-lived, vegetarian wiseacres, Mr. Priestley has to describe what he wants us to be like and then, in spite of ourselves, our spirits sink. Because somehow what we require is not the vision of what we might be, but the understanding, angry, bitter or hilarious, of what we are. Which is why in Dickens, to whom Priestley for good or ill owes so much, the death of the crossing sweeper in Bleak House is corny and marvellous and the good, ideal Christmas at Dingley Dell is finally corny and boring. No doubt Mr. Priestley him- self feels this. In a touching preface to The English Comic Characters he's at pains to tell us that the book was written at a time of personal tragedy, that the comic rumbustiousness is a façade merely, and that Jolly Jack doesn't exist. So even more is it a pity that the personal condi- tion is allowed to intrude so little in the work that follows.

Because what a writer doesn't have is a duty to be cheerful, constructive or socially useful. And it seems to be this sense of duty which often pre- vents Mr. Priestley from creating a convincing world of the imagination. Not without experience in the field perhaps, well understanding the nature of woman and her problems, cheerful, purposeful and game for adventure; but Titania has eluded him. The collective unconscious may have many resonant mansions, the cave for the old man •and the fool, the raft for the negro and the naked boy, the dark wood for the copulation of beauty and the beast. But what is not there is the sunny purposefulness of the Summer School, the good meeting of the cultural committee. For such occasions it is better to keep awake.

Better to keep awake because the dreams, when they come, are 'not wild or strange or revealing enough. In one of his stories, a kind of science fiction, he shows the danger of the 'Grey Men' triumphing. It's not a bad story, and chilling enough, until you wonder just what Mr. Priestley sees them as triumphing over, and turn reluct- antly to the end of Let the People Sing, which may be supposed to represent his ideas of colour- ful, happy existence:

It seemed as if a new and greater world, some rumour of which had already haunted her young mind, were now growing all around her, shooting up like the magic beanstalk. And she did not know whether to laugh or cry, and did a little of both, when the final pair of bandsmen, behind the big drummer, came into view. There, enthusiastically clashing the cymbals were Sir George Denbero -Baxter wearing a fireman's helmet, and Timmy Tiverton wearing no hat at all and looking like a happy half-drowned Yorkshire terrier.

We may agree with the optimists, the rational men, who believe in nothing more specific than the triumph of cheerfulness, common sense and good w ill. We may approve of them and wish them N., ell. But, such is our perversity, it is to the pessimists we must always turn for consolation.