Mr. Prie,stley'a Miinchausens
On the last Sunday before Christmas the Sunday Times makes a practice of inviting various eminent people to say what books published during the year they have liked or admired most. Mr. J. B. Priestley ended his contribution on a rather odd note. " I do not mention," he wrote, " any of the adventurous travellers' tales that are now winning all the jackpots. I rarely read one of them, and suspect that at any moment the enthusiastic public may find that it has been humbugged. Indeed, I have thought of faking one myself." Though perhaps they were intended playfully, these observa- tions strike me as foolish. At the moment the two biggest jackpot-winners in the category to which Mr. Priestley refers ata The Ascent of Everest and Seven Years in Tibet, both of which have sold well over 100,000 copies in a short space of time; I should hardly have thought that their authors were open to suspicion as humbugs. Since he seldom reads books of this type, Mr. Priestley presumably derives his doubts about their authenticity from other than textual sources, but he does not say what these are; and his implied contempt for the discrimination of the reading public would have come more appropriately from a less successful author. I think it might have been fairer to the travellers, and more becoming to his own literary status, if Mr. Priestley had merely said that he didn't happen to like reading their books, and left it at that.
Previous page
