The media
A master of wristwork
Paul Johnson
In the obituaries of J. B. Priestley, his record as a novelist and playwright has L fully debated but no one has men- tioned what to me was his most valuable accomplishment — the writing of essays. lie wrote successful plays and novels by applying prodigies of energy to developing workmanlike talents. He always up- neld the merits of talent, as opposed to genius, which he never claimed to possess. But if he was a self-made novelist and Playwright, he was a born essayist; there indeed, I think, there was a touch of genius. As a writer of essays, he never Played the literary man. He wrote the vast Majority of them for the papers, often to deadlines, plucking his subjects not out of alrY nothing but the day's news, as often as 110t. No journalist who writes a column can fail to profit from a long, analytical look at tins volumes of collected pieces; there is a tr3t to be learned about the technique there, and much to be envied because it Cannot be learned. As Priestley well understood, the essay Is, a piece of conjuring; it aims to convey ,s.narP and often uncomfortable proposi- `1011s, the result of much deep thinking, in relaxed and seemingly effortless manner. do this well takes hard work and a lot of eXPerience; and you must have a gift for it Many great writers cannot do it at all. It trequires, as it were, a certain looseness of 1131e writing joints. Stiffness, formality, tillute power are all amiss. It is significant I at, when describing cricket (which he 1t3vecl), Priestley always most admired the se-jointed player, the antithesis of rigid- used to say that Garfield Sobers `axnibited this flexible quality better than stl' cricketer he had seen, and he wrote a striking essay on the man. Priestley was a aebers of prose, and his loose-jointed dPproach to writing it allowed him to yevelop some glorious shots of his own. ,en .might call them tricks, but then all art i,s;InsistS of tricks when you get down to it. ere is a stroke in cricket known as the ,!g glide, in which by a masterful flick of ,`_ne wrist all the power of a fast bowler can 0°e transformed into four golden runs. I nee saw Len Hutton employ this device to Perfection in the Oxford Parks. Priestley
had a similar flick-of-the-wrist ability to turn an ordinary sentence into a memor- able one. You were led to expect bathos and — lo! — the last two or three words flicked the thought right to the boundary.
Like all good essayists, Priestley had total control over tone. His wartime broad- casts were really essays, cunningly devised to be spoken. I don't think they were ever published here: the Chilmark Press in New York produced a collection of them, All England Listened, in 1967, with an intro- duction by Eric Sevareid. They read re- markably well, though one misses that unmistakable voice, beautifully clear be- neath its Bradford overtone, and with a deep resonance in the lower notes. These were 1,000-word pieces, probably the length at which Priestley excelled. But he was one of the very few writers who could deliver a polished and memorable thought in a mere two or three hundred words. I have several volumes of these apergus, for instance Delight from 1947, and Outcries and Asides, 1974. To anyone who wants to learn how to write, I commend — just for starters — 'Brown Eggs', 'Existential' and 'Mineral Water in Bedrooms of Foreign Hotels', and 'The Ironic Principle', a marvellous bit of writing, reminding one that he was as keen an admirer of the English tradition of irony as Thomas More or Jane Austen.
My personal preference was for Priest- ley's longer essays, of 2,000 words or so.
He published a fine series, under the heading Thoughts from the Wilderness, during the 1950s in the New Statesman, and they later appeared as a book. I studied them as they came out, and they taught me a lot about how to organise an argument in a civilised fashion so that the reader doesn't feel he's being got at or lectured or condescended to; and, not least, how to have fun while tackling a serious subject. Priestley liked humour of all kinds, from ancient music-hall patter to almost imper- ceptible irony, and he held, rightly in my view, that what the world really needs is not more equality or social justice or even a good five-cent cigar but new jokes. Yet there was no mistaking the seriousness of the man in everything he wrote. What made him such a good writer was his ability to switch from one to the other without clashing his literary gears, and without frightening or shocking his back-seat readers.
Priestley's seriousness came out with unique effect in his famous article, 'Britain and the Nuclear Bombs', which appeared in the New Statesman on 22 February 1957. Its impact was enormous. It had the characteristic of great journalism: it articu- lated, in brilliant and masterly manner, what large numbers of people had been vaguely and incoherently thinking. It was the effective start of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Soon after, a group of us met in Kingsley Martin's fine Adam flat in the Aldwych. There were Priestley himself, Bertrand Russell, Denis Healey, Professor Pat Blackett and the American panjandrum George Kennan. I remember thinking I was lucky to be part of such a gathering of heavyweights. But what really struck me was the fundamental incompati- bility of views between the politicians and the rest. If there was one type Priestley hated it was the chap who prides himself on being a 'realist'. When Healey said, 'Yes, but let's be realistic', he exploded: 'All my life I've been forced to listen to "realists" and where have they got us? — into two world wars and now, very likely, they'll get us into a third.' All the future arguments which bedevilled and eventually degraded CND were adumbrated, even before it started, in that exchange.
Well: it was all a long time ago. In later years Priestley quite lost confidence in the ability of the Left to solve this problem or any other. He was never much of a utopian anyway. He once said to me: 'I don't want to know all the answers. It's a mistake to think you can fathom all the ,mysteries of the universe in your head.' I knew him well in his last two decades, and I found him a wise old man. But even in his eighties he never saw himself as old. He said: 'This old body of mine is all an illusion, really. In spirit, I'm still a brash young chap of 21, striding down Piccadilly and looking at a yellow silk tie in a shop window. Wonder- ing if I have the money to buy it — and the nerve to wear it! That was the spirit which made his essays live, and will keep them fresh.
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