J. B. Priestley

English playwright

• Born: September 13, 1894
• Birthplace: Bradford, Yorkshire, England
• Died: August 14, 1984
• Place of death: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England

Biography

John Boynton Priestley, the prolific author of nearly two hundred volumes of essays, novels, and plays, is twentieth century Great Britain’s best example of the writer as a down-to-earth, no-nonsense professional. He began his career hoping to become a man of letters in the eighteenth century fashion, exploring any subject that interested him in whatever genre struck him as most suitable. Eventually he regretted having written so much, understanding that critics sometimes ignore the too-industrious writer as they champion instead the slimmer output of more predictable writers who repeat themselves in a single literary vein.

Born in Bradford, the wool-merchandizing hub of northern England, Priestley was reared by a socialist schoolmaster father and a kindly stepmother in an environment that encouraged an interest in the arts. He took advantage of the town’s theaters, music halls, and libraries—resources which offered him artistic and intellectual stimulation of the highest order then available in England before World War I. The proximity of Bradford to the Yorkshire Dales, an area of extraordinary beauty, awakened in him an interest in nature as well. After leaving school, he became a clerk in the wool trade but in fact spent most of his time writing pieces on widely varying subjects for the local papers and even some London magazines.

An idyllic existence in what Priestley later remembered as a golden world came to an end with the war. Enlisting at age twenty, he was wounded in France and later gassed. Although the war itself does not figure in his writing, its horror remained with him all of his life; he mourned his countrymen’s disparaging of their former values and ideals. He aimed his work at reminding Englishmen of what they once had been and what they yet could be, were they to work in harmony, in community, in building a better world.

That work began in earnest after the war and three years at the University of Cambridge, when Priestley moved to London and became a writer for various newspapers and periodicals and a reader for a publishing firm. He augmented the income by which he cared for his growing family by publishing books of essays and literary criticism. While he was making his mark as a writer, he was by no means financially secure. Security, modest wealth in fact, came his way when he tried his hand at the novel. His fourth novel, The Good Companions, was Priestley’s breakthrough; it is an affectionate look at a band of not-too-accomplished performers making the rounds of provincial music halls who come to realize that a changing world is no longer receptive to the innocent fare they offer. It became a runaway best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic and, translated into many languages, established Priestley’s reputation around the world. He followed The Good Companions with even more ambitious works, darker in tone and peopled with extraordinary characters—idealistic heroes and heroines, sinister confidence men, comic grotesques—like those of Charles Dickens. A number of well-received novels followed.

The success of his novels enabled Priestley to enter the more precarious world of the theater, to which he had been attracted as a youth when he had contemplated a career as an actor. After learning the dramatist’s craft by collaborating on a stage adaptation of The Good Companions, Priestley wrote a soundly structured play by himself. Dangerous Corner initially drew tepid reviews but became an enormous success once it was championed by James Agate, the most influential drama critic of the day. Priestley himself later surmised that there was no playhouse in the entire world that had not housed a production of his first play. Despite its lack of depth and its perfunctory characterization, the highly diverting piece about some young people involved in at times unpleasant, even sordid relationships, suggested the directions his later plays would take. Dangerous Corner makes clear that persons who act irresponsibly in their own interests can accomplish nothing, that only those who are honest with one another, who support one another as they work in harmony, can make life truly worthwhile. Priestley gave the unhappy characters of Dangerous Corner the opportunity to try again, to rebuild their world, by ending the play with a time shift, an end that becomes a new beginning. The play demonstrated for the first time Priestley’s abiding interest in time theories, which would become the basis of some of his better, later plays.

Priestley’s best and most lasting work for the theater revealed his affinity for the work of Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov. Eden End, which takes place just before World War I, and The Linden Tree, set shortly after World War II, both deal, as does Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904), with a society in flux. The weaker will be unable to make the transition to a new era; the hearty and courageous will adjust, even triumph. Even more significant in jarring an ultraconservative British theater out of its complacency were the innovative, expressionistic plays Music at Night (first published in Three Plays in 1943) and Johnson over Jordan. In the former, a group of disparate characters come together as all humankind in a Jungian ritual bonding as they listen to the first performance of a piece of music. In the latter an English Everyman reexamines his wasted life after his death. In a journey outside time, outside space, he laments his lost joys and wasted opportunities and comes at last to a recognition of the ultimate worth of humankind.

Early in his career as a dramatist Priestley had solved the problems he had encountered in the sometimes uneasy relationships with directors and actors by forming his own production company. Eventually he decided to abandon a changing theater which was beginning to attract audiences out of touch with his own ideals. The brief essays and short fiction works such as “The Carfitt Crisis,” as well as social documents such as The Edwardians and a last volume of autobiography, were gentler forms for the aging Priestley. Active until the brief illness that caused his death in 1984, he would have been more pleased could he have known that his popularity would survive him. Priestley’s novels are widely read in Great Britain, the nation that sometimes disappointed him but never lost his love, and his plays are frequently revived in theaters throughout the country as well as in London’s West End.

Bibliography

Atkins, John. J. B. Priestley: The Last of the Sages. New York: Riverrun Press, 1981. Describes Priestley’s development as essayist, critic, novelist, dramatist, autobiographer, social commentator, historian, and travel writer. The book is most useful on the political, social, and economic background of the late 1920’s and 1930’s, the period of Priestley’s first three mystery novels.

Brome, Vincent. J. B. Priestley. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988. Brome offers an affectionate but candid portrait of the writer in public and private life. Argues that the prolific writer has been denied his proper niche by critics who do not deal fairly with those who write for a wide, general audience.

Cook, Judith. Priestley. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Cook provides a biography of Priestley, examining both his prose and dramatic works. Includes a bibliography and an index.

DeVitis, A. A., and Albert E. Kalson. J. B. Priestley. Boston: Twayne, 1980. After a biographical chapter that includes a discussion of Priestley’s time theories, the book divides into two sections, the first half dealing with Priestley as novelist, the second half dealing with Priestley as dramatist. All Priestley’s works in the two genres are discussed, the more significant ones in some detail. Includes a chronology of the important events in Priestley’s life and a useful bibliography.

Gray, Dulcie. J. B. Priestley. Stroud, Gloustershire, England: Sutton, 2000. This volume in the Sutton Pocket Biographies series provides a concise look at Priestley’s life and many works. Includes a bibliography.

Klein, Holger. J. B. Priestley’s Fiction. New York: P. Lang, 2002. Massive, eight-hundred-page study of Priestley’s entire fictional output, including all of his mystery novels. Bibliographic references and index.