Priestley Perturbations

ENGLISH JOURNEY--J. B. Priestley-- Harper ($3). At 40, John Boynton Priestley is one of England's most comfortably successful writers. His huge-selling novel, The Good Companions (1929), made him an overnight reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as a sentimental hearty of the right sort. Thousands of undiscriminating readers have hailed this blunt-minded Yorkshireman as another Dickens. Though Priestley himself is well aware that the resemblance is meagre ("I am not like Dickens at all"), his latest book may well give the myth a wider circulation. Dickens' sideline was social sympathy; Author Priestley's English Journey, a lengthy digression into the economic back streets of his country, shows the same individualist concern over poverty and ugliness, the same little-English confidence that character will muddle through the worst economic mess.

Starting democratically by motor-coach and ending by being driven in his own car, last autumn Author Priestley fetched a wide circuit through industrial England, busily noting what he saw and felt. At Southampton the great liners made him proud but a talk with a steward made him wonder. The Wills Gold Flake (cigaret) factory at Bristol pleased him. But the suburbs of Birmingham he found "beastly," and the benevolent despotism of Cadbury's cocoa factory at Bournville depressed him. Cutting through the Cotswold Hills he came on Chipping Campden, medieval wool trade centre, now a carefully preserved Arcadia, and Broadway, whose fame as a pretty village has attracted swarms of bright young people "in gamboge and vermilion sports cars."

The tawdry Goose Fair at Nottingham disgusted him. His home town of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he found changed for the worse. At Bradford a reunion of his old battalion made Author Priestley angrily reminiscent of the War. "I have had playmates, I have had companions, but all, all are gone; and they were killed by greed and muddle and monstrous cross-purposes, by old men gobbling and roaring in clubs, by diplomats working underground like monocled moles, by journalists wanting a good story, by hysterical women waving flags, by grumbling debenture-holders, by strong, silent, beribboned asses, by fear or apathy or downright lack of imagination."

He went through the Black Country north of Birmingham, the pottery district of Staffordshire (Arnold Bennett's Five Towns), the slums of Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, visited Blackpool (England's Coney Island), the collieries of East Durham. Everywhere he found something to interest and perturb him. His conclusions: "You go up and down this country and what makes you jump with astonishment and delight is something that has been there for at least 500 years. ... I find it difficult to believe in the God who inspired the creators of Beverley Minster. But I am beginning to find it even more difficult to believe in the debenture-holders who inspired the creators of the Black Country slag-heaps and the Durham 'tips'. ... I cannot help feeling that this new England is lacking in character, in zest, gusto, flavour, bite, drive, originality, and that this is a serious weakness. . . . We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Anybody who imagines that this is a time for self-congratulation has never poked his nose outside Westminster, the City and Fleet Street. ... We have led the world, many a time before today. . . . We can lead it again. We headed the procession when it took . . . the wrong turning. ... It is for us to find the way out again, into the sunlight."

The Author-- Son of a Yorkshire schoolmaster, John Boynton Priestley still talks in his broad, matter-of-fact native accent. At the outbreak of the War he enlisted as a private, emerged in 1918 as an .officer. In his three years at Cambridge he "was always faintly uncomfortable, being compelled to feel--and quite rightly too--a bit of a lout and a bit of a mountebank." While still an undergraduate he published a book of parodies (Brief Diversions), then went to London as literary adviser to a publisher, wrote book reviews for the London Mercury and the Daily News. The resounding success of The Good Companions, his second novel, freed him from Fleet Street. Once a widower and twice married, he has a family of five daughters, one son. Pudgy, slow-spoken, pipe-smoking. Author Priestley is an apotheosis of the sensible self-made British author.

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