13 - 19 September 2001
Issue No.551
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 13 - 19 September 2001 Issue No.551 |
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Plain talk
Britain's cultural establishment is currently celebrating the centenary of the birth of J B Priestly. Despite his prolific output -- dozens of novels, plays, poetry and essays -- Priestly is probably unknown to many readers in Egypt. He worked, too, as a journalist, broadcaster and a reviewer of the social landscape in Britain. Indeed, he is considered by some as the most versatile writer of his generation.
During the mid 1940s and early 1950s I was a member of English PEN in London. This gave me the opportunity to meet many leading English writers: Charles Morgan, E M Forster, Graham Green, Angus Wilson, V S Pritchett, Bertrand Russell, Edith Sitwell and others. And this is how I got the chance to meet Priestly. When I invited him to give a lecture at the Egyptian Institute he immediately agreed and gave a brilliant talk on "The writer in a Changing Society."
Listening to Priestly talk one could feel the genial humour of the man. I still refer to some of his writings, especially the essays. In one of them he seems to sum up his writings: "I flip from one kind of work to another," he writes, "partly sustained by a very genuine interest in the technical problem of all forms of writing. I have always wanted to be an all-round man of letters on the Eighteenth Century plan, which allowed or commanded a man to write essay or poem, novel or play, just as he pleases."
And this is exactly what he did. His reputation as a novelist was established with the appearance of The Good Companions. But perhaps he is better known for Angel Pavement, Daylight on Saturday and Sir Michael and Sir George.
Priestly also wrote over 40 plays including Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before. Most of his plays were West End hits, though it was The Linden Tree that gave him his longest London run.
Priestly's plays were characterised by their humour. He had a flair -- high, light and broad. In one of the prefaces to a volume of collected plays he makes an important distinction. High comedy, he writes, is unpopular with British writers. The preference for British audiences is for light comedy, since "it provides admirable opportunities to skilled star-performers, and of these the British Theatre has been sufficiently productive."
His preference, though, was for the broad comedy, "which is stronger in situation than light comedy, and more frankly farcical and less austerely intellectual than high comedy. It is, I believe, particularly suitable to the English temperament and, as I consider that I possess a fairly thick slab of this temperament, it is the field of comedy in which I have chosen to work."
Priestly also produced a number of critical studies, including Figures in Modern Literature, English Comic Characters, George Meredith, Thomas Love Peacock, English Humour, and, perhaps best-known, Literature and Western Man. This latter, divided into five sections, starts with Shakespeare and Cervantes and ends with the moderns, whom he describes as products and the critics of a society "rapidly cutting itself loose from the past or at least appearing to do so, busy changing anything that could be changed."
The last time I met Priestly was in July 1956 during a PEN Congress in London, the theme of which was "The Author and the Public: Problems of Communication." Priestly made the bold statement that "the writer should go after his audience wherever that audience may be... He or she should try not to limit his or her work to the printed word."
"I feel very strongly," he continued, "that in this country we would have had better films, we would have had better radio and we would have had better television if more writers had thought it their duty to learn how to use these media."
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