It is fitting in the year that I read the 'Good Companions' and 'Lost Empires' for the first time and re-read the magical, 'The Magicians' again https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2016/04/the-magicians.html that I ended the year reading the newly published, "Priestley at Kissing Tree House: A Memoir" by his long-time secretary, Rosalie Batten. Priestley hoped she might write a book about him, knowing him better than anyone who might undertake such a task, and she did. She started it in 1986, two years after his death and it was only discovered at Batten's death by her daughter. It now appears in an edition by Great Northern Books.
It is an overwhelmingly affectionate portrait but does not spare the author his vanities nor his contradictions. He was most insistent, for example, that people spelt his name right, "Priestley" not, as often rendered, "Priestly", he was overly concerned, at the time, that he was being forgotten just as Batten details the flood of ongoing events, play productions, interviews that Priestley was subject to; and, for a sympathetic and humanitarian man, he paid his staff wages that were by his own estimation 'mean'. As well as being forgotten, he remained concerned about money all his life (the two being obviously connected) and about the depredations of the taxman!
Yet when Batten describes, discretely, a moment in her life of great distress, Priestley was deeply concerned, offered her £100 to do whatever she wished, as long as it was spent on herself, and this allowed for a healing journey to Crete for Batten and the birth of her lifelong, rejuvenating love of Greece.
Their on-going relationship, after a nervous start, blossomed into a friendship, sometimes innocently flirtatious, that was yet driven by the professional demands of an author who was until very late in life producing at least a book a year and who was, by any estimation, a public figure. Mrs Priestley, wife number 3, the archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes, is only seen obliquely, a rather stern figure in the background, though they were happily married, for this is a portrait of the 'working man' first and foremost rather than the husband and father.
You get a very vivid portrait of that working man - morning and early evenings for writing, evening and nights for entertaining or attendance at events including the making of speeches - always short leaving your audience wanting more, not slipping into a hoped-for release from boredom; and, afternoons, well afternoons were difficult, especially if rain curtailed walks about the garden. Afternoons could bring mild bouts of 'acedia' and distracting visits to see what one's secretary was doing! One aspect of that work especially foregrounded was the tight control he wanted to exercise over his plays, often scuppering productions because the cast was not quite right or the proposed production was playing too loose with his tightly constructed intentions. In this, he reminded me of Beckett - both perfectionists over their own craft.
Priestley, in retrospect, was right to be concerned for his reputation. For it did, in the immediate aftermath of his death, dip. He was perceived perhaps as neither sufficiently 'high brow' to be a representative of 'modernism' nor sufficiently 'low brow' to be simply entertaining. To find yourself 'middlebrow' can be an awkward place, neither here nor there, and, to be fair, his voluminous output meant that there is a fluctuation in quality; but, a triumphal production in 1992 of An Inspector Calls propelled that play onto the GCSE syllabus and has kept the flame alive, a slow burn of continuing, gathering interest.
For, in truth, Priestley was a myriad minded man whose outward appearance - gruff, blunt Yorkshire man birthed in the Edwardian era - and authorship of popular novels and plays of social realism disguised deeper veins of interest - in metaphysics, in time and in depth psychology. Jung thought him the best lay interpreter of his work, and (as I discovered from Batten) enjoyed his novels too. They presumably enjoyed conversations about pipe tobaccos as well! This point is admirably argued by Anthony Payne in his new book, "Time and the Rose Garden: Encountering the Magical in the life and works of J.B. Priestley" https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2018/03/adventures-in-time-magical-adventures.html
He was, also, a man in search of an enfolding whole - a truthfulness of life that lay always just below the horizon, luring you on with the wonder of things, a wonder found anywhere and often beautifully conveyed in Priestley's work (including the paintings for he was a gifted amateur painter of landscapes too). Batten tells of how he regularly referred to Wordsworth's advice that life should be sourced in admiration, hope and love. Both given and received, these three were the essential qualities that sustained a flourishing, abiding life; and, in spite of vanities and failings, they are what Priestley strove to give witness to, bring alive in his works and in life. This is probably the only 'brow' one needs to be accomplished and completed.
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