MR. PRIESTLEY'S TRAVELS

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 108, 8 May 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

MR. PRIESTLEY'S TRAVELS

PHYSICAL AND MENTAL.

••MIDNIGHT IN THE DESERT."

J. B. Priestley's latest hook is perhaps first of all a testimony -to his determination not to be pigeon-holed. '"Because I wrote one jolly, hoarty, popular novel," he says, ''it does not follow that everything I have written is exactly the same." His vague wish is to be "an all-round man of letters," which, Lhough it may not be good business, is good fun. The alternative is to play for safety, to do the same thing over and over again—"painting two cows in a field, two cows in a field, until at last they write, for the school books, "Nor tan we omit a consideration of the leader of the two-cows-in-a-field group.' And there you are in your pigeon-hole, and not unlike a stuffed pigeon."

So his latest book, "Midnight on the Desert: A Chapter in Autobiography" (Heinemann) is different from any other book of his. It is hardly a chapter in autobiography. Last year he took his family to the United States, to a ranch in Arizona. There, being sufficiently far removed from England, from urban life and from literary life, and in a land which "offers a broad view of what is-happening in the solar system, with no particular reference to Man," he took time to think. He thought of the difference between the New World and the Old, he took stock of his own ideas, he mused upon the immensities. And (later, apparently) he wrote it all down for this book. It is, of necessity, formless, or at least informal. You will not learn from it where Mr. Priestley was born, or what a bright (or dull) boy he was, hut you will learn a great deal about the man he is to-day, and the things that interested him in America. They ranged from the American woman, about whom he says little that has not been said before, to the fourth dimension (and even the fifth and sixth), in discussing which he flounders about delightfully, with the reader in his wake. Herein lies part of the worth of his book. Wheir he feels confident about anything he expresses himself directly; when, as in his musings on the time theories, he is not sure of himself (and who can be?), he does not pretend; but his own puzzlement, the questions he asks himself and cannot answer, stimulate the reader far more than any dogmatic statement could.

The Grand Canyon — And Crime. In America, besides the Grand Canyon, about which he is fiercely enthusiastic ("At last, in all my travels, I had arrived, and there had been no anti-climax, and my imagination, after weeks or months of expectant dreaming, had not cried, 'Is that all?'"') he thought much about a phenomenon upon which other tourists have remarked — the attitude of the people toward organised crime. ("Not a tropical underworld of hot blood and passions," but "a chilly, grey, cellar-like, fungus world of greed, calculated violence and a cold sensuality.") He noted that an ordinary, good citizen would tell tales of the underworld, "but obviously he took such horrors for granted, as an Eskimo might regard his long, sunless winter. Graft, perjury, corruption, murder —■ these were to him among the realities, the given conditions, of life. While denouncing the morals of the people in this did ;; not'seem to question iti, right exist*at all. It did not seem to .occur to him that it ought to be suppressed like an outbreak of plague.*' This detached, cynical attitude, Mr. Priestley concludes, is "the finest possible protection for evil. Under that knowing glance and shrug, it could flourish for ever."

Since he wrote "The Good Companions," Mr. Priestley says, he has not met twenty-five persons who have not blamed him, either for having written it, or for not having written other novels just like it. One party denounced him as "a hearty, insensitive lowbrow," the other as "a gloomv high" brow." "Xow, merely by publishing anything at all, I must put myself, right and left, in the wrong." riiere is snmc substance in that apprehension. This book will not please all the people that his novels pleased, but it will increase the total number of his readers.