Untitled

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21993, 18 January 1937, Page 5

LITERATURE AND REALITY

STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY SCENE URGED

MR J. B. PRIESTLEY’S PLEA

LONDON, December 22,

An urgent appeal to authors to report their own age and to readers not to run away from reality was made by Mr J. B. Priestley in an address at the “Sunday Times book exhibition. „ “I am entirely m sympathy, he said, “with the old point of view that the novelist ought to be an entertainer. If things were better than they are I should not ask anything better for myself. People write and ask me why I don t write another ‘Good Companions. The answer is that I don’t want to. “The world has changed since I wrote that book,” continued Mr Priestley. “We are living in a strangely unsettled world, and I believe you would have very little respect for an author who in these times merely continued to blow his penny whistle. People are changing in their view of what the Author should do. Very often they want to borrow money, but many of the letters I receive are appeals to do something about the state of the world in which we live.

Authors as Guides

“Why should I be dragged into this?” he asked. “Because there is coming into being a feeling that popular authors should be guides, philosophers and friends. It isn’t that they think I have more wisdom, but that I have more time. Young people in particular feel that the writer should be encouraged to report on things because he is politically and economically disinterested. “Another reason is that the author is felt to have a clue to the ordinary human point of view, which every year is in greater danger of being lost as we become more and more organised. The pathetic thing about many citizens of big cities is that they have to go to novels to find real people, because the people they meet are automata, not present to their consciousness any more than the man who takes them up to the fourth floor in the lift.

New Reading Public

“The contemporary writer, if he is worth our respect, must deal with the contemporary scene, report it as he finds it, and humanise it for us,” Mr Priestley said. “We are living in so dangerous an age that literature cannot afford to play. I believe very sincerely that there has arisen in our own time a great new reading public which can, if it wishes, dominate our scene. On this public the future of the world depends, and I am proud to write for at.”