Delight, page 1
J. B. Priestley was born in Bradford in 1894. He was educated locally and later worked as a junior clerk in a wool office. After serving in the army throughout the First World War he went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before setting up in London as a critic and renowned essayist. He won great acclaim and success with his novel The Good Companions, 1929. This and his next novel Angel Pavement, 1930, earned him an international reputation. Other notable works of fiction include Bright Day, Lost Empires and The Image Men.
In 1932 he began a new career as a dramatist with Dangerous Corner, and went on to write many other well-known plays such as Time and the Conways, Johnson Over Jordan, Laburnum Grove, An Inspector Calls, When We Are Married, Eden End, The Linden Tree and A Severed Head which he wrote with Iris Murdoch. His plays have been translated and performed all over the world and many have been filmed. An Inspector Calls is still taught on the GCSE English Literature curriculum.
In the 1930s Priestley became increasingly concerned about social justice. English Journey, published in 1934, was a seminal account of his travels through England. During the Second World War his regular Sunday night radio Postscripts attracted audiences of up to 14 million. Priestley shored up confidence and presented a vision of a better world to come.
In 1958 he became a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and later in life represented the UK at two UNESCO conferences.
Among his other important books are Literature and Western Man, a survey of Western literature over the past 500 years, his memoir Margin Released, and Journey Down a Rainbow which he wrote with his third wife, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. J. B. Priestley refused both a knighthood and a peerage but accepted the Order of Merit in 1977. He died in 1984. His ashes were buried near Hubberholme Church in the Yorkshire Dales.
Copyright
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First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1949
This edition published by HarperNorth in 2023
1 EDITION
Copyright © J. B. Priestley, republished by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of the Estate of J. B. Priestley 2023
Introduction: © Tom Priestley
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Source ISBN: 9780008585709
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Version 2023-03-16
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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9780008585709
Dedication
For the family
These small amends
With the old monster’s love
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
Preface – or the Grumbler’s Apology
1Fountains
2Shopping in small places
3Detective stories in bed
4After finishing some work
5Meeting a friend
6Decks in early morning
7A walking tour
8Trying new blends of tobacco
9Gin and tonic, 1940
10Smoking as worship
11Discovering Tomlinson
12And the Marx Brothers
13Cosy planning
14Getting out of New York
15Buying music to escape tune-haunting
16Moment during rehearsal
17Sound of a football
18Romantic recognition
19Old photograph
20Coming home
21Smell of Tahiti
22Chamber music at home
23Charades
24My first article
25Celebrating at parties
26Making writing simple
27Books and music and furnished houses
28Shakespeare re-discovered
29The conductors
30Theatre curtains
31Fantastic theories
32Smoking in hot bath
33A bit of writing
34Walk in pine wood
35Answering back
36Manly talk
37Frightening civil servants
38Fiddling while Rome burns
39Family silliness, domestic clowning
40New box of matches
41Playing with small children
42Mineral water in bedrooms of foreign hotels
43Coming of the idea
44Stereoscope
45Seeing the actors
46Sunday papers in the country
47Long trousers
48Planning travel
49Metaphysics
50Early childhood and the treasure
51Reading in bed about foul weather
52Having one’s fortune told
53Wood
54Comic characters
55Money for nothing
56Children’s games
57Suddenly doing nothing
58Pleasure and gratitude of children
59Atmosphere of billiards
60Knowing a poet
61Giving advice
62Delight in writing
63Not going
64Quietly malicious chairmanship
65Secret Brotherhoods
66Cosy with work
67Other people’s weaknesses
68Bragging
69Plots
70Being solemn about one’s tastes
71Dreams
72The ironic principle
73Truth and fiction
74Three lighthouses
75This small world
76Discovering Vermeer
77Lawn tennis
78Not having to read books
79Homage to Moszkowski
80Locusts I have known
81Being recognised
82First time abroad
83Transport in films
84Streets like stage sets
85Nature as last consolation
86China and the Chinese
87Preparing for old age
88Moments in the morning
89Orchestras tuning up
90Dancing
91Escaping from time
92Bass voices
93Blossom
94Free passes
95Making stew
96No school report
97Seeing the North
98After a concert
99Buying books
100View from my study
101Reading about the Pink ’Un set
102Orchestras creeping in to piano
103Cooking picnics
104Beginning to cast a play
105Waking to smell bacon, etc.
106Sketches of C. J. Holmes
107Memoranda self
108Van Hoven
109Solemn antics of boyhood
110Departing guests
111Timeless mornings
112Women and clothes
113The delight that never was
114But this is where we came in
About the Publisher
Preface
or the Grumbler’s Apology
I have always been a grumbler. All the records, going back to earliest childhood, establish this fact. Probably I arrived here a malcontent, convinced that I had been sent to the wrong planet. (And I feel even now there is something in this.) I was designed for the part, for I have a sagging face, a weighty underlip, what I am told is “a saurian eye”, and a rumbling but resonant voice from which it is difficult to escape. Money could not buy a better grumbling outfit.
In the West Riding of Yorkshire, where I spent my first nineteen years, all local customs and prejudices favour the grumbler. To a good West Riding type there is something shameful about praise, that soft Southern trick. But fault-finding and blame are constant and hearty. The edge of criticism up there is sharpened every morning. So the twilight of Victoria and the brief but golden afternoon of Edward the Seventh discovered Jackie Priestley grumbling away, a novice of course but learning fast. A short spell of the Wool Trade − and in no trade do you hear more complaints and bitter murmurs − developed my technique. Then came the First W
Not that they ever understood what I was up to. We have always been at cross-purposes here. The feminine view appears to be that grumbling only makes things worse, whereas I have always held that a fine grumble makes things better. If, for example, an hotel gives me a bad breakfast, I have only to grumble away for a few minutes to feel that some reasonable balance has been restored: the grumble has been subtracted from the badness of the breakfast. So it is no use crying to me “Oh − do be quiet! It’s bad enough without your grumbling.” My mind does not move along these lines. If I have not had a good breakfast, I argue, at least I have had a good grumble. Thus I have always been innocent of the major charge − that of trying deliberately to make things worse.
Another point for the defence is that I have always looked and sounded much worse than I felt. When I am displeased − but not when I am pleased, I gather − for some reason, still hidden from me, I tend to overact my part. Often when I am feeling merely annoyed, a little put out, I appear to be blazingly angry or lost in the deepest sulks. The appearance is larger than the reality. And I have suffered much from this suggestion of the theatre or the public platform in my private behaviour. Time and again my real feelings have been misinterpreted. I may not have been enjoying myself, but at least I have not been suffering as intensely as the rest of the company imagined. (When rehearsals are going badly, I am often rushed out of the theatre, given drinks, flattered, cajoled, simply to keep me out of sight of the players, those pampered creatures.) Once, years ago, at a large party, when I was grumbling as usual, a young woman who was a stranger to me turned on me fiercely and told me I had better go home instead of trying to spoil other people’s pleasure. I was taken aback, and may be said to have stayed aback ever since. But though I would gladly send that woman an inscribed copy of this book − and regret I do not know her name, and hope all is well with her − the fact remains that she was misjudging me. The growling she overheard − for, dash it, I wasn’t talking to her − was a kind of small talk, almost a social gesture. My discontent was not meant to be taken seriously. It was that old unconscious exaggeration again. And although perhaps I always ought to have been more careful, for this I am more to be pitied than to be blamed.
A final point for the defence. Much of my writing, I have no doubt, consists of adverse criticism of this life, and so is a sort of grumbling at large. There is some self-indulgence here, I will grant you, but there is also a speck or two of something better. For I have always felt that a writer, if only to justify some of his privileges, should speak for those who cannot easily speak for themselves. He may run into trouble − and I have gone headlong into whole cliffsides of it − but at least nobody is going to give him the sack, leave him with a mortgage and four children who need shoes, if he comes out and tells the truth. I have therefore often grumbled in print more on other people’s behalf than on my own. Again, I am always led instinctively into opposition to the party in power and to all persons dressed in authority. I am a toady in reverse. I would not describe myself as a born rebel, for I have no fanaticism, but there is in me a streak of the jeering anarchist, who parts company even with his friends when they have succeeded to power. Moreover, having been fortunate in many respects, I have felt a dislike of appearing too conscious of good fortune, and some of my fault-finding and complaining has been a determined avoidance of hubris, like so much “touching wood”. And of course this has meant more grumbling.
So many a decent fellow, showing a better face to his bad luck than ever I appear to have shown to my good luck, must have cried in his exasperation: “Does this chap never enjoy anything?” And my reply, long overdue, is this book. And nobody can complain that I have waited until everything in the garden was lovely. The present state of the world – but no, we know about that. We can also bolt the door of the madhouse of our economic life, public and private, ignoring for once the mopping and mowing throng of bank managers, accountants, tax collectors. But during the period when I was trying to sort out, capture, record these memories and impressions of delight, I have had the nastiest flop I have ever had in the Theatre, we have coped with two weddings, sundry illnesses, and the longest and noisiest moving-house I ever remember, and I have had most of my remaining teeth pulled out, two at a time at intervals nicely calculated to keep every nerve in my head jangling, together with a minor sentence of forced fasting and reluctant self-mortification. In fact, most of the anxieties and miseries of an author, a parent, a householder, and an ageing sedentary male have been thrust upon me; and the life of Reilly, which some people imagine me to lead, has been further away than a fading dream. Nevertheless, through the prevailing thick and the occasional thin, I have kept close to this little book on Delight, so that it could be my apology, my bit of penitence, for having grumbled so much, for having darkened the breakfast table, almost ruined the lunch, nearly silenced the dinner party, for all the fretting and chafing, grousing and croaking, for the old glum look and the thrust-out lower lip. So, my long-suffering kinsfolk, my patient friends, may a glimmer of that delight which has so often possessed me, but perhaps too frequently in secret, now reach you from these pages.
1
Fountains
Fountains. I doubt if I ever saw one, even the smallest, without some tingling of delight. They enchant me in the daytime, when the sunlight ennobles their jets and sprays and turns their scattered drops into diamonds. They enchant me after dark when coloured lights are played on them, and the night rains emeralds, rubies, sapphires. And, best of all, when the last colour is whisked away, and there they are in a dazzling white glory! The richest memory I have of the Bradford Exhibition of my boyhood, better than even the waterchute or the Somali Village or the fireworks, is of the Fairy Fountain, which changed colour to the waltzes of the Blue Hungarian Band, and was straight out of the Arabian Nights. And I believe my delight in these magical jets of water, the invention of which does credit to our whole species, is shared by ninety-nine persons out of every hundred. But where are they, these fountains we love? We hunger for them and are not fed. A definite issue could be made out of this, beginning with letters to the Times, continuing with meetings and unanimous resolutions and deputations to Downing Street, and ending if necessary with processions and mass demonstrations and some rather ugly scenes. What is the use of our being told that we live in a democracy if we want fountains and have no fountains? Expensive? Their cost is trifling compared to that of so many idiotic things we are given and do not want. Our towns are crammed with all manner of rubbish that no people in their senses ever asked for, yet where are the fountains? By all means let us have a policy of full employment, increased production, no gap between exports and imports, social security, a balanced This and a planned That, but let us also have fountains − more and more fountains − higher and higher fountains − fountains like wine, like blue and green fire, fountains like diamonds − and rainbows in every square. Crazy? Probably. But with hot wars and cold wars we have already tried going drearily mad. Why not try going delightfully mad? Why not stop spouting ourselves and let it be done for us by graceful fountains, exquisite fountains, beautiful fountains?
