Brian Cathcart's seasonal selection from the New Statesman archive is a grumpy JB Priestley looking forward to 1964
Taken from the New Statesman archive, 27 December 1963
I trawled the bound volumes for a cheerful Christmas piece, but besides a couple by Robert Lynd, whom I mustn’t overuse, I found nothing that had weathered the years. There were fewer seasonal trimmings in years gone by, and perhaps merriment has not always been a strong point of the magazine. Priestley in a grump, with some New Year resolutions, does very well instead.
Selected by Brian Cathcart
You must first understand that 1964 is an important year for me. If I can live through two-thirds of it I shall reach 70. I am of course in my 70th year now, but it is 1964 that will make me feel I am in it, a genuine 70-year-old. I have never been much of a New-Year-resolution man, never feeling I ought to sort myself out to fit the calendar. But this New Year is different, and I feel I ought to encounter it in a different fashion, armed if only lightly with a few resolutions. These are entirely individual and personal, strictly between me and 1964; I seek no converts; I start no new movements; and if not a single reader agrees with what follows, I don’t care a damn. And if it possible to care less than that, I shall try for it in 1964.
Though not cutting off all help to certain excellent funds, I shall make no attempt from 1 January onwards to achieve a sort of global sympathy. If the Patagonians are having a bad time, if Kamchatka is being ruined, I will say I am sorry, but I do not propose to feel very sorry. I have not enough of this precious stuff to go round. I must be able to attend to those ‘minute particulars’. People I know in Alveston, Warwickshire, and London W1 are not going to be made miserable because I am worrying about the Patagonians and Kamchatka. If we insist upon being sorry for everybody, we shall end by having no real sympathy with anybody.
This does not mean I shall stop being an idealist. I have never been an idealist. I am not a man of ideals, and, indeed, detest them. If I attack – as I have so often done in these columns – nuclear weapons, Topside, Tory deception and self-deception, it is not because they run counter to my ideals, for I have none, but because they seem to me opposed to plain common sense. And here there will be no marked change in 1964. These present trends (I have just been visited by someone from the BBC and am suffering from a slight infection) will merely be continued.
But in other matters I shall take a stronger line. For example, long before any topic has been flogged to death, I shall withhold all attention from it. Up to now I have hung on, hoping that some new light might be thrown on the subject, suffering tedium for hours and hours; but in 1964 I shall assume they are all busy, in print or on the air, flogging it to death, and I shall hurry away early, to read a book, talk about something else or listen to gramophone records. This is particularly important after somebody dies. Any regret, compassion, sense of loss, we may feel cannot withstand the determined and highly organised wailings of the professional mourners; and I shall turn their pages or switch them off before they have turned grief into resentment.
I shall reduce my political reading, viewing, listening, to the barest minimum. Nobody need tell me that some party image is better this Tuesday than it was last Friday; or analyse some wretched little by-election as if it were the Day of Judgment. I will take my home politics on the broadest possible lines, thank you. And no more of those long pieces lifting the veil in Moscow, and proving that Kutsatov is coming up and Brassavich going down; or those Washington cocktail-party revelations proving that Senator Dillwater has the edge on Senator Blowfirst. Don’t tell me; I know that the future of the civilised world depends on what is happening among these types. But then if I read much more of this stuff, I shan’t care what happens to the world. As for all that bogus expertise about ‘first strike’ and ‘second strike’ and ‘overkill’, I have regarded it from the first as the ravings of solemn lunatics. All I can do in 1964 is to tell myself it does not even exist.
Now for the arts. Unless I know the critic and respect his or her judgment, I propose not to take the slightest notice of all those ‘rave quotes’ we are always reading. In 1964 I can no longer be taken in. If I miss something good, then I miss it. And probably it was not intended for me, anyhow. My taste was formed too long ago. So I detest harsh, jerky, irritable music, like the company of some neurotic who keeps kicking the furniture and biting his nails. I can take non-representational painting and enjoy some of it; but there seems to be a lot of impudent daubing about. And I confess to a prejudice against sculpture that is not solid and rounded but very thin and wiry and scratchy, as if its creator had been inspired by the sight of half-starved fowls. To be frank, I am tired of shock tactics in the arts.
We are always being told that some brilliant newcomer is ‘disturbing’. But the people he disturbs are the very people who are already disturbed. He never reaches the people who are blandly complacent and need disturbing. So a small minority somehow exists by taking in one another’s neuroses. And an avant garde is busy cutting the ground from underneath its feet: the anti-novelists are killing the novel, the anti-play is emptying the theatres, the anti-film is leaving the cinemas wide open to claptrap. For years now literature has been something that is written about, lectured on, but not read and enjoyed. You can attend courses on the new English dramatists but cannot find them where they ought to be – in the theatre. It is not the arts themselves that people in the mass despise and ignore – they will queue up for Shakespeare, Beethoven, Goya – but the contemporary arts. This may be because such people are conventional and stupid. But it is just possible too that what many contemporary artists offer the ordinary unfashionable public is something, perhaps arid, dusty, despairing, that the public does not want. After all, it is one thing to be a critic and to be paid for praising work that reflects your own private despair; and quite another thing to work all day and then pay money to be told that your life is not worth living.
I shall enter 1964 with the conviction that there is too much genius about and not enough talent. This is not a sneer. I mean exactly what I say. We are offered far too much work based on the assumption that its creator is a man or genius; it is obviously careless and botched and messy; but of course that does not matter if sheer genius is blazing there. But if it is not there, if there is no new vision of this life, if the centre is hollow, then, talent being absent, the thing is a dead loss. Shakespeare had genius, if ever a man had, but he had also – and in spite of some fits of indolence most industriously made use of it – enormous talent; and if the genius is not working, the talent is, assembling and arranging and shaping and persuading, making sure the pudding is properly mixed and cooked. Too many advanced playwrights and novelists now invite us to dinner and, when we arrive, wave us towards a table covered with raw meat, uncooked vegetables, eggs and flour and sugar and salt, with not an appetising dish in sight. If they are geniuses, this may work, but if they are not – and, after all, the odds are heavily against it – we go away hungry and angry.
A friend of mine, a critic but not of fiction, said he did not like certain younger novelists because they gave him nothing but only seemed to want to take away what he already had. I feel ready to advance into 1964 using this criterion on a fairly broad front. If a writer has nothing to offer me but his total despair, he can keep it. (He is probably writing out of vanity, anyhow.) I have lived 70 years – and not in any ivory tower or rose garden – and have arrived at certain conclusions about life and men and women. If a writer can add something, enrich my view, deepen my understanding, then I am all for him. But if he has nothing to offer me but his deafness, blindness and bitterness, I don’t want him. We are suffering now, in intellectual and aesthetic circles, from a snobbery of pessimism. Just as washing on TV advertising has to be whiter and whiter and whiter, so avant garde writing, straight from Paris, has to be blacker and blacker and blacker. Any week now, some Left Bank lad of 18, a wreck after several years of drink and drugs and homosexual affairs with elderly syphilitic tramps, will be blackest, and win the jackpot. But not with money of mine, he won’t.
Already an old square, I propose in 1964 to be even squarer. I have no desire to bully teenagers into trying to like what I like, and so long as they are out of my hearing, they can scream their heads off; but on the other hand the mass media must stop trying to Beatle me. At the point where teenage-herding, adolescent hysteria and high-pressure salesmanship all meet, there will probably be just as much sound and fury in 1964 as there has been in 1963; but nobody will do nicely out of explaining their social significance to me. Or, for that matter, the social significance of anything else. Any of that stuff needed here will be produced in and for the home market and will not be imported.
There will be no warm welcome from old J.B. to anything about Education, on which I already cast a glazing eye. I know, I know; it is all desperately important, but so long as people are ready to spend £1,000 million on higher education and about fourpence on civilising our urban life, the environment of that education, I cannot take them seriously. Why have more lectures on literature and courses on drama in towns where bookshops are vanishing and theatres are closing? And if by higher education they really mean more training and degrees for technologists, which is sensible enough, why don’t they say so and have done with it? And if they mean more than that, then let them start civilising our cities and towns before building innumerable hostels for arts students. Real education is not attending lecturers and taking notes and passing examinations; it is the acquisition of knowledge, taste and good values, with or without professors and courses, and here the environment is all-important. At the Coketown vs. University match, Coketwon will win. And we should stop kidding ourselves that it won't.
We English are the great self-kidders: it is out national vice. We do note suffer from a lack of idealists but from a scarcity of cheerful but sharp-minded idealists. The fog gets into our minds. Even the villains of our piece, who allow us to drift from one expensive disaster to another, really mean well, dimly hoping for the best. Being myself as English as steak-and-kidney pud – not to be despised; Boulestin once told me it was our great contribution to international cuisine – I have probably a large helping of self-deception. I will try to trim it a little in 1964, while indulging myself in those matters to which I have already referred.
And a Happy New Year!
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