A moment with JB Priestley

For much of the 20th century, John Boynton Priestley (1894 -1984) was an important voice in British letters. In this essay from a new collection, written in the tumultuous mid-Sixties, he reflects on the moments that make life worth living

Priestley in later life, when his ‘moments’ chiefly came to him through music (Getty Images)

All my life, I now realise, I have been nourished and secretly sustained by certain moments that have always seemed to me to be magical. If I have completed the tasks and shouldered the burdens all the way, finishing the marches without handing over my rifle and pack or dropping out, it is neither conscience nor energy that has kept me going but the memory and the hope of this magic. It has visited me before; it will come again. Sooner or later I would taste the honey-dew once more. And if this is to have a romantic temperament, then I have a romantic temperament.

If there is immaturity here, then I am still immature in my seventy-first year. But here I shall fire a few rounds in the direction of the enemy camp. People who in their confident maturity reject this magic, who have instant “nothing-but” explanations of everything, are either kept going by their vanity – and the vanity of severely rational persons is astounding – or not sustained at all, existing hungrily in despair, seeking power at all costs, trying various brutal excesses, or stiffening into automata.

I can imagine an age, in which this magic has been explained away, that would cover the world with zombies all manipulated and directed by power-maniacs. In such an age, power and organisation and machinery would be everything, poetry would be nothing. How far off is it?

Sometimes I have wondered if the seemingly inexplicable rages of the young, violently destructive now in so many different countries, might not be explained by the non-arrival of these magical moments. Something expected, promised at birth, is missing. Where among all these prompt deliveries of Grade-A pasteurised is the milk of Paradise? However, it is true that for one lad who is breaking windows there are 100, not mentioned in the papers, who never pick up a brick. And it is not for me to say that our Pop culture never brings its magical moments. But what is certain is that it does not attempt the grand and sublime, which is what we cry out for in our youth.

On the other hand, it is equally certain that whenever the Eroica or the Choral Symphony is being performed, the cousins of the brick-throwing lads will be there, if necessary standing for hours. The contemporary scene is now so wide and complicated that anything can be proved from it. I must return to myself.

Describing an innings by Jessup, Neville Cardus wrote: ‘He at once took the game out of the prison of cause and effect.’ That is what these moments have always done for me. That is why they are magic. Two and two suddenly make 25. In a flash they add another dimension to existence. They award us, for as long as they last, a bonus, huge, irrational, glorious.

We win a prize from God knows where. It isn’t earned and deserved; that would be justice or fair dealing, a decent cause producing a satisfactory effect; whereas this is magic. It belongs to the fairytale world, in which the idlest of the three lads in the forest meets the princess, and hardly anything that happens could be explained by experts writing in the weekly journals.

Indeed, the moments are entirely beyond the reach of experts, who, I am convinced, never experience them. They favour the woolly minded, of whom, I am proud to declare, I am one. Brush away all wool, give yourself a first-rate razor-sharp intellect, and you will go far, and probably a hell of a long way from this magic. This is one reason why men who have arrived where they have always wanted to be are impressive but not much fun to be with, so that their women so often look depressed. Whatever they may say, women believe in a magical world. They are seen in the prison of cause and effect only on visiting days.

It is my experience that these moments arrive as and when they choose. They cannot be summoned, nor even induced, beckoned. But of course some circumstances are more favourable than others. It is just possible I might be visited by one of these moments while reading a report on the tin-plate industry or a list of arthritic patients in Bedfordshire, but all odds are heavily against it. On the other hand, I have found the arts most generous with these magical moments, and this is one good reason – there are several others, mark you – for hanging around with them.

If this last phrase suggests an absence of painstaking study, anxious application, then it is doing what I intended it to do. I suspect – though of course I am writing within the limits of my own temperament – that you have to hold yourself a bit loosely, not bothering about cultural improvement, for the magic to work.

In the long run, which is where I am now, music has worked best for me, though when I was younger I think literature and drama were neck-and-neck with it. The visual arts have given me enormous enjoyment – and indeed I am a bit of a holiday painter myself – but for some reason obscure to me they have rarely brought me these magical moments. Perhaps my ear provides a shorter cut to enchantment than my eye.

Certainly music may do the trick when it is far below its highest level. Let nobody imagine I have to wait for Bach’s B minor Mass or Beethoven’s late quartets. To give the first example that occurs to me – and I could offer dozens – in the opening movements of his Cello Concerto and his D minor Symphony, Dvorak makes his woodwind trail after his main themes – they are like sunlit wisps of dissolving cloud – and to this day the magic has not utterly faded from them. Again, listening recently to a new recording of Elgar’s First

Symphony (which I had long thought I didn’t care for), I found that with the muted trombones at the end of the third movement, the Adagio, the sudden magic seemed almost numinous, as if the gods walked the earth again. Enough, enough!

How far and with what complexity and depth the arts interact with life, we do not know, though some brave writers – Proust, for instance – have refused to avoid the subject. It may be that people who know and care nothing about the arts have known as many magical moments as the rest of us have – perhaps even more if they happen to be introverts living in lonely places. (But probably far fewer if they happen to be ambitious politicians, editors of sensational newspapers, brisk salesmen, New York taxi drivers.) There seems to me no difference in quality between the moments coming by way of the arts and those that arrive, quite unexpectedly, in our ordinary daily life. These are more remarkable than the immensely heightened moments of travel, of which most of us could furnish examples – and perhaps too often do.

In my life I have suddenly known the greatest happiness always when there was no apparent reason for it – when out of nowhere there came floating up the great blue bubble. I shall never forget walking once, some years ago, along Piccadilly and across Leicester Square in a blinding snowstorm, which made walking difficult and did not seem to me at all picturesque and romantic, and yet I walked the whole way in a kind of ecstasy, as if in another world, magical and immortal. And there was no reason for it at all, not the tiniest scrap of any possible cause.

It is the same, at least in my experience, with personal relationships. I have never needed any help from manuals on how to get rich in the private commerce between the sexes; but even so, I think we are now inclined to make too much out of the bedroom scenes in our love stories. It is my experience that even in love the magical moments come when they please, often when we are wearing all our clothes and are far from the bedroom.

I can remember a moment of complete insight and perfect understanding, as if one had been given the freedom of a strange continent, that arrived in a dreary little teashop near the ministry from which I had extracted the lady of my choice. There were not even any words, just a meeting of eyes above the teacups, but a magical meeting, in which there was the promise of many happy years, an unearned bonus if there ever was one.

So long as we experience these moments, we live in a magical world. (And don’t let anybody talk you out of it, boy.) I was arguing the other day with a clever young man who said that we are machines – extraordinarily elaborate, intricate, delicate, subtle – but machines. I said that we weren’t so long as we remained open-ended, with one end open to the collective unconsciousness, the whole heritage of earth life, and the other open to influences beyond our understanding. And perhaps it is when we are suddenly opened a little more at either end that two and two seem to make 25, another dimension is added, we taste the honey-dew, and all is magical.

Of course the moments do not arrive as often as they did, but I soldier on in the belief that I have not yet used up my ration, that there are still a few more to come.

“The Moments” (1966) is extracted from ‘Grumbling at Large: Selected Essays of JB Priestley’ (Notting Hill Editions, £12 pre-order until 20 July launch; £14.99 thereafter)

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