‘Found, Lost, Found or The English Way of Life’ by J.B. Priestley

I am a great admirer of J.B Priestley’s writing – both his fiction and non-fiction. Several of his works have given me enormous pleasure, particularly ‘Angel Pavement’ and ‘An English Journey’, both of which were written in his heyday before the Second World War. For the past few years I have read a single Priestley book each year and plan to continue with this no-binge reading strategy of delayed gratification as I do with other much loved writers such as Anthony Trollope, Arnold Bennett, Ian McKewan and William Boyd. I want to be reading them with pleasure well into my dotage, if of course, I am granted one.

I chose this Priestley because it was published fifty years ago this month in April 1976 and I wanted a nice comfort read to sink into over the Easter weekend. It was the last novel he published – a final volume of memoirs followed – prior to his death in 1984. He was at this time past eighty and well past his best. ‘Found, Lot, Found’ does not begin to approach the virtuosity of Priestley’s early work. It is rather brief and sardonic, without the trademark optimism and celebration of Englishness that make his finest books so enjoyable and atypical. I still have to say though, that I enjoyed reading this and would certainly recommend it to someone who likes Priestley’s kind of writing and is interested the way his writing evolved during a long and pretty successful literary career.

The alternative title / subtitle is ‘The English Way of Life’ and this indicates that his purpose here – albeit in a very lightly worn manner – is to use a quite clever and original plot as the spine on which to base a series of scenes which in their different ways look to provide something of a portrait of England as perceived by JB in the mid 1970s. It does not really succeed in this respect, although there are passages which I found delightful.

Like many of his proud and patriotic generation, who had fought in one war and survived another with some bruises, Priestley found the post-1960s social revolution to be both fascinating and baffling. He was a liberal-minded fellow who was notably fond of sex, and so was in no way shocked by or disapproving of the changes in personal behaviour that were occurring. But he was much less impressed by experimentalist artistic endeavour and by the growth of a bureaucratic state, and it is these developments that he has some fun with in this novel. At one point, the central protagonist, one Tom Dekker, boards a train and sits in the same compartment as two young theatre directors of a type not inclined to the kind of plays Priestley wrote:

Batters had begun explaining his production of As You Like It, for some university town in the Midde West. ‘From the first I’d cut all that boring Forest of Arden stuff. My Arden was a little town in the Middle West.’

‘Modern dress then, naturally,’ said Riptin

‘Not quite old boy. About 1910. I was trying to tie it up to one of the earliest motorbike rallies in those parts. The Duke was a senior official of the rally who’d had to resign. And now listen to this. Against a lot of opposition, I insisted on taking out all the middle seats and building an easy ramp from the back up to the apron, so the cast could enter through the audience on motorbikes –

‘Now wait a minute, Batters old son. Don’t tell me you had all the cast riding motor cycles up a ramp – ‘

‘Not possible of course. I’d only four chaps who could manage that ramp, but what with helmets and goggles and leather togs nobody knew who they were. they rode off on the prompt side and then after a minute the people playing Rosalind and Celia and Touchstone and Orlando and Jaques made their entrances.’

‘What about trees and deers and all that jazz?’

‘Out – the lot. that worked okay. after all, the people round there had never seen any big trees or deer. Moreover, I did some original casting. Not only did I have a young actor playing Rosalind – as they did at the National a few years ago – but I also had a girl playing Orlando – and I don’t think that’s ever been done before, outside girls’ schools of course. Created a sensation – that and the motorbikes. I got another years’ contract. Go back in September, taking Gilda with me this time. You remember Gilda?’

Dekker longed to ask a few pointed questions about this version of As You Like It but felt that any interruption from a stranger might shut them up. However, very soon Riptin was explaining his interpretation on Antony and Cleopatra.

'I'm turning them on down there', he told Batters. 'And why? Because now it's a Roman political play. The love story was never any blooddy good. Think of all the top actresses who've played Cleopatra and always been a disappointment. Octavia Caesar's my central character and I've built up Enobarbus. Of course I've had to shift things around a bit. Brought in two scenes from Julius Caesar, and afriend of mine has done three extra scenes for me - smashing!, goes like a bomb now. Better than Brecht'.

This is not so dissimilar from Evelyn Waugh at his best and demonstrates that even in old age Priestley could sometimes hit the mark with panache. But he does not really manage it for most of this novel which feels much more laboured.

The other strength here is the plot, which is clever and rather sweet. It's a romantic comedy really involving two people in their thirties / early forties who have recently ended unsuccessful relationships and, while keen on one another, are cautious about committing to a new one. The contrivance is that the woman, Kate, tests Tom Dekker's declared commitment by disappearing into the country somewhere to work on a play she is writing. She does not tell him where she is going, except that it is somewhere in England. He then has to find her. Rather infuriatingly the book's title gives away the denouement, which I wish it hadn't. The plot serves Priestley's wider purpose well though because it means that Dekker has to visit all kinds of people in order to pick up the clues he needs to find Kate, and this provides the opportunity for the author to make his observations about England - as he saw it - in the 1970s.

So a touch disappointing in some respects, but reading this has in no way dimmed my enthusiasm for J.B. I will carry on tracking down out of print titles periodically and write about them here.