JB Priestley's "An Inspector Calls" has lasted. Photo by Fairfax Media via Getty Images/Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images
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In Britain, literature seldom changes minds or steers events as much as critics — let alone authors — wish it would. But in the summer of 1945, just as the Second World War ended, three works surfaced in quick succession that did leave a lasting stamp on their nation’s wider culture. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited set in golden stone an idyll — however ironically imagined — of aesthetic, and patrician, faith and grace. George Orwell’s Animal Farm told fairy-tale truths about the corruption of revolutionary idealism and presaged the full-spectrum critique of totalitarianism in his Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The third leg of this post-war triptych has, arguably, cast the longest shadow, but made the faintest mark. J.B. Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls, both a sturdy warhorse of the GCSE syllabus and a renewed theatre favourite since director Stephen Daldry’s 1992 production rescued it from the sneers of posterity, premiered in Leningrad and Moscow in September 1945.
Why in the Soviet Union? On a practical level, Priestley had dashed it off quickly and no West End house had room in its schedule. More profoundly, the Soviet hero’s welcome extended to drama and dramatist alike proved that, a few months after Hitler’s downfall, the mutual warmth of the wartime alliance had outlasted Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. On both sides: after his lap of honour, Priestley published glowing reports of his Russian journey in Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express.
For sure, Priestley’s mysterious Inspector Goole — who surges out of the night in 1912 to unmask the complicity of every member of a smug industrialist’s clan in the suicide of a despairing woman — does belong to the Popular Front era of high-minded, fuzzy-edged reformism. The Inspector’s warning to the guilty plutocrats, that “We do not live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other”, mandates no specific form of remedy beyond a change of heart. Feelgood vagueness often aids longevity. Besides, the them-and-us, capital-and-labour dualism of the pre-1914 Birling family business already felt antique in 1945 — as Priestley above all knew.
The play survives not for its message but its myth, of the ghostly avenger who makes conscience squirm and brings demons to the light.
Despite his robust presence in education, film and stage, the writer who could imbue bread-and-butter realism with this aura of strangeness and grandeur lacks the high-status devotees who surround the other literary weather-makers of summer 1945. Orwell commands near-universal reverence; Waugh the wary respect even of ideological foes (such as the late Christopher Hitchens). Priestley, the self-proclaimed “classless sort of man” who sought to unite the string quartet, the variety act and the football crowd into a single democratic culture, has suffered the fate of the “middlebrow” conciliator (he preferred “broadbrow”) in a polarised age.
A proud all-purpose hack, he wrote voluminously (for over half a century, from the early 1920s to the late 1970s), earned much, and enjoyed his fame. Virginia Woolf, with whom he predictably sparred, sniped at him as a “tradesman of letters”. The lad from the Bradford wool office gloried in such snubs. As well he might: a decade later, his morale-boosting wartime radio talks could reach audiences of 15 million.
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