Skip to main content
Read page text
page 10
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. J. B. Priestley, ‘Preface, or The Grumbler’s Apology’, 1949
page 11
Valerie Grove – Introduction – I n a cloud of pipe smoke, J. B. Priestley told his son Tom: ‘I always knew what I was going to do with myself, and I’ve never regretted making writing my profession.’ After another puff, he added, ‘I’m more a writer than a human being, I think.’ This strikingly self-aware declaration was made in front of Tom’s ­camera, during what was planned as an affectionate tele­vision portrait of his father for his 90th birthday. But since JBP died at 89, the film went out on his death, in 1984. The programme showed viewers the familiar image of John Boynton Priestley, OM, popularly known as Jack, in the library of Kissing Tree House near Stratford-upon-Avon, the splendid Georgian manor where he spent his last twenty-five years with his third wife, Jacquetta Hawkes. Here was that scowly, jowly face, usually photographed under a black hat. ‘A stocky figure in a plum-coloured velvet jacket and a mask of melancholy resignation’, as one biographer put it. Priestley agreed. Coming from the West Riding of Yorkshire, which ‘favours the grumbler’, he wrote, ‘I have always been a grumbler. I was designed for the part, for I have a sagging face, a weighty underlip, ix

Page Text

View plaintext

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.

J. B. Priestley, ‘Preface, or The Grumbler’s Apology’, 1949

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content