Guest review by Graeme Fife: BRIGHT DAY by J B Priestley

 

"Simply, his work rings true, a powerful example of how honesty emerges through the challenges of emotional intelligence."

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

Knowing Priestley through his plays and his experiments with shifts of time I now, belatedly, delight in his novels, discovering another side to a writer whose company I enjoy, whose work is rich in insight, tender and lyrical, muscular and unflinching, by turns. Priestley writes his own life into evocation of times he has known, lived through, learned from, without any blatant intrusion of autobiography. Simply, his work rings true, a powerful example of how honesty emerges through the challenges of emotional intelligence. Bright Day explores Priestley’s fascination with how the flux of time plays on our consciousness, by splitting the narrative between two eras of the central character’s life.

Set in part after the Second World War, the story begins in the lead-up to the First World War. Hope and confidence in those early years, a jaded sense of lost purpose in the aftermath of another shattering conflict, years later.

Gregory Dawson is staying in a hotel on the Cornish coast, working on a screenplay. Two guests arrive – people he knew as a young man in Bruddersford, thin disguise for Priestley’s native Bradford:

"My Bradford, where I was born and where I lived the most exciting and perhaps the most important years of my life is not really a town at all, it is a vast series of pictures in time and space…an autobiographical library…a hundred thousand succeeding states of mind, it is my childhood and
youth." 

Priestley captures the promise, and confusions, of youth, without sentimentality, tracing the progress of callow feelings, of unformed thought, in the gradual maturing of Dawson as a young man through his association with the Alingtons, a family of what seem to him brilliant individuals: sophisticated, stylish, wealthy. He’s drawn to their manifest poise, their sheer ease in a social milieu utterly strange to him, quite other. It’s part of his emergence into young manhood soon to be cast into the horror of the trenches. The shaping experience of war emerges only in casual allusion, but the imprint of that shocking reality resurfaces, almost subliminally, in the slow loss of any essential belief in the worth of what he is doing, labouring over a film script. It feels hollow. Hollywood’s charm has evanesced and, though this does not turn him into a cynic, it helps to impel him into revaluation of what those early years had exposed him to and a psychological blow whose implications he’s never explored or come to terms with. In disillusion, he finds elucidation.

The producer of the film he is writing spells out what underpins that disillusion: "... the power of movies…is frightening…What we are doing is filling a horrible vacuum, where once there were gods and goddesses and then afterwards saints and guardian angels. We are mythologists. We are the only licensed necromancers and wizards, shamans and medicine men. It is not the conscious mind, which we merely tickle but the deep unconscious that is our territory.’ 

And the deep unconscious is what Dawson learns to grapple with, painfully compelled but with frank courage. An old friendship, a renewed acquaintance, the triggers of memory, all push him to a realisation that he’s reached a natural terminus – both in his work and his life – where the call to change in both becomes irresistible.

From the tentative beginnings of his first years of work - in the cloth trade - his journey has taken him far geographically and intellectually, but it’s the need to reconsider, to re-examine, that lies at the heart of this beguiling story. From the New Year toast that father Alington proposes "to Nineteen Fourteen and all that it will bring us – peace, prosperity and friendship" to the recollection, years later, of how "an ageless secret self flitted through bewildering telescoped scenes that ran the chalk trenches of Picardy into Picadilly Circus and jammed Brigg Terrace and Canal Street into Hollywood and Beverley Hills…and cried 'Lost, lost, lost', searched and searched and could never find what was to be found".

But it is, finally, to be found and found through love. A woman Dawson meets on his completion of the script and decision to quit – despite lucrative offers of more work, work which he knows will only leave him feeling emptier – speaks of the death of her husband and repeats those words lost, lost, lost. But determined to confront the loss, she says "and the worst thing to do is turn your face away and hold yourself rigid and not let life go flowing through you. Do you see what I mean, Gregory?"

Bright Day is published by Great Northern Books

Other First World War books:

In Parenthesis by David Jones, reviewed by Graeme Fife

Now All Roads Lead to France by Matthew Hollis, reviewed by Celia Rees

My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Graeme Fife: WEST OF SUNSET by Stewart O'Nan

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history, four studies of the mountain ranges of southern Europe and, like many of us, waits with the patience of Job for decision on a number of manuscripts.

Stewart O’Nan’s multi-layered novel, West of Sunset, weaves a compelling story of many strands. Set in the Hollywood of the late 1930s its cast list features gilded names from the Golden Age of movies – the stars, Bogart, Joan Crawford, Garbo, the studios who made them stars, MGM, Metro, and the writers who wrote the scripts, among them Scott Fitzgerald, in the dying years of his life, contending, through an alcoholic haze, with the cruelties of the movie industry and his wife, Zelda’s, mental illness. She committed to a clinic/asylum, he ricocheting from one ungrateful writing job to the next, ‘as adaptable as a hermit crab’, their hapless daughter, Scottie, without any permanent or secure base – boarding school, her grandmother’s, visits to the clinic, hotel rooms in Hollywood.

It’s a nightmareish world, an existence which parallels the fake dreamscapes of the movies themselves. And west of sunset might be that murky penumbra left when the light fades from the screen and the never-never land of make-believe hits the hard rails of the reality: writers discarded mid-script with neither reason nor apology, the unforgiving demands of the writers’ building - the Iron Lung - the seedy apartment where Fitzgerald works, his neighbours ‘starlets and grips hoping to do better [and] an obese woman who sold her screams to the movies and treated them to free samples, rehearsing at all hours’.

The pressure to deliver is unrelenting – deadlines, endless pots of coffee, working into the small hours, ‘restaging the French revolution as a tragic love story for Garbo’, accommodating the imperious warning of the fading star in need of a hit after a flop: ‘I never die, I never ever lose my man’. This is Crawford, and O’Nan observes that as a star got older, the range of parts got narrower, and so the forlorn urgency to reclaim the glittering heights grew ever more insistent. But, when pretence rules, what certainty is there, can there be? Of his own tortured feelings about Zelda, the beautiful, funny, dazzling creature he married and still cherishes, declined into a woman oscillating between unpredictable states of tenuous reason and incomprehension, her body either haggard or bloated, yet still capable intermittently of thrashing him on the tennis court and swimming like the lithe nymph she’d once been, he reflects: ‘they’d been so miserable together that he’d never invented a happy ending for them’. Is this Fitzgerald or O’Nan? It doesn’t matter. So fully does O’Nan explore the spectral vision of pretence – that’s what they were all engaged in, after all, pretending – that the resonances are painful and telling. It was an environment of bad faith and worse taste. The author, praised lavishly by the producer, goes to the movie screening and sees what he wrote mangled, changed, lost, trashed.

Through all this, Fitzgerald still tries to answer the drive to write another novel, to do once more what he’d done best. And so, the feverish clutching at time, the chasing of scraps of money to keep going, despite promises and offers broken and reneged on, the constant battle with Goldwyn and Mayer ‘and whatever third head of Cerberus guards the gate’. But there is an unlikely redemption.

In Hollywood, Fitzgerald meets and falls in love with the English journalist Sheila Graham - inscrutable, self-possessed, sane, who, in looks, ‘might have been Zelda’s twin’. Their ardent relationship runs like a parallel life, a kind of stability to offset the chaos of his tormented marriage. Graham rebukes his drinking, he reforms, and, in a poignant conclusion to one chapter: ‘Whoever she was, he wanted her, as he wanted these peaceful days to last, and this new life, impossibly, to be his’. Oh, the latent force in that ‘impossibly’.
O’Nan is a writer of quite extraordinary range, author of a corpus of novels which embrace widely diverse styles, scenarios, bases of character and story. His work is infallibly wise, compassionate, fearless in its description of the darker margins of human existence, enthralling, always. West of Sunset is, in my view, one of his finest achievements – and I’ve read all his work – beautifully shaped writing, an unerring pulse of drama, a captivating story, full of pathos, wicked humour and indelible portraits drawn, as it were, from vibrant life. Here’s poor Zelda, in her delirium: ‘Maybe I was never meant to be a salamander, just this poor thing they wrap in sheets and feed when the bell rings. I’m sorry I cost you all those cities all those perfect boulevards with their lights burning down around us in the night.’

Graeme Fife                   
West of Sunset is published by Allen and Unwin, 2015.