PRIESTLY REVOLT

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 153, 20 February 1932, Page 2

PRIESTLY REVOLT

A STRONG PROTEST WILL NO LONGER BE CALLED A "GOOD COMPANION." "This is to give notice. On and after this date if at any public dinner or meeting at which I am present I am referred to as 'a good compardon,' I shall forthwith leave the building. There is a limit, and it has long ago been passed. "For over two years I have suffered. I can recognise now, with sinking heart, a certain foolish gleam in the eyes of my fellow-speakers, and I know it means that they are about to call me 'a good companion.' And they all say it as if it was a sudden bold inspiration. Never was a man so pestered and haunted by the title of a book as I ajn. It begiris to look as if I shall go down to the gra.ve (and that at no far distant date) as a confounded good companion," writes J. B. Priestly, author of "Good Companions," in the Evening Standard. "The book itself has sold about quarter of a million copies in this eountry, and still goes on, and its . title, which receives a hundred free advertisements every day, no doubt helped it. But nevertheless I wish I had called it something else. And let us get this straight • once and for all. "The novel is not about some people who were good companions, but about some people who organised a concert party called the Good Companions. The people in question were not idyllically good-natured and selfsacrificing. (Except by comparison with some of the monsters that pass as charaeters now in fiction). They were an ordinary set of fairly decent mummers. Sometimes they were jealous of one another, let one down, biekered and quarelled, and got drunk, were silly and stupid. There was nothing astonishingly noble about them, "But in an expansive moment — after supper — these people agreed to call their concert party the Good Companions; hence the title of the book; hence my misery. It would be just as sensible to keep referring to me as 'an angel' because a later (and in my opinion better) novel of mine is called 'Angel Pavement.' "I Have No Claim." "There is nothing contemptible, I admit, in being known as a good companion. (Though anybody who had been called it as many times as I have would be sick of it.) There are many dubious things in this life, but good companionship is obviously not one of them. But I have no claim to it. I am not one of those jovial, hail-fellow-well-met men who are always to be found, the centre of a jolly group, in. their club smoke rooms. I walk in and walk out of my club so gloomily that even now the servants are suspicious of my standing. I do not slap people on the back, and people do not slap me on the back at least, not more than once. "I am one of those half-shy, halfaggressive fellows (: ee iuiV-riority complex) who are not at a .a. j to get on with at a first meeting, improve a little on acquaintance, but are almost impossible to live with. I am proud, moody, and subject to fits of profound depression. I have no great opinion of my fellow-men. (I may lilce the people in my books, but that is because I have created them myself.) My countenance does not radiate faith and optimism. Nobody rushes me for comfort and cheer. My outlook tends to be pessimistic. I am not very sentimental, and certainly far less so than most of the young 'intellectuals,' who pretend to be so hard-boiled, partly because it is the fashion and partly because they want to cry so badly. The desperately sentimental, nervy, cry-baby author pretending to be very tough is one of the conunon sights in our modern literary world. "Dozens of elderly gentlemen, want1 ing to compliment me, have told me that I am really a Victorian. They could not have said anything that displeased me more. I am not a Victorian, and I should hate to be one. I am as much a child of this age as Mr. Aldous Huxley or Mr. Noel Coward, though I may not have followed its prevailing fashions so closely. That is probably because I have never lived in a small coterie and have knocked up and down more than most bright young authors. (Not that I am young or bright any more.) If I have any affiliations with past literature it is with the eighteenth century novelists, with Fielding and Sterne, rather than with the Victorians, who would have been shocked to a man by most of my opinions. "About once a fortnight- some publisher or editor wants me to write something about Dickens. I cannot imagine why. I am not an authority on Dickens, though I have, like any sensible reader, the heartiest admiration for his great comic and grotesque passages. But I have never been inspired to write a line by Dickens. Just because I have written two long novels that have comic bits in them and are fortunate enough to be popular, people seem to imagine that I spend my days and nights reading Dickens. They are crazy."