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CHAPTER 1

Priestley The Boy, The Soldier and The Student

We might be close to one of the great revelations that suddenly enlarge and enrich our vision of life. We are, due one. And I believed that this revelation might explode once and for all the bewildering problem of Time.

-J.B. Priestley

John (Jack) Boynton Priestley was born in Bradford, Yorkshire, in 1894. His father, Jonathan, was a schoolmaster who suggested that, on leaving school at sixteen, his ambitious son should pursue a career in the wool trade, an area of business for which Yorkshire was a world leader. In 1910 Jack, as he was known at the time and continued to be known throughout his life, started his working life at Messrs. Helm & Co based in the Swan Arcade, an imposing four-storey building of wrought iron and glass. But this was not the career Jack wished for himself. For him his future lay in words, not in worsted. He sent out various articles to local publications and was taken on in an unpaid position writing articles for a radical, left wing periodical, the Bradford Pioneer. This was in keeping with his own political beliefs, inherited from his father. His articles, actually short essays, were acutely observational and written in a style suggesting far greater age and personal maturity.

This maturity was evidenced in his reading at that time. In his 1964 book Man and Time, Jack describes how one of the most influential discoveries of his life was his encounter with Indian metaphysics fifty years before. This takes us to the period of 1912 to 1914. He describes how the Vedantic concept of Atman fascinated him. This is the idea that at a much deeper level of consciousness we can discover the "essential self" and that this essential self, Atman, is simply part of a single unitary essence which is known as Brahman. Remember, Priestley was only in his late teens at this time and yet he was already fascinated by the idea that we are all simply emanations of a singular consciousness. In Man and Time, he reflected on this:

I can remember the exultation I felt, being in my late teens, when if we have any sympathy at all with speculative thought we long to encounter bold and gigantic metaphysical conclusions.

It is important here to discuss exactly what Vedanta is. Vedanta is the esoteric aspect of Hinduism. But just as Gnosticism with regards to Christianity, Kabbalah in relation to Judaism and Sufism within Islam, each is an exclusive philosophy which presents a far deeper understanding of the universe than the 'religion' presented to the masses that follow the belief system as an accepted truth without thought or reflection. Vedanta is a non-dual philosophy. This means that within this system there is one, single 'essence' within the universe. This is in contrast with 'Dualism' which proposes that the universe consists of two very different essences: mind and matter. Of course, modern materialist-reductionist science argues that matter is all there is and that mind, or spirit, is non-quantifiable and non-measurable and therefore does not exist. Within Vedanta this non-dualism is known as Advaita. The unity consciousness that encompasses both matter and spirit is described by the term Brahman. It is this which intrigued the young Jack Priestley. As we shall discover, many times in his writings, novels and plays, he acknowledges that we are all one consciousness experiencing the physical universe subjectively. But what is the physical universe, the world of solid matter that presents itself to our senses? According to the teachings of Vedanta this seemingly tangible reality that exists outside of us is, in fact, a hallucination. Vedanta calls this Maya. The ego, the individual human consciousness, is also an illusion that exists within Maya. Vedanta suggests that we that are trapped within Maya sometimes have a brief glimpse of our collective consciousness. As we shall discover, Jack sensed Brahman many times during his life during periods of intense creativity or while being lost in music. We shall also discover that many of his plays attempted to place in a dramatic context these deeply esoteric ideas. Sadly, these were missed by the critics and the vast majority of the audiences.

That the young Jack Priestley was precociously intellectual is clearly evidenced by such interests. Remember this was the early years of the second decade of the 20 century. He was living in a provincial city without general access to the great flow of information found in London. He actively sought out these ideas. This gave him a particularly wide world-view. This was reflected in a particularly powerful article he wrote in 1913. With Europe obviously slipping towards a future conflict, only the source of ignition being unknown, the 18-year-old Jack Priestley argued that if he had his way "war would be abolished tomorrow."

As we shall discover from his later fictional writings, the years 1912 to 1913 had a profound effect on Priestley. In one of his radio broadcasts, commemorating the outbreak of World War One twenty-six years before, during the dark days when England stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany, he asked his audience:

Do you ever look back on your life and see it as a road that wanders through wildly varying landscapes? I do. And now, as I look back, before August 1914 the road seemed to be a sunlit plain, coming out the mists of early childhood.

This was a curious, linear way of looking at one's life and was probably influenced by his lifelong interest in Eastern Mysticism. It is as if Priestley, looking down from a lofty position outside of normal time, could see his past life like a road winding out of the distant horizon that was his deep past. As we shall discover, for Priestley this was not an analogy but how he actually believed time worked.

It was on one of those sunlit plains, during the summer of 1914, that Jack had had his fortune told by a friend. Maybe this associate viewed life's path from slightly higher elevation and could see the road ahead. Priestley was informed that soon his whole way of living would change and that in the near future he would often find himself in great danger. The friend then stated quite categorically that Jack's life would never be the same again. This was the first of many encounters Priestley would have suggesting to him that the future is already out there to be experienced by those sensitive enough to perceive its call.

Sadly, the radical change foreseen that summer's day was soon to occur. After a series of diplomatic exchanges between the European powers war was declared on 4 August 1914. The day before had been a Bank Holiday Monday and Jack and his friends had attended the Manningham Tide, a popular annual fair. He was later to write that many of the faces he knew in the crowds that carefree afternoon would not survive to see 1918.

On the 7 of September 1914, just six days before his twentieth birthday, Jack Priestley, the young man who wished to abolish war, enlisted to fight for King and Country. It is of significance that Jack did not rush off with many of his friends and join the local battalions of the West Yorkshire Regiment, but for some reason made his way to Halifax and signed on with the Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment. Had he joined the local group, the 16 and 18 Battalions, which became known as the Bradford Pals, he would probably have died or been seriously wounded in the first hour of the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 16 July 1916. Of the 2,000 who enlisted in the Bradford Pals, 1,770 were killed in the first hour of the offensive.

It is highly likely that Jack would have been among them. He was later to write that this curious decision, made for no reason that he could understand, was a "signal from the unknown." It is clear from his plays that the events of this particular time were vivid in Priestley's later memories. For example, in his autobiographical essay Margin Released he describes how, on 4th August 1914, "the newsboys were running and shouting every day and all the day." This image appears in his play Johnson Over Jordan in a stream-of-consciousness section and much later, in his unpublished and to-date unperformed last play, Time Was, Time Is, which is mostly set on the evening that news breaks that Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been shot in Sarajevo on the 28th of June. Indeed, we shall also discover soon that for Priestley, these evenings of high summer also have a particular magic.

Priestley experienced a much-reported First World War experience, one that he rarely wrote about but one that was to create in him an interest in the existence of a 'higher self'. During his time in the trenches he sensed that there was something watching over him, that this entity was both him and not-him. In his essay Instead of the Trees he describes how he was a casualty three times during the conflict. On each occasion he noticed that when terror was at its highest something inside him seemed to take over. This "something" was not frightened in any way. Priestley became intrigued as to the source of these sensations. If it was simply a psychological mechanism, then what was it that activated such a mechanism? He considered that this was something far more interesting than simply the ego. In Rain Upon Godshill he reconsidered these questions and wondered if some form of higher consciousness was active during these periods of creativity.

Later in his life he became more willing to discuss his experiences in the trenches. In 1964 he wrote a large 'tabletop' book entitled Man and Time. In the final chapter of this book, an essay entitled "One Man and Time", he discusses his own experiences of time perception. Without adding any further situational details, he describes how he and his fellow soldiers had:

On some occasions (we) slipped out of passing time, became detached observers of our fortunes, with death approaching in slow motion, as if we were in some other time.

In Margin Released Jack described the incident of his own wounding in June 1916:

There I was then, deciding on each section's share, when I heard a rushing sound, and I knew what it meant and knew, though everything had gone into slow motion, I had no hope of getting away before the thing arrived. Just as on earlier and later occasions when I have thought all was up, the first shrinking in terror was followed, as I went into the new slow time, by a sense of detachment. I believe from what I learnt long afterwards that the Minenwerfer landed slap in the trench, two or three yards away. All I knew at the time was that the world blew up.

From this it is clear that the sensation of time slowing down was something he experienced rather than simply him describing the experiences of others.

In his description of his wounding in June 1916 he refers to a "sense of detachment." This is also repeated in Man and Time where he comments how this feeling seemed to overcome soldiers who were about to die in the near future:

Then again, there were those men, lively gossipers and wags, who became subdued and thoughtful some hours before the sniper's bullet found them or the shell tore their bodies to bleeding shreds - as if they had been watching, throughout a whole morning, death pointing a finger at them across No Man's Land.

Here we have his early encounters with both time perception and also his developing belief that under certain circumstances a person can be aware of events in their own future. In the essay he commented that under such extreme circumstances time refused to flow in the accepted way, "it did not adapt itself to the facts."

Jack was buried alive by the German minenwerfer (a trench mortar) and was injured and deafened. In Margin Released he states that he had no recollection of how he was evacuated from the front lines and sent back to England and to a military hospital at North Evington, a suburb of Leicester. After fully regaining consciousness he ran a high temperature and was kept in bed for a few weeks. In the late summer he was then transferred to a convalescent home in Rutland. On his recovery he took a commission with the Devonshire Regiment and returned to the front in the summer of 1918. He was subsequently partly gassed when his gas mask malfunctioned allowing some of the poison to seep through. This was the official version but Jack felt that his actual condition may have been exacerbated by the large number of tots of rum he drank later that evening. He found himself in a state of total confusion and suffering from breathing problems. Fortunately, he was found by a group of British stretcher-bearers who took him out of danger. This was the last military action he saw.

In 1918, after his return to Britain, Jack had a book of poems, A Chapman of Rhymes, self-published. He was later to describe this as being a "collection of dubious verse" written in a vainglorious attempt to "leave something behind". He goes on to add that on actually becoming famous he sought out every copy and had them destroyed. Sadly, as far as he was concerned at least, some of the copies escaped his personal Bonfire of the Vanities and were, in the mid-1970s, being sold at over £250 per copy. Of significance was that Jack had dedicated this book to a young woman called Pat Tempest who had been his Bradford 'sweetheart' throughout the war. On his return home Jack and Pat rekindled their affection for each other.

In 1919 he was formally discharged from military service, emerging from the army and the war as Lieutenant John Priestley. He was keen to return to his hoped-for career as a professional writer. He approached the Yorkshire Observer, a popular local newspaper, and volunteered himself to write a series of articles on walking in the Yorkshire Dales. Much to his delight, and possible relief, they agreed. He spent the summer of 1919 out in the countryside and fresh air, a total contrast to his experiences in the killing fields of Northern France. He published the articles under the pseudonym "Peter of Pomfret" and was paid a guinea (just over £1.00, a large sum in those days) per article. But all summers come to an end and Jack had to think about his future. As an ex-officer he was entitled to apply for a small educational grant. He applied for one and was successful. He was accepted by Cambridge University and offered a place at Trinity Hall to read English and history. He was later to change this to history and political science. However, he really did not enjoy his time at Cambridge; he was older than most of his fellow undergraduates and from a very different social class. However, he found the environment extremely intellectually stimulating, particularly the lectures of the eccentric philosopher, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart.

Although not part of his degree course Jack regularly attended McTaggart's lectures. What fascinated him was McTaggart's eccentric philosophy of time, something that may have helped the ex-soldier understand some of his own extraordinary experiences in the trenches.

In simple terms (if it can be said that McTaggart's philosophy can ever be simple) McTaggart argued that everything that exists is real, and nothing can be real without existing. In this regard anything made of matter, that is anything that has size, shape, position, mobility and impenetrability, is, by definition, real. Can this definition of 'reality' be applied to something as ephemeral as time? McTaggart thought not. The only real quality that can be applied to time is that it has, in some difficult to define way, position and mobility. What it most definitely does not have is size, shape or impenetrability. In this regard McTaggart wrote:

Positions in time, as time appears to us prima facie, are distinguished in two ways. Each position is earlier than some, and later than some, of the other positions. And each position is either past, present, or future. The distinctions of the former class are permanent, while those of the latter are not. If M is ever earlier than N, it is always earlier. But an event, which is now present, was future and will be past.

From this McTaggart proposed that there must be two different types of time. He called these the "A Series" and the "B Series". The "A Series" can be described as containing specific moments in time that move through time in a sequence. By this he meant that the present must move along with the present moment. We have the concept of now and now moves through time. In the same way three hours ago similarly moves through time as does two weeks from now.

In his book Representing Time philosopher K.M. Jaszczolt gives two excellent analogies to facilitate understanding of these two complex concepts. Jaszczolt compares the "A" series to a ski lift, specifically the designs that are in continual motion. He asks us to imagine that as the ski lift goes past skiers latch themselves on. Each event in time is similar to a skier in that only one skier at a time can latch on at any one point. For Jaszczolt the "B" series is likened to a long washing line in which a person can hang different articles of clothing in different positions. The line is static and it is the person who can move up and down.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Time and the Rose Garden"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Anthony Peake.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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