J. B. Priestley in the Theater of Time

At 10:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 17, 1963, J. B. Priestley appeared on Monitor, the BBC’s fortnightly arts program, to discuss a work in progress. It was Man and Time (1964), his “personal essay exploring the eternal riddle,” which surveys ways time has been reckoned throughout history, time’s challenges to philosophy, science, and the arts, its character in “this age,” and, finally, Priestley’s own fascination: “multiple time,” in which past, present, and future become at once available to human understanding. Monitor gave him a chance not only to promote his theory of multiple time but also to get England to prove it. At the end of the program, the interviewer, Huw Weldon, asked the audience to send Priestley “accounts of any experiences they had that appeared to challenge the conventional and ‘commonsense’ idea of Time.”¹ Priestley particularly wanted examples of “precognition” (dreams or other visions of the future) and what he called “future influencing present” (cases in which an experience proves to have been caused by a later event). The hope was to use these experiences in Man and Time as evidence in the last chapters of the book itself, and Priestley was not disappointed. England readily obliged: “The response was so immediate and so generous that my secretary and I spent days and days opening letters.”² A photograph in Man and Time shows Priestley peering intently at a billiard table covered with hundreds of letters, many of which he quoted to powerful effect in the book’s final speculations (fig. 1).

One letter tells of a woman once brought to tears, for no good reason, by the sight of a hospital. Many years later, her long-time companion “died in that same hospital at which the girl so many years before had stared through her inexplicable tears” (MT, 201). Another letter recounts a woman’s dream of washing clothes in a creek with her baby standing nearby and throwing pebbles into the water. Seeing she had forgotten to bring soap, the woman went to get some, only to discover upon her return the baby “lying face down in the water” (MT, 225). She awoke with a “wave of joy” to see her baby safe, but then, months later, was astonished to find herself actually doing washing by a creek with her baby at her side—without soap, too, but forewarned by her dream against leaving her baby alone. One man wrote to Priestley telling how his brother had dreamt in detail about his own funeral: “He had dreamt of a funeral cortege, of the mourners, the bearers with red and white flowers, even me wearing a wide black hat” (MT, 324). Not long after, “he got a bad kick on the football field, it turned to peritonitis, he died, and his funeral was exactly as he had dreamed it—the red and white flowers, his football club colours—and it passed through the same streets, everything the same as in his dream.”

Fig. 1.

Priestley surveys the letters he received as a result of his 1963 Monitor appearance. J. B. Priestley, Man and Time (London: Aldus Books Ltd, 1964), 191.

Other precognitions were less portentous: for example, one of “an Indian canoe sailing across the Town Hall Square” which turned out nine years later to be theatrical scenery in transit. But together the letters do significantly challenge the conventional, common-sense idea of time. They helped Priestley prove his point: more exists for us than the present alone allows. And yet the letters were themselves the point. The whole situation—the television appearance, the letter-writing, the response—was itself a tactical performance, part of a life-long campaign in the theater of time.

By 1963, it had been more than three decades since Priestley published The Good Companions (1929), the first of many best-selling books to attain the runaway popularity that prompted Virginia Woolf to class him as a mere “tradesman of letters” and to write the essay “Middlebrow” (1932) in reaction against what he represented...