J.B. Priestley Calls
The author of An Inspector Calls, J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) held some
uncommon views. Like most English writers of his generation, Priestley
was committed, at least on paper, to a socialist view of the causes of
Great Britain's woes. The struggle between the haves and the have-nots
is often at the heart of a Priestley play or novel. But he also
injected into his plays his odd view of Time and its relation to human
beings. Priestley believed that all Time is present. What we call the
past is still happening; what we call the future is happening even as
we savor the present moment. Human consciousness prevents us from
seeing both the past and the future as easily as we see the present.
Prophetic dreams, for example, are part of the proof of this theory of
Time. The dreamer lives the future before the awakened sleeper lives
it: Same person, same future, different apprehension.
One may easily imagine
the Twilight-Zone effect this belief might have had on Priestley's work
even long before television had been invented, but no such thing
happened. Priestly manages to mete out serious comedies that leave the
question of Time unasked, thereby allowing the oddities of the human
awareness of Time—like deja vu and those prophetic dreams—to maintain
their mystery. Such is the case with An Inspector Calls.
Here, Priestley is
trolling for other fish. The target of his sharp pen is human smugness
and the blind indifference effected by that smugness. The play opened
in 1946, but the action takes place in 1912, in the dining room of the
respectable Birling family. The setting and respectability allow for
the usual retrospective comedy of vocabulary and parental shock. The
daughter, Sheila, accuses her brother of being "squiffy." He, of
course, understands the charge and denies it. But Mrs. Birling's
reaction is typical of the genre: "What an expression, Sheila. Really,
the things you girls pick up these days!"
Priestley is a master
of such easy comedy; in part, that mastery accounts for his great
popularity. As the second most popular radio personality during World
War II, Priestley was suddenly asked to stop broadcasting.
He and his friends assumed that the
Powers-That-Be didn't care for Priestley's socialist critique of
England. After his death, it was discovered that the call to silence
his radio show came from Winston Churchill, who was at the time the
most popular person on British radio. Churchill didn't like the
competition.
But his popularity
cannot simply be explained by the easy comedy. His facile jokes
sometimes have serious import. Consider the mixture in the following
speech, which comes early in the play, as Mr. Birling explains to his
son why war is out of the question:
The world is developing so fast that
it'll make war impossible. Look at the progress we're making. In a year
or two we'll have aeroplanes that will be able to go anywhere. And look
at the way the automobile's making headway—bigger and faster all the
time. And then ships. Why, a friend of mine went over this new liner
last week—the Titanic—she sails next week—forty-six thousand eight
hundred tons—forty-six thousand eight hundred tons—New York in five
days—and every luxury—and unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable.
The lines about a 30-year-old boating
accident, I'm sure, caused no bruises, but airplanes that can go
anywhere must have made the post-blitzkrieg London audience cringe.
Priestley begins with the serious and leads his audience to the easy
laughter at the smugness of Mr. Birling, and his unsinkable optimism,
because his play is not a lament about the war. It is, paradoxically, a
comedic cry of the heart.
What's in store for
Mr. Birling and the family might have been just as devastating to them
as World War II was to London except for their smug superiority. As the
visiting Inspector opens their eyes and pricks that smugness, some
begin to see, and others remain blind and indifferent.
But Time, that old trickster, gives every one of them a second chance.
Patrick McGuire
English Department
University of Wisconsin Parkside
