Mindless Chatter

I am operating at about sixteen percent of a person thanks to medical needlessness and it puts me at something of a disadvantage in reacting to the ending of Susan Cooper's J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author (1970) with anything more critically incisive than profanity.

To rewind a hot semi-linear second, I had just meant to complain that it feels almost superfluous for Cooper's The Grey King (1975) and Alan Garner's The Owl Service (1967) to be geographically as well as mythologically neighbors. Given their mutual setting in the valleys of North Wales, it finally occurred to me to check when a location in one novel turned up in the production history of the television version of the other. As anyone from the area could have told me, Tal-y-llyn and Llanymawddwy are about half an hour's drive from one another. As I noticed a couple of years ago, The Grey King is the only one of its sequence whose mortal and mythical layers are rigorously double-tracked instead of sewn back and forth through the great doors of Time: thanks to the machinations of the Light and the woman who hinges them as if fixed within a pattern of her own, the royal and terrible truth of Bran's parentage cannot be uncovered without simultaneously drawing out the tragedy of the previous generation in the present day, a sadder, messier, only locally legendary triangle whose fallout has nonetheless marked the valley as indelibly as the Arthurian stamp of Cader Idris. "I wanted to keep you free of it. It was over, it was gone, I wanted to keep you away from the past. Ah, we never should have stayed here. I should have moved away from the valley at the beginning." But the past is an event horizon, there's no escaping it in three days or fifteen centuries or eleven years, and when the power of the Brenin Llwyd has been broken and a human mind with it and the milgwn have all drowned themselves in a headlong rush of ghosts—when the Dark has given up the valley—the haunting of its human grief and loss remains. "Then the mist closed over Llyn Mwyngil, the lake in the pleasant retreat, and there was a cold silence through all the valley save for the distant bleat, sometimes, of a mountain sheep, like the echo of a man's voice calling a girl's name, far away." You see how dangerously a narrative imprints itself on a landscape. I discover that a person can go up the Dysynni Valley and stay in an Airbnb called the Shepherd's Hut and my first thought is that I don't care how nice a view it has of Craig yr Aderyn, I am not interested in tripping over a warestone while glamping.

Cooper's nonfiction came into it when I was thinking about the centrality of time to her work and Garner's, specifically the tradition of ancient and simultaneous ages in the land. It had made dawn-over-Marblehead sense when I finally learned that the "J. B." and "Jacquetta" to whom she dedicated The Grey King were Priestley and Hawkes. I had never gotten around to reading her biography of the former and was immediately distracted by it. As a portrait, it is analytical and awed by turns; she calls its subject a "Time-haunted man" and supports her argument with reference to his novels, plays, and nonfiction as well as the ghost-history that she differentiates from nostalgia for some idealized pre-WWI Eden overlapping the end of his adolescence, identifying it instead as a bitterly vivid awareness of all the possibilities smashed by the war onto the rails of the twentieth century we actually got. He sounds more than slightly Viktor Frankl about it, which I am guessing accounts for the parallel evolution with Emeric Pressburger. I was never able to figure out if it was plausible for the nine-year-old Cooper to have seen A Canterbury Tale (1944), but she wouldn't have needed to if she had the vector of Priestley. "And because there was enchantment in the life it offered, the hideous transformation scene that took place when the enchantment vanished in a cloud of black smoke, and came out grimed and different on the other side, was enough to leave a young man of the time very vulnerable to visions of a lost Atlantis—especially a young man who was to become gradually more and more involved, as he grew older, in theories of a continuum of Time in which nothing is really past, but everything which has ever been is still there . . . If there is, in effect, a fifth dimension from which one can observe not only the present moment but also everything which runs before it and behind—then things which seem lost have never really been lost at all." By the time she got around to writing the Lost Land of Silver on the Tree (1977), she would be able to explain it more poetically: "For Time does not die, Time has neither beginning nor end, and so nothing can end or die that has once had a place in Time." In terms of lineage, I can also get mildly feral when she discusses his wartime broadcasts which relied again, not on the wistfulness for an unmarred past, but the determination to build something stronger on the scars. Describing one in which he imagined himself explicitly choosing the second, harder work when offered the choice by the thought experiment of a great magician, the assertion that "the thing which is pure Priestley is the implication of an almost Arthurian destiny . . . and the vision it offers is one not of a misty Avalon but of a better Camelot" naturally makes me think "For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you." I keep finding reasons to argue with the last decision of The Dark Is Rising Sequence and yet another would be that it is demonstrably difficult to build a workable future on a past that's been erased. In fairness, she would get the balance right in Seaward (1983). I didn't react to the final pages of Cooper's biography of Priestley, however, because of any dot-to-dots I could draw from them to her own prose. They make a book-ending "picture" of the Omnibus programme which aired in 1969 as a tribute to Priestley on his seventy-fifth birthday, wrapping up what Cooper had until then considered a pretty marginal viewing experience with:

a condensed version of the last act of Johnson Over Jordan; and again there was an awkwardness, for this more than any of his plays translates badly to the medium of television, needing the depths of a craftily-lit stage to suggest the immensities of spaceless time in which it takes place.

But then, like the moment Priestley once celebrated 'when suddenly and softly the orchestra creeps in to accompany the piano', the magic that one had been hoping for all along suddenly came filtering through this television programme; for the part of Robert Johnson was being played here by the man for whom it had been written some thirty years before, Ralph Richardson, and Richardson and Priestley between them, actor and dramatist, magicians both, wrought a spell that produced, despite all handicaps, the real thing. Time had made one of those curious spiralling turns, for Richardson had grown older to meet the play, and fitted easily now into the role for which he had once had to draw in an extra couple of decades on his face; he played it without a false move or a marred inflection, and by the time he turned to walk into infinity, Everyman in a bowler hat, leaving one dimension for another unknown, I had forgotten the deficiencies of the small screen and could indeed hardly perceive its outlines at all. I had never seen Johnson Over Jordan in the theatre, but it had always moved me even as a written play, and I had never expected to have the chance of seeing Richardson act the part which had been so subtly tailored to his talent and voice. Now, however inferior his surroundings, I had. I blew my nose rather hard, and glanced across at Priestley.

I don't know what I expected him to offer us: a non-committal snort, perhaps; a rumble of technical criticism; at the most, a bit of knowledgeable praise for Richardson. But Priestley sat silent for a moment, gazing into space, looking unusually small in a very large armchair; and then he rubbed his eyes. 'I shed tears,' he said, rather gruff and low, 'not for what I have seen, but for what I have been remembering.' Then he hoisted himself up, and was his proper height again.

For a moment, he had been caught by a spell himself; caught by Time, by his own magic, and by that of his friend, and transported on to that other dimension where still there is playing the first production and every production of Johnson Over Jordan—and of As You Like It and The Cherry Orchard and Arms and the Man and all the rest—and where a younger Richardson is turning to walk not into the shadow of a cramped television studio but into the glitter of stars and the blue-dark cosmic depths that Basil Dean had created on a great stage, while Benjamin Britten's triumphant finale sounded out over the audience. Priestley wasn't really remembering, not really looking back; he was looking outward, into the level of Time where there is no forward or backward, no youth or age, no beginning or end. Like all the great enchanters, he has always seen it plainer than the rest of us yet can.

Obviously, I assumed at once that Richardson's televised performance survived only in the residually haunted sense that the space-time continuum never forgets a face, even one whose owner once unfavorably compared it to a hot cross bun; it would have been ironically on theme and characteristic of the BBC. To my surprise, the programme does seem to exist in some archivally inaccessible fashion and I could theoretically experience its time travel through the ordinary machinery of a telerecording, which would make a change from just about everything else Richardson was stage-famous for. I wouldn't be sitting next to Susan Cooper or J. B. Priestley, but the thing about art its that its audience is not bound by time any more than its maker. The author's bio for J. B. Priestley: Portrait of an Author identifies Cooper as the writer of Mandrake (1964), Behind the Golden Curtain (1965), and "two novels for children," which by publication dates must be Over Sea, Under Stone (1965) and Dawn of Fear (1970). She has not yet begun work on The Dark Is Rising (1973). She is not yet known herself as a magician of time. By my childhood she was firmly established as one and I checked out this book because I was interested in her stratigraphy as much as its subject and was so struck to find her interpreting him in the same language which I would use to discuss her, which Priestley had died before anyone coined as hauntology, although I am not sure from this portrait that he would concede that a future which had failed to materialize was existentially lost. By that logic, the profanity being all inside my head may or may not prevent it from reaching the genizah of time.