The People, Yes

DAYLIGHT ON SATURDAY--J. B. Priestley--Harper ($2.50).

Author Priestley's best-selling manipulations of sweetness and light (The Good Companions) have neither closed his mind nor cloyed his large public. Daylight on Saturday is a surprisingly successful blend of his new realism and his old sentiment. It reveals a picture of wartime England that will entertain the lighthearted, interest the thoughtful.

Three terse, vivid pages of description open the novel and set the scene. The main factory of Elmdown Aircraft Co. Ltd. comprises acres of windowless con crete camouflaged in a misty hollow in the South Midlands, ten miles from the nearest town. Says Priestley, "take away these drawing offices, these toolmakers' sheds, these long rows of machines, these workers on assembly, and within ten days the whip is at your back. All the brave, drilled men, willing to rush toward death, all the flags and national anthems, all the patriotic speeches, cannot rescue a people now. Without such factories as this, they are lost or dependent. . . ."

But Priestley's novel is not about the factory or the mechanical miracles which materialize in planes. It is about the people who make the planes--their lives, thoughts and hopes. With adroit skill he takes the reader about the plant, from office to assembly line, from drill press to canteen, relating a life history here, sketching a vignette there, until some 50 faces have become recognizable people and the novel's main motifs are weaving the mild suspense which makes Priestley so easy to read.

Priestley Sentiment. Many character types from earlier Priestley novels reappear in the Elmdown Aircraft factory: Sammy Hamp, whose limp and withered arm accentuates the humility that makes him the happiest man in the place; Edith Shipton, the sex-starved spinster whose shoddy affair with a headmaster is replaced by genuine love for the implacably good Arthur Bolton, whose family and little shop have been obliterated by a Nazi bomb; Sister Filey, in charge of the clinic, whose female vitality is boundless and unbounded by the usual conventions.

There are also some new characters: Rose, whose face is transformed and whose body sways when swing music as sails her from the factory loudspeakers; Bert Ogmore, the Communist assistant foreman, who is so devout he is practically a Russian; Lord Brixen, the fashion plate, who is a safe second string of the Conservative Party, and four men who are responsible for the functioning of the factory and most of the novel's dramatics: James Cheviot, the general manager; Francis Blandford, his chief engineer; Maurice Angleby, assistant engineer; Bob Elrick, the works superintendent.

Priestley Dramatics. Daylight on Saturday covers only a brief interval of time: two weeks in October 1942.

Production in the factory is falling and no one knows why. Blandford, the cold, Cambridge-trained aristocrat, believes it due to the stupidity of the workers who should be replaced by automatic machines. Elrick, the choleric man of the people (with an insane wife), who performed wonders after Dunkirk, thinks production is off because nothing is happening on the military fronts to inspire the workers. The conflict between these two men mounts to a thoroughly prepared climax. When Blandford is chosen to succeed the general manager, Elrick gets tight and makes a violent pass at one of the overalled women workers.

As he faces dismissal, the news of the breakthrough at El Alamein makes production zoom and leaves Elrick in the dilemma of a man who was right having put himself in the wrong. Thereupon Novelist Priestley melodramatically disposes of him. A mother-fixated widower hears voices emanating from the factory's biggest and most dangerous machine. The voices command him to redeem mankind by sacrificing a virgin. When this maniac tries to toss a girl into the maw of whirling metal, Elrick dies in saving her.

Priestley Observation. To those who wonder about social change in wartime Britain, Daylight on Saturday gives some clear, unequivocal advice. Ninety-five per cent of the people, say several of the novel's characters, are no different than before the war, do not understand the events which crash about their ears, hope only for a little "daylight on Saturday."

But in the character of Francis Blandford, Priestley suggests the beginning of a new British social trend. "The effective control of industry is a new and undisputed source of power," Blandford confides in an idle moment. "Industry already has its own aristocracy. But of course it's not quite the real thing. But once it's linked with the older and more obvious forms . . . there'll be no more silly chatter about democracy."

Against this trend Novelist Priestley poses the good will of James Cheviot, an engineer who does not "see himself as a member of a new ruling class," and who believes "that whatever you're doing in this war, you come in the end to people and to what they think and feel and are frightened of and hope for. ... To know they are fighting for themselves and for other folk like themselves everywhere, to know they are working for themselves and for other folk like themselves everywhere, that's what the people want."

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