You Can't Go Home Again

Most war-weary British veterans, dribbling back into civilian life that is still rigorously rationed and restricted, long for the cozily lighted window that means the unrestricted freedom and comfort of home. Through that lighted window John Boynton Priestley has tossed a well-aimed literary brick. Novelist Priestley (The Good Companions; Angel Pavement) is one of British Labor's most popular literary backers. In a brief (32-page), brusque, best-selling pamphlet entitled Letter to a Returning Serviceman, Priestley beseeches ex-Tommies to beware of their heart's desire--"the charmed cozy circle" of home life.

"There isn't much time. . . . Don't, I implore you, sink too deep, too far, into that famous English privacy. . . . Fleet the time carelessly [in] your slippers and armchair . . . go off with the girl and enjoy the loneliest possible holiday. . . . But when you come back, be a real citizen and not a hermit in a bungalow. . . . Remember that we are in history and are not merely watching it stream past. . . . I declare to you that I would rather see this whole island turned inside out and upside down every ten years, with whole cities pulled down and rebuilt as if they came out of a child's box of bricks, than I would see these grand folks of ours sinking into apathy again, lulled by the murmurs of fools and rogues."

Priestley (who has just returned from Moscow, where his new play, An Inspector Calls, is running in two theaters simultaneously) plainly tells whom he considers fools and rogues. They are "the tough fellows behind the huge . . . cartels," the "Lords Midas" of the press, "literary ladies and gents who adore peasants," "the aesthete with his private income . . . bloodless and shrinking." Veterans are also plainly told that in eschewing hominess they must stand four-square behind state-planned economy (". . . I do not believe in economic liberty. . . . Economic life is necessarily a communal life").

Priestley--now less & less a novelist, and more & more a pamphleteer--also admits that he sheds no tears for individual enterprise. "Modern man is essentially a communal and cooperating man. . . . We have no Leonardo da Vinci or Shakespeare. But we accomplish what would seem miracles to our forefathers ... by our new pooling of knowledge and our superb teamwork. When the American O.W.I. . . . showed us the film they had made about [TVA] . . . I felt as deeply moved as I would have been by a noble work of art."

To Tommies who might find his program drab. Author Priestley offers an unexpected inducement--a jihad against bluenoses: "I should like to see the English, once they had done their share of the community's work, doing what they damned well pleased; and refusing once and for all to be bullied by highly organised little gangs of teetotallers, Sabbatarians, and all the unloved and the life-haters. The chief freedom the English people need now is the freedom to have more fun. without regard to the feelings of sour-faced old women and envious old men."

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