Saturn Over the Water Read online

  SATURN OVER THE WATER

  JOHN BOYNTON PRIESTLEY was born in 1894 in Yorkshire, the son of a schoolmaster. After leaving Belle Vue School when he was 16, he worked in a wool office but was already by this time determined to become a writer. He volunteered for the army in 1914 during the First World War and served five years; on his return home, he attended university and wrote articles for the Yorkshire Observer. After graduating, he established himself in London, writing essays, reviews, and other nonfiction, and publishing several miscellaneous volumes. In 1927 his first two novels appeared, Adam in Moonshine and Benighted, which was the basis for James Whale’s film The Old Dark House (1932). In 1929 Priestley scored his first major critical success as a novelist, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Good Companions. Angel Pavement (1930) followed and was also extremely well received. Throughout the next several decades, Priestley published numerous novels, many of them very popular and successful, including Bright Day (1946) and Lost Empires (1965), and was also a prolific and highly regarded playwright.

  Priestley died in 1984, and though his plays have continued to be published and performed since his death, much of his fiction has unfortunately fallen into obscurity. Valancourt Books is in the process of reprinting many of J. B. Priestley’s best works of fiction with the aim of allowing a new generation of readers to discover this unjustly neglected author’s books.

  FICTION BY J.B. PRIESTLEY

  Adam in Moonshine (1927)

  Benighted (1927)*

  Farthing Hall (with Hugh Walpole) (1929)

  The Good Companions (1929)

  Angel Pavement (1930)

  Faraway (1932)

  Wonder Hero (1933)

  I’ll Tell You Everything (with Gerald Bullett) (1933)

  They Walk in the City (1936)

  The Doomsday Men (1938)*

  Let the People Sing (1939)

  Blackout in Gretley (1942)

  Daylight on Saturday (1943)

  Three Men in New Suits (1945)

  Bright Day (1946)

  Jenny Villiers (1947)

  Festival at Farbridge (1951)

  The Other Place (1953)*

  The Magicians (1954)*

  Low Notes on a High Level (1954)

  Saturn Over the Water (1961)*

  The Thirty First of June (1961)*

  The Shapes of Sleep (1962)*

  Sir Michael and Sir George (1964)

  Lost Empires (1965)

  Salt is Leaving (1966)*

  It’s an Old Country (1967)

  The Image Men: Out of Town (vol. 1), London End (vol. 2) (1968)

  The Carfitt Crisis (1975)

  Found Lost Found (1976)

  * Available or forthcoming from Valancourt Books

  SATURN

  OVER THE WATER

  An account of his adventures in London, South America and Australia by Tim Bedford, painter; edited – with some preliminary and concluding remarks – by Henry Sulgrave; and here presented to the reading public

  by

  J. B. PRIESTLEY

  With a new introduction by

  DAVID COLLARD

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Saturn Over the Water by J. B. Priestley

  First published London: Heinemann, 1961

  First Valancourt Books edition, January 2014

  Copyright © 1961 by J. B. Priestley, renewed 1989

  Introduction © 2014 by David Collard

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  Publisher & Editor: JAMES D. JENKINS

  20th Century Series Editor: SIMON STERN, University of Toronto

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.

  ISBN 978-1-939140-81-4 (trade paperback)

  Also available as an electronic book.

  All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.

  Cover by M. S. Corley

  Set in Dante MT 11/13.5

  INTRODUCTION

  Why is John Boynton Priestley, once among the most widely read and critically acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world, so neglected today? One reason is that he is an unashamedly middlebrow writer, and a middlebrow readership has long since transferred its loyalty to such lesser talents as Dan Brown, John Grisham, Robert Ludlum and E. L. James. This is unfortunate, as Priestley at his best (which was all the time) writes rings around them all.

  There’s also the challenge of Priestley’s dauntingly large body of work – where should a newcomer begin? There are around thirty novels as well as twenty plays, collections of short stories, journalism, essays, criticism and a volume of morale-boosting radio talks from the Second World War. The books that made him famous, and for which he is still best known all date from between the wars: Benighted (1927, filmed as The Old Dark House and published by Valancourt), The Good Companions (1929), Angel Pavement (1930) and English Journey (1934). In a career spanning well over half a century arguably his best novel – the author’s personal favourite and one that I never tire of recommending – was The Image Men (published in two volumes in 1968), a corrosively satirical assault on the mass media that remains bang up to date and deserves republishing.

  Priestley is a modern writer but he’s certainly no modernist. His prose is simple, straightforward and unaffected, like the author himself, who was a bluff, no-nonsense, hard-headed Yorkshireman. His values were largely those of his middle class Edwardian upbringing, not least in his attitude towards women, homosexuals, sinister foreigners and the fading glories of the British Empire. At the same time he was a progressive left-wing technocrat with a belief in centralised government and the meliorist benefits of Socialism, prompting one commentator to compare him (unkindly but memorably) with one of the pigs in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Orwell, it should be noted, secretly and rather shamefully passed Priestley’s name to the Foreign Office to blacklist as too pro-communist.

  Yet while Orwell now commands a huge international readership Priestley is in danger of becoming a forgotten figure, despite regular revivals of his two most celebrated plays, An Inspector Calls and When We Are Married. This is an injustice because Priestley is unquestionably the outstanding prose realist writer of his generation, a popular author who knows how to write a good sentence, build a good paragraph and make the reader turn the page. This requires skill and talent, both of which are plentifully evident in Saturn Over the Water (1961). It’s a very strange book indeed, and one that defies easy summary or analysis. Writing to a correspondent in 1969 Priestley claimed equivocally that this novel was ‘entirely imaginary (but what is “imaginary”)?’

  ‘Entirely imaginary’ is, if anything, a poker-faced understatement. Saturn Over the Water is an incredible novel, by which I mean that Priestley deliberately set out to write a book that is quite impossible to believe, an exercise in creative mendacity in which the author conscientiously spoofs every rule of narrative fiction, flouts convention and has great fun doing so.

  The elaborate sub-title of Saturn Over the Water is worth setting out in full:

  An account of his adventures in London, South America and Australia by Tim Bedford, painter; edited – with some preliminary and concluding remarks – by Henry Sulgrave; and here presented to the reading public by J. B. Priestley

  This approach – embedding a story within parentheses explaining how the manuscript came into the author’s
possession – harks back to an earlier time, and the title itself is a sleight-of-hand reminiscent of 19th century fiction. Priestley places himself at two removes from the narrative and becomes merely an intermediary. Sulgrave, an anonymous ‘social historian’, earns his keep in the brief Epilogue as Bedford’s manuscript comes to a sudden stop in a thick tangle of loose ends.

  Saturn Over the Water is admirably unbelievable but let me hasten to add that this is no bad thing. Priestley knew more about the art of novel-writing than just about any other author before or since, so in choosing to ignore the most elementary conventions he clearly does so deliberately. Why would a seasoned author deliberately play fast and loose with the most basic conventions of narrative and character? Let’s skim through the plot (without giving too much away) and see where that gets us.

  Prompted by his cousin Isabel’s dying wish, the painter Tim Bedford sets out to find her husband, a Cambridge bio-chemist called Joe Farne, who has disappeared after leaving his job at the mysterious Arnaldos Institute in South America. Bedford has one clue – a slip of paper in Farne’s handwriting containing a cryptic list of names and places:

  Gen. Giddings – V. Melnikov – von Emmerick – Steglitz – Something-Smith – Old Astrologer on the mountain? – Ospara and Emerald L. – Charoke, Vic.? – Blue Mtns? – high back Brisbane? – Semple, Rother, Barsac? – fig. 8 above wavy l. – Why Sat.?

  This slip of paper is all that’s needed to launch Bedford out of Cambridge and, via London and New York, to Peru, Southern Chile and Australia. The headlong pace, the confidently slapdash plotting, the international settings and the jet-age glamour all have a cinematic feel, and it’s in cinema that we find a parallel to Priestley’s method.

  Alfred Hitchcock favoured a narrative driver he called a McGuffin, a term he clarified in a 1966 interview with François Truffaut by relating a well-honed story ‘about two men in a train. One man says “What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?”, and the other answers, “Oh, that’s a McGuffin.” The first one asks, “What’s a McGuffin?” “Well,” the other man says, “it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.” The first man says, “But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands”, and the other one answers, “Well, then that’s no McGuffin!”

  ‘So you see,’ added Hitchcock lugubriously, ‘a McGuffin is nothing at all.’

  Well, not quite. A McGuffin is, in the right hands, a liberation – an essential but deliberately undeveloped device that serves to move the plot forward. It’s usually a goal of some kind, something of great importance (at least to the protagonist), usually with little or no explanation as to why it matters. The ideal McGuffin is typically unimportant to the overall plot – in the case of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest it’s nothing more specific than some vague ‘secrets’ that must be prevented from falling into the hands of an unspecified foreign power. In the right hands, as I say, it offers no end of opportunity because the author has virtually unlimited freedom to go where he pleases, free from the constraints of logic, coherence or credibility. Priestley pulls it off repeatedly and audaciously, as for instance when he introduces a clairvoyante late in the story to keep things moving, followed by the appearance of one Pat Dailey, ‘somebody enormous and quite incomprehensible’ who may be a prophet, a shaman, a hypnotist, a shabby drunk or even an alien deity but who above all offers some essential exposition which all seems to make sense at the time.

  A second McGuffin is the sinister organisation whose symbol, mentioned in the list above, is a figure 8 over a wavy line. The symbol gives the novel its title and its meaning is casually revealed in one of the novel’s many anti-climaxes. That the conspiracy involves the destruction of most life on the planet is standard practice for Cold War fictions, although Priestley is vague on the details. There are other intriguing undercurrents – Nietzsche is cited several times, and the novel might be seen as an investigation into the philosopher’s distinction between Truth and Untruth, not simply between what is true and what is false, but rather between what is life-enhancing and what is life-destroying – an opposition represented in the novel by the main female characters: the heiress Rosalia Arnaldos and the déclassée Countess Nadia Slatina.

  The forward momentum never slackens. Far from suffering conventional setbacks in his search for Joe Farne, Bedford is from the outset seemingly incapable of avoiding the names on the list. As a footloose artist he enjoys a degree of freedom and social mobility allowing him to mix easily with the likes of Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith, the dubious Chilean Communist ‘Mr Jones’ and the nonagenarian Peruvian millionaire Arnaldos. The encounters come thick and fast – all Bedford has to do is navigate a fast-flowing stream of happenstance.

  Bedford is a thinly-sketched and unconvincing character, although this in no way compromises his effectiveness as a device. An artist in his thirties, he is a pipe-smoking, whisky-guzzling, Wodehouse-quoting figure and a barely-disguised version of the author, despite constant professional references to purple madder, magenta, mauve and violet alizarin. Most of the other characters make brief appearances and are either never seen again, or reappear when the plot requires it. All are equally implausible, although there are some marvellous throwaway descriptions that lodge in the reader’s memory, such as Bedford’s view that Sir Reginald Merlan-Smith ‘gave me the impression […] that he kept a kind of pleasant emptiness, for you to play around in, well in front of what he really was, the hard place.’

  The relentless accumulation of implausible coincidences is presented casually and with little dramatic emphasis. It is this laconic offhandedness that paradoxically makes the most outrageous twists and turns plausible, as part of a self-contained world of intimately connected cause and effect. Priestley mischievously wrong foots us at the outset by joking about a succession of ‘non-coincidences’ that have to be negotiated before the story can really get under way. Once these are dealt with Bedford, without the slightest effort on his part, encounters all the key protagonists in swift succession, accompanied by this kind of dialogue:

  ‘How did you know Semple was one of Dr Magorious’s patients, Bedford?’

  ‘Semple’s brother is a member of my club.’

  And that’s it. Even within the tight-knit community of a rich and powerful cosmopolitan elite this is so implausible that it becomes, as I say, oddly believable, and we are no more inclined to question such audacious artlessness than we would complain about the ingredients of a well-mixed martini. What’s typical of the period, incidentally, is the author’s confident assumption of his lead character’s own centrality, something that links Priestley to John Buchan’s patriotic gung-ho yarns of the 1930s. Critics compared Saturn Over the Water’s headlong pace favourably to that of a Buchan novel, and I suppose Bedford is a slightly effete, bohemian version of Richard Hannay, although happily untainted with Hannay’s snobbish anti-Semitism. But Bedford inhabits the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis, a transitional episode that confirmed Britain’s reduced political and economic status. By the end of the 1950s the country’s authority and global influence had declined and in the year following the publication of Saturn Over the Water the American statesman Dean Acheson succinctly observed that ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.’

  Bedford eventually tracks down Joe Farne who is drugged and working as a waiter at a sinister pharmaceutical plant in Southern Chile. Farne is whisked away and Bedford, after a half-hearted interrogation, escapes with a sympathetic doctor named Rother, who is shot and later dies from his wounds. On the strength of a phone call Bedford next takes a cargo ship to Australia in pursuit of Rosalia (inevitably bumping into other key figures on board). One feels that in moving the action to Australia Priestley had a shrewd eye on Nevil Shute’s hugely popular 1957 novel On the Beach, in which a group of Melbourne folk await the arrival of a deadly radiation cloud, the aftermath of a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Shute’s harrowing account shows how each person deals with their impending
death and there is an explicit reference to such a situation in Saturn Over the Water. Both novels are period pieces, intriguing Cold War fables reflecting a time of technological advance, heady consumer confidence and unbridled paranoia.

  At the hollow heart of Priestley’s novel is a world conspiracy that barely withstands summary, let alone analysis. It seems to involve a plan by some shadowy organisation to destroy civilisation north of the equator and build human society again from scratch in South America, Africa and Australia. In the weakest part of the story, Priestley resorts (via the shabby mystic Pat Dailey) to some opaque metaphysical mumbo-jumbo:

  Here there’s a difference, a conflict, between what we’ll call thrones, principalities, powers, dominions, between spirits and disembodied intelligences, between men – for they’re still men – invisible and free of time, men visible and in time. Masters and servants, in sphere within sphere, level below level, give and take commands. One great design clashes with another.

  And again that’s pretty much it. I defy any reader to make sense of Pat Dailey’s ‘Age of Aquarius’ ramblings, with their baffling references to Saturnians and Uranians. The episode offers the opposite of exposition or clarification, although it’s typical of Priestley’s use of an ambiguous and omniscient figure, such as the all-knowing Goole in An Inspector Calls.