The Doomsday Men Read online

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE DOOMSDAY MEN

  AN ADVENTURE

  by J. B. PRIESTLEY

  With a new introduction by

  JONATHAN BARNES

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  The Doomsday Men by J. B. Priestley

  First published London: Heinemann, 1938

  First Valancourt Books edition, 2014

  Copyright © 1938 by J. B. Priestley, renewed 1965

  Introduction © 2014 by Jonathan Barnes

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  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.

  INTRODUCTION

  It is often the case that the works which reveal most about their authors’ preoccupations are not those which have been laboured over for great periods of time, honed and refashioned with punctilious dedication, but rather those which have been produced quickly and even distractedly—art that is hurried, instinctive, improvisatory. Without the gloss that patient redrafting can apply, the author’s unconscious fears and concerns seem more apparent than in those instances where the patina of craft has been diligently applied.

  J. B. Priestley’s The Doomsday Men is just such a text. It was typical of Priestley to write swiftly: his most famous play, An Inspector Calls, was completed within a week and in the years between 1932 and the start of the war his output included a quartet of novels, thirteen plays, three non-fiction books, several film scripts and numerous lectures and articles. Nonetheless, The Doomsday Men, finished in just three weeks, seems especially hectic in its production. Intended as a lucrative diversion (given that big-screen adaptations of Priestley’s novel Benighted and his stage drama Laburnum Grove had recently been hits, one wonders whether the possibility of film rights were in the author’s mind), the novel is not amongst the best-known or most beloved of Priestley’s oeuvre. His biographer, Vincent Brome, states that, in taking on the project, Priestley was “throwing literature to the winds” and notes also that reviewers “treated it as a jeu d’esprit.” Priestley himself was to opine that “The Doomsday Men was a mistake.” Melodramatic in its conception, it is often slapdash in execution. The plot, with its three, initially discrete, strands takes an age to be set in motion, the characterization is flimsy and the ending, rushed and perfunctory, relegates its three heroes—Edlin, Hooker and Darbyshire—to impotent bystanders. Satisfying only in parts, the whole is distinctly ramshackle.

  Nonetheless, this rickety entertainment is not without its moments of interest, in part, perhaps, because the speed of its composition. As the narrative progresses into penny dreadful villainy, fuelled by memories of Sax Rohmer which would a couple of decades later be popularized all over again by Ian Fleming, the story takes on the qualities of a fever dream. Episodes which seem as though they might become crucial end nowhere, characters appear and disappear almost at random and, once the protagonists stumble into the Mojave Desert, the lightly-drawn real world begins to dissolve entirely. This oneiric quality becomes embedded in the text itself as, over and over again, Priestley associates his characters’ bewilderment at the course of events with the state of dreaming. “This was a dream,” Darbyshire thinks, “in full glaring sunlight.” Later he “dreamily” accepts “every turning and new bumpy climb, not knowing where they were going” and stares “in dreamy astonishment.” “The dream through which he had moved all day was taking on something of a nightmare aspect,” he thinks, and, when imprisoned, wakes from “several long confused dreams.” Hooker too has “just had a most peculiar dream.” The eyes of John MacMichael “were not used to observe the world but only to see with in dreams and visions” and he is later to declare that all men “live in an uneasy dream of life, pursued by and pursuing shadows.” Even in the final paragraph, with peril apparently averted, Rosalie Atwood stares “dreamily down at the other four below.”

  If this line of imagery has a resolution, it is not in the pallid climax but rather in a more persistent element to the narrative, an insistence that Priestley’s characters—and, by extension, his readers—wake up. The real world intrudes repeatedly into this land of colourless derring-do and the shadow of the coming war falls heavily upon the narrative. Andrea tells her lover that “I haven’t time to waste even reading any more about their armies and navies and bombing planes and spies and executions; but I know everything’s getting worse.” Darbyshire remarks that “I ought to be able to manage it during the next three years, unless we have a war or something equally damnable.” The physicist Paul MacMichael is said to look “not unlike Stalin,” the old journalist Rushy Drew tells Jimmy Edlin that “Hitler and Mussolini and Stalin weren’t exactly expected either” and John MacMichael, in Hooker’s opinion, is “the Hitler of the Brotherhood of the Judgment.” Most suggestive of all, walking through London, “a mournful Old World monster of a town,” the American scientist George Hooker notes that the whole place is “terrified now that it would have all hell bombed out of it at the drop of a hat.” Written in 1937, the novel was not published until the following year by which time such instances of accidental prophecy would have seemed not in the slightest bit fanciful.

  Amongst this often confused and even uneasy novel, then, are clearly to be seen the author’s overwhelming concerns at the time of its composition. There is also perhaps an implicit warning—to nations asleep whilst all around them grave, palpable threats grow ever stronger. Even when it comes within a hairsbreadth of disaster, the world is only interested temporarily in its “night of terrible dreams,” forgetting all too soon and going back to its selfish slumber: “men returned to their ordinary tasks and thoughts, perhaps to destroy the world piece by piece.”

  Reading The Doomsday Men in the twenty-first century it is apparent that whilst the specific geo-political circumstances may have changed, little else has done so. Out of this hasty yet unconsciously revealing attempt to entertain, the voice of Priestley speaks to us again. He would be disappointed, one suspects, to learn that we ignore it still.

  Jonathan Barnes

  April 2014

  Jonathan Barnes is the author of two novels, The Somnambulist (2007) and The Domino Men (2008), which, between them, have been translated into eight languages. He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review and is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Kingston University. His website is http://www.jonathan-barnes.com.

  To DOROTHY BROOKE

  Dorothy, I must begin

  By warning you: here’s fantasie,

  A fairy-tale in Western rig

  (For a wet night in some country inn)

  Which please accept in memory

  Of Jane and me, Grahame and Fig,

  Of desert, mountains and blue air,

  The canyons, camps and buffalo steak,

  The maestro-works you crayoned there,

  The nonsense that we’d find—or make.

  (Sometimes I thought there seemed to be

  No
t five but six: as if we’d share

  Our laughter and the heart’s quick shake

  Of joy with one we could not see).

  As through the desert hills we’d go

  And bounced inside that dusty car,

  I cast us in this puppet show

  And made each puppet bravely shine;

  Though you, I think, are braver far

  Than these adventurers of mine;

  And being wise as well you’ll know

  The idle tale is not quite all,

  As children playing games may throw

  Strange threatening shadows on the wall;

  In such a world could I do less?

  So here, it’s yours. Good night, God bless!

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE ADVENTURE OF THE TENNIS PARTNERS

  It was the last day of the Tennis Tournament at Beaulieu, on the French Riviera. The late winter afternoon was fine, with plenty of brilliant sunshine, but as usual there was an undercurrent of cold, even of impending frost, beneath the surface of sunlight, giving the golden afternoon an unreal, theatrical quality. The little stand on the centre court was crowded with those people—the rich and the entertainers of the rich—who appear to be living a zestful and glittering life of pleasure in their photographs in the illustrated papers, and who so often are as dull, fretful, bored, as the other people who stare with envy at those photographs. They were not bored now, however, for the final of the Mixed Doubles had just begun, and it was a good match. On one side were Grendel, that long-haired, temperamental Czech, who would sometimes double-fault himself out of a game and then at other times hurl thunderbolt services like a maddened Jupiter; and Madame Tissot, a squat and powerful young Frenchwoman, as calculating as if every point cost a hundred francs, an icy terrible female to see across a net. The other pair presented a very different appearance. Malcolm Darbyshire was English, and slim, fair, good-looking, an Englishman of the more expensive films. He was not like most of the finalists, a tennis amateur who spent as much time playing as most professionals; he did not go from tournament to tournament, and his life was not bounded by Wimbledon and Forest Hills; he had no official rating from the Lawn Tennis Association; but instead had a profession—that of architect—and actually worked at it. But he was a good player, no doubt about that, and was playing well now, though he and his partner were in danger of losing this first set. She appeared on the blackboard as Andrea Baker, though nobody there could say whether this was her real name or not, for she was even more of a dark horse than Malcolm Darbyshire. But unlike many of the women players present, she did not look like a horse. She was a dark, golden-skinned American girl, a beauty, who was playing a quick sure game, darting like a great bird from the base-line to the net; and yet with something puzzling about her, not merely because she was an unknown who ought somehow to be well-known, but also because there was something about her oddly untrue to type. She ought by this time, after a week of play on those courts, to have been alight, all fire and energy and enthusiasm, with eyes like caverns filled with smoke and flame. It was all wrong. This girl was no blonde champion of the world, and had no excuse for wearing a poker-face. Who was she that she should look so composed, almost sleepily composed, almost listless, except when actually playing the ball? Some of the spectators, who were not all fools, wondered about her. She had been the mystery girl of the Tournament. Throughout she had played her matches, and then promptly disappeared, a large car, driven by a little brown chauffeur, taking her away. She appeared to have no friends; she was obviously rich, and an American, young and a beauty, and a good tennis player, and yet she merely played, made a polite remark or two, nodded, smiled faintly, and then disappeared. No lemon-squash or cocktails in the bar of the Bristol Hotel; no dancing nor dashes at night to the Casino at Monte Carlo; no moonlit kisses, no fun; she hurried into the extravagantly large car every day and vanished. So players and spectators alike had announced, in five different languages, that this was a very odd girl.

  Malcolm Darbyshire had been telling himself this all the week. Now, when he ought to have been concentrating entirely on the match they were losing, he was still worrying about her. As her partner from the first day, when they were brought together because neither of them had arranged to have a partner in the Mixed, he ought to have known more about her than anybody there, but he knew no more than the rest did, and had been compelled, rather reluctantly, to say so a good many times. But whereas they were still merely curious, he was worried. This was their last day. In an hour or so she would disappear into that confounded car again, and this time disappear perhaps for ever. And now he did not want her to disappear. He wanted to know all about her, not merely where she came from and where she had played before, but every little thing about her; and in exchange for her confidences he had a great desire to tell her all about himself, how he had decided to drop out of first-class tennis because he was really keen on his profession, how he had just secured a very junior partnership in a good London firm of architects and had been allowed to submit designs in minor competitions, had already had a hand in the building of a Council School, a church, and a small country house, and what he thought about politics, novels, music, food, drink, tobacco, travel, clothes, his two uncles, his sister’s husband and a thousand other things. Not for years, perhaps never before, had he felt so strong a desire to impart these confidences to a girl, or to listen at any length to any confessions she might like to make. He was twenty-eight; his tennis and good looks had taken him round a bit; he felt a mature sceptical male; and yet now, instead of enjoying this hideously expensive, tennis-playing holiday, snatched from the winter as a reward for an extra spell of hard work, he was spending most of the day and half the night thinking about this Andrea Baker girl, who might have been the Venus de Milo in shorts for all the response he had from her. True, she now answered his smiles of approval, which he felt were developing in their despair into idiotic broad grins, with tiny reluctant smiles of her own; and she had admitted that it was a nice day again or that they might have a hard match; but he was as far away from any possible exchange of confidences, any rapturous midnight confessions, as he had been a week ago. Now he found himself alternating between being angry with her and with himself, for being such a chump, and behaving like a neglected spaniel, an unpleasant role and one not easy to sustain on a public tennis court. Damn her eyes! And what eyes too!

  They lost the first set, by two games to six, and Malcolm felt that it had been his fault. Not enough good tennis, and too many glances across at his partner to see if at this last minute she was coming to life. That is, coming to life as a girl, not as a tennis partner, for she was playing better than he was.

  “Sorry, my fault!” he said, during the break and the buzz of talk from the stand.

  She nodded, not reproachfully. “We’ve time. Grendel isn’t so tough. He’s going to tire soon.”

  This burst of conversation from her, about the longest she had given him, filled him with delight. “Yes, Grendel soon tires, though he can come up again at times. But that Tissot woman is terrible. She’s all steel and rubber. We’ll never wear her down. But we’ll snatch this set, and then wear Grendel out.” He could have gone on in this vein, but she nodded again, as if to dismiss him, and now they had to open the second set. It was Malcolm’s service, and he put into it all his feeling of angry frustration. Twice he aced Madame Tissot; Grendel sent one flying out, and his other return, a more cautious drive, was cut short by Andrea with a neat little stop volley, one of her favourite shots. “But the trouble is,” Malcolm said to himself, with a certain gloomy satisfaction, “she’s stop-volleyed me too.”

  With the first game against him, Grendel now squared his massive shoulders, swept back his dripping mane of hair, and launched his thunderbolts, making it game all. The next game went to the Anglo-American pair, for Andrea served accurately, if not very fast, and Malcolm was ab
le to kill three returns at the net. Madame Tissot lost her service, chiefly because her opponents directed their returns away from the mighty Grendel at the net, sending them short as well as obliquely, and though the Frenchwoman was like Verdun itself when she was on the base-line, she did not move quickly up to the net. Malcolm served again, with the set three-one in their favour, and again got the game, but only after a long struggle. Grendel now entered one of his berserk spells, went roaring about the court, served and smashed as if the fate of Prague depended upon him, and won his own service and Andrea’s as well, making the score only four-three in favour of the Anglo-American partnership. It was now that Malcolm began lobbing against Grendel, to wear out that giant. It was a dangerous policy, for Grendel’s smash was terrific and he could hurl his two hundred pound bulk up into the air, to cut short a lob, like an over-size ballet dancer; but it was worth trying, especially as Grendel now began to sweep back his wet mane every minute or so, and his heavy breathing could be heard across the court. That game, with Madame Tissot serving, the lobbing did not work, for Grendel jumped and smashed down the first lob Malcolm sent him, and ran back and returned the second with a piercing forehand drive that almost knocked the racket out of Andrea’s hand. Four all. Malcolm’s service. But this time, instead of serving hard to Grendel, he gave him two slow soft ones, both of which Grendel bungled; but he served as hard as he could against Madame Tissot, who would have had no mercy upon any soft stuff. Five-four, and now Grendel’s service. Grendel made all the usual preparations for going berserk, and it looked as if his flashing racket would be murderous in its service; and so it was for the first two services, which could hardly be seen; but then, tiring rapidly, he double-faulted twice, making the game thirty-all, followed that by wildly driving a return of Andrea’s out of court, and finally smashed a lob of Malcolm’s into the net. So the second set went to Baker-Darbyshire at six-four, making the match set-all.