Dave's Book Blog: "The Good Companions" by J B Priestley

Wednesday, 3 July 2024

"The Good Companions" by J B Priestley

Three unlikely characters join a touring concert party and give vaudeville shows in mostly bleak towns in the Midlands of England.

Jess Oakroyd is a laconic Yorkshire carpenter who has dreamed of seeing the world; when he is dismissed from his job he takes the opportunity to walk out on his disapproving wife and her darling adult son. Miss Trant, who likes historical romances such as those by Sir Walter Scott, has looked after her father for twenty years but now he is dead and she has a small private income. Mr Inigo Jollifant, a talented pianist and rather less talented schoolmaster, rows with his principal's wife and is dismissed. Chance brings them together with a bankrupt group of touring artistes, some talented, others less so.

I think Priestley has modelled the book on the Pickwick Papers but democratised it so that, apart from Miss Trant and perhaps Inigo, the characters are all from the ordinary classes. The settings are all deomcratised too, so that we see an England where some towns are virtually bankrupt, full of the unemployed, while others are thriving thanks to new industries. These democratisations bring verisimilitude and act as a nice counterpoint to the insubstantial wonderland of song and dance; there is a message here that although material comforts might depend upon hard work and wage slavery, happiness - and, if you are lucky, wealth - comes from the much more fragile world of the arts. The touring, the slow descent into a linear plot, and the ultimate need for a happy ending all ape Pickwick but in the end it is only an imitation because the caricatures are less extreme, less fun, and the humour is too gentle.

It is written in the past tense and a fundamentally omniscient third person with occasional authorial interjections but mostly from the perspective of whoever is the subject of that chapter. There are moments when the author introduces spoilers (like Anthony Trollope, eg in Phineas Finn) to reassure the reader that some of the characters will find eventual success. It begins ab ovo, so that the first 40% of the novel consists of the back story of the three main characters, explaining how they came to be part of the troupe. This long introduction was a great way of building up their characters but I found it rather wearisome. This was exacerbated by the long-windedness of some of the prose. For example, in a rather heavy-handed attempt at humour, one minor character is described as "a rather down-at-heel senator from one of the remoter states of those that are united." (1.6) Why not just 'United States'?

E M Forster in Aspects of the Novel points out that we tend to overvalue long books so that we can justify to ourselves the time we have spent reading them. It felt at times that Priestley agreed with this thesis and was overwriting so that his readers would be impressed.

Nevertheless, this prolixity did mean that the three main characters have greater depth than many of those of Dickens. Miss Trant walks a tightrope between enjoying her new-found freedom and seeking security in the life she knows; Jess is doing the same, although he has less to return to; Inigo has yet to find any purpose in life.

The minor characters were less impressive. Susie, Inigo's love interest, didn't seem to justify her importance to the plot. The only minor character who really intrigued me was Jerry Jerningham, the dancer and singer and light comedian and male lead, who is pursued by girls but never responds because, it is said, he is devoted to his craft: "It was his ambition to be the most graceful lounger, the best of all the idle fops of revue and musical comedy, and to achieve these butterfly perfections he trained like an athlete and toiled like a slave." (2.2) But he is also described as an "Antinous in evening dress and dancing slippers" (2.2); this reference to the male lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian suggests that JJ is gay. Out of the blue, he gets married to an older lady, a widow, an admirer, who becomes his patroness but there are suggestions in the epilogue that the marriage is not a happy one. This mystery is left unsolved; I suppose it had to be since the 1929 publication date was when homosexuality was still a criminal offence in England.

For those who prefer their stories rounded-off with a coda, there is an epilogue which tells you what happened to most of the major characters.

There are references to 'niggers' and some anti-semitic tropes as is common with English novels of the period.

The book won the 1929 James B Tait Memorial Prize for literature.

Selected quotes:

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink." (1.1)
"She had long regarded him neither as a friend nor as a partner but as a nuisance, somebody who was always coming in to upset the house, always demanding food and drink." (1.1)
"There is about him the air of one who is ready to fail gloriously at almost anything." (1.3)
"He had a deep veneration for literature, so deep that he hardly ever made acquaintance with it." (1.3)
"Mr Oakroyd ... even tried to mumble some words of thanks, an agonizing task to any true Bruddersfordian, who always tried to arrange his life so that he will be spared such appalling scenes." (1.4)
"Youth, when it is exiled into the kingdoms of the old, at once turns itself into the strongest of secret societies." (1.6)
"She looked like a knowing and slightly dishevelled doll." (2.1)
"A woman who had said goodbye to the easy elasticity of youth." (2.1)
"The last house on the left was detached from the row, but was yet so close to it,so obviously still a part of it,that Miss Trant felt that this house had been just sawn off, as if it were the crust of a long loaf." (2.3)
"When you saw people you knew acting with amateur dramatic societies they were merely themselves with parts stuck on to them ... But with these professionals, you lost all sight of their private personalities; they simply came to life on the stage in another sort of way; and as you watched them, you could hardly believe that you really knew them as people." (2.3)
"The streets were being slashed with cold rain. One minute a pale sun would creep out and set everything glittering, and the next minute the rain would come sweeping down, up would go overcoat collars and umbrellas, and the streets would be full of people running as if for their very lives. A lunatic city. ... This tea-shop had the air of still being in the hands of charwomen. There were no charwomen to be seen but the place seemed to smell damply and cheerlessly of their labours ... The waitresses looked as if they had not yet recovered from a bitter reveille that had dragged them out of their little bedrooms ... and brought them sniffing in cold buses and trams and tubes to this tea-shop. Every customer, every order, was to them an affront. Their day had not really begun; they had hardly washed themselves yet; and as a protest against being disturbed so early they banged down sugar-basins and cruets on the little damp marble-topped tables. At close range they used the sniff, and at a distance the yawn." (3.3)