Time as Dream or Devil in J.B.Priestley

 

I have been rereading J.B.Priestley and watching movie versions of his “time plays”. These include a quite wonderful 1985 television film of “An Inspector Calls” with David Thewlis starring as the mysterious inspector who interviews a wealthy family after a young woman’s suicide – and then, when the story seems to be over, turns up to start the action all over again. There is also a 1985 film adaptation of "Time and the Conways", my focus in this piece.

The first and last act of Priestley’s play “Time and the Conways” are set in 1919, the second act in 1937, all in the same room of a spacious Victorian house in north England. In the first act Mrs.Conway and her six children have gathered for the 21^st birthday of her daughter Kay, and they are dressing up for charades. We see the varying ambitions of the adult children – Robin, just demobbed from the RAF, thinks he’ll make money and lead a dashing life by selling cars. Kay wants to be a novelist though she has just burned the draft of her first novel as “putrid”. Beautiful Hazel expects to marry someone one rich and tall and handsome. Madge, a severe school teacher, wants a Socialist utopia. Carol has quieter ambitions. Alan, void of any sense of style or self-importance, is content to live with his mother and work as an unnoticed clerk in local government. Moving in and out are visitors including Joan – who rebuffs Alan’s attentions, drawn to Robin’s bad boy glamour, and a ferrety lower-class little fellow named Beevers who’s been sniffing after Hazel and is brought in by the family solicitor. Hazel snubs him.

Towards the end of Act 1 Kate and Alan talk about time. Kate says it’s a devil. Alan says it’s a dream. They have the power to see all of their lives from beginning to end. At any given moment they are looking only at a “cross-section”. Seeing the whole story will give them the sense that despite everything, all is well. He quotes lines from William Blake to that effect. And says he will give her a book about time (certainly Dunne) to read on the train.

In Act II we shift from the aftermath of one world war to the eve of another and see how life has worked out for everyone. Carol died very young, perhaps from cancer. Robin is a drunk who married Joan who now wants a divorce. Kate is successful as a journalist but never published a novel. Madge is bitter and cynical, hoping to get a job as a headmistress. Beevers has made lots of money and married Hazel, who lives in fear of his sadistic abuse. Alan is quiet and philosophical as ever. Mrs Conway is in desperate financial straits and may have to sell her house for a lot less than it used to be worth. Kate has a vague recollection of some lines from Blake. Slowly, they come to her.

Joy and woe are woven fine
a clothing for the soul divine
and when this….we rightly know
safely through the world we go

In Act III we pick up from where we left Act I before, in the cheerful mess left from the dress-up games. Beevers is still being slighted. Mrs. Conway and some of her children, playing psychics, deliver happy predictions about how life will turn out for everyone. Mrs. Conway reports that she was offered an amazing sum for her house and a big profit for her shares but of course has no reason to accept…

So this is not about time travel but rather foreknowledge. It dramatizes the idea of the “long body”: that past, present and future all exist simultaneously and that in life we travel through “cross sections” of a reality that is already complete. The play delivers two cross-sections of the life of the Conways, with the hint that with greater awareness the actors could learn to remember the future and see the larger pattern. The script doesn’t take us to the idea that if you can see the future, you might be able to change it for the better. The benefit, if any, might be that you are better prepared to accept your fate.

Priestley had been impressed by J.D.Dunne’s theories of time and introduced the author to the original cast of “Time and the Conways”. Priestley later quipped that the actors gave the best performance of their lives when they pretended to understand Dunne's concept of Serialism.

Though the play is entertaining in its period drawing-room style, the implied philosophy is rather dismal and deterministic, and I am glad that Priestley didn’t stick to it. In other works, notably his huge and splendid nonfiction book Man and Time, he explored the possibility of an order of time he called “Time 3” in which it is possible to make adjustments and choose between alternate event tracks. He did not have the Many Worlds hypothesis that is increasingly popular in modern physics – which holds that our universe is constantly splitting into parallel versions where any outcome is possible. 

However, he did his darnedest to get our minds out of the coffin of a theory of the fourth dimension that maintains that we only see the future because it has already happened and can’t be altered. Like Dunne, he noticed that dreaming is our best way to travel across time, and staged an experiment to demonstrate the reality of precognition by collecting first-hand, verifiable reports of foreknowledge through dreams. Outside the Conways’ drawing room, Priestley is one of those who encourage us to make time a dream rather than a devil.