Mr. Priestley Fears Not: J.B. Priestley on L.P. Hartley's 'Night Fears'

As our previous posts may have suggested so far, 1924 was a quite well-blessed year for fantastic and supernatural fiction, with some notable titles. This month also marks the centenary of L. P. Hartley’s first book, Night Fears (1924), a short story collection. Hartley was 28, and had begun his literary career with reviewing and contributions to periodicals.

This volume includes some macabre and uncanny pieces, which were evidently an early taste of his, but at this stage they do not quite rise to the sure and sophisticated style he perfected in his later collections, such as The Killing Bottle (1932) and The Travelling Grave (1948). Nevertheless, the tales are of interest as the early work of a later master of the form, and they certainly show invention and panache.

The book was reviewed by J. B. Priestley in the London Mercury for August 1924 (Vol X, No 58) alongside contemporary novels, and receives a paragraph. Priestley was on the whole a generous and tolerant reviewer, with a particular pleasure in classic storytelling qualities of the kind later to be exemplified by his own work. But he was unconvinced by Hartley’s book.  

He begins: ‘Mr. Hartley has collected his short tales too soon. Except in one or two places, he is still merely trying his hand; the experienced and sensitive reader and reviewer is more apparent here than the genuine creative artist’.

It is amusing to see Priestley adopting a sort of avuncular tone here, since the two were near contemporaries: Priestley was born in 1894, Hartley in 1895. Priestley had not yet published a book himself, perhaps because he thought that he was a ‘genuine creative artist’ and was waiting for the right moment. When it came, it was with the Stevensonian thriller Adam in Moonshine (1927), about a picturesque modern Jacobite conspiracy in the wilds of Yorkshire, a most agreeable yarn with a moonshine plot as well as title. I found it great fun, although I'm not sure J.B. quite knew how to end it.

In the rest of the notice, Priestley becomes rather restless about the cleverness and style of Hartley’s work. ’Most of these stories are in reality somewhat pointless anecdotes that have a kind of false subtlety in the telling, a nod and wink manner’ (italics in original). He can at least see that Hartley has promise, though Priestley expresses this in a somewhat awkward and grudging double-negative: ‘reading these things . . .  does not leave me convinced that Mr. Hartley will not write good fiction—for I think he will’.

Priestley concludes with a characteristic harrumph. The book ‘does at least strengthen the suspicion that what might be called the “highbrow” short story is rapidly becoming as standardised, as much a mere bag of tricks as the despised “low brow” magazine tale.” It is interesting to see him here already quite robust in his literary tastes and opinions. He was himself to become a highly successful author of popular novels now regarded as resolutely ”middlebrow” (if we must have such terns).

He was of course correct to see that Hartley would indeed write good fiction, including some classic stylish and sardonic tales of the uncanny, and these may be found in the two volume edition of The Collected Macabre Stories from Tartarus Press.

(Mark Valentine) 

Image: The first edition of Night Fears (Ashton Rare Books).