End of a Party

...He is also a contributor to numerous British and American periodicals, including the New Statesman and Nation, in which this first appeared...

...And I longed to seize that microphone and to speak some real words into it...

...Like hell it had...

...Moreover, as several psychologists have been pointing out lately, men in a mass, as distinct from a genuine integrating group, are very dangerously situated, feeling the loss of many primary satisfactions and a growing sense of frustration...

...So might bees and ants have talked, already fixed in the pattern that would not be broken for millions of years...

...Win-stoned and Nved ourselves into some sort of air-conditioned ant-hill...

...Even in international affairs, though everybody concerned in them might still be running around in a rat race, there were, I thought, signs of this staleness...

...There was no fire, no heart, in the talk...

...While we still concentrated on the rapidly diminishing differences between Capital and Labor, the Conservative and the Progressive, staring at them much as our grandfathers did, perhaps our whole society was changing so quickly all around us that we were still talking about one world while already living in another, quite different...

...The faces of the workers, sharply illuminated by their television sets, were tranquil, if not downright blank...

...As the party talk went on and on?what Knowland was supposed to have said to Watkins, and so forth, the same sweepings of the political smoke-room that we get here...

...Life-haters would be denounced for bullying and bouncing us into accepting what we know in our hearts we do not want...

...There may soon come a time when there are not enough new playthings to divert all these frustrated people...

...But because we have conditioned ourselves to read about politics, to talk about politics, we continued reading and talking when there was hardly anything worth reading and talking about...

...The topics were threadbare, the treatment of them routine...

...Indeed, it might be that, like an audience at a magic show, we were the victims of a misdirection of our attention...

...I am still addressing myself, covered with tobacco ash and slumped down in an armchair sixteen stories above 57th Street...

...Certainly, with so much rearmament taking up the slack, on the whole we could say that employment, hours, wages, general conditions were fairly good on both sides of the Atlantic, and that few economists were uttering their usual grave warnings...

...Twenty years ago...

...Well, they could probably do without us...

...In the advertisements, the automobiles now had "the $100 miUion look...

...Had everything been settled, then, except for this dreary muddle of conflicting personalities...

...On the domestic front, at least, no great burning issues divided people...

...just as the same sort of people here remember stories about Winston or Nve...

...This party would ask questions much earlier than present political parties do...

...of all colors, and the Massmen—a party that asks where we are going, and why...

...They had lived and worked too long in a fatal atmosphere, in which harsh and intolerable things are covered with a blanket of woolly and almost meaningless language, in which "Human" does not mean human and "Rights" do not mean rights...

...If a Declaration of Human Rights has to be celebrated while I am around, then let us have not only the Boston Symphony—and I am all for that—but also, instead of a lot of dingy wool, a statement giving the names and addresses of all the people who, that night, have been allowed to live their own lives in their own way again, together with some apologies from the chief inquisitors...

...I did not blame the two officers of the UN, who had probably done their best in what was not their native language...

...What a noble creature Western Man is when he reveals himself as a hundred-headed instrumentalist...

...Alas, between Strauss and Berlioz there was an address on these Human Rights, written by one UN high functionary and delivered into the microphone (the whole occasion was being broadcast) by another...

...I do not pause to reply but to take a firmer grasp on these columns...

...It would examine and check what are now so many blind trends, acting on behalf of men's dignity, happiness and possibilities of development...

...asked myself what we ought to be talking about, if only to escape boring ourselves to death...

...Like Labor and the Tories, the Democrats and Republicans were nearly evenly matched, with some difference between their respective extremists, but little or none between the solid centers...

...This is the unity that should be in the United Nations...

...But, then, when I say "us" I mean a dwindling minority, neither Mass-men, who do not know what they want until they are told, nor Boss-men, who enjoy the bullying and bouncing...

...Then the lid might blow off...

...Outside the political speeches, leading articles and chatter, it was beginning to look like a society of Bossmen and Mass-men, with neither of them caring a rap about anything we late-night talkers might say or do...

...I reminded myself that the economic phase of politics had a beginning not so very long ago, and that now we may be within sight of the end of it...

...And if we had any sense, in London or New York, either we would stop reading and talking about politics, as people have often done in the past, or we would make an effort to wake out of our sleep-walking and try to see our situation in a new light...

...The powerful, the rich, were not screaming for the police...

...What we heard was dead thoughts in dead language...

...The night before, we had attended a concert given in the great hall of the United Nations Building...

...Gilbert Harding was withdrawing temporarily from What's My Line...

...The talk, as it usually is among the survivors of a New York party, was political...

...Soon it may be his turn to shape the policy of a new kind of party—that is...

...Er?-" I began, after telling myself all these tilings...

...we could fairly say that the look-out for a society seemed rather dubious, for the Bossmen are too busy settling their immediate problems of power to think far ahead, and Massmen hope not to have to think at all...

...if everybody capable of joining it is not crushed out of existence between the Bossmen...

...if I had had an article that expressed as frankly what I felt then as this expresses what I feel now...

...I told myself—and at the end of a party I really do tell myself things...

...The playing was of a kind to make the hair stand on end...

...Here was the whole Romantic Movement, at once idiotic and glorious, furiously alive to the last glitter of the loved one's tears, the final mutter of doom...

...Nevertheless, there might be a few things worth discussing, especially after a few scotches...

...In more ways than one that the political situation there in America was for once almost exactly like ours in Britain...

...Already it is the turn of the psychologist or social philosopher to utter the grave warnings...

...And now...

...They were nice people, clever people, good liberals all, but suddenly my interest in the talk melted faster than the ice in my glass...

...The people themselves were not boring, but their talk was...

...Give us a little more time, and we will have Iked...

...His latest book, Low Notes on a High Level, will be issued by Harper and Brothers next month...

...This essay marks the first appearance of J. B. Priestley in our pages in several years...

...Here everybody can agree that men have a right to health, education, well-paid regular work, excellent housing, and no doubt lovely, obedient children and cabinet-size television sets, because it is all unreal, and nobody in genuine authority is prepared to guarantee that men should enjoy even their few essential rights, those rights against tyrannical government and its overbearing officials that our "free world" has been kicking to bits for years...

...We were all parrots in a cage, wondering where the tropics had got to...

...However, we are still at liberty, and no microphones have been installed vet in our sitting rooms, so let us talk while we can—not about the largely artificial world in which Boss-men tinted blue or pink are imagined to be at one another's throats and Massmen...

...It was plain to be heard that all was make-believe, that no real men had any real rights, that probably at that very moment all manner of officials, throughout the world, were complacently ignoring all such rights and wrecking people's lives without a flicker of compunction...

...Money was being poured into the Christmas shops by the sackful...

...Moreover, this minority stands on a shrinking platform...

...hating the least effort, are supposed to be alert and vigorous guardians of freedom: but about the world that never gets into the papers, being so busy publishing them and swallowing them...

...But then some-bodv remembered a very good crack about Ike...

...I could have offered it to one of a dozen papers, any one of which would have gladly printed it...

...and is against sleep-walking and the routine acceptance of more-and-more-of-what-we-already-dislike...

...The quarrel then might not be about the ownership and control of the factory but about its very existence...

...On an ordinary occasion in that hall, such thought, such language might have passed unnoticed, but against the moving tracery and delicate fire of the music, they were like two corpses on a dance floor...

...I will offer odds of ten-to-one that my own modest funeral rites will be celebrated first...

...Priestley is the author of numerous plays and such recent novels as Festival, The Magicians and The Other Place...

...We had Harty's arrangement of Handel's Water Music, some delicious Richard Strauss songs by a large, smiling Viennese soprano, and, to conclude, the best performance of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony I ever heard or ever hope to hear on this earth...

...Round and round it went—what Ike might venture to do, what Senator This might say to Senator That—and people droned on, chiefly because they hated to break up the party and face the sleety night...

...I could have made a contribution to it—for had I not talked with Adlai Stevenson a few nights before?—but felt no inclination even to show off...

...We need not spend our lives at the fag-end of a party...

...and Alec Bedser's form in Australia was still doubtful, but otherwise Britain stood firm...

...There is just room to breathe in the space between Bossmen and Massmen...

...That would be something to celebrate...

...It was to celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, but it was not these Rights (though I believe in them) that had taken me there, but the thought of listening in comfort to the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch...