Priestley in Wonderland

MIDNIGHT ON THE DESERT--J. B. Priestley--Harper ($3).

Wintering with his household of nine on an Arizona ranch last year, Novelist Priestley spent an intensely ruminative 20 minutes one midnight in his writing shack analyzing himself, his U. S. travels, his possible travels in the Hereafter. His conclusions, considerably expanded and set down in Midnight on the Desert, show the familiar Priestley discursiveness, less of his easy-going humor than usual and a not-always recognizable U. S. On that night he felt like "a half-starved little coyote . . . howling to the stars."

Singing the glory of Arizona's climate, landscape and cowboys, Author Priestley less resembles a coyote than an oldtime prophet. The prophet's rhapsodies change to a jeremiad when he tackles U. S. women, Manhattan, Hollywood, the stricken man-made landscape between, the profligate waste of natural resources, the "chilly dank hell" of moral decay rising from U. S. indifference to its gangsters, its rich men and their political ineptitudes.

Chief U. S. illusion, says Priestley, is the notion that Americans are dyed-in-the-wool individualists, and for that reason hostile to the Russian collectivist scheme. The truth, he argues, pointing to the easy way of mass U. S. propaganda, to the lavish Russian imitation of U. S. ways, is exactly the other way round. "That is why," he concludes, "America is the country of awful flops and sudden gigantic successes." In short, "the average modern American" is a socialist at heart, but does not know it.

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