The enduring impression of JB Priestley is the down-to-earth, plain-spoken, pipe-smoking, cocksure Yorkshire entertainer, with a mind concrete and far from fastidious. It is nut an entirely agreeable one. ‘Jolly Jack’ Priestley, with his opinionated Honest John manner, has clearly presented his biographer with some embarrassment in explaining what lay behind the public image. Was it a pose? Vincent Brome avers that the bluffness ‘concealed immense sensitivity within’ and that he ‘was capable of depths of emotional awareness which led him into one of the most profound love relationships’. This is certainly an unexpected view of Priestley, but not a convincing one.

Priestley’s literary career is solidly dealt with, and the significance of novels like The Good Companions and Angel Pavement in 1929-30, after years of humdrum minor work, is well brought out. Brome is particularly good, too, on the way in which dramatic writing suited Priestley’s creative energy: rapid composition, patient adjustment in rehearsal, profitable production, and gradual establishment in the repertory. His plays of the 1930s and 1940s work well, as their enduring popularity with good amateur companies shows, and there will undoubtedly be regular revivals of the best.

The novelist and dramatist soon became a public personality. In 1934 he had travelled the country working on his English Journey, in which he set himself up as a bluff interpreter of an English spirit much impoverished by the industrial revolution and the slump. By 1940 his increasing concern with social issues and his standing as a public figure led to his giving a famous series of weekly ‘Postscript’ broadcasts, their oracular commentaries on current affairs much helped by his rich baritone voice. Their underlying socialism was implicit, but there was much concern in the Government about these increasingly left-wing views. ‘One must stop thinking in terms of property and power and begin thinking in terms of community and creation’, he assured a vast audience; the Ministry of Information or the BBC took fright, and Priestley was sacked in favour of A P Herbert, a more reliable commentator.

After the War he stood as a Conservative candidate, and was soundly beaten in Cambridge. There was an obligatory and predictably appreciative visit to Russia, with welcoming banquets and visits to collective farms. ‘Many years later,’ Brome tells us, ‘he realised that he was not altogether free of the charge of gullibility.’ He was later to be much involved in the early days of CND.

‘This man was not an island,’ Brome writes when outlining the immensity of his task; ‘he was a continent.’ The phrase lingers in the mind as we are shown in considerable detail how far Priestley was sexually incontinent. Brome makes much of his hero’s attractiveness to women – a come-hither look and a sexy voice are referred to in contrast to the paunch and the ‘potato face’. His first wife died of cancer, not before a mistress had turned up, and his second marriage soon showed severe strain from his infidelity; his wife developed psychosomatic illnesses as the hurtful adulteries multiplied. It is amazing that it survived their frequent reconciliations for so long. The time-consuming complexities of Priestley’s sexual life stimulated rather than crushed his literary work, and his output continued steady.

At the end of the war, however, there was a coup de foudre, and opportunities for furtive courtship were much increased by involvement with the international committees planning UNESCO. Sixty-five pages are devoted to his pursuit of the distinguished archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, and Brome believes that Priestley’s letters to her will ‘transform his reputation as a human being’. By themselves they might have done so, but against a background of his leaving an ailing wife and a daughter with severe mental breakdown, of disingenuous letters home and the ignorance of their respective spouses, they are much less convincing.

Jacquetta Hawkes has already written lyrically of Priestley’s courtship in A Quest of Love, a discreet pursuit with lovemaking ‘in the box of a provincial theatre or the garden of the Institute of Archaeology’: much of her account is reproduced here. Priestley, who had previously put off the old love for a new without any trouble, was this time severely smitten. A guilty eczema, hay fever, urethral trouble and ill-fitting dental plates were added to his middle-aged spread before the divorce and remarriage took place.

Regular sexual satisfaction was at long last achieved, and ‘they continued to make love until Jack was 83’. Spiritual contentment was much more elusive. He had long dabbled in the fringe-philosophies of time theory, which lay behind plays like Time and the Conways or I Have Been Here Before, in which the dramatic power of sinister coincidence is elevated into speculation about reincarnation. Ouspensky, Jung, Dunne and Gurdjieff gave him pause for thought, if not for intellectual analysis or reflective meditation. Such inchoate beliefs became a substitute for religion, with reincarnation a possibility even when the question of the soul had been conveniently dodged.

Materially, he enjoyed great success for much of his life. The early novels did well, and the plays were consistently profitable. A manor house on the Isle of Wight was acquired, two substantial farms were added, and there was a double set in Albany. He railed at Gilbert Pinfold for displaying the pretensions of a Catholic landed gentleman, but Priestley’s property was much larger than anything Waugh ever owned, and Brome refers to him as being ‘landed gentry’. Even after an expensive divorce settlement there was a bob or two left for a ‘beautiful white mansion’ near Stratford, with 35 acres, and we can spare our tears at his octogenarian laments about punitive taxation.

Even after 500 pages, the author cannot regard his work as definitive. ‘Many more biographies of Priestley will be written’, he assures us. Because of his subject’s longevity, Brome has to be defensive about a man who had long outlived his reputation as a Celebrity, and has not yet regained it as an Author. It was surely wrong to try and reinstate him as a Husband.