BENIGHTED
John Boynton Priestley was born in 1894 in Yorkshire, the son of a schoolmaster. After leaving Belle Vue School when he was 16, he worked in a wool office but was already by this time determined to become a writer. He volunteered for the army in 1914 during the First World War and served five years; on his return home, he attended university and wrote articles for the Yorkshire Observer. After graduating, he established himself in London, writing essays, reviews, and other nonfiction, and publishing several miscellaneous volumes. In 1927 his first two novels appeared, Adam in Moonshine and Benighted. In 1929 Priestley scored his first major critical success as a novelist, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Good Companions. Angel Pavement (1930) followed and was also extremely successful. Throughout the next several decades, Priestley published numerous novels, many of them very popular and successful, including Bright Day (1946), and Lost Empires (1965), and was also a prolific and highly regarded playwright.
Priestley died in 1984, and though his plays have continued to be published and performed since his death, much of his fiction has unfortunately fallen into obscurity. Recently, some of his most famous novels have been reprinted in England by Great Northern Books; Valancourt Books is republishing Benighted and Priestley’s excellent collection of weird short stories The Other Place (1953).
Orrin Grey resides near Kansas City, where he spends his time writing and editing tales of the weird, creepy, and supernatural. His first collection of strange stories, Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings, was recently released by Evileye Books. He loves old horror and monster films, and has a particular soft spot for “old dark house” pictures. His website is orringrey.com.
Fiction by J. B. Priestley
Adam in Moonshine (1927)
Benighted (1927)*
Farthing Hall (with Hugh Walpole) (1929)
The Good Companions (1929)
Angel Pavement (1930)
Wonder Hero (1933)
I’ll Tell You Everything (with Gerald Bullett) (1933)
They Walk in the City (1936)
The Doomsday Men (1938)
Let the People Sing (1939)
Blackout in Gretley (1942)
Daylight on Saturday (1943)
Three Men in New Suits (1945)
Bright Day (1946)
Jenny Villiers (1947)
Festival at Farbridge (1951)
The Other Place (1953)*
The Magicians (1954)
Low Notes on a High Level (1954)
Saturn Over the Water (1961)
The Thirty First of June (1961)
The Shapes of Sleep (1962)
Sir Michael and Sir George (1964)
Lost Empires (1965)
Salt is Leaving (1966)
It’s an Old Country (1967)
The Image Men: Out of Town (vol. 1), London End (vol. 2) (1968)
The Carfitt Crisis (1975)
Found Lost Found (1976)
* Available from Valancourt Books
BENIGHTED
by
J. B. PRIESTLEY
. . . . . the bright day is done,
And we are for the dark . . . . .
With a new introduction by
Orrin Grey
Kansas City:
VALANCOURT BOOKS
2013
Benighted by J. B. Priestley
First published London: Heinemann, 1927
First Valancourt Books edition 2013
Copyright © 1927 by J. B. Priestley
Introduction © 2013 by Orrin Grey
Published by Valancourt Books, Kansas City, Missouri
Publisher & Editor: James D. Jenkins
20th Century Series Editor: Simon Stern, University of Toronto
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without prior written consent of the publisher, constitutes an infringement of the copyright law.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Priestley, J. B. (John Boynton), 1894-1984.
Benighted / by J. B. Priestley ; with a new introduction by Orrin Grey.
pages cm. – (20th Century Series)
ISBN 978-1-939140-23-4 (acid-free paper)
I. Title.
PR6031.R6B46 2013
823’.912–dc23
2013007046
All Valancourt Books publications are printed on acid free paper that meets all ANSI standards for archival quality paper.
Design and typography by James D. Jenkins
Set in Dante MT 11/13.5
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
INTRODUCTION
In 1927, a 33-year-old Englishman named John Boynton (J.B.) Priestley published his first two novels, Adam in Moonshine and Benighted. For most readers who are picking up Benighted for the first time, however, it won’t be the novel itself that led them here. While the book was quite popular upon its release, and while Priestley went on to great success as a novelist, dramatist, and screenwriter, it is the cinematic version of Benighted that most people know today, if they know it at all, and it would be impossible to write an introduction to the book without first talking a little bit about the film.
Priestley’s novel was released in the United States in 1928 under the title The Old Dark House, which immediately positioned it as a deconstruction or summation of “old dark house” stories, a popular subgenre at the time. (In much the same way, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard would use the title of their 2011 film The Cabin in the Woods to signal their intentions toward that unofficial subgenre.) Old dark house stories featured groups of eclectic strangers gathering at some secluded house for the reading of a will, say, or stranded there when the bridge washes out in a rainstorm. They were extremely popular in the theater of the 1920s, and then on the screens of silent cinema, and even into the “talkies” of the 1930s and 1940s. Some of the most popular examples include The Bat and The Cat and the Canary, both of which found life on screen multiple times over the years. To modern audiences, the genre may be best known for its parody in the cult hit Rocky Horror Picture Show.
The first film version of Priestley’s The Old Dark House was released by Universal Pictures in 1932, and was seen by many (then and later) as the “apotheosis of all ‘old house’ chillers,” as William K. Everson would put it in his 1974 book Classics of the Horror Film. Directed by the legendary James Whale, its release is sandwiched between his more famous films Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935). The cast of The Old Dark House is composed of a who’s who of James Whale favorites, including Ernest Thesiger (Dr. Pretorius in Bride of Frankenstein) and Gloria Stuart (The Invisible Man), as well as Boris Karloff, who gets a special note in the credits assuring viewers that he is the same actor who played Frankenstein’s monster the year before, “to settle all disputes in advance.” The rest of the incredible ensemble cast is rounded out by names like Melvyn Douglas, Charles Laughton, and Lilian Bond.
The Old Dark House wasn’t considered a big success for Universal upon its release in the United States, though it broke box office records in the UK. It was shelved shortly after its production and Universal let the rights lapse in 1957. In spite of an unrecognizable William Castle remake in 1963, the original film wasn’t seen again for decades and was considered a “lost film” until a negative was disc
overed and restored thanks to the efforts of Curtis Harrington, director of “classic” schlock films like Queen of Blood and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?
Those who are coming to Benighted by way of The Old Dark House will find that the movie was a delightfully faithful reproduction of the book. Many of the film’s best and most famous lines are taken wholesale from the novel, including Penderel’s musing, “Supposing the people inside were dead, all stretched out with the lights quietly burning about them,” and Rebecca Femm’s speech to Margaret about “fine stuff, but it’ll rot.” The film is funnier, and, in true Hollywood fashion, the ending is happier, though it wasn’t always. The movie originally ended just as the book does, but it was re-shot after preview screenings determined that audiences wouldn’t respond as well to the book’s more tragic climax.
While Benighted is as preoccupied with the conventions of the old dark house genre as its cinematic counterpart, there are a lot of other things going on just beneath its mannered surface. Positioned between the two World Wars, the shadow of the first still lays heavy over the characters, while the specter of the second looms unspoken on the horizon. It is a time of tension, between hope and disillusionment, between the old world and the industrial age, between superstition and rationality. Beneath its veneer of charming suspense, the book captures the tension of all these dichotomies in the changing relationships of its characters, and in the conflict between the medieval Femm house and the more modern visitors forced to take shelter there from the storm outside.
Because the novel can get inside the heads of its characters in a way that is largely denied to film, Benighted has a more meditative quality and brings with it a sense of existential dread that The Old Dark House has largely replaced with more cinema-friendly bumps in the night. The dread is brought on partly by the aftermath of the war and its effects on the characters, and partly by the changing tides of modern life, but it also has elements of something else. Something older, that borders at times on the “cosmic horror” that was practiced by writers like Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and H.P. Lovecraft, though its closer relation would probably be found in the works of Stephen Crane. This dread comes not from any human agency, but from the sense that the universe itself is not a rational thing, and that humanity’s place within it is not an exalted one.
Though there are no monsters or supernatural phenomena in Benighted, there’s a passage in the middle of the book that provides a nice summation of the novel’s pervading sense of dread, but could just as easily serve as a primer for Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror:
His mind, outracing him, found an opposing presence, an enemy, but no name for it; a density of evil, something gigantic, ancient but enduring, only dimly felt before, but now taking the mind by storm; it was working everywhere, in the mirk of rain outside, here in the rotting corners, and without end, in the black between the stars.
Though there is much humor to be had in Benighted, it is a humor always in the shadow of the gallows, a way of whistling past the graveyard. The book’s mannered quality feels less like an old-fashioned theatricality and more like the characters are clinging to their manners as shields against an uncaring and chaotic universe, a fear as much of the uncertain future as the “benighted” past.
Which all runs the risk of making Benighted sound a bit stuffy, when really it’s anything but. One of the chief joys of the novel is in its ability to be read as a simple and enjoyable old dark house chiller just as easily as it can be mined for deeper thematic significance.
By the time the film version of The Old Dark House was released, Priestley had already become famous for the 1929 release of his third novel The Good Companions, which won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and was itself filmed twice (once in 1933 and again in 1957). Priestley went on to write more than twenty additional novels, as well as numerous plays and short stories. He remained prolific until his death in 1984. The Internet Movie Database credits him as writer on more than 90 titles, many of them film versions of his various plays. His first play, Dangerous Corner, was adapted for film at least four times. Today, however, he is largely forgotten, and many of his best works are out of print. This Valancourt Books edition marks the first time that Benighted has been widely available in almost half a century. It’s a momentous occasion for fans of the novel, or fans of the film, or anyone who enjoys a good “old dark house” tale, especially one that has a little more substance than most.
Orrin Grey
March 3, 2013
BENIGHTED
CHAPTER I
Margaret was saying something, but he couldn’t hear a word. The downpour and the noise of the engine were almost deafening. Suddenly he stopped the car and leaned back, relieved, relaxed, free for a moment from the task of steering a way through the roaring darkness. He had always felt insecure driving at night, staring out at a little lighted patch of road and groping for levers and switches, pressing pedals, had always been rather surprised when the right thing happened. But to-night, on these twisting mountain roads, some of them already awash, with storm after storm bursting upon them and the whole night now one black torrent, every mile was a miracle. It couldn’t last. Their rattling little box of mechanical tricks was nothing but a piece of impudence. He turned to Margaret.
‘You needn’t have done that,’ she was saying now. She had had to raise her voice, of course, but it was as cool and clear as ever. She was still detached, but apparently, for once, not amused.
‘Done what?’ Philip returned, but his heart sank, for he knew what she meant. Then he felt annoyed. Couldn’t he stop the damned thing for a minute? He was easily the coldest and wettest of the three of them.
‘You needn’t have stopped the car,’ Margaret replied. ‘I was only saying that we ought to have turned back before. It’s simply idiotic going on like this. Where are we?’
He felt an icy trickle going down his back and shook himself. ‘Hanged if I know,’ he told her. ‘Somewhere in wildest Wales. That’s as near as I can get. I’ve never found my bearings since we missed that turning. But I think the direction’s vaguely right.’ He wriggled a little. He was even wetter than he had imagined. He had got wet when he had gone out to change the wheel and then later when she had stopped and he had had to look at the engine, and since then the rain had been coming in steadily. Not all the hoods and screens in the world could keep out this appalling downpour.
‘This is hopeless.’ Margaret was calmly condemning the situation. ‘What time is it?’
There was no light on the dashboard, so he struck a match and held it near the clock. Half-past nine. There was just time to catch a glimpse of Margaret’s profile before the tiny flame vanished. It was like overhearing a faintly scornful phrase about himself. He suddenly felt responsible for the whole situation, not only for the delay on the road and the missed turning, but for the savage hills and the black spouting night. Once again he saw himself fussing away, nervous, incompetent, slightly disordered, while she looked on, critical, detached, indulgent or contemptuous. When anything went wrong—and it was in the nature of things to go wrong—she always made him feel like that. Perhaps all wives did. It wasn’t fair. It was taking a mean advantage of the fact that you cared what they thought, for once you stopped caring the trick must fail.
‘We’d better go on and try and arrive somewhere,’ Margaret was saying. ‘Shall I drive now?’ He was expecting that. She always imagined that she was the better driver. And perhaps she was, though. Not really so skilful with the wheel, the gears, the brakes, but far cooler than he was simply because she never saw the risks. Her imagination didn’t take sudden leaps, didn’t see a shattered spine a finger’s breadth away, didn’t realise that we all went capering along a razor-edge. Unlike him, she blandly trusted everything, everything, that is, except human beings. Now they were not so bad, merely stupid—the thought came flashing as he shifted his p
osition—it was only the outside things that were so devilish.
‘No, thanks. I’ll keep on. There’s no point in changing now. We’ll arrive somewhere soon.’ He was about to reach out to the switch when the light of a match at the back turned him round. Penderel, who had been dozing there for the last two hours, was now lighting a cigarette. ‘Hello!’ he shouted back. ‘You all right, Penderel? Not drowned yet?’ Penderel’s face, queerly illuminated, looked at once drawn and impish. A queer stick!—mad as a hatter some people thought, Margaret among them; but Philip wasn’t sure. He suddenly felt glad to see him there. Penderel wouldn’t mind all this.
Penderel blew out smoke, held up the lighted match, and leaned forward, as vivid as a newly painted portrait. He grinned. ‘Where are we?’ Then the match went out and he was nothing but a shadow.