Medicine for the blues

  Everybody gets the blues. There’s no cure, but I think J.B. Priestley’s little book Delight is medicine.

Here’s the beginning of his essay — he called these short items “reflections” — on “Manly Talk”:

 

Bluff manly talk, with a big background of travel and adventure behind it, like the old Wide World Magazine; and with everybody pretending to be a Kipling character.

 

Priestley thought that the best place for this kind of thing was the smoking room of a small ocean liner. The best place I ever ran across was a cabin on a sawmill pond in East Texas, where a Pulitzer-Prize winner would talk about writing and good books, and his cousin, one of the world’s great storytellers, would turn steaks on the grill. And with everybody pretending to be a Hemingway or Faulkner character.

Priestley listed some of the main topics of manly talk: travels, fishermen, guns, eccentrics and drinking. But he missed bird dogs.

Maybe it’s just because I’m from the uncultivated part of the country, but I don’t see how you can write a piece about manly talk without having a bird dog wander through it.

And that’s why everyone who likes to write should write a version of this book: There are different delights, and different folks have different ways of finding them.

Priestley wrote 110 short pieces. I’m going to give it a try.

• Source: J.B. Priestley, Delight; New York: Harper & Row, 1949, p. 59. I’ve mentioned this book more than once. Last sighting: “J.B. Priestley: ‘Delight,’” April 24, 2024.