Half a bottle a day

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

A Personal History A.J.P. Taylor (Hamish Hamilton £9.95)

There is far more to Mr Taylor's life than history books and common-rooms. As it says, this is a personal history and the story it tells is a bleak one in large part. Ac- cidentally or not, his public success has a background of private sorrow. Most of Mr Taylor's life has been dominated by unsuc- cessful relationships with women, begin- ning with his mother. His childhood was far from unhappy but was solitary. The only child loved his father but was cut off from that 'tiresome woman', although he was spoiled or at least pampered by both parents. Certainly he was comfortable. The book is candid about sex, but there might have been more about the other ever- interesting — even more interesting topic: money. Mr Taylor has often traded on a self-image as a man of the people; the working class, he once told Lewis Namier, was 'the class with which I emotionally identify.' And yet, he remarks almost in passing, his father inherited £100,000, and in 1920 was making £5000 a year in the cot- ton trade, a stupendous amount then.

After his mother came two wives, a sad story indeed. He and his first wife had several 'years of great happiness' in the Thirties when he had his first job at Man- chester University. Then followed, begin- ning, though by coincidence, with his return to Oxford as a don, 'a decade of intense, almost indescribable misery which left me crippled and stunted emotionally . .. fate certainly dealt me a lousy trick'. The prox- imate cause of this misery was Margaret Taylor's two infatuations. One was with Dylan Thomas — 'I disliked Dylan Thomas intensely. He was cruel. He was a sponger even when he had money of his own. He went out of his way to hurt those who helped him' — and the other was with Mr Robert Kee. The second was the more humiliating for Mr Taylor and an embar- rassment to all (including Mr Kee who did not reciprocate her feelings and 'behaved faultlessly'). The connexion with Thomas was more disastrous in the end, not least because Margaret persisted in giving him large sums of money and buying him houses.

The second marriage, to Miss Eve Crosland, was by inference no more suc- cessful but we learn nothing directly about it, not even her name. She asked not to be mentioned and presumably threatened the attentions of her lawyers. The result makes bizarre reading. One marriage ends. He moves. A few years later two sons are born as though by some male parthenogenesis. But never once does the second Mrs Taylor appear. Apart from the marriage itself it would have been interesting to learn about Mr Taylor's relationship with his late brother-in-law Tony Crosland: a leper's squint is provided by the letter which Mr Taylor wrote to Crosland, quoted in Susan Crosland's life of her husband, telling him to lay off the drink. Mr Taylor himself, in- cidentally, has never drunk more than half a bottle of wine a day, a lesson to anyone who wants to write two dozen books.

All these misfortunes colour, even discolour, his memoirs. There is less sign here of the Taylor who endeared himself to generations of schoolboy readers, undergraduate pupils and then of television viewers, he of the sparklingly merry (if sometimes cheap) wit. His loneliness in- creased, with few respites from marital suf- fering: he 'spent thirty-eight years in Ox- ford — more than half my life — without making a single intimate friend'. Maybe as a consequence there is a tone of undignified point-scoring and score-settling. He is in any case given to sweeping generalisation: `like most Jews [Namier]was an elitist'; `like most homosexuals [Bruce McFarlane] was neurotic'; someone else displays `unscrupulousness — the usual charac- teristic of a homosexual'.

Besides that, 'I have become a much more distinguished historian than Kenneth Bell' — who didn't give him a Balliol scholarship

— 'and ... none of the boys who got scholarships at Balliol when I got none has been heard of since';`and I, so despised by clever Stanley [Cohn, of Oriel, the college he did go to], have been a principal con- tributor to the Sunday Express'; 'I was, after all, the most distinguished historian of contemporary times in the university'; the History Board at Oxford 'should have created a Professorship ad hominem for me long before'; 'five out of fifteen con- tributors to the Oxford History of England have been knighted. No such honour was

offered to me — by none too selective quotation it is easy, not even very unfair, to portray Mr Taylor in a sour light. The pity is that a writer of his eminence feels it necessary to lick these old sores.

He fits perfectly Evelyn Waugh's descrip- tion of the 20th-century Oxford don who sees his job as an opportunity for 'private research and public performance' rather than the teaching of the young. And he ad- mits that he never enjoyed teaching, though it gave him an income.

It would be tedious to rehearse the bitter struggles at Magdalen and within the History Faculty at Oxford, still so alive to Mr Taylor, except to say that his pleas of ill- use seem unconvincing. But he used his time well; the books he wrote in those years of personal unhappiness and professional

dissatisfaction are wonderful. His first two, prewar, books are unread (though far from unreadable). The products of the last 15 years have a pot-boiled flavour (he may be one of those who are desperately worried by the prospect of poverty, however remote; he will always write for money). But from The Habsburg Monarchy to English History 1914-1945 he produced half-a- dozen full-length books and several collec- tions of essays which will be read as long as anyone reads history in English. He is a marvellous writer.

Politically he is very odd. Not, that is, in

his support for CND, not in the domestic politics to which he devoted so much time. At home he is an honest man of the Left. But his attitude to Soviet Russia is in- tolerable. A strong word, but: 'Later I came to see that these friends of mine' — in Czechoslovakia in 1948 — 'had brought it on themselves by trying to achieve a Czech government in which the Communists would have no part. In the Hungarian af- fair of 1956 I was less hesitant. Better a Communist regime supported by Soviet Russia, I thought, than an anti-Communist regime led by Cardinal Mindszenty.' And although he ostentatiously refused to vim' any country under right-wing dictatorshiP, he was happy enough to go to Hungary in

1960.

pro-Rr nTsasyialno,r, hwahs ieahlwhaeysenbrejeonns`rynstpapkaabselYs to mean pro-Soviet. He 'accepted the Five Year Plan as a demonstration of socialism in action which I still think it was.' And as for those who captiously criticised Soviet Russia, 'they disliked it for its good features

,

— no capitalists, no landowners — much as for its bad ones — intellectual in; itnolethraentrceeyaensdwthaes sianitsmociinaeliss.ntRussia's crchiMc_ tatorship.' Well, imputations ofnmototiitvsear...e, always hard to refute which is why th should be made with care. This particular

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charge can anyway be turned round: thenter are those who suspect that what Mr av if '5 has always admired about Soviet Russia not the attempt, however warped, at socialism but the naked power. Is there 19

his

more than a hint of power worship in Stalin,

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Bfaesacvinearhtironnkby such as Bismarck,

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His assoociation with Beaverbrook has

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always seemed one of the most discreditable episodes of his life. But Beaverbrook him praise, flattery — love even, the In, d ing link in a lonely and loveless life.. 7t_ that visit to Budapest also had a joyful a come. There Mr Taylor met Eva Haraszu,t5 Hungarian historian, who was to chan8e,,,IL; life. 'I had long thought after niy periences that I should never be intereste.u., in a woman again', but on his returndan_t; England, 'my feelings were stirre whenever I looked at the little red risiliwse; Eva gave me'. The story of in the end agenarian romance is funnY, and in fro d touching. Most of his book is hfar .c .11,,,d mellow; the last chapter to a life wnti aril!"togo h until then seen success and fame End little happiness really is a `HappY