A.J.P. Taylor: a saturnine star who had intellectuals rolling in the aisles
AJ.P. Taylor was born a hundred years ago this month. I owe a lot to him because he was responsible for my getting an open exhibition to Magdalen, my favourite Oxford college, which I had picked out as mine when a boy of ten. Later he tutored me in modern history. You arrived at his house, Holywell Ford, in the grounds of the college, on the dot of the hour, never a second before or after, and the typing within stopped and a growly voice said ‘Enter!’ Then you got a full, crowded hour, and left again on the dot. The typing (of a Sunday Express diatribe, probably) resumed before you had closed the door. You got your money’s worth. I once heard him say, ‘I always give good value’ — whether for books, articles, tutorials, lectures or TV programmes. He came from Southport, where his father bought a ‘marine villa’ after successful operations as a cotton broker, and Taylor, despite his left-wing views, prided himself on being an honest tradesman, ‘never knowingly undersold’. He was keen on money and drove a hard bargain.
If you want to know what he looked like, go to Bruges where more or less every man over 40 looks like A.J.P. He explained his sartorial taste to me: ‘Don’t like Bohemians, so won’t wear sports jackets and flannel bags. Don’t want to be stuffy and wear dark suits. So I have them make me three-pieces in corduroy. Just right.’ He added ‘A bow tie for gaiety.’ He could be sharp. Once, while I was reading my essay, he suddenly snapped, ‘What, precisely, were the provisions of the 1909 Lloyd George budget to which you refer, so grandly and glibly?’ I failed to give a satisfactory reply (not easy) and got a tremendous rocket: ‘Never make a generalisation you can’t instantly substantiate by a concrete, detailed and accurate example.’ Many years later, when I was an editor and he a contributor, he got me into an awkward libel action, by sheer carelessness, with Harold Macmillan, of all people. I had to write a grovelling letter of apology, so I let off steam by giving Taylor a magisterial dressing-down. He took it like a lamb. He was essentially a modest man, without any arrogance, though he had a strong sense of justice and of what was due to him. He liked to be led. His books and articles were all suggested to him by publishers or editors. He needed a captain to give orders. That was why he liked ‘Max’ so much.
He was a superb lecturer, always without notes. Both he and C.S. Lewis used Magdalen hall and filled it. Lewis overfilled it, but two thirds of his audience were girls squatting or lying at his feet, displaying their stocky legs. A.J.P.’s were nearly all men, and he started at 9 a.m., the only Oxford lecturer to do so. The college staff protested that it was hard to get the breakfast cleared in time, but A.J.P. told the home bursar, ‘The college exists to promote knowledge, not gourmandising.’ He was not so blissful a lecturer as ‘K’ Clark at the Ashmolean, who gave courses on painters he called ‘Rumbrant’ and ‘Tintorett’, but then ‘K’ had a prepared script and used slides. A.J.P. despised visual aids, as well as notes, and refused to use them on TV. ‘I am the aboriginal Talking Head,’ he said. Both his Oxford lectures and his TV programmes were immensely enjoyable but it is a melancholy fact that, afterwards, you couldn’t remember anything he said in either.
A.J.P. learned his tricks as a diplomatic historian, and followed the example of his mentor L.B. Namier in ‘locking himself into the documents’. Both found it hard to admit any other kind of evidence. It is a weakness, which invalidates Namier’s (once sensational) work today, and led A.J.P. to disaster in The Origins of the Second World War, a book seen by many as exonerating Hitler. On the other hand, his sinewy grasp of diplomatic history produced three fine books, on Bismarck, on the Habsburgs, and The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918. These should survive, for a few more decades, anyway. His contribution to the original OUP history of England series, dealing with 1914–45, is (I’m told) the only one still read by students, apart from Stenton’s famous Anglo–Saxon England. It is not to be trusted for judgment, as opposed to facts, but you cannot put it down. He told me, ‘No use writing history if you can’t make it as exciting as a good novel. Actually it’s more exciting.’ He said, ‘Better not write books at all, if they’re just going to gather dust on the shelves of a library. Use short sentences. Then put in the odd long one. Stress people. Build up character. History is made by great or wicked individuals not impersonal forces. Have fun. Enjoy yourself. You should be grinning with delight after a hard day’s writing.’ Taylor wrote some bad or foolish books. His Course of German History is wartime propaganda though, by God! it gave pleasure at the time. He threw away his Ford lectures, the most prestigious in the historical world, by his self-indulgent Fabian pamphlet, The Troublemakers. His biography of Beaverbrook is no good. On the other hand, much of his historical journalism is superb, and a collected volume of his best pieces would be of permanent value. His judgment was hit and miss. In 1948 he performed a notable service to freedom by standing up to the Russians in the notorious Congress of Intellectuals at Wroclaw. Hitherto they had got away with mass submission, but A.J.P. broke the spell with a fighting speech, and broke it for good. Kingsley Martin, who was there, wrote a striking piece about A.J.P.’s performance, saying the wen on his forehead was like a blazing symbol of dogged John Bull courage. A.J.P. didn’t like that. He was vain about his appearance. So he had the wen cut off. But if he poked Moscow in the eye on this occasion, he often annoyed me by his apparent subservience to orthodox leftwingery. He called the dreadful E.H. Carr, a Stalinist and writer of monumental mediocrity, ‘our greatest living historian’. His antiAmericanism was silly, irrational and cut him off from what might have been a big dollar income — a point I made to him once, to his dismay. (‘Paul, you know I care nothing for money. Er, do you really think so?’) A.J.P. had many children who gave him great satisfaction. His wives were another matter. Margaret, his first, had money and a passion for poets. Dylan Thomas sniffed this out, and came to live in a caravan in the garden of Holywell Ford, while he cadged endless handouts from her, repaying her with secret abuse in his letters. The intrusion of this awful Welsh sponger caused A.J.P. intense unhappiness, some of which is reflected in his autobiography, a sad volume he left too late, until his memory was going. Thomas more or less cleaned Margaret out. The second wife was Tony Crosland’s sister, and had been exposed to her brother’s sadistic, misogynistic bullying — a poor creature, I thought. His third was a Hungarian communist, a sour-faced lady. What A.J.P. saw in her I could not fathom. Perhaps she had some ‘oriental tricks’, of the kind that enslaved the Duke of Windsor to ‘Earwig’ Simpson. All in all, I felt sorry for A.J.P., who took his occasional reverses too hard. I liked him, valued him, and was grateful to him. Like Macaulay, he was a superb entertainer. He made people excited by history, just as Wittgenstein made them excited by philosophy. He was a star, if a saturnine one.
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