Dj Taylor

Thursday

25 May 2017
Dj Taylor

Boats, goats and landslides

J.L. Carr’s classic novel How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup (1975) contains a character named Arthur Fangfoss. Mr Fangfoss is a rural tyrant who, when standing for the local council, limits his election address to a pithy eight words: ‘If elected, I will keep down the rates.’ No such brevity, alas, attends the 2017 manifestos of the UK’s three main political parties. The shortest of them — the Lib Dems’ Your Chance to Change Britain’s Future — weighs in at over 80 pages, while Labour’s For the Many, Not the Few extends to a well-nigh novella-length 23,000 words. The Conservatives’ Forward, Together is not that much shorter and took several minutes to download (for some reason it seems impossible actually to buy a party manifesto these days.

Boats, goats and landslides

Thursday

9 Mar 2017
Dj Taylor

Father, son and holy ghost

No disrespect to any of the present incumbents, but Karl Miller (1931–2014) was a literary editor in an age when such jobs mattered. Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s he not only ran the books pages of two weekly magazines — The Spectator, and the Paul Johnson-era New Statesman — before moving on to edit the Listener, but did so with a conviction that their cultural stance was quite as important as the political material that crowded out the front end. The virus that had propelled him into literary journalism burned away for nearly 60 years, and his last book review appeared in these pages four days before his death. Not everyone liked or approved of Miller, or thought that the considerable power he wielded either in Grub Street or in his subsequent incarnations as Lord Northcliffe Professor at UCL and founding editor of the London Review of Books was a good thing.

Father, son and holy ghost

Thursday

12 May 2016
Dj Taylor

Goodbye to all that | 12 May 2016

Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself thinking of my grandmother, Mrs Lilian Taylor. This lady, who died in 1957, spent the first part of her married life inhabiting a couple of furnished rooms on the western side of Norwich and the second part of it living in a white stucco council house on the newly built Earlham estate. She was an intensely respectable woman, implacably opposed to strong drink and strong language, but of what, materially, did her respectability consist? On the one hand it meant goading my father through the scholarship exam to a place at the local minor public school. On the other, it meant distancing herself from those of the neighbours who took to brawling in the street on Saturday nights and whom my grandfather was occasionally brought out to pacify.

Goodbye to all that | 12 May 2016

Thursday

14 Jan 2016
Dj Taylor

Cold comfort for Gibbons fans

One of the great fascinations of a ‘lost’ work by a famous name dredged up out of the vault after a lapse of several decades lies in establishing precisely when it was written. The jacket of Pure Juliet offers no clue, but parenthetic mention of Star Wars being on at the Odeon and an old lady who fears the depredations of the IRA suggests a composition mark sometime in the late 1970s — at any rate somewhere near the point when Stella Gibbons (1902–1989) was approaching her 80th year. Take away these half-dozen references to such sure-fire signifiers of the Callaghan era as comprehensive schools and this awful ‘punk’ music and what remains could very easily have been filed in the 1930s. Certainly most of the dialogue — in which old ladies bellow ‘What?’ at their nervous interlocutors, thirtysomethings proclaim that they’ll be damned and a girl tells her fiancé that he’s an ass — is well-nigh archaic, as are the demographic boundaries of a cast in which elderly spinsters, breezy young men and domestic servants genteelly abound.

Cold comfort for Gibbons fans

Monday

23 Mar 2015
Dj Taylor

George Gissing: the last great Victorian novelist?

George Gissing’s The Whirlpool was originally published in 1897. In this shortened version of the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition, D.J. Taylor argues that its author is ‘the last great Victorian novelist.’ In the early summer of 1896, hard at work on the manuscript of what was to become The Whirlpool, George Gissing struck up a connection with the Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill. A natural solitary, wary of unburdening himself even to the friendliest male associate, Gissing seems to have decided that Zangwill, author of the best-selling Children of the Ghetto, was a suitable repository for his confidence. The fascinated account that Zangwill gave to his friend Montagu Elder of the evening on which Gissing ‘poured out his sad soul’ offers a horribly accurate precis of some of the personal demons that threatened to drag him down.

George Gissing: the last great Victorian novelist?

Thursday

14 Aug 2014
Dj Taylor

The hooligan and the psychopath

A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s notorious travelling fans (motto ‘we have a dream in our heads, to burn the south’), contains a memorable scene in which Parks spots a teenage boy screaming abuse at some rival supporters before returning to the mobile to assure his mother that, no, they don’t have much homework that weekend. Here, doubtless, was the raw material for 17-year-old Hellas fan Mauro Duckworth, whose absence from his father’s investiture with the honorary freedom of the city is explained by his confinement in a Brescia police cell after a pitched battle with the local constabulary. Mauro’s impending court case is, we rapidly infer, not the least of his 55-year-old multiple-murderer parent’s worries, for Verona, so long amenable to the furtherance of his schemes, looks to be closing ranks against him.

The hooligan and the psychopath

Thursday

19 Sep 2013
Dj Taylor

To ‘Flufftail’ from ‘Pinkpaws’: The Animals is only good for celebrity-spotting

There is a fine old tradition of distinguished literary men addressing their loved ones by animal-world pet names. Evelyn Waugh saluted Laura Herbert, the woman who became his second wife, as ‘Whiskers’. Philip Larkin’s letters to his long-term girlfriend Monica Jones are full of Beatrix Potter-style references to the scrumptious carrots that his ‘darling bun’ will have unloaded on her plate at their next meeting should wicked Mr McGregor not get there first. Wanting to soften the blow of his sacking by the BBC Third Programme in the early 1950s, John Lehmann went off on holiday with an intimate known to posterity as ‘the faun’. But none of this sentimentalising comes anywhere near in its effects to the torrent of effusiveness, personal mythologising and, it has to be said, downright archness uncorked by The Animals.

To ‘Flufftail’ from ‘Pinkpaws’: The Animals is only good for celebrity-spotting

Thursday

29 Aug 2013
Dj Taylor

Death of a hero

Sitting down to inspect the final volume of Pierre Coustillas’s monumental trilogy, I decided to start by counting the number of titles by or about George Gissing (1857–1903) that gleamed from the bookshelf hard by. There were 45 of them. Next, I decided to count the number of these items with which Professor Coustillas was in some way associated, either as editor, compiler or presiding genius. This realised a tally of 19, including such titanic endeavours as the Collected Letters of George Gissing (nine vols, 1990–1997) or the 600-page and now, alas, superannuated George Gissing: The Definitive Bibliography from 2005. As these statistics confirm, Coustillas is the staunchest defender, proselytiser and all-round apologist that Gissing ever had: a long-term conductor of the Gissing Journal, an impresario of every Gissing project worth the name, fit to be ranked, in the reputation-broking stakes, with Ernest Mehew on Stevenson and Gordon N.

Death of a hero

Thursday

8 Aug 2013
Dj Taylor

A Stone in the Shade, by Violet Powell - review

Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me Edith.’ I experienced similar misgivings on the occasion, some years ago, that Lady Violet Powell suggested that I might like to call her ‘Violet’. It was not that Lady Violet — Violet — made the least fuss about her title (‘as unswanky a Lady as could be imagined’, Kingsley Amis once declared); merely that she was the relict of a man whose eye for the social niceties made Lady Catherine de Bourgh look like a bumbling amateur. It was as if George Orwell, knocked into at some Fitzrovian party, had invited you to call him ‘Eric’. A Stone in the Shade, 15 chapters’ worth of autobiography left unfinished on her death in 2002, takes its title from the vantage point to which Violet would retire, sketchbook in hand, in the course of foreign holidays.

A Stone in the Shade, by Violet Powell - review

Thursday

31 Jan 2013

Thursday

27 Sep 2012
Dj Taylor

Bleak expectations

Shiva Naipaul died unexpectedly in the summer of 1985, six months after his 40th birthday. In his decade and a half on Grub Street, he published three novels, a brace of polemical travelogues and the scintillating miscellany of stories and occasional pieces collected in Beyond the Dragon’s Mouth (1984). An Unfinished Journey, an account of a Sri Lankan trip, whose 80th page he had reached when he suffered the heart attack that killed him, was issued posthumously in 1986. He was much loved (see the portrait by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in Absent Friends, 1989), much admired, much abused and — almost inevitably, given some of the things he wrote about — much misunderstood. The memorial essay prize instituted in his name by The Spectator after his death has been revived this year.

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