Taken from The New Statesman 28 September 1957
This affectionate portrait of A J P Taylor was written anonymously by
one of his students, David Marquand, who went on to enjoy a highly successful career as a Labour MP, political writer and academic. Taylor was a brilliant Oxford historian and one of Britain’s earliest television personalities. For many years he contributed waspish book reviews to the New Statesman. He was also a polemical journalist whose columns upset more fastidious colleagues.
Selected by Robert Taylor
The tousled face; the quizzical smile; the light voice with the broad Lancashire vowels; the intense nervous vitality and emotional warmth; the sudden rat-trap snap of the mouth; the air of mischievous gaiety like a small boy playing truant from school: this is A. J. P. Taylor’s TV personality. Is it the real one?
It is at least appropriate that it should be one of the most popular of TV personalities. Television is the real symbol of the 1950s, as much of a paradox as the age it symbolises. As popular as the banalities of the parlour games are the Brains Trust and its derivatives, forms of entertainment which consist simply in watching intelligent people argue. But the real attraction of such programmes is character in combat, not intellectual stimulus. ‘Personality’, not just ideas, makes the television star. And the personality of Alan Taylor seems as much of a paradox as the instrument he has mastered so well.
Even his position seems a paradox. There have been famous dons before him in politics or journalism. But dons like Keynes or Laski were famous for what they did or thought. Alan Taylor is famous for being Taylor. This, not his ideas on Bismarck or the Fashoda crisis, has won him an audience of millions. But at the same time he has won a second audience, an audience which is eager for his ideas, excited by Taylor the stylist, the intellectual juggler, the indefatigable system destroyer. Surely, a paradox? It cannot be easy to satisfy these two audiences. For the second audience is even a bit snobbish about the first, like a duchess jilted for a shopgirl. It is a little inclined to feel that Taylor the star lets down Taylor the don, that the bright lights and the mass circulations are a snare and a delusion, an insidious form of corruption. It is as if a respected Nonconformist parson, after the service was over, took off his black jacket and dog collar and, to the scandal of his congregation, performed brilliant acrobats in the Street outside the chapel.
Perhaps the clue to the puzzle is that the pastor uses the acrobat as bait, to lure a crowd after him into the chapel. Certainly, the urge to proselytise is one reason for Taylor’s public activity, just as
his uncompromising radicalism is one of his strengths as a TV personality. He has deep moral attitudes. Professionally, he is violently opposed to the tendency to take morality out of history. He is prepared to judge the statesmen of the past for immorality as well as stupidity, even more the statesmen of the present. Suez drove him to fury; and the abortive war scare last August saw him take the stump with violent anti-war speeches in the style of a pro-Boer. But this is not the only reason for his appearance on television. He is a preacher—but an acrobat as well. There are many other television dons; several intellectuals write for the popular press. Few of them do it so well. None of them is a star. Most of them, one suspects, don’t really like it very much. They do it to earn an honest penny or spread some gospel or other. Taylor does it because he enjoys
it. The vast audience clearly exhilarates him. One part of his personality is enormously satisfied by the knowledge that his name is a household word, that his face appears in most living rooms in the country every Sunday at three o’clock. He plays the part of a television star with too much’ exhuberant zest for it to be only a part.
He is not in the least a politician. He does take sides, more violently than most people—but in a battle that is scarcely ever fought. To listen to him talk politics, with the uncompromising moral certainties of his Quaker ancestors, is to listen to a voice from the past, from the good old days before the Left had to feel responsible—and before it had to be taken seriously. The demands of practical politics hardly seem to interest him. What counts is principle, not elections. We should tear down the mighty from their seats; we should build, not merely no H-bombs, but no conventional weapons either. In a pleasant room above the lawns of Magdalen, such moral certainties seem moving; down among the buses and lorries of the High Street they can appear touchingly irrelevant, almost quaint. To talk like a pro-Boer is to contract out of the 1950s. When the talker has not merely read his history, but written it, one cannot help suspecting he half wants to contract out — out of the muddle and dirt of workaday politics into the glare of the television studio where everything can look simple.
So far, it seems all of a piece. But Taylor is an odd preacher: once inside the chapel, he stops preaching. Like Cole or Laski, he is a left-wing don, with a reputation outside the university. But his position inside it differs as much from theirs as the nature of his reputation outside it. For a time Laski made the London School of Economics the combustion chamber of the social revolution. Taylor’s pupils are excited and amused, not handed the recipe for the good society. As a teacher, he is stimulating, often inspiring, sometimes infuriating. He is not only a paradox himself: the paradox is his favourite method of teaching. The confusing half-tones of the historical landscape are brilliantly lit up by a blaze of wild overstatement or a sudden flash of improbable fact. Their very perversity makes the pupil think for himself. History is fun, not a source of political philosophy.
Laski’s work was always partisan, fitting into a coherent world-view. Taylor is the pyrotechnician of history—a fox, not a hedgehog. The paradoxes, the epigrams, the flashes of malicious insight are directed as much against the Left as the Right. It is his own idiosyncratic vision of what actually happened that excites him, not some intellectual theory of history. ‘I am not a philosophic historian’, he wrote recently. It would be as true to say that he is not philosophic at all. Any party line is rejected, even the party line of consistency. ‘It’s no good going to that bloody man with an essay cribbed from his own books’ one idle pupil of his discovered; ‘he’s against it, even if he thought of it himself’. He has written a life of Bismarck that is as artistically moving as any novel, and a serious diplomatic history of monumental sobriety. But he is not weighed down by, them. He frisks about the past, like a terrier hunting rabbits, occupied solely by the search, uninterested in what he may have discovered last time, or what system his discoveries will fit.
The more one considers them, the more the preacher and the acrobat merge into one another.
As a don, Taylor excels above all in the lecture room; and his technique as a lecturer tells one a great deal about the man beneath. Most dons lecture badly. Their audiences, captured unwillingly by the exigencies of the syllabus, sit like a blank wall on which the lecturer sticks his information. At the end of the hour they emerge comforted by the growing wad of useful notes, hoping that present boredom will pay off in future examination results. Taylor’s audiences emerge from an artistic experience. They are as much part of the lecture as the lecturer himself.
The greatest moment of Taylor’s life was probably the hours he spent 18 months ago delivering the Ford lectures. Ford lecturers are always eminent historians; usually they are slightly pompous ones. Their work is published afterwards by the Oxford University Press, gleaming pieces of academic machinery, secure from criticism behind an armour plating of footnotes. Taylor’s was a brilliant piece of intellectual history, but it looked more like a novel than a history book. There were bore epigrams than footnotes. The printed work conveys little of the audience’s experience. The lecture hall was packed. The atmosphere was tensely expectant, like a crowd before a football match. The lecturer was a little late. He walked in and hurried, almost timidly, to the dais. He faced
the audience and, without any notes, started to orate. Occasionally, he pulled a postcard from is jacket pocket, and read out a quotation: a passage from Bright speaking to the House of Commons, a piece of soaring rhetoric by Gladstone at Midlothian. They were more than quotations. For a moment, the lecturer almost became Bright or Gladstone. The voice, the gestures, the timing, the emotional power, and the reciprocal relation created between audience and performer were those of a great actor. It was a histrionic masterpiece.
Here the Ford lecturer merges into the star. It was the visual excitement of these lectures which decided his television producer to try an experiment which was perhaps more of a tribute to Taylor’s ability as a teacher than anything Oxford could do: the invitation to deliver straight history lectures on commercial television. In another way, too, the lecture room and the studio meet. The subject of the lectures was Dissent in Foreign Policy; the title, The Troublemakers. They dealt with Taylor’s heroes: the great opponents of Foreign Office respectability Fox, Cobden, E. D. Morel. But one chapter was missing — the autobiography. For Taylor himself is a troublemaker. That is why he is a star, why he wants an audience in the first place, why he can get one and why he is able to excite it when he has got it.
But why be a troublemaker? A fellowship at Magdalen is as near to the heart of the Establishment as you can get. If the respectable academic establishment pails, there is always left—wing journalism. With the columns of the English Historical Review open to you, let alone the NEW STATESMAN, why bother about Free Speech? Financial security? Oxford dons want for very little. Perhaps the answer is the old one: a sense of insecurity caused by the nagging suspicion that Oxford never really accepts the clever invaders’ from below. But in the end the question seems unanswerable. However much one tears off the veils, however deep one penetrates beneath the surface mask, one returns at last to the starting point: the exuberance, the gaiety, the perverse charm, the human warmth. The man of many faces turns out to have the same face all the time. The star in the studio is no different from the don in his study. The seventh veil conceals only what the first did not conceal.
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