BOOKS

Rob Roy and The Thing

Raymond Carr

A. J. P. TAYLOR: A BIOGRAPHY by Adam Sisman Sinclair-Stevenson, f18.99, pp. 468 A. J. P. TAYLOR, THE TRAITOR WITHIN THE GATES by Robert Cole

Macmillan, f40, pp. 288

AJ. P. Taylor was, incontestably, the best known historian of his generation. At the height of his television fame, heads turned when he entered a theatre. But the question readers of these two excellent studies will ask is `Will he last? and if he does, for what will he be remembered?' In spite of his frequently expressed contempt for his academic colleagues as dry as dust merchants, bereft of readers, he wanted to be remembered as a professional historian. Historians wish to be celebrated as scholars whose works have changed the way we look at the past. By this exacting standard, he does not measure up to his colleague at Manchester University, Lewis Namier. However much one may deplore Namier's rejection of the force of ideas in history Taylor himself regarded idealists as respon- sible for more deaths than real politiker it is impossible to look at 18th-century history without assuming Namierite specta- cles. Taylor claimed that no one would be able to consider the origins of the second world war as they formerly had after his work: that he accomplished this was due to his gifts as polemicist, a stirrer up of accepted ideas, an enfant terrible ready to overlook a crucial sentence in his sources that might weaken his argument.

Not for nothing was Gibbon his bedtime reading. Like Gibbon, he held that the his- torian must delight as well as instruct his readers. History was an art to be practised and enjoyed like music, not a branch of the behavioural sciences which he despised. Like Gibbon, he had the marvellous gift of concentrating complex issues in the memo- rable sentence: epigrams are shot at the reader like so many cannon balls. Tom Brown Stevens, his colleague at Magdalen, chanted them after dinner to the intense Irritation of Maurice Bowra. Some of us still remember Taylor's dismissal of the demands of oppressed nationalities for political autonomy as, not so much a cry for freedom, as a claim for jobs for the local boys. This conversational Taylorism was even resurrected at a learned confer- ence in a Sienese monastery just a month ago.

The trouble about writing on Taylor is that he seems to have taken a perverse pleasure in contradicting himself, and per- haps, like most of us, he could never sort out in his own mind the relationship between determinism and free-will in histo- ry. At times he writes as if history was a chapter of accidents — just as he regarded his own career as dictated by chance — one damn thing after another which must be somehow or other sorted out into coherent narrative. Yet his Course of German History (1946), as Cole observes, 'bore the appear- ance of determinism from start to finish'. The Germans had to end up with Hitler. Time and time again he asserts that history can teach no lessons, that statesmen are fools when they look to the future in the mirror of the past. Yet Taylor's writings on Germany are meant to deliver a clear les- son: the 'historical continuity of the Ger- man menace' as the most populous, economically the most powerful and aggressive nation in Europe, could only be countered through East-West co-operation, a truth to which their anti-communism blinded the statesmen of the western democracies. Without it, the Slays would go under the German juggernaut. He could attack Soviet historians when they dis- missed his Anglo-Saxon colleagues as men- About the scene where your psychopathic rapist kills the nun — you can't have him smoking.'

dacious time-servers, but he never aban- doned his belief that the security of Europe would be best preserved by an understand- ing with the Soviet Union. With the Cold War, and East-West co-operation in ruins, the only safeguard against a resurgent Ger- many was the divided Germany of the post- war settlement. Taylor, who had thundered against statesmen drawing moral lessons from history, could now write:

There are not many moral lessons to be drawn from history. But one is certain. A divided Germany means peace. A united Germany means war.

The coming of the Cold War, he wrote, `devastated my life'. A sterile ideological conflict turned Britain and Europe into puppets of the Pentagon. So great was his disgust that not even the prospect of fat lecture fees could tempt him to set foot on American soil. He hated what he called `systems' and the Cold War had locked Britain into the wrong system — Nato. This demanded the rehabilitation of Germany as an ally against the Soviet threat. Hence his attack on the Nuremburg consensus' that the war was the sole responsibility of Hitler and his 'gang'. whose wickedness had been revealed in the trials. The con- sensus let the Germans off the hook; they could be embraced as allies, washed from any stain of war guilt.

The publication of the Origins of the Second World War in 1961 unleashed a torrent of criticism that severely, if temporarily, dented Taylor's reputation as a serious scholar. The thesis was simple. Hitler had no long term plans beyond the dream of a Greater Germany dominating Europe, that could be realised by the prac- tice of Bismarckian opportunism. His dream was shared by his fellow Germans; `good Germans', Taylor unfairly held, only appeared on the scene when Hitler had failed to realise his dream. Even less had he a precise timetable for a war in 1939. Sisman quotes a conversation of mine with Taylor in which he maintained that the

great avalanches are released by the pulling out of the last stone. The historian's task is to identify the last stone. Taylor never denied that Hitler's dream of a Greater Germany dominating the 'inferior' Slays would lead to war and must be resisted; but the particular war that broke out at a spe- cific moment in 1939 was the consequence of stones pulled out by the blunders,

misunderstandings and last minute bad timing of all concerned. The sentence that

stuck in his critics' gullets was 'in principle Hitler was no more wicked and unscrupu- lous than any other contemporary states- man', a patent distortion that was not saved by the additional assertion that 'in wicked- ness he outdid them all'.

Professor Cole, in a book that all histori- ans should read, is particularly adept in rooting Taylor's writings in his political passions: appeasement in the 1930s, the CND campaign for unilateral disarmament, the threat of nuclear war in the context of the systems of the Cold War. His early book on Germany's bid for colonies set out to prove that Bismarck was a German bully and the price of German friendship would always mean acceptance of German hege- mony. The lesson for appeasers was clear: they must stand up to bully-boy Hitler, or accept a German version of European security. Lord Granville acted in the 1880s as if 'no foreign government would be so cruel as to oppose the wishes of a bene- volent old gentleman'. The reader in the 1930s must surely infer that Neville Chamberlain was another such benevolent old gentleman.

If Cole's book exposes the relationship between Taylor's political convictions and his history, Sisman shows us how these con- victions were moulded by his life. His is a sympathetic portrait; but the warts are there for all to see. Taylor's meanness in money matters; the overweening vanity which made him seemingly immune and indifferent to criticism. After the demoli- tion of a seminar paper of Taylor's he clapped me on the shoulder with the words, 'I slew them didn't I?' Could he really have believed this?

His vast output — his annotated biblio- graphy runs to some 600 pages — reflects his joy in writing, just as his phenomenal memory allowed him to lecture without notes or teleprompters, finishing on the dot. Perhaps his disciplined industry was an inheritance from his self-made northern forebears. But after reading Sisman's bio-

graphy and Taylor's own A Personal History, one can't help wondering whether his unremitting industry was the refuge of

an insecure, unhappy man. Sisman chroni- cles with sympathy his disastrous marital history. Margaret, his first wife, succumbed to and then relentlessly pursued an outra- geously attractive pupil of Taylor's: 'It was the bitterest moment of my troubled life'.

She then wasted her private fortune on financing Dylan Thomas, a drunken sponger who turned Taylor's home life into a nightmare, a re-run of his father's weak- ness in tolerating his wife's obsession with a worthless man. Yet he could not get Mar- garet out of his system and his subsequent domestic arrangements with her were decidedly bizarre. Only his last marriage, with the Hungarian historian Eva Haraszti, brought him the happiness that had eluded him.

Central to Sisman's biography is Taylor's relationship with the establishment, which he saw as a modern edition of what his hero Cobbett called THE THING: the respectable manipulators of power who kept their activities secret by denying histo- rians access to official documents. He thought of himself as a radical in the dis- senting tradition — he had been educated at John Bright's Quaker school — and could hold that no one reared in the Angli- can tradition or who had been to Eton or Winchester could be a genuine radical. He celebrated anti-establishment radicalism in his 1956 Ford Lectures, delivered without a note, his quotations pulled from one waist- coat pocket to be deposited in another.

In spite of this self image as a northern radical in the tradition of Bright and Cob- den, he chose to work in Oxford rather than Manchester. Hence his resentment of the Oxford Establishment's rejection of his claims to preferment. He became an embit- tered man, the Rob Roy of the academic community. 'They shall hear of my vengeance,' Scott makes his Highland chieftain exclaim, 'that scorn to listen to the story of my wrongs.' People who wear bow ties may have an ambiguous relation- ship with the establishment. Did Taylor wish to be embraced by The Thing as the insider's favourite outsider? Sisman writes that he was a spoilt child and in a sense he remained one, striking out at imagined slights. Take his reaction in 1963 to the ter- mination of his Special Lectureship. He knew perfectly well that it was a temporary appointment, yet he organised a media campaign that he had been unjustly sacked. (In my view Oxford's injustice was more evident in its refusal to elect Namier to a chair as a boring Jew who would be an awkward customer in Senior Common Room.) Taylor was not merely the sacrifi- cial victim of old fogies who envied him as a lecturer who could fill Examination Schools at 9 am, or his fame and income as a journalist and television star. His critics feared what I can only call his unevenness. At his best he was superb. At his worst he could be awful, as he was in his rambling, unprepared 1981 Romanes Lecture. A man who could dash off an article in ten min- utes flat and review 50 books a year must inevitably push out some sad stuff. It is a tribute to Taylor's achievements that those who, envying his popularity and income, seek to emulate him, seem, in comparison, poor fish.

Nothing is more agreeable, Taylor wrote, than to make peace with the establishment `and nothing more corrupting'. He himself entered the establishment by the back door, through his friendship with Beaver- brook, whom he chose to regard a fellow enfant terrible. At last he was in touch with a maker of history, an exhilarating but dan- gerous experience for any historian. It does not matter that he shared Beaverbrook's prejudices from his hostility to the Common Market to subsidies for Covent Garden. What does matter is that he pre- sented Beaverbrook as a great historian; that Beaverbrook made things up was a diverting side to his character rather than a sin against the truth. Yet when he over- heard a remark of Sir Nicholas Henderson that he himself was not. 'particularly con- cerned' with the truth, Taylor never spoke to his old admirer again. Taylor's biography of Beaverbrook is unabashed hagiography of 'the man who stole my heart away', the man who never betrayed him as his friend Namier had done in blocking, as he believed, his appointment to the Regius Chair at Oxford. This, Sisman argues, 'was the turning point in his career.' Like Rob Roy, once rejected, he became reckless, providing ample fuel for his critics. It is characteristic of Taylor's defence mecha- nisms that he maintained that he would have refused to accept the chair from Macmillan whose hands were stained with the blood of Suez. It is a curious fact that I and another hard-bitten conservative, as electors to an Oxford chair, pressed Taylor's claims to recognition. As always we were shot down by bien pensant liberals.

The paradox is that Taylor, the scourge of the establishment, was the last of the

traditional narrative historians. The defender of the poor ended up as the chronicler of the great, except that they were rarely the good. His English History 1914-1945 he conceived as being a history of the English people. Yet it was not a social history of the people as his younger colleagues conceived it. Sir Keith Thomas called it the brilliant swan song of a dying concept of history where politics held cen- tre stage: economics, religion etc are flung in as refreshing interruptions, like drinks at the bar in the interval. A harsh judgment from the leader of the new historical estab- lishment.

Even so one must conclude that no one will be able to write the social history of England without some consideration of Taylor as a media phenomenon and a defender of unpopular causes. The histori- an of Taylor's times will find that he must consult Mr Sisman's biography. He will find it an enjoyable experience.