A Life in History
DRAPER, ROGER
A Life in History By Roger Draper Some people are criticized as much for their virtues as their faults. The great English historian AJ.P. Taylor was such a man. Many of his colleagues...
...Within three weeks of divorcing Margaret, Taylor married Eve Crosland, a former student who had become his mistress...
...When his father, Percy, left the business in 1920, he took out the rather large sum of £ 100,000...
...They tried to avoid doing so even when he invaded Poland...
...Taylor now spent Monday to Thursday at Oxford...
...Since Taylor saw that these values had to be flung in the teeth of the Communists, why the illusions about the Soviet Union...
...Material rejected by the government, though, was the core of his first best seller, The Course of German History (1945...
...She stresses his extreme conscientiousness in everything: teaching, despite his disliking the Oxford tutorial system...
...college administration, which he pretended to despise...
...Best known for his writings on 18th-century British politics, Namier was born in Poland and advised the British government on East European problems...
...Since Oxford did little to train professional historians, the next year he went to Vienna, where he took on a research project in diplomatic history directed by Alfred Pribram, the first of his two mentors, both Central European Jews...
...The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918 (1954), dealing with its challenge to the 19thcentury state system, is regarded by many as his masterpiece...
...While moving around London he devoted himself to popular journalism and to broadcasting, whose proceeds he needed to support these three households and his expensive tastes...
...Many of his colleagues at Oxford, where he taught for 38 years, could not accept one of the most admirable things about him: his ability to engage a very wide audience in the popular press, radio and television...
...Both parents were Liberals and pacifists...
...His goal—German domination of the East—was explicit, but he made up his means of attaining it on the fly, Taylor insisted, and the goal itself was a staple of German political thinking, not specifically Nazi...
...Back in Britain, at the University of Manchester (1930-38), he encountered the second, Lewis Namier, a politically conservative historian...
...All peoples ask for freedom from oppression—freedom from arbitrary arrest, freedom from a secret police, freedom to speak their opinion of their own government as well as of others...
...Taylor returned to Oxford as a fellow of Magdalen College in 193 8. Throughout World War II, he was a full-time tutor there and also worked as a broadcaster, a public speaker on wartime topics, and a propagandist...
...In his fine peroration, Taylor said: "I—if alone—am for the freedom of the mind—freedom for the artist to create as he wishes, freedom for the scientist to research, freedom for the writer to express his own ideas...
...I myself think Taylor was treated unfairly, if only because the idea that Hitler had worked out his conquests in detail is flattering to him...
...Taylor wrote three books that may continue to be widely read: The Struggle for Mastety, The Origins and English History...
...Alan Taylor's faults caused him much less trouble...
...By 1936 he was ardently antiNazi—indeed, anti-German—and for several years thereafter he lectured and wrote against appeasement and for British rearmament...
...The future historian loved his weak yet kind father, who appears to have given most of this fortune away, and disliked his mother, Constance, who developed an obsessive, albeit not clearly sexual, relationship with a male friend...
...When they moved to Oxford, however, Margaret became infatuated with an undergraduate and then with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, although Burk thinks it possible that she did not have sex with either...
...Taylor himself was appalled that so many people thought The Origins exonerated Hitler or the Germans...
...But what, as he himself worried, is the future of reading...
...But Hitler, Taylor showed convincingly, did not foresee that Britain and France would go to war in September 1939, following the rejection of his demand for the free port city of Danzig, with its ethnically German population...
...He then published a fine biography of Bismarck (1955...
...At most they got him dropped from a radio program and perhaps, as Burk suggests, made it impossible for the Labor governments of the 1960s and '70s to grant him a knighthood, but he would no doubt have rejected that or any other honor indignantly...
...Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who made the appointment, looked to Namier for guidance...
...Taylor's last academic work—and perhaps, the author and I both think, the best of his books—was English History 19141945 (1965...
...When he married Èva Haraszti in 1976, after his divorce from Eve, he added her to the cycle...
...The book argued, correctly, that the threat to European stability was Germany, not just Nazism, for the goal of dominating the Continent was common across that country's political spectrum...
...Thereafter, he published only material for general readers...
...Namier told Taylor he would be the choice if he gave up journalism and broadcasting...
...and family life, though he ultimately had three households...
...The two never spoke again...
...Nonetheless, he accomplished more as an academic historian than almost all of those who criticized his work in the mass media...
...What I remember is that he never hesitated throughout the length of the talk, about a very technical subject...
...Burk doesn't say...
...This kind of history was by then, the mid-1970s, a hobby for Taylor...
...Alan Taylor's paternal grandfather, James, founded a successful cotton-exporting firm in Lancashire...
...Because he refused to hew to any political line, he kept getting bounced off projects...
...But in 1948, surprising news came out of a "World Congress of Intellectuals" convened under Communist auspices in Poland...
...One of my few other complaints against her excellent book is that she writes of his being pro-Soviet "for most of his life" without indicating anywhere, as the phrase would suggest, that he really changed his views...
...When he applied to an Oxford college in 1923, he was asked, "What shouldbe done with Oxford in a Communist society...
...His popular writings, columns in downmarket newspapers, and television appearances, which created a whole new audience for history, were held against him in academia...
...In fact, Taylor argued, Hitler simply sought to exploit the Western powers' aversion to bloodshed...
...Once Germany was defeated, Taylor insisted that Britain could "remain prosperous and a Great Power" only in alliance with the USSR...
...Taylor's next work, The Origins of World War II (1961), seemed—wrongly—to mark an astonishing reversal of his outlook...
...Taylor is a very good read...
...Remarkably, those views did not prevent him from being regarded as an expert on foreign relations...
...Taylor's divorce from Margaret, in 1951, almost cost him his post at Magdalen, yet as Burk shows he was at bottom the wronged party...
...A Regius professorship in history, the profession's highest honor, fell vacant in 1957...
...Both books were written in his usual anti-German vein...
...In his family it had been assumed that the Allies were as much to blame for World War I as the Central Powers...
...Thomas, who from the late 1940s to his death in 1953 lived in houses indirectly paid for by Taylor, could be cruel...
...Why should he have expected them to fight...
...I looked anew at them while writing this review and liked them as much as I had when they were published...
...Burk thinks that "his real métier" was television, a claim I can't judge from personal experience...
...At his prodding, Taylor's attitudes toward Germany changed dramatically...
...For some time after the immediate postwar years Taylor continued to focus on Germany...
...He replied, "Blow it up after I have gone down" (that is, left...
...Taylor received first-class honors in history in 1927...
...On Friday, he went off to Margaret's house in London, for he wanted to go on playing an active role as the father of their children, and remained there until Sunday...
...The truth is that her Taylor is more attractive than his own, in A Personal History (1983...
...Taylor the man was no less remarkable than Taylor the historian...
...One day, his wife wrote, she and Dylan stood at a bar ridiculing "poor old Maggs' until they saw her, "the tears streaming down her mortified face...
...She was the mother of his two youngest children, whose existence, says Burk, wasn't known to the four he had by his first wife "for some years...
...The Manchester years of his marriage to Margaret Adams were the happiest of his adulthood...
...An unnamed participant (whose observations were recounted by Ved Mehta in his 1983 book, Fly and the Fly-Bottle) reported that Taylor not only delivered a "dyed-in-the-wool conservative" speech, but "had the gall to come over to me and whisper in my ear, 'I've been dreaming of giving a speech like that since God knows when!'" Burk quotes from its text, and actually it was classically liberal...
...Hitler, Taylor thought, may well have meant to go to war, though not until 1943, and against the Russians, not Britain and France...
...Some of his opinions were delusional: Though not, as a mature man, a Marxist—or a follower of any theory whatever—he held that Britain should have allied itself with the Soviet Union rather than the United States...
...Taylor (Yale, 491 pp., $35.00), that he struggled for years to keep the marriage together and ended it as a last resort...
...I did hear Taylor lecture to an academic audience—as usual, without notes—for an hour and a half...
...The prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials had accused Hitler of having a detailed "grand plan" that laid out his strategy and tactics...
...Their opposition to British participation in World War I pushed them to the fringes of the Communist Party, which their son joined briefly in the mid- 1920s...
...He wasn't very far Left in domestic politics, believing only in such bourgeois verities as the sanctify of contract...
...In the course of a 1946 BBC broadcast, he predicted that the Soviet economy would soon eclipse that of the United States...
...Taylor needed the money...
...He was also attacked for divorcing his first wife, but I am now persuaded by his former student Kathleen Burk, in her very readable Troublemaker: The Life and History of AJ.P...
...He drove down to London on Thursday, spending the night with Eve...
Vol. 84 • May 2001 • No. 3
