D.J. Taylor is a biographer, novelist, and literary critic. He has written nearly thirty books in a range of genres, including the Whitbread Award-winning Orwell: The Life (2003), the Booker-longlisted mystery Derby Day (2011), the alternative history The Windsor Faction (2013), and the picaresque Rock and Roll is Life (2018). He is a regular contributor of literary journalism to national publications to the TLS, The Spectator, the Guardian, and others; a selection of his literary reviews and essays were collected in Critic at Large (2023). Last October in the basement café of Waterstones Piccadilly, I spoke to him about his time at Oxford, his career as a writer, and his literary influences.
Cherwell: What were your impressions of your student life in Oxford, reading Modern History at St John’s College, and writing on Cherwell?
Taylor: It was a place that I wanted to love, but somehow couldn’t. To quote Larkin, it wasn’t the place’s fault. I suppose the thing that disillusioned me was that I always thought – arrogantly, as you do when you’re 19 – that the dons would be interested in me and my thoughts, whereas I found they were completely indifferent. At St. John’s I was taught by some brilliant, brilliant people, and half of me thought a little more resonance, a little more human warmth would be great. And then the other half of me thought, why should they be bothered with people like me, some shiftless 19-year-old undergraduate, while they’re off writing their brilliant books? I kind of saw both sides of it.
These were the days, generally, where you were left to your own devices. I was giving a talk at Balliol last year, and as I went through the turnstile there was a sign that said “Anxious? Depressed? Come and have a little chat with the Junior Dean.” There was nothing like that when I was there. I’m not being flippant, but you could have died in your room and no one would have noticed.
I remember the first year St. John’s admitted girls, there were still some bachelor dons who’d never taught women in their lives. I can remember us all sitting on the sofa of Dr Ross McKibbin, and Ross was terrified!
I can remember a vague idea for a thesis on the literature that grows out of urban history, and being told “What will that qualify you to do?”. In the end, I went back to London and was able to write things which I’d not have been able to do if I was a post-graduate.
Cherwell: What did you do after graduating?
Taylor: I wrote my first novel Great Eastern Land when I was about 23. For years afterwards, I continued working in the City, and I still dream about wandering those endless corridors, not quite knowing what I’m doing – it was traumatic, but also boring. To use that phrase of Orwell’s, you feel on a daily basis you’re pouring your mortal spirit out a pint at a time.
Cherwell: Were you still writing when you were working in the City?
Taylor: Yes – I won’t say I was shameless, but I’d be given my week’s work, and I would do it in a day, and then I’d do my own stuff. I wouldn’t go back and say “please can I have some more work?” Instead would quietly type up a book review.
Cherwell: Do you know how many reviews you’ve written as a whole?
Taylor: No idea. A lot. It’s a valuable discipline, because I’ve never known an academic reviewer to give you a better idea of a novel than your average review in The Spectator. The weekly book reviews give you a much better idea of how literature works. I’ve always admired weekly journalism, and always resisted the academic. It’s been fairly resistible. That is to say that there are all kinds of academics who are making marvellous contributions to the study of literature. The other thing is that I’m a generalist in an age of specialists.
Cherwell: You’ve written 13 novels. The late Hilary Mantel said that you were “marking out a territory as distinct and disturbing as Graham Greene”. Did you make a conscious effort to evolve a particular “Taylorian” style, and if so, what do you think are its main tenets?
Taylor: I’ve written different kinds of novels, and I’ll be perfectly honest: I wrote them because I needed to make money out of them. I remember after Orwell, sitting down with my publisher and she said “What are you going to do next?”. I said “Well, I want to write a novel. I could either write you one of my deracinate provincial intellectual ones, or a historical one”, and she said “Do a historical one” almost before I’d finished. So that was why I wrote Kept in 2006, which is the only book I’ve ever written that you could really call a best-seller, and then another Victorian novel called Derby Day in 2011. What I really like doing is writing about where I come from, Norwich. I have an affinity with where I come from, I’m very located by place. But you can’t make money by writing about that.
Cherwell: Can you give us a teaser for your upcoming collection of stories, Poppyland?
Taylor: It’s about strange people living in the east. The stories have titles like ‘Yare Valley Mud’.
Cherwell: In A Vain Conceit, your first non-fiction book, you critiqued English fiction in the 1980s. Would you say English fiction is still in a dire state in the 2020s.
Taylor: Looking back, I now think in comparison to what came afterwards I was over-egging it. I was 28, I just went home to my parents’ house in Norwich and just wrote it, and I enjoyed writing it. I think probably the best bits are the chapters about individual modellers, the bits that expire, and also a bit about how literary society works. I probably still agree with some of that, but it annoyed a lot of people.
I was a hostage to fortune, because I should have realized at the time that it ruined any career I might have wanted as a novelist for the next 10 years. Because every time I wrote something, you would begin: “In A Vain Conceit, D.J. Taylor announced that a novel should do x,y and z, and let me tell you, dearie, that if he fails to do that …”. It my own stupid fault, and I felt that after that I was just there to be kicked. Having said that, I did genuinely believe, and continue to believe, that the kind of establishment style of writers like Kingsley Amis and Margaret Drabble were well worth having a go at. Margaret Drabble I think was a brilliant writer in the 60s and early 70s, but started writing these state-of-the-nation novels with very good intentions, and the general effect was like reading about a series of garbled-up things; the characters used to sit down at dinner and chat with each other about the AIDS crisis. I’m a great fan of Margaret Drabble, I wouldn’t want people to think I’m dissing her. The reviewing marketplace in those days was adversarial in a way it hadn’t been. At the end of the 80s, money is going into the newspapers, there’s space for arts journalism, there’s space for kids. You were almost tacitly being encouraged to rough people up.
Cherwell: I want to talk a bit about two Georges who have influenced you: Gissing and Orwell. How did you first come to George Gissing?
Taylor: It’s difficult to remember, because I certainly read Orwell’s essay on him at an early stage and was fascinated by it. But I’ve got my kind of book repository. When I was a teenager, there was a very good bookshop at the University of East Anglia down the road, and I used to haunt it. It had the original Penguin Classics copy of New Grub Street, with an image of a nocturnal, smoky London on the front cover, and I’ve got an idea that that’s where my interest in Gissing came from. I don’t think it was all to do with Orwell, though, because I remember reading Born in Exile quite early on, and I don’t think Orwell ever read that. I’ve written a piece called “Orwell and Gissing” in a book coming out this year called The Oxford Handbook of George Orwell; it’s a longer version of the piece in Orwell: The New Life.
I remember when I was in sixth form, I used to use New Grub Street as a friendship test; if I met someone and I thought we’d be mates, I’d say “see what you think”, and no one ever liked it.
I also find Gissing’s English sense of melancholia is something I’ve always responded to. Orwell says that he writes about women and money, but in fact he writes about the emotional consequences of money’s absence. In other words, how you’re going to get on with women if you don’t have any money. That’s the link between Orwell and Gissing, I suppose. There’s the sense that Orwell, Gissing and Dickens form a triptych.
The other thing is that at the time I started getting into Gissing, everything he wrote was being reprinted by Harvester Press – they were very expensive. I remember reading a review in The Spectator when I was about 16 of the London Diaries, and thinking “this is fantastic, I’ve got to have this”. John Spiers, the founder of Harvester Press, started this thing called the ‘Harvester Academic Book Club’ – it was clearly just to clear the warehouse of books that they couldn’t sell. I signed up for this and got all these chunky hardbacks for virtually nothing. They had to close it down because it was just a giveaway. That was really where I got into him. I remember reading The Nether World as an Everyman paperback, which was about 70p. I was thoroughly a Gissingite by the time I left school.
Cherwell: Was Gissing one of the influences that made you want to be a writer?
Taylor: Having read Jacob Korg’s biography of Gissing, I remember thinking that despite how awful Gissing’s life was, there was still a romanticism about it. The garret is romantic. The stuff in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) about choosing between buying bread or books, is romantic.
Cherwell: Do you think Orwell was the main influence on you, or Gissing?
Taylor: Orwell was the more formative influence. Obviously Animal Farm and 1984 are on the syllabi, but I read A Clergyman’s Daughter at the age of 12 or 13. It’s quite serendipitous because my parents were not particularly bookish people, but my mother had a shelf of old paperbacks, and she had the Penguin reissue of 1961, that I’d just picked up looking for something to read, and it was the first grown-up novel I’d really ever read. That was really the spur, then I read the other ones after. I read Down and Out in Paris and London when I was about
Cherwell: How did Orwell: The Life (2003) come about?
Taylor: I finished Thackeray in 1999, and didn’t exactly bomb it – when they said what next, I realised the centenary of Orwell’s birth was coming up, and I suggested Orwell.
Cherwell: Did you meet any big names of Orwell’s contemporaries? At that time, there must have been a lot more people around who remembered Orwell than today.
You’re absolutely correct. The difference between the two books [Orwell: The Life and Orwell: The New Life] is that when I did the first one there were any number of 75- and 80-year-olds around who had drunk with Orwell and had tales to tell. 20 years later, the number of people who were alive in the world and knew him well was 7. The youngest today is 80.
I met Anthony Powell once when he was 89, and sadly, his mind was going – his long-term memory was fine, his short-term memory was completely trashed. Lady Violet, his widow, was very helpful. David Astor was still alive. Having said that, the great and the good very rarely say anything interesting, because they put it in their memoirs. If you ask them, they trot out their memoirs. By far the best stories usually come from ordinary people who came across Orwell in quite banal circumstances.
Cherwell: Onto Orwell: The New Life, your most recent book, you rewrote it from scratch.
Taylor: Yes, I wouldn’t call it a revised version – it’s a completely new book. So I sat down, and obviously I used my original notes, but sometimes I found things that I hadn’t used before.
Cherwell: Why should readers choose your 2023 biography, rather than the 2003 one?
Taylor: Because it’s a snapshot of a personality in time, written by someone who’s 20 years older.
Cherwell: You open the book by saying that for 50 years there’s been a whole industry of people saying that the Orwell game is up, but somehow he always goes on. Today, how important is Orwell’s place as: a), a thinker, b), a writer and c), a critic.
Taylor: People say that Orwell cannot discuss international power politics, or the way that the world works and the hinges on which it turns, but they find out that he has some extremely bright things to say about that. Orwell’s criticism stands out for a kind of common sense – he will point you in directions you didn’t think you were going to be pointed. As a writer, he’s not the world’s greatest novelist, but taken as whole, there’s a real resonance to his fiction.
