“Tell me what you like,” John Ruskin wrote in 1860, “and I’ll tell you what you are.” By his tastes, D. J. Taylor is that white rhino in the taxonomy of professional writers, the man of letters. Early fossils of this species have been excavated from Grub Street in 18th-century London, where the mighty Doctor Johnson roamed the plains of literature, attended by his Boswell as the rhino is attended by its waspish parasite, the Gyrostigma fly.
The survival of the species was never certain. The first men of letters, lacking copyrights and a large audience, simply starved to death. Even in the heyday of late Victorian literacy, the fittest specimens tended to resemble less Thomas Carlyle (who had mused on “The Hero as Man of Letters”) than Jasper Milvain, the thrusting hustler of George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). As early as 1914, French publishers noticed that the movies were eating into their sales figures. By 1969, the year of John Gross’s Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, extinction loomed. Then came the Internet, which was as welcome in the publishing industry as a meteor shower among the dinosaurs.
Still, The Prose Factory, as befits thirsty work, presents the glass half-full. The contents may often be bitter, but they also intoxicate. The Greeks believed that he who drank from the Hippocrene, the sacred spring on Mount Helicon, would always file his copy on time. Here, amid the drudgery, backscratching, and bouncing checks, the joy of a life with books shines through.
The working man of letters may resemble the hack of George Orwell’s “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” (1946), shuffling around the teacups and ashtrays in his dressing gown, “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” But having somewhere to pour your immortal spirit is no mean thing, especially if you can wear your pajamas to the office. Taylor reports that when the octogenarian critic George Saintsbury opened a package of books for review, his fingers “still twitched in anticipation fifty years into a reviewing career that had begun in the days of Matthew Arnold.”
Taylor is an accomplished twitcher of the finger: the author of a stack of novels, several acclaimed biographies, and, he confesses, enough journalism to paper Lord’s Cricket Ground. His theme here is taste, critical and popular, his counterpoint how the business of writing shapes the work of writers. This being an English history, the story of taste is a history of class. The Balkanization of literary taste is not a recent invention, and neither is the difficulty of making a living as a full-time writer. For, this being an English history, things have never been the same since 1914, and even more so since 1945.
Taylor’s “chronicle of dissolution” begins in 1918. Taste is still Edwardian. G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc for the pessimists, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells for the optimists, and Everyman’s Library (1906) for self-improvers, like Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). The light essay is called a “middle” because of its location in the magazine. In fiction, the public remains traditional: William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. In poetry, the whimsical, rural Georgians are critically acclaimed and—a last moment of consensus—popular, too. The nascent field of academic English is an antiquarian club. In these innocent days, literary theory has yet to be invented.
By the mid-twenties, the republic of letters has shattered into warring kingdoms. As in the days of Grub Street, it is a battle of Ancients and Moderns. The patriarch of the old ways is J. C. Squire of the London Mercury, who directs his squadrons of allies like ink-spattered cavalry in the pages of the major newspapers. Against the “Squirearchy,” the Modernist factions: the swinging snobs of Bloomsbury; the Sitwell gang, a trio of plummy self-publicists; and the circle of traditionalists around T. S. Eliot, editor of the Criterion. Even Oxford and Cambridge are at odds. Cambridge goes modern and critical, but Oxford, driven by J. R. R. Tolkien, turns towards medieval philology. Evelyn Waugh succeeds by splitting the difference, merging Dickensian caricature with the speech experiments of Ronald Firbank.
Waugh shows the roots of the schism in taste. In its expansive Victorian phase, the republic of letters had been large and prosperous enough to indulge its antagonists and even, in the Naughty Nineties, to support their experiments. Now, as English society changed, the avant-garde pulled away from the belles-lettrists, forming coteries around its “little magazines” and great salons.
In the 1930s, this division of taste was crosscut by political divisions; as Orwell tartly remarked, the “nancy poets” had discovered the fraternal joys of socialism. But socially, smart literature still belongs to the smart people. Though Virginia Woolf’s “common reader” may never have existed, she knew common people when she saw them—and wanted them out of Bloomsbury. Almost every significant interwar writer was privately educated. Eton alone produced the best critics of the thirties and forties, Orwell and Cyril Connolly; the novelists Anthony Powell and Henry Green; the aesthetes Harold Acton and Brian Howard; and the travel writers Robert Byron and Peter Fleming.
Meanwhile in a country where “intellectual” is an insult, public taste remained impervious to the glittering experiments. The reading public preferred traditional entertainers like J. B. Priestley, Somerset Maugham, P. G. Wodehouse, and Hugh Walpole. The solid storyteller Alec Waugh appealed to a far wider audience than his acerbic brother Evelyn, just as Peter Fleming would ultimately be outsold by his brother Ian. If Orwell briefly reunified literary taste, it was not because of his socialist politics but because of his sedulous traditionalism. The Orwell who rejected Dali’s “perverse cult of Edwardian things” built a wholesome bulwark of English things. His novels are Wells for the thirties; his literary essays are exercises in English social history. His now-exalted “As I Please” essays for Tribune are “middles” endowed with moral grandeur by war. “A Nice Cup of Tea” (1946), with its claim that the weekly ration can produce the necessary “twenty good, strong cups,” is a plea for patience amid postwar reconstruction.
The postwar settlement undid the aristocracy, in wealth, government, and letters. The fifties and sixties belonged to middle-class provincials: the terrible twins Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the rivalrous siblings A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble; the pompous critics of Cambridge, F. R. and Queenie Leavis; and the prose factory himself, Anthony Burgess. It was the age of Harold Macmillan’s managed decline and Harold Wilson’s style over content. Alec Waugh prospered in Hollywood and Evelyn fumed in Gloucestershire. As the economy of highbrow letters narrowed, and the media became more powerful, the novelists and poets sheltered in the ivory tower and the academics cashed in as talking heads. This pattern continued through the disastrous seventies and the exuberant eighties and nineties, the age of the overrated “literary novel.”
Changes in format and marketing had always shaped the business. The Victorian triple-decker had been corseted in a single volume to suit the lending libraries. The pocket paperback had increased sales, but lowered the tone in pursuit of readers. The Internet killed the golden goose, publishing’s Victorian infrastructure of copyright laws and distribution systems. The tenements of Grub Street, always rackety, are increasingly boarded up.
Taylor ends on a defiantly dispirited note. Literary culture is now so fractionated as to render the term meaningless; but reading and writing, and the capillary action of reviewing and criticism, continue. For Taylor, the modern writer’s “enemy of promise” is not Connolly’s “pram in the hall,” or its traditional companions of drink, journalism, and procrastination, or even novel diversions such as online gambling and placing pseudonymous negative reviews of one’s rivals on Amazon. It is institutionalization in the university: the erosion of promise in committees; political correctness; paper-clip-counting and “Creative Writing.” A writer mates with the Muse with the frequency of a panda—and not in captivity or under the observation of a tenure committee.
The Prose Factory is partial and personal, as taste should be. Taylor has a novelist’s eye for characters, a biographer’s talent for narrative, and a critic’s discernment for the vintages of the Hippocrene. There has been no better history of English letters since Gross’s Rise and Fall or, substituting comic fiction for historical tragedy, Burgess’s Earthly Powers (1980). The man of letters is not dead, just hungry and thirsty.
Dominic Green, a fellow at the Royal Society of History, teaches at Boston College.
