Literary England in One Volume

To write the history of “Literary Life in England Since 1918” in one volume, even a long one, is a daunting task. That D. J. Taylor has succeeded so well is a tribute to his own gifts and hard work, but it also highlights his familiarity with the literary life as it is lived today. Taylor is the author of fourteen books of fiction and eight books of nonfiction, including biographies of Orwell and Thackeray (who knew a lot about London literary struggles), and a survey of British fiction in the 1980s called A Vain Conceit. He contributes regularly to three or four newspapers, weeklies on the right and the left (Spectator, New Statesman), and other periodicals. A “man of letters” in the old sense, he is increasingly unusual in his not having a university job. Taylor is largely inspired by John Gross, whose 1969 book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters he credits as a “decisive influence.”

The Prose Factory is generally chronological, with thematic chapters. Among them are three on “Making a Living”; two on “University English”; and others on miscellaneous topics like “Highbrows, Lowbrows and Those In Between,” “Late Bloomsbury,” and “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Interspersed are shorter, more personal features, often on such representative figures as Hugh Walpole, George Orwell, Alec Waugh or A. S. Byatt, as well as Margaret Thatcher as a figure of authorial inspiration.

Among the delights of this book is the opportunity to learn more about such somewhat-eclipsed former notables of English literature as G. K. Chesterton, Edgell Rickword, J. B. Priestley, Desmond MacCarthy, A. J. Cronin, and John Middleton Murry. Much interesting light is also shed on the likes of T. S. Eliot, A. S. Byatt, and C. S. Lewis, whose works are still being read. I’m always happy to learn how much money Kingsley Amis made and how he spent it (drinking, mostly); how both the Left Book Club and middlebrow bestsellers informed George Orwell’s fiction; how F. R. Leavis and his wife, Queenie, exercised their influence on English secondary education; and how a man like Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch got to be the King Edward vii Professor at Cambridge. Taylor is always good on the subject of how the class system underlies apparently-aesthetic judgments, a study traceable back to the days when gentlemen and ladies were supposed to prefer Thackeray on the grounds of his breeding to the arriviste Dickens. In the twentieth century, class resentment, from one side or another, is important in understanding both Bloomsbury and the Sitwells, as well as Leavis and Stan Barstow. Class fluidity also helps account for Orwell’s movement downward and Evelyn Waugh’s upward.

Taylor proposes in his introduction two questions: what is literary culture, and what is taste? To the first he gives a comprehensive answer: it is “the environment in which books—any kind of book, and not just those written by Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie—are conceived, written, brokered, published, distributed, reviewed, received, brought to the book-buying public and, in rare cases, taken beyond it into the much vaguer and less strictly demarcated world of film and television.” As for taste, his definition is less satisfactory (necessarily) but refers loosely to a consensus about literary quality—how it is made, whose taste is determinative, and how it relates to popularity or book prizes are important parts of that subject.

Writing a book like this requires broad reading and archival research, and Taylor casually reveals familiarity with not just the history of literary journalism but with the lesser-known books of many novelists who are themselves nearly unremembered. Writing such a book also requires an individual voice. He is good at summing up his characters, as in his account of Ian Hamilton, biographer and editor of The New Review: “Once the mythological fog has drifted away from the Pillars of Hercules, the Soho pub in which, beneath a cloud of cigarette smoke, Hamilton held court for the best part of a...