English History, 1914–1945
1965
A TYPICAL INTELLECTUAL of the 1930s, A. J. P. Taylor made sure to enjoy the privileges he was busy criticizing. He was a rich man’s son. In 1919 his father sold his share of the family’s Lancashire cotton business and received £100,000 for it, or twenty million pounds in 1995 prices, according to Kathleen Burk, Taylor’s biographer. As a young man, Taylor joined the Communist Party, and in 1925 he visited the Soviet Union. Guilt may have been motivating him, but more likely at some instinctive level he felt it safe to support a total change of regime precisely because it would not happen. Nominally an agency facilitating foreign visitors, Intourist was actually an important tool of the Communist Party, controlling movement and conducting tourists to make sure that they saw only sites arranged to impress, like so many Potemkin villages. Taylor fell for it. Attending a postwar Party Congress in Communist Poland, he brought himself to say things that were sure to displease the Party, but all his life he remained the daftest sort of fellow traveler. He could write, “In the end, Stalin was a rather endearing character.”
The trick that brought him fame as an original historian was to stand received opinion on its head. For him, the British and the Habsburg empires had to be ridiculous while the nationalisms that destroyed them were popular. British statesmen who made peace were incompetent, while Germans who made war, like Bismarck and Hitler, were defensible. In The Origins of the Second World War, his most characteristic book, he argued that Hitler was a politician like any other, taking his chances where he found them. Nazism, then, was a set of accidents, not a deliberate program of conquest and mass murder. Not surprisingly, Taylor became the darling of neo-Nazis and Revisionists. It takes a very clever man to be quite such an idiot. When I told him that his depiction of Hitler was contradicted by a lot of documentary evidence, he snapped back, “I trod on their toes this time” as though that were a valid defense.
We ran into one another in the London Library when I was doing research for my book about Unity Mitford. Taylor immediately responded that he dined regularly with Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity’s Fascist brother-in-law, and he could take me along with him. I hesitated for a long time but eventually decided that Mosley knowingly or unknowingly might provide some useful leads. Dinner was in the Ritz. Old as he was by then, Mosley still had fantasies that the nation might call on him. When rhetoric wasn’t quite enough to make the point, he had a way of protruding his eyes, making his face look like a ridiculous mask. In his element, Taylor fed him political and historical subjects. Love of power was what had drawn this improbable pair together. It was fatal to Taylor the man to have no moral structure, and it was fatal to Taylor the historian to have no sense of truth. In the event that Mosley had become Gauleiter of a Nazi Britain in 1940, Taylor might very well have collaborated. As the meal was coming to an end, Mosley asked me for my opinion. I heard afterwards on the grapevine that my silence had unsettled him.