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DJ Taylor Speaker Event
April 18th 2006
On Tuesday 18th April 2006, DJ Taylor kindly spoke to East Anglian
Writers about his life and work as a writer. This is a summary of
what he had to say, reported by Benjamin Scott, Chairman, East
Anglian Writers.
Place and identity are important themes in DJ Taylor’s books, almost
to the point, he candidly admits, that his books can be seen as the
same book rewritten in a variety of different ways. The characters
and the situations may change but his overarching theme does not.
His central characters are compelled to leave their small home towns
and move to London to realise their ambitions (much like the author
himself). The characters then develop a yearning to revisit or go
back to their past homes and when they do, they find that the place
has changed out of all recognition (some for the good, but mostly
for the worse). This only increases their sense of deracination –
the world they knew has been lost for ever, despite the passage of
only a few years.
All but one of his first five novels have been consciously set
outside the M25 and despite having left Norwich at the age of 19,
the city and the region have been very conscious threads running
through his work. Even his first novel, Great Eastern Land, set in
an anonymous Eastern land was itself a mythological version of East
Anglia. This recurring visitation to the region in his work, mirrors
his own emotional attachment to the region. It was during his
thirties that he experienced his own sense of deracination, he did
not really feel at home in London, and a realisation that his
spiritual home had become the train between Liverpool Street and
Norwich. When he turned 40 he decided to return to Norwich with his
wife Rachel Hore and their three children.
Real Life, his second novel, explores the irony of going back to
one’s roots. The main character is disillusioned with the complexity
of life in the sleazy film trade of Soho during the 1970s. He
attempts to return to Norwich to his father’s house to find a more
straightforward life, away from the multiple layers of meaning that
make big city life so unbearable. However, it ends with a
realisation that real life isn’t that simple, and the character
finds deeper layers of meaning in Norwich that are even harder to
decode, like the local expression still used today, “What ever are
you like?”. It is not even a question. It is a statement that
reveals the speaker knows exactly what you are like and is asserting
their control over the conversation. Similarly, “reckon I will”, a
frequent answer from his teenage brother when he was growing up, has
an infinitely more subtle meaning to it. It is heavily redolent of
the nature of the relationship between the speakers.
Real Life, from which DJ Taylor read to the audience, also shows how
the landscape of our memories is not just made from the buildings
but also from the people that lived in them – the character on his
return to Norwich looks out for those familiar faces from his
memories, strangers that were part of a human landscape, like the
man with the dog, or the man with the shoes.
Incidentally, it was Real Life that led to DJ Taylor being sued for
libel after a character he created, based entire around a name that
had unconsciously come across in his research, was too close to the
mark. As part of the process of writing the novel, he created a
background for his character, a pornographer, but by pure
coincidence, it shared many real life similarities with the original
owner of the name, from the number of children to his religion.
Even his third novel, English Settlement, about a foreigner, an
American, making sense of London during the 1980s, does not escape
the pull of the region. While it explores the process of
colonisation and the personal journey of coming to terms with
swapping worlds, part of which means recognising the continuity
between places, key figures in the book have a distant Norfolk past
that still excerpts an influence over them.
Of course, his own and his family’s experiences are strong
influences. Trespass, his fourth novel, visits the Earlham Estate,
Norwich, in the 1950s, a reworking of his father’s experience
growing up there in the 1920s, as well as his own experience of the
area in the 1970s. The Comedy Man too, his fifth novel, was inspired
by his grandfather, “T. T. Taylor, The Popular Entertainer” a stern,
late Victorian Man known for his terse conversation at home, but
once he donned an old Macintosh and a bowler hat would come to life
(his best joke was “my wife is so thin that when she drinks tomato
juice she looks like thermometer”). The novel was about a comedy duo
Upward and King. Ted King, the straight man, leaves Yarmouth for
London to make his career with Upward. Years later after their
career is over, King tries to revisit his childhood landscape to
find some answers, only to discover that it has all changed for the
worse.
For his final reading, DJ Taylor read from his latest novel, Kept -
a Victorian Mystery, which is a sharp contrast of styles from his
previous work, having been deliberately composed as a Victorian
novel. The decision to change from his usual style to this Victorian
style was partly the result of advice from his publishers. When they
started discussion about his next novel, he offered them a choice:
something in his usual style exploring his usual themes or a
Victorian book. His publishers quickly made their choice.
He admits that it was one of the easiest books he has written. At
200,000 words long, it is not a statement made lightly, but having
been enamoured with Victorian novels from an early age, it was the
book that he had always wanted to write. Once he had decided on the
character voices he was going to use in Kept, and completed his
preliminary research, he found that, because the style of the book
was so well established already in his mind, there was less than
usual to worry about – a freedom so great that he was tempted to
write a novel twice as long. Luckily, it means that he has plenty of
material for a sequel.
Much of the story in Kept is borrowed from fact – the great train
robbery and the woman in the attic. It was during his research for
his biography of Thackeray that he first began to collect the
information that formed much of the theme and plot of the novel. The
life of Isabella, and her eldest daughter Annie, impressed itself so
heavily upon him that Isabella is the basis of his central female
character in Kept, who ends up locked in the attic of the West
Norfolk house during the 1860s.
Eagled eyed readers maybe reminded of Jack London when they read the
chapter North of 60, where there is a wolf chase across the great
Yukon. While he admits that writing it felt self-indulgent, he
wanted to pay tribute to the writer, whom he greatly admires. But,
he is adamant that the chapter still work as part of the greater
whole of the novel.
Questions and Answers
Why does DJ Taylor write under his initial and not his full name?
Readers have often assumed that DJ Taylor is a professor, a doctor
or a senior academic because the initials create a form of gravitas
that attracts a title beyond plain mister. However, his decision to
write under his initials rather than David Taylor or David John
Taylor was motivated by an entirely different reason. The truth is
that when David first started working in London there were far too
many David Taylors. One edited Punch, two were producers at the BBC
and there was even one was a TV zoo vet. It was annoying to receive
their post by mistake, but the worse was to come when he was
interviewing J L Carr whom spent the entire interview trying to talk
about his Datsun car. At the end of the interview, when asked why he
had kept talking about his Datsun, J L Carr returned the question,
asking if he was not the motoring correspondent from the Daily
Telegraph. It was that day that David took the decision to become
known as DJ Taylor.
As a successful biographer, having won the Whitbread Award for
Biography, what initially led him to write his biographies of
Thackeray and Orwell?
Like so much of the work he does, DJ Taylor talks about keeping the
wolves from the door. He regards himself as a “freelance hack”,
which is perhaps more modesty than a genuine criticism. However, he
does have a real passion for literature which led him during the
early Nineties to want to write a critical book about Thackeray’s
work. It was the influence of his publishers who suggested a better
way to feed and clothe his children that led him to write a
biography. It was hard work, but researching and exploring
Thackeray’s life was fascinating and rewarding (and still continues
to reward him as background research for his last novel, Kept).
Similarly, during the late Nineties after he stopped his part-time
job in corporate communications, he realised that he needed some
sort of financial sea defence to see him through life as a
freelancer. Given that the centenary of George Orwell’s birth was
only five years away he decided that it was too good an opportunity
to miss. If Thackeray was his favourite Victorian writer then George
Orwell was definitely his favourite 20th century author. On first
reading Orwell, he felt a great sense of mutual understanding as if
he was having a personal relationship with the author. Of course,
other books on Orwell came out that year, but they were always going
to. He was a big enough figure for there to be an open season on
biographies that year. DJ Taylor decided just to push ahead and hope
that his work retained its own edge. It was enormous fun and a sheer
pleasure to write, even though it involved a strict timetable in
order to hit a publication date in June 2003 to coincide with the
centenary.
Would he write another biography?
He is doubtful that he will write another biography. He loves
writing novels more than anything else and the trouble with
biography, he admits, is that they involve such hard work. You need
find a subject you love and it must be a figure who you feel such
affection for that learning of their human frailties can only
increase your respect for them. There are three literary figures who
he would be tempted to write biographies for: George Gissing, Ronald
Firbank, and Anthony Powell. However, there is no justification for
him to write them as they have already been covered, or are about to
be.
As an incredibly prolific author with weekly appearance in print
and on the radio, how does DJ Taylor manage to produce so much?
DJ Taylor writes with a discipline that amazes most writers, but it
is his background as a hard-working journalist that has helped him
prioritise his time. Currently he is writing a new non-fiction book
called Bright Young People, exploring the people of Evelyn Waugh’s
world in the 1920s and the fate that awaited them in the cold winds
of the 1930s. He must hand the finished draft to his publisher on
1st December, which means he has to write 5,500 words each week
without fail. As he calmly says, “what’s got to be done, has got to
be done”.
Does DJ Taylor work using a computer or with a pen?
He has a simple method of working. He works each paragraph over in
his head before he commits it to paper. After a single draft has
been written in longhand, he then revises it as he types it up into
a final draft on the computer. This is a direct result of his
training writing book reviews over 20 years ago. Computers were
barely around them and hard to use so everything had to be written
on a typewriter. Every mistake had to be corrected using correction
fluid, so it was a time-consuming process to write using the
typewriter. He learned to write 400 word reviews in longhand and
then typing them up without mistake – often at very short notice. It
is a discipline he is glad to have learned.
He is not keen on the idea of writing multiple drafts, although he
admits it is a system that works for many people, but he fears he
would lose his spontaneity and focus. For him deadlines and
schedules concentrate his mind and writing quickly means that his
work has to be as good as it can be, now. He enjoys writing under
these conditions and doubts that publishers who offer large advances
and generous five-year timetables do authors any good – this only
feeds their neuroses. He has never suffered from writer’s block and
has difficulty in understanding it. “The sheer pleasure of putting
words on paper” is a driving force, as he says, how can there be a
problem “when you have a blank page in front of you and words in
your head?”
Does his work keep him awake at night?
DJ Taylor admits he does sleep badly, although it is not writing
that keeps him awake. His dreams are usually filled with anxiety and
neuroses, for example, for over 20 years he had disturbing dreams of
his university finals.
How does he feel editors having influenced his career?
His first editor at Secker and Warburg was invaluable. She helped
shape the book and arrange the material, her advice plugging gaps in
his experience as a writer. However, Trespass and The Comedy Man
were not really edited. The publishers sent it to press without much
interference. He does admit, however, that in retrospect he wished
he had not followed the editorial guidance given on his third novel,
English Settlement, where he was encouraged to remove some sections
of the book, examining a character’s lost life in America, reducing
the book from 120,000 words to 85,000 words.
For non-fiction he trusts the advice of his editor Jenny Uglow. If
she says something doesn’t work he wouldn’t argue with her because
of her sheer skill and experience. He has had, however, many
arguments with his publishers and agent, especially when he was
innovating while writing biography. In his study of Thackeray’s life
for example, he uses fictional material to more fully explore areas
where there was a lack of information – after lengthy discussion he
agreed to lose some but not all of these commentaries. In Orwell:
the Life, however, he stood his ground despite the publisher’s
worries over his non-chronological essays exploring Orwell’s views
on topics such as Jews, women and rats.
Does he think that good editors still exist?
The old-fashioned editors who were committed people paid a low-wage
to spend weeks on a single book are now largely gone. There are
still people who will lavish attention on a writer’s work, but the
system has become a lot more impatient. It is not quite the
Philistine morass that many claim, but the workload for publishers
and editors has changed for the worse. Unfortunately, one of the
victims of the six or seven-day week for publishers is the attention
and energy that can be lavished on a single book.
However, he had a very good experience recently, working on a 35,000
word book on amateurism in sport, published by Random House’s Yellow
Jersey imprint. The typescript was studied with great care by the
publisher and it was followed by many hours of sensible editorial
conversation regarding the logic of material. The whole process, he
hopes, has lifted the book to a higher level.
There was a big editorial debate over Kept. The fictitious article
from All the Year Round, included as Appendix 1, was originally
intended to go midway through the novel, but he took his publisher’s
advice and included it at the end.
What will be his next novel?
There is certainly scope for another Victorian novel, perhaps even a
sequel to Kept, but he has two or three other novels in his head at
the moment (along the lines of his previous work) which he would
like to write first before returning to the Victorian books.
Has he ever thought of writing a modern Gissing?
No, but he thinks that there is an opportunity for someone to do
one. He also thinks that there are three novels that need to be
written by another writer: a modern take on New Grub Street and The
History Man, and a satirical novel about the creative writing scene.
Bibliography
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On the Corinthian Spirit:
The Decline of Amateurism in Sport (Yellow Jersey Press 2006)
Buy Now
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Kept (Chatto & Windus 2006)
Buy Now
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Orwell: The Life (Chatto & Windus, 2003)
Buy Now
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The Comedy Man (Duck Editions, 2001)
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Thackeray (Chatto & Windus, 1999)
Buy Now
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Trespass (Duckworth, 1998)
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After Bathing at Baxter's (Vintage,
1997)
Buy Now
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English Settlement (Chatto & Windus, 1996)
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After the War: The Novel and England Since
1945 (Chatto & Windus, 1993)
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Real Life (Chatto & Windus, 1992)
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Other People: Portraits from the Nineties
(with Marcus Berkmann; illustrated by Charles Griffin)
(Bloomsbury, 1990)
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A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the
1980s (Bloomsbury, 1989)
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Great Eastern Land (Secker & Warburg, 1986)
We are very grateful to DJ Taylor who gave up his
time to speak to us and to the New Writing Partnership for allowing
us to use the venue for the event.
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