Sadly, Her Majesty's horse Carlton House didn't triumph in the Derby today, though what a nail-biter of a race it was, and a marvellous win for Pour Moi and his young jockey, but this talk of the turf is relevant to books as DJ Taylor's novel Derby Day
D.J. Taylor is the author of two acclaimed biographies, Thackeray (1999) and Orwell: The Life which won the Whitbread Biography Prize in 2003, and of Bright Young People (2007), an account of the bohemian party-givers and aristocratic socialites of the 1920s and 30s. Of his nine novels, the most recent are Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006), Ask Alice (2009) and At the Chime of a City Clock (2010); Derby Day is to be published in June 2011.
I first encountered David Taylor’s work through Ask Alice, a novel about a woman’s rise and fall, which begins in Kansas in 1904 and spans thirty or so years, moving to Edwardian London, a crumbling country house, the provincial theatre and the drawing rooms of the highest society. There are echoes in the book of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and even E.F. Benson, and Beverley Nichols himself, delicately waspish, recounts scenes of courtroom drama in his ‘diary’ in the later stages of the story - but that is just part of the gloriously detailed, richly imagined world realised within its pages. The reader becomes absorbed in the multi-stranded narrative, following the eponymous Alice from her humble American origins to her eventual position of wealth and power between the wars, her story connected to that of the young Ralph Bentley and his eccentric uncle, Alfred, who by means of a surprising discovery make their name and fortune and achieve an entrée to a previously closed social milieu. It’s a delicious novel and it whetted my appetite for more from its author.
I then moved back in time to Kept: A Victorian Mystery which begins with the reports of the deaths by misadventure of two men in East Anglia, three years apart. The men are connected, the widow of the younger one being the ward of the elder, and although Mrs. Ireland’s dependent state is due to mental instability following the death of her child, quite why she is apparently detained at her guardian’s gloomy and neglected country house, and why those inquiring after her are denied knowledge of her precise whereabouts and welfare, is a puzzle.
As in Ask Alice, real people and events act as background to the intricate fretwork overlay of the fictitious ones. The plot travels from the Highlands of Scotland to the flat land of Norfolk, from the wilderness of Canada to the teeming streets of 1860s London, all these locations linked somehow with the reclusive, impecunious guardian, his ward’s disappearance and an audacious robbery. The influences here are obvious: Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, for example, but, whether you call it a pastiche, an episodic narrative which apes its progenitors, or a grand old yarn in the best high-Victorian manner, like Alice, it’s a captivating read.
At the Chime of a City Clock is a very different book in terms of its scale and complexity, but its quality and integrity keep it on a level with the two previous novels. Set in the early 1930s in the seedier parts of London, it features James Ross, a writer on his uppers who is reduced to selling carpet cleaner door to door. When he meets the glamorous Susie he thinks life is looking brighter, but there’s something suspicious about her boss, the mysterious Mr. Rasmussen, and when the police take an interest in Rasmussen’s activities, and cause Ross to stay incognito at a country house weekend, events take an unexpected turn.
In these three books alone, D.J. Taylor’s range and depth are obvious, and his beautifully precise prose powers his stylish narratives throughout. I wanted to know how he does it.
KH: When you’re beginning to think about a new novel, which comes first, the general setting, or the specific story you want to tell? Your books are so well-constructed, so finely detailed, that I wondered whether you approach them rather as an architect whose brief is to design a building to suit a particular piece of land, or the other way round, having the house in mind and seeking out the site on which to put it.
DJT: I’m delighted you think the books are finely constructed, as they tend to begin with random evocations of scene, plot-lines that develop almost as they go along. The seed-corn is usually a real historical event. For example, the idea for Mrs. Ireland in Kept came from Thackeray’s first wife, who went mad shortly after giving birth to her third child, and the tone of her first-person narrative was inspired by the journal kept by Thackeray’s daughter Anny. Similarly the theme of Ask Alice grew out of my study of the Bright Young People, and also out of a long-term interest in those sprawling early 20th century American novels by writers like Dreiser and James T. Farrell. I discovered that several of the celebrated London society hostesses of the 1920s were actually American expats, and that at least one – a woman named Mrs. Corrigan – was very humbly born, a farmer’s daughter from Wisconsin, I think. I thought it would be an interesting idea to create a fictitious grande dame with discreditable events in her previous life that then come following her across the Atlantic.
KH: There are large areas of common ground between your fiction and your non-fiction. Which tends to come first – does the biographical research, say, provide the framework for a subsequent novel, or does the preparatory work for a novel spark an interest which you then pursue in non-fiction terms?
DJT: I find that the two tend to inter-relate, sometimes in quite unexpected ways. For example, much of the raw material for Kept was certainly inspired by the research I did for my biography of Thackeray. Alice, as I’ve mentioned, grew out of the Bright Young People. Chime grew out of Alice. But there are also ways in which fiction leads you back to non-fiction. At the moment I’m working on a novel set in 1939, but I’m aware of how fascinating I find what were known as ‘lost girls’ – the clever, rackety and faintly disaffected young women who worked on literary magazines of the period and hung about on the fringes of Bohemian London. I don’t know if this will lead to a work of non-fiction, but it very well might.
KH: Kept, Ask Alice and Chime span the years from the 1860s to the early 1930s, while some of your other novels are set in the present or very recent past. Are you happiest writing about those earlier periods, and if so, what is their particular draw?
DJT: In all honesty, the stimulus is usually literary. I feel comfortable setting things in the Victorian era because I have read a great number of Victorian novels. The inter-war era fascinates me as it seems to prefigure so many of our modern arrangements and to provide all manner of fascinating parallels: a coalition government, for instance, not to mention the first stirrings – and this is something I touch on in Bright Young People – of modern celebrity culture.
KH: In your novels, you mix real characters and events with fictional ones; is this for added verisimilitude, or just for fun?
DJT: My template here is George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels. I always think fiction has much more bite, and much more scope, more room for manoeuvre, if there are real people wandering around in it.
KH: On the subject of fun, your books read as though you get enormous enjoyment from writing them. In Kept, to take one example, you use several different narrative styles and lead the reader down some blind alleys – does that dexterity keep the novel fresh and dynamic for you as you’re writing it?
DJT: If you aren’t enjoying yourself when writing then there is no point in even picking up the pen. Always, when writing, I’m trying to keep myself amused as much as the prospective reader.
KH: It occurred to me when reading Ask Alice that it was like looking at a painting by Frith, and then subsequently I came upon the passage in Kept where you comment on Frith, specifically, “[...] his art lies in design, in what he sees and what he does not see, in what he hastens to include and what he chooses to omit. It is remarkable [...] how often the eye remarks their chains of quiet connection [...] the effect is so very singular.” Do you consciously try to emulate Frith on the page, or does your love of detail just invite that comparison?
DJT: I am fascinated by Frith. My forthcoming novel Derby Day, of course, takes its title from his famous painting. I think what I am trying to suggest is that Frith was no more a realist than, say, Monet. His Derby Day, for example, was painted in the studio, using models, arranged in groups of three – ‘real life’ but devised in a wholly artificial way, and also full of interior narratives, connections between the people in it that are both spelled out and also only hinted at, existing simultaneously on the surface and beneath it. This is very fruitful fictional territory, I think.
KH: Does Frith himself play any part in your Derby Day?
DJT: There’s a piece in Frith’s autobiography which I quote as an epigraph, where he talks about the race offering a perfect subject. Originally we were going to put the painting on the jacket, but it didn’t work – there was too much going on, and it would have lacked focus. At one point I wanted to have Frith himself in it, but I feared it would turn into art criticism. As it is, it’s a Victorian mystery whose climax is reached at a version of the 1868 Epsom Derby. Though not a sequel to Kept, it brings back several characters from the earlier book, including the villain, Mr. Pardew.
KH: Regarding what you include and what you omit, would you tell us something of your working methods, for example, do you tend to go through many drafts of a book before you’re happy with it, and to what extent do you rely on your editor?
DJT: To be perfectly honest, I sit down and write it, in long-hand, and then I type it up. I haven’t time, or inclination, to work in any other way. I exist entirely from my pen and there are three growing children to support. I have two wonderful editors at Chatto & Windus – Jenny Uglow and Juliet Brooke, to whom I habitually defer as their judgment seems to me to be copper-bottomed. Juliet’s contribution is invaluable.
KH: You furnish your books comprehensively and beautifully (even when you’re depicting a less than salubrious part of town) – we know what your characters wear, eat, see and smell, what their homes and places of business are like, what they are reading, even. Are these finer points necessary steps for you in building a character or a scene, or are they the dressing or titivating, as it were, which comes later?
DJT: I don’t really know where all this comes from. Sometimes I like a stripped-down, ironic modernist style, like the early Anthony Powell, and sometimes I like detailed profusion. Some of the detail in Kept and Alice is at bottom a kind of skit on the way in which the books at which they gesture were written. I think if one is going to pastiche bygone styles then one should also pastiche the creative assumptions that produced them.
KH: Kept and Ask Alice are rich books, full of opulence, colour (quite literally in the case of the latter), texture, contrast. At the Chime of a City Clock is more austere: it feels like a black and white film, its down-at-heel characters and scruffy settings perfectly rendered. Which do you find is the greater challenge to write well?
DJT: Chime’s austerity. Certainly. It’s set in the grim 1930s, and the effect was to produce something down-market, shabby-genteel. I don’t find either kind of book an enormous challenge. Historical fiction is far less hard to do than contemporary - between 1986 and 2001 I wrote five contemporary novels and found them much harder work. Incidentally, there are sound commercial reasons for all this. Kept, for instance, sold five times as many copies as any previous novel of mine.
KH: You are very skilled at depicting the periods in which you set your books as they would have seemed to the people of those times, for example, in Kept a character reminds herself that she’s living in the age of steam engines and the Crystal Palace, thus highlighting modernity, progress, looking forward. What helps you to think yourself into the mindset and attitudes of the period?
DJT: Again, it’s the grounding in the fiction of the time. Chime, for instance, draws on the world of the ‘40s writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, whom I’ve always greatly admired. Minutiae that gives you an idea of how the people actually lived and thought is one of his strong points.
KH: What are you currently working on, and what is the next historical novel you have in mind?
DJT: A sequel to Chime, called Secondhand Daylight, will be out next spring. I’m two thirds of the way through a novel set in 1939 which I hope to finish by the spring of next year. Then I intend to come back to the here and now.
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