Christopher Tayler

Like Colonel Sanders: The Stan Lee Era

Christopher Tayler, 2 December 2021

In 1942, Ralph Ellison had a meeting with Fredric Wertham, the director of psychiatric services at Queens General Hospital in New York. Ellison, who was eligible for the draft, didn’t want to join a segregated army. A friend had suggested that Wertham might find a way to get him a psychiatric deferment. Wertham, a German Jewish emigrant, sympathised, and though a deferment...

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
by Abraham Riesman.

Stan Lee: A Life in Comics
by Liel Leibovitz.

The great realisation of the Stan Lee era at Marvel was that heroes didn’t need to be paragons. They could be anxious teenagers with money worries, like Spider-Man, or members of a bickering pseudo-family, like the Fantastic Four, or outsiders threatened with persecution, like the X-Men. Beyond that, it was left to others to fine tune their metaphorical resonances.

Dead Ends: ‘Not a Novel’

Christopher Tayler, 7 October 2021

‘Ididn’t write the book because I wanted to become a writer,’ Jenny Erpenbeck says of her first novel – a novella really – in one of the pieces collected in Not a Novel. She was 27, had studied opera directing and was working in a bakery in her native Berlin when she started writing what would become The Old Child (1999). The germ was a news story she...

Not a Novel: Collected Writings and Reflections
by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Kurt Beals.

The archaeological quality of Jenny Erpenbeck’s imagination allows her to come at East Germany from unexpected angles. She writes of learning to roller-skate on a street that was free from traffic because it terminated at the Wall, of money that was ‘light like play money’, of counting off the minutes of the school day on a huge capitalist clockface she could see in West Berlin.

For Want of a Dinner Jacket: Becoming O’Brian

Christopher Tayler, 6 May 2021

C.S. Forester, the writer of the Hornblower books, died in California in 1966. His second wife inherited the bulk of his estate. His elder son from his first marriage, who inherited $5000, began to reappraise his relationship with his father. Years later, in a self-published biography, the son would depict Forester as a manipulative fabulist, a distant, self-centred parent, a cold-hearted...

Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life
by Nikolai Tolstoy.

As long as you obeyed the rules Patrick O’Brian could be affable and generous, though visitors were sometimes shocked by his bossy way with his wife, Mary. ‘I irritated Patrick at dinner,’ she wrote in her diary in 1966. ‘I MUST TAKE CARE AND WATCH OUT.’ Nikolai Tolstoy thinks the power dynamics were more complicated than this makes it seem, and that a mixture of love, codependency and folie à deux was at work. To some extent, becoming O’Brian was a collaborative enterprise.

Barrage Balloons of Fame: We need to talk about Martin

Christopher Tayler, 8 October 2020

In Italo Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, a boy climbs a holm oak to make a point. Fifty years later he’s still up in the treetops: he never touches the ground again. Martin Amis began a similar feat of heroic resolve in the 1970s, and whatever you make of his commitment to an all-consuming idea of style, you can’t say he makes things easy for himself up there. In...

Before I Began: Coetzee Makes a Leap

Christopher Tayler, 4 June 2020

Let’s imagine that after this life, or perhaps before it, perhaps as a step in an endless transmigration of souls, we arrive by ship in a new land. Our memories of a previous existence are washed away. A beneficent but impersonal bureaucracy assigns us names and ages – the ages are apparently chosen by guesswork on the basis of how old we look – and arranges for us...

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