Enduring the nuisance of life : AN OLD MAN’S DIARY by A.J.P. Taylor (David & Charles: $17.95; 155 pp.)

Dammitall. This wonderful old diarist, curmudgeon, journalist, scholar, prodder and mischief maker A.J.P. Taylor clearly sees what is next in life. His death.

He’s 78 with Parkinson’s disease. There’s sleeplessness and sleepiness but neither when appropriate. Not much walking of his beloved British countryside now, he sighs, nothing really important left unsaid and diminished interest in events beyond his North London backyard and the orange marmalade cat squatting there.

Taylor even wishes for a pill so that death might become a personal decision. But there’s his wife. “She needs me,” he writes. “She loves me. For her sake, I suppose I must endure life as long as I can. Still, it is a great nuisance.”

And with that nuisance accepted, Taylor returns to what he does superbly--inverting the conventional, catching the wry and winking at life. Even his death.

He chuckles about finishing an autobiography. Or rather that he has stopped writing it. “Strictly,” he notes, “I cannot finish it until I am dead and then it will be too late.”

Then there’s the question of his wine. Taylor is a half-bottle-a-day man. Each year, he has been depositing a few cases of claret with Avery’s in Bristol. Now he is dipping into his stock.

“But how fast should I go? I should look a damned fool if I ran through my reserve before I died. But I should look even more foolish if I died with some of my reserve untapped. There is no easy answer.”

So see this book (Taylor’s 28th and a compilation of his 1980-’83 essays in The Listener and the London Review of Books . . . plus a bonus prize, his softly crusty Romanes Lecture for the 1981 academic year at Oxford) somewhat as a requiem for a heavyweight commentator, but also as a retrospective of one man’s incredible talent for whimsy as emphasis to the serious.

To be sure, there is nothing trivial in Taylor’s scholarship; from professor at Manchester University to Oxford fellow, as a nuclear mourner since the first bomb, as a historian of European wars and warriors, as editor of Lloyd George, as Communist-become-Laborite, as peer and/or judge of Michael Foot, Malcolm Muggeridge, Oswald Mosley, Thomas Hardy and Margaret Thatcher.

But he’s best as an idiosyncratic observer of us and master of a sly frivolity designed to enliven the dull. Let’s face it, plodding historians with leaden views are a dime a yawn. But find one like Taylor who combines cause with a vast enjoyment from just looking around . . . then, you’ve likely snared the world’s supply.

On survivors of a nuclear war: “Nuclear-proof residences are being provided underground for the chosen few. And, of course, those who do the choosing have naturally chosen themselves. There will be the Royal Family; the Prime Minister and her colleagues, and the defense chiefs . . . what an extraordinary coincidence. The very people who have led us to the slaughterhouse are to be preserved in the hope of repeating their achievement.”

On politics: “The new session of Parliament is now in full swing or, alternatively, total stagnation. Choose whichever phrase you like; they mean much the same thing.”

On worthy causes: “I doubt whether they benefit from meetings where the converted address the converted with passionate rhetoric.”

On cars and commuting: “A mass of metal is laboriously transported from one place to another. Then it is abandoned for the day, obstructing pedestrians who are attempting a less selfish method of locomotion.”

Lebanon: “Years of experience have taught me that one should never venture an opinion, favourable or unfavourable, on events concerned in any way with Israel or the Jews. Any attempt at a detached view opens the way for letters, telegrams, personal expostulations and, above all, telephone calls.”

This is Taylor as rich as his claret at Avery’s. Penetrating is a good word for his work. Perspicacious is better. Piquant, ironic and riotously bloody funny says it all.

He sees the decrepitation of civilization represented by the shopping cart, the Cold War, helicopter noise, grilled breakfasts, locked churches, microfilm, tour groups of shrieking schoolgirls and introduction of the three-course dinner at Magdalen College.

The only antidote, he implies, is renewed dedication to Macaulay and George Bernard Shaw, improved rail travel, single-verb sentences, the Isle of Wight, walking the Lake District, the Beethoven Quartets by the Amadeus Quartet and any movie by W. C. Fields.

In the late ‘40s--long before Masterpiece Theater and Penelope Keith--there was the impeccability of British Broadcasting Corp. radio and “A Book at Bedtime.” Huddled over the program, eyes closed, beginning minds made pictures from literature and us kids were safe among the narrated adventures.

The BBC readers, as I recall, were Alvar Liddell, David Dunhill, W. Barrington Dalby and Robert Beatty, an expatriate Canadian chosen by the similarity of accent to read any American book. The words were those of Agatha Christie, Peter Cheyney, C. S. Forester, and J. H. Chase.

They were meaningful, economical, colorful words employed the way A.J.P. Taylor uses them . . . while his, in turn, raise the irresistible temptation to read aloud in British to one’s lady.

So I did. Moved by him to clean enunciation. Inspired by him to impersonation. And thinking that if this be a book at bedtime, I’d be Richard Burton. Or at least John Houseman.