main page, here
NIGEL NICOLSON (1917 - 2004) and his parents
Wednesday 23 February 2005
An endearing underachiever
Harold Nicolson
Reviewed by Philip Ziegler
‘I am beginning to see that brain counts for little but that character counts for everything,’ wrote Harold Nicolson, in one of those flashes of self-perception which from time to time brilliantly illuminated his life. ‘It is not a pleasant thought as my character is weak and easily influenced.’ He was only just 17 when he articulated that particular piece of self-deprecation; he would have said exactly the same 60 years later and been right on both occasions. His ability to diagnose his weaknesses, coupled with a total inability to do anything to rectify them, was one of his most endearing characteristics; it also explained why his various careers, in terms of what his talents entitled him to expect, were signal failures.
His flirtation with Oswald Mosley illustrated both his fundamental benevolence and his capacity for fatuity. Like many others, he admired Mosley’s energy and self-confidence and joined the New Party in the belief that it offered Britain a chance for regeneration which was not to be hoped for from any of the tired and traditional parties of the past. He deplored Mosley’s attitude towards the Jews but still felt a sneaking sympathy for the sentiments that underlay it: ‘Although I loathe anti-Semitism,’ he once admitted, ‘I do dislike Jews.’ But he shrank from the violent side of Mosley’s politics and soon found the party vulgar and slightly ridiculous. When Mosley asked for suggestions for a suitable uniform for his party members, Nicolson characteristically suggested ‘grey-flannel trousers and shirts’. He disengaged himself from the New Party before the going got too hot. Mosley had no political judgment, was his final verdict. ‘He believes in fascism. I don’t. I loathe it.’ But when Mosley was interned in May 1940 Nicolson was one of the few active politicians who risked his career by offering to visit him in prison. Fortunately the overture was rebuffed: Mosley did not like the tone of Nicolson’s patriotic broadcasts on the BBC and refused to receive him.
Nigel Nicolson’s brilliant and alarmingly honest description of the relationship between his parents in Portrait of a Marriage has left little room for a biographer keen to disinter savoury — or unsavoury — new material. Rose is anyway not disposed to undertake any such investigation. His analysis of the bond that linked Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West is sympathetic, dispassionate and wholly non-judgmental. Despite the propensity of both parties to conduct amatory escapades with members of their own sex, one is left in no doubt that they loved and appreciated each other and that each attached enormous importance to their union.
Norman Rose is a distinguished Jewish historian with studies of Vansittart, Weizmann and Winston Churchill to his credit and a profound knowledge of international politics. Though Nicolson himself would have thought these qualifications entirely appropriate, Rose was the wrong person to write this biography. He makes much of his subject’s Foreign Office career and his subsequent pronouncements on foreign policy, but though Nicolson wrote a few cogent memoranda and for a time impressed those in authority over him, his propensity to equivocate, to irritate those on whose goodwill he depended, to ignore the realities of power and energetically to promote worthy but hopelessly unattainable causes, ensured that he would never have got to the top or anywhere near it. What is of interest about Nicolson is his writing, his friends and his curious life-style — and on this Rose is less strong. Typically, he analyses at length Nicolson’s not very significant contribution to the formation of foreign policy during the first world war but says nothing about what it was like to work peacefully in Whitehall while one’s friends and contemporaries were one by one dying on the Western Front. Lees-Milne’s biography of Nicolson, though astute and perceptive, left room for a more detached and considered study. Rose has provided some useful raw material for such a book but has not himself filled the gap.
John Campbell
Nigel Nicolson, editor
THE HAROLD NICOLSON DIARIES, 1907 – 1963
460 PP. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £ 25
0 297 84764 3
Norman Rose
HAROLD NICOLSON
383 PP. Cape. £ 20
0 224 06218 2
“It’s rather sad”, Harold Nicolson lamented near the end of his life, “that of all my forty books the only ones that will be remembered are he three I didn‘t realise i’d written.” He meant his diaries, originally published in three volumes between 1966 and 1968, and now republished in a single abridged volume. In fact, his other books — biographies, novels, literary criticism and journalism — are second—hand, second-rate and now badly dated. His diaries remain original, vivid, fresh and timeless. the publishers of diaries regularly invoke be name of Pepys; but in this case, the comparison is justified. Nicolson’s diary is an enduring work of literature which should never be allowed to go out of print.
Nicolson is a great diarist because — unlike overpraised solipsists such as Alan Clark — he is endlessly interested in other people, not just in himself. He is also blisteringly honest about himself, with a disarming mixture of vanity and modesty. He has a painter’s eye for visual detail and a novelist’s fascination with character revealed in gestures, words and tone of voice, as well as a historian’s sense of the sweep of events behind the trivial interchange of daily life. Then, with all these attributes, luck gave him a ringside seat in interesting times.
This new edition, once again edited by his son Nigel, adds some fresh material from the years before 1930 and a few entries after 1962. The new title is strictly inaccurate since letters to his wife, Vila Sackville-West, are freely mixed in with the diary, as before. But the book is only a third of the length of the original three volumes, which themselves contained only one twentieth of the whole diary. So there is still a vast amount of unpublished material.
Simultaneously there appears a new biography by Norman Rose. This is substantially shorter, more modern in tone and less literary in style than James Lees-Milne’s two volumes published in 1980—81. Rose, as one might expect, is somewhat franker than Lees-Milne about Nicolson’s homosexuality, and also about his unappealing traits, notably snobbery, racism and anti-Semitism, extreme even by the standard of his time. In fact on the sexual front neither biographer had much left to expose to the wake of Nigel Nicolson’s astonishingly candid account of his parents’ marriage which appeared in 1973. But, given the shelf life of books today, a new biography is welcome, and Rose does the job more than adequately —though for a professor of international relations his coverage of diplomatic affairs is oddly sketchy.
In spite of some vicious prejudices which are hard to take today Nicolson contrives to remain curiously sympathetic. Reading him as a student thirty years ago I identified with his fragile self-confidence and his nagging sense of never being quite at the centre of things. Coming back to him again after a long gap I still find much of the same empathy, yet find it hard to admit. What is most admirable is precisely Nicolson’s honesty about himself, his contradictions and his underlying decency. (“You know how I hate Negroes But I do hate injustice more.”) There is something infinitely appealing about a man of great gifts and considerable achievements who knew and constantly acknowledged that ultimately he was not of the first rank.
Nicolson was virtually born into the Foreign Office -- his father, Sir Arthur Nicolson, became Permanent Secretary the year after Harold joined — but his rise within it was rapid and merited. After spells in Madrid and Constantinople he played a precociously important role as a thirty-two-year-old Third Secretary redrawing the boundaries of Eastern Europe at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, but found the experience disillusioning. (“Darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to pieces as if they were dividing a cake.”) He continued climbing the diplomatic ladder in the 1920s until be blotted his copybook first by writing too frank a memorandum from Tehran about the sham of British policy in Persia, and then by publishing in 1927 an autobiographical novel which contained indiscreet portraits of recognizable individuals. He resigned in 1930 to strike out on his own.
Nicolson had, in fact, already carved out a second career as a writer: Some People was his sixth book. Of course he wrote too much and too quickly. His literary biographies (Paul Verlaine, Byron etc) are forgotten, and his ambition to be “the Proust of England” was far beyond his reach. But Some People mixed fact and fiction in an original way and is still in print. His three books of contemporary diplomatic history — Lord Carnock (a life of his father), Curzon: The last phase and Peacemaking, 1919— are still important eyewitness reflections on their period; while towards the end of his life his official biography of George V was path-breaking in its day.
Nicolson left the diplomatic service partly to break out of his comfortable predestined rut, partly to please Vila, who hated his official life and refused to follow him abroad. He was lured by Lord Beaverbrook’s money to become a gossip columnist on the Evening Standard, to which he was grotesquely unsuited. Then he became involved with Oswald Mosley’s New Party and edited the party newspaper, though to his credit he broke with Mosley as soon as he turned to Fascism. Finally, seeking to go into politics, he joined Ramsay Macdonald’s National Labour Party — the rump of Labour placement who had followed the turncoat Prime Minister in 1931 — and, by undeserved good fortune, be squeezed into Parliament in 1935 as Member for West Leicester. Though he despised his constituents, a wafer-thin majority secured him the perfect vantage point for the next ten years to observe the passing show of great events and to describe them in his diary.
The fourth strand which provides the private background to his public life was his extraordinary open marriage — open in the sense that while remaining emotionally faithful to one another both be and Vila fell free to indulge in a succession of homosexual affairs: mainly casual on Harold’s part, passionate on hers. There were some crises — notably Vita’s farcically tempestuous elopement with Violet Trefusis, which strained Harold’ s patience almost to breaking point at the very time he was fully engaged with the Paris Peace Conference. Their self-consciously aristocratic mutual tolerance would be harder to sustain in today’s more straitlaced climate. But as Vila once acknowledged, it was the fact that each was unfaithful with their own sex that made ii possible. “If you were in love with another woman, or 1 with another man it would inevitably rob our relationship of something. As it is, the liaisons which you and I contract don’t interfere.” Their frankness about one another’s extramarital needs — they stopped sleeping together soon after the birth of their two sons - is eye-opening even today. Yet with the private honesty went public hypocrisy: in 1929 the Nicolsons made a wireless broadcast on the BBC about the secret of successful marriage, and in 1932 they toured America — which they loathed – lecturing on the same subject.
At the time, of course, homosexuality was criminal offence, at least for men. First as a diplomat, then as an MP, journalist and popular broadcaster (Nicolson was for years a member of the panel of the Brains Trust, Harold constantly risked ruin because of his promiscuity, though his snobbery reduced the risk of blackmail, since he usually confined his adventures to his social equals. (“The idea of a gentleman of birth an education sleeping with a guardsman is repugnant to me. "). Both Nicolsons — Vita in particu1ar—prided themselves on their bohemian indifference to bourgeois convention while at the same time clinging to the wealth and privileges of respectable social position. It is hard to know whether to condemn the hypocrisy or to admit the nerve with which they got away with it. In truth it is the conflict of these elements that makes Harold’s diary such a compelling human document: the rashness and the secrecy; outrageous private behaviour overlaid by outward respectability; niggling ambition undermined by a crippling lack of self-belief; sound political judgement one minute, contradicted by extraordinary folly the next; impeccable democratic sentiments vitiated by the most callous elitism. Ultimately it is for their human weaknesses that we love Pepys and Boswell; and Harold Nicolson belongs in their company.
Jonathan Cape, £20/£18 and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25/£22.50
Harold Nicolson, by Norman Rose and The Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1963, Edited by Nigel Nicolson
Naive, snobbish and utterly compelling
By Richard Canning
Published : 31 March 2005
In the early 1930s, Harold Nicolson advised his teenage son Ben - the future art historian - not to worry if he turned out homosexual. He should "take the most natural line. As if you liked oysters done in sherry". Of Ben's relationship with "Jeremy" at Oxford, his father wrote to Vita Sackville-West, his wife and Ben's mother: "What a good thing! Ben can have all the fun he wants if he is quiet about it and does not dress like a tapette."
If Nicolson's guardianship of his two sons was unorthodox, this matched his and Vita's amorous pursuits. These were well-documented in their younger son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage (1973). Just as unusual was Nigel's 35-year stewardship of his parents' reputations. He also wrote a biography of his mother's lover Virginia Woolf, and edited both Woolf's letters and Harold and Vita's correspondence.
Nigel's greatest work for his father were the three volumes of Diaries, prepared in consultation with their author. When he died last autumn, he had just seen into publication this revised single-volume edition. Supplemented by letters, they are franker in many respects than the original Sixties volumes.
The diaries offer a sharper and more diverting account of Harold than Norman Rose's new biography. Rose has an eye for detail and his judgment is sound. But his prose is somewhat dry, and he is more comfortable with Nicolson the politician, not the writer.
All political careers are said to end in failure. Harold Nicolson believed he had failed in both political and literary realms, and others besides. An early diplomatic career petered out; he was gauche and unpredictable. The best of his books, Some People (1927), was a collection of fictionalised sketches of diplomatic circles. A minor classic, it reads wonderfully freshly but in its time was seen as treachery.
The appeal of Nicolson's diaries lies not so much in their integrity or intelligence, but the converse. His judgments were often absurd or naive. In 1930, he announced from Berlin that "Hitler has missed the boat". After Yalta, he shared Churchill's view that Stalin was a man who kept his word. A snob who resented and distrusted democracy, he regarded everyone but the Sackville-Wests - and himself, by adoption - as plebeian. His grotesque anti-Semitism had the odd consequence of making him a thoroughgoing Zionist. A separate state might gather Jews together "as Butlin's collects all the noisy holidaymakers".
Nigel Nicolson is to be applauded for his brave and selfless dissemination of his father's childish, self-regarding views. They make bitter but essential reading.
The reviewer is writing a life of Ronald Firbank