The sage of Sissinghurst
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Harold Nicolson had many strings to his literary bow, but his weekly column in the SPECTATOR was the most continuing example of his pro- fessional skill. To attempt, at however long a remove, to do something of the same kind, is to be taught, quickly, how difficult it is even to approach his mastery, how impossible to equal it. His recruiting for this journal was one of Wilson Harris's most brilliant coups and his causeries du vendredi were unique in their appeal; they were part of 'the civilisation we are fighting for.'
I have been searching in vain for another British career like Nicolson's. His combination of diplomacy, of the life of letters, of politics; long before he withdrew from the public eye, was more French than English. Whether be would have gone into la carriere if he had not been his father's son I cannot even guess. He abandoned diplomacy when he was half- way up the ladder, abandoning his chances of the highest rank in a profession then more pres- tigious than it is now. For without going quite so far as Mr Jock Bruce-Gardyne and offering all our Talleyrands, at home and abroad, to the General, I feel that the weight of the professional diplomat has become less with each improvement in communications, with each decline in civility, with the erosion of the fabric of custom and principle that Nicolson so ingeniously assessed and defended in his classical little book.
I once asked him why he had got out of diplomacy and he said—and perhaps meant— that he was bored with the slow movement of promotion and with the limited utility of jobs he had to do. Yet he hankered after some of the pleasures and possibilities of useful action that his profession had offered and it may be (I know nothing of it) that his wife's dislike of the diplomat's life of exile counted for more than the decline in the interest of the diplo- mat's job.
Yet it was diplomacy that provided some of the best raw material for Nicolson's literary work. To it we owe the story of Curzon's valet and the great man's trousers; to it we owe his brilliant and solitary entry into fiction, to it a power to be above or beside the battle, to have deep convictions but not to be noisy about them, which was one of his chief attractions —and one of his chief handicaps in the 'abra- sive' life in the corridors of power. Again, I once asked him whether his increasing literary reputation did not compensate for his halting progress in public life. If he was not one of the public faces, was he not, to quote Boling- broke, 'something more and better'? He doubted this. Like so many people with the injection of political ambition in his veins, he `could not go back to Pocatello' as the Ameri- cans put it. He could walk nostalgically past the House; he could think of its miseries as well as grandeurs; he had Sissinghurst instead of Pocatello—and yet.
I have seen too many American politicians stretching their hands out to the lost arena in vain, not to sympathise with his nostalgia while convinced that fate had really dealt kindly with him in removing him to higher and better things. Gibbon did not lust after Westminster while at work in Lausanne. Of course, Nicolson was not Gibbon. Witty, wise, kindly, he had not attempted the greatest peaks of Parnassus. I suppose that technically his greatest achieve- ment in formal literature was his life of his father; his second, his life of George V. That book once enabled him to rebuke me blandly and amiably. I had, in the course of a desultory meal, said that I regretted that John Wheeler- Bennett was going to waste his great gifts as a contemporary historian on such a dull and necessarily circumscribed a subject as George VI. 'You don't seem to remember that you once advised me against wasting my time on George V. Do you still think it was waste?' I freely admitted that my advice (which I had totally forgotten giving) had been bad, that George V was an excellent and admirable book. `Wheeler-Bennett will do George VI admirably and usefully.' He did, but George V was a more interesting if not a more admirable monarch than his son and the life will remain the classic account of the transition from the old monarchy to the new, in more than the mere name, from the House of Hanover (or Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) to the House of Windsor.
His other main biographical effort, the life of Dwight Morrow, was not a comparable success. Nicolson obviously did not like the American haute banque. (I wonder did he like the Euro- pean haute banque any better?) He did not understand or, at any rate did not accept, the mystique of the House of Morgan which re- garded itself in those days as a great power much as The Times did but with much more justification. The debts of Mexico, the claims of the oil kings were not matters of primary interest to Harold Nicolson and I'm afraid that he liked few Americans and regarded their social pretensions with a not always friendly irony. The snobbery of Europe was something worthy of an artist, but the snobbery of New York or even of Boston was hardly worth noting. After all, Henry James had had to seek his themes in Europe and if Proust had been born an American what could he have done with his genius? With my prepossessions I could hardly accept this view, but I candidly can't see how Harold Nicolson could have found an American setting for his perfect short story which tells of the young' French duke whom Proust proposed to put into one of the late volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu. He begged Proust not to do him this great, if ambiguous, honour. If he was put into the great book, he would certainly be blackballed at the Jockey Club where he was a candidate. Proust submitted and, a year later, Nicolson passing through Paris met the duke's mother and asked for news of the foolish young man who bad declined immortality. 'He was blackballed just the same' Two episodes in Nicolson's life seem to be set off against each other by an' ironical destiny. One was Nicolson's support for Oswald Mosley. Most people today have forgotten Sir Oswald or regard him as a figure of unfulfilled promise whom history has rightly discarded. But - it should be remembered in that most dreary of epochs, the age of Ramsay-Macbaldwin, many intelligent people, 'if only in a generous honest thought, took Action' in a mixture of hope and despair. Nicolson had nothing to be ashamed of; his was a generous if ill-judged example of misguided patriotism.
But to be offset againtt that unfortunate ad- venture there is the material that his brief affair with the Mosleyites and the more digni- fied but not much more successful career as an MP provided for the Diary, This has been most deservedly one of -the great literary successes of our declining age.. Nothing is more of a sop of madeleine for those who passed most of the war in London than the second volume. It is even more delightful as literature than as a document pour servir, if read alternatively with the odious and preposterous diary of 'Chips' Channon. In it there is the best and most friendly, not merely adulatory portrait of Winston, there is the best account of that period when London seemed to be slipping into the physical state of the last century of Byzantium, occupied, as I suspect Nicolson thought, by friendly barbarians who were yet barbarians. In the long run, it is not poet diplomats like Claudel and St John Perse that Nicolson will recall but the great Duc de Saint-Simon. Nicol- son was not, of course, an original genius like the 'manikin.' He had not the 'flame' or the power to hate that Saint-Simon had been en- dowed with. He was a nice man as the great duke wasn't. And Nicolson must be the only nice man who has left a great or nearly great diary.
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