Filial Comment
By NIGEL NICOLSON
ON December 22, 1938, Harold Nicolson re- corded in his diary : 'Lunch at the Reform with Wilson Harris. I agree to do a weekly article for him.' This was the origin of 'Marginal Com- ment,' which he contributed to the SPECTATOR from the beginning of 1939 until the end of 1952, with a year's gap, 1940-41, when he was a junior minister in Churchill's government. There were 670 articles in all, each of 1,500 words. Such is the purely statistical record.
In itself it indicates quite an achievement. To sustain this weekly output for thirteen years, without loss of quality or vigour, made demands upon his time, imagination and memory which few authors have experienced. He finally gave it up, as he said in his valedictory article, because 'I may end by repeating, even imitating, myself. I wish to postpone the date when my friends will whisper sadly among each other that I am be- coming, have in fact become, a bore. . . . People should refrain from dancing once the joints be- gin to creak.'
Once he had decided on a subject the actual writing came very easily to him. It was the find- ing of a new subject that began to test his in- ventiveness. He had almost exhausted his auto- biographical material by the time he had written over a million words, and while in the early years, until 1945, when he was in the House of Commons, there was an infinite supply of topical subjects ('weekly impressions rather than a record of weekly events'), later, when he was living and working at Sissinghurst, they rose less readily to his mind. When an old friend died, it was almost with delight that he pounced upon the opportunity to write an obituary article. He would ask us despairingly at breakfast on Sun- day mornings,'What can I write about this week?' `Write about match-boxes,' I once suggested, looking round the breakfast-table. So the article that week was about match-boxes. He typed it, always, in two hours, and it was in the post by lunchtime. It was never revised, never changed in proof, and always of precisely the right length, not a half-line shorter or longer than the full page which the SPECTATOR required. 'No Editor,' wrote Wilson Harris in his autobio- graphy, 'can ever have had a more ideal con- tributor.' Harold Nicolson reciprocated the compliment. His relationship with his Editor was not merely one of mutual non-intervention; it was 'symbiosis,' like that between another pro- lific author and another Mr W. H.
'Marginal Comment' became very quickly the outstanding feature not only of the SPECTATOR but of contemporary British journalism. School- masters would instruct their sixth forms to read it weekly as an illustration of what their own essays ought to be. Clergymen and solicitors would chortle over its gentle satire, and Harold Nicolson's colleagues in Parliament would regard a mention of their names as an accolade which could be conferred in no other way. The correspondence columns of the paper contained weekly marginal comments on the article, most of which attempted, never quite successfully, to capture its style.
It was the style of an essayist, not of a journalist. It was faintly eighteenth century. It reflected the personality and background of a
Harold Nicolson's Diaries and Letters: 1930-1939, edited by Nigel Nicolson, will be published by Collins on October 3, and reviewed by Robert Rhodes lames in next week's SPECTATOR. man who had spent his early years at Balliol and in diplomacy, and his later years in authorship and the more esoteric pursuits of power, a man who had a passionate interest in the contem- porary world but no sympathy with its vul- garisation, who enjoyed the cadence of a phrase, who was at home in half a dozen languages and literatures, who was witty, gregarious and a tease. 'Marginal Comment' might have infuriated its readers, but it seldom did. Once he received a letter urging him to write 'like a he-man with hair on his chest' (Harold Nicolson would have written 'upon), but he was never a he-man. He was an unhirsute critic. He could be as madden- ing as a stock judge in comedy, affecting ignor- ance of the interests and amusements of less gifted people : The bewilderment caused me by the correspon- dence in The Times newspaper [began his 'Marginal Comment' of November 14, 1952] on the subject of Mrs Dale, her family and circle, was not diminished by the fact that I had never yet heard the lady reading extracts from her diary upon the wireless. I took immediate steps to repair the omission.. .. Seldom, even in this age of cacophany, have I heard so much un- interesting emptiness discussed in the space of fourteen minutes.
This was Harold Nicolson at his worst. It was polysyllabic humour of the type for which Fow- ler reserved his greatest scorn. It was superior, mannered and rather cheap. But it did not irritate readers of the SPECTATOR. What was the secret of his ability to amuse by condescension?
I think that one answer must be that he never took himself or national institutions very seriously. That `Times newspaper' business was not an archaic affectation, but as much a dig at The Times as his abuse of Mrs Dale was a dig at the BBC, of which he had been a Governor. His readers came to recognise and enjoy his veiled prejudices much as a crossword-puzzle addict comes to know the mentality of its com- piler. 'Marginal Comment' was a taste that had to be acquired. Its artfulness lay partly in the very shape of it. He would begin as far away as possible from the main theme of the article, leav- ing the reader tantalisingly expectant of where the opening paragraph would lead him, since it never carried any other title than `Marginal Comment.' Thus: `The only thing which I have in common with Napoleon is an almost morbid interest in the part played by chance in human destiny,' were the first words of a discussion of Lord D'Abernon's influence on the German government between 1920 and 1926: was read- ing the other day the memoirs of a former American diplomatist,' was the introduction to a disquisition on cooking: "'The English winter," wrote Lord Byron, "ends in July in order to begin again in August",' prefaced his reflections on Hitler's threat to the Free City of Danzig. It was all part of his weekly game with his readers. They came to know that, although
the approach might be indirect, the conclusion would always turn round and firmly bite its be- ginning, like a whiting its tail. 'My articles,' Des- mond MacCarthy once said to him, 'just end; yours, my dear Harold, finish.' It was a deserved tribute, which gave him much pleasure. He knew from long experience the rhythm of 1,500 words, just as a 1,500-metre runner knows where in
the field he should be at any given moment of the race, and he contrived to quicken or slow down his pace so that he approached the finish- ing line with the proper reserves of energy in hand. There was never any padding or truncation.
`Marginal Comment' had great variety. At the very start of the series in 1939 he conceived it as 'a weekly essay, both detached and topical, both varied and consistent, both reflective and spon- taneous.' He never wavered from that intention. The first article could have been published as the last. Within this general theme there was room for infinite change of instruments and orchestra- tion. One week it would be about the contrast be- tween the German and the Italian characters; the next, the characteristics of different garden weeds; the next, he would write about Homer as a poet of nature. Each subject was loosely attached to a topical event or a personal ex- perience, whether in the current week or forty years before. He had the power of total recall— of conversations, of mannerisms, of the exact movement of a statesman across a room: I recollect an occasion, in 1920, when Lord Curzon was visited in London by M Stam- boliski, the Agrarian Prime Minister of Bul- garia. M Stamboliski derived but little political comfort from that interview. But when, shat- tered and indeed alarmed by the frigidity of his reception, he staggered to the door, Lord Cur- zon accompanied him to the very entrance to the lift, and while waiting for that antiquated con- trivance to adjust itself jerkily to the massive displacement of the Bulgarian Prime Minister, he flung his arm around the vast back of Stam- boliski and patted him gently upon the shoulder.
This sort of thing created a sense of par- ticipation. The articles were always flattering to the reader's self-esteem. Greek and Italian quotations were left untranslated, and obscure books or buildings were mentioned without any identification beyond their names. There was an assumption of shared culture, but at the moment when the weight of knowledge was becoming almost unendurable, there would be a sudden switch to an illustration which everyone could understand : It is not sufficient to attribute the whole Byronic legend to the maladie die siecle, or to rest content with Taine's dictum that 'no more illustrious prey was ever sacrificed to the cen- tury's disease.' Such explanations account for much, but they do not account for Goethe's admiration, for Stendhal's famous phrase, or for the fact that a hundred Midland squires should have been hushed to awed silence in the dining- room at Belvoir.
But in the end, it was Harold Nicolson's felicity with words, his unmistakable voice, that sus- tained the series and broadened its face to em- brace the whole English-speaking world. Nobody could remain for long annoyed with the author of such phrases as these: 'Nothing, unless it be an undergraduate, can put itself to bed so rapidly as the House of Commons'; 'There are moments when I hold my breath in amazement at the political dexterity of the Conservative party, as when one watches a huge sea lion catch (without the slightest change of expression) a ping-pong ball upon its nose'; or 'Lady Astor, who was not intended by nature to be a House of Com- mons man, is able to smooth by her unflinching friendliness the feathers which she ruffles by her unflinching interruptions.' Marginal comments will be written as long as journalism is an art, but 'Marginal Comment' will not, cannot, again be written quite like this. In other hands the style, the approach, would seem outdated, even absurd. Harold Nicolson may come to be regarded as the last of the great essayists in the classical manner.
He enriched the language by making full use of its riches. But he did more than that. By his vitality, his sense of the ridiculous, his wide cul- ture and experience, he managed better than most 'contemporary' writers to mirror his times. When he reads this, he will probably not agree with a word I have written. But then he was always an exceptionally modest man.
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