Fandango Diplomatique

PUBLIC FACES--Harold Nicolson--Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Five years ago, Harold Nicolson wrote a good book with a bad title (Some People). Public Faces is another such--a more ingenious and less amusing satire on the dignified, dangerous asininities of diplomacy and also a book that deserves a better name. Author Nicolson retails his solemn state secrets as one having had authority. Onetime diplomatist for Britain, he resigned before yielding to the temptation to be indiscreet.

Nub of his fantasy is the diplomatic struggle for possession of Abu Saad, an island in the Persian Gulf which contains the only known deposits of some perilous stuff, wanted by every peace-loving nation because it makes possible the world's fastest rocket airplanes. Britain has the concession; Britain's Cabinet (the only ones in the know) feel even guiltier because of the further fact that the same stuff can -be made up into the world's most destructive atomic bomb. At the centre of the ensuing pussy-wants-a-corner is Walter Bullinger, Britain's Secretary for Foreign Affairs. Born a little Liberal, torn between his guilty secret, the bad guesses of foreign diplomats, the bloodthirsty ambitions of Sir Charles Pantry, Secretary for Air, poor Walter has a most unhappy time. The

Abu Saad crisis grows hourly more acute. more complicated; then it seems to simplify itself into inevitable war. Walter Bullinger does his mild best but it is not good enough. If bright young Jane Campbell, his assistant, and not-quite-so-bright John Shorland had not spoken out of turn, threatened to give the world hell, there would have been hell to pay.

Everything irons out in the end. The wrong people get the credit, no one lives perfectly happy ever after: that, Author Nicolson implies, is the world's way. England, diplomacy, good intentions have somehow muddled through again.

The Author. Although his father was Lord Carnock of Carnock his mother was a Rowan Hamilton of County Down. Perhaps because he has Irish blood in him Harold George Nicolson is not the dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist his heredity and training meant him to be. Besides, his wife is Victoria Sackville-West--who, though one of the Sackvilles of Knole Castle, is a novelist of parts, her influence therefore subversive of public-school tradition. Through the regular mill of Oxford, crammer's school and Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson took his obedient but observant way. He came to have more respect for poets than for potentates. Born in Teheran, Persia and brought up in whatever foreign posts his family happened to be, he served his country in France, Spain, Turkey, Geneva. Persia, Germany. In 1929, unable to contain himself any longer, he resigned, joined forces with the "Bloomsbury Group" (John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, the late Lytton Strachey), took to ink. His first books were biographies of Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, Verlaine. No mere filial pietist, he wrote a biography of his father that might stand as a monument to the "old" diplomacy.

Harold Nicolson likes pictures but hates music. Snub-nosed, curly-haired, rosy, he looks a little too pert for his age (46), wears clothes a little too young for him. He knows "everybody" from London to Constantinople.

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