A Cultivated Mind

HAROLD NICOLSON: DIARIES AND LETTERS, 1930-1939. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. 447 pages. Atheneum. $7.50.

In the span of 40 years, Sir Harold Nicolson wrote 28 books of history (The Congress of Vienna), biography (King George V), fiction (Sweet Waters), essays (Good Behavior) and travelogues (Journey to Java), as well as countless book reviews and speeches. But nothing that Sir Harold has ever produced is so likely to win him a permanent place in British letters as this volume culled by his younger son from his personal notes and correspondence.

The reasons are clear enough. Nicolson, now 80, is among the last of a vanishing species of Englishmen--a cultivated, gregarious, urbane, multitalented man who was a diplomat, politician and bon vivant, as well as an influential critic and writer. From 1930 to 1964 Nicolson sat down each morning after breakfast and typed out an unsparingly candid account of what he had done, seen and thought the day before. In October 1964, when his son Nigel began to winnow through the notes, he found about 3,000,000 words.

His selection for this volume covers the decade leading up to World War II. It is a strikingly perceptive, intensely personal history of those turbulent years, made all the more so because Nigel Nicolson includes letters exchanged by his father and mother, the novelist and poetess Victoria ("Vita") Sackville-West.

Theirs was an odd marriage. While Harold was going everywhere--meeting here with Duff Cooper, there with Lord Beaverbrook, growling at Churchill for failing to muster sufficient opposition to Hitler--Vita remained secluded at Sissinghurst, the Tudor castle they had bought in Kent. She was a strangely masculine woman who wore breeches and gaiters in winter and linen slacks in summer, and who often said that her one enduring regret was that she was not born a boy. Still, Vita was enchantingly feminine where Harold was concerned. Her letters to him were filled with tenderness, as were his to her.

In all probability, their correspondence set some kind of record, for they wrote to each other every day when they were apart. Yet Vita steadfastly refused to take part in Harold's busy life, even turned down his plea to make a single token appearance at his side when he successfully campaigned for Parliament.

Politics y. Art. Nicolson actually tells little that is new about the historic events. What he does provide is an eyewitness record of the era, as well as the passing of a time when everybody of consequence in England knew everybody else--and an unbelievably clubbable lot they were. Nicolson casually notes, for example, that he popped in on Anthony Eden at the time of the Sudetenland crisis and found Eden in despair but still unable to make up his mind about what he would do. Nicolson was horrified at Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler, and he gives a vivid picture of the discord it caused among his upper-crust friends. When Chamberlain announced that he was making a second trip to Munich, he noted, "Raymond [Mortimer] rings me up and says, 'Isn't this ghastly?' Eddy [Sackville-West] rings me up and says, 'Isn't this hell?' Margot Oxford rings me up and says, 'Now, Harold, you must agree he is a great man.' I say, 'Not at all.' 'You are as bad as Violet [Bonham Carter],' she snaps; 'he is the greatest Englishman that ever lived.'" For all his preoccupation with ominous world events, Nicolson still found time to visit the Cambridge Union for a debate with Stephen Spender on the subject:

"Art must be political." Nicolson said no, and won, but recalls that Spender remarked, "I fear I cannot make an amusing speech. I have just been reading a book which says that all geniuses are devoid of humor."

Nicolson never tried to disguise the fact that he was a member of the elite, and since he obviously felt that people outside that elite had something wrong with them, he frequently sounds like a crashing snob. He never truly cared for Mrs. Wallis Simpson, for example; he looked on her as an American social climber, though he faithfully recorded each of the many times he met her at parties. Like many Englishmen of his generation and class, he was troubled almost as deeply about the abdication as he was about Munich. "What is so tragic," he confided in a letter to Vita, "is that now the people have got over the first sentimental shock, they want the King to abdicate. Opinion in the house is now almost wholly anti-King.

'If he can betray his duty and then betray the woman he loves, there is no good in the man.' Thus, although he may keep his throne if he 'renounces' Mrs. Simpson, he will have lost the respect of his subjects."

Blaze & Blink. Throughout his diaries, Nicolson gives deft descriptions of the people he met. George Bernard Shaw had "eyes as simple and unmalicious as those of an animal. He talks with a faintly effeminate voice and a soft brogue." Henry Ford's eyes "blaze and blink with faith and his large mouth twists sensitively into all variations of approval, obstinacy, pity and contempt."

From William Rothenstein, who did his portrait, Nicolson learned that Oscar Wilde "had a red face, grey lips and very bad teeth. He was so ashamed of his teeth that he used to put his hand over them when he spoke, giving an odd, furtive expression to his face."

Readers will lay down this civilized book only reluctantly. And they will say, as Critic Cyril Connolly did when he learned that there will be two more Nicolson volumes to follow: "Come on--where's the rest? Hand it over!"

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