Nicolson II: Diarist Triumphant

HAROLD NICOLSON : THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945, VOL. II OF DIARIES AND LETTERS. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. 511 pages. Atheneum. $8.50.

"One should write one's diary for one's great-grandson," writes Sir Harold Nicolson in the diary he kept faithfully for 34 years of his active life as a prolific author and sometime Member of Parliament. "The purely private diary becomes too self-centred and morbid. One should have a remote, but not too remote, audience."

Nicolson, now 80, happily did not wait that long to publish his notes and letters. The first distillation of his life time of civilized observation and sensitive introspection, edited by his son Nigel (TIME, Jan. 6), covered the fitful prewar years 1930 to 1939. It established Nicolson as a brilliant Boswell to his age and his peers. This is the swift and welcome sequel. Caught up by "the cataract of history" that was Britain's role in World War II, Nicolson now surpasses his earlier performance.

His view of events, as a member of the government and as a backbencher, is middle-distance only, and so not always in perfect focus. The editor's footnotes correct the record where Sir Har old's information was faulty, or where a dinner anecdote is constructed out of whole tablecloth. But the diarist's perceptions of people, from Churchill to De Gaulle to a rising Tory named Harold Macmillan, are always close-up and marvelously crisp and sharp. And the mood of an embattled nation is mirrored in all its nuances through the changing fortunes of war.

Jewels & Diaries. As Hitler's armies first spill across the Continent, Nicolson despairs for Britain, certain that the war cannot be won. Opposed to Chamberlain's appeasement, he describes one of the Prime Minister's speeches during which "Winston Churchill sat hunched beside him looking like the Chinese god of plenty suffering from acute indigestion." Even when Churchill becomes Prime Minister, Britain continues to suffer defeat after defeat. But, like the nation, Nicolson's spirits are somehow altered by the leadership of the man whom he admires more than anyone in the world. More than once, he recounts a day of disaster, only to end with a ringing, underlined, "We shall win!"

Much of Nicolson's charm lies in his candid humanity. He admits to finding exhilaration in the bombing of London; it is some slight compensation for the "dead weight on my life never to have known the dangers of the last war and never to have discovered whether I am a hero or a coward." When it appears that his wife will have to evacuate their Kentish country house, he advises her to load their Buick with two things: her jewels and his diaries. The Battle of Britain inspires unashamed pride: "I have always loved England. Now I am in love with England. What a people! What a chance! And the chance that we shall by our stubbornness give victory to the world."

Fine Retriever. At the same time, he has the intelligent man's impatience with much of the clap-trappings of war. "I notice that when we get on both sides of an enemy," he wryly notes, "that enemy is described as 'surrounded,' but when the enemy get on both sides of us, we are told that we have driven a 'wedge' between his two armies." When Hitler invades Norway, "the House is extremely calm and the general line is that Hitler has made a terrible mistake. I feel myself that I wish that we could sometimes commit mistakes of such magnitude."

The best of Nicolson remains his eye for the actors around him. Churchill, he tells the reader, cries often, and has a "strange" habit, when speaking to Parliament, of passing "his hands up and down from groin to tummy." Charles de Gaulle, observed in his London exile, has effeminate hands, lacking muscle and arteries in them, but already in 1941 is heard yelling "France, c'est moi!" at Nicolson in the Savoy Hotel. "His arrogance and fascism annoy me," writes Nicolson, "but there is something like a fine retriever dog about his eyes." Laborite Clement Attlee looks "like a snipe pretending to be an eagle," Anthony Eden is "fairly wobbling with charm," Lord Beveridge, father of the welfare state, looks "like the witch of Endor."

England was ruled--as it still is, though to a lesser extent--by a clubby elite. Nicolson's notes are full of first names and nicknames, and it is sometimes hard to tell whether he is talking about the Beefsteak Club or the House of Commons. Mixed with his uncommon sensitivity to great events there is an uncommon delight in gossip. This does not diminish the worth of the book. If history, as Carlyle said, is really the biographies of great men, it is also their gossip.

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