20th Century Pepys

HAROLD NICOLSON: THE LATER YEARS, 1945-1962, VOL. Ill OF DIARIES AND LETTERS. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. 448 pages. Atheneum. $8.50.

When Sir Harold Nicolson died last May at 81, enfeebled by age and prolonged illness, he was only vaguely aware that the first two volumes of his diaries and letters had brought him a quality of fame that had eluded him all his life. Perhaps the knowledge that he was being hailed as a Pepys to his age and peers might have struck him as an odd and final irony. "To be a good diarist," he once observed, "one must have a little snouty sneaky mind."

Nevertheless, Nicolson's perceptive daily jottings about places he visited and people he met assure him a position in British letters that he never achieved with his 34 books of history, biography, fiction, essays and travelogues. This final, posthumous volume, edited by his son Nigel, offers a beguilingly human account of the tremendous social changes that swept Britain so painfully after World War II.

Old Horse. Though he tried, Nicolson, the aristocratic son of an English lord, never quite came to terms with either men or movements that he found wholly alien to his upbringing. Partly because he convinced himself that he was at least a "cerebral" socialist, but mostly because he had been half-promised a peerage, he bolted the Conservative Party in 1948 and stood for Parliament as a Labor candidate in working-class North Croydon.

Some of the most amusing but also pathetic entries deal with his efforts to be folksy and humbly ingratiating with voters who understood him probably even less than he understood them. He was equally at a loss when dealing with party hacks. "I feel like a cow being led garlanded to the altar," he noted, "and they probably regard me as a very doubtful old horse." He lost the election, of course, and when he returned to London, half-angry and half-shamed, he poured out his feelings in an article in the Spectator that alienated him from the Labor hierarchy and forever spoiled his chances of gaining a peerage.

Royal Secrets. Nicolson was more at home when the royal family chose him to write the official biography of King George V. The task consumed three years, but he obviously enjoyed it, not only because the assignment was an honor but also because it gave him the opportunity to interview all the members of the royal family. Characteristically, his diary entries during this period bustle with provocative footnotes to history. For example, his interview with the late Queen Mary, who discussed the relations between her husband George and his sons: "She said that the real difficulty had been with the Duke of Windsor and never with 'the present King' [George VI], who always got on well with his father. She added that 'the present King' had been appalled when he succeeded. 'He was devoted to his brother and the whole abdication crisis made him miserable. He sobbed on my shoulder for a whole hour --there, upon that sofa.' "

Nicolson was an indefatigable notetaker at almost any public or private event of consequence. He attended the Nuernberg trials and noted that the Nazi leaders in the dock "look drab, depressing, like people who have travelled in a third-class railway carriage for three successive nights." Shortly after George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, he visited Shaw's Corner, near Ayot St. Lawrence, and saw the ashes of Shaw and his wife strewn about the garden in accordance with the playwright's will. As he reconstructs the procedure in his diary: "The Trustees and doctor got both urns and put them on the diningroom table. They then emptied the one into the other and stirred them with a kitchen spoon. They then went out into the garden and emptied spoonfuls of the mixture on the flower beds and paths. Just like the stuff Vita puts down for slugs."

Always a Bivalve. His wife Vita, the poet-novelist Victoria Sackville-West, is in fact the centerpiece of this last volume. She was as retiring as Nicolson was gregarious, and lived virtually a recluse at Sissinghurst, their Tudor castle in Kent, while he spent every week from Monday through Friday in London. The depth of their love becomes touchingly poignant in their correspondence as they grew older. "I am a bivalve," he wrote to her once, "and don't function properly when I am forced to be unicellular."

It was a sentiment that proved to be a prophecy. In June 1962, driven by habit, Nicolson sat down and made an entry. "Vita is breathing heavily, and then suddenly is silent. She dies without fear or self-reproach." It is the final entry in this book. Until his own death five years later, he lived as a broken and grief-stricken old man.

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