Appreciating Nicolson

Press, 16 July 1983, Page 18

Appreciating Nicolson

Some People. By Harold Nicolson. Constable. First published, 1927. This edition, 1982, 175 pp. $20.95. (Reviewed by Stephen Erber) This is a book in nine parts each part? dealing with characters who for one reason or another were important in Harold Nicolson’s life.. Most of the characters in this apparently fictional book are composite persons going under fictitious names and made up of a mixture of people whom Nicolson knew well — for example, the character J. D. Marstock was an amalgam two acquaintences, H. H. Duncan and J. R. Parsons. I say “apparently fictional book” because this is really an autobiographical book, not a biographical or fictional one. By the end of the book it is not the author’s characters who become well known to the reader, but the author himself. When it was published in June 1927, “Some People” became a best seller, much to Nicolson’s surprise and pleasure because he had no hopes for it. When he read the essays in proof form he protested that “(t)hey read like babbling idiocy ... I shall write no further books.” The essays consist of penetrating observations of public schools, (“the scrubbed boards and chipped enamel of school life”),

Oxbridge Universities, and above all of diplomatic life. It was the unnervingly accurate portrayal of the latter that caused Lord Birkenhead and George V to praise the book, and older diplomats to condemn it for indiscretion (i.e. uncomfortable truths) — a “cad’s book” wrote Sir Percy Lorraine, one of Nicolson’s former bosses. The thing that most people liked about it was that it was written in a brittle and amusing style which seemed to give the characters and events depicted a slightly larger-than-life quality (except for those who really knew). This latter reception irked Nicolson who maintained that what he had written was not a parody, but a commentary on the manners of the people and the age he had depicted. I have on this page before given it as my opinion that as a diarist and writer Nicholson has not been sufficiently appreciated. There is a tendency to remember him as a civilised practitioner of the English vice, who wrote a good biography of George V, and who created (with his wife Vita Sackville-West) a great garden, and not as a sharp observer of people and events with a very considerable ability to communicate what he had seen in writing. To my mind, this book is his best work. Consider his description of an acquaintance not quite up to operating as a diplomat in times of crises: “Under the cumulative effect of these unceasing menaces, Titty’s brain not in the most sedative circumstances a very taught or muscular instrument, became daily looser and looser. His thoughts appeared to flicker around his cerebral hemispheres without direction or mutual relationship. He lost the faculty of comparison, his associations became completely haphazard, his mental exchange-system ceased almost entirely to work.” I make no apology for spending time on a reprint of a book 55 years after its first publication because, unlike many works of similar vintage, it has not dated and produces for the reader today as good a picture of its times as a reel of film. It has deservedly, amused three generations and will assuredly amuse the present one.