[lit-ideas] Nigel Nicolson
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:56:10 EDT
Nigel Nicolson
(Filed: 24/09/2004)
Nigel Nicolson, who died yesterday aged 87, was a Tory MP in the 1950s, a
founding director of the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and the author or
editor of numerous stylishly written books; he was, however, best known for
Portrait of a Marriage, his account of the unorthodox union between his
parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.
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The book, which contained a frank account of his parents' infidelities and
homosexual affairs, caused a furore when it was published in 1973, and the
author found himself the subject of much obloquy, accused of betraying his
family and his class.
Private Eye parodied Nicolson's self-justifying foreword: his protestations
of filial piety and a claim that he had consulted those whose opinions he
most respected was appended by a footnote identifying his bank manager. A lewd
ballad went the round of the clubs of St James's which ended: a lesbian's
offspring begat by a queer/ But, self-made, a son of a bitch.
Yet in fairness, many felt he was justified in publishing an account which
placed his mother's passionate affair with Violet Trefusis, which had lasted
for three years, in the context of an enduringly successful marriage which had
lasted 50. Moreover, Vita's own private account of her love for Violet
(which her son had discovered in a Gladstone bag after her death) had, it
seemed,
been intended for publication.
Even Nicolson's critics, such as the writer Rebecca West (who declared that
Vita's account should have been left in the Gladstone bag) did not attribute
base motives to the book's author. His uncompromising integrity, indeed, was
one of Nicolson's most endearing characteristics, mainly because it was as
often applied to his own disadvantage as to that of others. A wise, kindly,
somewhat shy man, he accepted, occasionally with bemusement, his privileged
life
and heritage, yet managed to avoid the self-centredness and snobbery that
were such unattractive characteristics in his parents.
By nature nonconformist, he also had a stubborn streak of moral courage
which led him to stand up for the truth even when it was inconvenient, a
quality
which lent him a natural nobility.
The older brother of the art historian Ben Nicolson, Nigel Nicolson was born
in London on January 19 1917.
When he was about three, the family moved to Long Barn, a tumbledown
15th-century farmhouse near Knole, his mother's family home in Kent. In 1932,
they
moved permanently to Sissinghurst Castle and the house and its surrounding
gardens became his parents' joint enterprise until their deaths.
Neither parent really understood their sons, although Harold Nicolson was an
attentive father by the standards of the time. Their emotionally distant
mother had no time for little boys, even refusing to be alone in the same room
as her son Ben. As a result, the children spent most of their early years in
the company of nannies and governesses. Nigel attributed his inability to
sustain close relationships to his mother's coldness towards him.
He made his first acquaintance with Bloomsbury when, as a young boy, he was
recruited to the dinner table to make the numbers up to 14, and placed
opposite Lady Ottoline Morrell. Horrified by this apparition, he asked his
mother
in a whisper whether "that lady" wasn't a witch. "Of course she's a witch,"
said Clive Bell, to young Nicolson's mortification. "We have always known she
was but nobody has dared say so." Aged 11, Nigel became Virginia Woolf's
companion on butterfly hunting expeditions while she was writing Orlando, her
fantasy about his mother.
Quentin Bell would later invite him to edit Virginia Woolf's letters, a
project on which he collaborated with Joanne Trautmann, and which culminated
in
the publication, to great acclaim, of six volumes of correspondence between
1975 and 1980.
Vita Sackville-West's extraordinary relations included her mother, Lady
Sackville, who had moved to White Lodge in Rottingdean, Hampshire, after
leaving
her husband in 1919. As children, Ben and Nigel spent many cold afternoons in
her house waiting for lunch at 5pm, when it would be served by the
under-gardener, the cook invariably having given notice that morning.
When Lady Sackville died in 1936, she bequeathed the house to Nigel; he
would use the proceeds of its sale to help finance the launch of Weidenfeld
and
Nicolson and to buy the Shiants, some uninhabited islands in the Outer
Hebrides which he would later pass on to his son Adam.
At the age of eight, Nicolson was propelled into the "concentration camps of
boarding schools", first to Summerfields, Oxford, where he was taught by
Cecil Day Lewis and Leonard Strong, the novelist. He then followed his brother
Ben to Eton, where he fagged for Charles Villiers, the future chairman of
British Steel, demonstrated his independence by refusing to be confirmed with
the
other boys, and won a place to read Modern History at Balliol, Oxford.
At Oxford, Nicolson's initial shyness made his first year a misery, but in
his second year he began to come out of his shell. He spoke at Union debates
and organised the university branch of his father's party, the National Labour
Party, counting among his friends Denis Healey and Edward Heath. He also
rowed for his college, but did little work and graduated with a Third.
In the early years of fascism, Nicolson had rather admired the dictators.
For two years in succession he had joined Nazi friends in torchlit processions
in Berlin. "There is something awfully naive and charming and sincere about
[Hitler]," he wrote to his parents. "I cannot help reacting against all the
negative criticism of the regime that one hears in England. Nag, nag nag, the
whole time."
At Oxford his attitude changed and the Munich crisis clinched his
recantation. In April 1939, having been rejected for the RAF, he enlisted in
the
Officer Cadet Reserve and after the declaration of war, was commissioned into
the
Grenadier Guards. He spent much of the war in reserve, but in 1942 was
involved in the Tunisian campaign and was promoted to brigade intelligence
officer
in the rank of captain. In February 1944, his brigade was ordered to Italy,
where they fought their way northwards, finally entering Austria on VE day.
His post as intelligence officer gave him an opportunity to observe, at
close hand, the two Field Marshals, Montgomery, whom he disliked, and
Alexander,
whom he much admired. He was later forced to modify his opinions somewhat
while researching his biography of Alexander, which was published in 1973, the
same year as Portrait of a Marriage.
As he studied Alexander's papers, he came to like Alexander more as a man
but began to detect a certain willingness to kow-tow to higher authority and
take the easy way out in a crisis. Conversely, he came to admire Montgomery as
a soldier and strategist, even as he disliked him as a man. His study, Alex:
The Life of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis came to be widely regarded
as Nicolson's best book.
At the end of the war in Europe, Nicolson's brigade was involved, as part of
the British 5th Corps that occupied Carinthia, in the hand-over to the Red
Army of about 40,000 anti-Soviet Cossack prisoners - men, women and children -
and, to Tito, of some 30,000 Yugoslavs who had opposed him during the civil
war. The majority of these people were either murdered or died in captivity.
The incident had its sequel in 1989 when Nicolson agreed to give evidence on
behalf of Count Nikolai Tolstoy during his libel battle with Lord Aldington,
staff officer at the time, whom Tolstoy had accused of organising the
betrayal of the Cossacks, knowing their likely fate.
Nicolson had kept a record of events, from which it was clear that British
soldiers had lied to their captives about their destination as they were
herded on board cattle trucks that would transfer them to their enemies.
He recalled how, when Tito's partisans emerged to take control of the
trains, the Yugoslavs "began hammering on the inside of the wagon walls,
shouting
imprecations, not at the partisans but at us, who had betrayed them. This
scene was repeated day after day, twice a day. It was the most horrible
experience of my life."
In agreeing to give evidence at the libel trial, Nicolson made it clear
that, although he would support everything Tolstoy said about the enormity of
the
action, he could not accept his allegation that Aldington had arranged every
detail of it or was mainly responsible for the decision.
The libel case was a traumatic experience for Nicolson. When he testified
with painful honesty how, to his eternal shame, he had agreed to lie to the
victims about their destination, he was asked by the unsympathetic judge
whether
the court was meant to suppose that he was an habitual liar. Aldington won
the case, but never forgave Nicolson, a near neighbour, for appearing as a
witness on the other side; and Nicolson found himself being snubbed by old
friends who took Aldington's side.
Nicolson returned to England in July 1945 ahead of his battalion, as he had
been commissioned to write the official history of the Grenadier Guards,
which was published in 1949. When his father lost West Leicestershire in 1945,
he
was persuaded to enter politics and stood unsuccessfully for the same seat
as a Conservative in 1950, and for Falmouth and Camborne in 1951. He was
subsequently adopted for Bournemouth and entered Parliament in a by-election in
1952, with a majority of more than 14,000.
Nicolson was never comfortable with the Conservative tag. Yet he managed at
first not to cause too much offence and in 1955 was re-elected with an
increased majority.
In 1953 he had married Philippa, the daughter of Sir Gervais
Tennyson-d'Eyncourt, and bought a house near Christchurch where a daughter was
born in 1954
and a son in 1957.
The crunch came in 1956 when, having committed the almost unpardonable
offence of supporting a Labour private member's Bill to abolish hanging, he
then
abstained in the vote of confidence in the government over Suez. His actions
led to demands for his resignation from his constituency association. When he
refused, his executive sent a telegram to the Prime Minister repudiating
their member and pledging loyalty to the government.
In 1959, Nicolson, with the support of the chairman of the Tory Party, Lord
Hailsham, insisted on the matter being put to a postal ballot of members. But
in the meantime, he had become embroiled in a controversy of an entirely
different nature.
In 1949, he had founded, with George Weidenfeld, the publishing firm of
Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The firm struggled in its early years but the book
that
made the firm famous and contributed to Nicolson's debacle in Bournemouth was
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the controversial tale of a 12-year-old sex
kitten with whom a middle-aged man falls in love.
Nicolson did not wholly believe in the book and had argued against its
publication, but he was compelled to defend it when the firm took the decision
to
publish just as he was trying to save his political career. The two
controversies peaked simultaneously and the postal ballot went against him by
3,762
votes to 3,671.
For four years from 1960, Nicolson worked full-time for the publishing firm,
but resigned in 1964 before it became really successful, though he remained
an outside director until it was sold to Anthony Cheetham in 1992.
Instead he wrote books which, in his estimation, probably contributed more
to the success of the firm than he had by editing. His biography of Alexander
and Portrait of a Marriage were serialised by the Sunday Times, and in 1977
Mary Curzon won the Whitbread Prize for biography. The firm also published his
richly illustrated World of Jane Austen in 1991. Meanwhile, family
responsibilities were taking up more of his time. After his mother Vita died
in 1962,
his father Harold Nicolson suffered a mental collapse and Nigel and his
family moved to Sissinghurst to help care for him.
He had come to an arrangement with the Treasury and the National Trust
whereby Sissinghurst was transferred to the Trust in part payment of death
duties,
with the family retaining tenancy of part of the building. With family
income at a low ebb, he suggested to his father that he should publish his
diaries
and offered to edit them. The three volume diaries, published by Collins
became best-sellers and Nicolson devoted most of the proceeds to sustaining his
father until his death in 1968.
In his final homage to his parents he edited Vita and Harold, the letters of
Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1992). But by this time, many
reviewers had had about all they could take of the Vita and Harold menage.
"Just when you think it is safe to stick your head above the parapet to get
a gulp of air," wrote an exasperated Dirk Bogarde, "bang! crash! wallop! and
once more one is cowed by salvoes of the dreaded V-3s, Vita, Violet and
Virginia . . . Why does an elderly gentleman see fit to rake through the ashes
of
his parents' love and expose their very private thoughts to all and sundry,
for, as Vita would have said, 'the delectation of the common herd'?"
In his later years, Nicolson turned to journalism and wrote the Spectator's
Long Life column and a Time of My Life column for The Sunday Telegraph. His
autobiography, Long Life, was published in 1997.
Nigel Nicolson's marriage ended in divorce in 1970 and he never attempted to
marry again, although he continued to be a charming and entertaining
companion to his many friends. He seemed to love being surrounded by tourists
and
became something of an institution at Sissinghurst, where he was known to lean
out of his study window to invite visiting parties of Americans for tea.
Nigel Nicolson was appointed MBE in 1945.
He is survived by his son, the writer Adam Nicolson, and by two daughters.
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