Nigel Nicolson; writer, publisher and MP
Hyfler/Rosner
cast of Bloomsbury characters. His book about his parents
caused quite a stir in its time. (Portrait of a Marriage)
And naturally, this obituary from The Independent is
marvelous. He knew them all.
Nigel Nicolson
Child of Bloomsbury who became MP, writer, editor and
co-founder of Weidenfeld and Nicolson
24 September 2004
Though he had an active, adventure-filled life as a soldier,
politician, publisher, writer, traveller and caretaker of
the world's most visited garden, Nigel Nicolson regarded
himself as an under-achiever. At the end of his
autobiography he said "I would like to have written
Holroyd's book on Lytton Strachey" and "I would like to have
remained in Parliament long enough to achieve office"
(ambitions for which nothing in the previous 300 pages had
prepared the reader). His own modest epitaph was: "It has
not been a wasted life. It is studded with a few triumphs
and many moments of delight."
Nicolson was sometimes introduced to audiences for his
extensive American lecture tours as "the last survivor of
the Bloomsbury Group". This amused him, for he was nothing
of the sort, as both Frances Partridge (who predeceased him
by seven months, aged 103) and Angelica Garnett had better
claims.
However, he was a sort of junior Bloomsberry, as his mother,
the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, was for a time
the lover of Virginia Woolf, and the young Nigel and his
elder brother, Benedict (the art historian), saw a good deal
of Virginia. Orlando was a long love-letter from Virginia to
Vita, and its gender-bending noble protagonist gives a clue
to Nicolson's own background, which was too aristocratic for
full membership in Bloomsbury.
On his mother's side he was the full monty. Vita was the
only child of the third Baron Sackville, descendant of the
Earls of Dorset, and felt herself cheated by the accident of
her sex of her beloved Knole, the family's huge medieval
house on the outskirts of Sevenoaks, with its 365 rooms, 52
staircases and seven courtyards. On his father's side the
blood was blue-ish - Harold Nicolson was the youngest son of
an 11th baronet, who was elevated to the peerage as the
first Baron Carnock on his retirement as Permanent
Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Though Nigel
did not agree with him, Harold's biographer, James
Lees-Milne, wrote that both Harold and Vita were candid,
unrepentant snobs. (Their son preferred to think of them as
élitist - "an acknowledgement that some people are more
estimable than others, for their achievements or
character.")
Despite his own breeding (he was the heir presumptive to his
uncle's title, which will now pass to his son Adam), and the
fact that his address was "Sissinghurst Castle", Nigel
Nicolson's own credentials as a democrat were
unchallengeable. He had an air of diffidence, the result
probably of an unusual childhood with two chiefly
homosexual, physically undemonstrative parents, and the
failure of his marriage, which ended in divorce in 1970. But
this concealed a boundless curiosity, especially about other
people, which was bolstered by a (paradoxical) aristocratic
confidence that, with only a word or two, he could put
anyone at his ease.
For all that Nicolson could not conceal from guests at
Sissinghurst that he washed up the tea things and turned
down the beds himself, as a child he and his brother had had
a permanent nursery at Knole, on the first floor overlooking
the Green Court, and the full run of the house. He had been
curtsied to by maids, and was once "found fast asleep in the
Venetian Ambassador's bed which nobody had occupied for two
centuries".
Nigel Nicolson was born in London in 1917. Following a
London day school, where Harold Macmillan was also a pupil,
Nicolson went to the same prep school as the future prime
minister, Summer Fields in Oxford, from 1926 to 1930. (They
overlapped, too, at school, university, regiment and the
House of Commons.) Ben was already there, so Nigel was
"Nicolson mi", but still pretty miserable. Years later he
sent his own son, Adam, to Summer Fields, and had to be
reminded gently by the headmaster "that he was the least
visited boy in the school".
While he himself was at Summer Fields, his mother began her
affair with Virginia Woolf, which he says was "defused" by
the writing of Orlando in 1928, and in the 1930s the two
women began to draw apart, Vita to immerse herself in her
gardening and poetry. In the years of the affair the
Nicolson boys saw a good deal of Virginia (and a little of
Leonard Woolf), who behaved to them like a particularly
close aunt.
In 1929 there was another change in the family's
circumstances, for Harold resigned from diplomacy, meaning
there were no more foreign postings and a father much more
in evidence. Nigel felt he knew his "gregarious,
companionable" father much better than he did his "shy"
mother, and from him he learned to observe details both of
people and of places; and from him he absorbed the
religion-free morality Harold characterised as that of a
"good pagan".
Nicolson found the work at Eton, where he was from 1930 to
1935, "less intensive" than at Summer Fields, though he was
a swot "who enjoyed his work and took more trouble over it
than was strictly necessary". At the same time he was good
at sport, and counted winning his house colours as one of
the triumphs of his life. He was a wet-bob and found the
pleasures of rowing "ineffaceable. There is nothing like it
for rhythm except dancing." Though he cheerfully joined the
Officer Training Corps, he was a non-conformist to the
extent that, at the age of 16, he refused to be confirmed
with the other Eton boys.
In 1932 the family moved to Sissinghurst, in Kent, some 20
miles to the south and east of Knole, near Cranbrook. The
next year Nigel stayed in the South of France with Aldous
and Maria Huxley as (an unsuccessful) companion to their son
Matthew, and in 1935 went with his own family on a cruise to
Greece, which reinforced his lifelong passion for the
country, and what we can fairly assume was another passion,
50 years later, when he listed his "walk with Sue Baring
over Kos" as one of the high points of his life.
Though he failed to get a scholarship to Balliol, in the
autumn of 1935 he followed his father (and Harold Macmillan)
there. His brother Ben, he said, "blossomed at Oxford, while
I, at least for the first year, wilted". He credited his
closest male friend, James Pope-Hennessy, with lifting him
from his "trough of despond". He rowed for Balliol, made
speeches at the Union, organised the university branch of
the National Labour Party (for which his father, following
his uncharacteristically unshrewd association with Oswald
Mosley's New Party, won a seat in 1935), and became a friend
of Edward Heath and Denis Healey, for both of whom he
retained respect and affection.
He met Max Beerbohm, when the author of Zuleika Dobson was
visiting Balliol, because Max knew his father and "I was the
only person in the entire university whose name he knew, and
here was a man, I thought, whose name was known to the
entire university". At the crew's bump-suppers he learned
that he could not manage the traditional heavy drinking: "I
have always suffered from le vin triste."
At Glasgow, to see an exhibition with Rohan Butler, Nicolson
learned that he had ended the education "for which Vita had
paid by writing The Edwardians and All Passion Spent when
she wanted to be writing poetry" with a miserable Third in
Modern History.
In 1937 Vita sent him a cutting from The Daily Telegraph,
advertising for sale three uninhabited islands in the Outer
Hebrides, 600 acres in all, populated by puffins and seals.
He bought them for £1,400 of the £11,000 he had just
inherited from his grandmother, enjoyed their hair-raising
solitary splendour, survived his solo holidays on them, and
passed them on to his son, Adam, on his 21st birthday, as he
has passed them to his son William.
On his leaving Oxford war seemed imminent, and Nicolson knew
that any employment would be temporary. Introduced by the
son of the Warden of All Souls, he took up an unpaid job
with the Tyneside Council of Social Service, accompanying
social workers as they dealt with consumptive miners and
shipbuilders and compiling statistics for a book by Ellen
Wilkinson, the left-wing MP for Jarrow.
With disarming candour, Nicolson confessed in his memoirs
that he had found the dictators attractive, admitting not
only to admiring Mussolini, but, following two holidays to
learn the language in Germany in 1936-37, to reassuring
Harold and Vita "that Hitler was really a very nice man". In
Germany again the next year, he quotes a letter home, which,
to his discredit, shows that he was aware of the existence
of concentration camps. But by the time of Munich, "I wanted
this war, because it was just and it would give me something
serious to do." He chose to apply for a commission in the
Grenadier Guards, "a regiment which I chose for much the
same reasons as led me later to join the Conservative Party,
namely orthodoxy and the fact that some of my friends joined
it simultaneously".
At Sandhurst he learned the absurd rules that obliged
officers in the Brigade of Guards "to behave like
18th-century noblemen": when in uniform they were "forbidden
to carry a parcel, even a book. We could smoke Turkish, but
not Virginian cigarettes. We must not reverse in waltzing."
He left as a second lieutenant, and was stationed in London,
Lincolnshire and Scotland from the outbreak of war until
1942, when, following a comically aborted plan for an
invasion of German-held Alderney, he returned to Perth and
was made battalion Intelligence Officer, to which he was
better suited than the command of a platoon.
He took part in the Tunisian campaign, where he encountered
General Harold Alexander, the future Earl Alexander of Tunis
whose life he would write 30 years later, but then, for nine
months, his brigade was unemployed. In 1943, at Christmas,
he had a dramatic reunion with his brother Ben, seeing him
for the first time in the mirror of the Gents of the King
David Hotel in Jerusalem.
A month later, in January 1944 his brigade was finally
ordered to Italy, and there he experienced serious combat
for the first time. In the spring, as they moved into
Cassino, Harold wrote a piece for The Spectator about the
destruction of Italy's artistic heritage, saying that "he
would rather that his son were killed than allow Cassino's
monastery to be destroyed". The monastery was bombed anyway.
Nicolson counted "the day when we captured Perugia" as "for
me the most exhilarating of the whole war", as the
inhabitants "showered their English liberators with
flowers". Later, calling on the Bloomsbury-connected, wily
connoisseur Bernard Berenson at I Tatti near Florence, he
sorrowfully described the terrible damage he had seen done
to so many works of art: "My dear boy, it doesn't much
matter: they've all been so beautifully photographed."
Nigel Nicolson had a very good war. Yet he insisted that
the war had little effect on my character and . . . I would
have developed in much the same way had I spent those years
in an office. It cured me of shyness, but not of undue
reticence. I emerged still a virgin, for, though I admired
and desired women, I lacked the experience to make the first
advance.
He returned to England in July 1945, and was invited to be
the editor of the two-volume wartime history of the
Grenadiers, and himself to write the volume about the
Mediterranean campaign; his assistant was Marmaduke Hussey,
later Chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC. He came
to regret the "élitist" way he wrote the regimental history,
published in 1949 as The Grenadier Guards in the War of
1939-1945 (1949), making it seem that it was an officer's
war, in which the Other Ranks scarcely took part.
Not demobbed until 1947, Nicolson shared a London house in
South Kensington with his brother and father, where they
were fed breakfast by Nigel's wartime servant. He led a
giddy social life, in love with Shirley Morgan (later
Marchioness of Anglesey), going to dances, and taken up by
both the great London hostesses, Emerald Cunard and Sybil
Colefax.
In July 1946, his brother Ben introduced him to an
astonishingly energetic Viennese Jew, forced into exile at
the age of 18, who arrived in London penniless on the eve of
war, spent the Second World War broadcasting on the BBC to
Germany, Italy and occasionally France and, now aged 26, had
a vast acquaintance among aristocrats and intellectuals
alike. Nicolson met Weidenfeld - and the collision was
wonderful.
First he went to work for George Weidenfeld for £750 (almost
immediately reduced to £500 "until we find our feet") on a
magazine called Contact. Though it was a magazine, with
articles by Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Ernst Gombrich,
Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen, Richard Crossman and Harold
Macmillan, it got around paper restrictions by being bound
in hard covers like a book - a formula certain to lose
money. After it consumed a certain amount of Nicolson's
capital, it finally died in 1950. But George Weidenfeld was
a step ahead - he'd got a contract to publish illustrated
children's books (with texts mostly in the public domain)
for Marks and Spencer (with whom he was connected by his
first marriage to Jane Sieff).
At first Nicolson knew little of publishing, but when
Weidenfeld went to Israel for much of 1950 to be President
Chaim Weizmann's chef de cabinet he trusted his equally
young partner to run the show. Nicolson sometimes complained
about his partner's lavish and non-stop hospitality, but
eventually came to see that it was sound business practice,
attracting to his table not only potential authors, but
investors. The early staff included Clarissa Churchill,
Antonia Pakenham, Vanessa Jebb and Sonia Orwell - each of
whom married interesting men and one of whom, as Lady
Antonia Fraser, then Pinter, became a top-selling writer.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, as the firm became, was also lucky
in its editors, which included the talents of Christopher
Falkus, Tony Godwin and Ed Victor. Nicolson was proud to
have published Rose Macaulay's Pleasure of Ruins (1953),
Saul Bellow's Augie March (1954) and Maurice Bowra's The
Greek Experience (1957), but will be remembered by history
chiefly for the huge 1959 controversy surrounding Vladimir
Nabokov's Lolita. Nicolson had discouraged Weidenfeld from
confronting the Government head-on over the question of
obscenity, though he did not appreciate the bullying of the
then Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, who
threatened that he would see him in the dock even after the
passage into law of Roy Jenkins's liberalising Obscene
Publications Bill.
Nicolson wanted to prompt a test case, either by printing a
single copy of the book and sending it to the authorities
for a ruling or by persuading them to sue the Tunbridge
Wells library for circulating the imported Olympia Press
edition of Lolita. The DPP decided not to prosecute, Lolita
sold 100,000 copies in Britain, and Nicolson, who was only a
minority shareholder in the company anyway, lost much of his
influence on his partners.
At Weidenfeld's urging he worked full-time for the company
from 1960 to 1963, but resigned in January 1964, remaining
an outside director until the firm was sold to Anthony
Cheetham in 1992. In fact, Nicolson was probably more
valuable as a writer than as an editor. In 1973 alone, his
Alex and his Portrait of a Marriage were both serialised by
the Sunday Times and both headed the best-seller list for
quite a time.
Nicolson said he "drifted into politics". When his father
lost West Leicester in 1945, the chairman invited the son to
stand for the seat, provided he dropped the National Labour
label, and stood as a Conservative. For no better reason
than this, he took the Conservative whip when he was finally
elected to Parliament for Bournemouth East and Christchurch
in February 1952, with a majority of 14,000. He allied
himself to those Tories sympathetic to the welfare state
whom Winston Churchill once said to Sir Ralph Glyn were
"nothing but a bunch of pink pansies" - led by R.A. Butler,
Iain Macleod and Macmillan.
Nigel Nicolson spoke German, French and Italian, and was a
staunch European. As a member of the Consultative Assembly
of the Council of Europe, which met in Strasbourg, and then
at its annual reunions at Königswater, "I came to know Hugh
Gaitskell, Dick Crossman, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, John
Strachey and other Labour leaders, and they inclined me more
to the left than Bournemouth suspected" - especially Healey,
whose high spirits he found very attractive. He was
re-elected in 1955 with an increased majority of 18,500 over
the other two parties.
His constituents applauded his marriage in 1953 to Philippa
Tennyson-d'Eyncourt, though her parents did not, and, though
there were three children, and Nigel's careers in Parliament
and publishing were booming, the marriage was doomed by a
growing disparity of interests. His wife positively disliked
his constituency duties, and in summer 1967 she met Sir
Robin McAlpine, whom she married following their divorce in
1970. She died in 1987.
Nicolson's brief parliamentary career was distinguished by
his principled bravery. He became deeply involved in the
capital punishment debate because he was the only Tory
backbencher willing to brave the wrath of his constituency
by taking up the abolitionist cause; indeed, he became the
abolitionists' spokesman in Bournemouth, and consistently
supported Sydney Silverman's abolition Bill. Then his old
friend Ted Heath, now Chief Whip, told Nicolson the
Government wanted to introduce a substitute Bill that would
introduce total abolition in two steps. Nicolson gave him
his support - a mistake, as he "lost the respect of both
sides". He was unable to enjoy his victory when capital
punishment was finally ended in 1969, as he had lost his
seat over Suez, in what he called "the most important
incident in my life".
On 8 November 1956, a vote of confidence was taken in the
Government. Nicolson wanted to abstain, but knew he would
not get a chance to explain himself in the House. So the day
before he made a speech outlining his dissent to the
Bournemouth branch of the United Nations Association, for
which he was called a "conceited traitor". Before the vote
he asked Ted Heath if he could assure him that
the purpose of our invasion was "to separate the
combatants", as the Prime Minister claimed, and not to
regain control of the Canal by a subterfuge. He held my gaze
steadily and said nothing. I thanked him for his honesty,
and told him that I would abstain, and left the room.
Of the seven other Conservative abstainers, only Robert
Boothby kept his seat. Nicolson fought to retain his, but on
26 February 1959 he was deselected by 91 votes.
In October 1989 Nicolson was the chief witness in the trial
of Count Nikolai Tolstoy, who was being sued for libel by
Lord Aldington. The matter went back to the end of the war,
when, in May 1945, Nicolson's brigade was part of the
British 5th Corps occupying the southern Austrian province
of Carinthia. He was ordered to hand over to the Red Army
40,000 anti-Soviet Cossacks, and to return 30,000 anti-Tito
Yugoslavs. The majority of the 70,000 perished, many of them
murdered by their victorious countrymen. Tolstoy accused
Aldington, who, as Toby Low, was a senior staff officer at
the time, of having organised their betrayal. Aldington
sued, and in the celebrated trial won costs and £1.5m in
damages.
Nicolson had witnessed terrible things, such as the troops
hammering on the walks of the cattle wagons transporting
them to certain death. He did what he could discourage the
descendant of the great novelist from singling out
Aldington, and served as trustee of a family fund designed
to protect the Tolstoy house and the education of his
children, as Tolstoy was bankrupted by his legal debts.
Nicolson continued to believe that Tolstoy had what he
called "moral truth" on his side, but Tolstoy's appeal was
disallowed for lack of funds for "security of costs", and
Nicolson regarded the episode as historically and morally
unsatisfactory.
Nigel Nicolson was a fine prose stylist, with a precise,
vigorous turn of phrase that seems to me to owe more to his
father's splendid essays than to his mother's novels or
poetry. Though he wrote more than a dozen works of history,
biography, travel, memoirs and illustrated books about great
houses, I suspect his greatest achievement will be his most
scholarly work, the six volumes of The Letters of Virginia
Woolf, which he edited between 1974 and 1980, with Joanne
Trautmann, an American academic, of whom he became very
fond. He had had a rehearsal for this huge work when, from
1966 to 1968, he edited his father's Diaries and Letters.
His seventies and eighties were wonderfully productive, with
books on Jane Austen, Fanny Burney and Virginia Woolf, an
edition of his parents' letters to each other, his own
memoir, Long Life (1997), and even The Queen and Us (2003)
for the 50th anniversary of the Coronation. In addition, he
became a journalist, writing weekly columns for The
Spectator and, from 1992 to 1997, in The Sunday Telegraph,
the best column in Fleet Street.
His 1973 Portrait of a Marriage caused a furore. Though most
reviewers were impressed by his sensitive handling of the
story of his mother's affair with Violet Trefusis, there
were many who accused him of filial betrayal. I helped him
in some very minor way with some documents he needed to
consult, and he discussed its publication with me. I was
struck by his very Bloomsbury conviction that the truth of
the strange story was the only thing that mattered.
In 1967 Nicolson struck a deal to make Sissinghurst over to
the National Trust. The wisdom of this was apparent to all
his guests, as he was able to live in some splendour in his
eight-bedroom part of the house, without the work and
expense of keeping up the gardens or attending to the needs
of the 200,000 visitors the place attracts each year. He
claimed that he was no gardener, but he had the knowledge
and tastes of an accomplished plantsman, and strongly held
views also about garden design.
Though he never remarried, Nicolson relished the company of
women, and loved projects such as the 20,000-mile tour of
Europe he made in 1967 with Ian Graham and Kit Macdonald, to
do the research and photography for Great Houses of the
Western World (1968), as much for the company of younger
people as for the pleasure of the travel.
Coming from a family written about so often and with such
distinction - Victoria Glendinning's highly praised
biography of Vita appeared in 1983 - Nicolson would have
been surprised to be told that his own long and remarkable
life was as interesting as that of either of his parents.
And, if he did not manage to write a work of the stature of
Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey (1967-68, revised 1994),
we have not heard the last of him, for Nicolson kept a diary
himself, the publication of which will doubtless give years
of pleasurable work for its future editor.
Paul Levy
Nigel Nicolson's final job as an author in his lifetime was
to return to the celebrated diaries of Harold Nicolson,
writes Ion Trewin. He had edited these originally to provide
funds for his father's old age, when, debilitated by two
strokes, he began to need daily nursing. In three volumes,
they were a huge success, a counterpoint to those of his
sometime fellow Conservative MP Chips Channon.
Over the succeeding years Nigel discovered more of his
father's papers, not least some early engagement diaries
into which comments had been scribbled. Balliol, his
father's old Oxford college, had also been left some
valuable letters. By this time the diaries were out of
print. As his publisher I encouraged him to think of
producing a new, one-volume edition adding new material and
also restoring some original cuts made on legal advice or
"for reasons of discretion".
Whereas the original published diaries begin in 1930 when
Nicolson resigned from the Foreign Office and joined the
staff of the London Evening Standard to work on its
Londoner's Diary with Robert Bruce-Lockhart, the new edition
could now go back to 1907, when he was just 21 years old.
But the most exciting discoveries for Nigel were his
father's thoughts on the Versailles peace conference of 1919
where as a Foreign Office official he "established his
reputation" as a diplomat.
Nigel was a publisher's ideal author as I discovered working
on his final three books, always delivering his immaculate
text with accompanying photographs and captions. To help him
produce the new edition of his father's diaries, we
photocopied not only the original three volumes, but also a
condensed one- volume edition published in 1980 and
ostensibly made by a young American writer, Stanley Olson.
Olson, who was to go on to publish a life of the painter
John Singer Sargent, had been hired by Collins, the first
publishers of the diaries, to abridge and edit the original.
Sadly he had not proved up to the task. Nigel, drawing on
his skills as editor and sometime publisher, re-edited the
abridgement, but such was his good nature that he allowed
Olson's name to remain on the title-page.
For the new edition Nigel cut and pasted from some 1,200
pages of photocopies, interposing new or restored material
from the variety of sources now available to him. The
result - The Harold Nicolson Diaries: 1907-1963 was
published earlier this month - is as much a monument to son
as it is to father. Kenneth Clark had called the original
diaries "a brilliant portrait of English society", Michael
Foot remarked on the "honesty, decency, modesty, magnanimity
and wit" that were "stamped on every page". Nigel now hoped
that a new generation of readers would discover that these
diaries are also those of a historian, both political and
social.
With Nigel's death the publishing house that bears his name
loses one of its founders, even though he had ceased his
formal attachment to the firm when it became part of Anthony
Cheetham's Orion Publishing Group. Nigel, with the help of
his own diary, recalled at the time of the firm's 50th
anniversary in 1999 that the firm had been launched at
Brown's Hotel with a party and some "tolerable champagne".
When the guests had all left he counted 79 empty bottles.
But the firm was in business, and, even though Nigel lost
his original investment when the firm's finances were
reorganised in 1956, it was he who as the editorial adviser
to the firm was responsible for publication of Nabokov's
celebrated, and, at the time, some said notorious novel
Lolita.
Not for nothing was Nigel a politician. Was Lolita subtle
pornography or erotic art? His own opinion wavered between
these two extremes, as he recorded in his delightful memoirs
some 40 years later. When the Macmillan government declined
to prosecute and Lolita became a best-seller, the publishing
house of Weidenfeld and Nicolson never looked back.
Nigel Nicolson, writer, publisher and politician: born
London 19 January 1917; MBE 1945, OBE 2000; director,
Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1948-92; MP (Conservative) for
Bournemouth East and Christchurch 1952-59; FRSL 1973;
married 1953 Philippa Tennyson-d'Eyncourt (died 1987; one
son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1970); died
Sissinghurst, Kent 23 September 2004.