Nigel Nicolson; Telegraph obit
Hyfler/Rosner
(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.
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.
Bob Champ
> Nigel Nicolson
> (Filed: 24/09/2004)
>
I taped a talk (from C-SPAN, I believe) in which Nigel Nicolson
reminisced about his childhood associations with famous Bloomsbury
figures like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and of course, Vita
Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. He was a most charming man, highly
intelligent (as one might expect). I'm sorry to see that he has passed
on, but even at the talk, given a year ago, he looked fragile.
Bob Champ
Hyfler/Rosner
"Bob Champ" <robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9d079b90.04092...@posting.google.com...
Isn't C-Span the best? Was it Booknotes? Love that stuff.
Bob Champ
> "Bob Champ" <robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:9d079b90.04092...@posting.google.com...
> > "Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
> > news:<41539260$0$4032$61fe...@news.rcn.com>...
> >> Nigel Nicolson
> >> (Filed: 24/09/2004)
> >>
> >
> > I taped a talk (from C-SPAN, I believe) in which Nigel
> > Nicolson
> > reminisced about his childhood associations with famous
> > Bloomsbury
> > figures like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and of course,
> > Vita
> > Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.
>
Not "Booknotes" (I do enjoy that program immmensely), but as part of
the regular weekend Book TV line-up. This is the only place on TV I
know for people who read serious books, the only place (with the
possible exception of the History Channel) where intelligence is
accepted and encouraged.
C-SPAN has probably done more for freedom of speech on television than
any network in TV history.
Bob Champ
Terrymelin
books ever written about a relationship.
Terry Ellsworth
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Hyfler/Rosner <rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
> He then followed his brother Ben to Eton, where he fagged for
Unfortunate bit of slang, that.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Champ
> In the previous article, Hyfler/Rosner <rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
> > He then followed his brother Ben to Eton, where he fagged for
> > Charles Villiers, the future chairman of British Steel, [...]
>
> Unfortunate bit of slang, that.
I wonder if the word had its current connotation when it was first
used at Eton, which was a very long time ago.
Bob Champ
J.D. Baldwin
In the previous article, Iceman <isma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >> He then followed his brother Ben to Eton, where he fagged for
> >> Charles Villiers, the future chairman of British Steel, [...]
> >
> >Unfortunate bit of slang, that.
>
Oh, I'm aware of the cross-pond differences in slang. I once spent a
summer with the Royal Navy. I was young enough to titter a little
when one of the guys announced that he was "going to the stern to have
a fag," even though I knew perfectly well he was going for a butt.
Er, a cigarette, that is.
I did, however, jump a little when a very large enlisted man
approached me to ask what time I'd like him to come to my cabin to
knock me up in the morning.
But, given the source of Nicolson's notoriety, I found "fagged" a
little jarring. Also, I don't believe I've ever heard it used (this
way) as a verb.