Harold Nicolson

fiction, memoirs, diaries, and letters

fiction, memoirs, diaries, and letters

Harold Nicolson biography

September 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

diplomat, writer, socialite and politician

Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) was born into an upper middle-class family in Tehran, where his father (Lord Carnock) was the British ambassador to Persia. as it then was. He was educated at Wellington College then Balliol College Oxford, where he graduated with a third-class degree. He entered the diplomatic service in 1908 and was posted to Constantinople where he became a specialist in Balkan affairs. In 1910 he met Vita Sackville-West and despite her reservations about his diplomatic career (and her parents’ about his social status) they married in 1912 and had two sons.

He published biographies of the French poet Verlaine and studies of other literary figures such as Tennyson, Byron, Swinburne, and Saint-Beuve. His first major success (and still probably his best book) was Some People (1927), a witty collection of short stories and character sketches based on people he had met in the diplomatic service.

He and his wife were fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group, as well as visitors to Ottoline Morrell’s weekend parties at Garsington in Oxfordshire. Whilst Vita had affairs with Virginia Woolf and Violet Trefusis, he had liaisons with a series of men, including the literary critic Raymond Mortimer. They had a rather unusual marriage in which they lived separately a lot of the time, wrote to each other on almost a daily basis protesting their undying love to each other, and continued to have affairs with members of their own sex. All of this was recorded by their son in his Portrait of a Marriage.

After the end of the first world war he took part in the Paris Peace Conference, and he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies (which also caused his fellow Bloomsburyite John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission). At the end of 1929 he left the diplomatic service and went to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the Evening Standard. Despite (or maybe because of) his literary skills, he hated journalism: “It is a mere expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A constant hurried triviality which is bad for the mind.”.

In the 1930s, he and his wife bought Sissinghurst Castle, in the rural depths of Kent, the county known as the garden of England. There they created the renowned gardens that are now run by the National Trust. However, during the week he lived at the Albany, the famous bachelor chambers just off Piccadilly in London. He flirted briefly with Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascists, but then entered the House of Commons as National Labour Party member for Leicester West in 1935. (His wife refused to visit the constituency, regarding it as ‘bedint’ – a family slang term for ‘unacceptably low class’.)

He was very active as a parliamentarian, and became a keen supporter of Winston Churchill, especially during the second world war, when he was appointed private secretary to the Minister of Information in the government of national unity. He lost his seat in the 1945 election, and then despite joining the Labour Party, he failed to get back into parliament.

He turned to broadcasting and returned to journalism as an occupation. He was personally acquainted with a wide variety of figures such as Ramsay MacDonald, David Lloyd George, Duff Cooper, Charles de Gaulle, Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill, along with a host of literary and artistic figures. His Diaries provide a rich source of information on the world of diplomacy and politics in the years 1910-1960, and record meetings with Picasso, Diaghilev, Matisse, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.

He never achieved high office, and when eventually awarded a knighthood, he was so snobbish he felt it as an insult, because he thought he ought to be made a member of the Lords – so that he could escape what he felt as his ‘plebeian’ surname. He spent the latter part of his life writing and developing the gardens at Sissinghurst.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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Harold Nicolson Diaries 1907-1964

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

20th century diplomacy, literature, and politics

Harold Nicolson was a writer, a politician, and a diplomat – but he is best known as the husband of Vita Sackville-West, and thus by proxy a figure on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. He was quite a complex character, and one of the few examples I have come across of someone from the upper reaches of society whose political opinions moved from right to left during the course of life, rather than the other way round. Harold Nicolson’s Diaries is a record of his multi-faceted life.

This book is a compilation of both his diaries and letters – principally to his wife, from whom he spent most of their married life apart, something that might well have contributed to the longevity of their curious union (outlined in their son’s fascinating Portrait of a Marriage). It covers an immensely long period in historical terms – starting before the first world war and continuing through a restless life of politics, literature, travel, and high society hob-nobbing until the advent of the Beatles.

He was the only member of the peace conference that followed the second world war who had also been present at the first. For the majority of these pages (which represent only a small part of his complete diaries) he was either a diplomat or an MP. Surprisingly, for a snob and elitist, he was very critical of the punitive reparations extracted by the allies in 1918 (which also caused John Maynard Keynes to resign from the commission). Nicolson also petitioned the prime minister for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens, and he was passionately opposed to war, having fully absorbed the lessons of 1914-1918.

Lots of famous figures whiz through the pages in cameo performances: Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, Noel Coward, three generations of UK royalty, Konrad Adenauer, James Joyce (“a difficult man to talk to”) – and it is quite obvious that Nicolson isn’t name-dropping. These were simply the circles in which he mixed.

This work throws his collection of character sketches Some People into sharp positive relief, because for all the famous people and the important scenarios he finds himself involved with here, there is none of the artistic flair and the dramatic compression of his fictionalised narratives.

He resigned from the diplomatic service at the end of 1929 and went to work for Lord Beaverbrook on the Evening Standard, which he hated. He considered journalism “a mere expense of spirit in a waste of shame. A constant hurried triviality which is bad for the mind.”

Then he was torn between writing and politics, whilst he and his wife waited impatiently for his mother-in-law to die, so that they could inherit and be spared any worries about money (having in the meanwhile bought a castle). Actually, she spited them both, and left her money to their son.

He eventually got a seat as MP for Leicester (which Vita refused to visit) and settled into a busy life as an active parliamentarian. The inter-war years coverage is full of the rise of fascism, Italy’s attack on Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the abdication crisis, and then the full drama of the second world war, which provide his most inspired entries.

Although on the surface his political allegiances moved leftwards, he was a great admirer of Churchill, and he eventually regretted joining the Labour Party. He never achieved high office, and when eventually awarded a knighthood, he was so snobbish he felt it as an insult, because he thought he ought to be made a member of the Lords – so that he could escape his ‘plebeian’ surname.

Modern readers will have to choke back opinions which seem to come out of the political ark:

I believe that our lower classes are for some curious reason congenitally indolent, and that only the pressure of gain or destitution makes them work.

You know how I hate niggers …But I do hate injustice even more than I hate niggers

But the effort of restraint necessary is eventually worth it – because of the insights he affords into the workings of the English upper class, the oblique glimpses we get into power politics, the guided tours through London clubland, and his revelations about people as diverse as the Duke of Windsor (‘eyes…like fried eggs’) and Henry James (‘a late-flowering bugger’).

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Nigel Nicolson (ed), Harold Nicolson’s Diaries 1907-1964, London: Orion Books, 2005, pp.511, ISBN 075381997X

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Portrait of a Marriage

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

conjugal life a la Bloomsbury

Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother’s study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Portrait of a Marriage is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn’t cover.

It’s not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at ‘depending’ on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to ‘elope’ to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn’t have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn’t love or desire.

It’s an amazing story, and most instructive in class terms. Husbands colluding with their wives’ lovers for the sake of money to keep estates solvent, whilst paternity suits raged to the tune of £40,000 (this in the 1900s).

I was also very struck by how much of Sackville-West’s literary style is similar to Virginia Woolf’s. She is a great fan of the stream of immediate memory, and a narrative couched in extended metaphors and rhapsodic interludes. There are lots of schooners breasting silvery waves with the wind full in their sails, and that sort of thing.

There’s nothing here that will be remotely shocking in the sexual sense to modern readers. ‘I had her’ is about as explicit as it gets. But the behaviour – duplicitous, self-seeking, naive, and hypocritical – is breathtaking. Vita Sackville West finally broke off the relationship with Trefusis because she thought she might have had some sexual connection with Denys Trefusis – the man she had recently married – whilst West had two children with Harold Nicolson. Actually, Violet Trefusis hadn’t had any such connection, having made it a condition of her marriage contract.

There’s a lot of utterly snobbish ancestor-worship to get through and Nicolson’s chapters are written in a creakingly old-fashioned manner: ‘She permitted him liberties but not licence’. In fact Nicolson fils seems as wrapped up in snobbery as his mother:

her real friends were souls, but real souls who had some breeding and a gun, who could make a fourth at bridge, and who knew the difference between claret and burgundy

I found it quite hard to keep my rage down when reading of the almost unbelievable concern for money, status, and class. The events are only just over a hundred years ago, and this account of them was written in the 1970s, but it was like reading about social dinosaurs.

The latter part of the book outlines West’s affairs with Geoffrey Scott and Virginia Woolf – both of which she recounted in detail to her husband. Their son makes the case that the bond between them was strong enough to outlast these affairs – which it did, though on the basis that they had no sexual relationship with each other.

Of course you don’t need a brass plaque on your door to realise why a child would want to portray his bisexual and adulterous parents in the best possible light, but I must say all this is sometimes difficult to accept calmly.

As time went on the affairs petered out and the Nicolsons settled down to a quieter life, the major part of which they spent separately – he in London, she in their house at Sissinghurst – which might account for the longevity of the union.

These were people who seemed to have separated out sex from marriage, who obviously cared for each other, and yet spent most of their time apart, writing endless letters saying how much they missed each other. They also made sure their children were kept out of the way at all times. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere?

However, there is one very good thing to say for this memoir-cum-history. Anyone who wants a vivid, living example of the social values and the bohemian behaviour of the Bloomsbury Group need look no further. It’s all here.

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Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Orion Books, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 1857990609

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Some People (Harold Nicolson)

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

amusing character sketches, fictions, and memoirs

Harold Nicolson was a career diplomat, best known for the fact that he was married to Vita Sackville-West, who had a love affair with Virginia Woolf (and other women) and that despite his own homosexuality they kept going a marriage whose apparent success was recorded in their son’s account, Portrait of a Marriage. Nicolson blew this way and that in both literary and sexual terms, but in 1927 he produced a wonderful collection of portraits, Some People, which is part documentary and part fiction.

They are based on his experiences of public school and the diplomatic service. The idea he explained to a friend ‘was to put real people into imaginary situations, and imaginary people into real situations’. You can view this as a new literary form, alongside such works as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or just a personal whim, but the result is surprisingly polished and amusing. The sketches are based upon just the sort of upper-class privileged life Nicolson had led – scenes of a childhood spent in foreign legations supervised by a governess; life as a boarder at Wellington College; and early postings amongst similar toffs at the Foreign Office.

In one story Nicolson accompanies Lord Curzon on a diplomatic peace mission to Lausanne where he is due to negotiate with Poincaré and Mussolini – but the whole of the tale is focused on the Dickensian figure of Lord Curzon’s valet who drinks too much and disgraces himself in comic fashion at a high-ranking gala.

The stories are written in the first person – and for someone who had the opinions for which Nicolson became infamous, they are refreshingly self-deprecating. The narrator is more often than not the character in the wrong, the person who has a lesson to learn from others or from life itself. Real people such as Nicolson himself, Marcel Proust, Princess Bibesco, and Winston Churchill flit amongst fictional constructions in a perfectly natural and convincing manner.

The world of public school and Oxbridge run straight through seamlessly into that of the diplomatic service, and even though Nicolson’s conclusions are that its stiff conventions should be challenged and even broken, his stories rest heavily on the shared values of the Old School Tie, letters of introduction, and the right accent.

They reminded me of no less than the early stories of Vladimir Nabokov (written around the same time) which similarly combine autobiographical memoirs with fictional inventions. And the style is similar – supple, fast-moving sentences, a fascination with foreign words and places, and the phenomena of everyday life pinned down with well-observed details.

There was a lake in front of the hotel, cupped among descending pines, and in the middle of the lake a little naked island, naked but for a tin pagoda, with two blue boats attached to a landing-stage of which the handrail was of brown wood and the supports of pink.

It was this that made me think again of Jeanne de Hénaut.

It is writing which is very sophisticated, and which ultimately flatters the reader – it draws you seductively into this world of privilege, clubishness, and money. And yet if he had written more, I should certainly want to read them.

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Harold Nicolson, Some People, London: Constable, 1996, pp.184, ISBN: 094765901

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Vita and Harold

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Harold Nicolson was a diplomat, a writer, and a politician, but he is best known for being married to Vita Sackville-West. They were both fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She too was a writer – indeed a best-selling author in the 1930s – but is best known as the woman who fell in love with and ran away with Virginia Woolf. Collectively, she and her husband are also best known for their rather unusual marriage and its arrangements which permitted them both to have lovers of the same sex whilst swearing their undying loyalty to each other. All this is recorded by their son in the equally famous account Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold is a selection from their personal correspondence.

They wrote to each other voluminously (10,500 letters) throughout their long relationship – mainly because so much of it was spent apart. He worked in Persia whilst she stayed at home. Later, he had his rooms in Albany where he lived all week: she stayed in Sissinghurst writing and tending their gardens. The children were kept out of the way, and they met at weekends. In the meantime homosexual affairs flourished and they wrote to say how much they were missing each other.

The early letters are very playful and, it has to be said, full of the protestations of a deep friendship based on shared interests and understanding on which they later claimed the success of their marriage was built.

She is very understanding when he contracts a venereal infection from another male guest at a weekend party he attended with her as his new wife. He is more concerned but ultimately forgiving when she leaves him and their two children to ‘elope’ with Violet Keppel, who had just married Denys Trefusis.

She even writes to him from the south of France whilst he is attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – complaining that the exchange rate had dropped before she could convert her pounds sterling. He was negotiating the terms of the Armistice, whilst she was getting ready to gamble away her money in Monte Carlo.

It’s an interesting lesson in how letters must be put into a historical and cultural context in order to be properly understood. Vita writes a letter declaring undying love for her husband – but you would never guess it was written on the very day that she went off for the last time with Violet Trefusis.

Although Vita was the more successful author, his letters are more entertaining – at moments given to (unintentional?) humour:

[On horticulture] Shrubbery is a great problem if one is to avoid the suburban…[On his younger son] I said that about masturbation he must put it off as long as he possibly could – and that then he must only do it on Saturdays…[On education] I said that co-education was calculated to make boys homosexual for life, whereas Eton was only calculated to make them homosexual until 23 or 24.

Vita on the other hand is often more philosophically reflective, even if her observations are laced with a breathtaking notions of superiority:

The whole system of marriage is wrong. It ought, at least, to be optional and no stigma attached if you prefer a less claustrophobic form of contact. For it is claustrophobic. It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior; and I have a suspicion, my darling, that even our intelligence…wouldn’t have sufficed if our temperamental weaknesses didn’t happen to dovetail as well as they do…In fact our common determination for personal liberty: to have it ourselves, and to allow it to each other.

Serene detachment and au-dessus de la mêlée – yet this is the woman who travelled all the way to Paris to seduce Violet Trefusis whilst she was on her honeymoon, and forebad her to have any sexual relationship with her new husband Denys.

It’s amazing how many important political events Harold was connected with. He was the only person to be present at the settlement of both world wars. And he knew just about everyone who was anyone. In the course of his busy life he hobnobs with James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Charles de Gaulle.

No doubt there are today people with unconventional marriages, bisexual relations, connections in high places, and lots of money – but this one offers a glimpse of a world which has gone by. And I somehow doubt that people in future will be reading the emails and text messages which have replaced the written letter as a means of communication.

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Nigel Nicolson (ed), Vita & Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910-1962, London: Phoenix, 1993, pp.452, ISBN: 1857990617

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Harold Nicolson

fiction, memoirs, diaries, and letters

diplomat, writer, socialite and politician

Bloomsbury Group – web links

20th century diplomacy, literature, and politics

conjugal life a la Bloomsbury

amusing character sketches, fictions, and memoirs

The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

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