Harold Nicolson

Résumé du livre

Harold Nicolson kept a diary from the moment he resigned from the Foreign Office at the end of 1929 until October 1964. This volume covers the period from the beginning of the diary until the outbreak of the war. It is an incomparable record of those years, composed by a man who knew almost every major figure of his times and was endowed with the ability to describe hat he heard, saw and did, and to communicate what he felt. Harold Nicolson, as a writer and journalist, was by temperament an observer (as the title of his famous weekly articles for the Spectator, 'Marginal Comment' indicates), but he was also an active Member of Parliament during the last four of these ten years. Married to the poet and novelist V. Sackville-West, he lived in many worlds and enjoyed them all. He was gay, immensely sociable and profoundly interested in the way and politics of the world. He was a supporter in 1931 of Sir Oswald Mosley's New Party, and the unsuitable editor of its journal, Action. From 1935 onwards he was an influential opponent of appeasement. He wrote several books during these years, and with his wife was on terms of intimacy with Virginia Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury circle. At the same time he was a popular figure in the smarter world. He played a minor but surprising role in the Abdication crisis, edited the Londoner's Diary, and established a close friendship with the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. This book is of historical importance for the picture it gives of literary, political and social London in the 1930s. But it is also the portrait of a marriage between two very different and remarkable people. Harold Nicolson and V. Sackville-West, as their son points out in his Introduction, were on the face of it wholly unsuited to each other. While he was sociable, she was anti-social; while he was ambitious, urbane and gay, she was 'romantic, secret and undomesticated.' Yet no one reading this volume, and the letters which they exchanged daily when they were apart, can doubt the depth of their relationship. 'When with each other' Harold Nicolson wrote to her, 'we relax completely... Yet our relations are also dynamic. We stimulate each other... It is the perfect adjustment between these two elements, the static and the dynamic, which creates such harmony in our lives.' The symbol of that harmony can be found in the famous garden at Sissinghurst, which they created in close collaboration during the 1930s, and which rightly has an important place in these pages. This book has been edited by Harold Nicolson's second son, Nigel Nicolson whose Introduction illumines the background to his parents' lives.