Gentle Readers will by now be aware that Harold Nicolson is my guy. Y’all may be sick of the Nicolson clan. Let me see if I can count up how many books I’ve read by the family. There’s Harold Nicolson’s book on Diplomacy, his biography of Lord Carnock (his father), Some People, two volumes of his collected diaries and letters, and at least one collection of his Spectator columns. There’s his wife, Vita Sackville-West, and the collection of their letters to each other, which is one of my favorite things in the world. I’ve also read her novel The Edwardians; I’ve never read any significant amount of her poetry. I think I’ve read some of her letters to Virginia Woolf, but I may be making that up.
I have also read her autobiographical fragment that their son Nigel Nicolson published in Portrait of a Marriage; I can count that for both of them. I’ve also read Nigel’s memoir, Long Life.
In the third generation, I’ve read Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries and Sieze the Fire. And now Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer, which is about Britain in 1911. Both of these third-generation Nicolsons write history that Harold would recognize: sloppy, personal, vivid, with more emphasis on the imaginative insight of the author than on rigorous quantitative analysis. There’s a comment (perhaps in James Lees-Milne’s two-volume biography of Harold Nicolson, which I have also read) that Harold Nicolson’s preferred method of writing non-fiction was to immerse himself utterly in the subject matter until he felt he thoroughly understood it, making massive amounts of notes and building up a formidable library, and then, when he sat down to do the actual writing, working from the notes and books as little as possible. That’s a terrible method for getting things right, and in fact there are enough inaccuracies in his biographies to discourage the average non-fiction writer from adopting his methods, and a good thing too.
On the other hand, with a good writer and an interesting subject, what can emerge is something not altogether unlike historical fiction, pleasant to read and educational, personal and opinionated, annoying, inaccurate and attractive. Summer is a lot like that (as her brother’s books are). I was irritated by the descriptions of the smell of the flowers and that sort of nonsense. On the other hand, she’s trying to evoke a sort of sympathy between the read and a particular time and place, and perhaps that sort of thing is necessary, or at least useful, even if it isn’t provable or rigorous.
Oh, and there are lots of chatty and catty anecdotes, too. So that’s all right.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.