The Writer in Politics
BERNSTEIN, DAVID
The Winter in Politics THE LATE YEARS, 1945-1962: VOLUME III OF THE DIARIES AND LETTERS OF HAROLD NICHOLSON Edited by Nigel Nicolson Atheneum. 448 pp. $8.50. Reviewed by DAVID...
...Sheer desire for status, rather than personal affection, was responsible for Nicolson's final political error...
...There is the memory of Woodrow Wilson pecking at his portable in the White House...
...Or between the two worlds when it comes to ways of getting ahead...
...He swallowed his pride and told William Jowett, the Lord Chancellor, that he would gladly accept Labor party discipline if he were made a Lord...
...At the Democratic convention this year, though, the literati were hardly formidable...
...Most writers will understand what happened...
...Some delegates were writers, like Murray Kempton, but he seemed more at ease getting arrested by Mayor Daley's hired hands than sitting in on the convention itself...
...In politics, it has been due partly to lack of push and even of courage, and partly to a combination of unfortunate events (Mosley, National Labor, my being identified with the Ministry of Information at a bad time, and so on...
...But the need to be virginal, to observe, to be a commentator on society rather than a participant in it, seems to prevent them from being professional in their approach to politics...
...In this country you can get writers to sign their names to political ads in the New York Times, or even to try to be delegates to a political convention...
...As soon as the campaign ended, he wrote his weekly article for the Spectator, and in 1,500 amused, graceful words told of his ordeal as a candidate, thereby infuriating his supporters and horrifying the Labor leaders...
...Still, there are the Churchills and the Stevensons or—on a lesser plane —the Goodwins, Schlesingers and Sorensens...
...The embarrassing word to Jowett accomplished nothing...
...The pathos in Nicolson's diaries comes from his ultimate recognition that he was not willing to be as fastidious about his politics as he was about his writing...
...But it wanted the distinguished author—known to the less literary public for his frequent bbc appearances—to hold down the Conservative margin of victory...
...To a king Paris was certainly worth a mass, but to a writer a peerage could not be worth giving up a good topic for a piece in the Spectator...
...Nicolson hated every minute of the sordid three-week campaign...
...I am very well aware," he wrote in 1946 as he turned 60, "that I have not achieved either in the literary or the political world that status which my talents and hard work might seem to justify...
...His trouble was that he was a fastidious writer but a rather vulgar politician...
...And there are the similarities between the political career and the writing career: the need for expression, the search for a public, the influence of the fortuitous...
...Norman Podhoretz' manual on making it contains lessons for the aspiring politician as much as for the aspiring intellectual...
...Nicolson threw it away within the week...
...He started a career in diplomacy and gave it up, he said, because he didn't really want to become an ambassador...
...the political life was merely a matter of status, of pleasant dinner talk with celebrities and powerful men, of sitting on the fringe of social and political action...
...But the party demanded better proof of loyalty than a membership application...
...He was a member of Parliament for 10 years as a kind of independent, though, losing his seat in the Labor landslide just at the end of the war...
...Nicolson once attached himself to Oswald Mosely, the British Fascist, because Mosley and his wife were old friends...
...His talent was that of the essayist-journalist...
...Presumably he had now earned his peerage...
...He kept assuring himself that he really was a Democratic Socialist, but his goal was to be a member of the House of Lords...
...He died last May, thinking perhaps of a sentence he had once written about Byron's last journey: "How narrow is the line which separates an adventure from an ordeal, and escape from exile...
...In his old age, Nicolson lived placidly with his son's family, reading but no longer writing, unable to visit the old political haunts in London...
...The professional journalist betrayed the amateur public man...
...Reviewed by DAVID BERNSTEIN Editor, the Binghamton "Sun-Bulletin" Because I read this final volume of Harold Nicolson's diaries and letters as a kind of counterpoint to attendance at the Republican convention in Miami Beach and the Democratic convention in Chicago, the parts that seem to stay with me have to do with Nicolson's pathetic inability to combine his political ambitions with his talent as a writer...
...If not for the example of Winston Churchill, one might almost conclude that the two professions cannot coexist in the same person...
...He was a professional writer, but as a politician he was an embarrassing amateur...
...Theodore Soren-sen made a brief speech...
...Archibald MacLeish found it agreeable to accept Federal appointments from President Roosevelt, and writers lurked in every shadow of the Kennedy inauguration...
...and (b) that when I found I could not get one as an independent, I changed my party coat...
...In literature, the explanation is simple: although hard-working, I am not intelligent enough to write better than I do...
...There was Adlai Stevenson, who polished his speeches and essays until they glistened...
...He soon added another...
...On that April day in 1946 he wrote, "No evasions will obscure the facts (a) that I have asked for a peerage...
...If I scrape my conscience I must admit that there is some truth in that accusation...
...In a 1950 diary entry he wrote: "How I wish I had not been such an impulsive fool as to join the Labor party...
...Harold Nicolson was a natural writer...
...With the Labor party in power, his only hope was to become a "Labor peer...
...It would be easy to conclude from this—and from observation of the two conventions?that it is no longer possible to be a professional in both fields...
...Nicolson was asked to run as the Labor candidate in the North Croydon by-election in March 1948...
...if his style was sometimes florid it was not dishonest, and if his political method was sometimes romantic it was not unsuccessful...
...Although beaten, he did increase the size of the Labor vote...
...That ended any chance of a Labor peerage...
...The explanation, presumably, would be that the test of the writer is his integrity whereas the test of the politician is his ability to compromise, to get things done—and that these demands are incompatible...
...In 1945 he wrote his son Nigel—who is now a London publisher—that these were "two fatal errors...
...But no one will ever claim to remember this heavy-handed man for anything he ever wrote...
...Richard Goodwin held press conferences for Senator McCarthy...
...The only politician who could be given even the courtesy title of journalist during the formal sessions of the Republican convention was former Senator William Knowland of California, who runs the Oakland Tribune...
...It was certainly the cardinal error of my life...
...The Democrats are more likely to tolerate literary people...
...But there is Winston Churchill...
...So, in February 1947, Nicolson took the formal step of joining the Labor party...
...People will say that I did this because I wanted to get a peerage," he wrote in his diary...
...Probably Emmet Hughes, who once wrote an excellent tell-it-all book about the Eisenhower Administration, was lurking somewhere in the Rockefeller headquarters at the Americana Hotel, but I did not happen to see him...
...How much difference really exists between the literary hack and the political hack...
...The party knew the Conservative candidate, a local businessman, would win...
...Putting down the words was a vocation...
...he once joined National Labor, because he knew Ramsay MacDonald...
Vol. 51 • September 1968 • No. 18
