Nicolson again
Harold Nicolson left the British Foreign Office when he was about 40. He had been a pretty senior person at the Embassy in Berlin. Partly he left because his wife refused to accept all the postings and travel along with him; partly he fancied a career as a man of letters. By the time he was 50, nothing had panned out all that well, and he began to think seriously about running for Parliament. He had a very junior position in Churchill's government early in the war, and then was dumped because Labour wanted one of their own people.
Nicolson admits briefly in his diary that he is homosexual, yet it is obvious that he is madly in love with his wife, Vita Sackville-West. I guess it came out sometime later that Vita had a long, passionate lesbian affair. These two may have fit in well with the Bloomsbury group--Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, J.M. Keynes, etc. There is actually a discussion of this very point (September 2, 1940):
[blockquote]Viti [i.e. V S-W] says that our mistake was that we remained Edwardian for too long and that if in 1916 we had got in touch with Bloomsbury we should have profited more than we did by carrying on with ... the Edwardian Relics. We are amused to confess that we had never even heard of Bloomsbury in 1916. But we agree that in fact we have had the best of both the plutocratic and the bohemian world and that we have had a lovely life.[/blockquote]
There is a letter in which V S-W says she is devastated at the suicide of Virginia Woolf.
His diary qualifies as very good, if not great, in that he knows a lot of people and has pretty good stories about them.
Ramsay MacDonald, who was HN's party leader for a while, commenting on the "abdication crisis" (King Edward VIII was in love with Mrs. Simpson, an American divorcee): "The people don't mind fornication, but they loathe adultery." Words for Prince Charles to live by.
HN on Mrs. Simpson: "The upper classes mind her being an American rather than her being divorced. The lower classes do not mind her being an American but loathe the idea taht she has had two husbands already."
Mind her being an American? But the phenomenon of the old families marrying rich American wives was well known: Churchill's mother and aunt were examples.
After Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's last speech on the subject in the House, HN congratulates him, and Baldwin speaks frankly:
[blockquote]"You see," he went on--still holding me by the arm, "the man [i.e. the King, later Duke of Windsor] is mad. MAD. He could see nothing but that woman. He did not realize that any other considerations avail. He lacks religion. I told his mother so....I do not mean by that his atheism. I suppose you [meaning HN] are either an atheist or an agnostic. But you have a religious sense. I noticed it the other day. (That meant my sticking up for Ramsay). You realize that there is something more than the opportune. He doesn't realize that there is anything beyond. I told his mother so. The Duke of York [later King George VI, father of QE II] has always been bothered about it."[/blockquote]
Reminds me of Brideshead Revisited: the creepy Canadian millionaire is missing the part of the soul that would respond to religion.
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