Long Life

Nigel Nicolson MBE OBE was an incredible man. He wrote lovingly about his parents' unconventional marriage but he also writes about his own life in this book. He writes about growing up with nannies and privilege that people like me won't get to experience. His experiences during World War II earned him an MBE which he plays down. He loved both his parents and brother Benedict as well. He writes about his marriage and children. He writes lovingly about America as well. He also is very open and honest about his divorce and failed marriage. I think people who would be interested to know Nigel Nicolson who wasn't the son of parents who engaged in homosexual relationships. His mother was a lover of Virgnia Woolfe and Violet Keppel Trefusis. He is still a man who fought in World War II for his country and became both a politician and an author and editor of Virginia Woolfe's diaries as well. He writes lovingly about the home of Sissinghurst Castle where his parents devoted so much time in restoration and where he lived until his death as well.

I bought this book because I long ago read and admired Mr Nicolson's articles in The Spectator, in a column named Long Life. I enjoyed this book very much, not only because Mr Nicolson is a fine writer, but also because he has led such an interesting and well-balanced life. He has been an author, a publisher, a soldier and a politician. This book is important also because it relates events about people like Virginia Woolf and Nabokov which one will not find in scholarly tomes about them. Mr Nicolson has been in the thick of some of the more famous controversies of 20th century cultural history, such as the publication in Britain of the novel Lolita and the letters of Mrs Woolf. Wonderful read.

Much of Long Life will be familiar to regular readers of The Spectator, but Nicolson's book is delightful nonetheless. From his father he inherited the ability to write well, and utterly without pretension; from his mother he learned how to make words and phrases sing. Nicolson does not shed his English reserve, but we learn just enough of him and his life to want to know much more. Somehow it is reassuring to think of him sitting in the gazebo at Sissinghurst, gazing out over the flower-ringed moat in the summertime. To Nigel: an even longer life!