BooksObituaryNigel Nicolson
Distinguished publisher and biographer dogged by the shadow of his famous parentsThe publisher, editor, biographer and sometime politician Nigel Nicolson, who has died aged 87, laboured in the shadow of his famous and turbulent parents, the diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson and the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West. Although, like his elder brother, the art historian Ben Nicolson, he managed to carve a distinguished career for himself, this background was something of an ordeal, both professionally and emotionally, and, for a man of such obvious talents, Nigel Nicolson remained all his life considerably underrated.
With Lord Weidenfeld, he founded Weidenfeld & Nicolson, one of the most important and enterprising publishing houses to be started after the war; he served as a director from 1948 until his 75th birthday, in 1992. He was also closely involved, in 1959, in the publication in Britain of Nabokov's Lolita, a book that drew the threat of prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. It went on to sell 200,000 copies.
For seven dramatic years in the 1950s, Nicolson was also a Conservative MP, paying a heavy price for exercising a liberal conscience. But his chief claim to fame is as an elegant and fastidious biographer, and an editor of outstanding skill.
Nicolson was born in Ebury Street, London, where his parents, always better off than they pretended, had a London home, in addition to their first country house in Kent, Long Barn. When, in 1930, Harold and Vita splashed out on a semi-ruined Elizabethan castle, Sissinghurst, Nigel and his brother were lodged in a cottage, the old Priest's House, in what was to become one of the most magical gardens in England. At about this time, he was enrolled at Eton, going on to complete his education at his father's old Oxford college, Balliol.
After serving throughout the war with the Grenadier Guards, and being made MBE in 1945 for his services in Tunisia and Italy, where he was an army intelligence officer, Nicolson became the regiment's official biographer, although his main contribution to military history was a much-admired life of Earl Alexander of Tunis, published in 1973.
Much of his literary career, however, was taken up with sorting out the posthumous reputation of his wayward parents, whose bisexual parading of numerous lovers must have had an unsettling effect on both Nigel and his brother. Ben himself became bisexual, and the marriages of both boys ended in divorce.
In 1973, after consultation with Ben, and convinced that his mother had wanted such a book to appear, Nigel published his bestseller, Portrait Of A Marriage, a brilliantly structured account of the dramas, infidelities and deep emotional attachment that went to construct the partnership of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Unfortunately, when the television rights were purchased, which thrilled him at the time, Nigel made rather a fuss over the inevitably slanted treatment of the book on screen.
His other books included a biography of Mary Curzon, which won the Whitbread prize in 1977, and, in 1985, a highly accessible account of Napoleon's fatal invasion of Russia. Between 1975 and 1980, he also edited six volumes of the letters of Virginia Woolf, one of his mother's numerous lovers.
In 1992, he edited a collection of his parents' letters, but, in the field of editorship, he will be best remembered as the custodian of his father's diaries, which appeared in three meticulously edited volumes and revealed Harold Nicolson as one of the most vibrant and immediate diarists of the 20th century. Drawing on further diaries and letters that recently became available, Nigel re-edited the diaries in one volume. Happily, he lived to see its publication three weeks ago.
His brief interlude as a politician occurred between 1952 and 1959, when he represented Bournemouth East and Christchurch. He had already contested Leicester North-West in 1959, and Falmouth and Camborne in 1951. He eventually lost the confidence of his reactionary constituency association after a succession of differences of opinion - first, over his objection to capital punishment, then his disquiet with regard to Anthony Eden's intervention in Egypt and, finally, because of his support for the recommendations on homosexual law reform proposed by the Wolfenden committee.
Nicolson had quite a knack of getting embroiled in arguments, once with the third wife of his cousin Lord Sackville, who descended one day from Knole, the family seat in Kent, to demand what right Nigel thought he had to fly the Sackville flag from the tower at Sissinghurst.
He was also capable of great kindness, offering hospitality to the historian Count Nikolai Tolstoy, a distant relative of the novelist, who had written a pamphlet accusing Lord Aldington of war crimes. In 1989, Aldington was awarded $2.2m in damages after winning a libel suit that bankrupted Tolstoy. Nicolson was a defence witness.
He also heaped praise on the author of a life of another cousin, the tiresome Edward Sackville-West, saying he had "painted a portrait as good as [Graham] Sutherland's".
Yet in the lovely surroundings of Sissinghurst, where he continued to live alone after it had become a National Trust property, Nicolson seemed to evince more disdain for the hoards of appreciative visitors than delight in his good fortune. He appeared essentially a very lonely man, a condition no doubt to some extent alleviated when, late in life, he embarked on a new career in journalism.
In 1992, he began to write the Long Life column for the Spectator, eventually combining this weekly assignment with one for the Sunday Telegraph, called Time Of My Life. He drew heavily on these articles when, in 1997, he published a modest and agreeable memoir, Long Life. He also wrote a biography of Virginia Woolf in 2000, and one of the writer Fanny Burney in 2002. His final book, The Queen And Us, appeared last year. He was awarded the OBE in 2000.
By his marriage to Philippa Tennyson d'Eyncourt, who died in 1983 (his parents nicknamed her family, the Tenniscourts), Nigel Nicolson had a son and two daughters. And by a strange quirk of dynastic fortune, after the deaths of his father's two older brothers, he became his cousin's heir presumptive to his grandfather's barony of Carnock.
ยท Nigel Nicolson, politician, publisher, editor and author, born January 19 1917; died September 23 2004
This obituary has been revised and updated since the writer's own death in 2002
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