Ek het voorheen genoem dat ek waardering vir die skryfwerk van die Nicolsons het (SêNet, 25.11.2011). Dit behels die werk van Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West (sy vrou), Nigel (hulle seun) en Adam (Nigel se seun). Hoewel Adam tans hierdie werkwaardige skryftradisie voortreflik voortsit, ag hy sy twee voorgeslagte se woordarbeid oordrewe. In sy boek oor hulle landgoed, Sissinghurst (London: HarperPress, 2009, 358p), skryf hy: "Sissinghurst floats on a sea of words" (p 23). "Nicolson closeness had been a written performance for a hundred years" (p 24). Hy het dit veral teen Nigel, sy pa: "He was living each day for the account he could write of it the following morning in his diary" (p 24).
Adam beweer Nigel "could not live with the reality of human engagement" (p 21). "My sisters and I orbited around the sad and central absence of our father" (p 22). "If we came to stay, he would long for us to leave ... he treated his books and everything he wrote in the way that most people treated their children, with endless, careful nurture" (p 23). "He was so lonely that he could feel comfortable only with people who scarcely knew him ... Intimacy itself was menacing" (p 25). Harold, Nigel se pa, "understood his [Nigel se] nascent homosexuality" (p 256). Een van sy mansvriende het oor Nigel geskryf: "He is a cold man who wants to be warm, and cannot be" (p 22).
Wanneer die frase "long life" hom voordoen, is ’n mens geneig om aan melk in ’n kartonhouer te dink. Daar is egter ’n ander moontlike betekenis. Ek het uiteindelik daarin geslaag om Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004) se outobiografie, Long life (London: Phoenix, 1997/2007, 310p), op te spoor. Op die omslag is die newetitel: "Memoirs". Hierdie boek maak dit moontlik om Adam se siening van Nigel met Nigel se siening van homself te vergelyk.
Mense verskil. Byvoorbeeld, mense studeer op verskillende maniere. Die beste manier om iets te verstaan en onthou, is in my geval om aantekeninge te maak. Vita, Nigel se ma, was bevriend met Virginia Woolf. Nigel het in sy jeug Virginia en ander lede van die Bloomsbury Group leer ken. Hy onthou Ottoline Morrell bv as "camouflaged in paint and feathers like a parakeet" (p 33). "To us Virginia was as delightful as a favourite aunt" (p 39). "At school I received half a dozen letters from Virginia and threw them away when I had answered them" (p 43). Virginia het gesê: "Nothing has really happened until you have described it" (p 40). Dit kon as spoorslag vir die Nicolsons se skryfwerk dien; ook myne. Deesdae lees ek boeke om suiwer egoïstiese redes. Daarna skryf ek daaroor om optimaal by die leesstof te baat. Party van hierdie skrywes stuur ek na SêNet. As sommige lesers hierby baat, kan my egoïsme altruïsme word. Vir ander lesers is my skrywes skynbaar ’n bodemlose bron van irritasie.
Oor Harold, sy pa, skryf Nigel: "He would write to us [Nigel en sy broer Ben] every week when we were at boarding-school. Our family relationships ... were created more by these intertwining letters than by conversation" (p 2). Van sy ouers sê hy: "They were not snobs but élitist ... Elitism is natural and beneficial, an acknowledgement that some people are more estimable than others, for their achievements or character. It is not a matter of class" (p 4). "I have come to accept élitism as the natural product of every form of education throughout history" (p 77). Harold het gesê: "I ... believed in the principle of aristocracy. I have hated the rich but I have loved learning, scholarship, intelligence and the humanities. Suddenly I am faced with the fact that all these lovely things are supposed to be class privileges" (p 6).
Nigel se aangrypendste boek is myns insiens die een wat hy oor sy ouers geskryf het, Portrait of a marriage (1973). In sy outobiografie sê hy hieroor: "Their marriage ... was as remarkable a joint achievement as their garden" op Sissinghurst (p 11); ’n tuin met ’n "annual cycle ... like a play, with acts and scenes, each lasting a few days or weeks" (p 212). Die tuin is aan die publiek oopgestel en in 1967 aan die National Trust oorgedra. "To confine so sophisticated a garden to the few who live there would be like leaving a book unpublished or a painting unexhibited. It demands an audience" (p 217).
Op skool het Nigel "three essential tools, speaking, reading and writing" bemeester (p 54) en "the pleasure of sustained effort" leer ken (p 55). "The school chapter of an autobiography is allowed to be a fairly gloomy record, but by the time the author reaches university he is expected to show, by anecdote and deft allusion to names that subsequently became famous, that he was at last in the swim, and that the university meant a sudden flowering of talents and lifelong influences and friends. From me such an account would be false" (p 63). By die aanvang van sy studie op Oxford het sy pa aan hom geskryf: "Balliol [Harold en Nigel se kollege] does not care overmuch for the extent of a man’s knowledge: it cares dreadfully for his state of mind. Remember that what they want to find out is whether you are intelligent, not whether you are learned. They judge intelligence by the extent to which you avoid saying something stupid, rather than by the extent to which you manage to say something bright" (p 63).
"Balliol was famous for its African and Indian students. When the film Sanders of the River was shown in an Oxford cinema, and a canoe manned by eight natives shot across the screen, there was a shout, ’Well rowed, Balliol!’ and the audience erupted into applause. That was the extent of undergraduate racism in the 1930s" (p 67). Harold was nie ’n politiek-verligte nie: "He had an instinctive dislike of Jews and coloured people ... he hoped that Israel would attract as many Jews as possible" (p 4) sodat ander lande van hulle ontslae kon wees. Nigel was om ’n ander rede pro-Israel: "The existence of Israel was payment of a moral debt and its survival a brilliant achievement" (p 158). Saam met ’n Oostenrykse Jood, George Weidenfeld, het Nigel in 1949 die suksesvolle uitgewery Weidenfeld & Nicolson begin.
"I must say something about the blacks, for although I have no black friends I am troubled by them. Once, in Tennessee, I paused to ask a group of students why they were demonstrating against apartheid in South Africa when there was the unadmitted equivalent in the United States. They were shocked by the question" (p 274). Oor ras/kleur was hy meer verlig as sy pa, maar hy het gedink dat nóg die VSA nóg Brittanje die probleem opgelos het. Hy skryf: "Equality of opportunity ... is an impossibility" (p 73). Anders as sy pa, het Nigel nie die rykes gehaat nie. "Segregation by wealth gives no offence. It stimulates ambition" (p 271).
Die Codrington-biblioteek was vir Nigel "the loveliest, coolest room in Oxford ... I began to learn wat study is, the delight of original documents, the mean pleasure in finding scholars wrong, and to form opinions of my own" (p 68). Na universiteit "my education was continued by reading, listening and travelling, but especially by writing, for nothing concentrates the mind more than the obligation to put thoughts on paper" (p 75).
As skrywer was hy suksesvol, maar as vader het hy misluk. "They do not consider that I have been as good a father to them as Harold was to me and often tell me so ... The ’spaces in our togetherness’ which Vita advocated as the secret of a happy family life have sometimes been too wide" (p 285). As 80-jarige skryf hy: "I have reached the age when I open the obituary pages with trepidation" (p 288). Aan die einde van sy boek is sy beskeie gevolgtrekking: "It has not been a wasted life" (p 291). Inderdaad.
Johannes Comestor