Books: Nicolson II: Diarist Triumphant

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HAROLD NICOLSON : THE WAR YEARS, 1939-1945, VOL. II OF DIARIES AND LETTERS. Edited by Nigel Nicolson. 511 pages. Atheneum. $8.50.

"One should write one's diary for one's great-grandson," writes Sir Harold Nicolson in the diary he kept faithfully for 34 years of his active life as a prolific author and sometime Member of Parliament. "The purely private diary becomes too self-centred and morbid. One should have a remote, but not too remote, audience."

Nicolson, now 80, happily did not wait that long to publish his notes and letters. The first distillation of his life time of civilized observation and sensitive introspection, edited by his son Nigel (TIME, Jan. 6), covered the fitful prewar years 1930 to 1939. It established Nicolson as a brilliant Boswell to his age and his peers. This is the swift and welcome sequel. Caught up by "the cataract of history" that was Britain's role in World War II, Nicolson now surpasses his earlier performance.

His view of events, as a member of the government and as a backbencher, is middle-distance only, and so not always in perfect focus. The editor's footnotes correct the record where Sir Har old's information was faulty, or where a dinner anecdote is constructed out of whole tablecloth. But the diarist's perceptions of people, from Churchill to De Gaulle to a rising Tory named Harold Macmillan, are always close-up and marvelously crisp and sharp. And the mood of an embattled nation is mirrored in all its nuances through the changing fortunes of war.

Jewels & Diaries. As Hitler's armies first spill across the Continent, Nicolson despairs for Britain, certain that the war cannot be won. Opposed to Chamberlain's appeasement, he describes one of the Prime Minister's speeches during which "Winston Churchill sat hunched beside him looking like the Chinese god of plenty suffering from acute indigestion." Even when Churchill becomes Prime Minister, Britain continues to suffer defeat after defeat. But, like the nation, Nicolson's spirits are somehow altered by the leadership of the man whom he admires more than anyone in the world. More than once, he recounts a day of disaster, only to end with a ringing, underlined, "We shall win!"

Much of Nicolson's charm lies in his candid humanity. He admits to finding exhilaration in the bombing of London; it is some slight compensation for the "dead weight on my life never to have known the dangers of the last war and never to have discovered whether I am a hero or a coward." When it appears that his wife will have to evacuate their Kentish country house, he advises her to load their Buick with two things: her jewels and his diaries. The Battle of Britain inspires unashamed pride: "I have always loved England. Now I am in love with England. What a people! What a chance! And the chance that we shall by our stubbornness give victory to the world."