On Not Writing Marginal Comment
By HAROLD NICOLSON WHEN I was a child I was frightened at night. " Pleasant dreams," the nursery-maid would say as she blew out the candle beside my bed : to this day, the smell of a candle recently extinguished fills me with alarm. I had a cousin who was clever, wise and good. When I told her that I used to shake with terror when left alone between my cold white sheets, she did not remark that boys, even little boys, should be made of sterner stuff. She did not ask, as others asked, " But what on earth are you frightened of? " She knew that when the door was shut, when the foot- steps had receded, when even the - beam from the outside passage popped into darkness as the gas was turned off, she knew that then the room would gather itself together around the figure in the bed, whispering " Harold " at it, and that the darkness would become full of little shapes like leaves falling, shapes that at any moment might coalesce together to form a frightful face. So she gave me an Old Testament, bound in imitation leather, and told me that if I kept the book under my pillow and clung tight to it, then nothing frightening could occur! Dear Cousin Ethelwynne, I give you thanks across a gulf of more than fifty years. One morn- ing, when we were to start very early for the. station, my father came into my room to wake me. I leapt out of bed with eager promptitude and he noticed the little book lying on the sheet. He took it up and opened it : he praised me for my piety. I can still recall the confusion with which I gazed back at him; how could I explain to him that I was being wrongfully eulogised, or that what he assumed to be profound religious conviction was no more than savage super- stitious fear?, Perplexed by a sense of guilt, I tumbled into my shorts. It was many years later that 1 confessed to my father how, on that occasion, I had acquired undeserved merit. As always, he was interested and amused.
• * * * * , I cannot say that, at the time, I read with any thorough- ness the book which Cousin Ethelwynne had given me. My study of the Scriptures occurred at a later date, when I had to spend much of my school-time doing what was curiously called " divinity." But every night before undressing I would read at least one passage from the book and derive strength and comfort from what I read. " And Solomon," I read, " had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn : the king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price." How agreeable it was to drift off to sleep, clutching my talisman, and to picture strings of horses champing along The beach past Gaza and Askalon, or rolls of smooth linen, such 8 I had seen in Belfast, displayed upon trestled tables in the sak of Jerusalem. I do not remember for how many months or years I remained under the spell of Cousin Ethelwynne's exorcism; certainly I was never quite so terrified again. But night, dark and loneliness retained, for longer than 1 care to confess, their childhood mystery and terror, and for years I was saddened when the shadows grew longer across the lawn and when the dreaded hour of bed-time threatened to approach. A sudden decline of spirit would I experience as the sun lowered itself above the lake and forest, dipping westwards, oh, how quickly! into the cold Atlantic over there beyond the hills. Then came youth and freedom and lamps on supper tables glowing behind pink silk shades. Yet exactly the same lowering of confidence came back to me in later years on Friday afternoons. For fourteen years or so I wrote a Marginal Comment every Sunday morning. The approach of that ordeal would first throw its shadow after luncheon on Friday. " There is nothing," I would groan to myself, " nothing at all that I can write about this week." Nor was there any talisman to lighten my distress. One of the many quirks in human nature induces us, on acquiring liberty, to forget oppression. Even as the fellah of the Nile valley has forgotten all he heard about the, extortion to which his grandfather was subjected in the days of Khedive Ismail, so also do I forget the sadness that would descend upon me when the shadows lengthened on Friday afternoons. There come moments even when I am sorry that I am no longer subject 'to the benign discipline of Wilson Harris, and when I experience twinges of insecurity such as must assail an elderly member of the Wafd when he thinks back upon the days of Lord Cromer. I retain, moreover, a friendly feeling for the Spectator, which really is a dear old thing. I regret that I am no longer in permanent attendance and am therefore unable to watch, with the closeness that I should wish, the interesting experiment in rejuvenation that the veteran is at present undergoing. Moreover, whereas, when I was employed by that weekly on a regular assignment (if I may use a Yankee word), the subjects that suggested themselves were as sparse and rare as delphiniums in the Gobi desert, they now flock round my head beating excited wings. 1 want to write about Guy Fawkes, and the Rent Restriction Act, and the Minoan alphabet, and the difficulty of obtaining decent flower vases, and the causes of sulky salesmanship, and whether one is ever justified in telling children untruths (the answer being in the negative), and peridotite, and Dzerzhinsky, and the draining of the Malabar lagoons, and whether horse-flies are really the only sure method of extracting cactus thorns, and the nature of the beautiful and the good. Yet were I asked to write on any of these subjects a cold shadow would fall on Friday afternoon. * * * What I used to find so depressing about my Marginal Comments was that they had all to be of the same length : it thus occurred, as many readers noticed, that I was often obliged to spin them, so to speak, out. I envied Janus, I envy Strix, the subtle paragraph, the range of subjects, the short trenchant phrase. Yet, on the occasions when I have myself tried to write a column of snappy paragraphs about the events of the past week, I have found myself gasping in so confined an area, longing for a wide open space. A weekly essay more- over has to convey some impression at least of. spontaneity: once one finds oneself searching miserably for a theme through Friday afternoon, and all day on Saturday, the impulse becomes forced and one adopts the sprightliness of an aged gentleman leaping on to an omnibus to impress his younger friends. It was not even indolence that, after fourteen years, induced me to abandon weekly journalism; I am not a man who enjoys leisure and my prayer is that it is seated at my typewriter (Remington Compact Portable 1936) that I shall die. No, it was just that I had said all I had to say about those sorts of things and that I ,thought it was high time that I left space for someone else. I know that if ever the passion seizes me to write about any of the subjects I have enumerated, the Spectator in its friendship will find me room. All that I regret is that I do not actually enjoy my freedom a little more. * * * You might suppose that a man of average industry and imagination, foreseeing that, a week might come when his invention failed him, when his batteries were low, would provide himself in advance with stepney wheels wherewith to meet the difficulty when a puncture came. Yet I could not do this. Often, on a free morning, I tried to write a spare article to be used in an emergency, but never did I manage to bring it to a conclusion. In such matters it is not inspiration that is so compelling but the fact that the article must be posted not later than Sunday night. Perhaps therefore it was the gloom that descended on Friday after luncheon, the sadness that dragged me through the leaden Saturday, that in themselves provided the required compulsion. Yet I still wish that .at such moments I had possessed a talisman, containing a long list of subjects, as effective, as Cousin Ethelwynne's talisman. And that I could have settled down to my typewriter on Sunday morning, stirred and solaced by the fact that Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn.
Previous page
