A problem of discretion
PERSONAL COLUMN NIGEL NICOLSON
Fascinating though it is for the observer, the recent spate of Cabinet leaks must seem a dread- ful portent to the participants. I am not thinking only of day-to-day political indiscre- tion in the newspapers. I am also thinking of biographies, memoirs and diaries pub- lished during the lifetime of their authors or subjects, revealing the confidences of people still alive and active, or secret information about incidents like Suez, Munich or the 1931 crisis, which are still politically explosive. The auto- biography is an opportunity for self-justification and paying off old scores. Even Churchill's was not quite free from it, but we must await his son's final volumes to discover just how unfair or reticent he was. The publication of Lord Moran's diary (but not the keeping of it, since it is of incomparable interest) was inexcusable in face of the protests of the Churchill family. Lord Avon's Full Circle was a piece of selective pleading for Anthony Eden. Harold Mac- millan's autobiography is an exception: it is a perfect synthesis of revelation and discretion, because he leads us through his past troubles in such a way that we never sense that anything important is being suppressed.
But the trend towards over-frankness in biography and over-suppression in autobio- graphy is plain. The authors replay in public the games that were supposed to be played in private—the autobiographer with marked cards. There is no fifty-year rule for private papers. The sexual or medical aberrations of prominent men are now regarded as material without which their biographies would be incomplete, like Michael Holroyd's life of Lytton Strachey, which Malcolm Muggeridge has described in a capsule blurb as 'a fine study of sodomy at King's.' One result will be that people likely to be the subjects of biography will destroy their most intimate letters, and be very careful what they write in their journals. Diarists will be identified and suspect. The very keeping of the diary will be regarded as an unsocial act. So the private records of our times, perhaps the most articulate in history, will be paradoxically sparse, unless we impose on ourselves some sort of limitation on what is to be published and when.
I was faced with the problem when editing the diaries of my father, Harold Nicolson. It did not arise in its acutest form, for he wrote the diary in the expectation that it would one day be published or at least read, and decided to leave the original typescript to Balliol. He therefore omitted whatever could be regarded as offensive in fifty years' time, which meant, of course, a great deal less than what could be regarded as offensive now. He made no men- tion at all of his own sexual life or that of his friends, just as most people lock the lavatory door against their families. Because he is a kindly man, there is little malice in the diary; being highly self-critical and un- competitive by nature, he would write more harshly about himself than about other people; but being an observant and keen reporter, he included passages which would undoubtedly dismay some of his friends if published in their lifetime.
In my selection, I applied two principles of discretion. The first concerned unkind remarks about people of whom he was really very fond. Any diary records passing moods of irritation, following a bad dinner, a burgeoning cold, or a political disagreement. `So that's what Harold really thought of me!' they would say. He didn't, and I have spared such people (and there were few) the unnecessary pain of think- ing that he did. He cut only one passage from my edited version, which described a man as 'a rabbit-toothed fool.' But you hardly knew him,' I said, 'and he's been dead twenty years!' I know, but I really rather liked him.' But he passed without comment his description of Axel Munthe in 1939, 'Everything seems to have oozed from him except that secretion of oil with which he flatters,' because he thought him a fraud; and of Attlee as 'a snipe pretending to be an eagle,' because it is so evident from many other passages that he liked and admired him.
More difficult was the question of political discretion. I am not conscious of having falsified the record beyond the point made inevitable by a selection from so vast a mass of material, but I did think it necessary to ask the permission of any person whose private conversation (the meat of every diary) I wished to quote. In preparing the third volume for press, I sent out 183 such passages to people still living. Only six refused. Two or three others have suggested amendments CI think your father must have misunderstood me,' as he very likely did). Given the temptation to improve a mot or a reputation for prescience, the proportion of refusals was small.
Requests for amendment I refused, except in cases of minor errors, as when Sir Julian Huxley pointed out that the zebra which escaped from the Zoo in 1940 bolted as far as Camden Town, not Marylebone. But I have clipped the- pro- testers' letters to the relevant pages of the original diary, so that future students will read both together, and I omitted these short pas- sages from the published version. I have not often appealed to widows or children for per- mission to publish, for while I was concerned about their feelings, I feared the repetition of such requests as one I received from a widow asking me to substitute for my father's account of a conversation, her late husband's own record of it in his autobiography. I have made a few exceptions to my rule. One does not ask President de Gaulle whether he minds being quoted as saying privately in 1941, `La France, c'est moi!' for he would not reply. Nor does one invite Lord Avon's comment on a passage from the 1943 diary where he is described as `fairly wobbling with charm and grace' when proposing a motion of congratulation to Lloyd George on his eightieth birthday, for this was a public occasion, and the behaviour of politicians in public is a matter for open comment by any- one present.
But what sort of picture should the editor present of the diarist himself? Robert Rhodes James in editing Chips must have endured many more agonising moments of indecision than .I did, for Henry Channon was neither an admirable nor a modest man, while my only cause for hesitation was whether to reveal my father's racial prejudices and my mother's extreme conservatism; I did reveal both. It does not appear that Paul Channon imposed much censorship on his father's diaries. Chips emerges from them like a Tussaud model of himself, eyes preternaturally bright, his smile unchange- able. So cruelly revealing is his self-portrait that the point of the book (that it contains much sharp observation, and is an important record of how some Englishmen thought and acted be- fore the war) is lost in contemplation of the ingenuousness of Chips himself. One reads on in malicious expectation of such gems as this, from his account of Chamberlain's memorial service in 1940: 'There in the Abbey, and it angered me to see them, were all the little men who had torpedoed poor Neville's heroic efforts to preserve peace'—the little men including Churchill and most of the Cabinet.
Reviewing Chips in the SPECTATOR a few weeks ago, Robert Blake said that a diary 'is one of the least reliable forms of human testimony.' I see what he means. Hyperbole comes naturally to a diarist. But of the diarist himself it cannot fail to be a complete revela- tion, particularly when, like Chips's, it was overtly written for publication. Thai was Chips's tragedy. The diary which was to bring him immortality has made him a figure of fun. Of course it was right to publish it. But if I had been Paul Channon, I would have hesitated to be quite so frank quite so soon. I would have been concerned that those who did not know his father should think him more foolish than he really was. I would have reflected that discretion is as much a matter of taste as of judgment.
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