Long life
Sit back and applaud
Nigel Nicolson
There was (still is) a parlour-game in which you are asked who you would like to be if you weren't you. The smart answer is, 'Me'. But it is rarely the truthful answer. Many a night have I drifted off to sleep wishing that I was Peter Quennell, Denis Healey, John Julius Norwich or Richard Shone. Each of them, of course, if they knew of it, would think this sleep-wish fan- tastic ('Good God, if only he realised . . and their attitude towards me would wors- en irrevocably. They need not worry. I have discarded them all. Now there is only one person I wish to be (alas, to have been). No ques- tion about it. Leonard Bernstein.
That may seem an astonishing choice for someone with no ear for music, and whose idea of musical heaven is 'The Street Where You Live' from My Fair Lady. But watching Bernstein on television (I never met him) teaching a class, conducting a symphony, or, as last week, rehearsing his own West Side Story with Kin i Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras, I felt for him an admi- ration that bordered on love.
He cannot have been an easy man to work for but the most rewarding, for his standards were exacting and the whole orchestra would grin with sympathy as he buried his head in his hands with despair at their performance. The beauty of his old-age ugliness, the sweetness of his anger, his ring of joy when suddenly every- thing went right, were irresistible, and if I had been there, my whole life and aspira- tions would have been changed for the better.
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least. To the first of these familiar lines we can all nod assent; but what can Shakespeare have meant by the second? He meant Leonard Bernstein.
I may be told that there were flaws in his character, life-style, behaviour or even his professional competence. I do not care. I
do not want to know. It is one of the many benefits of old age that jealousy is replaced by admiration, for when there is little time left to become a Bernstein in any field of endeavour, one can sit back and applaud such rare people with joy.
My father used to tell us as children that it is the things that you haven't done in life that you regret, not the things you have done. I'm not so sure. I regret having argued too hotly on occasions that required tact, having hurt my brother by laughing at his Picasso, having thrown into the sea the pieces of a lapis ashtray I had broken hoping that my hostess wouldn't notice (she did), and much else. But my father was right in the sense that I should have chosen the Peloponnese rather than Tuscany for an undergraduate holiday, stood for Parliament as a Liberal rather than as a Tory, kept more friendships in repair, worked harder, thought more, and above all trained myself to love classical music.
Leonard Bernstein's character and career fill me simultaneously with wonder and self-reproach, the first always being productive of the second. There is one other man, in a very different field, with whom I can compare him: Dag Ham- marskjold, I would like to have been him, too.
But there is no use repining. They both had great fun being them, and I must not be too displeased at having to be me.
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