When we planned our timings for the 1949 Club, I hadn’t realised there would be a two-day work retreat… which was wonderful, but has put me very behind in amalgamating reviews, let alone reading them or writing my own. I have several more books to write about this week, though they may come in a scramble towards the end of the week…
And today’s is a book by a reliable, much-loved author: dear Beverley Nichols. I’ve been accumulating them rather faster than I’ve been reading them, but turning to All I Could Never Be has reminded me afresh why I love him so much.
As in several of Nichol’s books, the tone of this collection of essays is nostalgia for the 1920s. There are often links between the end of one essay and the start of the next, but other than that they are pretty disparate – covering his various friendships (usually with the great and the good), the genesis of some of his books, and perhaps most surprisingly a few sections on his Christian faith and its evolution.
Along the way, Nichols tries to walk a rather tricky line at times. He is keen to emphasise the humble origins of his career in journalism, suggesting himself as a sort of everyman appearing as an impoverished and curious outsider whenever his path crosses any celebrities or nobilites. But it is an impression that fades rather quickly when he talks about his friendship with (say) Nellie Melba, George Bernard Shaw or the Queen (i.e. the King’s wife – this is 1949, remember). For the truth is that Nichols clearly was never an outsider – except that, unlike the truly inner circle, he is an incorrigible name-dropper. When the names dropped are not famous, they will be at least titled. Somehow, I find it all charming rather than monstrous. And that’s probably because of his evidently unaffected delight in these people – and because he has such a way with words. This, for instance, is from an account of his early days of journalism:
I was dispatched to interview a female centenarian. She, poor dear […] sat staring at me with small red eyes, occasionally muttering, to nobody in particular, the phrase, ‘Boo-boo-la-la’. This, I felt, was an insufficient basis on which to build the sparkling denunciation of ‘the modern girl’ which my editor had requested me to obtain from her, and I returned to the office empty-handed.
That article may not have been sparkling, but Nichols always is in All I Could Never Be. Sometimes it is waspish, not to say bitchy – ‘Doubtless Randolph Churchill has many charms, but on the few occasions that I have met him he has hidden them’; ‘One’s first sight of Gertrude Stein was startling, like seeing Gibraltar at dawn’ – but often it is in delight at his fellow man (or woman). The Baroness who can’t resist buying a chandelier on every shopping trip; the Bright Young Things who jostled about in extraordinary costumes; above all, Nellie Melba. He is clearly in awe of her, and there is a moving account of the effect that hearing her sing as an older woman had on Nichols.
Some of the ‘names’ meant nothing to me, and presumably their star had dimmed since 1949. I have no idea who Emily Borie Sherfesee is, and his clue ‘whom Chicago would perhaps remember as Emily Ryserson’ did not help me out. But, nonetheless, I enjoyed his commentary that she was widely loved, ‘[not] for any of those curious qualities which, for lack of a better phrase, I must call ‘party manners’ – for she did not play the piano, her bridge was atrocious, her backgammon non-existent and – worst of all – she never told malicious stories about her dearest friends’. It is a joke, of course, but I think it reveals more than a kernel of truth about sort of society in which Nichols moved for so long. After all, he is certainly not reticent about revealing everything he can about his dearest friends in this book.
But it is not all gossip. Along the way, he talks us through the background to some of his books. Some, he is unflinchingly critical of – he dismisses his work of pacifism, Cry Havoc!, and explains why he recanted its thesis in the face of the Nazis. Others, he recalls fondly – his autobiography Twenty-Five, say, and particularly Down the Garden Path and its two sequels. All I Could Never Be was published before the Merry Hall trilogy, so his focus is on the first three books about his house and garden – and in these essays we learn what we perhaps suspected: that they are more fabrication than fact. Or, at least, the people in them are. He explains the real-life inspirations for a couple of the figures, and while the rest are fictional, the love he has for this house certainly isn’t. I found it interesting to see how celebrity culture was alive and well all those decades ago, and Nichols had to deal with bibliophile trespassers in his garden.
I’m so glad these more literary things were in the collection, because it’s always fascinating to see how a much-loved author arrived at his ideas – though I don’t think I’ve previously read an author being able to so dispassionately praise or censure his own prior work.
What I did not expect to find in this books was Nichols’ earnest reflection on Christianity. I had no idea that he was a man of faith, and have never read The Fool Hath Said because I’d worried he would just be scathing about faith. But in a chapter towards the end of All I Could Never Be, he writes this beautiful paragraph:
It was after one of these walks that I came home and read again, for the first time in years, the gospel according to St. Mark. As the sublime story unfolded itself, I kept whispering to myself – ‘if only it were true – if only it were true!’ And then, suddenly, I realised that I had never made any serious effort to find out whether it was true or whether it was not. I had based my conviction on a cheap and facile assumption – the assumption that miracles did not happen, although I was at that very moment surrounded by miracles, from the flowers on my desk to the ghostly bouquet of shadows that they cast on the wall. To the historical basis of a story that had held a large part of the civilised world for two thousand years, a story which was for all men a matter of life or death, I had given less attention than to the study of a company report. It was, to say the least of it, not very intelligent.
Over several more chapters, Nichols explores his discovery of faith – and the different groups which he became part of, and then left. I don’t know how that faith developed or changed after 1949, but I really appreciated reading something so thoughtful and sincere in a book that is often deliberately and delightfully flippant.
Perhaps All I Could Never Be has such a vague and unrevealing title because it covers a span far broader than a singular theme. And, gosh, I loved it. I was reminded what a joy it is to spend time with Nichols – with his irrepressible pen, his pithy epithets, and his character which is always a hundred per cent committed to whatever he is exploring – whether that is flowers, celebrities, or Jesus.