Nigel Nicolson

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HIS first view of Sissinghurst Castle was one Nigel Nicolson never forgot. It was a wet day in 1930; he was 13. With his mother, Vita Sackville-West, he had trudged round the ruins of a manor house and tower with a few rows of cabbages for a garden. “But we haven't got to live here, have we?” he asked.

He had to. His mother and his father, Harold Nicolson, had decided to make Sissinghurst their grand project. Harold designed it; Vita planted it; and Nigel and his brother, Ben, became the holiday labourers. Each day his father, who had been eminent in the diplomatic service, taught them how to dig ponds and clear brambles. Then at 6pm, between bath and bed, Nigel would visit his mother in her writing room. Wearily laying her pen aside, she would talk to him.

Vita and Harold were on the periphery of the Bloomsbury set they belonged to. The Bloomsberries passed through young Nigel's life like occasional exotic birds: Lady Ottoline Morrell, feathered like a witch, at dinner, or Virginia Woolf, thin and curious, peppering him with questions. He would go with Virginia on butterfly hunts, and showed her the family portraits at Knole when she was gathering material for “Orlando”.

All this might have been incidental to Mr Nicolson's life. For years he carved out his own, different, track. After war service in Tunisia, Italy and Austria, he joined an exiled Viennese Jew, George Weidenfeld, to publish Contact magazine and then, after 1950, to form the publishing house of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. At the same time he entered politics, becoming the Tory MP for Bournemouth in 1952. He wrote a biography of Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis, under whom he had served, and always thought this his best book. Having famous parents was undoubtedly an advantage, he wrote later. It had opened doors for him. But “children can escape”.

They could not escape quite so easily. In 1962, after his mother's death, Mr Nicolson found a locked Gladstone bag in her writing room. In it was a notebook containing an account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Letters from Violet, and from many other lovers, were stacked in a cupboard nearby. Ever since the publication of “Orlando” in 1928, it was known that Vita and Virginia Woolf had been lovers; unwittingly, Nigel himself had helped in the making of that “love letter”. His father, too, had had homosexual affairs, and yet his parents had stayed contentedly together.

The book he wrote in 1973 on the basis of those papers, “Portrait of a Marriage”, became a sensation, and he found himself enmeshed in the cogs of the Bloomsbury industry. He edited his father's diaries not once, but twice; he published his mother's letters and, in six volumes, the letters of Virginia Woolf. On tours of America, he would be introduced as the last survivor and heir of the Bloomsbury group.

The silver vase

He was not its last survivor, but he was its heir in unexpected ways. Between garden chores at Sissinghurst, Harold had dinned into him the importance of truthfulness, no matter how awkward: a Bloomsbury virtue in relationships, at least. Nigel took that attitude into both politics and publishing, and made a name for himself by defying government.

He was billed as a Tory, but believed he should not commit his conscience until he had had experience of Parliament. This caused nothing but trouble in Bournemouth, his staunchly Tory seat beside the sea. He was the only Tory backbencher to support Sidney Silverman's bill to abolish hanging, and one of the few to refuse to back the Tory government over Suez. When Bournemouth's Tories at last got rid of him, in 1959, his father sent him a silver vase inscribed Aliis licet, tibi non licet: “Others may do it, but you must not”.

His constituents were all the more upset because, at the same time, Mr Nicolson was trying to publish “Lolita”, Nabokov's tale of a 12-year-old sex-kitten ensnaring a middle-aged man. He meant it as a test case to expose the absurdities of the Obscene Publications Act; but he never defended the book as full-heartedly as Lord Weidenfeld did. He could not decide whether it was bravely original, or pornography. Its sales saved his publishing house, but he knew that both his parents were appalled by it. That weighed with him.

His biggest test of conscience, however, came in a different case. Immediately after the war he had been involved, in Carinthia, in the forced repatriation of thousands of Yugoslavs and Cossacks. The British had sent them home knowing they would be killed; most of them had been. In 1992, in the course of a libel trial, Mr Nicolson was obliged to admit publicly that he, too, had lied to the Yugoslavs about their fate. Realising they had been betrayed, they hammered desperately on the walls of the cattle trucks. It was, he said, “the most horrible experience of my life”.

It occurred to some that he might have betrayed his own parents almost as cruelly. He had not needed to unlock the Gladstone bag and scatter their infidelities to the world. But Mr Nicolson felt sure his mother had meant the papers to be published, and that the story of his parents' marriage would be an inspiration to others. As their custodian, he sat in the Sissinghurst gazebo with a tranquil heart.