YOUNG MR. NICHOLS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 13

YOUNG MR. NICHOLS

ALL I COULD NEVER BE, by Beverley | Nichols; Jonathan Cape. ; FOR so many years the public-and Mr. Nichols himself-have regarded the author as an eccentric young man, | sensationally young, successfully young, | that it is a shock for everybody all | round, including Mr. Nichols, to realise that he is now well into middle age. | Mr. ‘Nichols, indeed, is sadly aggrieved | by the fact, and that note of aggrieved | disillusionment becomes more pronounc- | ed as we turn .the pages of his book of recollections. ‘ He begins in the famous strain of his younger days-that whimsical, come-let- | us-all-be-bright-elves-together manner of | his, half-affectation, half-innate, fetching, but a little cloying also. He finds himself in a house, now given to the public, where once he was very much entertained by a famous hostess; and he takes us back into the past, introducing us, scrappily, to many titled people and even to the Duchess of York, our present Queen, whom he persists, to our confusion, in referring to as Queen at a date she was "no such thing." His work takes on a stronger note as he proceeds; he tells us of his hatkdays in Fleet Street under that charming eccentric Bernard Falk, and goes on to tell of ‘his claim to success and fame with his autobiography, Twentyfive, unintentionally inspired by Dame Melba, ‘the heroine of his novel Evensong, which was publicly burried in Aus‘tralia for remarks to which that country did not take kindly-an act which probably helped sell the book far more than any of the merits it could fairly claim as a novel. In describing the eccentricities of the eccentrics he has met, the author is particularly good-probably because he is (continued on next page) |

BOOKS (continued from previous page) an eccentric himself, always feeling he must play & part, being driven to disgust at himself by something higher which cannot be too well expressed by his pen, and forcing him to jump from one thing to another, from gardens to Frank Buchman, from prima donnas to pacifism-in all a queer mixture of affectation and sincerity, like the book itself, from which a most excellent, if unintentional, portrait of Nichols emerges. clearer. indeed, than his own

photographic frontispiece.

B.L.

C.