Harold Nicolson, Public Faces

Serendipity strikes again. I’ve been editing a book Handheld will be publishing in September 2023, about Hilda Matheson, who was among many other things a lover of Vita Sackville-West, and the Director of Talks for the BBC from 1926 to 1931, for whom Vita and Harold Nicolson, her husband, did online live broadcasts. BBC Director-General John Reith’s outrage at Harold’s talk on James Joyce’s Ulysses was the last straw that drove Hilda to resign from her post in December 1931. Hilda was also a temporary guardian of the Nicolsons’ two young sons while their parents were abroad for Harold’s diplomatic postings. So that’s the background.

Why am I telling you this? Harold Nicolson (diplomat, diarist, novelist, columnist, MP) published a novel in 1932 called Public Faces. It’s a political farce, languid and amused, very much a long clubman’s tale about political oneupmanship between Britain, France, Persia, Germany and the USA that turns on quirks of personality rather than political strategy. One of the lead protagonists is a senior civil servant in the Foreign Office called Jane Campbell, who was modelled on Hilda Matheson. So when I came across Michael Carney’s discussion of the novel during the editing process I was interested in reading it. And then I happened to find a Penguin paperback copy in the Oxfam bookshop in Wells last weekend, so I bought it.

It’s pretty good. (As was noted not that many years ago, it could do well if it were republished.) Nicolson’s depiction of civil service dynamics is utterly persuasive, as are his descriptions of how foreign policies emerge, and have to be balanced against domestic political expediencies. The characters are all nicely separated and quite believable. There is a very senior civil servant called Peabody who is more behind the times than he thinks he is. His ego will be a problem. The Foreign Secretary seems to long only for peace and quiet and can hardly ever get it except when he can fly down to his country house, leaving his wife and daughter to come by train, knowing that this will gain him some hours of solitude on his secret island. The PM is unpredictable and egotistical. Jane Campbell and John Shoreland, Peabody’s two juniors, are far better educated than he is, from higher class strata, and much more on top of things, which he resents. One of these juniors is unfortunately in love with the other.

Peabody’s opposite number in the French FO is subjected to multiple plane flights between London and Paris, with urgent message succeeding urgent message as the situation changes. On each occasion he takes off from Croydon he realises that once again he has forgotten to post his wife’s article, carefully placed in his portfolio, to the editor of the Sunday Times, for which she is the fashion correspondent. She will not be pleased. The Americans, French and Germans are nervous at what the British are up to.

What are they up to? There is an island off Persia for which the British have long held a mining concession. Quite recently and secretly a new mineral has been discovered there, and samples brought back to Britain have yielded unexpected and world-altering results. In effect, the British now have the means to make an atomic bomb, and have already constructed several long-distance rockets to carry them. The Minister of Defence, a former military man, is a little too keen to try these out and not waste time jabbering with foreigners. While initially the European Powers were jostling to gain the favour of the Shah of Persia to control this island and its resources, as soon as Sir Charles Pantry fires his rockets everything changes. An American warship is the first to be accidentally exploded, off the coast of South Carolina. Whoops.

It’s quite a tangle to unravel, and Jane Campbell – a fine portrait of a competent, efficient, supremely well-organised and resourceful adviser – does in fact save the day. I’m not sure that Hilda would have appreciated the rather lubricious appreciation from the authorial voice for Jane’s hips and other bodily attractions, but perhaps that was just Harold’s little joke.

Given Harold’s antipathy for John Reith, the pig-headed Presbyterian bigot who controlled the BBC’s output (‘the man has a head of bone’), it’s enjoyable to read that the novel’s quite useless British ambassador to Washington is also called John Reith. It’s interesting that Harold reused H G Well’s neologism of ‘atomic bomb’ from 1914 (according to the OED), though I’m not sure he would have followed the science. Harold also takes his narrative well into the 1940s, in which of course there is no World War Two. It’s really very odd reading paragraphs prefaced with ‘In 1940 …’ and ‘In 1945 …’ with no mention of war at all.

Public Faces is what the Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction calls a ‘near future’ sf novel, but I doubt Harold would have thought of it as that. He was far more interested in the workings-out of political complexities, which are extremely well done.