ALL 1 COULD NEVER BE (348 pp.)—Beverley Nichols—Duffon ($4).
_ It was a sunny June evening in the hectic ’30s. In his Westminster house, Beverley Nichols, man of letters, was arraying himself in exquisite evening dress: “Tails by Lesley and Roberts in Hanover Square, waistcoat by Hawes and Curtis . . . silk hat by Locke . . . monk shoes by Fortnum and Mason’s . . . crystal and diamond links by Boucheron . . . gold cigarette case by Asprey … a drop of rose geranium on my handkerchief.” But Beverley was not at ease. While he dressed and sipped a sidecar, he stared into his mirror and asked himself anxiously: “What is wrong with you? Why aren’t you happy?”
The answer reached Beverley (like most of his answers) in the form of a three-decker cliché. He was unhappy because “the clouds were gathering over Europe … the tragedy of Geneva hastening to its final act … the disciples of rearmament beginning to raise their voices.” And what, if anything, could a playboy like Beverley do to disperse the clouds, delay the final act, silence the raised voices? All I Could Never Be, Nichols’ second autobiographical book, tells exactly what Beverley did; but, as it is well spiced with rose-geranium anecdotes and set against a backdrop of Mayfair and Riviera high life, its place on the library shelf is beside Noel Coward and Sir Osbert Sitwell rather than beside Oswald Spengler and St. Augustine.
Caviar & Melba. Beverley began his glamorous career (in 1921) as a reporter for London’s gaudy Sunday Dispatch. The aim of this journal was to supply its readers with “an astonishing array of obscure countesses, viscountesses and . . . wives of baronets, all pontificating with monotonous regularity on the problems of the hour.” As many of these noble ladies were “barely literate,” it was up to Beverley to invent their opinions in order to have something to report. The rest of his job was writing what the Dispatch called “caviar-and-champagne” items, e.g., MYSTERY DOCTOR DENIES KNOWLEDGE OF COUNTESS; ARAB PRINCE’S STRANGE HOBBY.
It was a happy day for Beverley when the Dispatch dispatched him on an interview with Prima Donna Nellie Melba, to get her views on a currently newsy murder. They became good friends; she introduced him to high society, and he, in return, tried to write her autobiography for her. He found it hard sledding:
“When I asked her to give me a few frank words about Tetrazzini . . . she waved her hands and said: ‘Say she was a charming artist! A delicious artist!’
“I pointed out that only yesterday Melba had said she looked like a cook and faked all her top notes.
” ‘I can’t possibly say things like that. I must be generous.’
” ‘Then what shall we say about Caruso?’
” ‘Say he was a charming artist! A great voice! A superb voice!’
” ‘But what about his habit of squeaking rubber balls in your ear when you were dying in the last act of Bohème?’
” ‘Really! I couldn’t say such things! So vulgar!'”
Beverley soon realized that he was writing the wrong autobiography; he wrote his own instead. Twenty-Five was jampacked with caviar and champagne. It made Beverley one of London’s most popular society reporters.
Havoc & Confession. Thereafter, Beverley met everyone, from Gertrude Stein (like “seeing Gibraltar at dawn”) to Queen Elizabeth (he played her a Chopin étude when she was Duchess of York). But the person who turned his glamorous life upside down was Journalist Dorothy Woodman (wife of New Statesman Editor Kingsley Martin), who convinced him in the twinkling of an eye that war was just “a racket.” Beverley had found the “cause” he needed to balance his “idiotic life” as a bright young thing. The book that resulted from his conversion, Cry Havoc (1933), proved to be one of the influential works of the decade. Like a match to a bonfire, it touched off, as he says himself, “the frenzied debates … in which the youth of England swore never to fight for King and country.”
Beverley himself became conscious of a religious urge, and found his way into Dr. Frank Buchman’s “Oxford Group.” Beverley was not impressed by Leader Buchman, who was “so slick and starched and glossy that he suggested an American dentist: one felt he was always on the point of saying ‘Open wide!'” But he fell for the Groupers’ open-wide habit of confessing their sins to each other—until the disillusioning day when he himself tried to confess to a young lady-Grouper. With a scream of “Oh, really!” his confessor “shot away like a frightened deer.”
A Hatlike Hothouse. With “great sobs tearing me to pieces,” Beverley was soon carted off to a mental home, suffering from a nervous breakdown. He feared he was going mad—”But if I am . . .” he assured a friend, “I might as well do it with a certain amount of chic.” Instead of going mad. he took the more dangerous course of hunting up a new cause, which he found in the “underdog” condition of the British proletariat. “In the old pacifist days I wanted to blow up the War Office . . . Under the … Oxford Group I wanted to drag people to church by the scruff of their necks, and now … I felt like marching through Claridge’s with a banner proclaiming the doom of the rich.”
Fortunately. News of England (1938), Beverley’s proletarian polemic, was his last causal fling. While other Britons dug trenches in the parks and queued for gas masks, he turned to creating something that would “defend . . . small and beautiful things against … the mass ugliness and beastliness of the herd.” His labors resulted in a domed, floodlit hothouse, planned to resemble “a gigantic reproduction of one of Queen Mary’s hats.”
Today, at 52, Beverley is soberer, but no whit less naive, than when he wrote Twenty-Five. Most of All I Could Never Be is far too simple and sorry to stir up any ruckuses; the rest of it is first-rate gossip. The only ax it has to grind is Beverley himself.
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