25

25 by Beverley Nichols

Beverley Nichols's 25 is an autobiographical account of the author's experiences and encounters from his late teens through his mid-twenties, written with a light, witty, and often self-deprecating tone. The book opens with Nichols at nineteen, traveling to America as secretary to the British Universities Mission shortly before the end of the First World War, and proceeds through a series of vivid episodes organized around the remarkable people he meets rather than strict chronology. The American section introduces a cast of notable figures including President Woodrow Wilson, whom Nichols observes as exhausted and burdened by the complexities of wartime diplomacy, and former President William Howard Taft, presented as warm, jovial, and unexpectedly funny. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, is dispatched as a pompous dispenser of platitudes, while Elihu Root emerges as a rare example of genuine political integrity. The mission itself is portrayed with comic affection, its elderly and eccentric professors losing boots in hotels, predicting catastrophe, and navigating American hospitality with varying degrees of dignity. The group carries a stuffed toy rabbit named Cuthbert as a mascot, who is smuggled into the White House concealed in an overcoat. American journalism, vast wealth, and the contrast between vulgar new money and the quiet simplicity of figures like J. P. Morgan are observed with sharp but good-humored eyes. Morgan allows Nichols to hold a lock of Keats's hair from his extraordinary manuscript collection, a moment rendered with genuine feeling. After returning to England, Nichols goes up to Oxford, where he moves among a remarkable concentration of literary talent gathered in the aftermath of the war. John Masefield is portrayed as the most admirable of these figures, combining great humility with generosity of spirit, bicycling eight miles through snow to read poetry to undergraduates and donating two sonnets, including the celebrated poem beginning "Be with me, Beauty, for the fire is dying," to a student magazine without payment. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, is presented as a magnificent and leonine figure who freely dispenses the word "damn." W. B. Yeats drifts through Oxford in a permanent dream, crossing streets oblivious to traffic and expressing the view that if the English could only learn to believe in fairies there would be no Irish problem. The Sitwell siblings, Osbert and Sacheverell, are celebrated for their wit, their provocations of academic authority, and their inspired entries in Who's Who. G. K. Chesterton visits to debate divorce, sketching grotesque figures in lieu of notes and delivering an impromptu second speech of considerable intellectual force on the nature of symbols and institutions, while being firmly managed throughout by his diminutive wife. Oxford also brings Nichols into contact with political figures. As president of the Oxford Union, he invites both Winston Churchill and Horatio Bottomley to speak. Churchill is shown as a vigorous, forceful presence who lectures Nichols on the discipline required for writing, arranges his cutlery to illustrate Napoleonic campaigns, and then frets the following morning that his unguarded remarks about Russia have gone unrecorded. Bottomley, later imprisoned for fraud, arrives as a grotesque and compelling figure who disarms a potentially hostile audience with a frank acknowledgment of his lack of their educational advantages before delivering an oratorical performance of extraordinary power. Asquith dines at Balliol and reveals a passionate nostalgia for Oxford, while Mrs. Asquith throws flowers into the crowd and proves far more sympathetic than her public reputation suggests. A substantial section is devoted to a ghost story centered on a derelict house called Weir near the Nichols family home in Devon. The author, his brother, and a friend named Peter investigate the house on a moonlit night. Nichols experiences a sensation resembling the onset of anesthesia and is forced outside, while Peter, going in alone, is knocked down by something he can only describe as black, shaped like a man, and utterly silent. It is subsequently discovered that the house was the scene of a double murder decades earlier, committed in the very room identified as the source of the disturbance. A second ghost story involves all the clocks in Peter's family home stopping simultaneously at two minutes to one on a night when Peter witnessed an unknown old woman vanish into a locked and empty room. The Greek section describes Nichols's journey to Athens in late 1921, where he has been invited to research and write a work vindicating King Constantine, who is regarded by the Allies as a traitor. The journey through Belgrade is rendered as a study in postwar desolation, while Greece itself is greeted with rapturous description. Nichols is received with unexpected ceremony at the frontier and proceeds to Athens, where he dines superbly for very little money, visits the Acropolis by moonlight, and is received by both Queen Sophie and King Constantine. Sophie is presented as genuinely tragic, homesick for England where she grew up under Queen Victoria, caught between love of both England and Germany, and subjected to crude social ostracism during her exile in Switzerland. Constantine conducts a methodical rebuttal of the charges against him, arguing that he repeatedly warned the Allies about Bulgaria, refused to join a Dardanelles campaign he knew would fail, and at a critical moment warned the Kaiser that any incursion into Greek territory would mean war, thereby saving the Allied army. The atmosphere of Athens is rich with Russian refugees, intrigue, cosmopolitan adventurers, and the comedy of British Legation staff forced to flee whenever they encounter the unrecognized royal family. A late-night encounter with an armed and apparently deranged Frenchman on a deserted road is resolved by a well-placed kick and undignified flight. The final sections of the book shift to journalism and London. Nichols interviews William Orpen, who discusses painting, historical periods, and the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb with rapid, elliptical brilliance. He meets Elinor Glyn, who is precisely as her novels suggest and speaks with passionate contempt for the slack modern woman before revealing unexpected philosophical depth. He attends the trial of Edith Thompson and Fred Bywaters, describing the courtroom atmosphere with controlled outrage at the spectacle of beautiful, passionate love letters read aloud as evidence in a murder trial, and visiting the family with quiet compassion. H. L. Mencken visits London and delivers a sustained tirade against architectural degradation and advertising. Rudolf Valentino is interviewed and found to be interested primarily in his own photographs and his tailor. The French caricaturist Sem explains that he never draws from life but waits until memory distills his subjects into their essential animal forms. Vladimir de Pachmann plays Chopin in two different fingerings, recounts a love affair interrupted by a cupboard full of jam, and observes that London's sky weeps with him until he turns to music. Throughout, the book is less a conventional memoir than a gallery of vivid portraits, unified by Nichols's persona as a young man of charm, curiosity, and considerable social agility who finds himself, through a combination of talent and luck, admitted to an extraordinary range of company during a period of turbulent historical change.

By Beverley Nichols · Genre: Autobiography, Biography, Essay Collection · 27 chapters

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