The Prose of One Who Stopped and Smelled the Roses

For 13 years (1958-71), Nick B. Williams was editor of The Times, dealing with war, natural disaster and human cussedness--the stuff of news. Under his hand, The Times grew from a provincial right-wing sheet to one of the world’s acknowledged great newspapers.

All this time, though, Nick was suppressing, or perhaps nurturing, his natural urge to write about flowers, cats, birds, women and the mystery of life. When he retired, he began to pour out a stream of essays on those subjects.

Now his family has collected these exuberant pieces, written for The Times editorial pages, in “Reflections on a Mockingbird” (M & M Printing, Pomona.)

I guarantee this book will make you feel more alive.

I worked for Nick Williams all the time he was editor. I loved him. He was decisive. He was smart. He was old-fashioned, in an endearing way. He was generous. His humor mellowed and sustained us.

One day I received a letter from a young woman who taught school in a central Indiana farm town. She had seen my column in the Gary (Ind.) paper and thought I lived there. She invited me to her wedding.

Nick happened to be passing through the city room and I caught up with him and handed him the letter, for laughs. He speed-read it and handed it back.

“You’re going, of course,” he said. My mouth fell open. “When a lady invites a gentleman from The Times to her wedding,” he said, “he goes.”

I went.

Nick’s secret life emerges in full flower in these essays. He wrote of watching a movie scene in which James Bond was plying a gorgeous blonde with caviar and ice-cold vodka. “We were out of vodka but I chilled two ounces of old Dr. Gordon’s Home Specific. Canned anchovies on rye substituted for the caviar. The blonde didn’t seem essential to the formula, and I was, if only for a moment, James Bond himself. Or Walter Mitty.”

Many of the essays were written from Trinidad, the tiny Northern California town where Nick lived briefly after his retirement. But most are datelined Laguna Beach, where he lived with his second wife, Barbara Steele Williams, until his death, in 1992, at 85.

Nick’s wonderment is perhaps best expressed in a piece called, “What’s It All About, Alfie?” He asked that question of himself, remembering advice given by the sportswriter Grantland Rice years before: “Don’t hurry. Don’t worry, and don’t forget to smell the flowers.”

“Here in Laguna Beach, this time of year,” he reflected, “it is entirely possible to let time slither over you, and to forget . . . that this past one was not the best of summers. And to believe, from what you see about you, that winter will be better and that spring, next year, will mark the swinging of the pendulum. The sun goes down and even as it does the moon is rising. Just keep breathing.”

Nick abhorred exercise, pointing out to his wife that the only exercise tigers take is stretching. He was suspicious of what he called “the illusory and perilous pursuit of youth. . . . I am not one who blasphemes exercise. It has its place. It may be beneficial in some instances, but I shrink--I’ve shrunk a full inch since the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower--but I shrink from anything that takes me from my contemplation of the eternal truths.”

From his stretch of beach, Nick watched the eternal struggle of life in the sea and the sky. He was bemused by the humiliation of his cat, Tom, by a mother mockingbird. “The technique of these lady mockingbirds is murderous, and yet one is compelled to admire their skill. They flutter six or so feet over the next cat that they intend to brutalize, emitting raucous cries, and then they dive straight down like Stukas--POW!--zooming toward the sky before their stricken victims can strike back.”

Nick fancied himself a cook. He spent an entire afternoon in the kitchen trying to make a mincemeat pie like his grandmother used to make. Inspired by some bits of leftover steak, he threw in everything he could find--cinnamon, cloves, mace, fruit and chopped suet--adding brandy and nipping at it frequently from the bottle. When his wife came home she asked what he had made--some kind of glue? He said: “‘Throw it away, and bring me several aspirin.”

He wrote on the demise of skinny-dipping, the war between the mockingbirds and the crows, the sea gull who came to dinner, whales, the stars, the strange bird in the bathrobe and the return of the bad news birds.

Nick was aware of his mortality. He recalled a trip to Rome when he and his first wife, Elizabeth, found themselves at John Keats’ grave and read his epitaph: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Nick reflected: “But in the hush I doubt poor Keats now really cared.”