by Martin Amis
When she did go (and she has maintained her links with Aberfan), she involuntarily revealed why she had stayed away. In the photographs, you can see the terror as well as the pity in her eyes, and the doubt. She was the Queen. What did Aberfan tell her about the state of Great Britain? And what did it tell her about her habitual (and sincere) worship of a beneficent deity? One of her titles is Defender of the Faith, a mission close to her (Protestant) heart; and that faith was rattled at Aberfan. Monarchical emotion is emotion hugely magnified. It asks for a detachment that Queen Elizabeth only imperfectly commands.
She respects sincerity, and cannot fake it. This is one of Lacey’s typically pertinent anecdotes:
Early in her reign, Elizabeth II was due to visit the Yorkshire town of Kingston upon Hull and asked one of her private secretaries to prepare a first draft of her speech.
“I am very pleased to be in Kingston today,” the draft confidently started.
The young queen crossed out the word “very.”
“I will be pleased to be in Kingston,” she explained. “But I will not be very pleased.”
One duly notes that she was, nonetheless, “pleased” to mingle with various humdrum worthies in the dour surrounds of Kingston upon Hull. The woman is adamantine. How could she emote, to order, for the definitively brittle Diana?
It was to be, in effect, her first live televised speech—in two senses. The Queen addressed the people in real time; and she also had to show them the live being, the creature of glands and membranes. She spoke from the Chinese Dining Room in Buckingham Palace. The windows were open, and you could hear the crowd, ten thousand or more, milling and murmuring in the background. An aide asked the Queen, “Do you think you can do it?” And she answered, “If that’s what I’ve got to do.” The countdown began; the floor manager mouthed “Go.”
She was being asked to confront an intense need that she didn’t understand. No one understood it. Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober’s The Monarchy: An Oral Biography of Elizabeth II, contains, at this point, entry after entry from assorted insiders expressing blunt incomprehension of the public mood: “absolutely amazed…really amazing…beyond my capacity to understand…inexplicable…astonished…staggered,” and so on. And we still don’t understand it. My best guess is that the phenomenon was millennial. Human beings have always behaved strangely when the calendric zeros loom. And Dianamania bore several clear affinities to the excesses described in (for example) Norman Cohn’s classic The Pursuit of the Millennium: it involved mass emotion; it exalted a personage of low cultural level; it was self-flagellatory in tendency; and it was very close to violence. The phenomenon was, then, part of mankind’s cyclical festival of irrationality. In the Middle Ages and beyond, Cohn shows, something like this—the exaltation of an illiterate ploughboy—happened without fail not every thousand years but every hundred, and every fifty.
“So what I say to you now,” Elizabeth II made clear, “as your Queen and as a grandmother, I say from my heart.” It was an extraordinary act of balance: she gave a near-pathological populace what it wanted, while remaining true to her own being. Of the two words they most needed to hear, she allowed them one (“grief”), but not the other (see below). She didn’t sell her integrity to the delusive yearnings of the many. Nor did she attempt the solace of aphoristic eloquence. Curiously enough, she saved that for the events of September 11: “Grief is the price we pay for love.” And there is the word that England thirsted to hear. One final, mangled irony: Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, was an Egyptian Muslim. “TO DIANA AND DODI,” read the inscription on one floral tribute, “TOGETHER IN HEAVEN.” But which heaven?
And it was not yet over. With the Windsors, a familial drama inevitably becomes a national drama; but the drama had now become global. At dinner on Friday, it was still uncertain whether the two young princes would walk behind the gun carriage that held their mother’s coffin; and “their composure,” as Lacey notes, “would be the pivot on which the whole occasion turned.” The struggle, once again, was not to divulge emotion but to master it. This was a heavy call on their courage, and, of the two, Prince William was the more uncertain. The royal, the kingly thing, plainly, was to walk. Prince Philip, who had not intended to join the cortege, finally asked his grandson, “If I walk, will you walk with me?” And William walked.
If we are to venture into the psyches of the royals, we must first understand that they were all world-famous babies. Driven out of the Royal Mews in an open carriage for her regular airings, the diapered Elizabeth drew large crowds of cheering, waving admirers; one of her earliest skills was to wave back. She made the cover of Time at the age of three. The first biography, The Story of Princess Elizabeth, appeared when she was four. “She has an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant,” wrote Winston Churchill, who would be the first of her ten prime ministers. As the Queen celebrates her seventy-sixth birthday, she can reflect that the only time she misbehaved in public was at her christening. She cried throughout, and had to be dosed with dill water.
And Princess Elizabeth was, at this stage, a minor royal. She was the granddaughter of George V (whom she called Grandpa England), and the niece of the heir apparent, Edward, Prince of Wales. The King died in January 1936, when Elizabeth was nine. On December 10, Edward VIII signed the Instrument of Abdication (in order to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson) and, in his later wanderings, became a living example of royal futility. The ten-year-old now became the heir presumptive. While her father, who was suddenly George VI, went off to the Accession Council on December 12, Princess Elizabeth and her sister, Princess Margaret, were given a refresher course on their curtsies by their governess, Marion Crawford; on his return they greeted him with this formality, and it jolted him. “He stood for a moment touched and taken aback. Then he stooped and kissed them both warmly,” Crawford wrote. “Does that mean you’re going to be Queen?” was a question Margaret put to her sister. “Yes, I suppose it does,” said Elizabeth. “Poor you,” said Margaret. Their grandmother Lady Strathmore noticed that Elizabeth had started “ardently praying for a brother.”
Prince Philip of Greece was her third cousin, and she had known him, slightly, since childhood. The coup de foudre seems to have come when she was thirteen and he was an eighteen-year-old cadet—and the Second World War was six weeks away. Although penniless and homeless, and a nomad all his life, Philip could boast a sensational pedigree (he had a great-great-grandmother in common with Elizabeth: Queen Victoria). His penurious father moped in Monte Carlo. His deaf mother fancied that she was the mistress of both Jesus Christ and Buddha; Freud himself advised radiation of the ovaries “to accelerate the menopause.” The mental frailty of Diana Spencer has sometimes been attributed to her unhappy childhood. Much more graphic insecurity had the opposite effect on Philip, investing him with a brisk, and sometimes brusque, self-sufficiency. Elizabeth knew what she would be needing in a husband—a source of strength. And this was the strength that Philip was still able to offer his grandsons, nearly sixty years later, on that Saturday in 1997.
Philip and Elizabeth both had a “good” war, Philip distinguishing himself on the battleship Valiant, Elizabeth forming part of the royal tableau vivant of national solidarity (Hitler called her mother “the most dangerous woman in Europe”). The two of them corresponded, and there were visits to Windsor and elsewhere when Philip was on leave. Early in 1947, Elizabeth went abroad for the first time, to South Africa; the idea was to train her up for royal responsibilities but also to test the constancy of her feelings for Philip, to whom she was now unofficially engaged. On April 21, her twenty-first birthday, she addressed the Empire and the Commonwealth, and the speech was to be broadcast from Cape Town. “It has made me cry,” she admitted, after reviewing the final draft. Elizabeth was talking to her people, but one suspects that she was also talking to her future husband:
It is very simple. I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be
devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong. But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution alone unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do: I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God help me to make good my vow, and God bless all of you who are willing to share in it.
It is not very simple, is it—to agree to become a metaphor? At the time, Philip told a friend, “This is my destiny—to support my wife in what lies ahead for her.”
They married later that year—a flash of luxury in the postwar monochrome. Within three months, Elizabeth was carrying Charles III. Philip was posted to Malta, and for a while she experienced the unrelieved exoticism of ordinary life. They were in Kenya when word of the King’s death reached the royal party. An old friend passed the news on to Philip, and later said, “I never felt so sorry for anyone in all my life.” George VI was fifty-six. The total claim on the young couple’s freedom was now formally submitted. “He took her up to the garden,” the friend went on. “And they walked slowly up and down the lawn while he talked and talked and talked to her.”
In addition to their innumerable duties, almost all of them excruciating, the Royal Family has one main function: to go on being a family. In The Royals, Kitty Kelley’s louche but lively blockbuster of 1997, the most capacious subsection in the index for Prince Philip is “and women” (“76, 152, 154–55, 159–60, 192, 196, 265, 422, 423–27, 510–11”). Lacey’s emphasis falls the other way (“rumors of infidelities, 166–168, 212”). And there is certainly a moral persuasiveness in Philip’s confidence to a relative, “How could I be unfaithful to the Queen? There is no way that she could possibly retaliate.” The skittish Diana could not dissimulate her exasperation with married life; but neither could the duteous Charles. The demeanor of his father and mother, at least to this distant observer, is eloquent of mutual ease and admiration. Anyway, there they are, still, in 2002.
Divorce is modern, and monarchs must fear modernity. Now modernity came to the Windsors in the form of their children. When Princess Margaret broke up with Antony Armstrong-Jones, it was the first royal divorce in centuries. It used to be the case that the Lord Chamberlain personally excluded the divorced from the Queen’s presence. “In later years the Lord Chamberlain’s duties were modified,” Kelley writes, her acerbity finding its mark, “so the Queen could visit her divorced cousins, her divorced sister, her divorced daughter, and her two divorced sons, including the heir to the throne.” Meanwhile, her third son, Edward (recently married), was somehow acquiring the nickname of Dockyard Doris.
So we come to 1992, the “annus horribilis.” Princess Anne divorced in April. In August, the Duchess of York—Fergie—was photographed topless with a “financial adviser” (who was administering the famous “toe job”). At this juncture, another tabloid released the “Squidgygate” tapes, in which Diana pillow-talked on the phone with a young car salesman. And that November it was revealed that Charles had been recorded while having a similarly intimate chat with Camilla Parker Bowles. Long intrigued by the idea of the transmigration of souls, Charles saw himself reborn as, “God forbid, a Tampax,” so that he could “just live inside your trousers.” The Camillagate and Squidgygate tapes were both available on phone lines provided by the newspapers. You could listen to Charles saying, “I want to feel my way along you, all over you and up and down you and in and out…particularly in and out.” Then you could listen to Diana saying, “Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family.” Then came the great fire at Windsor. The monarchy was burning.
Or so it seemed. In fact, only Diana had the power to bring it all down; and this was her semisubliminal intention. George Orwell, in his long essay “The English People,” described the placards in the streets during the Silver Jubilee celebrations for George V, in 1935: “Some of the London slum streets bore…the rather servile slogan ‘Poor but Loyal.’ ” Other slogans, though, “coupled loyalty to the King with hostility to the landlord, such as ‘Long Live the King. Down with the Landlord,’ or more often, ‘No Landlords Wanted’ or ‘Landlords Keep Away.’ ” Orwell elaborates:
The affection shown for George V…was obviously genuine, and it was even possible to see in it the survival, or recrudescence, of an idea almost as old as history, the idea of the King and the common people being in a sort of alliance against the upper classes.
What Diana tried to bring about was an alliance between herself and the common people against the Royal Family. “The People’s Princess” was an entirely sophistical notion—and it worked. Despite the “pattern of deceit and narcissism” (Lacey), the schemes and manipulations, and the near-Sicilian taste for revenge, Diana, of course, had a genius for love—for indiscriminate love. Her besetting humor was self-pity; and temporary relief from its corrosiveness, I think, lay behind the undoubted force of her presence among the suffering. This connects again to the dangerous emotions that attended her death. Self-pity is a natural component of grief, of a roused sense of mortality, but in Dianamania it sourly predominated. “Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family”: in the end, horribly, what she did for the family was to die. It was a little Restoration.
This project of Diana’s was doubly radical, because the monarchy is maintained by love. If you are English, then your patriotism is unconscious (Orwell again); when it becomes conscious, and focused, it surprises you with a sense of hunger awakened and allayed. The feeling is unmistakably familial. “A princely marriage is the brilliant edition of a universal fact,” Bagehot wrote, “and as such, it rivets mankind.” The same could be said of a princely funeral—or, nowadays, of a princely divorce. The Royal Family is just a family, writ inordinately large. They are the glory, not the power; and it would clearly be far more grown-up to do without them. But riveted mankind is hopelessly addicted to the irrational, with reliably disastrous results, planetwide. The monarchy allows us to take the occasional holiday from reason; and on that holiday we do no harm.
The New Yorker 2002
More Personal 1
You Ask the Questions 1*
How is John Self (from Money) doing in 2001? What about Keith Talent (London Fields)?
Chris O’Hare, Belfast
John still works in advertising. He no longer toys with the prospect of a career in Hollywood. He has traded in his Fiasco for a secondhand Culprit. He has gained yet more weight, and his girlfriends are not getting any younger. But sometimes I think he is reading a little bit more than he used to.
Keith goes away every winter: to prison. In the temperate months, he lives semirough way up Ladbroke Grove. He never sees his wife and daughter (who are both fine). He still hopes for fame in the world of professional darts, though less ardently, believing that all this clean-look rubbish has destroyed the sport’s historical links with the pub.
But these are just guesses. Curiously, the moment you type that last full stop, your characters gain, or regain, free will. At the end of Night Train, I make it look as if the narrator-heroine’s suicide is inevitable and imminent. Every now and then, though, I think she came through and survived.
In memory and thought your minor characters are perhaps static, but the main ones continue to have their world (not very often visited), where they strive and age.
Have you read Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? If not, why not?
Katie Bowden, by e-mail
I have read Zadie Smith, and with a constant smile of admiration. I haven’t read Dave Eggers’s book, but I have read the title, and that took quite a while. The Nabokov novel we know as Invitation to a Beheading was for a while called “Invitation to an Execution,” but the “repeated suffix” was of course avoided. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius has two -ings in it. But I’m embarrassed to say that my immersion in Eggers is only title deep. I did an event with him once, and found him very likable and articulate.
You have attacked the brutality of jour
nalists, yet when young, you could be a savage reviewer of older writers. Do you regret that now?
Joseph Dartford, Hertfordshire
Insulting people in print is a vice of youth and a minor corruption of power. You ought to stop doing it as you get older, or else you look like mutton dressed as lamb. Insulting people in your middle age is undignified, and looks more and more demented as you head toward the twilight. The increasingly twitchy and uncertain figure of Tom Paulin, still insulting away, springs to mind. I think I did write a couple of career-ending reviews in my youth, and, yes, I do regret that.
Do you believe that you have evolved into the “New Man,” as you describe yourself in your latest work, The War Against Cliché?
Jazz Kilburn-Toppin, by e-mail
I said that the “New Man” (an idealistic figure of the 1970s) was in danger of becoming an old man prematurely, what with all the housework he’s done. I had (and have) a hand in raising four children. I got through that without becoming a New Man, but not without becoming an old one.
Why are the classics of modern US fiction superior to their British equivalents?
Peter Miley, Plymouth
Perhaps because America is the center of the world—just as we were in the nineteenth century, and had all those epic novels to prove it. But the days of American centrality are numbered, and I think British fiction is in very good health, now that it includes Indian fiction, Australian fiction, and all the rest.