by Clive James
Who was she? She was us. That was her secret and her nemesis. All of us must spend our lives fighting the internal battle between what we are and what people want us to be, and many of us are handicapped in the struggle by a deficient or fluctuating sense of what we are. But Diana was unusual, even among the stricken, for a sense of self that within a single hour could wink out to nothing or expand to embrace the world. As I said in my obituary – from the viewpoint of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, it was the only real boldness in the piece – I suspected quite early on in my fleeting acquaintance with Diana that she was mentally unstable. It has sometimes been put to me since then that if I knew that about her I should have had nothing to do with her. I can think of two answers, the first more obvious than the second. The first answer is that her living presence had the same effect as some of Botticelli’s models obviously had on Botticellli, who might well have been at his most serious when he conceded that Savonarola was right to want his pictures burned, but was at his most human when he behaved as if the beauty before his eyes was a heavenly mandate to get painting immediately. In my trade I meet a lot of women who are renowned for looking perfect. Diana didn’t look that, but she did look alive. She looked like life itself. To the argument that no man of sense would have thought twice about her if she had been a check-out girl in Tesco, the only possible reply is that she would have been the classiest thing to hit Tesco since bottled water.
But as the late Sir Kingsley Amis might have put it, she wasn’t a check-out girl, was she? No, she was the Princess of Wales. So I bathed in her starlight the same as any other man who got the nod. And once admitted to her acquaintance, there could not have been many men who wanted to be rid of her before she wanted to be rid of them. She was too fascinating, and was made even more so by one’s awareness that she knew how to be fascinating, and was working the trick as a baseball pitcher might keep his arm in shape by throwing rocks at a tin can. If Ortega was right to say that a man flirts so as to make the public woman momentarily reveal her private personality, then Diana knew how to reward flirtation, and the reward became only the more precious as you realized that a different private personality was being revealed every time. The lights were on, and everybody was at home. She was an all-star cast of knockout troublemakers: Bathsheba, Salome, Helen of Troy, Circe, Medea, Dido, Messalina, Francesca da Rimini, Lucrezia Borgia, Mary Stuart, Catherine the Great, Lola Montez, Thérèse Raquin, Anna Karenina, Marie du Plessis, Mata Hari, Isadora Duncan, Aimée Semple McPherson, Mildred Pierce, Eva Peron, Betty Blue, Betty Boop, Jessica Rabbit. You were looking at the inspiration of literature from the beginning of history, and she had never read a book. Try not being fascinated by that.
The second answer, the less obvious one, is the one worth expounding, because an awful lot of pious rhetoric has been lavished on the pretence that it had no substance. As many protean personalities do, but to a degree made irresistible by her beauty and position, she had the gift of reflecting a man’s best self back to him. At one level it was part of her gift for deception, and what that gift was like when it was working against you I hate to think. (It certainly worked against her: when she realized what her charm could do to disarm an editor, she made the supreme mistake of believing that she could manage the press, as if a fire could be put out with selective squirts of petrol.) But at another level it was enchanting, because she couldn’t have made it work with so many people unless she was genuinely receptive to the possibilities of life, having so many of its creative impulses within her own soul. There was always an easy thousand words to be written – some of the name columnists on the Diana beat were paid for the words at a pound each – about the remarkable extent to which she was uneducated. Few ever wrote about the remarkable extent to which she was educable. She must have had a natural feeling for words, for example, because by the time I knew her she had taught herself to speak with verve and to the point. She had read, and continued to read, nothing except hocus-pocus, but apart from the occasional malapropism she was a pleasure to hear.
At her funeral service, the melody that best reflected her later tastes was the work of Verdi, not Elton John. She came a long way in her appreciation of music, and the best inference was that this was because she was a born listener, just as she was a born dancer. It was often pointed out that she had no idea of how dedicated a real ballet dancer’s life has to be. I suspect that she had a very good idea, and regretted that she had found out too late, or anyway had begun in the wrong place. (The old Irish joke whose punchline is ‘I wouldn’t start from here’ applies exactly.) Deborah Bull’s marvellous writings are now with us to make clear what the life a real dancer has to lead is like, and incidentally they tell us about the sort of background from which she has to emerge. It is rarely an aristocratic one. Diana’s upbringing could scarcely have been more inimical to any kind of concentrated effort. All the more remarkable, then, that she became so appreciative of concentrated effort in the short years of her adulthood. It was one of the forces that combined to pull her apart. She couldn’t see a doctor in action without wanting to be his nurse. She envied anyone with a vocation. You could call it bubble-headed dilettantism if you liked, but to assume that it was part of some sophisticated pose was a failure of the imagination. For those bent on her destruction in print, it would have been more accurate and thus more useful to call her naïve. Though she had the con artist’s deadly knack of assessing a stranger’s character from how he spoke and stood, she would take his role in life at his own estimation, and captivate him by being in awe of it. No doubt there is something crazy about a woman who can’t meet a ditch-digger without letting him think that she harbours a frustrated dream of digging ditches. But ask the ditch-digger what he thinks. He thinks that she has flattered the life into him.
Of the harm she could do there is still no full telling, and I rather hope that we will never be told. But of the good that was in her there is not enough said. Writers shame themselves who devote their valuable skills to calling her charitable impulse a grandstand play. It is true – this can never be said too often either – that the kind of charity work Prince Charles does is a hundred times more demanding of time and discipline than anything his dizzy wife ever attempted. But with this talent as with any other, the Gods are erratic in how they dish it out, and they gave Diana the talent to visit the helpless with an injection of the Holy Spirit. How much she did with that talent is open to question. I suppose her compassion for landmine victims would have carried more conviction if she had cared less for the genius of Gianni Versace. But there should be no doubt that her damaged psyche carried unusual powers of sympathy. They couldn’t do much to help her – turned inwards, pity was one of her most lethal enemies – but they could do wonders for other people, a category which surely included, at least in the early stages of a liaison, those men who were granted the dubious blessing of her intimacy. In retrospect, redeeming features in Dodi Fayed are hard to find, but it is a safe bet that when he was near her he was at his best. She probably saw something in him, and got him to agree. It was the key to her way with the men in her life, most of whom, we should remember, have honoured her memory by keeping their counsel. The poor, damned James Hewitt was the exception, not the rule. (Even Will Carling tried to shut up, but found that the press pack was rather heavier, and faster on its feet, than any other pack he had ever faced: he must have thought that Jonah Lomu had been cloned into a regiment.) She overestimated Hewitt as she overestimated everyone, a tropism typical in those who lack self-esteem. Part of her downfall was that all her geese were swans. But Hewitt was unique in taking revenge on her for her credulity. From the men she cared most about we have heard nothing, a silence whose full fortitude is hard to estimate from outside. Only Prince Charles, subject to overwhelming pressure, has said so much as a word, and all who wish him well can only hope that he never feels bound to say another. The men who know most have said least, and the man who knows everything has said almost nothing, and that’s how it should be.
So when I first lunched with Diana in a public restaurant, my first thought was for my own welfare. Already enjoying the questionable privilege of a small measure of celebrity of my own, I knew the phone would start to ring that same afternoon, and I knew that anything I said would go straight into the database, to be quoted from in any context from then on, especially if the context was unfavourable. From the minute I sat down I was already cast in the role of Eats With Princesses. For the sort of commentator for whom ‘antipodean’ is a long, hard, funny word, anything I said on the subject would be grist to the mill. So for my own sake I resolved to keep my trap shut. But there was an additional element, and a much more important one. I was already appalled by the sheer amount of what was being written about her, whatever its nature. Not all of it was nonsense, but even the sensible stuff was part of an avalanche. Silence might have been a small gesture, but sometimes a small gesture is the only meaningful one you can make, especially when you are afraid. And I wasn’t just afraid of having my own small name attached to her big name, in the way that superannuated Mafia button-men, their achievements forgotten, find themselves remembered for their connections with Frank Sinatra. I was afraid of the storm. I didn’t want to be part of it. I was afraid of what it had already done to her, and of what it would do next.
The only significant thing I left out of the obituary was that I counselled her against going to America. When she raised the subject of how Jackie Kennedy had managed her later life, it wasn’t hard to guess what was going on in the Royal head. I told her that Jackie Kennedy had, to a certain extent, been able to choose privacy; that the same choice would never be available for a runaway Princess; and that she would need a private army, because the sidewalks of New York were very wide, and it was a long walk between the front door and the limousine. I all but told her what was really on my mind, which was that if she went to the United States she would almost certainly be assassinated. To say so at the time would have sounded like paranoia. Alas, it sounds less like that now. All I was wrong about was where the storm was taking her. It wasn’t to America, it was to Paris and the tunnel.
Anyway, the phone rang most days until her death. I suppose it would have rung less often since if I had kept to my rule and gone on saying nothing even when she died. The only excuse I can plead is shock. My answering machine filled up with messages from every publication and television channel: some of the names I knew all too well. People whose attentions had helped drive her to the wall were begging my help in decorating her coffin with their cheap wreaths. There were calls from Australia, from America, from Hong Kong. What it must have been like for those whose acquaintance with her amounted to more than a few short hours, Christ only knows. Not to respond was easy. It has been just as easy since. But on that awful day after the night Diana died, a great natural psychologist made it hard. Tina Brown called from Long Island and told me what she hoped I would do. When I said that I couldn’t possibly, she read my voice and asked what else I was going to do for the next few days.
It was the right question. Like so many others, I had been surprised by my own wretchedness and needed distraction from it with a job of work. Much has been made since of how the country and the world went mad in a self-regarding ecstasy, a populist frenzy that threatened the rule of reason. There is truth in that argument. The devastated Royal Family had a right to their seclusion. So-called popular opinion had no business hauling them out of it, although it was my impression that it was the press, and not the people it presumed to speak for, who stormed the gates. There is even something in the admonition that bigger tragedies happen every day. There is something, but not, I think, all that much. It is all too true that less illustrious victims are taken by the hour in circumstances inconceivably more cruel, and that there have been times when much younger ones have been taken by the million. But anti-populist oracles seldom consider the possibility that the people might already have known all that. Nor, if they knew all that, were they necessarily weeping at such a brutal reminder that sudden death, if it could come for her, could come for anyone, and thus for them. To believe they were weeping solely for themselves, you have to believe they were all selfish. My own bet, based on my own experience, is that the much-derided masses felt the pain of losing someone they loved.
No doubt they got above themselves, but I would be the last person to say they had no right to. Not that I favour populism as a political creed. I ceased to believe in the credentials of New Labour when Tony Blair read the lesson at Diana’s funeral. I wish John Prescott had read it instead: we might have heard the tones of sincerity, whereas populism comes down to a calculation of what will play, and there is no calculation colder than well-rehearsed sentimentality. Diana as the icon of demagogues is a frightening prospect. Julie Burchill is probably an extreme case, but it was very disturbing to find that someone who had gone on record as positively liking the idea that Stalin had killed millions of innocent people should also go potty for the Princess. Pundits who think of the people as an instrument to be played upon – and of course those who fear such a possibility think the same way – have been hailing Diana as a voodoo talisman. There will probably be more of that to come: not so rabid, perhaps, but more insidious for seeming reasonable. I wish I could say that I foresaw such things might happen, and wrote my piece as part of a pre-emptive antidote. But I didn’t need prescience to see the radiance of the icon. What I wanted to celebrate and lament was the radiance of the human being. She might have been less radiant had she possessed more integrity – she would have been less concerned to project her inner fires – but a human being she was.
Thankfully lost in my work, I spent four days writing about her, and have said nothing else about her until now. What I have offered here is not a defence of what I wrote, but a description of its circumstances, for anyone who might feel bound to make a serious study of what went on at an extraordinary time. I can’t tell whether I was right to predict that the impact of her death would change the emotional climate of the country, but I can’t tell if I was wrong either. The good news is that people in real life, as opposed to professional gossips, seem less inclined to suppose that celebrity status is a bed of roses, and are more likely to give away some of their precious time. I detect her example in that first effect, and her legacy in the second: if it
is true that she was self-obsessed, by just so much she dramatized her selfless acts, and to copy those is no less useful for being fashionable. The bad news is that the press scarcely let up for a year. The Daily Mail, for instance, carried a Diana story almost every day, and often her picture on the front page. Though the pressure eased off a bit after the anniversary, it is not as if the flood has dried to a trickle: there is still a steady stream. The expenditure of energy that has gone into all this is daunting to think about. Most of it adds up to less than nothing, but for a generation of journalists to spend the best part of a career hunting the Snark, and then go on hunting it after it is dead and buried – well, it can hardly come to good. But there is money in it, because people want to read the stuff; and to believe that the stories would vanish if the people really ruled is wishful thinking.
Winding down, I should perhaps say at this point, to block a possible line of reproof, that of the several thousands of pounds the piece earned all over the world, every penny was given directly to charity. The same will be true, in perpetuity, of the proportion of royalties for this book that is generated by the total pages devoted to the same subject, with an additional percentage to cover the possibility – slimmer now, thank Heaven, than would have earlier been true – of its sales being artificially increased by the allusion to her name. If a lawyer working for the Diana Memorial Fund feels justified in taking a salary, there are no doubt business ethics to justify it. But for a writer, on the level of elementary morality, there can be no quibbling: money made out of Diana’s death is blood money, and that’s final.