Discovering the whole thing is a hoax
Julie Burchill
DIANA by Sally Bedell Smith Aurum, L16.99, pp. 368
Aremarkable thing about the late Princess of Wales — peace be upon her is that, uniquely among icons, she appealed equally to all people, from the pathological- ly straight (She's just my type — tall and blonde,' leered the unspeakable Rod Stew- art) to the flagrantly gay, from the very young to the extremely old. I, for one, hope never to forget the look of mystified delight on the face of the disabled second-world- war veteran on having a young, radiant Diana embrace him while squealing 'My bottom's black and blue!' She had been sit- ting on a wicker chair.
Only a few people didn't seem to get it: her own class (who regarded her as the house negroes of the Southern plantations regarded runaways: an 'uppity niggah', insufficiently respectful to Massah) and a certain sort of middle-aged woman. This woman, who would be socially book-ended by Hyacinth Bucket and Patrick Hamilton's Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, is aspiring but dis- appointed, exasperated but still game, bol- shy but extremely anti-feminist. In real life, I suppose, she was best exemplified by Fanny Craddock, who yelled on about how much she hated 'Women's Libbers' while riding roughshod over every man she met. Mrs Thatcher was another.
Such women had no time at all for Diana. They were probably the last genera- tion who grew up thinking of the Windsors as at least semi-divine, and the chance to marry into them as far more desirable than discovering a cure for cancer, winning an Oscar and finding the lost city of Atlantis all rolled into one. Katherine Worsley was their role model, though even this most modest, securely raised and faithful of Windsor wives has apparently been exas- perated by life with the Munsters.
That Diana had fulfilled their dreams and then revealed them to be trash, with no more style than a shopgirl's cheap novella, filled these women with rage. Though great ones for the sanctity of marriage, their envy and confusion would lead them to back Camilla, and speak of her as a woman of 'character' and 'discretion', which is PC for ugly and sneaky. If she could bag the heir to the throne, there was hope for all of them.
These women will love this book. If I were them, I'd start at the index and work backward: 'Diana, Princess of Wales' 'bitterness of, 'borderline personality of 'dishonesty and tailored stories of, 'eaves- dropping and spying by, 'immaturity of, 'instability of', 'interests lacked by' — the list goes on. But the worst thing Bedell Smith can think of to say about Prince Charles is 'eccentricity of, not 'faithless- ness of', 'callousness of or 'spinelessness of', which I think says a lot.
All Diana's good qualities are viewed as defects; her sympathy for the sick and the weak and the evidence of her instinctive empathy giving comfort to the dying and their families are again documented and then dismissed as 'a false maturity', as she could not apply such comfort to herself. Charles, on the other hand, can do no 'Prepare yourself for a culture shock. From here on all the pizza menus are in Welsh.' wrong. Of the pile of hardback books by Laurens Van der Post and Carl Jung that he took on his honeymoon, producing them on the second night for Diana to read, she writes of his 'almost touching obliviousness' to his wife's lack of educa- tion. Maybe I'm naive, but since when did lack of sensitivity to others become 'almost touching'? Charles, of course, has 'a searching intelligence'; I've often wondered about this. We are led to believe that Camilla fulfils the intellectual Charles as well as the physical one, but do we believe that Camilla has had an intelligent thought in her life?
Diana's inadequacies mount up: 'too impatient to endure standing for hours in a chilly river'. That's it, then — off with her head. Her letters to friends (as opposed to Prince Charles's 'five- or six-page letters punctuated with passionate outbursts and bold underlinings' — yes, I get a lot of let- ters like that, in green ink. Isn't Care In The Community wonderful?) are brief and chatty, featuring 'simple descriptions' of her life, 'sprinkled with an occasional spelling or grammatical mistake or a cross- ing-out'. No wonder her poor husband was driven to adultery! During the most trou- bled years of her marriage, she would ignore the upper-class mothers at chil- dren's parties and talk only to the nannies and children; class traitor! In 1986, she . faints in Canada; Prince Charles later berates her for not withdrawing to a private room and fainting there instead. But Bedell Smith insists that his behaviour was 'not blatantly cruel'. Diana falls for her body- guard, Barry Mannakee, 'plump, with thin- ning brown hair and a working-class background' — how could she, having hooked an oil painting like Chas? When Diana fears that she will be committed to a mental institution, Bedell Smith considers this 'a reasonable course of action, given the severity of her symptoms'.
It is strange to find a woman taking this attitude to another woman so readily, and it is hard to communicate the pitilessness of this book: 'Diana was 25 years old, and had been exhibiting signs of mental illness for more than five years.' The central ques- tion is never addressed: what if you were a 19-year-old virgin who believed you were marrying for love, as normal people do, only to discover that the whole thing was a hoax, a deal, a horrible joke to which you were the punchline? Diana's problem was that she was too mentally healthy; unlike the royal autistics, she expected love and companionship. When she woke up in a trap of Kafkaesque dimensions, she felt extreme sorrow, fear and loneliness, which led her to behave irrationally.
But like Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, Diana wasn't mad. She was human, all too human, and it was for refusing to become a zombie that she was ridiculed and perse- cuted. Even after her death, it seems, she rests not in peace but in pieces, thanks to books like this.
Previous page
