From an amazing, funny, and sad review of Prince Harry's memoir, Spare. By Nicola Shulman in the January 27 TLS:
The King of England's younger son is, by his own account – rendered by his ghostwriter, M.R. Moehringer –a lifelong bibliophobe. "At all costs", he recalls of his youth, "I avoided sitting quietly with a book." As far as we know he has read one novel: John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, which he enjoyed, finding it "about friendship, about brotherhood, about loyalty": "it was filled with themes I found relatable". Encouraged, he had a look at Hamlet. An ambitious choice for only your second book, but this one seems to have come furnished with a plot summary: "Lonely prince," he read, "obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent's usurper". Relatable much? "I slammed it shut. No, thank you."
If this is true, it seems a shame that he didn't persist with this second book. If he had, he might have felt less lonely. Sussex sees all experience as a reflection of his own anguish, and he would in his later years have recognized much of himself here. A man who keeps mourning long after, he says, "everyone has moved on" from the parental death. The prince who tells his friends his native land is "a prison"; who hates himself for his helplessness, finds the palace ranged against him and gets his truth out by commissioning an entertainment in questionable taste. To judge from Sussex's opinion of senior courtiers, he'd enjoy the scene where Hamlet discovers one of these evesdropping behind an arras and, with a great cry of "A rat!", kills him on the spot. Few of us have walked behind the coffin of a royal parent, but Sussex has. . . .
At some point he would come upon a passage with particular resonance for himself:
Rightly to be great
Is, not to stir without great argument;
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
You could say that finding quarrel in a straw is Sussex's principal gift, and there are enough of them in Spare to fill a manger. His father laughed in the wrong place at his school play. He was once given a small bedroom on holiday at Sandringham. His neighbour parked his car outside his window, blocking his light. His brother didn't ask him to supper as often as he'd hoped. His great aunt, Princess Margaret, gave him a Biro for Christmas. It's wonderful to see this slender talent being turned into a lucrative career. Yet, by taking these annoyances so hard, he diminishes the gravity of the serious harms he has suffered, such as the almost inhuman onslaught from the red-top press and their mobs of paparazzi, not cursed, like their prey, with a keen sense of recent history.
For Sussex, though, grievances small and large weigh equally on his mind because they spring from the same place. Honour's at the stake. What he wants, and feels he is not getting, is respect, especially in comparison with his older brother, the heir to the throne. If he had been respected, his drama teacher wouldn't have assigned him a role in the school play "without my consultation". He'd have had a bigger bedroom. If he were respected, his father and brother would do something stop the paps, to stop the press and the tweeters (he studies both obsessively) from pursuing and tormenting him. As it is, he is dissed from all directions and, what is worse, he believes that his father, stepmother and brother have actively exploited his lack of consequence, feeding stories about him and later his wife to the press to distract it from their own shortcomings. Towards the end of the book, when Sussex seems to have become much madder than he was at the start, he has a conversation with his father, begging him to do something about all this press intrusion. His father – featuring here, ironically, as a weak man in thrall to an overbearing and effective wife – tries to explain that this is not in his power. Heaven knows he has the proof of it. "You must understand, darling boy," says his father, "the Institution can't just tell the media what to do!" "I yelped with laughter", writes Sussex, "It was like Pa saying he couldn't just tell his valet what to do."
Of the many sad examples of Sussex's sense of his own expendability, none is more bitter than this one: "I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy. I was summoned to provide back-up, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps, Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow". A distressing avowal, not least for what it implies, but doesn't say: that, thanks to the wretchedness of his parents' marriage, his birth marked the fulfillment of a minimum order: an heir and a spare. There were no more children after this. "My work is done", his father is alleged to have said. "I'm not a baby-making machine", said his mother (I'm remembering this; it is not quoted here) when asked if she was planning to increase her family. Had there been enough love left to make even one more child, Sussex would have had a sibling who knew what it felt like to be him, and maybe wouldn't have to keep – Lord, make it stop – telling us about it. . . .
[We go on from there to view the prince's unallayable grief over his mother's death, which still haunts him "despite years of therapy," and some strong insinuations that Meghan Markle is a mother-substitute who seems to him as perfect as Diana was. Perfect, says Shulman, is "a wretched thing to call your wife." The whole sad story might be a meditation on what "privilege" actually means, and what really makes for a good life.]
All of this behavior seems absolutely familiar and common to me. I've known people who treasured their resentment of perceived slights for more than seven decades; and I've known one person who claimed, in a very serious way, that the fact that an insult to them had been followed, after some time, by the person delivering the insult falling seriously ill indicated that there was a God, after all.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, there's a certain logic to resenting very petty slights more than major ones. A conscious, emphatic insult indicates a kind of respect: one is big enough to require effort to take down. An offhand dig indicates that the target is neglible.
Wow. Really? I can't say I have ever encountered this level of grievance-mongering from anyone I considered sane.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, absolutely. The seven-decade thing is in my own family, and it includes both resenting the insults and reiterating them (on the part of those delivering the insults), and not in a fun, teasing way. Usually when I bring this up to outsiders, they tell me their family is the same way, and they can tell stories to prove it.
ReplyDeleteSane or insane? I don't know. Across cultures and historical periods, this kind of thing seems to me a constant aspect of human social relations and being.
My family-of-marriage (which I escaped after staying far too long) was a classic example. My mother-in-law and her mother chewed the cud of their resentments constantly. I heard the same stories of insult and mistreatment over and over. And I am sure that M-in-L chewed the cud of her dislike of me with my then-husband as well.
ReplyDeleteIt was ugly and distressing.
Growing up, one of my family connections was to a first generation Italian-American immigrant who had been born in 1912. I knew him mostly as a kindly grandfatherly figure, but even in his twilight years he had a great deal of stereotypical "Italian Machismo" and what might be categorized in modern times as various forms of "fragile masculunity".
ReplyDeleteHe had a massive ego and an inflated sense of self worth; he always had to be right about everything; he always had to take credit for other people's good ideas; he never admitted to nor apologized for his mistakes, et cetera.
And yet, he had paper-thin skin, couldn't handle criticisms no matter how true or deserved, and remembered seemingly every perceived grudge and slight anyone had every paid him, accidentally or not, throughout his entire long life, and would regularly reminisce about them seemingly out of sheer absent-minded habit, temporarily driving himself into simultaneous anger and despair (which, of course, he was embarrassed to have other people see or know about, despite the fact that he couldn't conceal it worth a damn).
He was a hypocrite in a thousand different ways - judging others for doing things he himself did; for failing to do things which he himself neglected; for coming from circumstances he himself came from; or for not coming from the same circumstances he did, as if they had had any choice in the matter; for finding more success in their lives than he did (they didn't "earn" it, but had it handed to them); or for finding less success that he did (they're "just lazy"); et cetera, et cetera.
He had many good qualities - he was kind, charming, funny, generous, extremely loyal, and so on.
But he was absolutely a neurotic mess of a man, who spent his entire life trying to live up to a set of insane, impossible, illogical standards of behavior, emotion, and thought. And, worse, he expected everyone else to live up to them as well, and deeply judged them when they didn't.
The examples we're giving may sound extreme, but I think they're also deeply human. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if the treasuring of the memory of offenses, both given and received, isn't a major part of what lies at the heart of our consciousness of the past, both mythical and historical. The Trojan War is essentially a story of a series of slights, and vengeance for them, and the Iliad an intense examination of one such insult and its repercussions. I don't think this reflects just Greek culture, or Indo-Europeans, or whatever. Isn't the Bible essentially about Israel showing proper respect (or more often, failing to do so) to the deity?
ReplyDeleteSometimes I think that way of being is very Olde Worlde--and the family stories I hear often do seem to be about European or Asian immigrants or their immediate offspring. But what is MAGA, if not a movement for resenting slights? ("I am your retribution," and all that.)
So I come back to thinking it is a human universal. True, there are rationalists who are simply left baffled by it. But I think they've always been a small minority, often proudly so.
And there are many whose historical consciousness, instead of a litany of grievances, is simply a hazy melange of unthinking whiggishness and the happily contradictory sense that "people are worse than they used to be." And maybe that sort of complacency is peculiarly American, or white-American-upper-middle-class, or modern, or consumerist. Or not.
All in all, a messy issue full of complexity and contradiction. But very important.