Editor: Clive James wrote insightfully, and movingly, on the death of Princess Diana, and his article was published in the New Yorker. It was published to both acclaim and censure. Seventeen years after her death, it stands above everything else that was written at the time. It's long, and every word is worth reading. At the end of the article, I have included a link to the "postscript" that he wrote, following critical reception of what he'd written. Here is his New Yorker piece:
I wish I'd never met her
written for the New Yorker magazine by Clive James
No, there was not much I knew about her. But I knew it well. At one
period, starting either just before or just after her official
separation (I can't remember, and although a glance at the dates of her
letters to me would tell me, I can't bear to look at them) and ending
well before her death, I lunched with her often enough to goad the
lurking press into some arch speculation about whether I was helping to
mastermind her PR campaign, especially on television, my area of
expertise. Rather to my secret disappointment, it was taken for granted
that there was no romance. (My wife, well aware that she is married to a
romantic egomaniac, found that aspect particularly amusing.) When the
mid-market tabloids ran a page of photographs featuring the men
supposedly in Diana's life, my photograph was always among the
venerable, sometimes senescent, advisers, never among the young,
handsome and virile suitors. The assumption was that although she might
listen to what her privy counsellors said, she would never look at any
of them twice. In my case, that assumption, unlike the one about my
role as the
éminence grise behind her television adventures, was dead right.
No, there was nothing between me and her beyond a fleeting friendship.
Many
other men knew her better. Some men knew her intimately, and now, at
last, I do not envy them, because what they have in their memories must
make loss feel like death. (I never thought I could be sorry for James
Hewitt, but think of where he is now, deprived even of the reason for
his ruin, his empty head already rotting on Traitors' Gate.) As for the
man who knew her most intimately of all, the Prince of Wales, he is a
man as good and honest as any I have ever met, and I know him well
enough to be sure that since last Sunday week he has been on the Cross,
wondering whether he will ever be able to come down. My own knowledge
of her is minute compared with his and theirs, but now, for the first
time, I wish I had never met her at all. Then I might not have loved
her, and would not feel like this, or at any rate would feel it less.
But I did meet her, and I did love her.
No, it was not a blind love: quite the opposite. Even before I met her,
I had already guessed that she was a handful. After I met her, there
was no doubt about it. Clearly on a.hair-trigger, she was unstable at
best, and when the squeeze was on she was a fruitcake on the rampage.
But even while reaching this conclusion I was already smitten, and from
then on everything I found out about her at first hand, even --
especially -- her failings and her follies, only made me love her more,
because there were none of her deficiencies that had not once been mine,
and some of them still were. In her vivid interior drama I saw my own. I
didn't find out much, but what I did find out I found out from close
up, from a few feet away across a little table; and I knew it certainly,
and it made me love her more truly. I was even convinced (this was not
for certain, but it was a deep and ineradicable suspicion) that she
would get herself killed, and that conviction made me love her to
distraction, as if I had become a small part of some majestic tragic
poem: an obscure, besotted walk-on mesmerised by the trajectory of a
burning angel. I feared for her as I loved her, and the fear intensified
the love. It was too much love for so tenuous a liaison, and one of
the reasons I never spoke of it in public was a cheaper fear -- the
simple, adolescent fear of appearing ridiculous.
No, you don't have to tell me. I am appearing ridiculous now, but it is
part of the ceremony, is it not? And what flowers have I to send her
except my memories? They are less than a wreath, not much more than a
nosegay: just a
deuil blanc table
napkin wrapping a few blooms of frangipani, the blossom of broken
bread. Last week London went quiet; the loudest human sound was the
murmur of self-communion; and we are told that the same was true for
half the world. In the old times, when the plague came, people would
cast off their sense of self, say what was on their minds, find what had
always been in their minds but had remained unsaid even to themselves,
and make love to strangers. There was no
Totentanz this time, no
orgies,
no mass kicking over of the traces. But there was something of the same
liberation from the very British drive to protect the self. and I will
be surprised if some of the new openness does not remain. The lake of
flowers submerging Kensington Palace released a perfume that has
changed the air. And although those who did not participate in the
vigil might sit in judgment on us for our mass delusion, we will judge
them, in our turn, for their inhunian detachment.
No, nobody could escape her image in those first long days after her
death -- it was as if the planet were being colonised with her
replicated smile -- and each time I saw it, it brought back a reality
that was even lovelier. I first saw Diana -- the living human being, not
the image -- at the Cannes Film Festival. Sir Alec Guinness was
getting a lifetime-achievement award, I was to be the master of
ceremonies at the dinner, and Charles and Diana had come down from
London just for the evening. There was a reception beforehand. The whole
British film world stood around nursing drinks. It was like watching a
movie composed of nothing except cameo appearances. A bit of some TV
crew's lighting rig fell on a P.R. girl's head and she regained
consciousness in the arms of Roger Moore: she thought she was in a James
Bond movie. Then Charles and Diana came in and started working the
room.
With astonishment, I suddenly found myself on the roster of
familiar faces Diana wanted to meet. There she was, right in front of
me, and I instantly realized that no kind of film, whether still or
moving, had done her justice. She wasn't just beautiful. She was like
the sun coming up: coming up giggling. She was giggling as if she had
just remembered something funny. "I think it's terrible what you do to
those Japanese people. You are
terrible." She was referring to
the clips from Japanese game shows which I screened on the TV programme
that I hosted each week. I started to protest that they were doing that
crazy stuff to each other; it wasn't me doing it to them. But she
quickly made it clear
that she was only pretending to be shocked. She said she never missed
my show and always had it taped if she was out. While I was still
feeling as if all at once, I had been awarded the Booker Prize for
fiction, the Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Academy Award for Best
Actor, she switched the topic. "Ooh. There's that odious man Maxwell
over there. Don't want to meet
him again. Yuck."
No, she really meant it. She made a face as if she had just sucked a
lemon. And that did it. I was enslaved. Looming hugely at the far side
of the stellar throng, the publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell was doing
his usual simultaneous impersonation of Victor Mature and King Farouk: a
ton and a half of half-cured ham wrapped in a white tuxedo, his
pan-scrubber eyebrows dripping condescension like spoiled lard. At the
time, the old crook hadn't yet been rumbled. Some of the cleverest men
in Britain were still working for him and helping to vilify anyone who
questioned his credentials. But this young lady, with a head allegedly
composed almost exclusively of air, had the bastard's number. On the
other hand, after knowing me not much more than a minute, she had just
handed me a story that would have embarrassed the bejesus out of the
Royal Family if I had passed it on: it would take only one phone call,
and next morning the front page of every British tabloid except
Maxwell's Mirror would consist almost entirely of the word "Yuck."
Either she was brave to the point of insanity or else I radiated
trustworthiness. I decided it must be the latter. For the air of
complicity she had generated between us in so brief a time, the best
word I can think of is "cahoots". We were in cahoots.
No, it couldn't last. With the two-minute mark coming up, she started
regretfully signalling that our lifelong friendship would have to be
temporarily put on hold. Her pursed lips indicated that although she
would rather stay talking to me until Hell froze over, unfortunately her
duties called her away to schmooze with far less illustrious people
than me. Her mouth saying that she was looking forward to my speech, her
eyes saying, "Plant you now and dig you later," she fluttered a few
fingertips and swanned off in the direction of Sir Alec. What would she
say to him?
Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope. I wish I hadn't just thought of that.
No, I didn't see her again for a long time. But I thought of her often,
and especially when I saw Charles. In those days, I was one of the
outer ring of his advisers. The system worked -- probably still works
-- like this. The inner ring of advisers are on call full time for
anything. In the outer ring, you get called to the centre when the
upcoming job touches on your areas of competence: in my case,
television, Australia, and occasionally the arts. Flattered to get the
nod, I gladly made trips to see him. Born to a life in which people
magically appeared when needed, he sometimes had trouble remembering
that his 15 minutes with you at Highgrove or Sandringham would cost you a
whole working day, but apart from that he was impeccably sensitive,
courteous, and just plain thoughtful -- a quality of his which is
continually underestimated, and one which will make him a great King
when his turn comes, as come it must. (Diana's declaration, in her
Panorama
interview, that Charles might never reign was the single biggest
mistake she ever made, but haven't you said foolish things about the
person you loved after it all went wrong?) Our meetings, though
invariably friendly and increasingly funny, were always strictly
business, so it was no surprise that Diana wasn't around. But when my
wife and I asked him to dinner he came alone, his wife was never
mentioned, and sadly I began to realise that that was no surprise
either. The word was out that they were sticking together for the sake
of the monarchy and the children but were otherwise going their separate
ways.
No, it couldn't go on like that. I still think it should have, and right up to the divorce I published articles in
The Spectator
saying that they owed it to all of us to stick together somchow, or
else the press would be confirmed in its hideous new role as a sort of
latter-day Church of England with witch-finders for priests. But I was
making the fundamental mistake of being more royalist than the King. The
two people at the centre of events were pursuing happiness, American
style, and it was becoming more obvious all the time that they had known
enough unhappiness to justify the pursuit. During Charles's 40th
birthday party, at Buckingham Palace, I met her again. There were no
cahoots this time. She said that she had enjoyed my latest documentary
and that she was glad to see me, but she didn't seem to be glad about
anything else: the lights in her face were dimmed down to about
three-quarter strength, so she looked merely lovely, at a time when her
full incandescence should have been outshining the chandeliers. Charles
did his formidable best to jolly everyone along. The Duchess of York
chortled around in her usual irrepressible manner, a bumper car in
taffeta. It was fun to go for a piss, stand in a reverse line-up of
hunched dinner jackets, and gradually discover that I was the only man
staring at the porcelain who was not a crowned head of Europe. But
generally there was something missing, and nobody could be in any doubt
what it was. She was still there physically, but her soul had gone AWOL;
and
without that soul the party had no life.
No life, and no future. Soon the press was piling it on, and steadily
the intrusiveness got worse. It became known that she was trying to
lessen the effects by getting a few media figures on her side. It was
manipulation, but what else does a marionette dream of except pulling
strings? So I thought I knew what it was about when she sent me an
invitation to lunch at Kensington Palace. I thought there would be at
least half a dozen of us there to receive the gentle suggestion that a
few supportive words would not come amiss. (Even for my generation,
words like "supportive" are losing their inverted commas by now: her
unashamed use of me-speak has influenced the language.) But after I was
shown up the staircase to the sitting-room I found myself alone. When
she came into the room, it was as if that first conversation in Cannes
had been frozen by the pause button and now the button had been touched
again to re-start the tape. "Sorry there aren't any film stars," she
said. "There's just me. Hope you don't get bored." The cahoots were
back. We sat down at a small table in the next room and immediately
established the protocol that would become standard, and which I will
always cherish as one of the best running gags I was ever involved in.
She ate like a bird while encouraging me to eat like a wolf, as if I
weren't being fed properly at home. There was a catch under the joke:
that I had a home, she made it clear, was enviable. She envied me my
long marriage. When I told her that I had been a bad husband and a
neglectful father, and that my guilt had begun to erode my peace of
mind, she said that I must have done
something right, if we were
all still together, so I should take comfort from that. Her own
marriage, she said, was coming apart. She told me why and how. I could
hardly credit my ears. Armed with nothing else except what she told me
then, I could have gone to a telephone and blown the whole thing sky
high. But the cahoots ruled that out. The tacit bargain was: You tell me
what you can't tell anyone else and I'll tell you what I can't tell
anyone else, and then neither of us can tell anyone else about what we
said.
No, it wasn't mutual therapy. But I suppose it was a mind game. There
must have been dozens of other people that she played it with, but she
infallibly picked those who would never break the deal. (If she had
chosen her lovers on the same principle, she would have given a lot
fewer hostages to fortune, but desire doesn't work like that.) She would
make each of her platonic cavaliers believe, or at any rate want to
believe, that he was the only one. The joker in her real life doubled as
the ace of diamonds in the game: it was her childhood. Everything in
her tormented psyche turned on what had happened to her at the age of
six, when her parents separated and left her to a loneliness that
nothing could cure. Then, while I was clearing her plate after I had
cleared mine, she popped the question: "Something like that happened to
you, didn't it?" It was the Princess of Wales who was asking me, so I
gave her the answer. Yes, it did. When I was six, my mother got the news
that my father had been killed on the way home from the war.
No, my mother cried. No, no, oh no. I was the witness of her distress, I
couldn't help her, and I had been helpless ever since. I sometimes
thought, I said, that everything I had ever written, built, or achieved
had been in order to offset that corrosive guilt, and that I loved the
world of women because I feared the world of men. Diana touched my
wrist, and that was it: we were both six years old.
No, it was no trick. It might have been a mind game, but her mind was
her most vivid reality, the battlefield on which she looked for peace.
It was a good mind, incidentally. Of all the poisonous dreck ever
written about Diana in the newspapers, the most despicable was based on
the assumption that she was stupid. Journalists who read three books a
year and had scarcely two ideas to rub together about anything called
her an ignoramus. The truth was the opposite. Schopenhauer ("Chopin
who?" I can hear her say), who was a great reader himself, pointed out
the danger of letting books get between us and experience. What Diana
knew was based on experience, and she knew a lot, especially about the
mind. Well aware that her own was damaged, she sought comfort from those
who would admit to the same condition. She spent too much time with
gurus, spiritualists and exotic healers, but that wasn't frivolity: it
was desperation. For the rest of the time, which was most of it, she
had a remarkable capacity to do exactly the opposite of what she was
notorious for: far from being obsessed with her own injuries, she would
forget herself in the injuries of others. It was the secret of her
appeal to the sick and the wounded. When she walked into a hospital
ward, everyone in it recognised her as one of them, because she treated
them as if they could have been her. They
were her. She was just
their souls, free for a day, in a beautiful body that walked so straight
and breathed so easily. The sick, she would often say, were more real
to her than the well: their guard was down, they were themselves.
No, I didn't figure all that out straight away, but as time went on it
became more apparent to me that I was her patient. I missed her after
that first lunch, with a mild version of the forlorn longing I have seen
among friends of mine when their shrinks go on holiday. So I did
something so presumptuous I still don't believe I had the brass neck to
go through with it. I asked her to lunch. The separation was
practically official by now, she was kind of up for grabs so why not,
you know,
ask her to lunch? I made the phone call to her
secretary and hung up feeling like someone who was going to get a flea
in his ear the size of a hummingbird. But 10 minutes later the secretary
was back on the line. The Princess of Wales would be delighted. How
about the Caprice?
No, I didn't get there half an hour early -- only 20 minutes. I took up
my elaborately casual position at the corner table, double-cleaned my
finger-nails with my door key, and watched the forecourt through the
window. As always, she was on time to the minute. When she stepped from
the chauffeur-driven car, it wasn't just the way she looked that
stymied me.
No escort. She had been threatening for a while to
start going out without an escort, and now she was actually doing it,
the crazy little twit. The chill of fear I felt was probably useful in
making me appear cool as I rose for an air kiss that stopped every knife
and fork in the room, as if time had been switched off. The rattle of
cutlery started again after she sat down, and there we were,
tête-A-tête. It wasn't cahoots yet, though. By this time, two camps had
formed, Charles's and Diana's. Diana's people were busy calling Charles
a stuffed shirt, and Charles's people were just as busy calling Diana a
dingbat. I wanted to make it clear to her that I was for both of them,
and against anything that would make them irreconcilable. I couldn't,
either in public or in private, say a word against the Prince. Putting
it in jokey form -- always her preferred way of hearing a lecturette -- I
told her that if we were caught talking high treason she would be given
the privilege of dying by the sword, whereas I, a commoner and a
colonial, would be lucky if they even bothered to sharpen the axe. She
laughed, said she understood completely, and made it evident that she
admired Charles's qualities as much as I did. Things bubbled along
nicely. Cahoots again. I got both our meals to eat as usual, and from
the next table the director-general of the BBC was looking at me as if I
were a combination of Errol Flynn and Neil Armstrong. He was stuck with
the Home Secretary. Christ, what fun she was. But the chill of fear
came back when she started to talk about the possibility of going on
television with a personal interview. I knew it wouldn't be with me, but
that wasn't the reason I counselled her against it. I said if that
happened the two-camps thing would go nuclear, and continue until there
was nothing left. She would be on the run forever, and there would be
nowhere to go. Nowhere would be far enough away. She seemed convinced,
but of course she was pretending. She had already decided.
No, I don't think she was being malicious, or even mischievous. There
was just a lot of stuff she couldn't share. At least once, however, she
lied to me outright. "I really had nothing to do with that Andrew Morton
book," she said. "But after my friends talked to him I had to stand by
them." She looked me straight in the eye when she said this, so I could
see how plausible she could be when she was telling a whopper. I would
have been terminally cheesed off if I hadn't suspected that she knew I
knew, and just didn't want to be remembered as admitting it. In the
Panorama
interview, she did admit it, so I had two reasons for feeling that
historic programme as a personal wound, quite apart from my premonition
that it would wound her. It multiplied her popularity, but it propelled
her in the direction I had spent a lot of time telling her she should
never think of going: over the wall, out of the country, away from her
protection.
No, there was no chance she would listen. She
hated the
protection. She saw the protectors as assailants. She believed, against
all the evidence of her own beautiful eyes, that there was some kind of
enchanted place called Abroad, where she would be understood and where
she could lead a more normal life. This place called Abroad became a
recurring theme in future conversations at other restaurants. Kensington
Place, in Kensington Church Street near Notting Hill Gate, was one of
her favourite hangouts, and she thought it funny that I always booked a
table against the back wall, instead of up front, near the window. There
was an acre of unshielded glass and she --
she -- wanted to sit
near it. It scared me rigid. Sometimes I could barely eat my own lunch,
let alone hers. But it seemed she would rather have gone down in a hail
of broken glass than live in fear. She could live in her own fear -- the
fear of never finding happiness, of never making the pieces fit, of
Mummy and Daddy never being together again -- but she could never live
in mine, the fear for her life.
No, she never took my advice even once. Well, just once. Before she went
to Japan on her big solo diplomatic trip, she asked me what would be
the best thing she could do there, apart from all the hospitals and
stuff. She knew that I was a student of the Japanese language and
Japanese literature, and she thought I might have some nifty scheme up
my sleeve. I told her I did, but it wouldn't be easy. I told her that if
she learned even a few words of the language -- just the standard
phrases about how pleased she was to be there -- she would knock them
out. I could lend her my teacher, a gentle but determined little woman
called Shinko. Diana, after her standard protestations about being too
thick, said she was up for it. Shinko, quietly experiencing the same
emotions as I would have done if I had been asked to teach the Emperor
of Japan croquet, marched up to Kensington Palace and did the job. Diana
flew to Japan, addressed a hundred and twenty-five million people in
their own language, and made the most stunning impact there since
Hirohito told them that the war was over.
No, she didn't forget. When she got back she called me to lunch at
Bibendum. We did all our standard numbers, culminating in the hallowed
dessert routine, by which I ordered one crème brûlée with two spoons and
finished the rest of it before she had swallowed her single mouthful.
As usual, she had finessed that deadly third glass of wine into me
without my even noticing. But there was an extra
petit four with
the coffee. It was a little red box that opened to reveal a pair of
cufflinks: gold ovals enamelled in pink with the chrysanthemum of the
Japanese imperial family. "
Domo arigato gozaimash'ta," she said. Thank you very much for what you did. "Did I get that right?" Yes, I told her: you got that right.
No, there is not much more. Our last lunch was at Kensington Palace and
Harry was present with one of his friends, so there were no cahoots.
She was putting distance between us. Later on, quietly and nicely, I was
dropped from her list. I understood completely. I had wanted her to be
Queen. I had wanted, when I grew old, to see her in the gradually,
properly altering beauty of her middle age. I had wanted to see her
beside Charles, on the day when he took his proper place as the most
intelligent and concerned monarch this country has ever had. I had
wanted to have lunch with her once a year and do the dessert routine
again. But she wanted life. She was going on to those other, faraway
adventures which she knew I didn't believe in. I hoped I would hear
about them someday.
No, I never saw her again. Neither will anyone now. Not even once. Never even once again.
No, I can still see her. She's leaving the Caprice, heading for the back
door, because a Range Rover full of photographers has just pulled up in
the street outside. She's turning her head. She's smiling. Has she
forgotten something? Is she coming back?
No.
Clive James has requested that the proceeds from this article go to
The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 104-108 Grafton Rd, London NW5 4BD.
Clive James wrote a postscript to this article, following critical reception throughout the world. Click the link:
http://www.clivejames.com/books/evenas/postscript
