Lives in Writing (22 page)

The laughing is important. Ian McEwan has recalled that ‘It was part of Malcolm’s automatic generosity to laugh easily at other people’s jokes. Who can forget that delighted, whinnying giggle?’ People liked to be in his company because he generated a life-enhancing effort of mutual amusement. When I wrote the article on him for the
New
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
the editor asked me to add to my first draft, which was an account of his life and career, a description of his personal appearance and bearing, and this is what I wrote:

Physically Bradbury was tall, but never used his height to intimidate. His manners were gentle, his voice light. His speech had no perceptible class or regional accent, though in later life it acquired an attractive, slightly patrician drawl. When he read from his own work his delivery had a distinctive rising and falling intonation. He possessed a whole spectrum of laughs, from an infectious giggle to a full-throated guffaw. His long, handsome face, surmounted by dark wavy hair that became thinner and grizzled in later years, was the face of an intellectual, the broad brow furrowed with the traces of thought; but there were laughlines around the eyes and the mouth was always apt to break into a smile. When he wrote on the typewriter or computer, the tip of his tongue flickered and curled between his lips as if in sympathy with the difficulty and delicacy of the task.

THIS IS AN
edited version of an essay written two or three weeks after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales on 31 August 1997. I wrote it ‘on spec’, mainly because I wanted to record my own impressions of, and thoughts about, the event and its aftermath while they were still fresh in my mind. I vaguely hoped to place it in an American or foreign journal, but by the time it was finished the international press was sated with articles on this subject, and I soon abandoned the attempt. Later I made some use of the material in a stage play and a novella entitled
Home Truths.
In
2001
I donated the essay to an anthology called
Sightlines,
published to support the Royal National Institute for the Blind’s Talking Books Appeal. I shortened the original text considerably, but left its reflections as they were expressed in September
1997
, and it is reprinted in that form here.

I heard the news relatively late, because we don’t listen to the radio at home in the mornings, and there was nothing about it in the Sunday papers delivered to our provincial doorstep. I was in the kitchen making mid-morning coffee, timed for the return of my wife from attending mass at our Roman Catholic parish church. I usually accompanied her, but on this occasion I hadn’t. Mary came in at about half-past ten, frowning. ‘Have you heard that Princess Diana has died?’ she said. ‘There were prayers for her at mass.’ I think I said, ‘Oh no!’ – something like that, anyway. I remember feeling an unexpectedly sharp pang of real regret, quite different from what one usually feels about the death of a well-known but remote public figure. ‘How?’ was my first question. Mary didn’t know. She hadn’t lingered at the church to enquire because we were going out, to a horticultural sale at a country house north of Birmingham.

We turned on the television and learned the basic facts about the accident in Paris. We watched and listened to the Prime Minister speaking live outside his parish church in County Durham. He looked genuinely shocked and grief-stricken. The reporters and presenters on TV also seemed exceptionally moved by what they were reporting, real feeling threatening to overwhelm their professionalism. Martyn Lewis’s voice broke once and it seemed to me that his cheeks were wet. This struck me as extraordinary and unprecedented. But there didn’t seem to be any immediate prospect of additional hard news, only speculation and handwringing. We decided to go ahead with our expedition, but we talked over the tragedy in the car, and during the rest of the outing. Again and again one’s thoughts kept reverting to it. My predominant reaction, after that initial, surprising pang of personal regret, the simple wish that it hadn’t happened, was to reflect on the extraordinarily
literary
quality of the manner and timing of Diana’s death. No novelist or scriptwriter could have improved on its ironies and symmetries: the legendary princess cut down in her prime, together with the man recently acknowledged as the love of her life, apparently hounded to death by the lackeys of the very media which had made her famous. The day was dark and rainy, and we drove home in the early afternoon in a ferocious thunderstorm, as if nature was doing its best to encourage the pathetic fallacy. I thought of
Julius Caesar
: ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.’

As soon as we got indoors I switched on the television, just in time to see Prince Charles arriving at the Paris hospital with Diana’s two shocked-looking sisters. From then onwards it was hard to keep away from the television. I had never met the princess, nor seen her in the flesh; I had never thought about her unless she was prominently in the news (which admittedly had been quite often, especially over the last few weeks) and I had always regarded her as a flawed human being – more sinned against than sinning, certainly, but at least partly responsible for her own misfortunes, and excessively concerned with her own public image. And yet I felt that a light had gone out of the world. I was not alone. It soon became clear that the whole nation, or a very large part of it, was swamped by an extraordinarily powerful tidal wave of emotion, in which grief predominated.

Diana’s death and the events of the week following surely constituted one of the most extraordinary public dramas of the twentieth century, a collective catharsis that climaxed at the funeral – especially at that moment, beyond the daring of any scriptwriter’s imagination, when applause on the streets of London for the Earl Spencer’s broadcast eulogy, with its implicit criticism of the Royal Family, surged through the open doors of the abbey and was taken up by the congregation. In Hyde Park, more than 100,000 people who were watching the funeral service on giant TV screens, many in tears, leapt to their feet and clapped their hands. A friend of mine who was there, the theatre and film director Mike Ockrent, told me it was an electrifying experience. ‘I understood for the first time the nature of a revolutionary crowd,’ he said. ‘If somebody had told us to march against Buckingham Palace, we would have marched.’ But those commentators who dismissed the whole thing as a product of mass hysteria or media manipulation seem to me to have completely misread it. It was authentic.

Literally millions of blossoms – weighing some 10,000 tons in all, it is estimated – were gathered and laid upon the ground in Diana’s memory. A charitable fund opened in her name quickly attracted over £100 million in donations. Her place of burial is expected to become a popular shrine. There is talk of constructing a ‘pilgrimage walk’ through the London parks connecting landmarks associated with her life. Hardbitten journalists have apologised in print for the snide articles they wrote about her in the past. My wife, summarising one such
mea culpa
to me at breakfast, suddenly burst into tears, surprising herself as much as me. Three Scottish professional footballers, a social group not renowned for emotional sensitivity, flatly refused to play for their country in an international match scheduled for the day of Diana’s funeral, and forced the Scottish Football Association to change the date of the fixture. My tennis club closed for the morning of the funeral, but reopened at 2 p.m. The organiser of social tennis, a down-to-earth forty-something Birmingham businessman, sent a message that he was ‘too upset’ to attend. A man told a national phone-in radio programme that he had lost his wife through cancer last April; they had been happily married for forty-four years and he loved her dearly, but he had shed more tears for Diana than for his wife. These are just a few representative facts and anecdotes culled from thousands.

Whether the effects of Diana’s death prove to be lasting or ephemeral, the public and private reaction to it, not only in Britain but around the world, was extraordinary, and the question remains: why? Many theories have been advanced in the last few weeks. None of them alone can explain the phenomenon; but perhaps when considered together they begin to suggest an answer to the question. I list them as versions of Diana and interpretations of her ‘meaning’.

‘She was a star.’ The term was used again and again in the immediate aftermath of Diana’s death. Once restricted to the movie industry, it is now applied to celebrities of all kinds. In the secularised modern world, stars are the nearest thing we have to the pagan deities of old, after one of whom Diana herself was named. Stars are like us, and sometimes they visit our mundane world and touch our lives, but mostly they inhabit another plane of existence, a world of luxury, glamour, mobility and excess, which we can only glimpse through the media. Nobody is born a star, but some achieve stardom and some have it thrust upon them. Diana belonged to the latter category. What propelled her from obscurity to fame was of course her engagement and marriage to the heir to the British throne. It was, as people said at the time, a fairy-tale wedding, a modern Cinderella story. Her good fortune seemed to demonstrate that the wish-fulfilment of romance need not be confined to the world of fiction; it could actually happen. In fact Diana belonged to a rich and aristocratic family, and had had the conventional upbringing of a girl of her class. But at the time of her engagement she
seemed
like the girl next door – pretty, shy, unaffected and unpretentious, earning her living in a humble job (assistant at a nursery school) and sharing a flat with other working girls. She was seen as a catalyst that would modernise and humanise the monarchy.

As we all know, that hope was dashed, and the fairy-tale turned into something more melodramatic and more ironic: the royal soap-opera. It is important to remember, amid the posthumous adulation she is receiving, that public opinion was always divided about Diana’s part in the deterioration and collapse of her marriage to Charles, and about her behaviour after they separated and divorced. If she had lived to marry her Dodi, she would undoubtedly have attracted a good deal of criticism for so doing. Controversy didn’t make her any less of a star – on the contrary – but it was only in death that she achieved apotheosis, that immortal stardom which very few, such as Marilyn Monroe, Eva Peron and Elvis Presley have attained – and none of them on the same global scale. Diana’s death instantly edited out all her faults and follies in public consciousness. It was only her virtues, her good works, her suffering and her beauty that were remembered. In the days following her death we were frequently told that she had been the most famous woman in the world, and it seemed obviously true, but I can’t recall anyone saying it before she died.

It is hardly necessary to state that Diana would never have achieved her quasi-mythical status if she hadn’t been beautiful, but it is worth considering what kind of beauty it was, and how it was mediated. It was not flawless (her nose, for instance, was too long and the wrong shape for classical perfection) but it was highly photogenic. In the days following her death we were reminded again and again of the stunning visual impact of her appearance in photographs and on film. To use a movie industry cliché, the camera loved her; while, as a writer in the
Independent
newspaper shrewdly observed, portrait painters generally failed to convey any sense of her exceptional physical presence. She could have been a model – she had the tall, lissom figure for it, and the natural grace of movement, and a passion for clothes. Though she suffered from and resented the attentions of the
paparazzi
, she clearly enjoyed posing for the camera on her own terms.

Cynics will say that Diana’s fame was precisely an illusion, a trick performed by the media, who exploited her iconic potential for their own materialistic ends; and that the demonstration of public grief at her death was also largely generated and manipulated by the same agencies. Undoubtedly the myth of Diana both before and after her death would never have developed as it did before the age of the mass media. It was through them that she imprinted her image on our consciousness, more deeply than we realised until she was dead. But the media are such an all-pervasive part of modern life that it is vain to suppose we can find some other, more authentic ground for public, collective experience. Although there was certainly something contagious about the grieving for Diana which television, in particular, encouraged, there was nothing hysterical about the behaviour of the people who queued to write in the books of condolence, or lined the streets of Diana’s funeral route. And the saturation coverage of the event does not explain, or explain away, the small private pang of sorrow which most people felt when they first heard the news.

The media that were so pruriently fascinated by Diana’s marital and emotional problems in life have focused since her death on her devotion to her two sons, and on her work for charity and good causes like the abolition of anti-personnel mines. This is all part of the ongoing secular canonisation of Diana, against which the Earl Spencer gently warned in his funeral address, when he pointed out that her high-profile charitable work was in part an effort to overcome a lack of self-esteem. This is not to say that it was simply a calculated polishing of her public image. On the contrary it is clear that she often did good by stealth, and that when she did it publicly she genuinely saw this as a way of turning her media celebrity to positive account. However, it was, again, her beauty, her effortless physical grace, which made her such a potent figure in the fund-raising, consciousness-raising business. The images we saw replayed and reprinted again and again in the weeks after her death, of Diana touching an AIDS patient, of Diana walking through a minefield, and above all of Diana hugging, cradling and holding on her lap children and infants suffering from all kinds of dreadful disease, mutilation and malnutrition, were intensely moving precisely because she never seemed to be straining for effect. She didn’t need to.