Humans tend to take the whole waddling away thing quite badly. ‘When a child feels abandoned,’ D.W. Winnicott writes in The Child, the Family and the Outside World, he
becomes unable to play, and unable to be affectionate or to accept affection. Along with this, as is well known, there can be compulsive erotic activities. The stealing of deprived children who are recovering can be said to be part of the search for the transitional object, which had been lost through the death or fading of the internalised version of the mother.
We can’t be sure of the effect of the lost mother on the king penguin, but we can be in no doubt that it matters greatly to England’s royal family. In his essay ‘The Place of the Monarchy’, Winnicott helps us gain traction on the problem: ‘It is in the personal inner psychic reality that the thing is destroyed,’ he writes. And later:
Whereas a monarchy can be founded on a thousand years of history, it could be destroyed in a day. It could be destroyed by false theory or by irresponsible journalism. It could be laughed out of existence by those who only see a fairy story or who see a ballet or a play when really they are looking at an aspect of life itself.Prince Harry’s mother died when he was twelve years old, and his search for the transitional object has been messed up ever since. In Tom Bradby’s interview with him for ITV, after Harry describes the crash in Paris he immediately speaks of not wanting the same thing to happen to his wife. ‘Shooting, shooting, shooting,’ is the way this ex-soldier describes the actions of the paparazzi that night. He has always believed that Diana was murdered by careless journalists pursuing her for personal profit, and he wants to get rid of these death-eaters before they get anywhere near his wife and children. Journalism for him is a profession opposed to truth. This seems so obvious to him that it acts as a gateway drug to everything else he believes. The art of biography appears to the prince to be a pane of clear glass through which the truth will finally be revealed to the reader. So here it comes: The Corrections by Harry Windsor, a postmodern social novel in which the author will confront the twisted evils that harass civilisation and be a living antidote to the poison spread by the Daily Mail. It’s an impressive scheme of outrage. Harry’s truth is a cartoon strip of saucy entertainments and shouty jeremiads masquerading as a critique of the establishment, and it simply couldn’t be more riveting. His truth – ‘my truth’ – is much better written than the Mail, though guddling in the same sad bogs on the same dark heaths of human experience. Really funny, though. We find him losing his virginity to a horsey woman round the back of a pub. We find him staying up half the night at Eton smoking smuggled-in weed. One time, he takes acid and is so off his royal tits he thinks he’s having a chat with a toilet seat. Another time, his cock nearly drops off at the South Pole when it gets frostbitten. He gets decked by his brother and falls onto a dog bowl, but doesn’t punch him back. Truth is everywhere. Truth is relentless. Truth is a noisy neighbour who just swallowed four disco biscuits and dragged his sound system into the garden for a bit of a social. What’s not to like?
In a world of royal enchantment, competitive PR, national myth-making and pure lies, the truth – if played loud enough – can seem like a human right eclipsing all others, and Harry has worked himself up to the point where truth is life and life is truth. (He’s been in California for a while. He’ll get over it when the tax bill arrives.) The mantra comes towards you waving glow sticks. Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is 100 per cent a possibility,’ and that he’s ‘open’ to helping the royal family understand its own unconscious bias. It must be quite annoying, if you’re them. You don’t have to be Baudrillard to feel that Harry’s idea of the truth is simplistic, and that he’s become a bit of a fundamentalist: anything that isn’t ‘my truth’ is automatically part of the big lie. Harry has set out to convince the world that his family are professional liars, with one or two saving graces, such as heavenly anointment. And he’s not wrong.
Diana died in the full glare of the cameras, and Harry and his brother were forced to mourn her in that same light, an experience believed, in the popular mind, to be something that would bind them together for ever. It actually served to cast them out of each other’s sphere as they searched separately for their mother. Their father, a cultured, adult man in a permanent foetal crouch, couldn’t comfort them or share their feelings or join them in trying to alter the future.
Pa and I mostly coexisted. He had trouble communicating, trouble listening, trouble being intimate face to face. On occasion, after a long multi-course dinner, I’d walk upstairs and find a letter on my pillow. The letter would say how proud he was of me for something I’d done or accomplished. I’d smile, place it under my pillow, but also wonder why he hadn’t said this moments ago, while seated directly across from me ... Pa confessed around this time that he’d been ‘persecuted’ as a boy ... I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn’t survive. How had he? Head down, clutching his teddy bear, which he still owned years later. Teddy went everywhere with Pa.In this fierce toboggan ride of a book, Harry never says that his mother is dead, only that she has ‘disappeared’. Photographs, images, pieces in the press, the proofs of his and his family’s specialness, are what obsess him and drive him into a spiral of confusion as he fights for control of his life. I would say, right off, that when a mother dies so publicly and so violently, the fight is likely to be with the sibling. Nobody actually shares their parent – that’s just an illusion – and even the healthiest of brothers are parrying with wooden swords. Each child wants to go back, fighting off all monsters, all observers and opportunists, all lovers and all brothers, to be alone with her again.
There has never been a book like this, with its parcelling out of epic, one-sided truths. Most royal biographies, even the lively ones – his mother’s, his father’s, poor old Crawfie’s – were made airless by vapid writing, spurious genuflections before royal protocol, cringing vanity masquerading as public service. Harry does much less of that. He goes in for a Las Vegas-style treatment of the royal problem, with multiple sets, many costumes and guest appearances by everybody from Carl Jung to Elton John. There are overshared war experiences, bouts of snotty complaining, daddy issues, mummy issues, brother issues, bedroom-size issues, whose-palace-is-it-anyway issues, arguments about tiaras, Kate Middleton issues and todger-nearly-dropping-off-in-Harley-Street issues. Harry notarises his pees, his poos, his sweat and his bonks. He reveals the duff present his auntie Margaret gave him for Christmas (‘I was conversant with the general contours of her sad life’). He calls his brother bald. He has trouble showing affection without its being excessive (he hugs his therapist after one session, FedEx-ing the transference before session three) and barely introduces a person into the narrative before shortening their name and making them a ‘legend’. So, we have Chels, Cress, Euge and other colourfully abbreviated lives. Harry wants to love. He wants purpose. He’s nobody’s ‘spare’. He can never quite say it out loud, and neither could his aunt Margaret, but he’s pissed about being number two, and he takes all the unfairness and makes of it a Molotov cocktail. Take that, Camilla! Take that, courtiers and royal correspondents! Take that, Pa, from your ‘darling boy’! You can’t help agreeing with him half the time; the other half is spent worrying how he’ll ever make it through his life, as he mistakes his need to end his pain with the need for a global reset.
by Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books | Read more:
Image: Good Morning America
[ed. Missed this earlier this year, but with Harry's court case against the Mail recently resolved thought it would still be of some interest. Terrific review.]
