Royal Stuff
Hello–
Yes yes, I know this blog is already weird. In January I dedicated some of my morning coffee time to reading Royal Style by I. Sewald. I cannot say that I luxuriated in its pages, but I am sure that I was meant to. Royal Style is a very dated book, it was published in 1988, and, as can be seen from the front cover, it was a puff piece. Look at Charles and Diana smiling in their grand surroundings in the late 80s, when we now know that the marriage was beyond the rocks by then. Well, I am not here to discuss their marriage, although reading this book in 2023 is a bit shocking throughout, because in it Diana is a vibrant presence and of course expected to be one for a long time. It was written less than 10 years before her death, and before any of the royal divorces. The few pictures in the book show case weddings, the Queen mother, little royal children and everything is just—at it height, and apparently always would keep trending up. As a time capsule…it feels both nostalgic and cautionary.
But I want to talk about the late 80s. A time of conspicuous consumption, when every 24 year old was on the verge of marriage or had already taken that leap, and the next step was two babies. There were still “stay-at-home” moms (outside of religious homeschooling families). My parents had a pink living room with a piano, where you never went except for fancy gatherings or Christmas photos. Twas really a different time. I was just going through my oldest photos to move them into a new album (do you know that most stores don’t carry photo albums anymore? Because this is an antique technology now. I had to buy mine online) and I saw little baby me in a long lacy dress, being held by every member of my extended family, attired in their best clothes, in the pink living room. How did we ever have time for these ceremonies?
Anyway, I do not want to belabour the point too much here. I’m not really sure what the point is myself. Except that I am looking for a German word which would encompass the striving for perfection, without being aware that that perfection is not sustainable—that feeling that the late 80s gives me. Vergangenheitsanscheinendperfektionsehnsucht ? [The longing for a seemingly perfect past] (This word does not exist).
Am I saying that this book about the Royal family reminds me of my own life? Well, I don’t mean to, but… it is true that my parent’s marriage fell apart around that same time, and we lost the pink living room and my mom no longer had the time to design and make new Christmas dresses for us every year. Sometimes I look back and I miss that house in the country very much, because it’s where I first experienced the world; sometimes it seems like the events of that time do still need to be addressed, because they live in me and affect how I act. But in the end, it was better. For us, everything turned out the way it should have been, the places we ended up going, the people we ended up meeting. But I don’t think Prince William and Harry were so fortunate. Losing their mother made their life…go a different way, and while they will still be able to live good lives, and have great experiences, there is no blessing to find in the fact of their mother’s passing. They will always wish that that hadn’t happened and that life had been different.
This is very apparent in Prince Harry’s book. And I know it has already been picked to pieces, but I just want to register that I too read it. I heard it on audible, and it is long, and a bit weird in spots, but generally, I appreciated it (enough). I think that everyone has the right to tell their story (caveat: not murderers*) and I imagine that the writing of it helped him process things, as writing generally does. Prince Harry (henceforth P.H.) has lived a life very different to all of us, and I think he is allowed to make that clear. Society holds public figures to different standards, we need them to mean something, often a lot of different things at one time, according to our own individual hang-ups—I wonder–how can we possibly expect someone like P.H. to adhere to our standards and practices, when his life has been so different, when he has been on parade as a symbol of our collective and unspoken hopes his whole life? And yet he is remarkably normal sounding. Yes, yes, I know that there was a ghost-writer, but Prince Harry reads the audiobook himself and it sounds remarkably like we imagine he would talk, or the things he would think are funny/important.
One of the main impressions I came away with from the first part was that “some people are meant to be soldiers.” A lot of people seem to skip PH’s war stuff, the conservative types who want to hate on him generally just don’t want to give him any credit for having done anything, ever (even though they are the type of people who generally admire veterans and support their own country’s military actions) or they are pacifists who skip it because “war shouldn’t happen.” Um, yes. That would be great. But we live in the world. And soldiering is, a profession. It pretty much has always been, and this book just made me realize that, for better or worse, some people are very good at being soldiers. It seems that Prince Harry was one of these, he enjoyed the work, gaining the skills, and the lifestyle. I almost felt it was a pity as well that he had to leave off doing it, when it so clearly was the work he was meant to do.
That was pretty much my main takeaway from the book, that some people are suited by disposition to be soldiers (and that good people might be this way, not just demented killers). I didn’t enjoy the second half of the book so much, the kind of aimless partying, and his marriage, although it seems that he wanted marriage more than anything. He really really wanted a family; I mean, it all makes sense, just not too much happened, except that was momentous to him. Well, actually maybe its good that we get a story from a public man which says the biggest and most important event of his life was his marriage. That is where women’s stories have ended, for long enough.
Basically, for a person who still lives under the English Crown (nominally) I felt I had to read Spare, I was also curious, and P.H. and I are the same age. This book also points out how different the Gen X and millennial generations are from the one previously. The Boomers started out as freewheeling no doubt, but they conformed in the end. And we just…can’t quite do that for some reason.
*Some people might say that P.H is a murderer because he well, murdered during war, and to that I say, the context of war is “different.”