Matlock Tv Tome

ALTHOUGH Diana, Princess of Wales, died over two years ago, she has not gone quietly. Opinions on Diana continue to be deeply divided varying from the those who consider her a saint in heaven to the savage critiques of A. N. Wilson: 'a young woman who did little except go shopping, fornicate and vomit' (Sunday Times) and Brian Sewell; 'a whining harridan and promiscuous playgirl' (Mail on Sunday). The book industry associated with her name thunders on, reflecting these violent divisions. Hers was a fate which launched a thousand books -- my apologies to Melvyn Bragg, who first used this slight variation on Marlowe.

The latest offerings range from heavyweight academic analyses to the strictly factual narration of the 'Diana events', as one tome describes them. She is seen variously as saint, sinner or psychologically flawed, practically from the egg. Diana, The Making of a Media Saint, edited by Jeffrey Richards, Scott Wilson and Linda Woodhead (I.B. Tauris. 182 pages. ISBN 186064-388-4), belongs to the first group. The title has the virtue of recognising that the sainthood of Diana is largely a media artefact and although it is a collection of essays written by academics, they are expressed with enough clarity to reach the average reader. This is not entirely a hagiography, but a serious examination of the factors that worked to make Diana a 'saint of the people'. Some balanced judgement is shown in giving space to dissenting voices, even a respect for accuracy in correctly attributing the phrase 'People's Princess' to Julie Burchill in 1992 rather than to Blair. ('The People's Princess' was a title given to the philanthropic and vastly stout Princess Mary of Cambridge in the 1890's to the annoyance of her cousin, Queen Victoria.) But although sainthood is contested, she is finally seen as a 'post-modern saint, as saint of image, excess, beauty, desire and display.' I suppose, in these terms, so is Elizabeth Taylor. Linda Woodhead goes even further in claiming spiritual significance for Diana. Her death is claimed to be possibly the biggest single event in world histo ry, and, most importantly, her Religion of the Heart is hailed as 'the most influential form of faith in Western Societies today.' This is a claim impossible to prove since this religion has few external signs being individualistic, non-traditional and with no formal structure.

Mourning Diana: Nature, Culture and the Performance of Grief, edited by Adrian Kear and Deborah Lynn Steinberg (Routledge. [pounds]45.00. 218 pages. ISBN 0-415-1939-1), also written by academics, is an extraordinary offering. Although its subject matter is confined to a study of the mourning which followed the death of Diana its reach is much wider. The preface is beyond parody in its threatened range of interdisciplinary approaches. An abbreviated list of these may suffice to give a flavour of these approaches and astonish those unfamiliar with current academic trends. They include feminist, queer and cultural studies, performance studies, studies of visual representation, sociological, literary and political theory, the performativity of grief as a cultural political phenomenon and the study of the sites of phantasmatic (sic) investment, with political hegemony thrown in for good measure. The real home for this kind of writing is the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America: the ordinary reader will run screaming from the room. The publishers have foreseen its limited readership in pricing it at [pounds]45. There is a predominant left-wing feminist viewpoint to these essays, allying the funeral grief with a new 'caring' Britain and an emphasis on Diana as an icon of the rejected and dispossessed. In her own position, as a renegade figure enacting inappropriate behaviour, she becomes a gay icon 'who identified as sexually straight ..., but functioned as politically queer.' No dissent is allowed from the opinion that the entire country was plunged into mourning and that this has lasting political significance. Disagreement is understood to provide further endorsement: 'The act of repudiating the illusory significance of the events simply serve(s) to reveal a vicarious investment in both the action and the actions of the people performing them.' This is a Catch 22 situation for the reader or spectator. The oddly synchronised vocabulary, unity of view and reliance on the theories of the French ph ilosopher, Derrida, argue committee writing. Most irritating is the use of bracketed word splitting (a French deconstructionist trick) to smuggle in multiple meanings -- as in 'be(long)ing'. 're(New)al'. '(in)corporeal'. Pretentious circumlocutions are preferred, for instance for 'narrate' we have 'narratological reconstructions'. And just consider the following: 'In the transition from the ontological to the hauntological, in the liminal realm of the still living dead, Diana had been transformed into an altogether 'Other' 'Diana'. There was self-evidently something in 'Diana' other than Diana herself, and this indeterminate surplus enabled her to occupy an intermediary space in which to articulate an excess of meaning.' Writing like this gives academia a bad name. I believe with Wittgenstein that: 'Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.'

If one can fight one's way through the verbose jargon there are some provocative, almost explosive contributions in this book. Arvind Rajagopal's essay on 'Celebrity and the Politics of Charity' contrasts the Saint of the Gutters and the Versace Princess, offering a thoughtful analysis of charitable giving in relation to government responsibility. The two figures, one highly individualised, dedicated to self-assertion and pleasure-seeking, the other ascetic and self-denying, are sharply contrasted. When Diana felt herself to be criticised for her high-maintenance life-style she jetted off to Mother Teresa to redress the balance by mere proximity, sainthood by association -- and it worked. In his sustained series of contrasts between the two figures, Rajagopal takes time out to demolish the myth of Mother Teresa as a humanitarian, relating her cavalier treatment of the sick in refusing to use some of the vast donations made to her to relieve their sufferings or pay for diagnoses. She and her nuns saw no point in alleviating pain or the eradication of poverty. 'Poverty is beautiful' she declared and one nun naively confessed after Mother Teresa's death that if the poor became rich 'We will lose our jobs.' Another essay, Diana Taylor's 'Downloading Grief' brilliantly details the resonances with Greek tragedy in Diana's death, in a style mercifully free of jargon.

It is a relief to turn to the unpretentious little book by Diana's florist, Kip Dodds, titled simply Kip's Flowers for Diana. (Sidgewick and Jackson. [pounds]16.99. 119 pages. ISBN 0-283-06348-3). This is beautifully illustrated with photographs of the kind of arrangements and floral gifts which were requested practically every day by Diana. Kip is content to worship the Princess from afar with humble adoration, his bouquets the equivalents of the poems and songs in the tradition of Courtly Love. Any meetings with his Lady are mentioned with great diffidence, without hinting at any insider knowledge. It is difficult to see how such an innocent made the transition from a council estate in Matlock to running a shop in Kensington smart enough to attract the attention of Diana, but he did. His prose and his posies are equally artless and charming. He is also capable of the grand effect. The swags of Christmas garlands outside Diana's front door are staggering and show, whatever other mistakes Diana may have made , when it came to flowers she had taste and style or at least knew where to find them.

Psychological studies of Diana continue to emerge. The first to diagnose her as suffering from a borderline personality disorder was Nigel Dempster in 1995 in an article 'Is Diana the Mistress of Manipulation?'. He gives nine characteristics of the disorder of which five are needed for positive diagnosis. Diana scores nine out of nine. Sally Bedell Smith's, Diana in Search of Herself (Aurum Press. [pounds]16.99. 451 pages. ISBN 0-8129-3030-4), makes the same case at much greater length. It is a very detailed and well-sourced examination of Diana's psychology, making a strong case for her troubles as preceding her marriage. Smith declares that Diana's acts of compassion were dictated by her own insecurities and that, like an ageing Hollywood, star she needed popular adulation and stimulated media attention to get it. Diana was prone to the pose of victimhood, an actress and one for whom there was no truth only the point of view of the moment. This has sold well in America to the fury of the British press sinc e a great deal of the material is taken from our own journalism. But Smith has an impressive number of private sources, some anonymous, and her theory that Diana had a borderline personality disorder is presented convincingly. Dr. Thomas Stuttaford has advanced the same theory in In Your Right Mind (Faber and Faber. [pounds]16.99. ISBN 0-571-194-168), evidencing Diana's difficulties with keeping staff and her intense and unstable relationships. September's Psychiatric Bulletin details an account of a patient who literally became mad with grief after Diana's death. The Bulletin explains this as due to the loss of her 'transitional object'. This is, in psychiatric terms, the vehicle for the kind of emotion a child is capable of when halfway between its fantasy world and the sphere of adult relationships, where intense feeling focuses on some object, such as a cuddly toy. 'Diana became such a toy' reported Hannah Betts in The Times (4 October 1999) in an article on the inappropriate mourning.

Another well-researched book which puts the academics to shame is Martyn Gregory's The Last Days (Virgin. [pounds]15.99. 256 pages. ISBN 1-85227-855-2). This examines the events leading up to, and including, the fatal crash. This is an authoritative analysis, based on the evidence of key witnesses including the French authorities. He is an experienced TV reporter who has produced a much praised Dispatches programme on Channel 4 on the accident which ended Diana's life. It is in this book that Gregory argues that Diana's romance with Dodi Fayed was a pretence to make her real lover, Hasnat Khan, jealous. Moreover, Mohammed Fayed's claim of a British government's conspiracy was an attempt to deflect attention from his own part in the tragedy. Dodi's decision to put a drunk, drugged and unqualified driver in charge of the car and leave by the back door of the Ritz in Paris with no back-up car was authorized by his father. 'There has been virtually no media focus on this central factor in the death of the Princess.'

Perhaps the strangest book, Divine Intervention (Cima. [pounds]15.99.253 pages. ISBN 1-903116-00-7), is written by Hazel Courteney, who claims to have been possessed by the spirit of Diana while shopping for almond croissants in Harrods. Her eyes turn cornflower blue from time to time, her legs dematerialize, she has the taste of death in her mouth and the stench of death about her. Commands from Diana control her: she must write a book, speak to Prince Charles and Sarah, Duchess of York. Hazel Courteney was a health columnist for the Sunday Times until Diana told her to stop and this book is interlarded with health advice. After her shattering experience in Harrods she ate white bread and jam to 'ground herself', plus porridge and a vitamin B complex -- all nature's tranquillizers. Courteney reinforces the Diana-as-saint belief since the Princess appears to be running a kind of Masters of the Spirit course from beyond the grave. At Glastonbury, Courteney hears the voice of Christ saying he did not die on th e cross, but lived a full life and had children. Diana tells her that to save the planet we must re-use plastic bags, flush the loo less and, best of all, it's OK to laugh and shop. This last message is the most convincing, but as to the rest I must quote Wittgenstein again: 'Of what one cannot speak, one must be silent'.

Finally, let the wretched James Hewitt have the last word. His book, Love and War (Blake. [pound]16.99.296 pages. ISBN 1-85782-3184), is an act of self-defence. One cannot help but sympathise with a man who finds himself described as a cad and a love rat in every tabloid. So far he is the only protagonist not to have his say, and he does so with no salacious detail and without publishing Diana's letters except in the briefest of paraphrases. In fact there is even a suspicion that the affair is engineered by the palace, enabling Prince Charles's affair to proceed. The book clearly shows the truth of Byron's saying: 'Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence.' Diana is devastated at Hewitt's departure to the Gulf war, he is excited. Pages are devoted to his tank and his men while Diana writes loving letters or 'blueys'. Hewitt is attractive to women, who appear to throw themselves at him, but he clearly has little idea of how to cope with them except in the purely physical sense. Mars truly does not understand Venus. He is as uncomprehending of the dramas played around him as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Stoppard's play. Dumped by Diana, deluded by the mistresses who either 'borrowed' or stole his letters, used by practically everyone -- the refusal to return his letters was disgraceful -- Hewitt is the victim par excellence in the whole sorry business.

Dr. Joan Bridgman has lectured for the Brunel and Open Universities.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group

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