Even as We Speak by Clive James

Author:Clive James [James, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780330526678
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

New Yorker, 15 September, 1997

POSTSCRIPT TO A REQUIEM

Complete with all its stylistic arabesques, the preceding obituary is reproduced in the form it took when it was first published in the special edition of the New Yorker which appeared in the week of the accident. The following weekend, a slightly shorter version appeared in Britain, in the Sunday Telegraph, and that was the version which was subsequently reprinted, sometimes in further abridged form, in newspapers and magazines in other languages, and was reproduced in its entirety in the book Requiem which came out to mark the anniversary. Not at my initiative, but with my agreement, the second version was shorn of the first version’s opening paragraph. Some London journalists, usually professing more sorrow than anger, had taken particular exception to this, quoting it dutifully as evidence of how at least one of Diana’s admirers had lost his head. Even the second version, as I have subsequently discovered, provides ample opportunity for critics deploring the state of modern journalism (or anyway deploring the modern state of my journalism) to demonstrate how a once-keen critical brain can be softened to sponge cake by the moist air of celebrity. When the Requiem volume came out, one of its reviewers – somehow contriving to forget that it was he, and not I, who was a member of the sweating team of Stakhanovite shock-workers currently pouring forth yet another load of loosely mixed sand and gravel on the topic of Diana – kindly said of my piece that I must have regretted ever having written it.

When I read what he and some of his colleagues said, I did regret having written it, but only for the moment. Self-justification is a bad reason for writing a postscript to anything, but I would be conspiring at my own hanging if I failed to record that on this topic my fellow scribblers were the only people I heard from who said that I had done the wrong thing. Other people said that I had spoken for them. From all over the world I received letters by the hundred. The harshest admonishment any of them proffered was that if I had let grief unhinge my equipoise, that was only appropriate, because they too had felt bereavement with such force that all their normal stability had trembled on its base. To be fair to my colleagues in the media, those I knew personally were ready – unusually ready, but those were unusual times – to concede that my cry from the heart had struck a note whose authenticity they recognized, even if it had come from a heart that had spent too much of its existence worn on a sleeve. One famously unfoolable TV critic had been telling me for years that the Royal Family was a swindle perpetrated on honest labourers such as herself. She phoned me in such a fit of tears that she could hardly choke out her message, which was that her anguish was made worse because

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