I find myself suddenly interested in British royalty. The Crown — I’m on season three, watching nightly from a heated mat on the floor — has functioned as a kind of gateway drug, eventually softening me to a suggestion from my mother that I read Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare. I did, and was fascinated. From there, on the recommendation of my friends Tre and Brian, I moved on to the memoir of Anne Glenconner, Princess Margaret’s longtime friend and lady in waiting, called, unfussily, Lady in Waiting. As promised, it was one of the most satisfying audiobook experiences I’ve had. An aged Glenconner reads the book herself, her voice dripping with privilege and some barely repressed scorn. Her stories are absolutely wild.
Through Lady in Waiting, a network of aristocrats, artists, and eccentrics began to light up. I find it extremely fun to discover exactly how these people are connected by looking up biographies and photographs of them online. This makes me actually appreciate the internet.
Anne Glenconner was married for a half-century to Colin Tennant (a baron and madman who, in one final plot twist, left everything to a servant), nephew of the socialite and Bright Young Things member Stephen Tennant. Stephen was the grand-uncle of Stella Tennant, the model who committed suicide in 2020, who was also a granddaughter of Deborah Mitford. Glenconner was classmates with Caroline Blackwood, writer and Guinness heiress, who was married to Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, and later, to Robert Lowell, who was of course married to Elizabeth Hardwick. And on and on. I took the first volume of Lucian Freud’s biography out of the library (tl;dr: what a dick) and broke out The Dolphin Letters to remember a few of the choice words that followed Hardwick’s discovery of Lowell and Lady Blackwood’s affair: “. . .it was just this afternoon that I knew it was Caroline. I felt such relief and burst out laughing!” I’m so sure, Liz.
I’ve long found Blackwood interesting and was pleased to see McNally Editions is reprinting The Stepdaughter this summer. In addition to novels and stories, she wrote personal reportage, including an odd book about the women of the nuclear protest camps at Greenham Common called On the Perimeter. Looking for more information about that book, I found this review, a characteristically polite skewering by Marilynne Robinson (!) in 1985.
Of course, to read those in the royal circle is to encounter profound delusions about wealth, power, colonial violence. Though they suffer mightily, these are individuals insulated from understanding much of anything about the world beyond their manor houses, so they do ghastly things, pathetic things. Prince Harry thinks nothing of attending a “colonial and native” costume party at his brother and sister-in-law’s, for example (to say nothing of the Nazi incident!). Lady Anne Glenconner and her husband Colin Tennant turned the Caribbean island of Mustique into an exclusive bohemian playground. Tennant even crowned himself king of the island at The Golden Ball, his 50th birthday party, among oiled-up locals hired to wear loin coverings made of coconuts.
One finds oneself thinking that the assorted miseries of these types are the result of a kind of spiritual rot, for we tend to know even those things we do not want to know we know. I read a book explicitly on that theme this month: Missing Persons, or My Grandmother’s Secrets by Clair Wills. Wills, a Cambridge academic who contributes frequently to the London Review of Books, is half-Irish and writes here about the discovery of a cousin born in the 1950s in a mother-and-baby home in the same Irish town where she spent her childhood summers. She begins to investigate a family tragedy hidden in plain sight and ends up writing broadly about the culture of secrecy that abetted the brutal treatment of unmarried mothers in Ireland. The book is a bit circuitous — put more generously, Wills finds no easy answers and many dead ends —but it’s the best thing I’ve read about these homes and their normalization. “There was a whole system set up that made disappearing look ordinary,” Wills writes. She challenges the facile assumptions we (I) make about prudishness or repression in this context. Writing about the grandmother who banished the young pregnant woman, for example, she says, “Looking back now I can interpret her anxiety as rooted not so much in sexual puritanism as sexual awareness. Sex was everywhere, always waiting to waylay you, and you had to be permanently on guard.” Wills shares some of her own personal history too. In all, the book is moving, disturbing, and an important contribution to a growing body of knowledge about these entrenched forms of not-knowing. It made me think about all that we refuse to know or remember, in families and elsewhere.
Others this month:
Went to London, Took the Dog by Nina Stibbe
Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny record of everyday foibles. This diary covers a year in the (mid)life of a writer considering a divorce who stays with another writer, Deborah Moggach, in London. It’s rare that I find a book this hilarious. I didn’t want it to end.
The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
This is the third in the Thursday Murder Club series that I’m always going on about and I think my favorite so far. I’m running out of these and hope Osman is writing more quickly.
Of Cities & Women: Letters to Fawwaz by Etel Adnan
My first Adnan. Lyrical, philosophical. I loved it. She was supposed to write an essay about feminism for a magazine issue on “Arab Women,” but penned these letters to its editor instead, from Barcelona, Aix-en-Provence, Skopelos, Murcia, Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, and Beirut. I adore a book that was supposed to be something else but turned into itself. I found this really beautiful.
Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt by Brontez Purnell
A memoir in verse by a local queer punk legend whose band I’ve loved forever. This book is very short and of the moment, crackling with seen-it-all wit.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell
A quiet British novel about a cookbook editor nicknamed Piglet who’s set to marry in a few months time. When she discovers her fiancé has done something very bad, she begins to eat a lot as she figures out what to do. A bit predictable, but lovely writing and good food descriptions. I longed for more dinner party scenes — but don’t I always?
Onto April. Happy reading! 📚🌷♥️
So good. How do you read so much? You’re my reading hero!