Born in an age of deference, the Princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism. Attempting to straddle the two, wanting to be treated as both equal and superior, and vacillating, from one moment to the next, between the easy-going and the hoity-toity, her behaviour often led to tears before bedtime.
I’m not going to spend much time on Craig Brown’s ‘biography’ of Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling and there’s a good reason…
The book is comprised of 99 vignettes about Margaret, spanning her whole life. And it seems that loads of people were willing to share a incident story –
…if you were in search of an amusing tale with which to entertain your friends, you’d opt for the immersive Margaret experience: a late night and a show of stroppiness, all ready to jot down in your diary the moment she left, her high-handedness transformed, as if by magic, into anecdote.
The Queen makes an occasional appearance, as does the Queen Mother, but the focus is firmly on Margaret’s antics with her chosen social set; her frequently rude behaviour at dinner parties; her doomed relationship with Peter Townsend; and her disastrous marriage to Anthony Armstrong-Jones.
She leaned towards the artistic, the camp and the modish, even going so far as to marry a man at the centre of that particular Venn diagram.
But here’s the thing. Early in the book (‘glimpse 19’) there’s a fictitious chapter about the Princess marrying Pablo Picasso. Picasso’s obsession with the Princess is documented, however this extrapolation by Brown derails the book. The ‘flourish’ is repeated a number of times, in different ways, as the book progresses. How do you then discern the real from the fake? And did I care? No. But what a strange editorial decision.
2/5
Princess Margaret was born in 1930, the same year as air hostess and newscaster entered the language, and died in 2002, when googling, selfie, blogger and weapons of mass destruction first appeared. Is it just me, or do a remarkably high proportion of the words that share her birthday also reflect something of her character? … Inventions that first came on the market in 1930, thus introducing new words to the language, included bulldozer, electric blanket and jingle, all of which have a faint echo of Margaret about them. The Gibson…was introduced to fashionable society.
As part of the 20 Books of Summer reading challenge, I’m comparing the Belfast summer and Melburnian winter. The results for the day I finished this book (August 12): Belfast 16°-20° and Melbourne 6°-20°.
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#Snap! We both encountered the royals this week, ha ha.
Margaret…she would have made a much more interesting queen…
There was a brilliant bit in the book saying how it was the Queen’s job to be ‘dull’ – imagine knowing that from a young age?! And another bit that quoted their father saying “Elizabeth is my pride and Margaret is my joy”. Who knows if that was ever said, although there’s enough of that theme that you have to think there was either truth in it, or it became a self-fulfilling prophecy!
Brown’s metier is satire, not biography.
In ‘Ma’am Darling’ he re-imagines traditional biography as a collection of ’99 glimpses’: essays, lists, catalogues, palace announcements, newspaper cuttings and diaries, which, while undoubtedly entertaining, are aprocryphal, subjective & unreliable records shaped by a narrator’s memory, agenda, and whether they’d left the dining room on the night they coined Pooping of the Colour, when the Queen Mother’s colostomy bag burst all over her shoes, leading Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, in mid-season form and looking determined in a seventh-absinthe-martini sort of way, to tweak her left nip & shout ‘Look here, you old trout! The shoes finally match the bag, what? Everyone thought you had rotten eyesight. Or couldn’t accessorise. Some said a vengeful Keeper of the Shoehorn on thr’penny wages you lot nick off chimney sweeps was taking advantage of your not having seen the old bunions & corns since The War…
[Sidebar: rotten bloody luck, that…no, wait…rotten bloody JEWS, you said! Shhh, don’t mention the war.]
…and she’s been sending you out in those white lawn-bowls shoes from Oxfam — yes, the ones with the paper-clip laces! — which are the all the scream in military drag circles & the Workhouse…sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
Brown treats such material as highly entertaining, often deliciously piquant ‘faction’, a little light relief for reader & writer.
The final category in ’99 Glimpses’ is parody, at which Brown exels.
One is a pastiche of Lytton Strachey; another echoes Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’; yet another, in which Brown imagines how things might have gone had Margaret married her admirer Picasso…oh, dear…
*mouth vomit*
…sorry, where was I…oh, yes, this was written in the style of the artist’s biographer, John Richardson.
I think this is where you came in.
The more I read about Margaret, the more splenetic with rage hate I become.
Madge Boozehound of Meths Manor, County of Can’t Sing, was imperious, ungracious, high-handed, rapacious, cruel, dismissive, insufferable, intolerant, demanding, RUDE, and as relevant as a pantomime dame.
I blame Cookie. Entitled dipsomaniac COMMONER.
And, my dear, the TEETH…
Well pleased to have stumbled across this today.
Bravo!
Also, bottoms up!🥂
Nancy Rant