Her Majesty's a Pretty Nice Girl

At the back of my cutlery drawer, my fingers graze the tarnished coronation teaspoon that was the sugar spoon in my family for all my growing up. My mother came by it in 1952 upon the accession of Princess Elizabeth Windsor to the throne of England. I sincerely doubt that my ever-thrifty mother went out and bought the spoon. It was probably a freebie handed out in the kind of forced celebration we have been witnessing this week upon the death of said queen. Yesterday, to commemorate the queen's funeral, the entire UK was shut down - no airplanes, no doctor's visits, no chemo appointments, no weddings, no other funerals. If they could have sutured pregnant women's vaginas shut, there would have been no births either. 

You would be forgiven for thinking this kind of state control smacks of the deaths of dictators in more repressive regimes, but in some ways it is worse. You can force a reluctant populace to go through the motions of grief, but in London at Westminster, there were subjects lined up for miles and many hours, wiping their tears as they walked past the queen's coffin (whether or not there was an actual body inside.) The last couple in line told reporters that this was the biggest day of their lives, surpassing the births of their three children. 

The BBC, which used to have a reputation as an upstanding purveyor of news and quality television, has shifted in recent years to toeing the government line. So, once the death of the queen was announced, the beeb went into overdrive, covering the queue past the coffin at Westminster twenty four hours a day. 

I understand that we live in desperate times, that the three year pandemic has taken its toll on the minds of humankind. If you want to dig deeper, you could recognise this mental instability as a result of the breakdown of the Empire and or of Christianity which is on very loose footing these days on the British island.  The ebb of a moral compass that has governed the hearts and minds of a populace back into the misty shades of recorded history is no inconsequential drift. 

But the hysteria surrounding the passing of a ninety-six year old monarch in England (judging by the sparse attendance in Edinburgh's Holyrood Park, the Scots felt differently) was, well, hysterical. The Left Bank TV production The Crown has in recent years displayed for all to see the depth of dysfunction that lies at the heart of this royal family. I won't go into the untimely death of Diana (though satirist Trevor Noah did), but the proscriptions for who should marry whom, the poor children left to the care of nannies,  the pathology of the "stiff upper lip," the strangeness of lives lived to the drumbeat of a past (and brutal) empire, would give any good psychologist a field day. 

It's hard to topple icons. It is proving near impossible to indict obviously criminal former American president Donald Trump. But when that icon lives rent free in the minds of its subjects, the task is even harder. We all grew up wth Queen Elizabeth as the model of decorum, as the height of a social ladder  that only the pedigreed few could climb. When I was a girl, I marvelled at royal speech. No one else quite speaks like that. It requires a certain quality of pole in the rectum. But back then I didn't want to be another anonymous Scottish girl with a Scottish accent. In the sixth verse of the empire hymn, the National Anthem, is a line about crushing the rebellious Scots.  I didn't want to be in the way of the crushing engine that levelled my agency and left me no credence.

Many, many years later, royal speech, like royal authority, rings hollow in my ears. You cannot ignore the steam roller that accompanies the march of the Empire and everything the royal family represents.  The younger royals have tried to look more accessible, have tried to present themselves as just anther family. But what does it do to the mind of a little George VII that he will one day ascend to the throne of England?  The best of the royals have tried to get out, but there is never enough time to escape the swipe of the steam roller. Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, many others who were hid from sight, and now Prince Harry have tried thrusting through the thorny forest to escape the shadow of the castle. 

In the past week, I have had to look away from the spectacle of a week-long funeral pageant in the name of such an obviously flawed institution. As a Scot, coming down from ancestors who were moved off their land in the Highland clearances and who were disregarded by the powers that have since 1707 resided in London, it all leaves me with a nasty taste, a bitter pill, and not one that even a spoonful of sugar from my mother's royal spoon will ever dispel. 

The queen's death at Balmoral in the highlands of Scotland was well orchestrated. She famously feared the break up of the Union, and this was her final gesture. But, as a Scot by birth,  it is my hope that this symbol of the queen's death in Scotland will carry into history a different weight. Just as the icon of the British Empire gave out her last breath on Scottish soil, so let the union follow swiftly behind.

THE DIVIDE BETWEEN A WRITER AND HIS/HER CHARACTERS

Years ago, I studied for a week with author Paul Harding.  His book Tinkers is one of those books I keep going back to, because the language is so rich and the images so captivating. I rarely find those qualities in a modern book (though another is James Galvin's The Meadow.) Harding won the Pulitzer prize for Tinkers, and nothing he has produced since has come close.  I think he got self-conscious, as tends to happen when great accolades are thrown at an author. I remember him saying to me that he was afraid all the attention would just disappear. And it did. But, as I told him, the book that won the prize is still worthy, still in print, ever more worn and thumbed through on my shelf. 

I recently came across a diary entry I made during that period of study, and I wanted to blog about it, because I think it raises an interesting question about how much of their own self a writer interjects into their characters.  

One last harp on having studied with Paul Harding a couple of weeks ago and then I'll let him go: I had a question I was bursting to ask him or any other significant writer which had to do with how much the author inhabits his or her characters.  See, when I started my own book Veil Of Time (which then became a trilogy) I thought to myself that for once I would have a protagonist who wasn't sort of a mirror doppleganger of myself. It's not that I'm an especial egoist or overly vain (though I might also be both of those things), but just that somehow my protagonists mostly are me with my set of values and ideas, my cosmology. I called this character Maggie Livingstone, who was a childhood friend of mine (still is, in fact, and lives now in the exact location of my book.)

I wasn't going to make my protagonist Maggie Livingstone, who is a veterinarian and sort of a no-nonsense type of person, but I thought if I gave her that name, she wouldn't end up spouting my religious beliefs and my longings and my moral values. I kept that up for a while, but the more my character moved through the scenes and the book came to take shape, there I was in the middle of the action, masquerading as my friend. 

So, my question to Paul Harding was just this: how can you keep yourself out of your writing and create rounded characters who aren't you. (I put this to him when the rest of the class had gone on coffee break.) I was a little bit surprised by his answer, because (being an egoist and vain) I had thought this was a problem unique to myself. But no, he said he had struggled with the same thing and that every author did. He said from time to time he wondered that if he were a better writer, he might be able to write protagonists that weren't him, but ultimately the author is putting his or her self on the page and that's the way it should be. (I'm not talking about genre writing here - John Le Carre didn't need to be a spy himself, though he did need to have an overwhelming interest in the subject. Formula novels don't run into this problem so much because the characters are more cookie cut out of material that is already made to a certain recipe.) 

I was looking at Elizabeth Strout's new book "The Burgess Boys," her follow-up to "Olive Kitteredge." I wasn't surprised to find another Olive Kitteredge between the pages doing business under another name. Location was the same, character almost the same. It's just that our psyches are populated by certain characters or archetypes and the author would have to twist him or herself into all kinds of contortions to make this inner world come out on the page as something else.

So Herman Hesse wrote a large number of books and basically they all come with the same message, the same set of values and the same array of characters. (I read them all nevertheless.) DH Lawrence, the favourite of my youth, wrote the same book over and over.  The point is, in the words of Martin Luther in the fifteenth century, "Hier stehe ich. Anders can ich nicht" (the famous, "Here I stand, I can do no other.") 

So I got my question answered, and I feel better about Maggie Livingstone turned Claire McDougall (though she may not!) Paul Harding said that the opening of "Tinkers," where his protagonist hallucinates that the ceiling is cracking and falling in on him springs right out of his own history with  his grandfather.