(Above: Catherine, Princess of Wales. Photograph by Paolo Roversi. Released to mark the occasion of the then Duchess of Cambridge’s 40th birthday in January 2022. From the National Portrait Gallery. London.)
Plans - like life itself - can change and do so with the suddenness of a surging undertow or a physical assault or a missed step on the way to a fall toward one’s brokenness or, in what must feel like a conflation of those things coming together all at once: a cancer diagnosis.
Before my own plans changed, I had it penciled in on my schedule this week to write a column about manipulation in culture and art and politics and to tie its lede to the manipulated photo that Kensington Palace sent out on Mother’s Day here in England and for which Catherine, Princess of Wales, then so graciously and troublingly took the fall when it was discovered that it had been digitally altered. The Palace however refused to issue the original photo - if there had even been one - leading to further speculation about her and her whereabouts and the state of both her health and her marriage. Such speculation had an even deeper basis in the mistrust that the press and so much of the public has for any pronouncements issued from “the Palace” since what “it” considers the needed narrative does not always conflate with the complete truth. Our correctly feeling deep emotional wells of sympathy and empathy and concern for Catherine and her husband and their three young children now that she has announced that she has cancer - as we would, I hope, for any family - cannot erase the fact that the first press release and subsequent statements, which included the information that she did not have cancer and that the surgery was not cancer-related, were lies told in official language. And any shading of honesty - no matter if courtiers were commanded to do so - always darkens into a shadier form of duplicity. As a republican over here in London where I now spend half of each year, I could argue that duping the public is what the Royal Family is all about. Even its name - Windsor - is a dishonesty which was appropriated from the name of a piece of property back in 1917 when the name was adopted by a proclamation of King George V which replaced its historic German name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and thus made the family more culturally palatable during WW I as a public institution, which its members and those who steadfastly support it insist it is. Its production budget - and it is finally a traveling show of honors bestowed and ribbons cut and titles granted and invitations issued and balconies populated and hats worn and sashes shouldered and charities fronted and boredom bejeweled and frowns smilingly retrofitted as the smattering of smirks a bit too politely smeared there with upperclass privilege - is mostly funded by public coffers. Even with my political leanings and misgivings about any family being designated royal, I was careful not to post about all the conjecture the last few weeks on social media when the rumor frenzy was at its heights even though I did comment once on someone else’s post. I did however privately say this: “If she has cancer - and the insistence that she doesn’t sadly makes me think she does - after King Charles’s own diagnosis, then the Royal Family will become more popular than ever because of just that: sadness.” And this: “King Charles’s story is Shakespearean but the Royal Family has long ago become more of a soap opera so most people are talking about Catherine in soapy - even trashy - ways. People want the soap, not the Shakespearean tragedy.” This: “Either way, that is all they are: narrative. They are lived narrative.” A Shakespearean soap opera. Sadness. A narrative predicated on subjects. I’ll stand by those statements now in public here in this column.
The irony of this latest heightening of the family’s narrative is how finally well-behaved Fleet Street has been compared to how its tabloid denizens have fed with such glut and glee on such stories in the past. We live in a social media age now and each person with a keyboard and the inclination can ramp up the Royal Family’s ever-Fleet-ing narrative with rumors and innuendos and sexual puerilities purloined from the trashiest corners of the internet. Fleet Street is now us. But the Royal Family is part of it also - and, indeed, always has been. It just feeds the friendliest press the specific fodder it wants them to regurgitate to go along with the other parts of the journalistic diet over here, a yellowing of suet and swill that British swells swallow up as well. And the Royal Family has a big social media footprint itself. Even I, a republican, am one of its 13. 4 million followers on its Instagram account. You can also be by clicking on it here.
But even with social media and Fleet Street and centuries of generational narrative that must be noticed - even, I’d posit, remarked upon with either respect or an unreliable sort of ribaldry - in order for the family to have a reason to exist in the form it still does in a symbiotic cultural need that I will never quite understand (just go walk around the National Portrait Gallery and look at the visual hagiography and read the narratives posted by each portrait, which I have also told people is like walking through a gallery of Vanity Fair covers of the day), this double cancer diagnosis story about Catherine and her father-in-law is a deeply personal one. I respect that aspect of it. And yet they still have not chosen to share the specific cancer each has which could then offer another level of empathy to those suffering from such forms of it. So there will still be speculation and conjecture and gossip - which might just be the point more than privacy or even the secretive shame about the form that disease can take in a life. For the Royal Family construct to keep going as, again, the only thing it finally is - narrative - it must not only be a lived one, but one that is participatory. If the public only knows part of each chapter of its narrative being spun for them then they remain interested and are themselves part of the yarn just as they were of yore documented so well at the National Portrait Gallery. In such a way, they have a personal investment - just as the public more literally invests in this enterprise - in the narrative continuing in the way a book is just a collector of dust unless it is read. The public is sentenced to the royals just being a bunch of sentences being daily written for their consumption, and always have been. They are each trapped in this British cycle of saga.
But back to this latest Catherine chapter we have all been consuming with such interest and curiosity. Even if a semblance of coercion were present in her statement videoed by the BBC, she handled herself with dignity as well as the duty that is now part of her marriage to such a man. I was deeply touched by it - as anyone who has been affected personally by cancer continues to be as she and her father-in-law undergo their treatments and their family is privately there for them. When I was speaking personally and privately myself about this, I would always mention the children - George and Charlotte and Louis, ages ten and eight and five respectively - because in my own life I was one of three young children whose mother received a cancer diagnosis at the age of 32 and died at 33. I kept thinking of George and Charlotte and Louis and how Catherine had to navigate that part of the narrative - telling her children or only telling the oldest - into which her children were born. I have felt for those kids a lot. In the depths of my still wounded soul, I feel for them.
I was eight when my own mother was dying of cancer. My brother was six and my sister was four. Our father, a sports celebrity in Mississippi, had died the year before in a car accident. So our story - The Little Sessums Orphans - became a human interest one throughout the state. We became narrative. But I was the only one told earlier of our mother’s cancer and her prognosis. It changed my whole life being given that knowledge. And I have lived every night since with the memory of my mother’s last night alive and her saying goodbye to me over and over from her hospital bed as I stood on a stool for her to see me because I was still so small. In so many ways, my life has been a long goodbye to my mother from that moment on. I was never the same. I know I was never again a child. In fact, when my grandmother told me of my mother’s impending death and that God needed another angel in heaven and that was the reason she was about to die, I said, “Then I hate God.” My grandmother, in her shock, slapped me. She began to cry. I then comforted her for having slapped me. It was in that moment I became an adult at 8 years old. It was also in that moment I saved myself by more deeply condemning myself to a life lived as narrative because I remember stepping out of the moment in order to survive it by observing it. The condemnation was my salvation. I have been living a writerly life of observation and narrative ever since.
I have thought so much of Catherine’s children and how, in ways they are just beginning to comprehend, their childhoods are ending during this Easter holiday in their England which is for now still narratively theirs. They are condemned to it. That seems to be their generational prognosis: the run-on sentence that is royalty. May their mother’s narrative and their grandfather’s continue with threads of personal survival and public inspiration.
I wish them well - and wellness.
F-ing excellent. Tour de force, especially when you finally got to Mississippi.
Your adept blend of personal experiences and insightful societal observations illuminates the complexities of manipulation in culture and the royal family's narrative. Your empathy and insight into Catherine's family, alongside the exploration of broader implications, are deeply appreciated.