Princess Margarettable vs Queen Elizaboring
Or, how to avoid talking to commoners
Have you come far?
That is Queen Elizabeth’s all-purpose conversation starter, a simple question that’s less than the sum of its parts. Why, you could tell Her Royal Highness about the traffic, the specific route you took, or even your mode of transit. No matter how you answer, it will be dull. This is what Sarah Koenig’s mother called “Route Talk” in an episode of This American Life titled “The Seven Things You’re Not Supposed to Talk About.” Fittingly, the podcast host declared route talk to be the “my mother’s number one killer of discourse, her crown jewel.”
For a woman who has actual crown jewels, that’s the beauty of route talk. The Queen doesn’t want to talk to you, and if she must, the chit chat should be polite, unmemorable, and brief.
Princess Margaret, Her Majesty’s late younger sister, had a different solution to the same problem. To avoid commoners’ conversation, she quickly insulted them. Less noblesse oblige and more noblesse o-bludgeon.
This is nicely illustrated in Craig Brown’s lively 2017 book Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. It’s a “Cubist portrait of the lady” offering scores of short takes on the woman who “shows up without warning, popping her head around the door of every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the twentieth century.” If Season Four of The Crown is, as The Guardian extravagantly claimed, “so good it might actually save Christmas 2020,” Brown’s book may extend the feeling till New Year’s.
Every caustic comment Her Royal Highness stooped to make is contained herein, and it’s generous to call them witty. Like her response when Lord Carnarvon poured her a glass of his extremely valuable 1836 Madeira:
‘Exactly like petrol.’
Brown explains that this was her schtick: Whereas Elizabeth saw it as her job to put people at ease, Margaret was there to put them at unease. The Princess “took a perverse pleasure in saying the wrong thing, ruffling feathers, disarming, disdaining, making her displeasure felt.” She was the other side of the coin, a tough job when your sister’s face is actually on the money.
Everyone knew what the Queen’s job was. As Brown recounts:
Once, when Gore Vidal was gossiping with Princess Margaret, he told her that Jackie Kennedy had found the Queen ‘pretty heavy going’.
‘But that’s what she’s there for,’ explained the Princess.
What was Margaret there for? As one of her friends lamented:
“She never knew whether she was meant to be posh or to be matey, and so she swung between the two, and it was a disaster.’
What’s the lesson here?
Be resolutely dull and people may suspect great wisdom.
Be aggressively rude and people may suspect great wit.
But both really only work if you are to the bad manners born.
Quick quips; lightning
On the subject of Brits Behaving Badly — and when don’t they? — the writer Lawrence Osborne is a master of the cynical aside. Some choice cuts from his 2012 novel The Forgiven:
Every career has a few moments of visibility followed by a long, painful subsidence into total anonymity.
She struggled to recall what he did. A financial analyst? She had little idea what financial analysts did, if they did anything.
“The men of the desert know everything,” Hamid said once, like a quote out of Lawrence of Arabia. But they didn’t, really. They were just efficient pessimists, and therefore astute readers of human nature. They always assumed the worst, and that made them correct nine times out of ten.
The world was a dreadful place, Daddy said, by and large, and the best thing you could do was make fun of it. At least that was an authentically English response.
Link link, nudge nudge
Sometimes the best reaction to the crooked timber of humanity is a simple shrug. And so GWQ endorses WhateverTree, an 11-minute animated film that chronicles the rise and fall of an emoji-shaped stump. A labour of love by Friend of the Newsletter Isaac King, it’s a Vimeo Staff Pick and a front runner for the year’s Best Performance by a Twerking Pizza in a Supporting Role, though to be fair I’ve yet to see David Fincher’s Mank.
The 74th issue of GWQ is a little bit posh, a little bit matey, and all shrug. My book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting makes a suitable coaster for your 10 a.m. G&T. Lord Carnarvon, if you’re pouring, I could use a top up. The moral of every season of The Crown is that these people would be so much better off if they could just express love. Lead the way by tapping the ♥️ below.