The way the subject of a photograph looks at the photograph is unlike the way anyone else will ever see it. You hope your worst bits haven’t been emphasized too much. You hope not to look like a bag person. You hope not to scare people who come across the picture by chance.
Let me try to see this picture as if I were not its subject. Richard Avedon was not interested in making a picture of a cheery novelist without a care in the world. I think he wanted to make a portrait of a writer to whom a number of bad things had happened. I think the picture shows some of that pain, but also, I hope, it shows something of resistance and endurance. It is a strong picture, and I am grateful to Avedon, for his solidarity, for his picture’s clarity, and for its strength.
November 1995
Crash
THE DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA
It has all been so disturbingly novelistic, and the novel I’m thinking of isn’t a fairy tale, although Diana’s story did begin like a fairy tale, nor is it a soap opera, although goodness knows the long saga of the battling Windsors has been sudsy enough. I’m thinking of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, whose recent film adaptation by David Cronenberg caused howls from the censorship lobby, particularly in Britain. It is one of the darker ironies of a dark event that the themes and ideas explored by Ballard and Cronenberg, themes and ideas which many in Britain have called pornographic, should have been so lethally acted out in the car accident that killed Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed, and their drunken driver.
We live in a culture that routinely eroticizes and glamorizes its consumer technology, notably the motorcar. We also live in the Age of Fame, in which the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities, too, a transformation that has often proved powerful enough to destroy them. Ballard’s novel, by bringing together these two powerful erotic fetishes—the Automobile and the Star—in an act of sexual violence (a car crash), created an effect so shocking as to be thought obscene.
The death of Princess Diana is just such an obscenity. One of the reasons why it is so very sad is that it seems so senseless. To die because you don’t want to have your picture taken! What could be more meaningless, more absurd? But in fact this frightful accident is freighted with meanings. It tells us uncomfortable truths about what we have become.
In our erotic imaginations, perhaps only the camera can rival the automobile. The camera, as a reporter, captures the news and delivers it to our door and, in more adoring mode, often looks upon beautiful women and offers them up for our delight. In Princess Diana’s fatal crash, the Camera (as both Reporter and Lover) is joined to the Automobile and the Star, and the cocktail of death and desire becomes even more powerful than the one in Ballard’s book.
Think of it this way. The object of desire, the Beauty (Princess Diana), is repeatedly subjected to the unwelcome attentions of a persistent suitor (the Camera) until a dashing, glamorous knight (riding his Automobile) sweeps her away. The Camera, with its unavoidably phallic long-lensed snout, gives pursuit. And the story reaches its tragic climax, for the Automobile is driven not by a hero but by a clumsy drunk. Put not your trust in fairy tales, or chivalrous knights. The object of desire, in the moment of her death, sees the phallic lenses advancing upon her, snapping, snapping. Think of it this way and the pornography of Diana Spencer’s death becomes apparent. She died in a sublimated sexual assault.
Sublimated. That’s the point. The Camera is not, finally, a suitor in its own right. True, it seeks to possess the Beauty, to capture her on film, for economic gain. But that’s a euphemism. The brutal truth is that the camera is acting on our behalf. If the camera acts voyeuristically, it is because our relationship with the Beauty has always been voyeuristic. If blood is on the hands of the photographers and the photo agencies and the news media’s photo editors, it is also on ours. What newspaper do you read? When you saw the pictures of Dodi and Diana cavorting together, did you say, that’s none of my business, and turn the page?
We are the lethal voyeurs. “Are you satisfied now?” people in Britain have been shouting at photographers. Could we answer the same question? Are we satisfied now? Are we going to stop being fascinated by those illicit images of Diana’s kisses, or by the earlier “sensational scoops” of Prince Charles naked in a distant room, of Fergie getting her toes sucked, all those purloined moments, those stolen secrets of public people’s private lives that have, for more than a decade now, been the stuff of our most popular newspapers and magazines? Will we no longer want to eavesdrop on the intimacies of those—like the voluptuous Earthling movie star in a Vonnegut novel, imprisoned with a man in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, so that the locals could study her mating habits—whom we imprison in fame?
Not a chance.
Princess Diana became skillful at constructing the images of herself she wanted people to see. I recall a British newspaper editor telling me how she composed the famous shot in which she sat, alone and lovelorn, in front of the world’s greatest monument to love, the Taj Mahal. She knew, he said, exactly how the public would “read” this photograph. It would bring her great sympathy, and make people think (even) less well of the Prince of Wales than before. Princess Diana was not given to using words like “semiotics,” but she was a capable semiotician of herself. With increasing confidence, she gave us the signs by which we might know her as she wished to be known.
Some voices have been saying that her “collusion” with the media in general and with photographers in particular must be an important mitigating factor in any discussion of the paparazzi’s role in her death. Perhaps so; but one must also consider the importance attached by a woman in her position to controlling her public image. The public figure is happy to be photographed only when she or he is prepared for it, “on guard,” one might say. The paparazzo looks only for the unguarded moment. The battle is for control, for a form of power. Diana did not wish to give the photographers power over her, to be merely their (our) Object. In escaping from the pursuing lenses, she was asserting her determination, perhaps her right, to be something altogether more dignified: that is, to be a Subject. Fleeing from Object to Subject, from commodity toward humanity, she met her death. Wanting to be the mistress of her own life, she surrendered herself to a driver who was not even able to control her car. This, too, is a bitter irony.
The Windsors and the Fayeds are the archetypal Insiders and Outsiders. Mohammad al-Fayed, the Egyptian who longed to be British, bought Harrods (and Conservative MPs) in his failed quest for British citizenship, and membership of an Establishment that closed its doors against him. Princess Diana’s love of Dodi al-Fayed may have felt to Dodi’s father like a moment of sweet triumph over that Establishment. Diana alive was the ultimate trophy. In death, she may unmake al-Fayed. He has lost his eldest son and perhaps also his last, best chance of being accepted by the British.
I described the Windsors as Insiders, but their status is also in doubt. Once beloved of the nation, they are now widely seen as the family that maltreated the far more beloved Diana. If al-Fayed is fated to remain on the outside looking in, then the Royal Family itself may just possibly be on the way out. The nation’s love of Diana will undoubtedly transfer itself to her sons. But if our insatiable, voyeuristic appetite for the iconic Diana was ultimately responsible for her death, then we should ask ourselves some sober questions about these boys. Would they be better off away from the crippling burdens of being Royal? How can they go on living in the real world she tried to show them, the world beyond the closed society of the British aristocracy, beyond Eton College? Diana herself seemed far happier once she’d escaped from the Royal Family. Perhaps Britain too would be happier if it made the same escape, and learned to live without kings and queens. Such are the unthinkable thoughts that have become all too thinkable now.
September 1997
The People’s Game
A FAN’S NOTES
1. WE ARE THE WORLD
In 1994, when the soccer World Cup was about to be played across the length and bre
adth of a largely indifferent America, perhaps the main concern of those few U.S. citizens who knew it was happening was that the alien phenomenon of soccer hooliganism might be about to arrive in the States. Fortunately the England team failed to make the finals, and so the feared English hooligans stayed home. Fortunately for the hooligans, I suspect, for, as I heard an American comedian explaining on British television, the World Cup matches were to be played in some of the toughest neighborhoods of some of the toughest cities in the world. “I tell you what,” he suggested. “Why don’t you bring your hooligans, and we’ll bring ours.”
Four years later, the 1998 World Cup was staged in and won by France, and as it happened I watched the entire tournament in America, on ESPN and Univision. The dullness of the ESPN coverage, with its commentators desperately misapplying the terminology of America’s ball games to soccer, suggested that America’s lack of interest in the rest of the world’s favorite game was as great as ever. Even when the USA team was defeated by Iran—Iran!—there was no more than a brief blip of attention before the Yankees, McGwire, and Sosa regained center stage.
Over on the Spanish-language Univision channel, however—“Góóóóóóóóóóóóól!!!!!!”—things were very different. Here was all the excitement and color missing from the ESPN commentary. And as it was on television, so it was also in real life; for wherever in polyglot America you stumbled over clumps of French men and women, or Brazilians, Colombians, Mexicans, Croatians, Germans, even Brits, for example in the many-nationed bars of Queens, the tournament and its passions were to be found there also, blazing as fiercely as anywhere else on earth.
The poor performances of the USA team were no doubt due, in part, to the crushing uninterest of the American mainstream but could also, I thought, be ascribed to the fact that the team seemed to be made up of college kids. For while college teams successfully supply fresh talent, year after year, to the NFL and NBA, soccer is not a college sport. Soccer is the people’s game, played with empty tin cans in the back streets of Brazilian cities. Soccer is working-class self-expression. If the United States is to have a first-rate soccer team, its administrators must look away from the colleges and into the heart of the minority communities who could be found crowding around their televisions in those summer weeks, sharing in the world’s excitement over the world championship of o jogo bonito, the Beautiful Game.
How to convey to America the idea of beauty as applied to a ball game it knows and cares so little about? How to explain the links that exist between soccer teams and national character? For all soccer fans know what it means to play like Brazilians (that is, with flair, flamboyance, and intoxicating rhythm), or like Germans (with great discipline, unwearying physical strength, and iron determination) or Italians (defensively, but with devastating bursts of counterattacking play).
This essay seeks to answer such questions by avoiding them. It seeks to find common ground between those who, like me, love soccer, and those to whom it feels like an alien irrelevance. It sets out not to describe the arcana of the game itself but to explore a related condition that crosses all sporting boundaries: that of being a fan.
A fan doesn’t just tune in once every four years to cheer his country’s team at the time of the World Cup. The true soccer fan is the club fan, for whom continuity is everything, and so is loyalty in times of adversity, and small gratifications offer great emotional rewards. Which is why, one rainy Sunday afternoon in March, I set out for Wembley Stadium, London, to watch my favorite club, Tottenham Hotspur, take on Leicester City in the final of the Worthington Cup.
There are three major competitions in English soccer each season, one played in leagues—the elite Premiership and the three lower divisions of the Football League—and two on a knockout basis (i.e., whoever loses is eliminated): the ancient and glamorous Football Association Challenge Cup (the “FA Cup”), and the johnny-come-lately, cheap-and-cheerful League Cup, which has metamorphosed, in this era of sponsorship, into the Milk Cup, the Coca-Cola Cup, and now the Worthington Cup. (At least milk, Coke, and Worthington beer are all things you can pour into cups. Cricket, also a much-sponsored sport, has had its Cups sponsored by the manufacturers of cigarettes and razor blades.)
In spite of the third-out-of-three status of the Worthington Cup, the chance to watch one’s team play at Wembley lifts the heart and quickens the pulse. Wembley is the hallowed heart of the English game, the turf on which the England team won its only World Cup way back in 1966. I’ve been a Spurs fan since the early 1960s, but I’ve never made it to Wembley to watch them in a final until now.
What’s more, the nineties have been lean years for this once-great soccer club. But now, here we are in a cup final again. A win may herald the beginning of a new golden era. I make my way to the great stadium, full of hope.
2. FIRST LOVE
I came to London in January 1961 as a boy of thirteen and a half, on my way to boarding school and accompanied by my father. It was a cold month, with blue skies by day and green fogs by night. We stayed at a huge barracks of a hotel, the Cumberland at Marble Arch, and soon after we settled in, my father asked if I would like to see a professional soccer game.
In Bombay, where I had grown up, there was no soccer to speak of; the local sports were cricket and field hockey. The only part of India where soccer was taken seriously was Bengal, and although the fame of the Mohun Bagan team of Calcutta had reached my ears, I had never seen the game played.
The first game my father took me to see was a friendly match between the North London club, Arsenal, and the Spanish champions, Real Madrid. I did not then know that the visitors were rated as perhaps the greatest club side ever seen anywhere. Or that they had just won the European Cup, the annual tournament held to determine the champion of all Europe’s national champions, five years running (an achievement that nobody before or since has matched). Or that among their players were two of the game’s all-time immortals, the Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, “the little general” who masterminded his national side’s humiliating drubbings of the England team, and the Argentinian center-forward Alfredo di Stefano. Other Real players—the flying winger Gento, the defensive colossus Santamaria—were rated almost as highly as the two superstars.
This is the way I remember the game: *11 in the first half, Real Madrid tore the Arsenal apart. The London club was and is renowned for its tough defensive style of play—“Boring Arsenal” is a label they were stuck with for years—but Real went through them almost at will, and at the halftime break led 3–0. Then, because this was after all just a friendly game with nothing riding on it, Real took off their star players and replaced them for the second half with a bunch of kids. Arsenal stubbornly kept all their first-team players on the field and the game ended up tied, 3–3; but not even the most die-hard Arsenal fans at the game could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams. On the way back to the hotel my father asked me for my views. “I didn’t think much of that English team,” I told him, “but I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there’s an English team that plays like Real Madrid?” Unknown to me, I had asked for the near-impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan’s airborne heyday, I had asked, “Can you find out if there’s a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?” My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, “I’ll ask at the front desk.” What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous club of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart.
There were still many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know that between Tottenham and Arsenal, the Spurs and the Gunners, there was a long rivalry and a deep mutual loathing. I didn’t know that the Spurs tradition was of cavalier attacking play, and that if Arsenal were jeered for their negativity (it was said that their fans would sing in celebration of a scoreless draw), then the leaky Spurs defense was also a traditional butt of ridicule for soccer fans everywhere. I didn’t even know the wor
ds to the Spurs’ version of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.” (“Poor old Arsenal lies a-moldering in the grave / while the Spurs go marching on! on! on!”)
Most of all I didn’t know that under their manager, the taciturn Yorkshireman Bill Nicholson—“Billy Nick”—and their loquacious Irish captain, Danny Blanchflower, Tottenham had become the greatest team to emerge in Britain since the “Busby Babes” of Manchester United perished in the Munich air disaster of 1958. The hotel clerk had been right. This team could have given Real Madrid a fright. These were the Super Spurs in their greatest year, on their way to capturing British soccer’s Holy Grail, the League and Cup Double; that is to say, victory in a single season both in the First Division of the Football League and in the country’s premier knockout competition, the FA Cup.
I don’t remember who Spurs thrashed that day, but I do recall understanding that I had in some profound and unalterable way been changed by my visit to this bleak northern borough of a city in which I was still a complete stranger. The boy who left the Spurs’ stadium at White Hart Lane after the final whistle was no longer a spectator. He had become a fan.
Bill Brown, Peter Baker, Ron Henry, Danny Blanchflower, Maurice Norman, Dave Mackay, Cliff Jones, John White, Bobby Smith, Les Allen, Terry Dyson. To this day I can recite the names of the first team without needing to look them up. I can even do most of the reserves. Johnny Hollowbread, Mel Hopkins, Tony Marchi, Terry Medwin, Eddie Clayton, Frank Saul . . . Sorry. Sorry. I’ll stop.
I can remember, too, the horror with which I greeted the series of mishaps that broke the side up. I felt them as personal tragedies: Blanchflower’s knee injury, Norman’s broken leg, Mackay breaking the same leg twice, and above all the death of John White, killed by lightning while sheltering under a tree on a golf course. White’s nickname at Spurs had been the Ghost.
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