On September 5, the day before the funeral, I flew to New York, changing planes in London. About three hours after we left London, I went to get a glass of water and was approached by one of the stewardesses. With a catch in her voice, suitably dewey-eyed, she approached me, put what I’m sure she thought was a comforting hand on my arm, and said, “We’ve just heard from the captain. You’ll be so glad to know. It’s going to be a beautiful day in London tomorrow.”
Steel-eyed, I replied, putting a note of vague confusion into my voice, “Excuse me, isn’t this plane going to New York?”
She tried not to gasp, but she did a bad job of it. “For the funeral,” she said. Was that a tear?
For the past week I’d been listening, watching, and reading as a planet convulsed itself over the very unfortunate death of a woman I had never, during the fifteen years the press had brought me the various chapters of her life, found in any way interesting. Sure, I was sorry she died, poor thing, but I’m sorry when any decent, innocent person dies. Maybe I’m a heartless brute, but I didn’t see why the death of this particular woman should have profound meaning for me, and so I snapped, threw up my hands, and said, making no attempt to disguise my irritation, “I can’t stand any more of this. I just don’t want to hear it,” and went back to my seat. I was sitting in business class (upgraded, though the stewardess didn’t know that) so she couldn’t be rude to me, and it was, after all, a plane, so she couldn’t very well ask me to leave, could she? But I did hear her moan to a fellow passenger, “Some people just don’t understand.” You got it, babe: some people just don’t understand.
Back in my seat, I continued reading the last fifty pages of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, a novel that tells the story of Lily Bart, child of a once-wealthy New York family with ties to high society. Raised with no education, raised with no higher purpose than to be socially decorative, her highest goal is to marry well, which meant, for the women of Lily’s time and class, to marry wealth. I’d read the book two or three times before, knew that Lily’s terrible power to see through the sham and falsity of her society, her ability to see just how cheap and vulgar it was, doomed her to perpetual failure in its terms. Given the chance to marry Percy Gryce, a man as dreadful and dull as his name, she tosses it away; given the chance to take vengeance on the woman who has destroyed her life, she refuses because to do so would be to act ignobly. Seconds after having heard herself disinherited from the will of the one relative who might have made her wealthy and thus free, she rises to her feet and congratulates the woman who has inherited what should have been hers.
Nobility of instinct and action are as much a part of Lily Bart as are her laziness and financial irresponsibility. She often does the absolutely wrong thing, but she always does it for the finest of motives.
She dies—is it accident or suicide?—of a self-administered overdose of laudanum in a squalid apartment in a bad neighborhood in New York. As I read the passage describing her death and the finding of her body, I found tears running down my face, even though I had known what was coming, had seen Lily’s doom approaching for the last three hundred pages, and for the third time.
And I found myself struck by the seeming callousness of the fact I could cry for this fictional heroine while remaining Sahara-eyed over the death of the woman who was so much like Lily in so many tragic ways. Badly educated, raised with no higher goal than to marry well, trapped in a society the falsity of which she could see but which she failed to escape, Princess Diana resembled Lily Bart, and yet my tears fell for the fictional, not the real, woman.
In his introduction to Biographia Literaria, Coleridge writes of the need for the reader of poetry to engage in a process he calls “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Unless we allow our imagination free reign, unless we allow ourselves, for the time it takes us to read a work of fiction, to believe that those people and these events are real, then we are doomed not to enjoy the experience.
To those of us who have spent the major part of our lives in books, fictional characters do become as real as human characters, perhaps more so. Certainly, in the hands of a genius, these fictional characters take on an enhanced reality and are known and understood more intimately than most of the people we meet in life. We know Emma Bovary better than we know most of our neighbors; we understand Anna Karenina better than we understand most of our friends. Antigone’s pigheaded, doomed pursuit of virtuous behavior will always inspire those of us who are less noble of spirit.
Lily Bart is great because Edith Wharton is a genius; Emma Bovary is real because Flaubert was another one; and Anna Karenina’s nobility is the result of Tolstoy’s magnificent talent. Princess Diana, alas, found only the shabbiest of hacks to tell her tale: the National Enquirer, Das Bild, Gente. In the pages of rags like these, her life could never be anything more than a succession of clichés and photo opportunities. Though we’ve seen thousands of photos of her, read about the most intimate details of her life, we never knew anything about her, not the way we know Emma and Anna and Lily. Whatever substance might have been inside Di we never knew and probably never will know because her tale never found a genius to tell it.