A PLACE IN THE RECORD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 917, 8 March 1957, Page 12

A PLACE IN THE RECORD

THE HEART HAS ITS REASONS, the Memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor; Michael Joseph, English price 30/-. HE Duke of Windsor published A King’s Story in 1951, and though the ultimate value of the memoir was undeniable, many of us were sorry to see him invite the discussion that follows a printed book. The Duchess of Windsor’s autobiography adds no .embarrassment now; it may even improve the situation. Too suave a chronicle to answer directly anything said by others, its tone and content offer some antidote to such venom as is in Brody’s Gone with the Windsors. As autobiography it succeeds in giving a clear and credible picture of its subject, and this is probably what we most require. It provides our only first-hand knowledge of a woman about whom we were all obliged to have an opinion. It is very well written, in a natural style which seems to fit the amused, confident face of the childhood photos. The Duchess’s life has centred on people and places, rather than on ideas. Her lifelong appetite for parties, picnics and

sightseeing is rescued from tedium by her tenderness for the past, which gives us bright pictures of the Baltimore she grew up in, and of her relations, and a haunting acquaintance with the gentle Mr. Simpson. She is without pretence or censure; everyone comes rather well out of her good-humoured treatment. Character, it is implied, is one’s own responsibility. Life is what one makes of what happens. Losers don’t pity themselves, and winners don’t pity losers. A King’s Story ended on the day after the abdication. The best writing, and the saddest reading, in the Duchess’s book concern the next period, where the Duke is shown discovering his exile to be more thorough than he had prepared for. Her chapters on the crisis avoid. the provocativeness of her husband’s story, but well convey the confusion of the final weeks, and the degree to which they both hoped that their resolve to marry would somehow or other not cost them the throne. To understand their hopes, we have to recall the Prince of Wales’s long popularity; and the mental climate of

the 1930’s when anything new seemed possible, at least to our generation. And in the weeks when the British public said nothing, because it was told nothing, the two principals were reading the romantic speculations of overseas papers. Those American writers who cast their

compatriot as chatelaine of Buckingham Palace can surely not have asked themselves whether they would allow her the comparable position in White House. The Duchess of Windsor strikes one as belonging in spirit to no democracy; her ideas of privilege are antique. A nation that shuns formula may need the occasional events that force a definition, as the abdication forced us to define the monarchy. This book will have a fixed place in the record. It may find a place, also, among those perceptive studies of Britain by outside writers who admit themselves baffled.

Dorothea

Turner