J.R. Moehringer was worth the million dollars he reportedly received for ghostwriting Spare, Prince Harry’s account of life in the House of Windsor as this generation’s prodigal son. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist knows all about books, and that’s good because Harry doesn’t. A self-styled non-reader, the 38-year-old royal spare asks, on page 13, “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?” Literary allusions abound on the path to page 407, most of them to names or sources—Ecclesiastes, Dame Julian of Norwich, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Wordsworth, Tennyson, William Ernest Henley—unlikely to have crossed the prince’s prior consciousness. Reviewing Spare for the January 23, 2023 New Yorker magazine, Rebecca Mead praises this “literary artifice,” and the “coherent narrative” created by Moehringer, who “bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon.”
Of Mice and Men and Brothers Who Fight
The American canon was another matter, and Harry approves of John Steinbeck. “The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring,” he recalls on page 49, “was a slender American novel,” Of Mice and Men. “Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck didn’t need a translator,” he explains. “He wrote in plain, simple vernacular. Better yet, he kept it tight. Of Mice and Men: a brisk 150 pages.” But brevity isn’t the only reason Harry singles out Steinbeck. Unlike Who-the-fook-is-William-Faulkner, Steinbeck is found to be writing about the Windsor brothers in his classic novella. “A story about friendship, about brotherhood, it was filled with themes I found relatable,” says Harry. “George and Lennie put me in mind of Willy and me. Two pals, two nomads, going through the same things, watching each other’s back.” Steinbeck’s story of “two blokes . . . gadding about California, looking for a place to call their own, trying to overcome their limitations” ends with a bullet in the back of the head, however. Did Harry miss the fratricidal point? For greater clarity, Moehringer might refer him to more Steinbeck: to East of Eden, where Cain almost kills Abel, or to Burning Bright, Steinbeck’s tale of bastardy, murder, and family forgiveness.
(Page numbers are given because Spare has no index. I owe the tip for this post to a literary-minded friend who left Florida about the same time I did, almost 20 years ago. Like Harry, we prefer gadding about California.)
