Literary Review - December 2005 / January 2006

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DIARIES&MEMOIRS

didn’t love her, but after a glass of champagne she cheered up, or so he thought. The humiliation must have been acute at times – some embarrassing moments are recorded here, when Diana and the mistresses come face to face. They were a surprisingly modern couple. Duff wrote Diana’s newspaper articles, which were very highly paid, and she used her celebrity to help him get into Parliament and put him on the social and political map. He was clever and hard-working and never scrounged off her rich relations. Duff entered Parliament in 1924, and after that the diaries change. Politics kept him so busy that he had less time for mistresses and even less for writing his diary. He was right over appeasement, and his diary records the divisions in the Chamberlain government over Munich.

F RANCES W ILSON Confessions of a Chav

S TRANGELAND

★By Tracey Emin (Sceptre 212pp £14.99)

T HEPSYCHO -SLUTIS back (‘body from Baywatch, face from Crimewatch’), and the latest incarnation of ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’, as she calls herself, comes in the form of literary, rather than visual, confessions. Strangeland appears ten years after Emin hit notoriety with another form of autobiography, ‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963–1995’, the tent on which she sewed the names of all those who had ever shared her bed, including members of her family and her aborted foetus. In the intervening decade Emin’s style has not ‘developed’ so much as reinforced itself. In ‘My Bed’, a reconstruction of the unmade bed in which she resided for three weeks in a suicidal depression, she once again used herself as her art, presenting us with a crumpled and stained set of sheets and accompanying debris, a work which has only as much meaning as we are prepared to give to the experiences of the artist. Tracey’s bed was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1999 and bought for £150,000 by Charles Saatchi, but still the most memorable introduction for many to Traceyland was her appearance in December 1997 to discuss ‘The Death of Painting’ on a late-night Channel 4 chat show. Pissed out of her tree, Emin had no idea what was going on (she tells us in Strangeland she thought by the comfy sofas and soft lighting that she was in someone’s house). Having been ignored through most of the show she then

His most fulfilling job was Ambassador to Paris, where he was posted by Churchill in 1944. Here he and Diana could operate as a partnership, which is what they did best. In his diary Duff chronicled the Nancy Mitfordish Paris of grand and glamorous French aristos whom Diana and he entertained. Duff had a mistress named Loulou, but Diana was by now so reconciled to his unfaithfulness that she happily tucked the ailing Loulou up in bed when she came down with flu. The diary is beautifully edited, with notes which provide just the right amount of information, and John Julius Norwich has written a perfectly judged introduction. As a candid record of an extraordinary marriage, this book is gripping. To order this book at £16, see order form on page 78

stole it, declaring to the august company, before staggering out into the night, that she wanted to be with ‘real people’ like her friends and her mum. Next day she awoke with a head like a Chinese burn to find herself transformed from one of many artworld enfants terribles into a national treasure, an antetype of Big Brother’s Jade Goody and the hooligan queen of Chav Art. While art critics are divided as to whether she is a great artist or a con artist, literary critics will no doubt unanimously agree that, as a writer, Tracey Emin stinks. We’ve seen her writing before of course; she often suggests that her visual art is a kind of text, but writing on a tent is not the same as writing on a page. Coming to such a sure conclusion about anything produced by Tracey Emin is dangerous; it could be that the crude naivety of her book will be seen by some as precisely its brilliance. But it is easier to sniff out weakness in the literary world than in the world of contemporary art, and most of those who can’t tell the difference between a good and a bad installation can spot the difference between good and bad prose. What’s interesting is that Emin’s writing stinks in precisely those areas which make her visual art refreshing. For example, the persistent belief in romance which rests so touchingly with the sluttishness of her tent or her bed is simply mawkish here: ‘This is a love story – a True love story,’ Emin writes in one chapter – ‘of the deep and burning passion between me and a man old enough to be my father: a Turkish man, a fisherman, a mountain man. It was wrong for us to be lovers.’ And while the

Emin: the face of modern art

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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