Letters

Reg Prinz. Todd Andrews declares the name is, if not its bearer’s “real” one, at least an alias well antecedent to Harrison’s: a coincidence doubtless turned to account, but not an ad hoc imposture. Its young bearer had an established early reputation as an avant-garde cinéaste before his application to the Tidewater Foundation for subsidy; as he was not given to conversation, and spoke cryptically when at all, the most he could be taxed with was his not vigorously denying a role he most certainly did not “play.” For some reason Harrison had been taken with him on sight, and Jane acknowledged that while Prinz readily accepted all proffered support for his cinematic activities, he could not be accused of exploiting Harrison’s esteem. His visits to Redmans Neck were in part as a planning consultant to Marshyhope’s Media Centre, the directorship of which he had declined; and in part out of an apparent interest in Harrison himself.

I met His Majesty that same evening, Mr Prinz not till several months later. The original George III in his distress was often physically out of control; required constant attendance by Dr Willis and company; often needed restraining by strait-waistcoat (Willis calls it in his journal “the &c”; George himself referred to the restraining chair as his “coronation chair”); and suffered concomitant bodily infirmities. Harrison, until the twin strokes that blinded and killed him, was in rosy health and amiable temper, a little heavy but by no means obese, withal rather handsomer at seventy than he’d been in his forties, when I first met him at Capri — though not, like Jane, preternaturally youthful. And he was as entirely in control of himself as his complex dementia allowed: certainly in no way dangerous to himself or others, and inclined more to manic fancies than to manic projects. Therefore he needed very little supervision; his company was agreeable, and his conversation, if often saddening, was civilised and frequently clever. Not to disgrace, by his ubiquitous “delusions” (e.g., that Cambridge, England, was Cambridge, Maryland, or that his ministers were trustees of the Tidewater Foundation), the monarchy he held in such esteem, he ventured off the “palace grounds” only reluctantly and never unaccompanied. The “affairs of the realm” he gladly turned over to the queen and ministers aforementioned, though he still opposed the idea of installing Drew as prince regent. And since, “in his madness,” those crucial affairs were translated into such hallucinations as Marshyhope State University College, His Royal Highness into a minor American industrialist named Harrison Mack, Jr., he conscientiously attended to what was represented as the news and business of those hallucinations, and could talk as knowledgeably about Lyndon Johnson’s administration as about John Adams’s and Napoleon’s.

From all this one might imagine that, pragmatically speaking, he was not mad at all. But though his conduct of affairs “in this world,” as he put it, was in the main responsible and judicious, his identification with mad King George was more than an elaborate, self-cancelling whimsy. Harrison suffered from the duplicity of reality, as it were; events and circumstances that he could not “decipher” into Georgian terms, and thus deal with on their own, alarmed him, lest he mishandle them. And if his nightmares (and infrequent daytime seizures) were learnt from the history books — like George, he fancied he had seen Hanover through Herschel’s telescope; imagined London flooded, and would rush in the royal yacht to rescue “certain precious manuscripts and letters”; signed death warrants for “all six of [his] sons,” etc., etc. — the terror and anguish they caused him were heartfelt.

My own knowledge of the period was cursory at that time, but I remembered that Fanny Burney had held some post in the royal household (she was in fact 2nd Keeper of the Robes to Queen Charlotte) and that, about the time of the king’s first major attack and the publication of her epistolary novel Evelina, she’d commenced a diary of her observations and reflections on the grave event. It was my thought to represent myself, if Harrison should press for such representation, as Mrs Burney: I knew her writings only slightly, but Harrison (and G. III) in all likelihood knew them not at all — Cervantes and Fielding were their only novelists — and the role seemed congenial enough. I suggested and explained it to Jane; she approved, but hoped no fiction would be necessary, as she’d alerted Harrison to my coming, and he’d remembered me affectionately.