Prince Harry reveals he found his memoir's opening quote on BrainyQuote.com
The Duke has been more than happy to make clear that he has no pretensions of being a bibliophile in the promotion of his book
Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, begins with a literary quote from the celebrated American author William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
It lends an air of literary respectability to the memoir, yet just a few pages later, the Duke admits that he found the famous line on the website BrainyQuote.com.
The Duke of Sussex was so taken by Faulkner’s turn of phrase, he writes, that he was “thunderstrick”. His first thought was “Who the fook is Faulkner? And how’s he related to us Windsors?”
The quote comes from Faulkner’s 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, which tells the story of a Mississippi woman whose infant child is murdered by her nanny. Throughout the novel, she struggles with her past in which was violently sexually assaulted and forced into prostitution.
The author, a leading light of the so-called Southern Renaissance, was a noted apologist for slavery who once declared that he longed for the return of the “benevolent autocracy” of slavery, in which "Negroes would be better off because they’d have someone to look after them."
Faulkner also opposed the forced ending of segregation in the South, saying that if it came to it, he'd "fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes."
Despite his political views, Faulkner’s works continued to be celebrated for bringing the tragic tradition into the modern world.
In the promotion of his book, the Duke has been more than happy to make clear that he has no pretensions of being a bibliophile.
In one of the more tetchy exchanges during his ITV interview with Tom Bradby, the journalist compared the Royal family’s feuding to “sort of Shakespearean tale”.
The Duke responded bluntly, “You’ve probably read more Shakespeare than I have.”