That Stephen Fry Moment Revisited

In the midst of a colossal response to an article in Another Newspaper (a little like invading a country on a  thousand mile front because a child in that country has blown a raspberry at you) , Stephen Fry has posted as follows at http://stephen-fry-me.tumblr.com/post/61754597917/some-weasel-of-a-telegraph-journo-wants-me-to-give-up#

 

Well, that’s his affair. But because his target has incidentally mentioned me, he also includes this passage, to which I must now wearily respond, or people might think I accepted his version.

 

‘Walker concludes his vicious little paragraph firstly by telling an outright lie: that I “buttonholed” my dear friend Christopher Hitchens’s brother at the luncheon after Christopher’s memorial service in New York. Not true. I could see Peter Hitchens in the doorway of the Waverly Inn, standing utterly alone  (as he does intellectually, morally and socially amongst his brother’s friends) and, taking pity, I just came up to chat. He responded so rudely, so vilely and with such lack of human decency, that I couldn’t but tweet at the extreme difference between two products of the same parents. Probably a misjudgement on my part. I make many. But then Peter Hitchens is proportionately as joyless and unlovable a person as his so deeply missed brother was joyful and loveable and I was upset at such charmless rudeness. And I was, I freely admit, a little drunk. Which is just what Christopher would have wanted me to be.’

 

Um. I would cheerfully have left this matter.  Mr Fry’s boorish behaviour at the time was roundly criticised even by some of his fans, and I thought that he had been chastened by this. Not chastened enough, it would seem. So, I’ve got out my chastening set, in the hope that Mr Fry will in future stick to making giggly BBC programmes about the F-word, which is obviously his metier, and leave me alone.

 

I can’t recall exactly who I was talking to immediately before Mr Fry bulged up to me, as I talked to so many people on that occasion.  As it happens, I am on good terms with many (though not all) of my brother’s friends, and his family are of course my family too.  I was, for certain, stone cold sober as I knew I had work to do that evening on the train.  So my memory may be clearer than his.   I certainly wasn’t in any doorway. Had I been, as he claims, standing utterly alone, I should have seen Mr Fry coming afar off, and fled, much preferring solitude to any kind of encounter with him ( and wisely so, as it transpired).

 

I had managed to avoid any contact with Mr Fry at the actual memorial gathering at the Cooper Union, when at one point I saw him approaching purposefully,  out of the corner of my eye , and so swiftly absented myself.  I don’t like anything about Mr Fry, have been rude about him in print and thought it would be hypocritical and wrong to pretend friendliness to him in person. Any encounter would either be dishonest or abrasive, and as this was a solemn occasion, I thought it simpler and better-mannered to avoid any risk of that. Had it been some light-hearted occasion, I’d have welcomed the chance to tease a person I regard as greatly over-rated by himself and others. My position, as a declared believer and conservative at an overwhelmingly atheist and radical gathering, was sensitive enough without my having rows with Stephen Fry. As it was, when Mr Fry forced himself on me, it was in much more relaxed circumstances, in a bar, and even then I was restrained and quiet. Had it been left to me, nobody outside my immediate family would ever have known about our encounter, which I mainly recall for the dullness of his discourse.

 

He mentions my brother , calling him his ‘dear friend’ . This was the case, as I can myself confirm.  I had, some months before, had a conversation about Mr Fry with my late brother. We had discussed Mr Fry’s  portrayal of Jeeves on television. I  thought it greatly inferior to Dennis Price’s matchless mastery of the role in our own childhood, and we both felt it generally wrong and unWodehousian.  We also talked about the evening when he and Mr Fry had come up against a rather inadequate Roman Catholic team at a debate in London, in which I thought (and still think) that the pair of them – encouraged by an audience pretty heavily tilted towards their side -   went some way beyond the limits of civilised debate. I have reason to think that Christopher and Mr Fry may, in the end, have wondered about that too.

 

Christopher said that, despite the awful ‘Jeeves’,  he had decided that Mr Fry was All Right Really. I urged him to reconsider, saying that Mr Fry wasn’t remotely on his intellectual level,  but he was adamant. We left it at that.

 

The idea that Mr Fry wanted to show ‘pity’ for me is absurd, especially given his obvious sensitivity to criticism,  demonstrated by the whole piece in which this passage occurs.

 

Why on earth did he seek me out? The bar in which we found ourselves had three or four separate rooms. There was plenty of space in which to avoid each other. And he cannot have missed my enthusiastic spreading of the summary of him in ‘The Dictionary of National Celebrity’, which described him as ‘A stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person is like’. While this is, when you think about it, far ruder to his fans than it is to him, you wouldn’t like it being said about you.

 

I think he wanted some sort of redress. Everything that has happened since confirms me in this view.

 

And so he appeared without warning, forced his company on me when he could easily have guessed it wasn’t wanted,  interrupted my conversation,  introduced himself as if I mightn’t know who he was (such modesty) , and said, as I recall, that he thought we probably disagreed. I confirmed this, and said quite evenly and without rancour that I knew who he was, and  that I didn’t like the way he behaved (citing the debate I mentioned above) .   He wanted to know why not. I told him.  

 

As I recall, my main complaint was about the dangerous intolerance of the modern atheists, who claimed to know the unknowable and so dismissed their opponents as stupid and ignorant, and would in the end seek to silence them altogether. This is, after all, the theme of my book on the subject.

 

He didn’t appear to understand the point I was making, and reiterated some dull boilerplate, containing assumptions about my beliefs which weren’t correct,  which didn’t in any way respond to what I had said. I expect I looked as bored as I was by this poor, thin undergraduate stuff. I seized an opportunity to slip away, and knew nothing further until I read of his tweet, which was later withdrawn.

 

I have no idea what ‘human decency’ has to do with it. It wasn’t *his* closest living relative whose death we were marking. I had certainly not sought him out. He couldn’t possibly have expected me to welcome his company. I most definitely hadn’t looked for it, and in my view even a moderately perceptive rhinoceros would  have been aware that I was actively avoiding it.

 

I might add that my late brother was seldom reluctant to speak frankly to those he disliked, at any occasion at all. In that way, I should have thought I was demonstrating one of the several strong similarities between me and my brother, one of which is not to be too inhibited about letting people know what we really think of them, when they ask for it, and sometimes even when they don't.

 

Actually, my brother could be far ruder than I have ever been, and few of Christopher’s friends can have escaped a demonstration of his ferocious, white hot rudeness, even if only as spectators .  For those in doubt of this, I believe there is a good account of such an explosion in a ‘New Yorker’ profile of him  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker

 

If Mr Fry truly admired or really knew my late brother, he can hardly be censorious about a bit of rudeness, nor can he suggest that, by being rude to him, I in some way showed myself dissimilar to Christopher.  In comparable circumstances, approached at a close relative's memorial event by someone he despised,  I have no doubt that Christopher would have been much, much ruder, and I expect most people in the room would have known about it. Since Mr Fry speculates that Christopher would have approved of his being a little drunk (which is likely true) , I will hazard a guess that Christopher would also have enjoyed my clash with Mr Fry. He’d have thought it enlivened the occasion. Mind you, I only knew him for 59 or so years.

 

As for being ‘joyless and unloveable’, I’ll leave that to those who know me best to decide. I can only say that I was not overjoyed to have Mr Fry’s company forced on me, and that I was not in any way seeking his love, let alone hoping to charm him. That does not necessarily mean that I am joyless and unloveable, nor even that I am charmless. I may be all of these things, but Stephen Fry wouldn’t ever know.