Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

(ditto)

Oh dear. Oh double dear. Such terrible, terrible misery.

For Narcissus to find himself desirable, the water he looks into must be clear and calm and sweet. If a person looks into a turbulent pool his reflection will be dark and disturbed. That was Mr. Kett’s face, rippled with dark perturbation. He was being lied at, but lied at so well and for so impenetrable a reason. I can see his perplexity so clearly. It looms before me now and the turbulence in his eyes makes me look very ugly indeed.

A number of boys at Stouts Hill had asthma, the Gloucestershire air was said to be good for them. One boy came for that very reason but made no improvement. He left for Switzerland after only five weeks, a five weeks spent with an inhaler constantly at his lips. The following term at morning prayers the headmaster reported his death to us and everyone turned to look at me.

HAHAHAH

We talk of the callousness of the young. “Children can be so cruel,” we say. But only those who are concerned with others can be cruel. Children are both careless and carefree in their connections with others. For one nine-year-old to think passingly about the non-swimming agonies of another would be ridiculous.

Nothing prayed for—it is life’s strictest and least graceful rule—comes to you at the time of praying. Good things always come too late. I can swim now.

Saturday’s breakfast was always boiled eggs, and there is nothing so unpleasant in all this world as a roomful of human beings who have just eaten boiled eggs. Every fart and burp sulphurises the room with the most odious humming guff, a smell I can never smell to this day without returning to the hell of Cong Prac.

Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide.

Classical music is private art, stripped of that kind of association. That, partly, is why classical music is also very nerdy. Its decontextualised abstractions take the classical music lover and the classical music practitioner out of the social stream and into their own heads, as do chess and maths and other nerdile pursuits.

Classical music can be “rescued” therefore from the void of abstract nerdaciousness by association with film, television and advertising, so that Beethoven can make you think of power generation companies, Mozart of Elvira Madigan and Trading Places, Carl Orff of Old Spice aftershave and so on, and no doubt our own contemporary composers Philip Glass, Gorecki, and, God help us all, Michael Nyman, will be similarly pressed into service by Laboratoires Garnier and Kellogg’s Frosties before the century is out.

Hugh Laurie and I used to write and perform material of a more or less comedic nature in a 1980s Channel 4 comedy and music show called Saturday Live. It was the programme that notably launched Ben Elton and Harry Enfield into public fame. One week Hugh and I had some sketch or other which involved an ending in which I needed to sing. Not a complicated song, some sort of R&B verse, nothing more. Harry Enfield was to conduct a band wearing amusing headphones and a pleasing Ronnie Hazlehurst grin and Hugh, I suppose, was to play the guitar or piano. I can’t remember why I had to sing and why Hugh couldn’t have looked after the vocal department as he usually did. Perhaps he had a mouth organ to deal with too. Hugh can sing splendidly, and play any musical instrument you throw at him, the son of a son of a son of a son of a son of a bitch. I said to Hugh, as I say to everyone who will listen, “But this is mad! You know I can’t sing …” Hugh, either out of exasperation or a cunningly laid plan to force me to wrestle my musical demons to the ground, said that I would just plain have to and that was that. I suppose this would have been a Wednesday: the programme, as the title suggested, was transmitted live on Saturday evenings. By Thursday morning I was all but a puddle on the floor.

Haha!

it occurred to me that the bloody man had only released me from my singing burden for that one single occasion. “Hit it, bitch …” had been my trigger and this one Saturday night the moment of its activation. He had not freed me of my musical inhibitions permanently. The talisman’s power had been all used up and if I wanted to sing again in public I would have to make another sodding appointment. There and then, in the vodka-and-cocaine-fuelled passion of the moment, I made a vow never to do so. Singing and Stephen were not meant to be.

language, which is the parent, not the child, of thought.

the moment mankind decides that a practice like beating is of significance then it becomes of significance. I should imagine that were I a child now and found myself being beaten by schoolmasters I would be highly traumatised by the experience, for every cultural signal would tell me that beating is, to use the American description, a “cruel and unusual punishment” and I would feel singled out for injustice and smart and wail accordingly.

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me. Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper.

The public school headmaster and the public school prospectus use the word “philosophy” much as Californian Valley Girls use the word “like,” ceaselessly and senselessly.

HEALTHY —a word that needs some unpicking. Its meaning derives from whole and hale and is cognitively related to such words as holy and healing. Heal is to weal (as the Eleven Plus might say) as health is to wealth. To be healthy is to be whole and holy. To be unhealthy is to be unclean and unholy, insanitary and insane.

Fun paragraph.

It is one thing to build sanitation systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy bacteria and bacilli, but it is another to build educational systems that inhibit the breeding of unhealthy ideas and beliefs. Besides, while we can universally agree that cholera, typhus, and typhoid are unhealthy we are unable to come anywhere close to consensus as to the healthiness or otherwise of ideas.

The yellowest sweatingest butter we had too, neatly patterned on all sides with the marks left by the patting paddles.

Fun sentence.

He was and is a simply remarkable man. Many sons are proud of their fathers, and no doubt have reason to be—for there are many remarkable men in the world. For sheer brain-power, will, capability and analytical power however, I have to say, all family loyalty aside, that I have never met anyone who came close to him. I have met men and women who had known more and achieved more, but none with so adaptive and completely powerful a brain. His ability to solve problems—mechanical, mathematical, engineering problems—is boundless, which is to say bounded only by the limits of the universal laws he holds so dear, the laws of Newton and the laws of thermodynamics. The clarity of his mind, the perfectionism and elegance of his abstract mathematical and intellectual modelling and practical design and his capacity for sustained concentration, thought and work stagger me, simply stagger me.

His name was Neumann, which he changed in England to Newman. His father, my great-grandfather, a Hungarian Jew also of course, had lived for a time in Vienna, and it was always said of him that he was the kind of man to give you the coat off his back. You can imagine how my blood ran cold when I read this in Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, while reading about the early life of Hitler for my last novel, Making History: After their quarrel Hanisch lost sight of Hitler, but he gives a description of Hitler as he knew him in 1910 at the age of twenty-one. He wore an ancient black overcoat, which had been given him by an old-clothes dealer in the hostel, a Hungarian Jew named Neumann, and which reached down to his knees … Neumann … who had befriended him, was offended by the violence of his anti-Semitism.

Holy shit

One assumes that the word “tish” descends, not from the German for table, but from a contraction of the word “partition,” but applying logic to English slang is never a sound idea.

“Wagger,” or “wagger-pagger-bagger,” which was used to denote “waste-paper basket,” is an example of that strange argot prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s that caused the Prince of Wales to be known as the Pragger-Wagger. Even today, in the giddy world of High Anglicanism in such temples of bells, smells and cotters as St. Mary’s, Bourne Street, SW3, I have heard with my own two ears Holy Communion referred to by pert, campy priests as “haggers-commaggers” and my mother still describes the agony and torture of anything from toothache to an annoying traffic jam as “aggers and torters.”

I love this?!

Peter Pattrick was pleased as punch, and punched me pleasedly and proudly on the arm to prove it.

Fun

I had decided years ago that I had a “maths block” and it infuriated me that this condition was not as properly recognised as dyslexia, for example, which was just beginning to be acknowledged as a syndrome or accepted condition. In fact I don’t have the numeral equivalent of dyslexia, if there really is such a thing; it was all, I fear, to do with my father. Anything at which he excelled I seemed to go out of my way to be not just bad at, but quite staggeringly and impressively awful at. Not just maths and science therefore, but music too.

“Late, Fry?” “Really, sir? So am I.” “Don’t try to be clever, boy.” “Very good, sir. How stupid would you like me to be? Very stupid or only slightly stupid?”

I will apologise for many things that I have done, but I will not apologise for the things that should never be apologised for. It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possessions, money, property—on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success. Scarcely fresh news I suppose, but then the Gospels aren’t either, yet they too contain ideas that bear repetition. Only a fool dismisses an idea because it has been heard before.

being defined by the circumstance that I was and am both transparent and opaque, illegible and an open book. Sometimes I wonder what is the point of all my dissembling and simulation if so many friends, acquaintances, enemies (if I have any) and perfect strangers are able to see through my every motive, thought and feeling. Then I wonder what is the point of allmy frankness, sharing of experience and emotional candour if people continue to misinterpret me to such an extent that they believe me balanced, sorted, rationally in charge, master of my fate and captain of my soul.

Such then was the spin of my madness. I expected the illegible and the deeply buried in me to be read as if carved on my forehead, just as I expected the obvious and the ill-concealed to be hidden from view.

I should have known better, it was a Tuesday in February. Many of my life’s most awful moments have taken place on Tuesdays, and what is February if not the Tuesday of the year?

I don’t ever underestimate my father’s capacity to surprise and to solve problems, but nor do I forget that his very capacity to solve problems has burdened him with the propensity to find problems where none exists. We all know the ancient story of the Gordian knot, a tangle so complex that it was said he who could untie it would rule the known world: Alexander simply slashed it open with his sword. My father could never, never cut a Gordian knot—he might complicate it further and eventually solve it, but by the time he did so the known world would have moved on.

“how would you define wisdom?” “Wisdom?” Ramsay chewed the word around in his mouth. “Oh, I should say that wisdom is the ability to cope.” On that definition, one with which I wholeheartedly concur, I should say my mother is the wiser of my parents.

great def. From my viewing of First Reformed yesteryday: "Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind, simultaneously. Hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself." Coincidence?

I could finish it by myself from a fairly early age and hated sharing it with anyone else, stiffening into cardboard if someone looked over my shoulder or asked for a clue. This is indicative of my need for independence, I suppose, proof that I didn’t need anyone in the way my parents needed each other, more than that, proof that I positively needed not to need, proof, in other words, of fear.

Tennis was despised by Garth Wheatley, the master in charge of cricket and by the professional, an ex-Leicestershire player whose name I am ashamed to say I have forgotten. They both called it, disdainfully, “woolly balls.”

woolly balls HAHHAH

It must have been something more than slightly sickening and slightly frightening for them to know that the most efficient way to stop me stealing was to let me have as much money as I wanted. It’s like proving Pythagoras by drawing and measuring as many different right-angled triangles as you can.

which gave us almost three days of London. Only it didn’t, because we had rushes of blood to the head and went to the cinema and watched A Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and Cabaret, over and over and over and over and over again for four days in a row. Hell of a year for cinema, 1972.

Art had gripped me, poetry, music, comedy, cricket and love had gripped me and have me in their grip still, but cinema. Films have a peculiar power all their own.

We tremble on the brink of selling that part of ourselves that is real, unique, angry, defiant and whole for the rewards of attainment, achievement, success and the golden prizes of integration and acceptance; but we also, in our great creating imagination, rehearse the sacrifice we will make: the pain and terror we willtake from others’ shoulders; our penetration into the lives and souls of our fellows; our submission and willingness to be rejected and despised for the sake of truth and love and, in the wilderness, our angry rebuttals of the hypocrisy, deception and compromise of a world which we see to be so false.

There is nothing so self-righteous nor so right as an adolescent imagination.

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The Go-Between, the novel whose celebrated opening words those are, has long been a favourite of mine.

I've heard this somewhere else. Where? 국어??

I knew that the past was a foreign country, and knew too that it followed logically that the future must be abroad; in other words I knew that it was my destiny to become a foreigner, a stranger to myself I was passionately patriotic about my own age, a fierce believer in the rightness and justness of adolescence, the clarity of its vision, the unfathomable depths and insurmountable heights of its despair and its joy. The colours that shone and vibrated so strongly through its eyes were the true colours of life, this I knew. Because I had read a great deal I knew as well that one day I would see things in different colours, take up citizenship in a different country, the country of the adult, and I hated my future self because of it. I wanted to stay behind in adolescence and fight for its rights and I knew that the moment I left it I would care only for the rights of my new age, my adulthood with all its falsities and failures.

The perception of nature, the depth of emotion, the brightness and intensity of every moment, I knew these faded with age and I hated myself in advance for that.

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody’s mother believes in them. No one else believed in me. Principally of course—oh how one sees that now—myself. Principally, I did not believe in me. I believed in ghosts more than I believed in me, and take my word for it, I never believed in ghosts,

Life, that can shower you with so much splendour, is unremittingly cruel to those who have given up. Thank the gods there is such a thing as redemption, the redemption that comes in the form of other people the moment you are prepared to believe that they exist.

The American Bar of the Ritz is now a casino club to which, strangely enough, I do belong. Sometimes Hugh Laurie and I will go in there and lose fifty pounds at the minimum stake blackjack table.

It was only as I was finishing my dinner of steak and salad and beer in the dining room of this soulless assembly of melamine and Artex that I realised that the date that day was the twenty-fourth of August 1975. My eighteenth birthday. It was my eighteenth birthday. I had come of age here, in this place. I was eighteen years old. Not a fifteen-year-old discovering poetry, the beauty of algebra and the treachery and terror of growing up. Not a tormented fourteen-year-old whose life has exploded into love. Not a naughty twelve-year-old who broke school bounds to visit sweet shops. Not a grown-up eight-year-old who put a new boy at his ease on a train. Not a funny little boy who cried when his mole was upstaged by a donkey and didn’t dare go into the headmaster’s classroom because he was frightened of the big boys. Not a wicked little imp who pulled down his trousers and played rudies with a boy called Tim. An eighteen-year-old youth on the run. A somewhat less than juvenile delinquent. A petty thief who ruined people’s lives with theft, betrayal, cowardice and contempt. A man. A man wholly responsible for all his actions.

I am weeping too for grown-up children so lost to themselves and to hope that they squat in doorways, lie on beds, stare in stupors high or wired, or sit alone all eaten up with self-hate on their eighteenth birthday. I am weeping too for the death of adolescence, the death of childhood and the death of hope: there are never enough tears to mourn their passing.

Scenes from a childhood that I loathed and which sent me mad with longing, as did the tattered photograph of the loathed familial prison that still I carried with me everywhere I went—the oval loveliness of Matthew pasted on the obverse side.

No. I was Stephen. I was always going to be Stephen. I would always be that same maddening, monstrous mixture of pedantry, egoism, politeness, selfishness, kindliness, sneakiness, larkiness, sociability, loneliness, ambition, ordered calm and hidden intensity. I would cover my life with words. I would spray the whole bloody world with words. They were still all that I had but at last they were getting me places.