Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  The English have a positive mania for attaching the word “philosophy” to the most rudimentary and banal platitudes: “Our philosophy is to please the customer,” “do as you would be done by, that’s my philosophy,” “a blend of traditional comfort and modem convenience is very much the Thistle Hotel’s philosophy,” that kind of nonsense. The word gets its most savage mistreatment in the mouths of that peculiarly pompous animal, the public school headmaster, that creature so ruthlessly and brilliantly slaughtered, stuffed, mounted and put on permanent display by Peter Jeffrey in Lindsay Anderson’s film masterpiece If …

  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.

  It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy, for example, to apply the precepts and principles of Edward Thring to the modern world.

  In other words, they had added a metalwork division and a screen-printing room to the carpentry shop.

  It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy to develop the potential of every pupil.

  In other words, the school’s A-level results and Oxbridge success rate were well below the average.

  It was Very Much Uppingham’s Philosophy (even in my day unironically expressed) to turn out polite, cheerful, all-round chaps.

  In other words the average Uppinghamian is a well-mannered, decent fellow with a stout heart but not too much between the ears.

  If all this sounds like mocking criticism, it is not meant to.

  Well-mannered, decent fellows with stout hearts and not too much between the ears were the gravy and potatoes of two world wars. The well-maintained memorials in Uppingham catalogue a greater roll of the dead than the size of the school warrants. If other, smarter schools provided the brilliant generals and tacticians who moved counters on maps at Staff HQ, then Uppingham served up the gallant young fellows who sprang so cheerfully and so unquestioningly up the trench ladders, leading their men into the certainty of muddy, bloody slaughter. What is more, Uppinghamians who survived would never be so unsporting or so tasteless as to write clever sceptical poetry about the experience afterwards.

  There is a word which still means much to the English and which was for many years a rod for my back, a spur to prick the sides of my intent, a Fury from which to flee, a nemesis, an enemy, an anathema, a totem, a bugaboo and an accusation. I still recoil at its usage and its range of connotation. The word stands for everything I have always wanted not to be and everything and everyone I have felt apart from. It is the shibboleth of the club I would never join, could never join, the club outside whose doors I might stand jeering, while all the time a secret part of me watched with wretched self-loathing as the elected members pushed through the revolving doors, whistling, happy and self-assured. The word is

  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.

  For the English the words “healthy” and “hale,” at their best, used to carry the full-bellied weight of florid good cheer, cakes and ale, halidom and festive Falstaffian winter wassail. By the end of the seventeenth century, the hale health of pagan holiday was expelled from the feasting hall along with Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch by the sombre holy day piety and po-faced puritanism of Malvolio, Milton and Prynne. “Health!” became no longer a bumping boozer’s toast but a quality of the immortal soul. Health no longer went with heartiness, but with purity.

  “For your soul’s health’s sake …” said the priest.

  Thomas Arnold, and behind him Edward Thring and a squadron of other great Victorian pioneering headmasters, whiskers flowing in the breeze, found a new meaning for health. They twisted a poor Roman satirist’s cynical hope into the maxim of the Muscular Christian: Mens sana in corpore sano.

  “A healthy body makes a healthy mind” became the wilfully syllogistic mistranslation upon which a “philosophy” was founded. Cleanliness, generation upon generation of Britons were led to believe, was next to godliness. Health of body was to be looked upon as an outward and visible sign, to misappropriate the glorious poetry of the Eucharist, of an inward and spiritual health.

  Thring had some reason to believe in Health, where health meant hygiene. During his headmastership of Uppingham School he had become infuriated by Uppingham Town’s refusal to do something about its sewers, whose antiquity and medieval inefficiency were causing regular outbreaks of typhus and typhoid amongst pupils and staff. With the furious energy and implacable will of all great Victorians, he moved the entire school hundreds of miles away to the seaside village of Borth in Wales until such time as Uppingham’s local economy suffered enough to force its burghers to do something about their sanitation and, literally, to clean up their act. Thring and the school returned in triumph to a hygienic Uppingham and the school’s Borthday is annually celebrated still.

  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. I suppose today, the fashionable word to apply is “meme,” the evolutionary scientist’s new buzzword, a concept that applies the model of the selfish gene and the greedily self-replicating virus to movements in thought, to philosophies, religions, political tendencies, trends in individualism and sexual license, to growth, development, change and ideo-diversity in everything from the rights of animals to the rights of man. One model is as good as another, but today’s memologists kid themselves if they think they were the first to look on ideas as diseases. Their twist is to call religion the virus, where their predecessors looked on atheism, humanism and freethinking as the contagions. Scientists bring the pure neutrality of φυσις and the beautiful self-working holiness of nature to bear upon the problem. Their grandfathers, Charles Darwin’s furious contemporaries, invoked the Bible, the edicts of Empire and that curious Victorian morality that believed worthiness to be the same as worth and healthiness the same as health.

  The religiosity of the public schools had sown into it, praise the Lord, the seeds of its own destruction, for the cornerstone of public school education was a study of the languages of classical antiquity, Latin and Greek, and a study of the classics leads the alert reader away from the revealed claims of ecclesiasticism and towards the beauty and holiness of Socrates, Plato and Lucretius.

  Uppingham School has very few alumni of whom it can boast in terms of that fell whore, Fame. The odd politician (Stephen Dorrell being the current foremost example), the even odder explorer and eccentric (the Campbells, Donald and Malcolm, for example), an odd actor or two (William Henry Pratt was in my House and achieved eternal glory under the wisely altered name of Boris Karloff), the great director John Schlesinger was there too, but very few writers and artists. Indeed the best known writers to have attended Uppingham include a most exotic trio of early twentieth-century minors. James Elroy Flecker for example, a poet and dramatist whose best-known work, Hassan, was set to incidental music by Delius and contains splendid mock Arabian felicities like, “Shall I then put down the needle of insinuation and pick up the club of statement?” and the couplet that should be the motto of every unhealthy schoolboy:

  For lust of knowing what should not be known,

  We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

  Flecker’s contemporary at Uppingham was the exotic Arthur Annesley, better known as Ronald Firbank, whose books included Vainglory, Valmouth and Sorrow in the Sunlight, unfortunately retitled as Prancing Nigger. Firbank remains even today near the top of the essential reading list of every w
ell-read literary queen. He was a great favourite of “better” writers like Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Ivy Compton-Burnett, and his writing exemplifies par excellence that style of poisonous, luxuriant prose that Cyril Connolly defined as the Mandarin. As E. M. Forster wrote of him and his louche created world of birettas, lace stays and pomanders, “Is he affected? Yes always … Is he himself healthy? Perish the thought!”

  A little older, but longer lived than either, was Norman Douglas, the third of the Uppingham triumvirate, and at one time a kind of literary and social hero to me and a writer whose first editions I still collect to this day. Here is something that Douglas wrote about Uppingham in his 1933 memoir, Looking Back.

  A mildewy scriptural odour pervaded the institution—it reeked of Jereboam and Jesus; the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs; the food was so vile that for the first day or two after returning from holidays I could not get it down. The only good which ever came out of the place was cheese from the neighbouring Stilton, and that, of course, they never gave us. And the charges … On my mother’s death I found, among her papers, those Uppingham accounts: God, how they swindled her! I daresay all that is changed now.

  The mildewy scriptural odour and that reek of jereboam and Jesus still sometimes hung in the air around the more solid Victorian buildings of Uppingham during my time there and we were certainly never fed on Stilton, but otherwise the place had certainly, as Douglas dared say, changed. The fees were, and still are, steeper than those of many schools with better reputations, but I don’t think it could be accused of swindling. Most of the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs too, but then schoolmasters always strike cocky adolescents as supercilious humbugs. If anyone was a supercilious humbug it was most certainly me.

  What I adored about Douglas and about Firbank is that they were, as Forster said

  UNHEALTHY

  The black bombazine bombast of their Victorian childhoods and educations gave those two writers a deep yearning for light, colour, exoticism and the pagan, in Firbank’s case the Marian paganism of the Romish church, in Douglas’s the real paganism of dryads, fauns and the Great God Pan. They strove instinctively for a style that is the antithesis of blackness and bombast and the best word for that style is not Connolly’s “Mandarin,” but “camp.”

  What is camp? A much misunderstood word. Everyone has their own feel for it, here is mine.

  Camp is not in rugby football.

  Camp is not in the Old Testament.

  Camp is not in St. Paul.

  Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek.

  Camp loves colour.

  Camp loves light.

  Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things.

  Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings.

  Camp prefers style to the stylish.

  Camp is pale.

  Camp is unhealthy.

  Camp is not English, damn it.

  But …

  Camp is not kitsch.

  Camp is not drag.

  Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe.

  Camp casts out all fear.

  Camp is strong.

  Camp is healthy.

  And, let’s face it …

  Camp is queer.

  (Mostly.)

  How much a sensitive heterosexual boy is drawn to the silks, the light, the paganism, the poison and the luxury of camp is a question. How much a straight boy needs an alternative world, that too is a question. If he does need one, it is more easily found ready-made in the contemporary outside of rock and roll, sport, cars and girls. So easily found that it is not really an alternative world at all, merely one that is just different enough in emphasis from that of the older generation to enable the youth to feel rebellious and rorty.

  A boy who knows that he is other, who knows that the world is not made for him, who reads the code implicit in words like “healthy” and “decent,” he may well be drawn to the glaring light and savage dark of the ancient world and the poisonous colours and heavy, dangerous musks that lie the other side of the door into the secret garden, the door held open by Pater, Wilde, Douglas, Firbank … even Forster himself, missish and prim as he could be.

  Without the “benefits” of a classical education, a boy growing up knowing his difference might in my day have been drawn to The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, musicals, glam rock and fashion. Today the gayboy in every section of society has a world of gay music, dance and television to endorse his identity. Manchester has its gay village, London has Old Compton Street, the gay world meets daily to chat, cruise and invigorate itself on the internet. They don’t need a parcel of old poofs historically sequestered in Capri and Tangier to tell them who they are and where they come from and whether or not they have the right to hold their heads up high.

  I did need them, however. I needed them desperately and without them I am not sure what I would have done to myself.

  Queers are not the only unhealthy people to contaminate English society of course. There are Jews too.

  I never much cared about my Jewishness as a boy. The arbitrary oddity of difference between the Western patronymic custom and the primacy of maternal bloodlines in Judaism meant that, by virtue of surname, I passed as gentile. My father’s family name of Fry was as old English as could be, steeped in Quakerism as far back as the founding of the movement. John Fry, a parliamentarian ancestor, signed King Charles the First’s death warrant. My Great Uncle George wrote a book called The Saxon Origins of the Fry Family as a counterblast to those heretical relations (the chocolate-making swine from Bristol) who believed that they originated from the town of Fry in Normandy. The opening words of Uncle George’s disappointingly little-read work are:

  Unlike many so-called English families, the Frys did not come over with William the Conqueror in 1066—they were there to meet him when he arrived.

  My mother might be entirely Jewish, but my surname is entirely English, and that made all the difference to me in terms of my perceived identity. To the English it meant I was English, with faintly exotic overtones, to the Jews it meant I was Jewish, with only a venial blemish. I had, that is to say, the best of both worlds. There are plenty of children in Britain with Jewish fathers and gentile mothers who therefore count as non-Jews to the Jewish, but whose surnames being Goldberg, Cohen or Feinstein, find themselves being treated by the British, in Jonathan Miller’s phrase, as the Whole Hog. Besides, I don’t really, so far as I can tell, look especially Jewish and these things, too, make a difference.

  I only remember three other Jewish boys at Uppingham: their names were Adley, Heilbronn and Green. Their Jewishness was probably of greater importance to them than mine was to me. I used my mixed blood as a vague extra element of exoticism about which I could boast, for there was no palpable anti-Semitism at Uppingham—just the usual careless use of the words “Jew” or “Jewy” applied to anybody to indicate meanness with money, no more than that.

  I have feelings about English anti-Semitism that are as mixed as my own blood. Those members of my mother’s family who survived the holocaust went to live, with the single exception of my grandfather, in America or Israel. In conversation with them I would get very hot under the collar when they shook their heads wonderingly at my grandfather’s decision to live in what they regarded as such an anti-Semitic country as England.

  “What about Benjamin Disraeli?” I would retort. “He was Prime Minister over a hundred years ago. He gave Queen Victoria the Suez Canal and the title of Empress. He died an earl. When’s the first Jewish President of the United States going to be sworn in?” I would conveniently forget to add, of course, that Disraeli’s father had converted to Christianity. “Or look at Rufus Isaacs,” I would say. “Presidents and potentates would have to bow and call him Your Highness when he was Viceroy of India. He died a marquess. Half of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet is Jewish. The New York Athletic Club didn’t allow Jews in as members until a few years ago. Can you imagine such low, bras
h vulgarity in a London club?”

  Very self-righteous and patriotic I would be. They might respond with talk about the British wartime reluctance to believe in the depths into which Nazi anti-Semitism had sunk and their handling of the Palestinian Mandate.

  This is not an argument I feel qualified to pursue. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that there is a kind of anti-Semitism peculiar to Britain. I have mentioned before the use of the word clever and with what particularity it is applied to men like Jonathan Miller and Freddie Raphael. Jews, like homosexuals, are not quite healthy. They are part of that parade of pale, clever men who, at the turn of the century, confused the healthy world with all that talk of relativism and doubt and those weird ideas about determinant history and the divided self. Einstein, Marx and Freud took the old healthy guilt that sprang from Eden and the Cross and which Western Culture had somehow successfully purged of Jewishness and gave us a whole new suite of guilts that a good cold shower and a game of rugger couldn’t quite cleanse. Indeed, the perverted swine would probably look at that cold shower and that game of rugger and read all kinds of nasty things into them, the kind of nasty things that only a pale, unhealthy kind of outsider could possibly see. They’ll read anything into the most innocent of pastimes, these Jews and these pansies. Reading things into things, if that isn’t the favourite hobby of the intellectual I don’t know what is. Come to think, dim stirrings of old Latin lessons here, doesn’t “intellectual” actually mean “reading into”? There you are then. People nowadays can’t look a plain thing in the face and call it plainly what it is. Intellectuals to the left of us, intellectuals to the right, reading. Beastly, unhealthy swine.