Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  Well, no one talks in quite that John Buchaneering way anymore, but the modes of thought are still there, or rather modes of anti-thought: still there, still present and incorrect. The Jews still manage, in some people’s eyes, that supremely clever trick of being to blame both for capitalism and its excesses through their control of banks and financial institutions and for socialism and the liberal consensus that threatens the very stability of capitalism and the free market. It’s their bloody Torah and their damnable Talmud, simply encourages too much of reading things into things and too much smug rabbinical cleverclever cleverness.

  The Uppingham mind certainly was not trained to read too much into things. Those schoolmasters with imaginations and intellects had enough to do to get the boys through O level examinations without worrying their heads with real ideas: they did their best, but it is easy to forget how much more powerful is the corporate mentality of schoolboys than the individual intellect of a schoolmaster. It was easier for the boys to brand a schoolmaster pretentious than it was for a master to call a boy unimaginative. Indeed, I can remember endless arguments (see, there’s another thing you Jews are always doing … arguing) with other boys about that great sin of “reading too much into things.” It is a cliché amongst healthy schoolboys to say, “You can read anything into anything. Bloody hell, all this Shakespeare stuff. I mean they read too much into it. In Braddy’s English set today, you won’t believe it, but he was going on about bloody Hamlet and his mother and he used the word ‘Freudian’ about them … I mean, Jesus, how stupid can you get? Doesn’t he realise Freud wasn’t born until hundreds of years later? Shakespeare couldn’t have known anything about Oedipus complexes and all that rubbish. I can’t believe our parents pay men like that to talk such pseudy wank.”

  It’s mean to attack so hopeless a brand of feeble stupidity or mock so terrible a lack of imagination, in the end it is its own tragic handicap, and those who go to the grave unilluminated by the light of ideas are the sufferers, but of course I didn’t know that then, I thought such Philistines were already the victors and that the life of the mind and the imagination was under threat from all sides. Besides I was a terrible show-off and I used to react angrily, with great moral fervour and all the Jewy, pansy strength of my wicked tongue. Not that argument could ever swerve the stolid Uppinghamian mind away from his settled conviction that art, literature and the play of ideas were anything more than “wank.” Indeed, the better one argued, the more it proved it was all words, words, words.

  “Oh, you can argue anything with words, Fry. Doesn’t make it right.”

  It is one of the great ironies of British (anti-) intellectual life that a nebulous sense of twentieth-century relativism has taken hold, somewhere deep down, and is used to damn and distrust the logical and the rational. Thus a point of view about art can be dismissed as “pretentious” and “wank”—in other words, as not solid, not real, “airy-fairy” and “arty-farty”—while at the same time any logical, rational defence of it is dismissed as “just opinion” or “semantics” in a world in which, “let’s face it, everything is relative, anyway …”

  I wished that Forster’s 1934 obituary of the art critic Roger Fry (no relation so far as I know) could be mine … I can’t think of a better encomium.

  What characterized him and made him so precious in twentieth-century England was that, although he was a modern, he believed in reason …

  [He] rejected authority, mistrusted intuition. That is why his loss is so irreparable … If you said to him “This must be right, all the experts say so … Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so,” he would reply in effect, “Well. I wonder. Let’s see.” He would see and he would make you see. You would come away realizing that an influential opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe …

  Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.

  Forster, in other words, is talking about a classical mind, a Greek mind. It is so ironic that classical education, English style, produced nothing but anti-classical attitudes. The English public schoolboy product can easily live out his whole life believing that imagination is the same thing as fantasy, that ideas are deceptive ornament and that ornament itself is supernumerary to life’s requirements, he reflects absolutely our age of unreason: the plodding and carefully plotted lines of Nuffield empiricism are fine, but inference is to be distrusted. He lives between the extremes of the revealed truths of convention and current morality on the one side, and the vague, ignorant madness of a misunderstood sense of relativism, opinion and New Age finger-wagging-more-things-in-heaven-and-earth-Horatio-ism on the other, confusing mysteriousness with mysticism, and relativism with the idea that any view is up for grabs without the need for the winnowing processes of logic, reason and personal experience. Catastrophe, breakdown, marital disaster, personal tragedy, injustice or abuse are often the only crises that drop the scales from their eyes. I speak as such a product myself, you must understand, not as one looking down from a Heliconian height.

  For, in spite of all my differences, such as they are, I was never fully the sensitive outsider, the rejected Jew, the outrageous queen or the distanced intellectual that I liked to picture myself to be. I was never quite as intelligent as I thought I was, never quite as bold in my refusal to be conventional, never quite as alienated by my sexuality, never quite as sure of my belonging to the inner life of art and the mind. I absorbed the lessons of E. M. Forster readily and greedily. I collected him in first edition as avidly as I collected Norman Douglas. It is worth quoting almost in full that famous passage that hovers above all this. It is taken from “Notes on the English Character,” the first essay in his 1936 collection Abinger Harvest, whence also came the lines on Roger Fry and Firbank.

  Note One is that the character of the English is essentially middle class; after a little historical explanation as to why that might be safely stated, Forster continues:

  Solidity, caution, integrity, efficiency. Lack of imagination, hypocrisy. These qualities characterize the middle classes in every country, but in England they are national characteristics also, because only in England have the middle classes been in power for one hundred and fifty years. Napoleon, in his rude way, called us “a nation of shopkeepers.” We prefer to call ourselves “a great commercial nation”—it sounds more dignified—but the two phrases amount to the same.

  The Second Note contains that famous phrase “the undeveloped heart.”

  Second Note. Just as the heart of England is the middle classes, so the heart of the middle classes is the public school system … How perfectly it expresses their character—far better, for instance, than does the university, into which social and spiritual complexities have already entered. With its boarding houses, its compulsory games, its system of prefects and fagging, its insistence on good form and esprit de corps, it produces a type whose weight is out of all proportion to its number …

  And they go forth [the public school boys] into a world that is not entirely composed of public school men or even of Anglo-Saxons, but of men who are as various as the sands of the sea; into a world of whose richness and subtlety they have no conception. They go forth into it with well developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts … An undeveloped heart, not a cold one. The difference is important …

  Once upon a time (this is an anecdote) I went for a holiday on the Continent with an Indian friend. We both enjoyed ourselves and were sorry when the week was over, but on parting our behaviour was absolutely different. He was plunged in despair … I could not see what there was to make a fuss about … “Buck up,” I said, “do buck up.” He refused to buck up, and I left him plunged
in gloom.

  The conclusion of the anecdote is even more instructive. For when we met the next month our conversation threw a good deal of light on the English character. I began by scolding my friend. I told him that he had been wrong to feel and display so much emotion upon so slight an occasion; that it was inappropriate. The word “inappropriate” roused him to fury. “What?” he cried. “Do you measure out your emotions as if they were potatoes?” I did not like the simile of the potatoes, but after a moment’s reflection I said, “Yes, I do; and what’s more I think I ought to. A small occasion demands a little emotion, just as a large emotion demands a great one. I would like my emotions to be appropriate. This may be measuring them like potatoes, but it is better than slopping them about like water from a pail, which is what you did.” He did not like the simile of the pail. “If those are your opinions, they part us forever,” he cried, and left the room. Returning immediately, he added: “No—but your whole attitude toward emotion is wrong. Emotion has nothing to do with appropriateness. It matters only that it shall be sincere. I happened to feel deeply. I showed it. It doesn’t matter whether I ought to have felt deeply or not.”

  This remark impressed me very much. Yet I could not agree with it, and said that I valued emotion as much as he did, but used it differently; if I poured it out on small occasions I was afraid of having none left for the great ones, and of being bankrupt at the crises of life. Note the word “bankrupt.” I spoke as a member of a prudent middle class nation, always anxious to meet my liabilities. But my friend spoke as an Oriental … he feels his resources are endless, just as John Bull feels his are finite.

  This is how Forster finishes.

  … the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface—self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

  I hope and believe myself that in the next twenty years [this was written in 1920] we shall see a great change, and the national character will alter into something which is less unique but more loveable. The supremacy of the middle classes is probably ending. What new element the working classes will introduce one cannot say, but at all events they will not have been educated at public schools …

  The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposition of their governments, for the shrinkage of the globe is throwing us into one another’s arms. To that understanding these notes are a feeble contribution—notes on the English character as it has struck a novelist.

  Well, have we seen “a great change”? Has the supremacy of the middle classes ended? In a pig’s arse has it ended. Even today, mutatis mutandis, the character of the English is defined by the character of its (still rising) middle classes and even today, the character of those middle classes is defined by the character of the (still disproportionately) powerful public school product. The schools of course have changed, to the extent that public schoolboys wear baseball caps and expensive Nike footwear, listen to rap music, raise the pitch of their voices at the end of sentences in that bizarre Australian Question Intonation picked up from the TV soaps, and say “cool” and “slamming” a lot. That is nauseating certainly, embarrassing obviously, but fundamentally it alters nothing. No one can seriously suggest that the average English public schoolboy emerges from his school with a South Central Los Angeles sensibility, or the outlook, soul and character of an unemployed working-class spot welder. The body is probably even better developed, the brain as fairly developed but the heart just as undeveloped. The British have always absorbed cultural influences without losing their character. After all Humphrey Lyttelton and his generation listened to black jazz at Eton in the 1930s and probably called their friends “cats” and “daddy-o.” In our day we said that things were “far out” and “like, wow …” but it altered our Englishness not a whit. Plus ça change …

  It is worth remarking, I suppose, that the Indian “friend” Forster referred to in his Notes was, of course, a lover; also worth remarking that Forster never points out that his impression of the English character was not only middle class and public school, but also male.

  On that subject it so happens that the first edition of Abinger Harvest that I possess once belonged to the historian R. W. Ketton-Cremer, who retained in its pages a pristine clipping from the Sunday Times of March 22, 1936 containing a review of the book by the eminent critic Desmond MacCarthy—in those days there really were such things as eminent reviewers.

  MacCarthy makes the following delicate point with great perspicacity and elegance.

  His [Forster’s] peculiar balance of qualities is more often found in woman than in man; and if I could be confident of not being misunderstood by those who consider intellect a masculine speciality, I would add that his viewpoint … both as a critic and a creator, is feminine rather than masculine … Absurdities and tragedies, he seems to be saying are due to the failure to link experiences together—to connect. That is Mr. Forster’s “message.” Now, the essentially masculine way of taking life is to handle it departmentally. A man says to himself: there is my home and my private life of personal relations; there is my business, my work; there is my life as a citizen. In each department he has principles according to which situations can be handled as they arise. But in each department these are different. His art of life is to disconnect; it simplifies problems … The feminine impulse, on the other hand, whether on account of women’s education or her fundamental nature, is to see life as more of a continuum. That is part of what I meant by saying that Mr. Forster, as a creative writer and as a critic, takes the feminine viewpoint.

  Intuiting, and finally knowing for sure that Forster was somehow, like me—Not As Other Boys—allowed me to form a more natural bond with him as a writer than I might otherwise have done. Certainly “Notes on the English Character” and later Howard’s End became sacred texts for me at Uppingham, together with Cyril Connolly’s perfect Enemies of Promise and its Theory of Permanent Adolescence:

  It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.

  It was difficult for me to know quite how to handle that. On the one hand I believed that I was made homosexual the day I was bom, on the other I loved the idea that it was School’s Fault and that I was the victim of a wicked and corrupt system. Connolly, one sees now, meant socially as much as erotically homosexual, hence “the last analysis”—but there were days when, unhappy with my sexual lot, I liked to blame my education for my nature. Ihab Hassan, as so often, is right on the money when he says in The Anti-Hero:

  The ambivalences of a bourgeois hero in an overwhelmingly middle class society raise for him problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence … The sad history of the anti-hero is nothing more than the history of man’s changing awareness of himself. It is the record of his recoil … Man, meanwhile, goes clowning his sentimental way into eternity.

  It can come a bit hard sometimes to see one’s own unique, heroic life pinned so pitilessly to a wall. At other times it can endorse, affirm and save, but as I go clowning my sentimental way into eternity, wrestling with all my problems of estrangement and communion, sincerity and simulation, ambition and acquiescence, I shuttle between worrying whether I matter at all and whether anything else matters at all but me.

  I am sorry to borrow from others so much, but to do it one last time, I bring Montaigne to my defence:

  I quote
others only the better to express myself.

  Just in case you get the impression that from the age of thirteen onwards I spent all my time sitting in libraries reading Cyril Connolly, Michel de Montaigne (the fabulous edition translated by the fabulously named M. A. Screech was not available then), E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank and Ihab Hassan, I should say that I have conflated and compressed time here.

  None of this reading, none of this connecting or identifying with literature or the lives of others took place until the great event happened—the great event of my falling in love. Until that time I read a huge amount of Sherlock Holmes and P. G. Wodehouse, Talbot Baines Reed and G. Henty, Alastair Maclean and Agatha Christie, Biggles and Buchan, Hammond Innes and Len Deighton, Dornford Yates and Dorothy Sayers. What is more, I still do.

  2

  I believe Stouts Hill wanted me to leave them as early as possible. I had sat for the Uppingham scholarship examination aged twelve and failed to receive an award. I came close enough to an exhibition for Uppingham to recommend me to try for the exam again at a later date. I suspect, however, that Stouts Hill had Had Enough: the idea of me hanging around for another year did not please Cromie at all and it was agreed that I should leave as soon as possible, retaking the scholarship examination internally once installed in Uppingham. I bade good-bye to Stouts Hill then, aged twelve, without ever having been made a prefect, selected for a single athletic team, or achieving any distinction whatsoever save a record number of canings and a handful of academic prizes.