Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  And to Cambridge I must away now. London doesn’t suit me. I can’t keep on installing new wirelesses in my car for ever; thieves will have to look elsewhere. There is a limit to my patience. And now the producer has just biked over a message (the verb ‘to bike’ I notice is not included in either dictionary under advisement); the message tells me that I have gone on long enough. Well, rather than bike my ending to you all individually, let me use the speed of the airwaves to say, if you have been, I’m most awfully pleased.

  Trefusis and Rosina

  In which Donald Trefusis and Rosina, Lady Madding, recall a night of love that never was.

  Donald Trefusis first:

  If I were asked to remember one evening above any others it would be that evening in June when, just down from Cambridge, I attended one of Jaquinda Marriott’s extraordinary salons in Kerdiston Square.

  Jaquinda, who had the most fascinating ears in Europe, was something of a mystery. Married to Archie Marriott, the sportsman and Shadow Chancellor of Oxford University, she was said to come originally from the Hungarian royal family, although all of us suspected her of more humble origins. It is certainly true that the birth records of one Mabel Blifford were destroyed in a fire in 1924 just six months before Jaquinda appeared on the scene. But whatever her provenance there was no doubting the perfection of those ears and the splendour of those salons. She collected people of talent rather as some people collect children from school – every day. Pianists, painters, poets, statesmen, novelists, princesses, even oboists were gathered together under those lovely, pendulous lobes and bidden to attend her levées and talk and play and smoke.

  The soirée to which I refer was her second of the Season and I arrived late owing to an argument with a cabbie. He had advanced the claims of Baron Corvo as a novelist over those of Capt W.E. Johns and this I could not allow. When at last I extricated myself the party was in full swing. Ivor Novello and Cecil Beaton were wrapped in deep yellow crêpe de chine in the hallway, reciting passages from The Old Curiosity Shop in Danish, a fashionable pastime amongst the younger dandy set at the time. Minty Havercuck, the Duke of Montreech’s young bride, in a devastating flounce of Berlin silk, talked animatedly to Malcolm Lowry and T.C. Worsley, whose dancing seemed in its heat and frenzy to stand as a kinetic symbol of our mad decade, as it rushed headlong towards destruction in perfect 5:8 time.

  But all these sights receded into background mist for me as I beheld a young girl whom I had not seen for four years. Rosina Bantwigg, the younger and by far the second most lovely of the celebrated Bantwigg twins. She stood, her hands behind her back, her head cocked like an inquisitive librarian, listening to John Gielgud teach Sacheverell Sitwell how to time a joke. Oblivious to everything else, the ragtime music, the Prime Minister’s feeble impression of Vesta Victoria, Unity Mitford’s moustache, Cardinal Halloran’s swimming trunks, I gazed on this enchanting creature hungrily. She turned for a moment and saw me. A bright smile lit up her face as she approached. ‘Why Donald,’ she said, ‘how perfectly delightful.’ The voice, the image, the smile are fixed now in my mind like stars in the sky. They pilot me through life, they are my one fixed point, the paradigm to which all else in my universe must strive. At that point, I rather injudiciously jerked my head back, shut my eyes and vomited all over her. The heat, the tallow, the hemp, I don’t know what it was. Without stopping to look back I hurried from that room and out of that life for ever. She married Tom Madding of course. Never saw her again.

  Rosina, Lady Madding, remembers the same evening:

  Because of my connection with the Kirkmichael family – my grandmother, the Marchioness Gloweravon, was born the Lady Vyella Kirkmichael – I was afforded from an early age a glimpse of English drawing-room and country house society, before the Second War drew a thick black-out blind across that world and extinguished its brilliance for ever. It was that privileged entrée that so positively endorsed my already strong feelings of adolescent crypto-syndicalist anarcho-Marxist neo-Buddhist Presbyterianism. A mordantly cynical young hound I might have been in the 1930s, but even I, in my gauche rejection of all that my family stood for, could not fail but be captivated by the beauty, the charm and the effulgence of those relics of the century’s golden Edwardian summer, whose brightness and warmth shone all the more strongly through the sombre gloom of a depressed decade.

  Of course, my favourite parties were those given by Jaquinda Marriott in her London residence in, I think, Kerdiston Square. She called them salons, they weren’t of course. No hair-dryers.

  I remember one such evening in the May or June of 1932. Everyone had to come dressed as a paradox. Bertie Russell came as the group of groups which is not contained within that group: I came as Achilles, with my sister Castella as the tortoise. I felt most sorry for G.K. Chesterton who came as the answer to the question ‘Is this a question?’ and was ignored for the whole evening. It was a lovely summer’s night, I was nineteen, the world was at my feet.

  But every Eden contains a viper and the canker in the apple of this evening took the shape of the foul Brandelia Cawston who dedicated herself to spoiling my evening. She mocked me, trod deliberately on the train of my thought, dropped ash in my glass and yawned whenever I spoke. She had never liked me and she was doing her best to provoke me into vulgarity. And then, while I was listening to Osbert Sitwell teach Laurence Olivier how to do a German accent, I spotted young Donald Trefusis across the room. My heart missed a beat; here was the now tall and comely youth whom I had hero-worshipped to abstraction when I was still in pig-tails and sheep’s ears. Brandelia Cawston spitefully pinched my arm. A glance at Donald told me that he had seen this and taken in the whole situation. I excused myself from Olivier and Sitwell and, followed by the odious Cawston girl, approached Donald. He jerked his head back and, reading his intentions perfectly, I stepped smartly to one side to allow him to puke all over the wretched Brandelia. Never was I more delighted. I had not seen anyone look to such disadvantage in society since Edgar Wallace’s toupée caught fire in Cap Ferrat in 1924. I turned to thank my bold rescuer, but he had vanished, leaving not a wrack behind. I never saw him again. I think of the dear man always, wonder what became of him. Life can be so cruel. Let me wrestle now.

  Trefusis Accepts an Award

  This is a record of Trefusis’s only television appearance. Here he accepts the British Press Guild’s award for Best Radio programme or somesuch.

  Heaven bless you, I must confess that I find all this light a little distressing, I dare swear my eyes will accustom themselves to the glare in time. It really is no wonder that television persons look so monstrously stupid. I now know that it is the blaze of electric light which lends that dead, hopeless look to the eyes. I’m wandering from the point. Where am I? Awards. Prizes.

  Well, I am sure that the British Press Guild, or whatsomever body has offered this wireless trophy to us, did so with the very best intentions, but I am bound to remark that I think it is a terrible mistake. I am sure I have no wish to offend any of the officials responsible, and I have no doubt that we are all deeply sensible of the profound compliment paid us but I must reasseverate: you have made a foul blunder. I am far from saying, you must understand, that we do not deserve this accolade. I have no doubt that our little broadcasting feature is no more beastly than any other that smutches the airwaves. Indeed on occasions we create moments which can only be described as golden in the intensity of their excitement, the freshness of their vision and the vigour of their insight. Nonetheless I stand by my view that to embody this worthiness in the form of an official award spells death, confusion, disaster and ruination. Let me delineate my reasons.

  I have a dread fear that awards serve only to encourage recipients into a state of bumptiousness and self-conceit that can only be considered alarming to persons of sense and tone. Loose Ends is transmitted in the morning, 10.00 of a Saturday. Wise persons, honest persons are abed at this time. If not precisely under the blankets at least they have got no further than
the breakfast table. The nervous system is steadily adjusting itself to the horrors of daylight and loud noises. Picture the hideousness, if you would be so kind, under such circumstances, of a bumptious, self-satisfied Nedwin Sherrin. A man whose saving grace is his detachment, calm, modesty and discretion of demeanour transformed into an animated, confident and self-satisfied clarion. It really cannot bear thinking about. No, I must apologise, but this airy, glib distributing of prizes may unleash forces upon the airwaves that we will all come to regret.

  What great works of literature did Kipling produce after his Nobel Prize? None. He was too busy sitting at home, glowing with pride and burnishing his silver cup with the cuff of his sleeve. Prizes must come not as an encouragement to continue, but as a valediction, a closing encomium, a farewell tribute.

  You have meant well, ladies and gentlemen of the British Press Guild, and we all thank you, at another time I would have been prepared to be excessively fulsome in my thanks, even to the extent of kissing each and every one of you full on the lips for an embarrassingly long time, a privilege of the old. As it is I fear I must temper my gratitude with wariness. No, really these lights are getting to me now. In a moment I will achieve the dull, glazed look of a dead halibut or a live weatherman. I sense a migraine and a filling sinus. Time, I fancy, to press a cologne-drenched handkerchief to my temples and lie down. If you have been, thank you for stopping it.

  Trefusis and the Monocled Mutineer

  The BBC had just screened Alan Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer, a drama based on the so-called Mutiny of Etaples during the First World War. The screening had caused howls of protest from some quarters. It coincided with the appointment of Sir Marmaduke Hussey as Chairman of the BBC.

  VOICE: This morning, on his return from the island of Crete, Donald Trefusis, Regius Professor of Philology at the University of Cambridge and Extraordinary Fellow of St Matthew’s College, turns his waspish attention to the political storm arising from the appointment of the new Chairman of the Governors of the BBC.

  Waspish? What do you mean waspish? Really these boys who do the announcing have the most peculiar ideas. Waspish indeed. Hello. As most of you will already have read in this quarter’s edition of the Neue Philologische Abteilung, that noble vade mecum of the linguistically concerned, my excavations into the origins and splendour of the Minoan dialects of Ancient Greek have just been completed, and have been compared in their size, scope and sweep to those more material digs made by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos. Just some of the reviews of my work: ‘A job of daring reconstruction and imaginative revivification’, Language Today. ‘Professor Trefusis has cast a new light on Greek particles and their antecedents’, Which Philologist. ‘I shall never look at the iotal slide in the same way’, Sparham Deanery Monthly Incorporating the Booton and Brandiston Parish Magazine. But my work has earned as much condemnation as praise. ‘Left wing nonsense,’ writes Ferdinand Scruton in The Times. Of that I say little. I may only observe that the chain I wear about my neck as I speak has depended from it a medal of the Eleutherian Order First Class, a token of appreciation from the Cretan people worth more to me than all the academic plaudits that I have no doubt will be mine before the sycamores have quite shed their last golden leaves onto the fast flowing waters of the Cam. Ah yes, to be home in russet England is something indeed.

  Crete is a wine to be sipped with pleasure only for short periods. Without, it must be said, the steadying influence of the BBC’s World Service to keep a rein upon my reason, my stay on that incomparable island would, I make no doubt, have been insupportable. The despatch of news, information, music, drama and imbecility from Bush House to Kalathas was unending and inspiring. But one oft repeated theme on the short wave commentaries never failed to catch my attention. Imagine my horror to learn of the presentation of a dramatic series on the television in England while I was away, called, I believe, The Molecule Mountaineer, by a Mr Alec Bleasdale. Unless I vastly mistake the matter a dramatist has distorted history to suit his own vile political ends. My father happened to be at Etaples on the fateful three days in question and there is no question but that what has since been described as a revolution was merely an incident in which a private hesitated for a fraction of a second before carrying out an order to shoot himself. So great was the discipline, loyalty and affection for their officers of the British fighting men during that glorious war that this trivial act of hesitancy seemed like gross insubordination besides the norm of instant obeisance and respect that prevailed amongst the cheerful, eager-to-be-senselessly-slaughtered soldiers at the Front: a small blemish that marred the beautiful truth of Tommy’s constant patriotic wish to obey in all things the noble, wise and strategically brilliant officers who led him. And now some ghastly playwright has tried to make something more of it than that. The government has rightly stepped in to intervene. My prayers are with the new Chairman of the BBC. His first duty, as I see it, must be to burn all tapes of, and prohibit any future productions of, the twisted plays of that arch propagandist and historical liar, William Shakespeare. For too long have the radical lunatics running the television centre got away with encouraging such pseudologous, canting and doctrinaire mendacities as the Tragical History of King John, King Richard III, Kings Henry IV, V and VI in all their false and lying parts. As any historian will tell you, there was no hawthorn bush at the battle of Bosworth Field under which Richard III’s crown did or did not roll. He never said, it is my duty to inform you all, ‘My horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse’. Shakespeare MADE IT UP. IT WAS A LIE, a dreadful, propagandist lie to please the fashionable place-servers of the day. I trust Mr Marmalade Butty will prohibit all performances of this frightful bearded playwright’s works in future. ‘Why’, as my great predecessor in the Chair of Philology at Cambridge was used to ask, ‘why are all the clever people left wing?’

  Some of the more sensitive amongst you will detect a note of teasing irony in my voice. Of course you are right. Really it is beginning to look as if I cannot turn my back on Britain for a moment without ghastly interfering ignorant imbeciles meddling in things they quite simply do not understand. The idea of a politician being able to tell the difference between history and fiction is grotesque in the extreme, they cannot tell a drama from a jar of pickled walnuts or a work of art from a moist lemon-scented cleansing square (such as Olympic airlines very thoughtfully provide for one’s facial laving after an in-flight supper); the thought that they can be trusted to do so is absurd, preposterous and hideous. Fiction, it appears I must tell stupid people everywhere, is pretend, rather like politics. If every fiction masquerading as fact, whether it be revoltingly jingoistic or never so crassly iconoclastic, were to be anathematised then it is not only copies of Shakespeare and Milton and Dickens and Joyce and Shaw that would be flung on the pyre but every recorded utterance by every human being. For as a philologist I am in a position to tell you that language is a lie. Yes! Language itself. A stone is a stone, the word ‘stone’ is not a stone, it is a token, a linguistic banknote that we exchange to indicate the idea of a stone. It saves us the trouble of having to haul one out of the ground to show our interlocutor what we mean.

  Whether the assemblage of fatuity, prejudice, hatred and fear that constitutes the British public (those not listening at the moment) and the instruments of its political will understand the economics that regulate the supply and exchange of these linguistic banknotes or not – and fellow linguists will forgive my rather mechanistic pre-T.E. Hume approach – is immaterial.

  Oh, gentlemen, ladies, all – the lies, the futility, the unreason, the folly. If you want repression, censorship, hypocritical moralising and propaganda on your televisions then go and live in America. There! I’m tired now, my thighs and hams are taut from the flight from Iraklion, I must visit my buttock masseur at Addenbrookes: a splendid man – he leaves no stern untoned. If you have been, goodnight.

  Trefusis Blasphemes

  VOICE: Donald Trefusis, Professor of Philology at the Unive
rsity of Cambridge and Extraordinary Fellow of St Matthew’s College, presents another in a series of his widely noticed ‘Wireless Essays’. On this occasion he speaks in angry and scandalous vein on the subject of Blasphemy.

  ‘The woods decay,’ shrilled Tennyson, ‘the woods decay and fall.’ As we approach the season of no light, no sun, no warmth, no leaves, no joy, no green, November, as Hood with archetypal paranomasia liked to phrase it, my mind turns to eternal Verities. His Lordship, the Bishop of St Albans, a prelate in a long line of book-burners and anathematisers, has seen fit of late to damn, castigate and otherwise consign to the great bonfire a charitable venture entitled – and I find this hard to credit, but my young friends here at the University assure me that it is so – The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, a work of many hands whose proceeds are to be sent to Africa and other places that have most need of material assistance this Yuletide.