by Stephen Fry
‘Now then young man, you drop that ugly weapon and come out with your hands in the air, at once, do you hear?’
A flash of savage white teeth in the darkness was all I could see, a grotesque clicking of metal all I could hear, as the crazed villain cocked his shotgun. I leapt forward and pressed the trigger on the strange device I had taken from the car. A buzzing and crackling of electricity and a dull, sickening thud as the last of the robbers was on the ground, unconscious.
Pedro and I sat with Captain Donahue in the ambulance as we rushed him to St Timothy’s hospital.
‘Guys, I don’t know what to say. Pedro, I’ll see you get a medal for this, and as for you Professor, hey you …’
‘Hey you, you, you! Wake up there! You think this bus is a hotel for the night or what? Wake up! This is the terminus, you gotta get out here. Come on, move it!’
Dear me, such dreams this city inspires. Such dreams. Love to all.
Section Two
Reviews & Oddments
The Tatler and Sex
This article was commissioned by Jonathan Meades, now a celebrated restaurant critic and documentary-maker. At the time he was a features editor under Mark Boxer at the Tatler magazine. He was compiling a Christmas feature which consisted of Things That People Didn’t Do. He rang me up asking if there was anything I didn’t do. Gavin Stamp and Brian Sewell and others were contributing articles on why they never watched television, drove cars, went on holiday, and so on. The only thing I could think of that I abstained from utterly was Sex. This little article has sorely tried me since. Every time I am interviewed I am asked about my celibacy. Every time someone writes about me they (quite justifiably I suppose) complain that I’m ‘always going on about’ my sexual abstinence. All my fault. For the record, I remain as pure as I was when I first wrote this article, which was in 1985.
Lord Hailsham, you may remember, sent letters to important people in Cabinet earlier this year telling them he strongly disapproved of ‘having sex’. Quintin and I have had our disagreements over the years – we could never agree about John Denver, for instance – but on the subject of sex we are as of one mind.
I haven’t – and I can’t speak for Hailsham here – had sex for four years. This didn’t begin as a conscious embrace of the positive virtues of celibacy, nor was I forced to make myself unavailable because no one wanted me. Less an oil-painting and more an oil-slick I may be, but I think that if I wanted intimate carnal congress I could find it without paying. I gave coitus the red card for utilitarian reasons: the displeasure, discomfort and aggravation it caused outweighed any momentary explosions of pleasure, ease or solace. A simple calculus of felicity.
Sex does not enrich or deepen a relationship, it permanently cheapens and destabilises one. Everyone I know who is unfortunate enough to have a sex-mate, joy-partner, bed-friend, love-chum, call them what you will, finds that – after a week or two of long blissful afternoons of making the beast with two backs, or the beast with one back and a funny shaped middle, or the beast with legs splayed in the air and arms gripping the sides of the mattress – the day dawns when Partner A is keen for more s winking, grinding and sweating and Partner B would rather turn over and catch up with Mike and Psmith. Dismal weeks follow. A finds it difficult to meet B’s eye any time after 9.00 in the evening, B announces in a nonchalant voice that he or she is ‘completely bushed’ just so that A will know that ‘it isn’t on tonight’ and, before they are a month older, nasty cracks appear.
I yield to no one in my admiration of the erotic capabilities of the human body. The contemplation of the erotic is a joyous frame in life’s rich comic strip. But let it not be supposed that there is anything erotic about coition. A walk, a smile, a gait, a way of flicking the hair away from the eyes, the manner in which clothes encase the body, these can be erotic, but I would be greatly in the debt of the man who could tell me what could ever be appealing about those damp, dark, foul-smelling and revoltingly tufted areas of the body that constitute the main dishes in the banquet of love. These zones, when interfered with, will of course produce all kinds of chemical reactions in the body: the blood will course, the breath will quicken and the heart will pound. Once under the influence of the drugs supplied by one’s own body, there is no limit to the indignities, indecencies and bestialities to which the most usually rational and graceful of us will sink. And, my dear, the smell …
Let’s face it, we have outgrown the functional necessity for these lusts. There was a time when Man did not connect the act of intercourse with the production of babies. It is, after all, a very long-term cause and effect. There is no obvious reason to suppose that a penetration one summer leads to a baby next spring. And so in the past we had to keep rogering blindly away all the time and Dame Nature was kind enough at least to make it spasmodically pleasurable. We have inherited this instinct to rut as we have inherited other instincts once necessary for survival: the instincts to fight and quarrel and frighten and conquer. But these vestigial urges have no place in a rational, intelligent community that can determine its own destiny.
I concede that it is healthy to remember and respect our origins and the duality of our nature, but we still have eating and sleeping and defecating – these are far less under our control and serve to remind us quite painfully enough of the physicality and baseness of the flesh that houses and imprisons our great creating minds. We have no need of the moist, infected pleasures of the bedroom to humiliate us more.
Besides, I’m scared that I may not be very good at it.
Books Do Furnish A Room
Some book reviews written for the Tatler here. Written, with typical cowardice, in a disguised persona. Perhaps because I was afraid of the possible revenge of Baron de Massy to whom I was extraordinarily unkind. I still have a copy of his book Palace, however, and I really think my opinion was fair. Hating critics as I do I include this to show my hypocrisy or, if I wanted to be kinder to myself, to show that I know how foul critics are because I’ve been one myself.
Williver Hendry, editor of A Most Peculiar Friendship: The Correspondence of Lord Alfred Douglas and Jack Dempsey and author of Towards The Brightening Dawn and Notes From A Purple Distance: An Ischian Memoir, casts a loving eye over some June publications.
I pluck two books down from the reviewing shelf, autobiographies the both: here is Palace by Baron Christian de Massy, sprig of the house of Grimaldi, and here The Beaverbrook Girl by Janet Aitken Kidd, fruit of the Beaverbrook bough.
Massy, nephew of Prince Rainier of Monaco, shows us a photograph of a crumpled Ferrari from which he emerged unscathed. The state of my Ferrari after it had slid 150 yards on its roof. I don’t know how I got out of this one, quips the legend beneath. Scuba diving with plastic surgeon Ivo Pitanguy, Brazil, 1977 needs no comment from me, nor I think do Back from Africa with the repaired Alfa Romeo or Mamou and her notorious terriers in front of the castle. Here is a wild, exotic world: peopled by exciting, glamorous personalities! The scene shifts hectically from Monaco to Gstaad to Beaulieu, Brighton and Paris and then back again, in a mad helter-skelter of parties, press-launches and nightclubs, to Monaco! How right was Scott Fitzgerald: they are not like us these people; they converse freely with motor-racing champions, glossy magazine editors and the manufacturers of ski bindings! We can only gape with wonder as Baron de Massy spins his tales. We chuckle at the impish devilry which inspired him to name his dogs Cocaine and Cannabis. We sigh with envy at evenings which, as often as not, seemed to finish off at nightclubs where McEnroe, Gerulaitis and Borg were seen to be present! Here is more chic, élan, panache, diablerie and esprit than could be found at the cosmetic counter at Boots. But what of the man’s prose?
From the salon we proceeded up the grand staircase to the ballrooms, where I saw Gunter Sachs and his wife, Mirja, Jackie and Helen Stewart … I also saw Cary and Barbara Grant, the Sinatras, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, David and Hjordis Niven, and the Niarchos family. Others there were Marc Bohan of Dior, Madame Artur R
ubinstein, Maurice Druon and Edgar Fauré of the Académie Française, the French stage and screen star Marie Bell, the Rothschilds, Edmond, David and Guy, and their wives, and the Duke and Duchess of Orleans. The Duke of Huesear, the son of the Duchess of Alba, was wearing his black ceremonial uniform slashed by the blue cordon of Isabella II of Spain. A Scottish relative of ours was dressed in the family tartan and kilt.
Note there the details of dress: he misses nothing, this one. But there is cunningly wrought narrative too. We learn how one night Salvatore Dozio (he arrived newly rich at Monaco having made over $100 million from ‘various mysterious dealings’!!!) bet any of his four Rolls Royces against the author’s one Ferrari that a man they spotted in Régine’s was Ringo Starr. Massy knew the man to be Adrian, Mr Starr’s manager, but accepted the wager and chose as his prize a bottle green Corniche with beige leather seats! Salvatore, a good loser, toasted the victor with Louis Roederer Cristal champagne! Such style! But like all great stories this one is tinged with tragedy. For Massy soon learnt what it meant to drive such a car. Once a woman spat upon the vehicle, on another occasion its sides were scraped! Signs of envy were everywhere. And then – comble de malchance! – sour old Uncle Rainier reported to the officials that his nephew possessed a Rolls Royce whose customs duty had not been paid and he was forced to sell. But our hero, with touching spirituality, reveals that he felt little regret at the car’s passing out of his life: it had been fun to own, but it meant nothing to him. Remarkable anecdotes of this quality fill Baron de Massy and Charles Higham’s book. Here is that marriage of style and content we look for in all great writing. A shatteringly vulgar and worthless life captured in shatteringly vulgar and worthless prose. A must.
What of Mrs Aitken Kidd? A formidable lady indeed. We see one photograph entitled An important win in combined driving at the Hickstead driving Derby and another dubbed simply Painting in my studio at Slythehurst. We are in the realms of parody here surely. Slythehurst? But look at some more pictures: Proud owner of the Vega Gull, a fast, good-looking aeroplane and Marriage to Drogo Montague, son of the Earl of Sandwich, at Caxton Hall and further explanation from me is unnecessary. Artist, sportswoman, débutante, and pilot. A rich life. She was born to money, position and eminence; she enjoyed wealth, beauty and accomplishment and yet, I cannot help but feel, if she had her time all over again she wouldn’t change a thing.
What else is on my shelf this month? Virago have produced The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 by Elaine Showalter. This is a good work of serious feminist scholarship, and as such, I am sorry to say, unlikely to appeal to my readers. That is your problem, not that of the book. See how hard on you I am! Elaine Showalter intelligently examines definitions of female insanity in relation to historical attitudes towards women. Chapter Two is entitled ‘The Rise of the Victorian Madwoman’s a circumstance which alone is worth the entrance money of £6.95.
I hope Eleanor Bron will forgive me if I quote a little from Pillow Book (Methuen £4.95), the arrival in paperback form of her engaging collection of thoughts, reminiscences, axioms and observations. From Phil on The Archers one day she heard this noble line: ‘Did those lambs get off to the abattoir all right this morning?’
She also collects her own thoughts under headings. We have things that make you appreciate men (‘a lover who presents you with a huge cardboard box halfway through lunch, in which are packed thirteen china rhinoceroses’), difficult things (‘doing reaction shots as Mary, Mother of Jesus, to a Crucifixion which was filmed three days before you arrived’) and frightening things (‘the baying of an audience before a charity show in which the Monty Python Team is appearing’). An entrancing little book.
Three Forms of Sudden Death (and other reflections on the grandeur and misery of the human body) is the work of F. Gonzalez-Crussi (the kind of surname that these days I would urge any young writer desirous of instant publication to adopt), who is an eminent Professor of Pathology. These essays on physiology use the author’s knowledge of anatomy and disease as a platform from which to discuss mortality, the universe and the human mind. Works of upper-middle-brow scientific philosophy are all the scream at the moment; a breadth of reading, a shrewdly accessible use of crispy technical words and a wealth of macabre anecdote combine to force an impression that wise and true things are being asserted. It may be that close inspection reveals that this is not the case, but it is fun being fooled. I was reminded of Primo Levi’s excellent Periodic Table, the conversation book of many an Islington and Fulham dinner table, my young friends tell me.
The Ludlumesque machismo of the prose style of The Kidnap Business (Pelham Books £13.00) is most depressing. This is the world of ‘the stake out’, ‘the drop’ and ‘clean phones’, written in the style which has made Dick Francis and Frederick Forsyth their fortunes, taut, wiry, sparse, spare, lean, tense, wry. Such a style first made an impression because it was considered in some way ‘journalistic’, while journalistic writing of the kind embodied in this book now seems to go out of its way, in its turn, to imitate thriller prose. This is how the book opens: ‘Outside, the traffic poured towards the Rome suburbs. Inside, the office was unremarkable.’ The effect is to fictionalise fact by adopting the outworn stylistic tricks of those who attempt to factualise fiction. I hope that makes sense. Reading back, I see that it does. Good.
I have nothing to say about Alexander Walker’s Vivien (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), a biography of Vivien Leigh, other than that it seems to be very good indeed.
I also feel free to heap praise on Roy Kerridge’s People Of Britain (Robert Hale, price n.a.), admirably lacking in preciosity, and free from that snobbism, prejudice or sentimentality one might, perhaps unfairly, attribute to The Field, the magazine which saw the first publication of much of this enthusiastic and good-hearted gallop around the British Isles.
Historians will be pleased to hear of the publication of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell: A study in contrasts and comparisons by Maurice Ashley (Methuen £13.00) and of Christopher Hibbert’s The Grand Tour (Thames Methuen £15.00).
I wish I could report the publication of my collection of janderisms, Way Up On Poop Deck (and other clippings), but Something Has Gone Wrong at the printers. I think you have enough books to be going with for the time being.
The Annotated Father Brown
Here, from the books page of The Listener, is a review of a very strange book indeed:
The Annotated Innocence Of Father Brown: G.K. Chesterton, Edited by Martin Gardiner, Oxford University Press, £12.95
This is a very odd1 book. A heavily annotated2 edition of Father Brown? I picked up my review copy a bewildered3 being. So bewildered that the large question mark suspended above my head cast a dark shadow over the opening pages, making concentrated reading almost impossible. Has the Oxford University Press gone mad,4 I wondered. Or perhaps Father Brown is being set for A Level these days. Why on earth should the simplest and purest detective stories ever written need annotation? The answer, and it is by no means a satisfactory one, is to be found in Martin Gardiner’s introduction. He notes that the Sherlock Holmes canon has, over the years, attracted hundreds of works of mock-serious scholarship as well as inspiring the foundation of many groups and societies – he mentions the Baker Street Irregulars, more of that later. But, he complains, ‘Nothing like the Baker Street Irregulars has been formed around the Father Brown canon – five books of short stories plus several tales not in any of the books. I find this surprising.’ My italics, and if I could have them printed in red ink, I would. Surprising? If Mr Gardiner’s launching pad for this book is genuine surprise at such a circumstance, then surely we are in for a rough read.
The use of the word ‘canon’ seems to me to be the giveaway here. The Sherlock Holmes stories constitute a canon, the Father Brown stories do not. I feel qualified to speak on this subject having been in my time, as a schoolboy, the youngest member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. For a few thrilling, mad, exultant yea
rs I lived and breathed Sherlock Holmes to the exclusion of all other lives and oxygens. I could recite huge passages of the text, remember dates, details, names and incidents as if I had actually been by the Great Detective’s side during each adventure. Which of course I had, for Watson had taken me there. We can all picture those lodgings, seventeen well-trodden steps up from the ground floor, the patriotic initials V.R. shot in bullets above the fireplace, the tobacco-bearing slipper, the shelf of commonplace books. We all know Holmes with his pipe, his violin, his lens and his cocaine, and Watson with his thick English neck and those twin legacies from the Afghan Wars, the trusty service revolver and the bullet wound that still twinges when the weather turns. We all know that hundreds of letters a year are still sent to Mr Holmes at 221B Baker Street5 and that for some odd reason, only a little to do with literary merit or deep psychological insight, Sherlock Holmes lives, independently of his creator, as few fictional characters before or since have lived. But what is Father Brown? A dumpy figure in a shovel hat. He has no chronology, no place, no paraphernalia, no details. Chesterton is sovereign in his kingdom, the two are inseparable. What is canonical about those five books of short stories? How many letters a week does Father Brown receive in 1987?
Holmes lives by detail, his criminals leave palpable traces in the world, traces from which the analyst can infer and deduce. From facts, from taxonomy, from concrete evidences Holmes can build up the picture of a crime. Father Brown approaches it from quite another direction. From his knowledge of man, his sin and his soul, Father Brown can extract the particular. It is amusing to treat the Sherlock Holmes stories as real history, the verisimilitude of the style is a help here, and any inconsistencies can be attributed to Watson’s fogged memory rather than the author’s carelessness. It is the details that fascinate us with Holmes, with Father Brown it is the generalities. Small wonder that, on reading, the little priest appears to exist in a vacuum, a universe away from those cluttered Victorian rooms in Baker Street.