Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  The inspiration for this misguided annotation of The Innocence Of Father Brown is Baring-Gould’s Annotated Sherlock Holmes. It may as well have been Enoch Powell’s edition of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War.

  Well, I have suggested that there are no apparent grounds for the scholiast to interfere with Father Brown, but has Mr Gardiner at least tackled his subject with glee or wit or learning? I am sorry to say that I do not think he has. This is not all his fault. He is an American,6 not in itself prohibitive of any of the foregoing qualities, far from it. The alert may have deduced his nationality already (‘You know my methods, Watson. Apply them’) from his reference to the Baker Street Irregulars.7 Unfortunately, however, he seems to have annotated the text expressly for his fellow countrymen. A lot of footnote space is therefore devoted to explanations of where Hartlepool,8 Highgate,9 Putney,10 Bond Street11 and suchlike places are, and which famous literary people once lived in them. And I wonder how many of you will need to have ‘Boxing Day’12 or ‘Father Christmas’13 glossed? Do you not know what a ‘rook’14 is, or an ‘old buffer’?15 I appreciate that a number of Americans might be sent into paroxysms of puzzlement over such opaque anglicisms, but this book is being published in England and offered to an English public. Mr Gardiner also makes a number of mistakes in his glosses. He does not quite appreciate the significance of the phrases ‘two-pence coloured’, for example, or ‘sewn up’. Stratford we are told is ‘a railway station east of London’. And does Westminster really ‘contain Hyde Park’?

  Mr (or possibly Dr) Gardiner is apparently a ‘world famous’ writer on mathematics and science and he loses no opportunity to denounce fringe religions or to introduce into his footnotes anecdotes from the life of Einstein. Certain passages are drawn to our attention as being ‘arresting, beautifully worded sentences’ or ‘marvellous paragraphs’, but otherwise Chesterton’s literary style is not discussed.

  Try as I might I cannot understand why this edition is being presented to the public. Chestertonians will possibly appreciate the bibliography at the back of the book, but there is little here that they will not already know. For the rest of us there is a smartly printed edition of twelve magnificent stories, one or two undoubtedly absorbing glosses (I particularly enjoyed a discursion on the history of Sunny Jim of Force Wheat Flakes fame) and a great many irritating and irrelevant ones. Chesterton once observed that angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. If you happen to see a book soaring majestically around the countryside in the near future you can rest assured that it won’t be The Annotated Innocence Of Father Brown.

  1‘Odd’ Peculiar, rum, strange.

  2‘Annotate’ To add notes to, furnish with notes (a literary work or author)’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

  3‘Bewildered’ Baffled, perplexed, puzzled, all of a doo-dah.

  4‘Mad’ Potty, bonkers, dippy.

  5221B Baker Street currently houses a main branch of the Abbey National Building Society. A Building Society is a large financial institution providing mortgages for lenders and low rates of interest for investors.

  6Native or resident of the United States of America.

  7The Baker Street Irregulars (named after Holmes’s army of street urchins) is an American Sherlockian group. An Englishman would more naturally have cited the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. ‘Brilliant, Holmes!’ ‘Meretricious.’

  8Hartlepool is an eastern seaport town in the county of Durham.

  9Highgate is a northern suburb of London. Samuel Coleridge and Andrew Marvell were among its famous literary residents.

  10Putney is a London suburb on the south side of the Thames. The poet Algernon Charles Swinburne was one of its famous literary residents.

  11London’s Bond Street is noted for its elegant shops and fine art galleries, and for such famous residents as James Boswell and Laurence Sterne.

  12The first weekday after Christmas, apparently.

  13The English name for Santa Claus and not, as you might think from the name, a kind of Romanian chest harp.

  14The rook is an entirely black variety of European crow, smaller than a raven and a trifle larger than a jackdaw.

  15‘Old buffer’ means simply a chap or fellow – ‘usually expressing a slight degree of contempt’ (Oxford English Dictionary).

  Arena

  This was written for Arena magazine.

  Nine out of ten readers who expressed a preference have said that articles in men’s fashion magazines which open with the words ‘When I was at Cambridge’ are unreadable and horrid. The world has sorrow enough without adding to it reminiscences of crumpety, crusty, punting days on the Cam. But I know you’ll forgive me if I risk it because what I have to say may well rock the foundations of the British Establishment, give the Attorney General a substantially unpleasant headache and profoundly alter the way we think about day-wear for the over-forties.

  When I was at Cambridge it was, naturally enough I felt, my ambition to be approached in some way by an elderly homosexual don and asked to spy for or against my country. Some undergraduates wanted to be ‘noticed’ by post-Structuralist lecturers and invited to contribute to Strategies of Difference, the English faculty’s quarterly in-house deconstruction and semiology magazine, others were keen to tell the world about their loving relationship with God. Others yet were interested in the idea of doing some of the sex they had heard so much about at school. There were those who wanted simply to be left alone and develop and grow as human beings, those who mucked about in rowing-boats and those who trailed teddy-bears along the ground and called each other ‘my dearest lovely old dear’, though I’m happy to say that those last were quickly mopped up at the beginning of each term by small, highly mobile assault teams armed with American army flame-throwers. Cambridge isn’t Oxford, after all. But I, I simply wanted to be recruited by a begowned whoopsie from whichever extreme of the political spectrum. My wish was granted: more of that later.

  We all know about the English obsession with spying. It has been calculated that more ironic remarks, more acerbic observations and more balanced, sober appraisals have been made by Spectator journalists on that very subject than even on the amusing topic of the rise of the left-wing clergy. Something deep in the English character leads us to want more than anything to live deceitful lives; perhaps it is something anal. Perhaps not. It may be our world lead in irony that creates in us a craze for deception and guile, it may be our highly developed sense of world disgust. It is apparently true that if a Frenchman is approached by a member of his government and asked, while on holiday, to deliver a certain package to a certain address for a small sum of money and the undying gratitude of the Republic, he will tell the functionary in question to go and boil his head. British consulates in every neck of every wood in the world, however, are daily besieged by Englishmen who beg to be used as couriers, dead-letter postmen, lamp-lighters, sleepers, moles or honey-trappers, for a free trial period, no job too dirty, no demand too obscene. We all believe we qualify as The Perfect Spy.

  I can trace my own mania for covert operations back to when I was twelve and Straker-Nesbitt passed me a note during double maths. It was a searing June, I remember. A childhood June. It seemed as though the only cloud in Gloucestershire was the cumulus of chalk swirling in a shaft of sunlight that streamed through the classroom window and lit Mr Dobson’s bald head as he squeaked simultaneous equations on the green-board. I decrypted Straker-Nesbitt’s note on my one-time pad or ‘rough book’. The message was clear. Unequivocal. Bald. Direct. Shocking in its glaring obviosity. It smote me like a smiting thing. ‘Hearne is in love with Martineau. Pass it on.’

  I did not pass it on. Throughout that cruel June I patiently ‘turned’ Straker-Nesbitt until he himself was in love with Martineau, paid Jackson-Spragg to pretend to be in love with Martineau and personally refereed the fight in which Straker-Nesbitt broke Jackson-Spragg’s arm and was expelled. That evening I went to bed with Martineau myself.

  The spying virus had
invaded my blood, my senses, my identity. Identity? I had no identity. I was a stand-up chameleon, an onion of lies, each new skin a deeper deceit. The original skin, the truth, had been peeled off and discarded years ago. In the assize of daily life I could as easily be God’s advocate as the Devil’s: everyone’s friend, the enemy of all.

  In the second week of my first term at Cambridge, however, I was just another frightened, self-regarding young thing who hoped that Heffers bookshop hadn’t run out of copies of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and that if MI5 or the KGB were going to move, it would be soon. I had a tea-pot, an Elvis Costello record and a coffee-grinder. In case I was going to have to pass as left wing, I wore jeans – very unfashionable in those punk years. Should it be that I had to move freely amongst the establishment, I wore a tweed jacket and old-school tie. Sneakers on my feet, a Barbour round my shoulders, I looked like the living result of a game of pictorial consequences.

  Dr Sir Rannald Seward made his move at a ‘Tea Party Against the Cuts’ on Scholar’s Lawn.

  ‘And you are Fry?’ he said, stabbing the table with his forefinger and catching a crumb which he transferred to his mouth with practised ease.

  ‘So they tell me,’ I replied with a sorrowful half-smile that hinted at nothing and promised everything.

  He patted my groin. ‘And what do you think of Nicaragua?’

  ‘I’ve not met. Is he in this college?’

  I saw him again a fortnight later at an Early Music concert to raise money for SWAPO.

  ‘Ah, Fry. I didn’t know you were fond of Monteverdi.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful country and the Americans have no right to try and destabilise it,’ I said with passion.

  ‘Come to my rooms tomorrow for tea. Bring a cat.’

  To my surprise there were seven other freshmen of my year also present at the tea-party. I noticed with a thrill that we all dressed alike and that we all shared the same shifty, awkward look of voyeurs caught in the act of peeping through a hole in a bathroom wall. We didn’t talk much. Apart from anything else my cat didn’t get on at all well with the turtle, the Dandy Dinmont terrier, the guinea-pig, the Roman snail, the Shetland pony, the sea-lion or the Marino ram brought along by the others.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said Seward at last, above the din. ‘Take those animals into the other room and come back. I have something to say to you all.’

  When all was still he spoke again. ‘You eight have already caught my attention this term.’

  Sixteen lips puckered into eight unsightly smirks.

  ‘Look at yourselves. Who are you? Confused and uncommitted, vacillating and shiftless: snivelling public school boys looking for street credibility. Or are you rancid bourgeois upstarts trying to pass yourselves off as aristocrats? A smelly old man asks you to tea and tells you to bring an absurd animal. You do it. You don’t question his sanity, you simply do it. He impertinently rubs your bottoms and you say nothing. You have no confidence, no belief in self, no sense of belonging to the world, no interest in humanity, no understanding of who you are.’

  I shifted uncomfortably. This didn’t sound like a recruitment speech.

  ‘I have no doubt you will stay as you are. You won’t change a thing about yourselves.’

  Ah, that’s better, I thought. He seems to be giving us our orders now.

  ‘You will spend your three years at this place in a crass mental jelly. You will commit yourselves to nothing, engage yourselves in nothing, believe nothing, feel compassion for nothing and have sympathy with nothing. History will march on: cities will fall, nations will starve, the world will turn. But you will be no part of it. If you are ever questioned you will echo the prevailing clichés of the moment, but reveal nothing of yourself. You will go out into the world, get your jobs in advertising, industry, the City, education. You will live and behave as if this tea-party had never happened. You will be asleep. Fast asleep. Think about what I have said. Now get out.’

  These were tough commands. He wanted us to live apart from, yet within, the world. We were to be sleepers. How did he phrase it? ‘You will commit yourselves to nothing, engage yourselves in nothing.’

  Well my generation has done as it was told. We have blown with the wind and lackeyed the varying tide. I must admit that after three years of it I grew impatient to be contacted, to be awoken and used. I don’t want to belabour you with the technicalities of the ‘tradecraft’, as we spies call it, but in the end you must become your cover, think it, breathe it, believe it. A lot of deep moles actually become unusable after too long because they assume their fictional identities so perfectly that they either forget or recant their original purpose. Not me, I hope. Not my generation. We are made of pretty strong stuff. When the call comes we’ll be there. Until then, we’ll take the Daily Mail, we’ll investigate the advantages of endowment mortgages and no one will ever guess that we are really seething with passion, vitality and enthusiasm. Just don’t keep us waiting too long or the world will have gone by and we’ll have missed it.

  The Book and the Brotherhood

  Also reviewed in The Listener.

  The Book and the Brotherhood. Iris Murdoch. Chatto & Windus. £11.95

  Iris Murdoch. I’ve always admired that name. The iridescent, dilating bloom of ‘Iris’ and the honest, moral authority of ‘Murdoch’ inspire such perfect confidence. And what titles she finds to place below that excellent handle! She must look down the list and glow with pleasure: The Fire and the Sun, The Nice and the Good, The Red and the Green, The Servants and the Snow. What a shame Thackeray got there first with The Rose and the Ring. And now we have The Book and the Brotherhood, perhaps the best title yet. I’m not being flippant: titles are very important to writers, and to readers too. The words of this title pound like distant drums in the mind as you read, just as they pound in the minds of the novel’s characters as they live.

  Partly fed by Oxbridge literature, partly by hazy images of some Platonic Academy, I went up to my university aware that I might work my way into some holy circle of friendship; whether the Apostles or some more local and informal sodality I didn’t know, but Anthony Powell and Simon Raven, Iris Murdoch herself and countless biographies had prepared me for the belief that university affords opportunities for special friendships – not pairings, but a wider, sacred circle, within which any number of pairings may be made. It never quite happened for me: friends I found, and have kept, by the dozen, but there is no definable coterie. I was aware of it happening for others and am peripherally associated with a number of different fraternities which have lasted the lustrum that has elapsed since my graduation. The peculiar feature of these groups is their self-consciousness – they have named themselves as a circle; once that is done a group dynamic comes into play that binds them somehow to watch over each other for ever. They are aware of the ideal of the Academy and feel obliged to attempt to live up to it. They have created their own college, which lasts beyond the ambit of their undergraduacy, and of which they are all fellows. It is a life fellowship.

  The members of the Brotherhood in Iris Murdoch’s novel are fellows of just such a private college, one which has lasted three decades. We meet them at an Oxford commem ball, and a confusing fifty pages that is. Close on a dozen characters we have to become acquainted with, and that involves a great deal of turning back and checking up. Which one was Gerard? we ask ourselves. Was he the one who? – oh no, that was Gulliver. And was it Lily or Tamar who is Violet’s daughter? And who exactly is Violet anyway? Did Gerard once live with Jenkin or Duncan? Or both? And what decade are we in? The young people at the ball are favouring dark blue frilly evening shirts, so it can’t be the present day. But it is. Iris Murdoch is a little behind the times with young people’s fashions. Does she really think it possible that a rock band might exist that is called The Treason of the Clerks? Fair enough, she can’t be a novelist, a Plato scholar and a DJ.

  By the end of that evening we are a little clearer. It is well worth the effort. Iris Murdoch’s ce
ntral idea, the plot, is a terrific one, which she must have been delighted to hit upon. This brotherhood of Oxford men and women decided in the hot flush of their left-wing youth to commission the hottest and leftmost-winged of their number, Derek Crimond, to write a book. A work of political philosophy, neo-Marxist social economics, we are not quite sure what form it was supposed to take, they are not sure. At that time they had graduated, were doing well in the Civil Service and Diplomatic Corps, felt guilty that Crimond, in staying closer to their ideals, was unable to afford the time to write his great work and so they self-consciously formed a Gesellschaft on the Rilke and Musil model that would support Crimond in his work. But that was years ago. Crimond still draws the salary, but not a paragraph of his book has appeared: besides, the rest of the group have moved steadily away from those radical positions into soft socialism and outright liberalism. Crimond has stayed as pure as ever, an advocate of violent revolution, terrorism even. As devices for studying the meaning and motions of intellectual integrity, friendship, betrayal and trust through time, the Brotherhood and its dreaded Book are ideal. How can the shining silver ideals of the Academy and Holy Friendship survive the corroding realities of the social, sexual and political world that sublunary adults inhabit? The grubby truths of adultery (Crimond for a second time steals the wife of poor Duncan Cambus), post-adolescent hysteria, suicide, even murder, besiege the hallowed citadel.

  The device allows a subtle and complex world of symbol and mythical iconography to play teasingly with the narrative: books, towers, water, blood, the moon and death form a Major Arcana of images that implicate Wagnerian, Hellenic and Freudian legends of Blutbruderschaft, renunciation, runes, oracle and eroticism.