by Stephen Fry
The reputation of Wagner’s music itself is forever clouded by the knowledge that Hitler liked it. For some the Ring, a work as much about the redemptive power of human love and the meaninglessness and destructive madness of power as anything, should only be used as the sound-track for documentaries about Nazi bestiality. Poor Dickie W. is forever damned by association.
There are nine more weeks to go of this television Wagner. Judge it for yourselves. We haven’t yet seen Sieglinde, Brünnhilde or the other Walküre Sisters. I’m just praying that they won’t be fat, or your worst predispositions will be realised. Even if they do turn out to be grotesquely gigantic I, of course, will probably swear blind that they are thin. No one is exempt from this kind of prejudice. Except you, naturally.
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There have been a number of depressing revelations lately in the letters page of this newspaper about pointless and insulting changes in pub names. I heard recently that a well-known public school had decided to ‘up-date’ the title of Bursar. He is now to be known as the school’s Financial Manager. God save us all.
What Are We Fighting For?
Like any freedom-loving, red-blooded, vetiver-scented Englishman I’m all for giving Saddam Hussein a damned good hiding. I think we are all aware that it’s time to open the dusty cupboard, take out the swishy cane and bend the bounder over. The man has it coming to him, that no one can deny. Putting on side, cheeking his seniors, bullying the little sprogs and generally swanking around the place like a peacock, it’s more than a fellow can stand. It is therefore appropriate that the masters’ common-room of the world should have decided to come down on him good and hard, sending him to Coventry, confiscating his sweets and making sure that it is now against the rules for anyone to smuggle fresh supplies to the little beast until he gives back what he stole. It is also natural that the Americans should have been appointed prefects, entrusted with the job of swinging the cane should that ultimate punishment prove to be necessary.
I have become increasingly disturbed over the years, however, about the behaviour, demeanour and intent of these our prefects. There was a photograph in one of the Sunday magazines this week of an American desert soldier standing in front of a wall on which had been painted the words ‘BURN IN HELL, SADDAM’. I know there is a tradition of chalking phrases like ‘This one’s for you Adolf’ and ‘Cop this, Fritz’ on the noses of bombs and shells, but simply to adorn a wall with such a bald, remorseless curse seems to me to reveal a frightening flaw in the American fighting man.
Jimmy Swaggart, the Christian fundamentalist, claimed that Mother Teresa of Calcutta would burn in hell because she had not been born again. Islamic fundamentalists have insisted that Salman Rushdie be assassinated because of scenes he invented in a novel. On all sides we feel threatened by fanatics and fundamentalists in whom all trace of human fellow-feeling would appear to have been erased. On good evidence we have persuaded ourselves that Saddam Hussein, as commander-in-chief of a million loyal fighting men, represents one of the most dangerous and wicked of these fanatics and that he must be stopped. Leading the concerted global effort to stop him is the United States Army.
As an admirer of so much in and of America I hate to say this, but I really do not feel in the least bit represented by that army. I cannot convince myself that they are fighting for values with which I can identify. The phrase ‘BURN IN HELL, SADDAM’ comes close to explaining why this is.
It all started I think with the adoption of war-paint and headbands during the Vietnam War. The men had to have rock music, officially supplied drugs like marijuana and amphetamines and they had to be allowed to dress virtually as they pleased.
The forces that subsequently invaded Grenada and Panama looked more like a band of mercenaries than any national army. Coupled with the peculiar willingness on the part of the Pentagon to play along with their fantasies of make-up and bandannas came a ludicrous element of public relations manipulation that led to the packaging of these military adventures with logos and brand-names. Thus the invasion of Panama was dubbed Operation Just Cause. American soldiers gave out free Operation Just Cause T-shirts to the citizenry of Panama. T-shirts. I assure you it’s true.
Now poor President Bush has to put up with generals promising him on television that ‘they can be in Baghdad inside five days’, fantastic claims that an awareness of history and plain common sense must instantly deny. These top-brass soldiers with their unbelievably childish nicknames, ‘Stormin’ Norman’ and so on, are publicly behaving like ten-year-olds, obsessed with ‘kicking butt’ and ‘nuking the sonofabitch’.
I am sure ‘our side’ needs consolation, encouragement and a little positive propaganda to keep public opinion from going soft, but are the united nations of this earth in this decade at this moment in history best represented by the insane infantile posturing that leads to phrases like ‘BURN IN HELL, SADDAM’ being painted on walls in military encampments? I like to think that in an English camp in the desert such a graffito would earn the perpetrator one heck of a rocket from his commanding officer.
To be disturbed and frightened by the fundamentalism of this aspect of American military behaviour is not to be anti-American any more than it would be anti-British of an American to despise our football hooligans. The difference is that we are ashamed of our football hooligans. I am not sure how many Americans are ashamed of the image their military seems so keen to foster.
I am aware that many will read this and claim that criticism of any aspect of America’s involvement in the Gulf is tantamount to ‘giving comfort to the enemy’, a crime that prohibits all but the most orthodox opinions on the matter. I admire immensely America’s remarkable and courageous commitment. I am sure that the average American fighting man is as decent, brave and civilised a GI as ever he was. They are our allies, we stand with them in the desert, shoulder to shoulder. But I would also like to believe, foolishly no doubt, naïvely for sure, that we are fighting for the same reason – a detestation of fanaticism, fundamentalism and barbarism – and that vengeful ferocity and unfettered machismo will form no part of our strategy.
Let’s stand up to Saddam in the name of civilisation, not in the name of our own particular brand of savagery.
Making the Right Moves
We all know that the English tug-of-war team has had unparalleled success in recent decades, consistently winning the world championships in a manner that has left the world gasping with envy. Victory has been more elusive in the sister sports of soccer, tennis and asynchronous breaststroke, but it would be unseemly for us to hog all the great athletic trophies to our manly chests. English prowess in one activity, however – part sport, part game – has gone largely unheralded. For half a century Russia has bestridden the chess world like a colossus, marking it and making it her own. How can it be, then, that the second strongest chess country on earth is England?
Even as Karpov and Kasparov wrestle again for the world crown England, a nation which had never had a Grandmaster fifteen years ago, now has more than any other country save the Soviet Union. It started with Tony Miles, creator of the extraordinary Birmingham Defence, and includes Nigel Short and Jonathan Speelman, two of the highest ranking players ever.
The English Chess Explosion, as it was designated ten years ago, was said to have been the result of young British players being inspired by the monumental Spassky–Fischer clash in Reykjavik in 1972. But this begs the question why weren’t American players similarly inflamed? It seems extraordinary that the United States should be a weaker chess nation than England; they receive after all the pick of the defectors; they have a population five times as great. English chess is notoriously underfunded, underencouraged and underpublicised and yet it continues to prosper.
My own theory, and I cannot emphasise its worthlessness enough, is that chess is fundamentally a theatrical affair. I first became really interested in the game when I heard about the Smyslov Screw. There was a great Russian world champion, who recently enjoyed something o
f an Indian summer, called Vasily Smyslov, particularly noted as a master of the end-game. Whenever he moved a piece from one square onto another he had a habit of twisting it, as if screwing it into the surface of the board. Others might drop their man lightly, or bang it aggressively, Smyslov gently screwed it in. The psychological effect of such a move can be devastating. It looks so permanent, so deliberate, so absolutely assured. Kasparov hunches himself over the game, in a brooding, minatory and virile manner that is worth at least three extra pawns. Jonathan Speelman’s attitude, lolling and flopping over the board like a benign octopus, is essentially a comic approach, funny without being vulgar, which cannot but put his opponent at a huge disadvantage.
Chess is ludicrously difficult, I choose the word ‘ludicrous’ with etymological care. George Steiner in his excellent White Knights of Reykjavik claimed that there are more possible games of chess than there are atoms in the Universe. I, for one, shall take his word for it; I can’t possibly be bothered to count. That being the case, taken with the sad likelihood that a computer will beat Kasparov one day (Karpov has already been defeated by a machine), human chess will have to continue to develop along dramatic lines. The Russians have been amongst the most significant theatrical nations of the modern age, with Stanislavsky, Gorky, Gogol and Chekhov: British theatre needs no such citation of names to prove its illustrious heritage.
The development of modern chess closely reflects the development of dramatic styles; the old classical romantic distinctions were quickly replaced around the beginning of the century by the Modern style of Steinitz, a dialectical, realist mode of playing that might be said to compare with the dramaturgical styles of Shaw and Chekhov. It was no longer the King that counted, but the pawns and the bourgeois minor pieces that controlled the centre. The Hypermodern age that succeeded this had an abstract quality, almost absurdist in its refusal to engage in those central questions, preferring to concentrate on the tensions behind the control of the centre, the language of chess itself rather than engagement in it. This recalls the age of N.F. Simpson, Stoppard, Beckett, Pinter and Ionesco.
Today, in the post-Modern and post-Hypermodern chess age, things are altogether more ambiguous and mannerist, more ‘multimedia’. This is true in drama too, we are without a settled style or voice to the age.
If we wish to achieve real supremacy in chess we must stress those qualities that have given our drama its greatest strength: the eccentric, the bizarre, the comic, the mannered and the elegant; the same qualities we associate with, say, Stoppard or Olivier. We must at all times refrain from the conventional, the orthodox, the pedestrian and the timid. We need chess equivalents of Alastair Sim, Ralph Richardson, Maggie Smith, Noël Coward, Arthur Lowe and Alan Bennett: absolute technical mastery, benevolently disguised.
Chess is indeed like life, for we need people of precisely those qualities in all aspects of our national existence. If the British have any contribution to make to the world that might stave off grey-suited stalemate it is to offer a bouncy, charming, unorthodox and theatrical flair.
Licked By the Mother Tongue
Did you know that the verb ‘to buttonhole’ is a small corruption of ‘to buttonhold’? You probably did. I discovered this truth the other day in Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue: The English Language, along with the astonishing intelligence that Shakespeare invented nearly two thousand English words, including ‘obscene’, ‘barefaced’, ‘critical’, ‘leapfrog’, ‘countless’, ‘excellent’, ‘gust’, ‘hint’, ‘hurry’, ‘lonely’ and ‘dwindle’. Ben Jonson was apparently responsible for ‘damp’, ‘clumsy’ and ‘strenuous’ while Thomas More gave us ‘absurdity’, ‘acceptance’, ‘exact’, ‘explain’ and ‘exaggerate’ and Carlyle devised ‘decadent’ and ‘environment’.
How you sit down and invent a word is one thing, but how you get the world to accept it is very much another. My friend Hugh Laurie once invented a word which I have since used unchallenged. You know those strange spongy and – let’s not deny it – phallic objects that are placed over microphones? The official name for them is ‘pop-shield’; they are supposed to stop the microphone ‘popping’ on violent plosives. If you say ‘Peter Piper picked a peck … etc.’ closely into a microphone denuded of such an article you will see why they are necessary. Hugh Laurie was sitting in a recording studio once and he said to the engineer, ‘There’s rather a lot of Ps and Bs in this, hadn’t we better have a spoffle on?’ Without so much as a raise of the eyebrows the engineer hurried in with a pop-shield and fitted it to the microphone. A word was born; unchallenged, somehow instinctively understood. I have since used spoffle regularly and never found anyone in doubt of its meaning.
Of course there is an onomatopoeic quality to spoffle, and possibly an unconsciously devised portmanteau element, something between ‘spongy’ and ‘muffle’, which makes it a much easier word to invent and understand than say ‘obscene’ or ‘strenuous’. It is also true that the word ‘pop-shield’ already existed, rendering the neologism, however satisfactory, superfluous. All this demonstrates just how difficult it is to make new words.
There is an old story about an eighteenth-century Irish theatre manager called Daly who wagered that he could introduce a brand new word into the language within twenty-four hours. He then was supposed to have spent the next day and night chalking a four-letter word over every wall and public building in Dublin. Everyone talked about the word and wondered as to its meaning and the bet was won. The word was ‘quiz’ which came to mean originally a teasing problem or craze, ‘What’s the quiz?’ It then developed into a noun for a teasing person and a verb meaning to twit or scrutinise someone teasingly, often through a quizzing-glass. Now of course it means a game-show. This pleasant story is all very well, but I think most people would accept that the origin of quiz is probably a contraction of ‘inquisition’.
The fact is that the initial explosion of English is over. In modern times we have received many new words from other societies, Anglo-Indian, American, Australian as well as our own marginal and regional cultures, but these have provided technical and demotic words; writers, poets and commentators have not contributed, they have decided to make do with the reservoir of verbiage already in place. Today, if a playwright decided, like Shakespeare, to invent hundreds and hundreds of new words, he would simply be sniked at, he would be tredged and impulcated.
A piano keyboard may have only eighty-eight keys, but it does not stop new harmonies and melodies being discovered every day. The tragedy of our language is that with a million keys to press we so often come up with the same phrase, time after weary time, endlessly reusing the same tired stock expressions.
I propose a Fresh Phrase Day to be held every year. Any newspaper, writer, commentator or public figure who uses a phrase that can be proved to have been used before will be fined, the money going to the sadly depleted coffers of the Oxford English Dictionary whose latest magnificent venture has yet to enter the black. On Fresh Phrase Day ‘majorities’ may be enormous or colossal, but they will never be allowed to be vast or overwhelming. Coffers will not be described, ut supra, as ‘sadly depleted’ nor will ‘ventures’ be either ‘latest’ or ‘magnificent’, allegations will not be ‘wholly unfounded’ nor will any phenomenon ‘take place against a background’ of anything. The new phrases that will be coined to replace the usual clichés will replenish the stagnant pond (or stale pool) of the language for another year until the next Fresh Phrase Day.
This should encourage us to think in new ways too. I disgusted myself yesterday when I was buttonheld by a child in the street who hailed me with the familiar cry ‘Penny for the guy’. Instead of dropping fifty pence into his palm, which is presumably what he meant by a penny, I allowed myself to look at the feebly half-stuffed pillow case with a badly felt-tip penned face on it and say ‘Call that a guy? Why in my day …’ just the kind of rank, tedious, sententious remark most likely to get a child’s goat, the kind of remark you promise never to let fall from your lips
when you grow up, and there I was, letting it fall.
Had it been Fresh Phrase Day the child could have fined me, as it was, of course, he punched me in the face.
Let the People Speak
I have been on the streets interviewing representatives of the British public on the subject of the situation in the Middle East. The results have been revealing if not interesting.
‘What are your feelings about the Gulf Crisis?’ I asked a gentleman in Turnpike Lane.
‘Well obviously,’ he said, ‘I was delighted to see that Sandy Lyle’s swing has returned. Let’s just hope they can sort out the shenanigans over Ryder Cup selection by next season.’
I moved on to Duke Street, St James’, where I waited outside Green’s Oysterium to catch the opinions of the great. A leading head of the secret service had views it would be foolhardy to ignore.
‘War as such,’ he said, ‘is currently inevitable. You cannot seriously imagine that President Bush would spend billions of dollars on moving a colossal force of arms to the Middle East, wait a few months and then simply bring it home without the primary concession, unequivocal Iraqi withdrawal from UN agreed Kuwaiti territories, being met. It is therefore probable that hundreds and thousands of young lives will be lost. The sand of the desert, to paraphrase Newbolt, will be sodden red.’