The Hippopotamus

by Stephen Fry

  Your story about Peter Cambric interested me greatly. I can’t really believe that, if he felt so “at one” and in a state of “ecstasy” he would have been able to do something so self-conscious as aim a rifle and then pull a trigger. One of my stranger therapists tried to induce a similar state of mind in me, as part of a process that was supposed to heal or cleanse my blood. Her technique had something to do with alpha and theta waves in the brain. These are necessary for Biofeedback which is the popular name for her technique. A group of us would be in a room together, lying on couches, all leukaemics and AIDS patients, and we had to relax totally until our theta and alpha waves were buzzing or radiating or emitting or whatever it is that they do, and then she made us communicate with our bodies.

  “See your blood as a crystal stream, absolutely pure and ab­solutely clear,” she would say. “See it gently flow and ripple and glide. But look, look deeper into the blood, there is a tangle of weed just below the surface. You think it’s out of reach, but it isn’t. You can reach, you can reach into the stream. Lean for­ward and reach into the stream and take the knot of weed, take it in your hands. It is like jelly. The consistency of jelly. Rub it between your fingers. You can press it and rub it between your fingers and feel it dissolve. As it dissolves you can dip your hands into the water and allow the dissolved residue to be car­ried down the stream. All the weed is untangled and dissolved and all its tiny particles now float freely and easily down the stream to be lost in the sea. Now the river is pure and free and clear again.”

  All this would go on for hours and cost thousands as you can imagine. It works in your head up to a point. But, no matter how relaxed I was, whenever she told me to rub the jelly be­tween my fingers I would look down at my hands (in my mind, this is) and something in my brain would force the weeds to become hard and fibrous and knotted and insoluble. I would force them to return to jelly, to something like the consistency of overcooked spaghetti, and then I would rub and rub, think­ing I had won, but at the heart of the soft spaghetti this demon in my head would force me again to see another tangle of coarse, black fibre. And so it would go on, one part of me will­ing myself to dissolve the weed, another part of me forcing my­self to recognise that the heart of the weed was malignant and unbreakable-down. When the session was over, as all the oth­ers did, I would smile sweetly at the healer, so as not to hurt her feelings (ridiculous when you think how much money she was making out of us) and say that I felt most amazingly at peace, but I knew that the little knot was still there.

  I am the only one of that group alive now.

  I must rush to catch the post. I want you to get this before Uncle Michael arrives.

  Ted, I know I have done the right thing in sending you to Swafford. The length of your letter and your current state of mind show me that God, in his extraordinary way, has found a means to save both of us together in one action, as it were. You are my “godfather,” the word is not accidental.

  Forgive me if all this is, as they say in America, “too on the nose,” but I’m not interested in shirking embarrassment any more. If my younger self could read this letter she could never in a million years beleive that I had written it.

  Write as soon as you can and as much as you can. If there is any possibility of your borrowing a type-writer or word-processor it would save me eye-strain and head-ache . . .

  Sending love and awaiting news

  Jane

  II

  Swafford

  Friday/Saturday, 24th/25th July

  Jane,

  Well, as you can see i have reluctantly consented to your request and tracked down a machine. This belongs to simon and appears to be quite unused, it does to words what the KRAFT company does to cheese.

  apparently i bang the keys too hard, being used to mechani­cal type-writers. NOR DO I UNDERStand how the bloody shift key works, it either locks the capitals or denies me any at all. STill at least youll be able to read this if I can get simon or davey to show me how the printer is operated.

  I enclose with this letter the story of david and the sabotage of the boxing day shoot for your edification, even if its irrele­vant to your needs i thought you might enjoy it.

  Your letter, contrary to your expectation, did not embarrass me at all. I don’t know who or what you think i am, some sort of Henry wilcox or C. Aubrey Smith figure who goes all pink and stiff at the mention of emotion or faith. I’m a poet for fucks sake, not a treasury official. THE ONLY EMOTION that annoys a poet is cheap emotion, unearned emotion, borrowed emotion, the emotion of wish-fulfilment, emotion that comes from fantasy or guess work and not from the gut. at least that’s what it says in the poet’s manual.

  BUT, pausing only to remark that there is no such word as “anallegory” much though there should be, i’m not presuming here to judge your emotions, the weird thing (talking of weird you seem to have forgotten the golden rule “i before e except­ing after c.” You wrote “beleive” in your letter. Perhaps you knew the right spelling but your subconscious mind couldn’t commit itself to producing such a terrifying word as “believe” in its entirety) the weird thing . . . what is the weird thing I was going to say? OH YES, THe weird thing about this word-processing affair is that you cannot go back and cross a word out. with a type-writer you can backspace and cover your er­rors in x’s. It actually seems to be impossible here, one can ab­solve oneself of all one’s sins and nobody will be any the wiser. Except oneself.

  Talking of going all pink and stiff at the mention of things there has been a much fuller house this weekend than I ex­pected. I mentioned in my last letter that I thought it rude to ask hosts or hostesses about the composition of a house-party, so i was surprised to discover that a girl claiming to be your best friend has been down here since Friday night. Goes under the name of Patricia Hardy, smells of cucumber juice and is the cause of much pinkness and stiffness in the undersigned, pre­sumably you knew she was coming. I hope she’s not here to spy on the spy.

  I’ll come to her and the others later. Where did I leave off last time? Monday morning. Yes. I finished my first letter to you, rolled wearily downstairs to post it in the box in the hall and dozed lightly with my head against a barometer on the wall for five minutes before managing to pull myself up the banisters, one rail at a time, finally falling on to my bed five minutes short of eight o’clock.

  I AWOKE in time for lunch and managed to brazen out Annie’s looks of blended astonishment and reproach in the small sitting room beforehand.

  “Couldn’t sleep. Bed too comfortable, everything too quiet,” I explained, but I could see that she thought I had been sitting up in my room all night quietly boozing myself into a stupor. Since I believe there are few things more transparently undignified in this world than a drinker making an effort to ap­pear sunny and energetic in order to prove to the world that he is innocent of a hangover, I swallowed the insult of her look and declined her offer of a sherry without further protestations of innocence.

  I shan’t take you through every hour of every day: it’s now Saturday and very little occurred on Monday and Tuesday that I judge worthy of notice. Simon was still away and Anne seemed anxious for me to bear David as much company as I could.

  “He’s very bright, they tell me,” she said. “I’m afraid that there’s not much stimulus for him in the holidays. Simon is that much older and has . . . different interests. As you know I was never exactly bookish either. Michael is wonderful with him, of course, but he’s been so busy lately . . . do you remember his niece Jane? Jane Swann?”

  Ha! Your name had come up for the first time. You haven’t made it plain whether or not your condition is known to the world so I made no mention of it, anxious to see whether news has reached Swafford.

  “I should say so,” I replied. “She’s my other godchild.”

  “Oh, of course, so she is. Jane was here in June, part of which covered Simon and Davey’s exe
at after exams, and she and Davey got on like a house on fire. All the more remarkable re­ally because . . .” She broke off in some confusion.

  “Because?”

  “I’m not sure if you know,” she said, with the kind of upper-class emphasis which would have told me even if I hadn’t.

  “The leukaemia? Yes, Jane told me.”

  “Really? I didn’t know you were in touch. The most appall­ing thing. Jane invited herself here and . . .”

  She thought better of saying whatever it was she had in mind to say. She knew about your mother and me, naturally, so perhaps she felt she was being tactful in not going on about your branch of the Logan family.

  So you stayed at Swafford in June, did you? Is that when God smote you, or did you go as a result of being smitten? No doubt you’ll let me know in your own good time.

  (Extraordinary thing about this machine: when you type an apostrophe or inverted comma it can tell whether it should curl to the left or the right. Thus, when typing the dialogue above I would press the same key for quotes and it would auto­matically “type it like this.” Damned smart. I’m beginning to see what all the fuss is about.)

  The upshot of this conversation is that Davey has had me more or less to himself. He is a quick lad, no question about that, and I think genuinely interested in poetry and art and thought and the life of the mind. As is natural at his age, he believes that poetry’s sole function seems to lie in the descrip­tion of nature. Keats, Clare, Wordsworth, selected Browning and Tennyson, that sort of jazz. I delicately put him right.

  “No, no, no, you chump. You must have heard the expres­sion ‘the egotistical sublime’? These people aren’t writing about dandelions and daisies, they’re writing about themselves. Romantic poets are more obsessed with self than the most ther­apy-addicted Californian you can imagine, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ ‘My heart aches,’ ‘My heart leaps up.’”

  “But they love nature, surely?” We were walking through the park on the way to the village, where I wanted to stock up on Rothies. Michael only provides cigars for his guests. This would be Monday afternoon, three-ish. There was a beagle pup in need of exercise with us. Its function was to double the length of the walk, wee on my buckskins and attempt the styl­ish feat of snapping its jaws shut on darting butterflies.

  “Listen, old darling. Nature is the shit we were born in. It’s pretty, but it isn’t art.”

  “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”

  “Ye-e-s, but if you imagine that beauty is only available out there, you’re going to have a grotty young life, you know. Don’t imagine that celandine and meadowsweet, ranunculus and clo­ver offer us our only path to truth, beauty and Vedic happiness. John Clare could wander the leas and dells in a loony trance because there were leas and dells to wander in. We have cities and edge-of-town big-shed architecture now. We have televi­sion and algae-wrap lymphatic treatments.”

  “So we’re supposed to write about those, are we?”

  Get the “we,” Jane. I was thirty-eight before I dared put “poet” in my passport and confess membership of the genus irritabile vatum.

  “We’re not supposed to write about anything.”

  “Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

  “Yes, and he would have looked ten kinds of idiot if every­one had agreed with him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, poets would then have to have been described as the acknowledged legislators of the world, wouldn’t they? And get off their velvet-clad arses and start enacting. That wouldn’t have suited him at all.”

  “I don’t see that that’s a very helpful observation.”

  “Well, excuse me.”

  We walked on in silence for a while, the beagle pup leaping like a dolphin in the sea of long grass.

  “Look,” I said, “I love the fact that you want to be a poet. I adore it. But I cannot, in all conscience, imagine an occupation more . . . In fact, let’s make a wager. I bet you, David Logan, I bet you that during my stay here you will not be able to name a single profession that has less use, less chance, less future, less point, less status and fewer prospects than the calling of Poet.”

  “Sewage engineer,” he replied at once.

  “Two scenarios,” I said. “Scenario A: all the poets in En­gland, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland go on strike. Re­sult? It would be fourteen years before anyone outside Gordon Square or the offices of the TLS so much as noticed. Hardship, discomfort and nuisance quotient? Nil. Impact? Nil. Newsworthiness? Nil. Scenario B: all the sewage engineers in London alone go on strike. Result? Turds and tampons flopping out your kitchen tap, your feet squelching in scum and ooze where’er you walk. Typhus, cholera, thirst and catastrophe. Hardship, discomfort, nuisance, impact and newsworthiness quotients? High.”

  “All right, all right, that was a bad one. Um . . . composer then. Classical music composer.”

  “Well, closer. Modern composers do have a small audience, I grant you. But most of them, those who don’t make the big money—and there is big money to be made even in what they insist on calling ‘serious’ music—fill in time and earn their rent by writing film-scores, advertising jingles and public domain sound-tracks, conducting, teaching harmony and counter­point at conservatories, that kind of thing. If they want to they can play bar piano in the evenings in a nightclub. A poet, though, what cabaret skills has he got? He has an even smaller audience, his work is almost exclusively confined, after all, to those who speak the same language: if he wants another job his only choices involve other people’s poetry. He reviews. My God, how he reviews. In every newspaper, periodical, quarterly and magazine you can think of, he earns his daily Hovis reviewing other people’s poetry. Or he teaches. Unlike the composer he doesn’t teach the skills of his craft, he doesn’t teach prosody and metre and form, he teaches other people’s poetry. If he’s a big cheese, he can edit the poetry list of one of the few remain­ing publishing houses that runs such a thing. He’ll be publish­ing other people’s poetry and anthologising other people’s poetry. No doubt he can make appearances on ‘The Late. Show,’ ‘Kaleidoscope’ and ‘Critics’ Forum’ too, talking about other people’s poetry. Jesus God, if I had the choice between coming back in this century as a poet or a composer I’d take composer and give half my annual income to charity in grati­tude.”

  Davey looked rather rattled by this outburst and I instantly felt the worst kind of pig. He thought for a moment, biting his lower lip. “I know you don’t mean all that,” he said. “I know you’re just testing my vocation. I know that there is nothing better to be than a poet and that you know it too.”

  By this time we had reached the alleyway that leads into the main street of the village and I realised that a strange and won­derful thing had happened, or rather, a foul and horrid thing had failed to happen. I had spoken for half an hour with a youth who claimed to be a poet and he hadn’t so much as hinted that he wanted me to read a single one of his poems. Perhaps this is the miracle, Jane, to which you have alluded . . .

  That was Monday afternoon. Tuesday was a quiet day. We took a boat out on the lake and I drank Chablis and, at David’s request, read aloud from my Collected Verse. Still no move from him to inflict any of his on me.

  He thought “Lines on the Face of W. H. Auden” was con­trived, which I told him was like complaining that The Hundred and One Dalmations had a lot of dogs in it. He liked “Martha, As Seen in a Slit of Light” and “Ballad of the Workshy Man,” but his particular favourite, naturally, was “Where the River Ends,” which I hadn’t the heart to tell him was in fact inspired by the news that Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poetry was being set for school exams. He thought it was an ecological poem, a “green” poem avant la lettre, about sewage outflow into the sea. Youth’s a stuff I’ll not en
dure.

  Insanely, as if by the power of hypnosis, I found myself ask­ing whether, since I’d shown him mine, he’d show me his.

  He blushed like an overripe peach. “You don’t want to see it really,” he said.

  “Well, can you recite any? Truly, I’d love to hear some.”

  This from Ted Wallace, mind you, who’d been known to hurl himself into moving traffic at the prospect of verse recita­tion.

  The poem was short, which was good. The poem was sweet, which was good. The poem had form, which was good. The poem was bad, which was bad. The poem was called “The Green Man,” which was unpardonable.

  the green man

  I sucked the earth and sucked it dry

  Dry earth is dust, powder for the hair

  I stretched myself and plucked the sky

  Plucked sky is blue, a blue coat to wear

  I licked the grass: licked it clean

  Clean grass is hay; gold hay for the flesh

  I hugged the leaves; squeezed their green

  Squeezed sap is blood, and blood must be fresh

  I sowed the seed, seed of my own

  Sown seed is white, white as the breeze

  Soon will be born, blood of my bone

  Son of the earth and child of the trees

  This man of straw, this god of mud

  Blue is his coat, proudly unfurled

  The precious green, the green of his blood

  Shall bathe us all clean and ransom the world

  I did warn you. It’s like smelling someone else’s farts, isn’t it? He seems to be recording, in his own graceful way, a wank in the woods. In case you’re wondering whether I lovingly com­mitted this thing to memory, let me assure you I have copied it out from a painstakingly calligraphed manuscript which Davey presented me as a result of my having been (how could I be otherwise?) complimentary.

  So much for Tuesday. Wednesday, however, was of the highest significance for Swafford, since it saw Michael’s return from town. We understand he now hopes to stay for some time. He has a kind of telecommunications centre installed in his study where he can toil away stripping assets, defrauding pen­sion funds and acquiring whatever it is that big cheeses like your uncle do acquire . . . acquisitions I suppose.