Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

My performance that Saturday will never be counted alongside Marilyn Horne’s début at the Met or the release of Imagine, but I did get through it without a blush of self-consciousness or a tinge of fear.

It was only afterwards, winding down as usual in the Zanzibar, the early pre-Groucho watering-hole of choice amongst 1980s comedians, photographers, artists and the like, that it occurred to me that the bloody man had only released me from my singing burden for that one single occasion.

‘Hit it, bitch…‘ had been my trigger and this one Saturday night the moment of its activation. He had not freed me of my musical inhibitions permanently. The talisman’s power had been all used up and if I wanted to sing again in public I would have to make another sodding appointment. There and then, in the vodka and cocaine fuelled passion of the moment, I made a vow never to do so.

Singing and Stephen were not meant to be.

I am grateful to him for allowing me access to a forgotten memory, but it is not a path I have any desire to travel down again. I dare say there are other memories hidden away in the tangled briar-bush of my head, but I see no earthly reason to start hacking away there.

Music matters to me desperately, I’ve made that clear, and I could cover pages and pages with my thoughts about Wagner and Mozart and Schubert and Strauss and all the rest of it, but in this book my passion for music and my inability to express it in musical terms stand really as symbols for the sense of separateness and apartness I have always felt. In fact they stand too as a symbol of love and my inability to express love as it should be expressed.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

You see, when it comes down to it, I sometimes believe that words are all I have. I am not actually sure that I am capable of thought, let alone feeling, except through language. There is an old complaint:

How can I tell you what I think

until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?

It might have been designed for me, that question. It was years before Oscar Wilde was to shake me out of a feeling that this was a failure in me, when I read his essay, written in the form of a Platonic dialogue, The Critic As Artist:

ERNEST: Even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.

GILBERT: More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other – by language, which is the parent, not the child, of thought. (My italics, Mrs Edwards, my italics)

Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.

Swimming turned out, when I did it, to be simply the ability to move forwards in water. When I did learn to play pieces on the piano, I discovered that I did not fly or approach any penetration of the cosmos. Language, I had to confess to myself, did get me places. It got me academic success, and later financial and worldly rewards that I could never have dreamed of. I learned to use it to save me from bullying, mockery and rejection. Language went on to give me the chance to do things that I am pleased to have done. I have no reason to complain about language.

Others, however, had much to complain about in me, so far as my language was concerned.

They could not understand it.

During my first term at Stouts Hill I found it almost impossible to make myself understood. It drove me insane: I would say things perfectly plainly and always receive the same reply -‘What? Hng? What’s the boy saying?’ Was everybody deaf?

My problem was eventually diagnosed by a keen-eared master. I was speaking too quickly, far too quickly; I talked at a rate that made me unintelligible to all but myself. The words and thoughts tumbled from my mouth in an entirely pauseless profusion.

For example, ‘Sir, is it really true that there are no snakes in Ireland, sir?’ would emerge as something like ‘Sriseel-troosnayxironss?’

I heard myself plainly and was most hurt and offended when the same insulting word was thrown back at me again and again.

‘Don’t gabble, boy.’

A solution was found by the school in the endearingly Margaret Rutherford form of an extraordinary old lady bedecked with amber beads, lavender water, wispy hair and a Diploma in the Science of Elocution. Every Wednesday and Friday she drove from Cheltenham to Uley in a car that looked like a gigantic Bayswater pram and trained me for an hour in the art of Diction.

She would sit patiently at a table and say to me, dipping her head up from the table and blinking her eyelids with astonishing rapidity as she did so: ‘And turn it down! And turn it down!’

I would obediently repeat, ‘Annidern, annidern.’

‘No, dear. “And-ah, turn-ah, it-ah, down-nn!” You see?’

‘And-ah, turn-ah, it-ah, down-nn?’

‘I do not want you to say “and-ah, turn-ah”, my dear. I want you to be aware that the “d” at the end of the “and” must not run into the “t” at the beginning of “turn”, do you see? And. Say “and” for me.

‘And.’

Did she think I was a baby?

‘Good. Now “Turn”.’

‘Turn.’

‘And turn.’

‘Anturn.’

‘And-ah turn!’

‘And-ah turn!’

Poor woman, she did get there in the end. She introduced me to the pleasure of hearing a progression of plosive and dental consonants – the sheer physical delight to be derived from the sounds and the sensations of the tongue on the teeth – by teaching me the tale of that extraordinarily persevering and stupid woman called Elizabeth, whose Shrove Tuesday misadventures with rancid butter teach us all how by striving, we might turn disaster into triumph. The story went like this.

‘Betty had a bit of bitter butter and put it in her batter and made her batter bitter. Then Betty put a bit of better butter in her bitter batter and made her bitter batter better.'

From there we moved on to ‘She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish sauce shop, welcoming them in.’

The standing at the door was fine – piece of piss -but the welcoming of them in nearly turned my tonsils inside out.

‘Yes, perhaps that one is too difficult for you, dear.’

Too difficult? For me? Ha! I’d show her.

Hours I spent one weekend mastering the art of welcoming them in. At the next lesson I enunciated it like Leslie Howard on benzedrine.

‘Very nice, dear. Now I should like you to say: “She stood at the door of Burgess’s fish sauce shop, welcoming him in.”’

Aaaaagh! Disaster. I made a great run for it and fell to the ground in a welter of ‘mimming’ and ‘imimming’, my larynx as tangled as a plate of spaghetti.

‘You see, my dear, I am not interested in you learning these sentences as if they were tongue twisters. I want you to try and feel how to talk. I want you to allow the words to come one after the other. I think you like to compress them all into one bunch. Your mind races ahead of your tongue. I would like your tongue to see the words ahead, each one a little flower on the wayside, that can only be picked up as you pass. Don’t try to snatch at a flower before you have reached it.’