Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

A little older, but longer-lived than either, was Norman Douglas, the third of the Uppingham triumvirate, and at one time a kind of literary and social hero to me and a writer whose first editions I still collect to this day. Here is something that Douglas wrote about Uppingham in his 1933 memoir Looking Back.

A mildewy scriptural odour pervaded the institution – it reeked of Jereboam and Jesus; the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs; the food was so vile that for the first day or two after returning from holidays I could not get it down. The only good which ever came out of the place was cheese from the neighbouring Stilton, and that, of course, they never gave us. And the charges… On my mother’s death I found, among her papers, those Uppingham accounts: God, how they swindled her! I daresay all -that is changed now.

The mildewy scriptural odour and that reek of Jereboam and Jesus still sometimes hung in the air around the more solid Victorian buildings of Uppingham during my time there and we were certainly never fed on Stilton, but otherwise the place had certainly, as Douglas dared say, changed. The fees were, and still are, steeper than those of many schools with better reputations, but I don’t think it could be accused of swindling. Most of the masters struck me as supercilious humbugs too, but then schoolmasters always strike cocky adolescents as supercilious humbugs. If anyone was a supercilious humbug it was most certainly me.

What I adored about Douglas and about Firbank is that they were, as Forster said

UNHEALTHY

The black bombazine bombast of their Victorian childhoods and educations gave those two writers a deep yearning for light, colour, exoticism and the pagan, in Firbank’s case the Marian paganism of the Romish church, in Douglas’s the real paganism of dryads, fauns and the Great God Pan. They strove instinctively for a style that is the antithesis of blackness and bombast and the best word for that style is not Connolly’s Mandarin, but Camp.

What is camp? A much misunderstood word. Everyone has their own feel for it, here is mine.

Camp is not in rugby football.

Camp is not in the Old Testament.

Camp is not in St Paul.

Camp is not in Latin lessons, though it might be in Greek.

Camp loves colour.

Camp loves light.

Camp takes pleasure in the surface of things.

Camp loves paint as much as it loves paintings.

Camp prefers style to the stylish.

Camp is pale.

Camp is unhealthy.

Camp is not English, damn it.

But…

Camp is not kitsch.

Camp is not drag.

Camp is not nearly so superficial as it would have you believe.

Camp casts out all fear.

Camp is strong.

Camp is healthy.

And, let’s face it…

Camp is queer.

(Mostly)

How much a sensitive heterosexual boy is drawn to the silks, the light, the paganism, the poison and the luxury of camp, is a question. How much a straight boy needs an alternative world, that too is a question. If he does need one, it is more easily found ready-made in the contemporary outside of rock and roll, sport, cars and girls. So easily found that it is not really an alternative world at all, merely one that is just different enough in emphasis from that of the older generation to enable the youth to feel rebellious and rorty.

A boy who knows that he is other, who knows that the world is not made for him, who reads the code implicit in words like ‘healthy’ and ‘decent’, he may well be drawn to the glaring light and savage dark of the ancient world and the poisonous colours and heavy, dangerous musks that lie the other side of the door into the secret garden, the door held open by Pater, Wilde, Douglas, Firbank… even Forster himself, missish and prim as he could be.

Without the ‘benefits’ of a classical education, a boy growing up knowing his difference, might in my day, have been drawn to The Wizard of Oz, Cabaret, musicals, glam rock and fashion. Today the gayboy in every section of society has a world of gay music, dance and television to endorse his identity. Manchester has its gay village, London has Old Compton Street, the gay world meets daily to chat, cruise and invigorate itself on the internet. They don’t need a parcel of old poofs historically sequestered in Capri and Tangier to tell them who they are and where they come from and whether or not they have the right to hold their heads up high.

I did need them, however. I needed them desperately and without them I am not sure what I would have done to myself.

Queers are not the only unhealthy people to contaminate English society of course. There are Jews too.

I never much cared about my jewishness as a boy. The arbitrary oddity of difference between the western patronymic custom and the primacy of maternal bloodlines in Judaism meant that, by virtue of surname, I passed as gentile. My father’s family name of Fry was as old English as could be, steeped in Quakerism as far back as the founding of the movement. John Fry, a parliamentarian ancestor, signed King Charles the First’s death warrant. My Great Uncle George wrote a book called The Saxon Origins of the Fry Family as a counterblast to those heretical relations (the chocolate making swine from Bristol) who believed that they originated from the town of Fry in Normandy. The opening words of Uncle George’s disappointingly little read work are:

Unlike many so-called English families, the Frys did not come over with William the Conqueror in 1066 -they were there to meet him when he arrived.

My mother might be entirely Jewish, but my surname is entirely English, and that made all the difference to me in terms of my perceived identity. To the English it meant I was English, with faintly exotic overtones, to the Jews it meant I was Jewish, with only a venial blemish. I had, that is to say, the best of both worlds. There are plenty of children in Britain with Jewish fathers and gentile mothers who therefore count as non-Jews to the Jewish, but whose surnames being Goldberg, Cohen or Feinstein, find themselves being treated by the British, in Jonathan Miller’s phrase, as the Whole Hog. Besides, I don’t really, so far as I can tell, look especially Jewish and these things too, make a difference.

I only remember three other Jewish boys at Uppingham: their names were Adley, Heilbronn and Green. Their jewishness was probably of greater importance to them than mine was to me. I used my mixed blood as a vague extra element of exoticism about which I could boast, for there was no palpable anti-Semitism at Uppingham – just the usual careless use of the words ‘jew’ or ‘jewy’ applied to anybody to indicate meanness with money, no more than that.

I have feelings about English anti-Semitism that are as mixed as my own blood. Those members of my mother’s family who survived the holocaust went to live, with the single exception of my grandfather, in America or Israel. In conversation with them I would get very hot under the collar when they shook their heads wonderingly at my grandfather’s decision to live in what they regarded as such an anti-Semitic country as England.

‘What about Benjamin Disraeli?’ I would retort. ‘He was Prime Minister over a hundred years ago. He gave Queen Victoria the Suez Canal and the title of Empress. He died an Earl. When’s the first Jewish President of the United States going to be sworn in?’ I would conveniently forget to add, of course, that Disraeli’s father had converted to Christianity. ‘Or look at Rufus Isaacs,’ I would say. ‘Presidents and potentates would have to bow and call him Your Highness when he was Viceroy of India. He died a Marquess. Half of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet is Jewish. The New York Athletic Club didn’t allow Jews in as members until a few years ago. Can you imagine such low, brash vulgarity in a London club?’