Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

Very self-righteous and patriotic I would be. They might respond with talk about the British wartime reluctance to believe in the depths into which Nazi anti-Semitism had sunk and their handling of the Palestinian Mandate.

This is not an argument I feel qualified to pursue. There is no doubt in my mind, however, that there is a kind of anti-Semitism peculiar to Britain. I have mentioned before the use of the word clever and with what particularity it is applied to men like Jonathan Miller and Freddie Raphael. Jews, like homosexuals, are not quite healthy. They are part of that parade of pale, clever men who, at the turn of the century, confused the healthy world with all that talk of relativism and doubt and those weird ideas about determinant history and the divided self. Einstein, Marx and Freud took the old healthy guilt that sprang from Eden and the Cross and which Western Culture had somehow successfully purged of jewishness and gave us a whole new suite of guilts that a good cold shower and a game of rugger couldn’t quite cleanse. Indeed, the perverted swine would probably look at that cold shower and that game of rugger and read all kinds of nasty things into them, the kind of nasty things that only a pale, unhealthy kind of outsider could possibly see. They’ll read anything into the most innocent of pastimes, these Jews and these pansies. Reading things into things, if that isn’t the favourite hobby of the intellectual I don’t know what is. Come to think, dim stirrings of old Latin lessons here, doesn’t intellectual actually mean ‘reading into’? There you are then. People nowadays can’t look a plain thing in the face and call it plainly what it is. Intellectuals to the left of us, intellectuals to the right, reading. Beastly, unhealthy swine.

Well, no one talks in quite that John Buchaneering way any more, but the modes of thought are still there, or rather modes of anti-thought: still there, still present and incorrect. The Jews still manage, in some people’s eyes, that supremely clever trick of being to blame both for capitalism and its excesses through their control of banks and financial institutions and for socialism and the liberal consensus that threatens the very stability of capitalism and the free market. It’s their bloody torah and their damnable talmud, simply encourages too much of reading things into things and too much smug rabbinical clever-clever cleverness.

The Uppingham mind certainly was not trained to read too much into things. Those schoolmasters with imaginations and intellects had enough to do to get the boys through 0 level examinations without worrying their heads with real ideas: they did their best, but it is easy to forget how much more powerful is the corporate mentality of schoolboys than the individual intellect of a schoolmaster. It was easier for the boys to brand a schoolmaster pretentious than it was for a master to call a boy unimaginative. Indeed, I can remember endless arguments (see, there’s another thing you Jews are always doing… arguing) with other boys about that great sin of ‘reading too much into things’. It is a cliché amongst healthy schoolboys to say, ‘You can read anything into anything. Bloody hell, all this Shakespeare stuff. I mean they read too much into it. In Braddy’s English set today, you won’t believe it, but he was going on about bloody Hamlet and his mother and he used the word “Freudian” about them… I mean, Jesus, how stupid can you get? Doesn’t he realise Freud wasn’t born until hundreds of years later? Shakespeare couldn’t have known anything about Oedipus complexes and all that rubbish. I can’t believe our parents pay men like that to talk such pseudy wank.’

It’s mean to attack so hopeless a brand of feeble stupidity or mock so terrible a lack of imagination, in the end it is its own tragic handicap, and those who go to the grave unilluminated by the light of ideas are the sufferers, but of course I didn’t know that then, I thought such Philistines were already the victors and that the life of the mind and the imagination was under threat from all sides. Besides I was a terrible show off and I used to react angrily, with great moral fervour and all the jewy, pansy strength of my wicked tongue. Not that argument could ever swerve the stolid Uppinghamian mind away from his settled conviction that art, literature and the play of ideas were anything more than ‘wank’. Indeed, the better one argued, the more it proved it was all words, words, words.

‘Oh, you can argue anything with words, Fry. Doesn’t make it right.’

It is one of the great ironies of British (anti-) intellectual life that a nebulous sense of twentieth-century relativism has taken hold, somewhere deep down, and is used to damn and distrust the logical and the rational. Thus a point of view about art can be dismissed as ‘pretentious’ and ‘wank’ – in other words, as not solid, not real, ‘airy-fairy’ and ‘artyfarty’ – while at the same time any logical, rational defence of it is dismissed as ‘just opinion’ or ‘semantics’ in a world in which, ‘let’s face it, everything is relative, anyway…'

I wished that Forster’s 1934 obituary of the art critic Roger Fry (no relation so far as I know) could be mine… I can’t think of a better encomium.

What characterized him and made him so precious in twentieth-century England was that, although he was a modern, he believed in reason…

[He] rejected authority, mistrusted intuition. That is why his loss is so irreparable… If you said to him ‘This must be right, all the experts say so… Hitler says so, Marx says so, Christ says so, The Times says so,’ he would reply in effect, ‘Well. I wonder. Let’s see.’ He would see and he would make you see. You would come away realizing that an influential opinion may be influentially backed and yet be tripe…

Intuition he did not reject. He knew that it is part of our equipment, and the sensitiveness he valued in himself and in others is connected with it. But he also knew that it can make dancing dervishes of us all, and that the man who believes a thing is true because he feels it in his bones, is not really very far removed from the man who believes it on the authority of a policeman’s truncheon.

Forster, in other words, is talking about a classical mind, a Greek mind. It is so ironic that classical education, English style, produced nothing but anti-classical attitudes. The English public schoolboy product can easily live out his whole life believing that imagination is the same thing as fantasy, that ideas are deceptive ornament and that ornament itself is supernumerary to life’s requirements, he reflects absolutely our age of unreason: the plodding and carefully plotted lines of Nuffield empiricism are fine, but inference is to be distrusted. He lives between the extremes of the revealed truths of convention and current morality on the one side, and the vague, ignorant madness of a misunderstood sense of relativism, opinion and New Age finger-wagging-more-things-in-heaven-and earth Horatio-ism on the other, confusing mysteriousness with mysticism, and relativism with the idea that any view is up for grabs without the need for the winnowing processes of logic, reason and personal experience. Catastrophe, breakdown, marital disaster, personal tragedy, injustice or abuse are often the only crises that drop the scales from their eyes. I speak as such a product myself, you must understand, not as one looking down from a Heliconian height.

For, in spite of all my differences, such as they are, I was never fully the sensitive outsider, the rejected Jew, the outrageous queen or the distanced intellectual that I liked to picture myself to be. I was never quite as intelligent as I thought I was, never quite as bold in my refusal to be conventional, never quite as alienated by my sexuality, never quite as sure of my belonging to the inner life of art and the mind. I absorbed the lessons of E. M. Forster readily and greedily. I collected him in first edition as avidly as I collected Norman Douglas. It is worth quoting almost in full that famous passage that hovers above all this. It is taken from ‘Notes on the English Character’, the first essay in his 1936 collection Abinger Harvest, whence also came the lines on Roger Fry and Firbank.