Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

IS ME, WHAT I WILL BE IS A LIE.

I can dimly, just dimly, recall writing it. A whole condition of mind swims back into me every time I look at it, and swam back all the more strongly when I typed it out for you just now. I won’t go so far as to call it a Proustian petite madeleine, one of those epiphanic memory revivifiers, for the memory has always been there, but it still has the power to create a feeling like hot lead leaking into my stomach, a feel-good pain that was both the dreaded demon and the welcome companion of my adolescence. It was a strange piece of writing to happen upon as I did recently, going through all my old papers, writings, poems and scrapbooks, and it’s a strange thing to look at now. What would you think if you read such a message to yourself?

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. The Go-Between, the novel whose celebrated opening words those are, has long been a favourite of mine. Actually, they were filming Harold Pinter’s adaptation of it in Norfolk round about the time I wrote that letter to myself. I had read the book and bicycled off to Melton Constable to see if they needed extras. They didn’t, of course.

I knew that the past was a foreign country, and knew too that it followed logically that the future must be abroad; in other words I knew that it was my destiny to become a foreigner, a stranger to myself. I was passionately patriotic about my own age, a fierce believer in the rightness and justness of adolescence, the clarity of its vision, the unfathomable depths and insurmountable heights of its despair and its joy. The colours that shone and vibrated so strongly though its eyes were the true colours of life, this I knew. Because I had read a great deal I knew as well that one day I would see things in different colours, take up citizenship in a different country, the country of the adult, and I hated my future self because of it. I wanted to stay behind in adolescence and fight for its rights and I knew that the moment I left it I would care only for the rights of my new age, my adulthood with all its falsities and failures.

In those days loyalty to youth usually meant loyalty to ideas, political ideas chiefly. Ageing was seen as compromise and hypocrisy because it seemed inevitably to entail a selling out of ideals, environmental ideals now, but political then. For me, however, all this meant nothing. I was not even remotely interested in politics, the environment, the bomb or the poverty of the Third World. Only one thing counted for me then, Matthew, Matthew, Matthew, and I suspected, quite rightly, that one day love would count for less. I did not suspect, however, that one further, finer day far, far forward, love would come round to counting for everything again. A lot of salt water was to flow down the bridge, the bent bridge of my nose, before that day would come.

I had fully determined, you see, to Do My Best at Norcat, and I believed that this would involve a number of fundamental alterations to my nature. I believed it meant I must subdue my sexuality and become heterosexual. I believed it meant I must bury all thoughts of Matthew and convince myself they were part of ‘a phase’ one of those ‘intense schoolboy friendships’ that you ‘grow out of’ and I believed it meant that I would get my head down and work.

My writings then, were an attempt at expulsion, catharsis, exorcism, call it what you will. They were a farewell. I knew, or thought I knew, that I was about to betray my former self and plunge into a world of good behaviour, of diligently completed homework, punctual attendance and female dating. A tangle of briar might as well persuade itself that tomorrow it will become a neat line of tulips, but I had thought it was my destiny. At the same time I knew, absolutely knew that there was some quality in me, foul, ungovernable, unmanageable and unendurable as I was, that was right. The perception of nature, the depth of emotion, the brightness and intensity of every moment, I knew these faded with age and I hated myself in advance for that. I wanted to live on the same quick Keatsian pulse for all time. Perhaps Pope was right to suggest that a little learning is a dangerous thing, for it may be that had I read much, but I had not read all: I had read enough to connect my experience with that of others, but I had not read enough to trust the experience of others. So when, for example, Robin Maugham in his autobiography Escape From the Shadows wrote of his schoolboy loves and passions and his hatred for his father and his relationship with his famous uncle and his desperation to find a role for himself in an alien world, I connected with that, but when Maugham reached his twenties, became a writer of sorts, fought in tanks in the desert war, and then looked back at the ‘Shadows’ from which he had gratefully escaped, I thought him a traitor. He should have stayed and fought, not just in England, but in the republic of adolescence. He should not have committed the crime of growing up. I prefigured in my mind my future self being just so treacherous and it appalled me and angered me.

The only ‘work’ and I use the word ill-advisedly, which I can give you a few lines from is an epic poem I began that summer, an epic in which I grandly decided to ape the structure and ironic style of Byron’s masterpiece Don Juan, which involved grappling with the complexities of ottava nina which, as you shall see, is a verse form which I did not do any justice at all. It suited Byron well, but then Byron was Byron; Auden excelled at it, but then Auden mastered all verse forms. I… well, I floundered.

The Untitled Epic (that, I grieve to confess, is its title) which I have just reread completely for the first time since writing it, much to my great embarrassment, seems to be much more directly autobiographical than I had remembered it to be. The scene I will inflict on you is the poetic version I attempted of that red-headed Derwent’s ravishing of me. I call him Richard Jones in this instance and make him House-captain. As Isherwood was to do in Christ op her And His Kind I refer to myself in this epic as ‘Fry’, ‘Stephen’ and occasionally, like Byron, ‘our hero.

We are at verse fifty something by now, I had planned twelve Cantos, each of a hundred verses. Richard Jones has sent Fry down to his study ostensibly to punish him for being in bed late. Fry waits outside the door in his dressing-gown and pyjamas, hoping he isn’t going to be beaten too badly. I apologise for the completely show-offy and senseless semi-quotations from everything from Anthony and Cleopatra to The Burial Of Sir John Moore at Corunna. The painful polysyllabalism of some line-endings was in deference to Byron’s much more successful comic use of hudibrastic rhyming. I was fifteen, it’s my only excuse.