Stephen Fry - MOAB IS MY WASHPOT

‘If they only knew!’ I screamed inside. ‘If they only knew what I have within me. How much I can pour out, how much I have to say, how much I have inside. If they only knew!’

I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, not all that Carrie teenage telekinetic wank, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform. Yet I was unwanted, rejected and unthought of. My mother, yes, she believed in me, but everybody’s mother believes in them. No one else believed in me.

Principally of course – oh how one sees that now -myself. Principally, I did not believe in me. I believed m ghosts more than I believed in me, and take my word for it, I never believed in ghosts, I’m far too spiritual and emotional and passionate to believe in the supernatural.

I did have a friend. One friend. He was the local rector: he looked, oddly enough, exactly like Karras in The Exorcist, but his own life was so emotionally difficult and his own struggles with faith, family and identity so intense that it was, in his case, a question of Physician, heal thyself. He did me good by asking me to teach his daughters maths, which was psychologically smart and very touching. He knew maths had come hard for me and he knew too that there was a teacher in me raging to get out. He nearly tipped me (certainly not by trying to, he was no evangelist) into religion and I had made a quiet visit to the Bishop of Lynn, God’s representative in Norfolk of a mysterious body called ACM, the church’s vocational testing instrument, which accepted or declined applicants for ordination. We talked awhile, this Bishop, Aubrey Aitken, and I and he had given it as his booming opinion that I should wait awhile until God’s Grace became clearer to me. He boomed because he had no larynx and spoke by means of one of those boxes that Jack Hawkins was forced to use towards the end of his life. The ceremony of ‘switching the Bishop on’ when Aitken came to preach was an accepted addition to local services within the diocese.

The Bishop was right of course, I had no vocation at all, merely the kind of vanity of a Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park, the vanity that made me think I would make a better preacher, a more stylish preacher than the kind of soggy, incoherent priest that was beginning to proliferate all over England. I knew I couldn’t believe in God because I was fundamentally Hellenic in my outlook. That is the grand way of putting it, I was also absolutely convinced, if I want to put it more petulantly, that if there was a God his caprice, malice, arbitrariness and sheer lack of taste made him repulsive to me. There was a time when he had on his team people like Bach, Mozart, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Laud, Donne, Herbert, Swift and Wren: now he had awful, drippy wet smacks with no style, no wit, no articulacy and no majesty. There was as much glory in the average Anglican priest as you would find in a British Home Stores cardigan. Of course what I didn’t know was that – looked at in the right way – there is as much glory in a British Homes Stores cardigan as can be found in St Peter’s, Rome, the Grand Canyon and the whole galaxy itself, but that is because I looked at nothing in the right way. When I had first caught sight of Matthew I saw the beauty in everything. Now I saw only ugliness and decay. All beauty was in the past.

Again and again I wrote in poems, in notes, on scraps of paper.

My whole life stretched out gloriously behind me.

If I wrote that sick phrase once, I wrote it fifty times. And believed it too. In a phase from Dirty Harry, I had been flopped lower than whaleshit. I was at the bottom with no way up. If Ronnie Rutter saw me now, what would he think? His school reports had been generous, but there had been a kernel of truth in that word, whatever my woes at Uppingham, that word he used, ‘exuberant’. Exuberance now was something gone from me for ever, something I could never recapture.

Which brings us back to the heap of pills and capsules and the glass of water. With one last vile and violent curse against the world, the world that had turned back into a rotting mole, an uncaring cycle of meaningless, wearisome repetition and decay, I swallowed them all, turned out the light and fell asleep.

I awoke in a flickering strip-lit world of whiteness and to a grotesque pain in my throat and cheeks. A tube was being forced down me, while a nurse slapped my cheeks and repeated and repeated and repeated:

‘Stephen! Stephen! Come on, Stephen! Come on. Stephen, Stephen! Stephen! Stephen! Come on now. Try! Come on. Come on. Stephen!’

It seems that at about midnight my brother had been awoken by the noise of my vomiting. When he entered the room he saw me arc a huge spray that he swears reached the ceiling. The ceiling in my bedroom was very high. I remember nothing of this, no ambulance rides, nothing. Nothing between switching out the bedside lamp and the sudden indignity of rebirth: the slaps, the brightness, the tubing, the speed, the urgent insistence that I be choked back into breathing life. I have felt so sorry for babies ever since.

It seems that the very mixture that I had thought would truly put an end to me was what saved me. I have given up puzzling over whether I subconsciously knew that or not. I am just grateful to the luck, the subliminal judgement (if there was any), the care of the gods, the sharp ears of my dear brother and the skill and ceaseless implacability of the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital nurses and doctors.

Little was said about it all at home. There was little to say. One of the men who worked for my father, who had worked for him since Chesham days, stopped me two days later and gave me the most vicious ticking off I had ever been given in my life. He was a frighteningly strong man called Tyler, who looked like a weather-beaten Malayan planter and whom I suspected of extreme right-wing politics (probably on account of his Mosley moustache): whether he thought he was doing psychologically the right thing or not I have no idea. The burden of his tirade was the worry that I caused my poor mother and my poor father. Had I any idea?

‘Did I make them unhappy?’ I asked.

‘Of course you did, you young bastard,’ he snapped.

‘Unhappy enough to end their own lives?’

‘No,’ he called after me as I fled, ‘because they’ve got more guts.’

I think my father may have guessed that love was at the root of this, for I remember him coming up to my room (for almost the first time in his life) and telling me some complicated story about how he had consulted a tarot reader who had said that I was unhappy in love. I believe this was his way of indirectly indicating that he was ready to listen to anything I had to say. I had nothing to say of course. Maybe I’ve made this memory up. Tarot and my father don’t seem to go together.

I can’t think what all the stampings and yellings and sobbings must have done for my poor sister Jo. We don’t talk often about this time, except with rueful smiles and raised eyebrows. How grateful my parents must have been when it was time for me to go back to Lynn for my last term, my A level term. Grateful that I was out of the way, for all that they knew it was a pointless exercise, my returning. They knew, they knew that I was all played out.

Between the three-card brag at The Woolpack, life and more pinball in the Students’ Union, the Paradox Parties, Kathleen and my own misery, I had given up any pretence of academic work. Towards the end of my second year it had become apparent to me and to everyone else that I would fail everything. I cannot recall my mental state, by ‘recall’ I mean just that, I cannot summon it up into me, the way I can so exactly feel again the earlier emotions that led up to the pitiful suicide attempt. I have memories of Kathleen and the Corvo set, I have memories of Phil and Dale and cards, I have memories of organising films to show for the Film Society. I have memories of trying to dance to Slade and Elton John at Union discos. I remember the unknown band Judas Priest coming to give a concert. I remember the little acting I did.