Completely Fry-ed

Actor and Writer Stephen Fry has a new novel out. Meanwhile, he keeps his splendid brain in peak condition.

The Toronto Sun, July 24, 1994 by Heather Mallick

I would be greatly in the debt of the man who could tell me what could ever be appealing about those damp, dark, foul-smelling and revoltingly tufted areas of the body that constitute the main dishes in the banquet of love." - On why he is celibate (from Paperweight)

"Family life, family values, decent normal family, family fun, family shopping, family leisure. The word is used these days much as the word 'Aryan' was used in Germany during the 1930s." - On why 'family values' is a double-edged sword (from Paperweight)

"To me a fundamental axiom is that you never ever regret the things you've done, only the things you haven't done. When you sit there at the age of 80, you can't go 'Ooh, I did that awful thing. I got drunk that evening ... I was rude to that person.' Not living is the sin." - On his philosophy of life (from an interview in the British edition of Esquire)

"It's just marks on a page, that's all it is, just black and white. A drop of ink can change the world. It's an unbelievable piece of technology, a book." - On why literature is worth fighting for (in an interview last week)

The brain of Stephen Fry is a massive thinking machine, relentlessly fertile, endlessly churning, loaded with thought-provoking phosphorus and bubbling with verbal essays on everything from O.J. Simpson to G.K. Chesterton's cleaning lady. It is a brain guaranteed to induce terror in even the most confident and well-researched interviewer.

Preparation for an hour's chat with Stephen Fry: Watch Peter's Friends, starring Fry, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. Watch Blackadder, especially the episode in which Fry as Gen. Melchett excoriates the slug-balancer. Watch Jeeves and Wooster (Fry as Jeeves) and A Bit of Fry and Laurie (Fry as Michael Jackson). Re-read first novel The Liar. Read second novel The Hippopotamus (Random House, $ 29.95) (do not skip bit where boy has sexual intercourse with horse). Re-read Paperweight, a collection of his writings. Test both tape recorders, set two alarm clocks, read up on Chesterton. Panic and buy Fry a gift.

Stephen Fry in person is extremely tall with a huge head, the better to contain the great brain. He has a schoolboy haircut, a posh accent and manners that would leave Cary Grant wondering where he went wrong. I break the ice with the gift, which is Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland's Shampoo Planet ("You are too kind, I am so touched"), and he breaks the ice with an anecdote about W.H. Auden's scrotum. And we're off, on a conversation that leaps from topic to topic, following the trajectories of his brain.

Fry has just finished filming IQ, an American film starring Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins, in New York. At his publisher's suggestion he has "popped over" to Canada to promote his new novel. He likes Canada very much, he says, but as the Toronto circuit that Random House has mapped for him takes him in a triangle from their sparkling new offices to CBC headquarters to the Four Seasons in Yorkville, it is not surprising that he finds our city rather lovely in contrast to New York. "Gosh, everything's so clean!"

Fry, who does indeed, as he says, resemble Oscar Wilde (a man he loves and admires greatly), is one of nature's Polite People. He is the quintessential courteous Brit, and the effort he makes to conceal his horror at American behavior is well-intentioned, if ineffective. "I was in Joe Allen's in New York when the Bronco business happened - chasing O.J. Simpson's Ford - and everyone got up from their table and crowded around the television." He is appalled by the American disregard for the presumption of innocence as well as their contempt for privacy and dignity. "To see it live and to have cameras, I find very distressing. It really is shocking." On the other hand. "I think America does almost everything better than the British except two things. The British do know how to behave in a cinema. Going to a cinema in America is a nightmare; you might as well just go into the street and put your ear against the wall of the cinema; you'll hear as much of the film that way. It's ridiculous. And we make better cheeses."

Fry is a serious, well-read person and possessor of a nice little Cambridge education. He is thus perfectly placed to appreciate how ludicrous it is to be serious. This really is the essence of The Hippopotamus. His anti-hero, Ted Wallace, is a bad-tempered, drunken, parasitic failed poet who thinks about sex "every damned sodding bloody minute of every bloody damned sodding day." Regarded as a repellent object by everyone around him, he is in fact the most humane and intelligent person in the place. While those around him drown in mysticism and the Godhead, drunken Ted has some acute things to say about matters that are more down to earth. "Ted Wallace won't put up with people who say 'This is spiritual truth," says Fry. "He'll say spiritual truth exists in this biscuit or this person or this ashtray."

Fry himself says people get far too caught up in ideas. "I'm rather an enemy of thought, in terms of abstract notions, and I think that is the reason I am a comic novelist. The point about comedy tends to be that ideas are distrusted. And that's true of your average standup comedian, right up to the highest realms of Dickens, and Sterne, and Jane Austen and the great comic novelists, even Shakespeare. Comedy tests ideas and tends to find them ridiculous." Fry then gracefully introduces an anecdote about Ibsen, a critique of the recent flood of anti-feminist/feminist I-did-not/you-did-too books and what Dostoevsky would think of modern book review pages.

It's all very entertaining. But it is a relief to hear Fry say firmly that the intellectual life on its own is terrifyingly arid. "What I couldn't bear would be to live in any kind of atmosphere which was primarily intellectual or literary and to have only friends with whom one discussed Heidegger or the latest book on Spinoza. I get most pleasure out of sitting around a table with friends and their families - I have godchildren and nephews and things like that. There is much more delight and truth to be got out of a good and amusing holiday with friends and their children than to go on a reading tour." One of Fry's most attractive qualities is the deep interest and concern he feels for the young. This is a streak that should manifest itself in everyone when they hit 30, but older people now seem to despise the younger generation. Asked the impossible question - What is the great joy of your life? - Fry answers: "I'm obviously someone who isn't a parent, but godchildren come very high on my list." He becomes emotional as he describes a letter he received from a five-year-old godson in response to a "proper, grown-up" letter he sent to him. "Children have this power to control one's mood. One thinks they're tiny and they must be scared of you, but actually you're scared of them. The desire to please them without being sycophantic is enormous, isn't it?"

Young people figure largely in The Hippopotamus, as they did in The Liar, which appears to be semi-autobiographical. Fry has always been extraordinarily open about his own life - he appears to be uneasily aware that he would have paid a heavy price for this in the U.S., although less so in his own country, which tolerates difference - so much so that one would feel foolish asking him about his renowned celibacy.

Fry, who is gay, has not indulged in sex for, say, 15 years (but who's counting?), had a chequered career as a student (expelled, up before the magistrates, etc.) and seems to have been a deeply unhappy adolescent. That persona bears little resemblance to the self-confident, kind and witty man he is now - like the famed comic novelist P.G. Wodehouse without the shyness, like Oscar Wilde without the naivete. He is extremely funny about heterosexual sex in The Hippopotamus. Ted Wallace: "I merely want the simple truth understood and out in the open: men like sex and women don't. Sometimes in my dreams, I imagine a world in which women enjoy sex: a world of heterosexual cruising in parks and promenades, heterosexual bars, heterosexual backrooms, heterosexual cinemas, heterosexual quarters of the town where women roam, searching for chance erotic encounters with men."

"I've met a great many famous men, men of good report," Wallace says. "Do you know, without exception, those I've known well enough to be able to sit with round a whisky bottle in the small hours have all confided to me that the real motivation behind their drive to become famous actors, or politicians or writers or whatever, has been the hope, somewhere deep inside them, that money, celebrity and power would enable them to get laid more easily?" That's it in a nutshell. Life is founded on an imbalance of desire. Obviously, desire has not been Fry's motivation. He is a prolific, self-disciplined artist who has also achieved great things in partnership, with Branagh, for instance, and with actor and writer Hugh Laurie.

Fry loves the arts. If there is one thing that annoys him about right-wing government (and he has many objections), it is that they fail to see the value of culture. He argues for what is best about his own nation with an eloquence combined with practicality that one yearns to hear from Canadians. Brits are spoiled for choice when it comes to the arts. Here in Canada, we are midway between that still-literate nation and the Fox network, an American programming nightmare run by an Australian, Rupert Murdoch, who decided to let Americans have their head.

The complaint of the London Sunday Times reviewer about The Hippopotamus was that Fry was too clever. Seriously. "One feels that under all the flashy wit there is a moral seriousness and sensitivity that could produce a much more deeply felt novel," Lynn Barber wrote. Imagine anyone suggesting a Canadian novelist was too funny and too intelligent for his own good. Imagine anyone saying an American novelist hadn't worn his heart sufficiently on his sleeve. Fry posed for British Esquire in a Turnbull & Asser white shirt, Tommy Nutter jacket and pinstripes. Flip the page over and he is holding the coat open to reveal his monolithic, hairy-armpitted body encased in a white corselette and striped silk boxer shorts. Which way you like your Fry is entirely your preference. Fry the intellectual or Fry the joker or Fry the pleader for human decency. Or Fry, the all-three, the perfect literary Fry-up.

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