Joy for the jester
Stephen Fry is quite clear about what he is. It’s there in the first line of his entry in Who’s Who: “writer, actor, comedian”. That probably reverses the public perception of Fry, whose blustering generals and bloodthirsty monarchs have made him television’s favourite barmy buffer. But writing is not a sideline: he is a proper writer, not a celebrity with a word processor.
The Stars’ Tennis Balls (hideous title but a pertinent quote from The Duchess of Malfi), which is published today, is his fourth novel. Add his well-received memoir, Moab Is My Washpot, and Paperweight, a 470-page collection of his journalism, and he has something resembling an oeuvre. To have produced such a volume of work at the age of 43 is impressive enough; to have done it while appearing in films and on TV, as well as developing a curious role as linchpin of British national life (his close friends number everyone from Prince Charles to Peter Mandelson), is extraordinary.
I was watching a banal TV biog of Sir John Mills the other day, and who should pop up giving his pennyworth but Fry, separated from “Johnny” by 50 years but still apparently a close chum. Fry is a fixture on such programmes, just as he is a regular – always polished and funny – on chat shows. He is one of those clever people who uses ubiquity to ensure that you never find out anything about them.
As his output would suggest, Fry is stupendously well organised. He has his laptop (he is crazy about software) and a constantly ringing mobile that plays The Ride of the Valkyries (he is crazy about Wagner). He also has a cold, but he’s a trouper and can still apostrophise through the sneezes and wheezes. A Fry soliloquy is something to behold, words, ideas and quotations tumbling out in torrents. The third playing of The Ride of the Valkyries prompts me to ask him about Wagner and, in turn, music. He becomes animated and I am engulfed.
“I am a very emotional person, and music was the thing that always made it gush out. Music has a particular access to one’s emotional self that is at a far deeper level than any other art form. Eliot said it was the deepest of the arts and deep beneath the arts, and that seems to be true. I suppose it’s because it’s abstract, it’s not about anything, so it’s not mediated or palliated by the dirt of actual reference. A word is more or less a token – poets are always struggling with the words they’re having to use. I think it was Rilke who said that ‘language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin’. Musicians don’t have to do that: they don’t have to use language, the diminished currency of everyone. Because music isn’t about anything, it can be about everything.”
When Fry was on remand for credit card fraud as a teenager (you surely know all that stuff from chat shows and the memoir), his fellow inmates called him “the professor”. His alter ego on Radio 4’s Loose Ends was Dr Donald Trefusis, Carnegie professor of philology at Cambridge. In his journalism (mainly columns he wrote for the Listener and the Daily Telegraph), he uses the word “banausian” with a remarkable, indeed tiresome, frequency. You get the point: he is a crazy prof, in fact and fiction.
The new novel, a reworking of The Count of Monte Cristo (readers will be invited to spot the similarities), falls into the category of good read rather than great book, pacy, well constructed and rather gruesome. If one were to make a criticism, one might say that it was a trifle banausian. It works like clockwork, but one does not buy a novel to tell the time.
When celebrities write novels, it is often the celebrity that gets reviewed rather than the novel. Should he perhaps publish them pseudonymously, as Don Trefusis, say? “It is the dearest dream of one’s bosom for it to be reviewed as a novel, not a Stephen Fry novel, but you can’t keep it a secret, and then it looks like a form of vanity. I do receive letters from people who are only dimly aware that I’ve popped my face on the screen, particularly from abroad. In the US and Germany they have no sense of me as a person.
“I’ve got less self-conscious about it. I used to feel incredibly embarrassed if I went to a dinner party and there was a ‘real’ novelist there. I would think they had every reason to think ‘I saw your window display in Waterstone’s, you bastard, while my literary masterpiece sits on the back table’. Now I have to accept the fact that I can never be quite sure why people read the books.”
Might the writing, as the Who’s Who hierarchy suggests, displace the acting? “I cordon off some time to write a book, so I take on nothing at all for these months. I just cannot write and act at the same time. I can’t be halfway through a chapter and then go off and act. I have to become completely lost in it. But to be only a writer would drive me mad. I’m a pretty social animal a lot of the time and writing is such an isolated business that if that was my only work I don’t know how I’d cope. Similarly, if I was just an actor I don’t know how I’d cope with never having any control.”
We meet at one of Fry’s favourite haunts, the Groucho club in Soho. I notice that he often conducts interviews here, always upstairs in a red room that induces narcolepsy. It is another example of Mr Ubiquity adroitly protecting his privacy: no chance of getting near the Norfolk rectory in which he lives with his newish partner, about whom very little is known other than that he is 10 years younger than Fry, doesn’t work in showbusiness and is said to have made Fry blissfully happy.
Fry once said that he had spent the first 15 years of his professional life defining himself by his work but had succeeded only in making himself unhappy. He was lonely; he had made the peculiar statement that he was “90% gay”; he had proclaimed his celibacy; in 1995 he fled a production of Simon Gray’s Cell Mates that had been critically panned; he disappeared; he considered suicide (he had made a serious attempt in his screwed-up teenage years); he was admitted briefly to a psychiatric hospital; he moved to New York and stayed in the US for a year.
Finding a partner had, reputedly, made a big difference. When I asked him about his new-found happiness, he laughed loudly. “Oh, blimey, I don’t want to overdo it either way really. It’s not that I was profoundly and hopelessly miserable before. I had that well-publicised wobble in 1995, and it’s certainly true that since then I’ve felt more cheerful. My friends tell me I’m more relaxed, and it makes me wonder whether I was really such a miserable sod before. It’s not like some religious conversion in the sense that I go round skipping, but nor is that to underestimate the pleasure to be had by having the sort of relationship with someone that one hasn’t had before.”
So why keep this perfect partner under wraps? “It’s a tricky one to play: if you keep it very secret, some paparazzo will be all the keener, so we go out together, we were in the Ivy the other night, we go to film premieres together, he doesn’t duck round side entrances. But he prefers not to be photographed – he’s not in the business and I don’t see why he needs to be in the press. I’m glad about that. It would be a little odd to have a partner who revelled in the spotlight. I have to say the press have been fine about it; they haven’t hunted us down.”
The Ivy, film premieres, Fry’s social whirl. How did he get sucked into that? “I haven’t cultivated it. Before I had a partner, I was a very useful spare man for dinner parties. I was quite aware that people occasionally like a court jester. I never had a problem with that. The director-general of the BBC would be arranging his party for Wimbledon and might say ‘we’ll have someone merry – I know, Stephen Fry’. Along the way one meets interesting people. I am fascinated by people and to some extent I am a snob, in what I think is the amiable sense of the word, in that I am capable of being amused and slightly glamorised by people whose lives are slightly different because they are from a long line of dukes or because they control 700 companies.”
Is the professor, the philologist, the man who quotes Rilke happy to play the jester? “I can be a chameleon. I enjoy it and I don’t think I am necessarily being hypocritical about it. I do have lots of different circles. I have lots of friends with whom I play snooker up here: the kind of people who come to the Groucho club but also like to play snooker, lads to some extent. I like going to football matches and have a season ticket at Norwich. I also have gay friends who haven’t the faintest interest in snooker or poker or football, and I can sit round a table with them talking about the sort of things they talk about. There are different sides to me, and I am more comfortable now with those multiple personas.”
Fry is an odd mixture of high Tory and low radical: it’s just the middle class he can’t stand. He plays establishment figures wonderfully because, with his posh country/public school/Cambridge background, he is one. He is attached to old England and in love with English eccentricity; but he despises the pettiness, materialism and xenophobia of modern Conservatism.
A question about his alleged “cocaine problem” produces another torrent, this time political. “It wasn’t a problem; it was far from a problem; it was perfectly enjoyable. But one has to be very careful what you say on these matters because people are so greasy and sanctimonious and Daily Maily about it. For some reason they decide that if you’re in the public eye it’s your job to be a role model, and if you say anything other than that it’s the most wicked and appalling thing and it caused me nothing but misery and heartache and I vomited every night and my nose exploded with blood, you are vilified.
‘There’s a name for my pain – the Daily Mail. It symbolises bourgeois fear: fear of outsiders, fear of anything different. Someone should write a book about how uniquely wrong about everything the Daily Mail has always been. It typifies everything that is most shaming about this country in terms of its lurches towards xenophobia and fear: everything in the name of the family, that horrible capital F for family. It’s become what the state was for a Stalinist: everything that is done in the name of the family is acceptable.”
Fry wrote a column in the Daily Telegraph in 1997 explaining why he would be voting Labour and describing himself as an “apostate to his caste”. It is a clue to his chameleon-like character – the Tory radical, the traditionalist who wants to nuke the nuclear family, the populist intellectual, the secretive socialite.
“Trying to square opposites is what so much of one’s life is about. From teenage onwards I have always had a double pull. One wants desperately to belong, but on the other hand one yearns to be outside and revels in the things that make one different. I suppose that’s particularly true if you grow up at the time that I did and know that you are not as other girls. That gives you a distinctness.”
With that The Ride of the Valkyries erupts again, and it is time for Fry to fly, having once more escaped being pinned to a rock.
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