It is clear that I am not in the joint for some appalling sexual or financial misdemeanour that will cause me to be beaten and tormented by my fellow convicts. I have done something that is wrong, that is disapproved of by ‘society’ yet which is tolerated with amusement by criminals and even police officers.
Nobody lets me see the newspapers. They will only upset me, I am told. It is all very strange.
Friends visit me. Always staying the other side of the bars. Hugh and Jo Laurie. Kim Harris, my first lover. My literary agent Anthony and my theatrical agent Christian. My sister and PA Jo. There is something they are not telling me, but I am comfortable in prison and feel sorry for them, having to leave and return to the world of bustle and business.
I am in the corridor cleaning the floor with an electric polisher. It has two rotating discs with gently abrasive pads press-studded to the base, and I enjoy holding it like a pneumatic drill, feeling its power under me, how I have to keep it from flying free of my grip as it pulls like an eager dog at the leash. The floor comes up in a glossy shine. This is the life.
An old lag walks up to me, coughing on his tightly rolled-up cigarette, which wags up and down as he speaks. He has seen a letter in the governor’s office, which he Pledges and tidies daily. My sentence is to be extended. I will never leave.
I take the news well. Very well.
I wake up, or the dream peters out or merges into something strange and silly and different.
It is easy to attempt a little oneiromancy here. My real life is a prison, so a real prison would be an escape. That would be the one-line pitch, as they say in Hollywood. I am one who, like so many Britons of a certain class and era, was born to institutions. School houses merge into Oxbridge colleges which merge into Inns of Court or the BBC as it was or into regiments or ships of the line or into one of the two Houses of Parliament or into the Royal Palaces or into Albany or the clubs of Pall Mall and St James’s. All very male, all very Anglo-Saxon (a few Jews allowed from time to time – it is vulgar to be racially obsessed), all very cosy, absurd and out of date. If you really want to have a look at this world in its last hurrah just before I was born then you should read the first eight or nine chapters of Moonraker, a Bond novel, but with an opening that is simultaneously hilarious, fantastically observed, drool-worthily aspirational and skin-pricklingly suspenseful.
I observed of myself in my second book of memoirs, The Fry Chronicles, and earlier in my first, Moab is My Washpot, that I seem always to be obsessed with belonging. Half of me, I wrote in Moab, yearns to be part of the tribe; the other half yearns to be apart from the tribe. All the clubs I belong to – six so-called gentleman’s clubs and goodness knows how many more Soho-style media watering-holes – are vivid testament to a soul searching for his place in British society. Maybe prison is the ultimate club for people like me.
‘That’s institootionalized,’ as Morgan Freeman’s Red puts it in The Shawshank Redemption, the world’s favourite film.
I am wary of interpretations. I refuse to interpret my life and its motives because I am not qualified. You may choose to do so. You may find me and my history repugnant, fascinating, indicative of an age now long gone, typical of a breed whose time is up. There are all kinds of ways of looking at me and my story.
If you want to bore someone, tell them your dreams. I seem to have got off on the wrong foot. I plead forgiveness for, while I would not claim that there is anything experimental about this memoir, I would ask you to be ready for a flitting backwards and forwards in time. The experience of writing about this period in my life has had some of the qualities of a dream: unexpected, freakish, disgusting, frightening, incredible and at one and the same time crystal clear and maddeningly occluded. It is my job, I suppose in this far from divine comedy, to be Virgil to your Dante, guiding you as straightforwardly and tenderly as I can through the circles of my particular hell, purgatory and heaven. In the following pages I will try to be as truthful as I can; I will leave interpretation and, generally speaking, motivation, to you.
Very Naughty, but … in the Right Spirit
Aside from anything else, there is the problem of plunging in as if you already know my past …
Bertie Wooster, the hero and first-person narrator of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, used to say to his readers at the beginning of each new book something along the lines of ‘If you’re one of the old faithfuls familiar with previous episodes of my life as given to the world in the volumes Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles, now would be a good time to get on with a few odd jobs around the house – go for a walk, wash the cat, get on top of the backlog in your email inbox and so forth – while I fill in newcomers with the story so far …’ only, of course, he would be referring not to Moab or The Chronicles, but to The Code of the Woosters, say, or Right Ho, Jeeves. And it is most unlikely that he would make any reference to inboxes. But you see the point.
There is a faint chance that you might have come across the two predecessors of the memoir you are now holding in your hands, in which case I can imagine you tapping your foot with impatience when it comes to my ushering the uninitiated down old and well-trodden pathways. ‘Yes, yes, we know all that, get on with it, man,’ I seem to hear you mutter from far away. ‘Let’s come to the new stuff. The juicy bits. Scandal. Showbiz. Drugs. Suicide. Gossip.’
On several occasions, as I meet someone in that embarrassed wine-sipping huddle that always occurs before a dinner party, for example, they might tell me how much they thoroughly enjoyed such and such a book of mine. All fine and charming, if a little embarrassing: ‘One never knows what to say,’ as Agatha Christie’s alter ego, the popular author Ariadne Oliver (so splendidly played by Zoë Wanamaker in the television adaptations), often remarks. Anyway, an hour or so in, internally warmed by vinous glassfuls, I might tell, as one does around the dinner table, a story of some kind. I will notice the very person who confessed to admiring my book laughing heartily and whooping in surprise at the punchline. As they wipe the tears of infatuated merriment from their eyes, I will think to myself, ‘Hang on! That exact story is told, word for word, in the book they just assured me they liked so much!’ Either, therefore, they were lying about having read the book in the first place, which, let’s face it, we’ve all done – so much easier not to read books, especially the books of one’s friends – or, which is in fact quite as likely if not more so, they have read it and simply forgotten just about every detail.
What remains, as one ages, of a book, is a smell, a flavour, a fleeting parade of sense-images and characters, pleasing or otherwise. So I have learned not to be offended. One does not write expecting every sentence to be permanently branded into the memory of the reader.
Far from being a curse, such memory leakages are actually rather a blessing. We all become, as readers, a little like the Guy Pearce character in the film Memento, only without the attendant physical jeopardies. Every day a new adventure. Every rereading a first reading. That is true at least of recently read books. I can recount almost word for word the Sherlock Holmes, Wodehouse, Wilde and Waugh that were the infatuations of my childhood (not to mention the Biggles, Enid Blyton and Georgette Heyer), but don’t ask me to repeat the plot of the last novel I read. And it was a really good one too, The Finkler Question, by Howard Jacobson, which won a Booker Prize. I should have read it two or three years ago when it came out, but I am hopelessly behind with contemporary fiction. Almost everything I read these days is history, biography or popular science. I laid The Finkler Question down, finished from end to end about three months ago, thoroughly satisfied. I remember laughing a lot, there was a (racist?) mugging and a lot of very clever and compelling writing about anti-Semitism and all kinds of other delicious and wildly intelligent prose. But apart from the name Finkler and that incident I honestly don’t think I could tell you what happened in the book, only that I loved it. I am way past the age when stories and even exact phrases and speeches stick.
There are seventeen ste
ps up from pavement level to Holmes and Watson’s 221b Baker Street rooms; the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685; and the Battle of Crécy was fought on 26 August 1346 (the precise day isn’t that hard to fix in my brain as it is my father’s birthday). These and all kinds of irrelevant nonsenses I can reel off without recourse to Wikipedia. Exact phrases from Holmes, Jeeves, Mr Micawber and Gimlet (Biggles’s commando equivalent) come pouring back to me, especially French Canadian Private ‘Trapper’ Troublay’s habit of hissing sapristi! whenever he was perturbed.
I actually have a collection at home still of most of the works of Captain W. E. Johns, creator of Biggles and Gimlet (and of their female equivalent, the hearty and heroic ‘Worrals of the WAAF’). In a satisfactory row (on my shelf at least, if not in publishing order), three of the Gimlet books are Gimlet Lends a Hand, Gimlet Bores In and Gimlet Mops Up. Gay innuendo simply rocks. Even Monty Python couldn’t do better than that, although their Biggles Flies Undone parody made me laugh so much when I first read it in one of the Python books it gave me a serious asthma attack. True. It was the fact that they had so clearly read the books themselves with exactly the same attention to style and mannerism that I had that made me rock backwards, kicking my legs in the air in delight and wheezing like a dying emphysemiac. The point I suppose I am trying to make is that I will have the enormous pleasure of reading Howard Jacobson’s book again in a year or so as a fresh and new surprise.
A friend of mine pointed out recently how absurd it was that people reread so little: do you only listen to a piece of music that you love once? Anyway, shush. You’re distracting me. The whole point of this opening section is to fill in the newcomers on the subject of La Vie Fryesque. And if you are reading this and have also read my previous stabs at autobiography you have been warned: there will be repetition, and possibly even self-contradiction. What I remember now may differ from what I remembered five or ten years ago. But if you feel you know my life up until the ending of The Fry Chronicles and have no yearning for a redux reduction, you may happily jump from black arrow to black arrow or pop off and get on with your little tasks about the home, maybe settle into that TV box-set you’ve always meant to get around to because everyone else seems to have watched it but yourself. Let me try meanwhile to run by the relevant earlier history of my life as briskly as I can.
There is always the opportunity, I might add, for you to put this book down right this very minute and immediately download or buy in hard copy Moab is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles, consume them in that order and save both of us all this repetition, but I wouldn’t like to come over as greedy for sales. We’re all above that kind of unpleasant mercantilism.
So where do I pick the story up from? From whence do I pick up the story? Whence do I pick up the story? Alistair Cooke, the British journalist best known for his broadcasts from America for the BBC, once told me that when he was a very young man contributing material for the legendary C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian he had submitted a piece of copy which included the phrase ‘from whence’.
‘Tell me, laddie,’ Scott had asked, tapping an angry pair of fingers on the offending phrase, ‘what does the word “whence” mean?’
‘Er … “from where”?’
‘Exactly! So you’ve just written “from from where” – tautology: go and correct it.’
Cooke was foolish enough to stand up for himself. ‘Shakespeare and Fielding both frequently used “from whence”.’
‘Well, they wouldn’t have done if they’d written for the Manchester fucking Guardian,’ said Scott.
So. While the others are still at their chores, let me pick the story up for the new arrivals. The others can pick it up whence I dropped it. Doesn’t sound right to me, but there we are, Scott must have known what he was talking about.
Our hero, after multiple scholastic expulsions (this is me I’m referring to now, not Alistair Cooke or C. P. Scott – I’m attempting a paragraph of that Christopher Isherwood/Salman Rushdie kind, where I refer to myself in the third person: it won’t last long, I promise), after an adolescence steeped in folly, misery, heart-shredding mooncalf romance and a short lifetime of wayward self-delusion and multiple crookedness, a sly, cocky, guileful and self-fantasizing fool, found himself imprisoned for credit-card fraud and – still a teenager – on the brink of a life of permanent failure, incarceration, familial exile and squalid ignominy. He managed somehow to extricate himself from all this and acquire academic qualifications and a scholarship to Cambridge University. Well, he did not ‘manage somehow’, but broke through thanks to the combined wonders of flawlessly kind parents and his own late discovery that he enjoyed academic work very, very much and could not bear the idea of missing out on a real education, especially amongst the stones and towers and courts of Cambridge, where heroes like E. M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Tennyson and William Wordsworth had pursued their silly games, rigorous work, lyrical sodalities, sentimental friendships and semi-serious sacra conversazione – reading earnest and intellectually powerful papers from hearthrugs while nibbling anchovies or sardines on toast and being touched up by dons recruiting for MI6 or the KGB.
That Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook of Beyond the Fringe and John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle of Monty Python and Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie of The Goodies, let alone Germaine Greer, Clive James, Douglas Adams, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen, Peter Hall, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner and so on, had also been at that same university, eating up the stage generations before me, was a less self-conscious inducement, although I suppose if I am honest, a small part inside of me did somewhere dream of fame and recognition in an as yet inchoate form.
You do not, I believe, grow up, even if you are Stanislavsky, Brando or Olivier, knowing that you are a great actor. Much less do you grow up believing that you have it in you to make any kind of a career out of performance on stage or screen. Everyone has always known that it’s ‘an overcrowded profession’. We are most of us these days I suppose familiar with the tenets of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which quite cogently argues that no one ever made a success of themselves without having put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before breaking through. No one, not Mozart, not Dickens, not Bill Gates, not The Beatles. Most of us have instead put in 10,000 hours of wishing, and certainly as far as acting was concerned I had long thought I would like to take a stab at it but hadn’t gone much further than that. I think my first print review, ‘Young Stephen Fry as Mrs Higgins would grace any Belgravia drawing-room’, went to my head when I was about eleven years old.
‘Oooh,’ whistling intakes of breath. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine actors unemployed for every one with a job, young fellow.’ How often would I hear this at drinks parties when I was a boy, such remarks always accompanied by the merest flash of a look acutely designed to assure me that with a face and string-bean body like mine I would never make a handsome leading man and should perhaps think of some other career.
‘Being a barrister is a little like being an actor,’ became my beaming mother’s comforting and hopeful mantra. For a while I went along with this and between the ages of twelve and fifteen would tell the Norfolk landowners and their wives to whose parties we came and went that I was all set to make it to the Bar. Norman Birkett’s Six Great Advocates was now my constant companion, and with all the repulsive self-confidence of the lonely geek I would bore my family with stories of the great forensic triumphs of Marshall Hall (my especial hero) and Rufus Isaacs, a great role model for any Jewish boy, since he rose to become Marquess of Reading and Viceroy of India. From a fruit market in Spitalfields to being curtseyed and bowed at and called Your Highness in the viceregal Palace of New Delhi. Imagine! And unlike Disraeli, a practising Jew. Not that I was ever that; nor were any of my mother’s immediate family. We were, in Jonathan Miller’s immortal words, not Jews, just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog. But then, as the Nazis showed, you don’t have to practise (
even for 10,000 hours) at being Jewish to be beaten, exiled, tortured, enslaved or killed for it, so one might as well embrace the identity with pride. The rituals, genital mutilations and avoidance of oysters and bacon can go hang, as can the behaviour of any given Israeli government, but otherwise consider me a proud Jew.
My background and upbringing in rural Norfolk seem, from a twenty-first-century perspective, a bizarre throwback. I think our way of life was in fact old-fashioned even in its own time. A fish man every Wednesday clopping in by horse and cart, coal trucks, butcher’s, grocer’s and bread vans arriving to deliver whatever provender that wasn’t brought up to the back door by the gardeners for the cook, whose sister-in-law scrubbed floors on her knees three times a week. No central heating, no mains water, just coal or wood fires and a Victorian pump-house to draw up water, one source being a cistern reliant on soft rainwater which filled the tank that fed all the baths and wash basins with soft but rusty-brown bathwater, the other source drawn up from a groundwater aquifer which supplied the house’s single drinking-water tap, fixed low down over a wooden bucket in a vast Victorian kitchen warmed only by a coke-fed Aga. There was a china-pantry, a food-pantry, larders, sculleries and an outer-scullery with a huge butler’s sink that could only be filled from a grand brass hand pump. Outside the china-pantry, just by the door to the cellar stairs, hung a long rope which ended in a bulging red, white and blue sally. If any of us children were out in the garden and were needed, the rope would be pulled. The clang of the bell could be heard half a mile away at the local pig farm, where I sometimes liked to spend my time ogling piglets. Every time I heard that bell, my stomach seemed to fill with lead, for unless it was lunch or supper time it nearly always meant Trouble. It clanged the news that somehow I had been Found Out and was required to stand on the carpet in front of the desk in my father’s study and Explain Myself.