The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry
Euan Ferguson
The Observer, Sunday 19 September 2010
The second volume of Stephen Fry's memoirs recalls his Cambridge years and rise to fame in perfect prose and excruciating honesty
Well, Kerry Katona Vol III this ain't. And it's possible that Mr Fry even wrote all of it himself.
That Stephen Fry needs no introduction is what he has always wanted. He is writing today, of course, from a position of fame, but the period which this, the second volume of his autobiography, covers is the decade or so after he'd done his shameful late-teen jail stint for credit-card theft, and made it, despite his appetites, his addiction, his self-admitted "slyness", to Cambridge, last of his last chances, and with the world before him to either trample or embrace.
What follows is many things: a grand reminiscence of college and theatre and comedyland in the 1980s, with tone-perfect showbiz anecdotes, and genuine readerly excitement as we try to forget that we know what happened next; a rehabilitation, for Fry himself, as he finds himself becoming genuinely popular, and genuinely good at some things – acting of a limited sort, sketch-writing, hard, hard work – rather than just "being clever". And through all of it he tells us, with exemplary and often exruciating honesty, of his crippling self-doubts, his needinesses, the greed of his addictions, his drive, shallow though he knew it was, for fame. What Fry does, essentially, is tell us who he really is. He knows he's always been seen, by friends and enemies alike, as confident, quintessentially English, languorously zing-full of bons mots, at ease in any surroundings. Inside, he says, there's an often terrified half-Jew poof, horrified by the unattractiveness of his body, unable to smile sweetly without looking smug, knowing he's been given a second chance and filled with terror at the thought of blowing it.
Even he knows he's straying towards reader-unfriendly territory by spending three pages exploring his personal angsts during a time when, say, he's just had his first play put on at the fringe, or been head-hunted for a new radio show. So he gets his retaliation in first, explaining why he's explaining it all, and making it even more fascinating, before giving us another story about a BBC producer, or how musicals get written, or his tennis-match theory of sitcoms and thus why the very first Black Adder didn't work. The mix is perfect.
The first half, essentially, is college, back in the days when it was generally accepted that education was about much more than learning things. He admits he was blessed with a fine memory, an ease with quotes which helped him sail exams, but much of his real education, the expansion of his hinterland, took place "in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink." Admittedly, and he admits it, he had decent enough frolicking/ learning companions, chief among them Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, but back then, remember, they were just friends. Fry also, talking of those days, pulls off the near-impossible in managing to make you feel sorry for the most lucky, privileged souls on Earth: young people, during May Week at Cambridge, punting and swimming and in love and in puddles of champagne. Sorry for them, that is, in an et in arcadia ego way: the memento mori reminder that so many of the rest of us can say – "I, too, was young once" – and that these nymphs will so soon be fat and disappointed and 50. OK, sorry for them a little.
The first half, which ends with his revue picking up the first-ever Perrier, ends thus: "A year and a half earlier I had been on probation. Lost… in dense blackness of an unfriendly forest thick with brambles, treacherous undergrowth and hostile creatures of my own making. Somehow, somewhere I had seen or been offered a path out and had found myself stumbling into open, sunlit country."
As success bestrode success, he grew more easily into what people always saw him as: "Like many masks this smiling, placid one has become so tight a fit that it might be said to have rewritten the features of whatever true face once screamed behind it. Were it not that it is just a mask and that the feelings underneath are as they always were."
He's not without bite, but it's careful. If there's a target it's batted away with logic and a catspaw, but no claws. The sourness of Simon Gray and his great friend-enemy Harold Pinter depressed him. Even here there's not so much viciousness as intellectual confusion, which turns into a pleasingly spirited demolition of the meanness of their great influence, FR Leavis. Fry, who famously walked out of Cell Mates, wasn't invited to Gray's funeral. He's also confused, a little, about a few colleagues such as Robbie Coltrane and Alexei Sayle, and their reactions (or reported reactions) to him: essentially, anti-nob prejudice. Fry's turning of the tables is done with courtesy and logic, and again makes you think. The only true sin in Fry's world is incuriosity. He doesn't despise people who don't know anything, but he despises, truly despises, the fact that they don't want to know anything, ever.
He is apologetically unapologetic, or perhaps it's the other way round, for his own 80s years of ostentation, as the money began to flow in. He now cringes gleefully to recall the Paul Smith shirts and exciting new croissants to which he and Hugh treat each other after the latest ludicrously lucrative eight minutes' work of Soho voice-over, the Kings Road swaggering, the membership of St James's clubs, the cars. It doesn't take a man of his powers of self-analysis to conclude that he was basically waving his own many new credit cards around at this time, just to say: "Look, I didn't steal them. I'm here under my own steam." He tells us of his babbling excitement upon the invention of the Apple Macintosh, his next addiction (the Twitter stuff will doubtless be in one of the next books; but, believe me, for some of us the adoration of the Mac was the same thing back then, if more exclusive); and of his celibacy, for work was his latest addiction and he loathed the hostile judging eyes of the disco gay scene.
This is, above all else, a thoughtful book. And namedroppy too, and funny, and marbled with melancholy throughout. Its camaraderie of tone lets it wear its learning lightly yet leaves you with a hoaching number of new insights, new ways of looking at things, from snobbery to reality-TV contestants. The mask is now firmly on, and he grows into it each day, not least early last week in the Festival Hall, at his mammoth broadcast book launch, when he strode on stage as if lent – no, willingly given, for ever – the confidence of half of England, and was welcomed with the roars and love of the other half. Yet this book is a painfully honest attempt to tear the mask aside, for us. We are, if we are not damnably incurious, splendidly the better for it.
Euan Ferguson
The Observer, Sunday 19 September 2010
The second volume of Stephen Fry's memoirs recalls his Cambridge years and rise to fame in perfect prose and excruciating honesty
Well, Kerry Katona Vol III this ain't. And it's possible that Mr Fry even wrote all of it himself.
That Stephen Fry needs no introduction is what he has always wanted. He is writing today, of course, from a position of fame, but the period which this, the second volume of his autobiography, covers is the decade or so after he'd done his shameful late-teen jail stint for credit-card theft, and made it, despite his appetites, his addiction, his self-admitted "slyness", to Cambridge, last of his last chances, and with the world before him to either trample or embrace.
What follows is many things: a grand reminiscence of college and theatre and comedyland in the 1980s, with tone-perfect showbiz anecdotes, and genuine readerly excitement as we try to forget that we know what happened next; a rehabilitation, for Fry himself, as he finds himself becoming genuinely popular, and genuinely good at some things – acting of a limited sort, sketch-writing, hard, hard work – rather than just "being clever". And through all of it he tells us, with exemplary and often exruciating honesty, of his crippling self-doubts, his needinesses, the greed of his addictions, his drive, shallow though he knew it was, for fame. What Fry does, essentially, is tell us who he really is. He knows he's always been seen, by friends and enemies alike, as confident, quintessentially English, languorously zing-full of bons mots, at ease in any surroundings. Inside, he says, there's an often terrified half-Jew poof, horrified by the unattractiveness of his body, unable to smile sweetly without looking smug, knowing he's been given a second chance and filled with terror at the thought of blowing it.
Even he knows he's straying towards reader-unfriendly territory by spending three pages exploring his personal angsts during a time when, say, he's just had his first play put on at the fringe, or been head-hunted for a new radio show. So he gets his retaliation in first, explaining why he's explaining it all, and making it even more fascinating, before giving us another story about a BBC producer, or how musicals get written, or his tennis-match theory of sitcoms and thus why the very first Black Adder didn't work. The mix is perfect.
The first half, essentially, is college, back in the days when it was generally accepted that education was about much more than learning things. He admits he was blessed with a fine memory, an ease with quotes which helped him sail exams, but much of his real education, the expansion of his hinterland, took place "in the rooms of friends, with earnest frolic and happy disputation. Wine can be a wiser teacher than ink." Admittedly, and he admits it, he had decent enough frolicking/ learning companions, chief among them Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, but back then, remember, they were just friends. Fry also, talking of those days, pulls off the near-impossible in managing to make you feel sorry for the most lucky, privileged souls on Earth: young people, during May Week at Cambridge, punting and swimming and in love and in puddles of champagne. Sorry for them, that is, in an et in arcadia ego way: the memento mori reminder that so many of the rest of us can say – "I, too, was young once" – and that these nymphs will so soon be fat and disappointed and 50. OK, sorry for them a little.
The first half, which ends with his revue picking up the first-ever Perrier, ends thus: "A year and a half earlier I had been on probation. Lost… in dense blackness of an unfriendly forest thick with brambles, treacherous undergrowth and hostile creatures of my own making. Somehow, somewhere I had seen or been offered a path out and had found myself stumbling into open, sunlit country."
As success bestrode success, he grew more easily into what people always saw him as: "Like many masks this smiling, placid one has become so tight a fit that it might be said to have rewritten the features of whatever true face once screamed behind it. Were it not that it is just a mask and that the feelings underneath are as they always were."
He's not without bite, but it's careful. If there's a target it's batted away with logic and a catspaw, but no claws. The sourness of Simon Gray and his great friend-enemy Harold Pinter depressed him. Even here there's not so much viciousness as intellectual confusion, which turns into a pleasingly spirited demolition of the meanness of their great influence, FR Leavis. Fry, who famously walked out of Cell Mates, wasn't invited to Gray's funeral. He's also confused, a little, about a few colleagues such as Robbie Coltrane and Alexei Sayle, and their reactions (or reported reactions) to him: essentially, anti-nob prejudice. Fry's turning of the tables is done with courtesy and logic, and again makes you think. The only true sin in Fry's world is incuriosity. He doesn't despise people who don't know anything, but he despises, truly despises, the fact that they don't want to know anything, ever.
He is apologetically unapologetic, or perhaps it's the other way round, for his own 80s years of ostentation, as the money began to flow in. He now cringes gleefully to recall the Paul Smith shirts and exciting new croissants to which he and Hugh treat each other after the latest ludicrously lucrative eight minutes' work of Soho voice-over, the Kings Road swaggering, the membership of St James's clubs, the cars. It doesn't take a man of his powers of self-analysis to conclude that he was basically waving his own many new credit cards around at this time, just to say: "Look, I didn't steal them. I'm here under my own steam." He tells us of his babbling excitement upon the invention of the Apple Macintosh, his next addiction (the Twitter stuff will doubtless be in one of the next books; but, believe me, for some of us the adoration of the Mac was the same thing back then, if more exclusive); and of his celibacy, for work was his latest addiction and he loathed the hostile judging eyes of the disco gay scene.
This is, above all else, a thoughtful book. And namedroppy too, and funny, and marbled with melancholy throughout. Its camaraderie of tone lets it wear its learning lightly yet leaves you with a hoaching number of new insights, new ways of looking at things, from snobbery to reality-TV contestants. The mask is now firmly on, and he grows into it each day, not least early last week in the Festival Hall, at his mammoth broadcast book launch, when he strode on stage as if lent – no, willingly given, for ever – the confidence of half of England, and was welcomed with the roars and love of the other half. Yet this book is a painfully honest attempt to tear the mask aside, for us. We are, if we are not damnably incurious, splendidly the better for it.
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