The Fry Chronicles (43 page)

‘Forgive me for calling out of the blue,’ he said. ‘My name is Jonathan Meades and I work for the
Tatler
magazine. I got your number perhaps from Don Boyd, who knows everybody.’

‘Hello. How can I help?’

‘I am putting together an article in which people write about something they
don’t
do. Gavin Stamp, for example, is telling us why he doesn’t drive, and Brian Sewell is giving us a piece about never going on holiday. I wondered if you might be able to weigh in?’

‘Gosh! Er …’

‘So. Is there anything you don’t do?’

‘Hm,’ I scrabbled frantically around in the recesses of my mind. ‘I’m afraid I can’t really think of anything. Well I don’t strangle kittens or rape nuns, but I’m assuming this is about things we …’

‘… about things we don’t do which most of humanity does, exactly. Nothing?’

‘Oh!’ A thought suddenly struck me. ‘I don’t do
sex
. Would that count, do you think?’

A pause followed that made me wonder if the line had gone dead.

‘Hello? … Jonathan?’

‘Four hundred words by Friday afternoon. Can’t offer more than two hundred pounds. Deal?’

I cannot entirely understand, to this day, why I withheld my body from sexual congress with another for as long as I did. Kim and I had been partners in a complete and proper sense at Cambridge and for a month or so afterwards. Since then I had become less and less interested in sex while Kim had pursued a more conventional and fulfilled erotic career and had by now found himself a new partner, a handsome Greek-American called Steve. Kim and I still adored each other and still shared the Chelsea flat. He had Steve and I had … I had my work.

If
I have a theory to explain the celibacy that began in 1982 and was not to end until 1996 it is that during that period work took the place of everything else in my life. Whatever effect multiple school expulsions, social and academic failures and the final degradation of imprisonment may have had on me, I think it true that my last-gasp escape into Cambridge and the discovery that there was work I could do and be valued for doing galvanized me into an orgy of concentrated labour from which I could not and would not be diverted, not even by the prospect of sexual or romantic fulfilment. Perhaps career, concentration, commitment and creation had become my new drugs of choice.

Work can be an addiction like any other. Love of it can
be a home-wrecker, an obsession that bores, upsets, insults and worries those close to you. We all know that drugs, alcohol and tobacco are Bad, but work, we are brought up to believe, is Good. As a result the world is full of families who are angry at being abandoned and breadwinners who are even more angry because their hours of labour are not sufficiently appreciated. ‘I do it for you!’ they cry. While it may be true that work puts meat on the table, everyone around them knows that hard workers do it for themselves. Most children of workaholics would rather see less money and more of their parent.

Within a year of leaving Cambridge, friends and family were already referring to my apparent inability to use the word ‘no’. I soon began to hear myself described as a workaholic. Kim preferred the word ‘ergomaniac’ partly because he was a classical scholar and partly I suspect because the ‘maniac’ part better expressed the absurd frenzy with which I was starting to throw myself into every offer that came my way. To this day I am often reminded by those about me that I don’t have to say yes to everything and that there are such things as holidays. I don’t believe them, of course, no matter how many times they assure me it is true.

The question that most troublingly refuses to go away is whether my productivity, ubiquity and well … career harlotry … have stopped me from realizing what, in the world of fathers, teachers and grown-ups in general, might be called My Full Potential. Hugh and Emma, to name the two most obvious of my contemporaries, have never been as recklessly carefree, prodigal and improvident with their talents as I have. I want to say that they have always had reason to believe in their talents more than I have in mine. But then I also want to say that I have had more fun than they have and that:

Which is all very well, but while I may want to say all kinds of things, I am not sure that they would necessarily be true. I will not go so far as to claim that, when falling asleep every night, I mourn lost opportunities. ‘Every night’ would be an exaggeration. There is a vision that comes to me often though.

I picture myself at the surface of an ocean: the course of my life is played out as a descent to the sea bed. As I drop down I clutch at and try to reach blurred but alluring images representing the vocation of writer, actor, comedian, film director, politician or academic, but they all writhe and ripple flirtatiously out of reach, or rather it would be truer to say that I am afraid to leap forward and hug one of them to me. By being afraid to commit to one I commit to none and arrive at the bottom empty and unfulfilled. This is a self-aggrandizing, pitiful and absurd fantasy of regret, I know, but it is a frequent one. I close whatever book I have been reading in bed, and that same film plays out again and again in my mind before I sleep. I know that I have a reputation for cleverness and articulacy, but I also know that people must wonder why I haven’t quite done better with my life and talents. A jack of so many trades and manifestly a master of none. In my perkier moods I am entirely pleased with this outcome, for I refuse to stand on a carpet in a headmaster’s study and endure wise shakings of the head and heavy school-report pronouncements about my shortcomings. Such attitudes are grotesque, impudent and irrelevant. ‘Could do better’ is a meaningless conclusion. ‘Could be happier’ is the only one that counts. I have had five times the opportunities and experiences accorded to most, and if the result is a disappointment to posterity, well prosperity can eat it. In less perky moods, of course, I entirely concur with the judgements of the head-shakers and school-report pronouncers. What a waste. What a fatuous, selfish, air-headed, indolent and insulting waste my life has been.

While it is not exactly counterintuitive it may perhaps be less than immediately obvious to point out that it is a great deal more conceited of me to bemoan my life as a waste than for me to be more or less satisfied at the way it has turned out. Any regret at my lack of achievement suggests that I really believe that I had in me the ability, should I have concentrated on any one thing, to have written a
great
novel or to have been a
great
actor, director, playwright, poet or statesman or whatever else I might delude myself I had the potential for. Whether or not I have the ability to be any of those things, I do know that I lack the ambition, concentration, focus and above all
will
without which such talents are as useless as an engine without fuel. Which is not to say that I am lazy or unambitious in the short term. You might say I am good at tactics but hopeless at strategy, happy to slog away at whatever is in front of me but unable to take a long view, plan ahead or imagine the future. A good golfer, they say, has to picture his swing before he addresses the ball in order to drive. My whole life has been an adventure in hit and hope.

But sex. Yes, we have to return, I fear, to sex. We were discussing that commission for the
Tatler.
I wrote the article for Jonathan Meades, outlining my distaste for being cursed by nature with an urgent instinct to rummage about in the ‘damp, dark, foul-smelling and revoltingly tufted areas of the human body that constitute the main dishes in the banquet of love’ and my sense that the whole business was humiliating, disgusting and irksome. I suggested that a life without sex and without the presence of a partner offered numerous benefits. The celibate life allowed productivity, independence and ease free from the pressures of placating and accommodating the will and desires of another: released from the degrading imperatives of erotic congress, a new and better kind of life could be lived. Sex was an overrated bore. ‘Besides,’ I confessed as I ended the article, ‘I’m scared that I may not be very good at it.’

The piece was quoted and reproduced in whole or in part in several newspapers, and for the next twelve years it was rare for this particular C-word not to be attached to me much as macrobiotic is attached to Gwyneth Paltrow and tantric to Sting. I joined Cliff Richard and Morrissey as one of celibacy’s peculiar poster children. Profilers, chat show hosts and interviewers in the years to come would regularly ask if I was still keeping it up, ho-ho, whether I would recommend sexual abstinence as a way of life and how I coped with the loneliness of the single state. I had created a rod for my own back with this article but have never regretted writing it. It was, more or less, inasmuch as these things ever are, true. I
did
find the business of eros a nuisance and an embarrassment. I
did
enjoy the independence and freedom afforded me by being unattached and I
was
afraid that I might not be very
good at sex. Am I going to deny my terror of rejection, or my low sense of my own physical worth?

With the passing of each year the odds against me ever forging a full relationship lengthened as I felt myself less and less practised in the arts of love and less and less confident about how I would ever go about finding a partner, even supposing that I wanted one. There was just so much to
do
. I was rehearsing in London prior to going down to Chichester to start
Forty Years On
, I was working on
Me and My Girl
, chugging out journalism and taking enthusiastic steps in another medium: radio.

The Tatler
celibacy article. Photo Tim Platt/
Tatler
©Condé Naste Publications Ltd. Words Stephen Fry/
Tatler
©Condé Naste Publications Ltd.

Ever since I can remember I have loved radio, especially the kind of talk radio that only the BBC Home Service, later Radio 4, provides. Throughout my insomniac youth I listened through the day right up to the national anthem, when I would retune to the BBC World Service. ‘England made me,’ Anthony Farrant says to himself in the Graham Greene novel of that title. England made me too, but it was an England broadcast on 1500 metres Long Wave.

I wrote this as the opening of an article on the World Service for
Arena
magazine.

I’m sure I knew what I meant at the time by the World Service’s ‘dishonesty’, but the truth is I still adored and valued radio above television. Radio 4’s mix of comedy, news, documentary, drama, magazine, panel game and quirky discussion is unique and was central to the fashioning of my outlook and manner. I grew up to the sound of warmly assured and calmly authoritative BBC voices vibrating the fabric speaker covers of valve wireless sets manufactured by Bush, Ferguson, Roberts and Pye. One of my first-ever memories is sitting under my mother’s chair in our house in Chesham while she tapped away on her typewriter with characters from
The
Archers
arguing about dairy cattle in the background.
My Music
,
My Word!
,
A Word in Edgeways
,
Stop the Week
,
Start the Week
,
Any Answers
,
Any Questions
,
Twenty Questions
,
Many a Slip
,
Does the Team Think?
,
Brain of Britain
,
From Our Own Correspondent
,
The Petticoat Line
,
File on Four
,
Down Your Way
,
The World at One, Today
,
PM
,
You and Yours
,
Woman’s Hour
,
Letter from America
,
Jack de Manio Precisely
,
The Men from the Ministry
,
Gardener’s Question Time
,
The Burkiss Way
,
The Jason Explanation
,
Round Britain Quiz
,
Just a Minute
,
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue
,
Desert Island Discs
and a hundred other dramas, comedies, quizzes and features have amused, amazed, enriched, enraged, informed and inflamed me from the earliest age. My voice, I think, owes more to the BBC microphone and the dusty, slow-to-warm-up Mullard valve than to the accents and tones of my family, friends and school fellows. Just as there are the lazily sucked bones of Wodehouse, Wilde and Waugh in my writing style, if style is the right word for it, so the intonations of John Ebden, Robert Robinson, Franklin ‘Jingle’ Engelmann, Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, Derek Guyler, Margaret Howard, David Jacobs, Kenneth Robinson, Richard Baker, Anthony Quinton, John Julius Norwich, Alistair Cooke, David Jason, Brian Johnston, John Timpson, Jack de Manio, Steve Race, Frank Muir, Dennis Norden, Nicholas Parsons, Kenneth Williams, Derek Nimmo, Peter Jones, Nelson Gabriel, Derek Cooper, Clive Jacobs, Martin Muncaster and Brian Perkins have penetrated my brain and being to the extent that – much as heavy-metal pollutants get into the hair and skin and nails and tissue – they have become a physical as well as an emotional and intellectual part of me. We are all the sum of countless influences. I like to believe that Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens, Austen, Joyce, Eliot, Auden and the great and noble grandees of literature have had their effect on me, but the truth is they were distant uncles and aunts, good for a fiver at Christmas
and a book token on birthdays, while Radio 4 and the BBC World Service were my mother and father, a daily presence and constant example.