Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  I have just leaked all over you the feelings of longing and self-reproach that tortured me over my inability to swim. These feelings were as nothing, are as nothing, to what I felt and still feel about God’s cruelty, God’s malice, God’s unforgivable cruelty in denying me the gift of music.

  Music is the deepest of the arts and deep beneath all arts. So E. M. Forster wrote somewhere. If swimming suggested to me the idea of physical flight, then music suggested something much more. Music was a kind of penetration. Perhaps absorption is a less freighted word. The penetration or absorption of everything into itself. I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley, Jim Morrison and their adherents ceaselessly remind us, swing open wide. That is actually the sort of phrase, unless you are William Blake, that only makes sense when there is some LSD actually swimming about inside you. In the cold light of the cup of coffee and banana sandwich that are beside me now it appears to be nonsense, but I expect you know what it is taken to mean. LSD reveals the whatness of things, their quiddity, their essence. The wateriness of water is suddenly revealed to you, the carpetness of carpets, the woodness of wood, the yellowness of yellow, the fingernailness of fingernails, the allness of all, the nothingness of all, the allness of nothing. For me music gives access to every one of these essences of existence, but at a fraction of the social or financial cost of a drug and without the need to cry “Wow!” all the time, which is one of LSD’s most distressing and least endearing side effects.

  Other arts do this too, but other arts are forever confined and anchored by reference. Sculptures are either figuratively representative or physically limited by their material, which is actual and palpable. The words in poems are referential, they breathe with denotation and connotation, suggestion and semantics, coding and signing. Paint is real stuff and the matter of painting contains itself in a frame. Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once. The grunt of rosin-rubbed catgut, the saliva-bubble blast of a brass tube, the sweaty-fingered squeak on a guitar fret, all that physicality, all that clumsy “music making,” all that grain of human performance, so much messier than the artfully patinated pentimenti or self-conscious painterly mannerism of the sister arts, transcends itself at the moment of its happening, that moment when music actually becomes, as it makes the journey from the vibrating instrument, the vibrating hi-fi speaker, as it sends those vibrations across to the human tympanum and through to the inner ear and into the brain, where the mind is set to vibrate to frequencies of its own making.

  The nothingness of music can be moulded by the mood of the listener into the most precise shapes or allowed to float as free as thought; music can follow the academic and theoretical pattern of its own modality or adhere to some narrative or dialectical programme imposed by a friend, a scholar or the composer himself. Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set on its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks. Nothing else comes close.

  AND I CAN’T FUCKING DO IT

  I can’t so much as hum “Three Blind Mice” without going off key. I can’t stick to the rhythm of “Onward Christian Soldiers” without speeding up. I can’t fucking do it.

  Bollocks to Salieri and his precious, petulant whining. Maybe it is worse to be able to make music just a bit, but not as well as you would like to. I’d love to find out. But I can’t fucking do it at all.

  To see friends gathering round a piano and singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” “Anything Goes,” “Yellow Submarine,” “Summertime,” “Der Erlkönig,” “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” “Edelweiss,” “Non Più Andrai”—it doesn’t fucking matter what bloody song it is …

  I CAN’T FUCKING JOIN IN

  I have to mime at parties when everyone sings “Happy Birthday.” … mime or mumble and rumble and growl and grunt so deep that only moles, manta rays and mushrooms can hear me.

  I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

  I’M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF

  I’m tone DUMB.

  The tunes are there in my head. There they are all right, perfect to the last quarter-tone of pitch and the last hemi-demi-semi-quaver of time. The “Haffner,” “Fernando,” the Siegfried motif, “Whole Lotta Love,” “Marche Militaire,” “Night and Day,” “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “The Great Gate of Kiev,” “Lara’s Theme,” “Now Voyager,” “Remember You’re a Womble,” even the opening bars of Till bloody Eulenspiegel, I can play them all effortlessly in my head.

  Not just the tunes, but the harmonies too, the rhythmic patterns, everything. I find I can usually tell if a tune is in the keys of C minor, D major or E-flat major, they are like recognisable colours to me, not a stunning gift, but proof surely that I am not tone deaf. But between what is there in my head and what I can express with my voice or my fingers … there falls a mighty and substantial shadow.

  “Oh, how does that tune from Bonanza go?” someone will ask, and everybody will clutch their foreheads and screw up their faces as they try to force their memories.

  But there it is, the whole Bonanza theme in my head, fully armed, orchestrated entire, perfect to the last trill and triplet, every element complete and perfect, as if played inside me by the Vienna Philharmonic, led by Isaac Stern and conducted by Furtwangler. I can hear it as clearly in my head now as I can hear the mighty roar of King’s Lynn’s rush-minute traffic heading for Swaffham along the A47.

  “Go on, then, Stephen. If you can hear it, hum it …”

  Ha! That’s a joke. Hum it. I might as well try to make a car engine out of spaghetti or a well-dressed man out of Martyn Lewis.

  If I try, if I really try to render it, to reproduce the concord of sweet sound that moves so perfectly in my head, the sound that emerges will shock and embarrass. I am looked at with reproach and faint disgust as if I’ve done something unpardonably tasteless and un-British, like farting at the Queen Mother or kicking Alan Bennett in the balls.

  I’ve got a voice, haven’t I? A voice that can mimic accents, a voice with a fair repertoire of impressions and impersonations. Why can’t it express musical sounds as I hear them? Why this musical constipation? Why, oh Lord, why?

  And why so cross about it? I’ve covered a page with the most intemperate profanities and the most ungovernable rages on this subject, why does it upset me so much? Some people can’t walk, for Christ’s sake. Some people have severe dyslexia or cerebral palsy, and I’m whining about not having a gift for music. After all, what’s so bad about not being able to render a tune?

  “Come on, old fellow,” the reasonable person might say, “we all know what the Mona Lisa looks like. We can all picture her in our heads, right down to the crazing on the varnish and the smokily shaded dimples at the side of her mouth. But which of us can doodle her? We don’t complain, we just shrug and say that we’re hopeless at drawing … why can’t you say that about not being able to sing?”

  Yeah, that’s all very well. But you see music is more than that. Music is social, music begins in dance. Music is actually about joining in. When I moan about swimming or about singing, I’m really moaning about not being able to join in. And I’m not really moaning, either. I’m trying to recapture an old misery and unravel it.

  There is a scene in one of my favourite films, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 Running on Empty, where River Phoenix (at his absolute coltish best) arrives at a new school with a new name (Manfield), a new history (made up) and hair dyed newly blond (dreamy). He and his family hav
e spent their life running from the FBI—“on the lam” as they say in America. We the film audience know, but Ed Crowley who plays the music teacher at this new school does not, that Phoenix’s character is an exceptionally gifted pianist. As Phoenix is welcomed into the music class, he sinks down into his seat and Crowley plays excerpts from two musical tapes, one a Madonna dance track, the other a classical string piece.

  “What’s the difference between these two pieces of music?” asks Crowley.

  The class giggles. The difference is surely so obvious.

  “One is good and the other is bad?” suggests a student.

  What a sycophantic creep. We can see that most of the class find the Madonna much more fun than the classical.

  “That’s a matter of opinion surely,” Crowley says to the sycophant.

  Phoenix, trained his whole life not to draw attention to himself, looks around the classroom. We know that he has an answer, but what can it be?

  What answer would you give, come to that, if asked to describe the difference between a Madonna track and a classical string quartet?

  Ed Crowley turns to this new student.

  “Mr. Manfield?” he asks. “Help us out. What do you think?”

  There is a fraction of a pause as Phoenix twiddles shyly with his pencil before giving this reply.

  “You can’t dance to Beethoven?”

  I like that.

  You can’t dance to Beethoven.

  And if you can’t dance, you can’t join in.

  Music from the “ragtime and jazz tradition” (why do I feel that the word “tradition” is taking on the greasiness of the word “community”? The “gay community,” “the divided communities of Northern Ireland”—the “Gospel tradition,” the “folk tradition”) all the way through to blues, R&B, rock and roll, soul, funk, reggae, pop, ska, disco, rap, hip-hop, techno, acid house, jungle, Tesco, handbag, trance, hypno and the rest, always keeps its back beat and its dance roots; its proper home is still the dance floor and the shared experience of adolescents swapping records in their bedrooms. It is public music, it publicly defines an age, it is still dance, now in fact, since the high days of folk rock and hard rock, it is more than ever dance.

  When two or three gather together and hear “Blockbuster,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Come on Eileen” or “Relax,” there is that other dance to be danced, the generational dance in which listeners are united in their decade, the age they were at the time of the music’s release, the ridiculous trousers they wore, the television programmes they watched, the sweets they bought, the hi-fi set up they spent weeks arranging and rearranging in their bedroom, the girls and boys they thought of as the love lyrics and guitar licks pounded into them.

  To earlier generations “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” “A-tisket, a-tasket,” “We’ll Meet Again” and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade” might perform the same office. Those same people who, listening to the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” will shriek, “Oh, that takes me back to my very first dance! My very first nylons! My very first Alvis motorcar!” will have been young and bouncy when Britten wrote The Turn of the Screw or when Walton produced Belshazzar’s Feast, but you won’t hear them squeal with the delight of public reminiscence and the memory of first snogs and first lipsticks when the “Sea Interlude” from Peter Grimes floats over the airwaves. Classical music is private art, stripped of that kind of association.

  That, partly, is why classical music is also very nerdy. Its decontextualised abstractions take the classical music lover and the classical music practitioner out of the social stream and into their own heads, as do chess and maths and other nerdile pursuits. Mussorgsky’s “Night on the Bare Mountain” is not nerdy however, when it makes everyone brighten up and do their whispering impression of the slogan for that cassette tape TV commercial: “Maxell! Break the sound barrier …”

  Classical music can be “rescued” therefore from the void of abstract nerdaciousness by association with film, television and advertising, so that Beethoven can make you think of power generation companies, Mozart of Elvira Madigan and Trading Places, Carl Orff of Old Spice aftershave and so on, and no doubt our own contemporary composers Philip Glass, Gorecki and, God help us all, Michael Nyman, will be similarly pressed into service by Laboratoires Gamier and Kellogg’s Frosties before the century is out. It is customary for those who like classical music to damn the advertising industry and the producers of commercials and TV programmes for vulgarising their beloved music. If you can’t hear Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, they say, without thinking of Robert Robinson and Brain of Britain, or Mozart’s “Musical Joke” without Hickstead and the Horse of the Year Show galloping through your head, then you’re a philistine. Well that’s just the arse’s arse. The same snobbery is being applied now to pop music and we are starting to hear complaints about the Kinks being yoked to the Yellow Pages and John Lee Hooker turning into a lager salesman.

  There is simply no limit to the tyrannical snobbery that otherwise decent people can descend into when it comes to music.

  Hugh Laurie made me laugh for a week early on in our friendship when he re-enacted the youthful party scene in which some nameless figure will approach a stack of records next to the hi-fi, go through them one by one and then say, his brow wrinkled with cool, sour disfavour, “Haven’t you got any decent music then?”

  The mirror-shaded Rolling Stone journalists have no idea how close they are to the opera queen, the balletomane and the symphonic reviewer for Gramophone magazine. They are sisters under the skin. Cysts under the skin more like.

  The tribal belonging, the sexual association, the sense of party—these are what popular music offers, and they have always been exclusion zones for me. Partly because of my musical constipation—can’t dance, can’t join in the chorus—partly because of my sense of physical self, feeling a fool, tall, uncoordinated and gangly.

  On the other hand I’m not Bernard Levin. I am not in love with the world of classical music or set upon the intellectual, personal or aesthetic path of a private relationship with Schubert, Wagner, Brahms or Berg. Nor am I a Ned Sherrin, devoted to the musical, to Tin Pan Alley and twentieth-century song. I did well professionally first crack out of the box with a stage musical, but musicals don’t mean much to me. I am not a show girl I fear.

  There is no proper way for me to express what music does to me without my sounding precious, pretentious, over-emotional, sentimental, self-indulgent and absurd. No proper way therefore to express either what it has done to me over the years to know that I would never be able to make music of even the most basic kind.

  I would like to dance. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

  I would like to sing. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.

  I’d like to join in, you see.

  Guilty feet, as George Michael tells us, have got no rhythm.

  I can play … I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking through fingers, blood dripping from ears. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the notes as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. Playing the piano is not the same as making music.

  None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.

  It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them
I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

  Singing began for me, as it does for most of us, in a communal form. Whether it is “All Things Bright and Beautiful,” “Little Bo-Peep,” “Away in a Manger” or “Thank You for the Food We Eat” that is how children first raise their voices in music. I joined in like every other child and never thought much about it until prep school and Congregational Practice.

  It was the custom of prefects to patrol the pews during Cong Prac and make sure that everyone was paying attention and doing his best to join in.

  One Saturday, perhaps my third or fourth week at Stouts Hill, Hemuss the music master had selected the hymn “Jerusalem the Golden” for the next day’s service. We had never sung it before. Don’t know if you’re familiar with it—it’s very beautiful, but not easy. Lots of unusually flattened notes and set in a subtle rhythm that seems a world away from the simple tumpty-tum of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which is a hymn any old fool can speak-sing without drawing too much attention to himself.

  We listened to Hemuss playing this new tune through on the piano a few times, then as usual, the choir had a stab on their own. Next came our turn.