Moab Is My Washpot

by Stephen Fry

  I wasn’t really thinking of much, just joining in aimlessly, when I became aware of a prefect, Kirk, standing next to me. He pushed his face right up to mine, his ear against my mouth and then called out in a loud voice.

  “Sir, Fry’s mucking about!”

  The boiling flood that rose to my face then is rising again now. It is of that heat and fever that can only be caused by injustice—rank, wicked, obscene, unpardonable injustice.

  Hemuss stopped playing, a hundred voices trailed off into silence, a hundred faces turned to look at me.

  “On your own then, Fry,” said Hemuss, “and two and three and …”

  And …

  … silence.

  My mouth rounded in the shape of the words, a small husky breath may or may not have hissed from my throat, but the school heard nothing and saw nothing, save a crimson straining face and eyes screwed shut in shame.

  “This isn’t a game, Fry! And two, three and …”

  This time I tried. I really tried. Words did emerge.

  I had got no further than “… with milk and honey blest” before, within seconds of each other, Hemuss stopped playing, Kirk hissed, “God, you’re completely flat!” and the whole hall exploded with hooting, braying laughter.

  Since that time I have been to weddings and to the funerals of deeply loved friends and been entirely unable to do anything but mime the words of the hymns I have so desperately wanted to sing. I have felt guilty for paying nothing but literal lip service to those for whom I care. Since I have a certain facility with words and with performance I am often asked to give speeches on such occasions and this I can manage. But I don’t want that. All I have ever wanted is to be part of the chorus, to be able to join in.

  Is that true?

  I’ve just written it, but is it true?

  An odd thing is this. I had no memory at all of the Cong Prac hooting-braying incident until I went to see a hypnotist nearly twenty years later.

  Oh, hello … a hypnotist now, is it?

  Actually, this was a completely practical visit to a hypnotist.

  Hugh Laurie and I used to write and perform material of a more or less comedic nature in a 1980s Channel 4 comedy and music show called Saturday Live. It was the programme that notably launched Ben Elton and Harry Enfield into public fame.

  One week Hugh and I had some sketch or other which involved an ending in which I needed to sing. Not a complicated song, some sort of R&B verse, nothing more. Harry Enfield was to conduct a band wearing amusing headphones and a pleasing Ronnie Hazlehurst grin and Hugh, I suppose, was to play the guitar or piano. I can’t remember why I had to sing and why Hugh couldn’t have looked after the vocal department as he usually did. Perhaps he had a mouth organ to deal with too. Hugh can sing splendidly, and play any musical instrument you throw at him, the son of a son of a son of a son of a son of a bitch.

  I said to Hugh, as I say to everyone who will listen, “But this is mad! You know I can’t sing …”

  Hugh, either out of exasperation or a cunningly laid plan to force me to wrestle my musical demons to the ground, said that I would just plain have to and that was that. I suppose this would have been a Wednesday: the programme, as the title suggested, was transmitted live on Saturday evenings.

  By Thursday morning I was all but a puddle on the floor.

  How could I possibly sing live on television?

  The problem was, even if I spoke the lines, I wouldn’t be able to do so in rhythm. The musical intro would begin and I would be unable to come in on the right beat of the right bar. The very oddity of my performance would detract from the point of the sketch. The whole thing would become a number about a person making an appalling noise for no apparent reason.

  Many people get stage fright: the moment they have to speak or act in public their voices tighten, their legs wobble and the saliva turns to alum powder in their mouths. That doesn’t happen to me with speech, only with music. Alone or in the shower, I can soap myself in strict tempo if there is music playing on my Sony Bathmaster. But if I think so much as a housefly is eavesdropping, everything goes hot, bothered and bastardly: I lose the ability even to count the number of beats to a bar.

  It occurred to me, therefore, the Thursday prior to this programme, that a hypnotist might perhaps be able somehow to cure me of this self-consciousness and allow me to kid myself, when the moment came round on Saturday in front of cameras and studio audience, that I was alone and unwitnessed.

  The more I thought about it, the more logical it seemed. A hypnotist couldn’t turn me into Mozart or Muddy Waters, but he might be able to remove the psychological obstacles that froze me whenever music and I met in public.

  I let my fingers do the initial walking and then followed them all the way to Maddox Street, W1, where a hypnotherapist calling himself Michael Joseph had a little surgery. He came complete with a soothing manner and a most reassuring Hungarian voice. The matey, discjockey tones of a Paul McKenna would have sent me scuttling, but a rich middle-European accent seemed just what was required. Aside from anything else, it reminded me of my grandfather.

  I explained the nature of my problem.

  “I see,” said Mr. Joseph, folding his hands together, like Sherlock Holmes at the commencement of a consultancy. “And what is dee … how you say?… dee cue that comes before you must start singing for diss programme?”

  I had to explain that the words that immediately preceded my singing were in fact “Hit it, bitch …”

  “So. Your friend, he is saying ‘Hit it, bitch …’ and next music is starting and you must be singing? Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  The business of being put in a trance seemed childishly simple and disappointingly banal. No pocket watches were swung before me, no mood music or whale song played in the background, no mesmeric eyes bored into my soul. I was simply told to put my hands on my knees and to feel the palms melt down into the flesh of the knees. After a short time it became impossible to feel what was hand and what was knee, while miles away in the distance rich, sonorous Hungarian tones told me how pleasantly relaxed I was beginning to feel and how leaden and heavy my eyelids had become. It was a little like being lowered down a well, with the hypnotist’s voice as the rope that kept me from any feeling of abandonment or panic.

  Once I was in what I might as well call a trance, I was asked for all memories and thoughts connected to singing. It was at this point that every detail of Kirk and the humiliation that attended my attempt at a solo “Jerusalem the Golden” flooded unbidden into my mind.

  So that was it! That was what had been holding me back all these years. A memory of childish public humiliation that had convinced me that I never could and never would sing in public.

  The hypnotist’s voice, at once both far away and incredibly close, made the suggestion that when I heard the words “Hit it, bitch …” I would feel totally relaxed and confident, as if alone in the bath, unjudged, unself-conscious and unembarrassed. I would sing the verse I had to sing on Saturday lustily, forcefully, amusingly and with all the relish, gusto and self-pleasure of a group of Welshmen in the back seat of a rugby coach. Not his simile, but that is what he meant.

  I assimilated this suggestion and made a strange, echoey interior note to myself that it was all quite true and that it was absurd that Saturday’s gig had ever held any terrors for me, while my voice murmured assent.

  After counting me backwards into consciousness and telling me how refreshed and splendid I would feel for the rest of the day, the hypnotist tried to sell me the inevitable Smoking, Dieting and Insomnia tapes that lined his bookshelves and sent me on my way, my wallet lighter by fifty or so pounds and my heart by a million kilos.

  My performance that Saturday will never be counted alongside Marilyn Home’s début at the Met or the release of Imagine, but I did get through it without a blush of self-consciousness or a tinge of fear.

  It was only afterwards, winding down as usual in the Zanzibar, the early pre-Groucho wa
tering hole of choice amongst 1980s comedians, photographers, artists and the like, that it occurred to me that the bloody man had only released me from my singing burden for that one single occasion.

  “Hit it, bitch …” had been my trigger and this one Saturday night the moment of its activation. He had not freed me of my musical inhibitions permanently. The talisman’s power had been all used up and if I wanted to sing again in public I would have to make another sodding appointment. There and then, in the vodka-and-cocaine-fuelled passion of the moment, I made a vow never to do so.

  Singing and Stephen were not meant to be.

  I am grateful to him for allowing me access to a forgotten memory, but it is not a path I have any desire to travel down again. I daresay there are other memories hidden away in the tangled briar bush of my head, but I see no earthly reason to start hacking away there.

  Music matters to me desperately, I’ve made that clear, and I could cover pages and pages with my thoughts about Wagner and Mozart and Schubert and Strauss and all the rest of it, but in this book my passion for music and my inability to express it in musical terms stand really as symbols for the sense of separateness and apartness I have always felt. In fact they stand too as a symbol of love and my inability to express love as it should be expressed.

  I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language—not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

  You see, when it comes down to it, I sometimes believe that words are all I have. I am not actually sure that I am capable of thought, let alone feeling, except through language. There is an old complaint:

  How can I tell you what I think

  until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?

  It might have been designed for me, that question. It was years before Oscar Wilde was to shake me out of a feeling that this was a failure in me, when I read his essay, written in the form of a Platonic dialogue, The Critic as Artist:

  ERNEST:

  Even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.

  GILBERT:

  More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it. There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other—by language, which is the parent, not the child, of thought. [My italics, Mrs. Edwards, my italics.]

  Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.

  Swimming, turned out when I did it, to be simply the ability to move forwards in water. When I did learn to play pieces on the piano, I discovered that I did not fly or approach any penetration of the cosmos. Language, I had to confess to myself, did get me places. It got me academic success, and later financial and worldly rewards that I could never have dreamed of. I learned to use it to save me from bullying, mockery and rejection. Language went on to give me the chance to do things that I am pleased to have done. I have no reason to complain about language.

  Others, however, had much to complain about in me, so far as my language was concerned.

  They could not understand it.

  During my first term at Stouts Hill I found it almost impossible to make myself understood. It drove me insane: I would say things perfectly plainly and always receive the same reply—

  “What? Hng? What’s the boy saying?”

  Was everybody deaf?

  My problem was eventually diagnosed by a keen-eared master. I was speaking too quickly, far too quickly; I talked at a rate that made me unintelligible to all but myself. The words and thoughts tumbled from my mouth in an entirely pauseless profusion.

  For example, “Sir, is it really true that there are no snakes in Ireland, sir?” would emerge as something like “Sriseeltroosnayxironss?”

  I heard myself plainly and was most hurt and offended when the same insulting word was thrown back at me again and again.

  “Don’t gabble, boy.”

  A solution was found by the school in the endearingly Margaret Rutherford form of an extraordinary old lady bedecked with amber beads, lavender water, wispy hair and a Diploma in the Science of Elocution. Every Wednesday and Friday she drove from Cheltenham to Uley in a car that looked like a gigantic Bayswater pram and trained me for an hour in the art of Diction.

  She would sit patiently at a table and say to me, dipping her head up from the table and blinking her eyelids with astonishing rapidity as she did so: “And turn it down! And turn it down!”

  I would obediently repeat, “Annidern, annidern.”

  “No, dear. ‘And-ah, turn-ah, it-ah, down-nn!’ You see?”

  “And-ah, turn-ah, it-ah, down-nn?”

  “I do not want you to say ‘and-ah, turn-ah,’ my dear. I want you to be aware that the ‘d’ at the end of the ‘and’ must not run into the ‘t’ at the beginning of ‘turn,’ do you see? And. Say ‘and’ for me.”

  “And.”

  Did she think I was a baby?

  “Good. Now ‘Turn.’ ”

  “Turn.”

  “And turn.”

  “Anturn.”

  “And-ah turn!”

  “And-ah turn!”

  Poor woman, she did get there in the end. She introduced me to the pleasure of hearing a progression of plosive and dental consonants—the sheer physical delight to be derived from the sounds and the sensations of the tongue on the teeth—by teaching me the tale of that extraordinarily persevering and stupid woman called Elizabeth, whose Shrove Tuesday misadventures with rancid butter teach us all how by striving, we might turn disaster into triumph. The story went like this.

  “Betty had a bit of bitter butter and put it in her batter and made her batter bitter. Then Betty put a bit of better butter in her bitter batter and made her bitter batter better.”

  From there we moved on to “She stood at the door of Burgess’ fish sauce shop, welcoming them in.”

  The standing at the door was fine—piece of piss—but the welcoming of them in nearly turned my tonsils inside out.

  “Yes, perhaps that one is too difficult for you, dear.”

  Too difficult? For me? Ha! I’d show her.

  Hours I spent one weekend mastering the art of welcoming them in. At the next lesson I enunciated it like Leslie Howard on benzedrine.

  “Very nice, dear. Now I should like you to say: ‘She stood at the door of Burgess’ fish sauce shop, welcoming him in.’ ”

  Aaaaagh! Disaster. I made a great run for it and fell to the ground in a welter of “mimming” and “innimming,” my larynx as tangled as a plate of spaghetti.

  “You see, my dear, I am not interested in you learning these sentences as if they were tongue twisters. I want you to try and feel how to talk. I want you to allow the words to come one after the other. I think you like to compress them all into one bunch. Your mind races ahead of your tongue. I would like your tongue to see the words ahead, each one a little flower on the wayside, that can only be picked up as you pass. Don’t try to snatch at a flower before you have reached it.”

  I wriggled in my seat at the soppiness of the image, but it did clarify things for me. Before long I was even able to tell the strange story of the blacksmith’s mother who wants to know just what her son thinks he’s up to with that set of saucepans:

  “Are you copper-bottoming ’em, my man?”

  “No. I�
��m aluminiuming ’em, Mum.”

  I was able to say the seething sea ceaseth, and thus sufficeth us, and able to imagine an imaginary menagerie manager, managing an imaginary menagerie.

  But many an anemone has an enemy, and her enemy was pace.

  “This is not a fifty-yard dash, my dear. I want you to love every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth. Every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth. What is it that I want you to love?”

  “Ev-ery single movement of my tongue and lips and teeth.”

  “Ev’ry, dear, not ev-ery. We do not wish, after all, to sound foreign. But you said there ‘tongue and lips and teeth.’ A few weeks ago you would have said ‘tung-nips-n-teeth,’ wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “And now you know our wonderful secret. How beautiful it is to hear every single movement of your tongue and lips and teeth.”

  We moved on from John Masefield’s “Cargoes” to Alfred Tennyson’s “Blow Bugle Blow” and within a term I was comprehensible to all. Like those foreigners in adventure stories who would come out with Caramba! Zut! and Himmel! when excited, I was still likely to revert to rushing streams of Stephenese at moments of high passion, but essentially I was cured. But something wonderful and new had happened to me, something much more glorious than simply being understood. I had discovered the beauty of speech. Suddenly I had an endless supply of toys: words. Meaningless phatic utterance for its own sake would become my equivalent of a Winnie the Pooh hum, my music. In the holidays I would torment my poor mother for hours in the car by saying over and over again “My name is Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton. Gwendoline Bruce Snetterton. Snetterton. Snetterton. Snetterton.” Ignoring the gender implications of such a name choice, which are not our concern just now, these were the only songs that I could sing. It was the journey from consonant to vowel, the tripping rhythm, the texture that delighted me. As others get tunes on their brain, I get words or phrases on the brain. I will awaken, for example, with the sentence “Hoversmack tender estimate” on my lips. I will say it in the shower, while I wait for the kettle to boil, and as I open the morning post. Sometimes it will be with me all day.