by Stephen Fry
I am sure that a great deal of good was done by these apostles of lucidity. A DHSS document that is impenetrable or equivocal insults, confuses and oppresses. What interests me however is the feeling I have that these outbursts can be seen now as part of the late seventies movement that prepared the way for She Whose Court Shoe Ribbons Peregrine Worsthorne and Roger Scruton Are Not Worthy To Tie. I am not suggesting for a moment that the strategy was deliberate, just that those Don Quixotes who tilted at the windmills of State, Socialism, the Town Hall and the University Sociologists believed language to be a crucial battleground. The modes of utterance which they ridiculed were typically, therefore, those of state institutions: the rhetoric of social science and left-wing orthodoxy. ‘To purify the dialect of the tribe’ was the mission, to return to the Addisonian virtues of common sense and plain-speaking.
But it isn’t so simple. The word ‘stone’ is not itself a stone, it is a kind of promissory note. If I use it, I will not be asked to fetch a stone to show what I mean, for the meaning of that particular word is generally understood, just as producing a banknote does not require me to go to Threadneedle Street to fetch the sliver of gold that the note promises to deliver. But were I to use the word ‘stone’, in its sense of a measure of weight, in America where they count weight in pounds, then I would have to convert it for them before I could use it, just as I would have to convert English money there before I could spend it. A common understanding is clearly a prerequisite to the use of linguistic currency.
But the language of what T.E. Hulme called ‘the capital letter moralists’, referring to those who were free with words like Justice and Reason and Virtue, assumes a common understanding of fundamental aims, beliefs and ideas which there is no evidence to suggest exists. Common sense and a common view of the world may well have been possible in the eighteenth century, but we know, or ought to know, better by now. For all its infelicities and inelegancies, the language of the sociologist or the left-wing historian is carefully politicised to take account of the fact that a neutral use of words like ‘equality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘decency’ is quite impossible. Those who tried to understand the world therefore devised quasi-scientific jargons which might well produce phrases like ‘meaningful relationships within an on-going familial context’ but which (unless you are such a donkey as to think the phrases are used to impress, when they so manifestly fail to do so) at least strive for an honest denotation of phenomena shorn of dubious connotations. But when today’s politician or guardian of public morals use words and phrases like ‘ordinary decent people’ or ‘morality and family life’ or ‘moderate thinking’ they are using words that have no more foundation in universal truth than do the propaganda buzzwords of Nazism, Communism or Christianity.
We take pride, or used to, in the plurality of our society, in its elasticity and tolerance. As we retreat politically and socially into more rigid structures, so the politicians take on a language of common assumptions and unchallengeable assertions. Returning to the banknote metaphor, a whole economic system is being built on a fundamentally unsound and illusory standard: there is nothing in the bank but dogma and declaration.
I am not so sure, after all, that I do not prefer the phrase ‘notionally limited scope for action within wider ambits and prescribed social parameters’ to the word ‘freedom’. At least I know where I am with it.
Compliant Complaint
This business of complaining. It worries me terribly. Part of the problem is that I have a rather snazzy alarm clock. I have abandoned the square pot of tea and spit in the face of boiling water that I was treated to by my old Goblin Teasmade and turned my back on the bleeping reveille that morbidly reminded me of those cardiographic blips that threaten to straighten out into a single tone, and have embraced with fervour a black box that contrives instead to jerk me from the dreamless with television. I know it’s a shameful luxury, but what with my secret diplomatic missions in the daytime and duties as a volunteer neurosurgeon at night, morning television is the only chance I get to peer into the magic eye. Don’t be too disgusted at my sybaritic lifestyle but the programme that usually evaporates the honey-heavy dew of my slumbers is called Open Air which begins at nine o’clock, goes away for a bit to make way for Kilroy and other such fantastic aberrations and then returns to sweep up the mess it’s made, round about eleven thirty.
Open Air is a weird charter for the mad people in this country. That this island is heaving and groaning with barkingly deranged citizens no one can doubt, what is so worrying is that they are given licence to parade their bizarre delusions on a daily basis. Take the snooker problem. Anyone with a mind to read the ratings can see at a glance that the World Professional Snooker Championships yield BBC2 just about its highest viewing figures for the year. In other words, snooker is remarkably popular. A great many people like it. Millions and millions. For seventeen days the tournament is covered by the BBC, chiefly on channel 2. And then for weeks afterwards people who probably watch ten minutes of BBC2’s normal output in a week write, telephone, fax and telex the BBC complaining that there is nothing but snooker on television, which aside from being a downright lie, seems to me to be a perfectly dismal and hopeless observation. Do they imagine that the BBC are going to throw away their chance to show an immensely popular sporting event just because Mrs Edith Plackett and a few hundred others don’t understand the rules and don’t want to watch it? You can bet your socks that half of those who gripe at snooker are glued to their sets during Wimbledon fortnight. If their televisions were only capable of receiving BBC2 one certainly might sympathise, but most of us can receive four channels and even if the other three are not offering programmes that appeal, does that mean we have to pester the poor schedulers with our fatuous prejudices?
That style of complaint is one thing, howling insane certainly, but relatively harmless: the BBC are not such donkeys as to take notice of the few hundred who complain when weighed against the fifteen million who watch. But unfortunately the corporation is not always so restrained. In radio especially, television’s fragile parent, management has a fatal tendency to disregard that arithmetic. The fallacy is to argue that if, out of two hundred calls and letters logged, seventy per cent register a dislike then the programme must be unpopular. But it is imperative to remember that at least ninety per cent of that two hundred could instantly be sectioned under the various mental health acts that exist to protect society from the damage that the boilingly mad can inflict. How is it that the views of the disturbed can hold sway over those of the balanced?
There was once a decent and jolly sort of radio sit-com called After Henry. My only worry was that the language, for something as well conceived and performed, was a little unrealistic. Too many ‘golly’s’ and ‘goshes’ for my taste. The odd ‘Christ’ and ‘bloody hell’ popped up, but too infrequently to suggest the reality of intelligent British speech, which as we know, uses blasphemous, coital and cloacal expletives as a matter of course. But even those few Gods, bloodies and hells were too much for the average Radio 4 listener. The senior executives in radio around this time started to issue terrifying edicts about language which have all but strangled the medium. Radio writers are now in the position of painters a few hundred years ago. If there are pudenda, let them be provocatively swathed in gauze. Single entendre is proscribed, but double entendre is acceptable. Another generation of children will be brought up to regard sexuality as a sordid adult world of guilt and fear, to be protected from them until they commit the crime of growing up.
It is time television management stopped regarding letters received as a sample of anything except the tortured ravings of those requiring urgent help. Normal people are too busy getting on with their lives to bother with writing to their family and friends let alone to broadcasting companies, and until this is realised and letters of complaint are automatically incinerated unread we will continue to be dictated to by the disordered.
How I Wrote This Article
Tut, tu
t … the man’s struggling. Only a few weeks after he wrote Absolutely Nothing At All he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel with an article about how to write an article … dodgy, distinctly dodgy.
I know it reeks of navel contemplation of the worst kind, but I thought it might interest you to know how this article was written. As a child of the communications revolution, the information technology boom and all the other electronic explosions that have taken place over the last few years I think I can justify such distasteful auto-omphalic scrutiny by stating that this article could not have been composed, proof-read and dispatched to The Listener in the way that it has been without the help of the kind of technological splendour which people claim, in a brow-clutching sort of way, they abominate much as a vegetarian abhors a veal chop.
The more banausic details of the piece’s composition are that it has been typed on a word-processor and delivered over the telephone via a fax machine. It is more interesting perhaps to concentrate on the parallel programs that operate with the word-processor and assist the harassed journo in his headlong rush towards the deadline. Let me talk a little more about my ‘kit’ as they would say in the army. I have a sound digitiser which enables me to talk into a microphone and have the computer welcome me when I turn it on. ‘Hello Stephen, good morning!’ it might say in my own voice or perhaps ‘Go on, make my day’ in Clint Eastwood’s. It is hardly a productive tool to anyone but a musician or radio producer, but how much better it is to have a monkey-screech or car-horn reminding you that you have mistyped than a dull computery sort of ‘beep’. I have available dozens of type-faces or ‘fonts’ as they are called in the trade. These range from the simple but elegant Times Roman, to the more elaborate Tiffany and Trump Medieval fonts, by way of Galliard, Garamond and Helvetica. There are thousands of colours available too, I have complete control over saturation and hue to achieve precisely the blend that most satisfies me. That takes care of the simple anal priorities, the sound and the look. These are equivalent to the feel and smell of the paper and the colours of inks and width of nibs with which writers used to be obsessed.
As well as footnote, table of contents, automatic hyphenation and indexing facilities, suitable for longer works, I have an ingenious option called ‘Smart Quotes’ which works out whether I want opening or closing quotation marks. Thus in the phrase ‘Smart Quotes’ I type the same inverted comma key and the clever machine knows how to handle the direction of curl. Similarly the ligatures ‘fi’ and ‘fl’ for ‘f i’ and ‘f l’ look after themselves (I hope the typesetter for The Listener is able to reproduce them or the foregoing sentence will be meaningless to you). Again these are anal concerns, but the output on a 300 dots per inch laser printer is of impressive quality and this fills one with confidence.
Now to the handling of the document itself: I have an on-line Thesaurus which enables me, when desperate, to find synonyms. Let’s try it on ‘desperate’: ‘Acute, critical, crucial, major, pressed, somber and unhappy’ are offered inter alia. That American spelling of ‘sombre’ leads me to tell you about the spelling checker. If I pass the text of this article as written so far through the on-line lexicon, the following words are queried: omphalic (quite understandable, why should it know such a pompous, sixth-form sort of a word?), banausic (ditto), fax, computery, harrassed (which it correctly told me should be spelt with only one ‘r’) and, amusingly, ‘somber’ (this is an English spelling checker).
So, the article is pretty, correctly spelt, and full of blisteringly accurate synonyms. But what of style? There is software for that too. ‘MacProof: The Macintosh Style-Checker’ can trawl my document for infelicities of style: sexist, racist and inelegant uses of language. It cleverly spotted that I had written ‘which which’ (a common double-typing easy to miss when proof-reading) earlier on. It frowned on the use of the word ‘per’ in the phrase ‘300 dots per inch’ saying it preferred ‘a’, ‘for each’ or ‘for every’. It accused me of too much of what it called ‘nominalization’, turning verbs into nouns: offering as general advice that the sentence ‘The recreation of Paul Revere’s ride by the Historical Society was beautifully done’ is better rendered as ‘The Historical Society re-created Paul Revere’s ride beautifully.’ Otherwise I was cleared of sexist or racist usage and the text was positively vetted as free of vague or overworked expressions.
I turn next to perhaps the most indispensable aid of all: the Word Count. I find that I have typed 887 words so far. Too much: I shall have to go back and prune. I am allowed 830, at a pinch 850.
Well there you have it. One fresh, stylish, clear and bouncing article, now reduced to 842 words. Boring though, isn’t it?1
1Yes, ed.
Tear Him for his Bad Verses
If Salman Rushdie is still alive by the time this article emerges from the print-room, and I do hope he is, I wonder if he is considering how fortunate he is not to have written a novel in medieval Britain which contained any criticism of Christ. If certain members of the Islamic faith are a little overzealous in their protection of the good name and offices of their Prophet, then they are as kittens compared to an affronted Christian of the old school. A mad Mohammedan might riddle you with bullets and scream a lot, but at least he won’t tear the skin from your body, slowly draw out your entrails and preach you a homily on your soul’s purity while doing so. Not, I appreciate, that this is much of a consolation to the beleaguered Mr Rushdie, who would rather stay alive than be a martyr to artistic freedom any day of the week, I should imagine, but the thought might take his mind off the more terrible daily anxieties. He might also chat to his armed body-guards, in between games of Pass the Pig and Crambo, on the subject of Cinna. He was the Roman, you remember, who was not Cinna the Conspirator, one of the assassins of Julius Caesar, but was Cinna the Poet. The mob decided he had better die anyway: ‘Tear him for his bad verses,’ summed up the popular feeling at the time. I dare say in Bradford this very day there is a Salman Rushdie the Pastry-cook who is going about the place in fear and trembling lest he might be torn for his bad biscuits.
I am about to embark on a novel myself next week, writing one that is, I’m not ready to read one yet, and I have been puzzling over what subject I could possibly treat which would have me walking in fear of death. I can’t think of many. But it is interesting and, frankly, not unworrying, to think that I could endanger myself, my publishers, and all good booksellers, just by making a few flippant remarks about the Prophet.
We cannot underestimate the enormity of what has happened to Salman Rushdie. He is forty years old. He knows that for the rest of his life he is under a sentence of death. This year he will probably escape the bullet, and next I expect. But in five years’ time? Will the police continue to protect him: would the expense be considered justifiable in the year 2000? To the Islamic fundamentalist there is no statute of limitations. They do not forget or forgive. We’ve all seen movies about the Mafia informer who is given a new identity after shopping his boss and moves from city to city, never settling, never making friends. The contract is out and he cannot sleep easy. The contract is out on Rushdie now and there are in Britain alone, it is thought, a thousand who would want to honour it for their eternal soul’s sake. Quite simply can you imagine the horror of seeing a life of fear stretch out in front of you? I really believe that the Rushdie Affair constitutes one of the most extraordinary international incidents of the decade.
We are forced to examine every idea we think permanent and unchallengeable. Try to imagine persuading a Moslem fundamentalist that Rushdie has a right to live. ‘But he insulted the Prophet, he must die,’ is the response. ‘But tolerance,’ you protest, ‘if he insulted Christ there would be a lot of fuss, a few apoplectic bishops would appear on The Late Show, but he wouldn’t be killed.’ ‘But Mohammed is the Prophet, Christ is not.’ That is the crux. The Islamic fundamentalists do believe, are sure, that there is only one prophet and his name is Mohammed and they do not accept that everyone has a right to a point of view if it
is going to be a wrong one. ‘If we are actually right, then it is absurd to be tolerant of those who are wrong.’ They are not interested in freedom of expression, they are interested in correct expression, they cannot be argued into thinking their point of view shameful. We can see the difference, or think we can, but our own faith in tolerance prohibits us from being as intolerant of Islam’s point of view as Islam is of ours. But we can’t sit by and let a novelist be murdered just because it would be intolerant meddling to fight for his right to say anything. Can we?
We must recognise just how little we have succeeded in exporting the revolution in enlightenment, tolerance and freedom that has been going on in the West, in fits and starts, for the last two or three hundred years and now have to wonder whether our revolution, by definition passive, is going to endure the violent passion of that in the East.
I think my novel is going to be about a dormouse called Clive and a hedgehog called Timothy and the adventures they have together in the forest. It’s safer. Mind you the Animal Rights activists these days …
Oh dear, I’ll play safe and set it in South Kensington.
The following appeared in the Christmas 1987 issue of The Listener:
The literary editor, when clearing out her office preparatory to the move to The Listener’s new quarters, discovered a bundle of papers wedged at the back of a drawer. The find appeared to be an autograph manuscript of a previously unpublished Sherlock Holmes story. Uncertain of its authenticity, she asked Stephen Fry, a noted Sherlockian, to edit the text and reflect on its provenance.
