by Stephen Fry
The following joke is often heard in theatres throughout Britain during the pantomime season.
UGLY SISTER 1: Whenever I’m down in the dumps, I buy myself a new hat.
UGLY SISTER 2: So that’s where you get them from.
Not guaranteed to cause everyone to fall off their seats and writhe around on the floor barking with laughter perhaps, but a perfectly adequate gaglet.
For myself, whenever I am down in the dumps I buy myself a new piece of software. I lavish on my computer a love and loyalty that others prefer to expend on their pets, their cars or their collections of erotic bookplates. The latest confection with which I have tried to tempt the jaded palate of my machine is a perfectly extraordinary program called GRAM•MAT•IK™ Mac. Please don’t ask me to explain the bullets between the letters, I suspect the tmesis is necessary for copyright reasons, as is the unusual spelling of the word ‘grammatic’. ‘Mac’ refers to the fact that my computer is called a Macintosh, named after the variety of apple, not the impermeable raincoat, of that name.
The purpose of GRAM•MAT•IK™ Mac is to assist the writer by proof-reading his scripts and texts and offering grammatical and stylistic advice. Perhaps the most bizarre feature offered is a ‘comparison chart’ in which the user’s writing is measured against three different prose styles: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Ernest Hemingway’s short stories and a Life Insurance Policy (author unknown). The writer is awarded marks for readability, according to two alarming criteria known as the Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level and the Gunning’s Fog Index. The writer is also told to which High School Grade his writing is equivalent. In common with most Britons I have not the faintest understanding of the American educational system and wouldn’t know a Grade Point Average from a sophomore, so I cannot tell whether the fact that my writing consistently achieves an Eleventh Grade standard is good or bad. It may mean that I write like an eleven-year-old, it may mean that I am Marcel Proust; I think I am happier not knowing.
I have just passed every word of the above through the program to see what the computer would make of what I have already written today. The very first sentence of this article, I am afraid, was challenged. GRAM•MAT•IK™ Mac has a downer on the passive voice. ‘Consider revising, using active voice. See Help for more information,’ it commanded. I was also told to replace the word ‘assist’ with the word ‘help’, the word ‘achieve’ with the word ‘get’ and the phrase ‘the fact that’ with the word ‘because’.
On the Flesch–Kincaid level I achieved or ‘got’ a 12, which means, I am sorry to say, that my prose is ‘difficult for most readers’. Averages of 4.66 letters and 1.5 syllables per word, on the other hand, compare favourably with a Life Insurance Policy. At 23.6 words per sentence, I am almost exactly level with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address which has 23.4, but nowhere near Hemingway’s sparse 13.5. I can be pleased, apparently, that 12.7 per cent of the total words are prepositions, but must work on my over-reliance on the passive voice.
Monday’s leader in the Telegraph fared little better. A convincing piece on Mr Hurd’s visit to Hong Kong was excoriated for over-use of the word ‘unacceptable’. This shows a lamentable unfamiliarity with the correct style of Telegraph leaders in general. I, for one, hope the day never dawns when a Telegraph leader fails to use the word ‘unacceptable’ at least four times.
The leader writer’s paragraph lengths were also abused. ‘Paragraphs may be too long for most readers to follow. Try reorganising ideas into shorter logical units,’ was the program’s advice.
A Flesch–Kincaid level of 14 means the writing is ‘difficult for most readers’ and represents a High School level ‘above the 11th grade’.
Well, having forked out good money for this program, I am loath to call it a useless and impertinent piece of junk, so I shall go on, for the time being, testing myself against it.
Something may happen over the weeks. My style may change. It may remind you of Hemingway. He was a great writer. He used short sentences. His writing was good. He knew it was good. He knew it was good because his Gunning’s Fog Readability Index was high. He never used the passive voice. He thought adverbs were cissy. He never said ‘the fact that’. He preferred to say ‘because’. He liked to say ‘gotten’ instead of ‘achieved’.
He has gotten himself a reputation. He was tough. He wore a beard. He drank. He fished for marlin and bonefish. He shot. He even shot himself. Perhaps he shot himself because he thought his life was too long, like a bad sentence.
Perhaps he thought his life was too passive.
Who can say?
Careering All Over the Place
Vermeer is probably the only artist who could successfully have painted my schooldays. Having to depict all those floors in his interiors made him the absolute master of rendering the chequered and you simply don’t get more chequered in this world than my unfortunate schooldays.
One of the few schools at which I was allowed to stay long enough to unpack boasted, as well as all the usual staff, a careers officer. This man’s job, so far as I could tell, was to get each pupil to fill in a form and, on the basis of the answers given, to tell him what job he was fit for in later life. Like any sinecure of this kind, the post of careers officer was exclusively reserved for retired naval officers. Admirals got the job of bursar, commanders naturally expected the post of careers man.
It was part of the careers officer’s duties to maintain an office stuffed with glossy brochures and prospectuses so that those who wished to find out what life was like with Proctor & Gamble or Penguin Books could read all about those incomparable institutions. The office (being deserted for nine tenths of the time and secured with a childishly simple lock) became for me a bolt-hole from which to escape the attentions of authority or in which to enjoy a quiet smoke.
While frowsting in this refuge I used to read the files on those boys, senior to me, who had been sent for to fill in their career forms. It became clear that the job of careers officer was money for the oldest of old rope. To the question: ‘What sort of career to you envisage for yourself?’ a subject might answer: ‘Doctor’. After a few more queries about ‘working with other people’ and O level results, the careers officer would write at the bottom, ‘should be a doctor’. If the applicant had written ‘Don’t know’ in answer to the first question, the officer would scribble instead ‘Accountant?’
After my O levels, it was my turn to complete the form. Next to the first question, ‘What sort of career to you envisage for yourself?’ I wrote, naturally, ‘School Careers Officer’. Beside this answer the careers officer, I discovered when I hoicked out my own folder on my next visit to his office for a soothing Embassy Filter, had written ‘Comedian, eh?’
I like to think, therefore, that I am one of the very few people in the world who has taken his careers officer’s advice.
The great joy about living the kind of life I do, I have always imagined, is in being able to pursue a kind of Bohemian ideal. There is no point in writing and acting for a living, it seems to me, unless you are prepared to smoke in bed, get up late, wear clothes that are comfortable to the point of squalor and be loose in your morals and language. It may be a struggle to live up to these ideals, but whether we like it or not, they go with the territory. I have always therefore been very surprised by those colleagues of mine who have turned themselves into limited companies and taken to producing their own television shows and running offices filled with secretaries, photocopiers and espresso machines. I suppose the word I am groping towards is responsibility. The moment you start hiring squads of assistants and telephonists you are responsible for others. I yield to none in my admiration for managers and the officer class in general, but some flaw in my character has always caused me to be terrified of hiring, firing and giving orders.
Politicians, of course, by the very nature of Parliamentary democracy, have a great deal of responsibility. They cannot be loose in their morals or language; they cannot wear pyjamas until five in the
afternoon and for all I know are forbidden by their Whips to smoke in bed.
In some moment of madness I agreed, last week, to appear with politicians, on the BBC’s Question Time. As the supposedly ‘non-aligned’ figure on the programme I could not decide whether it is easier to answer a question as an independent soul or whether the strictures of partisan discipline give one a simple line with which to respond. Everyone was hugely nice and jovial and not in the least pompous, off air at least. At one point, however, the audience was accused of being partisan. I noticed a letter endorsing that opinion published in this newspaper.
The BBC get very upset about this accusation. Every audience applicant has to fill in a form full of details about voting habits, jobs, hair length and all sorts of apparently irrelevant factors. Audiences are then chosen to reflect what is designed to be a rigorously representative cross-section of British society. I have the greatest faith in this system. I believe in filling in forms.
It is perfectly possible, after all, that the questionnaires were drafted by the same people who designed the careers forms for my old school.
Tolerance to Disease
Ten years ago (in May 1981) an article appeared on page twenty of the New York Times. It reported an outbreak of a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, in forty-one previously healthy men, aged twenty-six to fifty-one. A Dr Alvin E. Friedman-Kien of the New York University Medical Centre said that he had tested nine of these men and ‘found severe defects in their immunological systems’.
By the same time the following year everyone had heard of AIDS, a disease communicated by the infection of the blood by the retroactive virus HIV. In this country, as in America, it became clear that the overwhelming majority of those who had contracted the disease fell into three categories: homosexual men, intravenous drug users and haemophiliacs.
For a time the pestilence attracted the hysterical attention of the press, primarily in the case of the tabloids because of the thrill involved in chronicling the affliction of famous people like Rock Hudson and Liberace. Wild rumours flew around suggesting that the disease originated from Haitian pigs or Central African monkeys with whom disastrously adventurous American tourists had enjoyed unorthodox intimacy. The Globe newspaper in America put forward in all seriousness the theory that AIDS was part of the curse of Tutankhamen and that the virus had been released when his tomb was opened in 1922, reaching America when an exhibition toured in the 1970s.
None of these theories, for all their freakishness, can match the appalling truth of the Western world’s reception of this disease. It is held by many Christians here and abroad that AIDS is a visitation from God, sent down to punish those whose life-styles the Almighty finds reprehensible. This is one of the most startling and disturbing ideas to have emerged from a species already renowned for its fatheadedness and unwillingness to reason that I have ever heard. We are supposed to imagine a Divine Being who for centuries has gazed down on earth and witnessed daily acts of cruelty, wickedness, violence, tyranny and merciless hatred without ever raising a hand to interfere; a Divine Being who, since the Ark, has vowed never to involve himself in Mankind’s affairs, but who, late in the twentieth century, decides that those who roll around with same-gendered friends or who, like thousands of respectable Victorians before them, decide to fill their brains with a distillation of poppy juice, are meet to be destroyed by the most unpleasant, lethal and ruthless plague that ever the earth has seen. What kind of Divine Being could be so capricious, cruel and irrational as to behave like that? Where is the disease that affected only concentration camp guards? Where the virus that strikes down the torturers of children, the corrupt, the murderous and the despotic?
Well, it may be argued that only a fundamentalist fringe can dare hold such desperate beliefs. But there is an apparently less extreme view that argues that those who contracted the disease through blood transfusions, primarily the haemophiliacs, are somehow ‘innocent’ sufferers. This implies of course that the rest are guilty, and therefore somehow less deserving of our pity. Pity, however, is not subject to computation, qualification or contingency. It, like mercy, droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. Certainly one could argue that anyone who becomes HIV positive today must have done so by disregarding simple advice freely available for years and is therefore foolish. But when we begin to divide the world into the deserving and the undeserving, as the Victorians did with the poor, we are turning our backs on every decent human impulse.
How would Christ have behaved in this situation? Would he distinguish and discriminate, would he pronounce judgment? It seems unlikely that a man who touched lepers and befriended sinners would ally himself with those who crow and rub their hands with barely disguised pleasure at the misery and suffering this disease has brought. He might well say ‘Go and sin no more,’ but he would say that as much to the bank-manager, the priest and the politician as to the homosexual. We are, after all, all of us sinners. Christ is still the man who said, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’
Ten years into the development of the disease, if the advice of the Princess of Wales that when we meet someone with AIDS we hug them is taken up, then perhaps some actual good may have come of this affliction, something that improves us as well as those who are suffering.
For it is sure that even if AIDS lasts a thousand years it will never claim as many lives as intolerance already has and daily continues to do.
A Strange Man
There was a strange man on the wireless the other day. Nothing new there, radio has become more or less a home from home for strange men. When Marconi took his very first working set to the patent office I am sure he listed as one of the advantages of his system the possibility that strange men would one day be taken from the streets and given refuge around a green baize table with nothing but a microphone and other strange men for company. Radio has developed a function, not unlike that of London clubs, in creating safe havens for the deranged and deluded of the realm.
The strange man I am referring to was a ‘witness’ on the Radio 4 programme The Moral Maze. I usually find that my moral requirements are met by The Archers, from the ethics of mineral water bottling to the duties of pig-keeping, but there are those who need more, and for them the programmers have provided The Moral Maze. This week’s episode addressed the subject of censorship. The strange man was brought on to argue that we should certainly censor not just our artistic product, like films and television, but also our journalistic output. What possible interest could be served, he wondered, by covering stories of violence and disturbance in countries thousands of miles away? His children did not need to be exposed to this kind of thing.
On the subject of films, he remarked that the crazed soul who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan had watched the film Taxi Driver and had emulated in his dress and modus operandi the film’s hero, Travis Bickle. He also maintained that Michael Ryan had been imitating Rambo when he terrorised Hungerford. Anyone with an interest in films would agree, I suspect, that Taxi Driver is a superb film, one of the very best ever made, and that First Blood, Rambo and Rambo II are frankly dreadful. Whether this is relevant I do not know, it certainly did not concern the witness.
A point not raised was the circumstance, of which we are all aware, that a great many serial killers, far more than is comfortable, are actuated by motives which spring from a close reading of the Bible. Peter Sutcliffe and many others who went about the place ‘cleaning up’ the streets, ridding the world of prostitutes and sinners, claimed to have heard in their ears the voice of God and the words of St John from the Book of Revelation. I have not heard a call to suppress the Bible for this reason, nor would such a call be reasonable. Perverted minds have used the Bible as a pretext for antisemitism, violence, tyranny and torture many times in our history. One perverted mind seems to have used Taxi Driver to endorse an attempt on the life of a statesman. I am not claiming that Taxi Driver is as great an achievement as the Bible, that would be nonsense, b
ut the principle remains the same.
We are suffering, perhaps as a result of the rise of training at the expense of education, from a notable lowering in the understanding of fiction and what it means. There is a character in a West End play at the moment who, preparing her defence in an action brought against her by a Royal Shakespeare Company actress, talks disparagingly about what she imagines to be a typical RSC audience. ‘Who goes to the RSC?’ she asks. ‘Eight rows of ponces on the mailing list and fifteen hundred extremely browned off schoolchildren.’ A review of this play in a serious newspaper the following day asked, ‘Does the playwright seriously believe that this is an accurate reflection of what constitutes a Stratford audience?’ They may as well have said, ‘Does Mr Shakespeare really think it is acceptable for people to strangle their wives on the evidence of nothing more than a dropped handkerchief and a few whispered insinuations?’
Perhaps we are to develop into a society in which warnings are pasted onto written works, as they now are on cigarette lighters, penknives and plastic bags. I should say, therefore, that if anyone takes this article as an encouragement to put their hands in their pockets, smoke in the street or slouch yobbishly, I take no responsibility. If this article happens to end all war and strife, I happily take the credit.
Fun With Dolphins
What do you get when you cross a kangaroo with a sheep? A woolly jumper. Everyone knows that. What do you get when you cross a Mancunian with a dolphin? A court case. Perhaps you missed the article in yesterday’s Telegraph in which it was revealed that a Mancunian (male, 38) has been arraigned for allegedly committing an act of a lewd, obscene and disgusting nature with a dolphin, whose name, gender and age have been withheld to protect the animal and its family from further embarrassment. A lewd act, you might think, would be bad enough; a lewd and obscene act throws into doubt one’s whole faith in mankind; a lewd, obscene and disgusting act really gives one occasion to wonder what the world is coming to. Only heavy and relentless counselling, one supposes, can save the dolphin from being traumatised, socially damaged and possibly – in that awful cycle that so characterises acts of sexual impropriety – from becoming itself an abuser and forging another link in the chain of degradation that will pass even unto the tenth generation.
