by Stephen Fry
I cannot of course comment on a specific case that is sub judice, but it may be that acts of this nature can be argued to be consensual. Dolphins, after all, are highly intelligent animals with a language and etiquette all of their own – they even have schools, probably better run than our own. It may be therefore that they like nothing better than a little interspecies congress from time to time. You do not have to be a perverted French Structuralist or a formalist anthropologian to discern elements of the erotic in many of the myths and fables concerning mankind and the dolphins, from Arion to My Friend Flipper.
I dare say the details of this case will emerge, but what intrigues me at the moment is the preparation that must have gone into the procuring of this creature for sexual purposes, or indeed porpoises. You cannot, in my experience, roam the streets, even of Manchester, on the expectation of finding available dolphins. Some careful planning is necessary. A jemmy, wire-cutters, swimming-trunks and an underwater torch would seem to be minimal requirements. For the more romantic sexual adventurer a bunch of plankton and a box of herrings would surely be a sine qua non.
Once, through the usual contacts, one has obtained the name and address of a likely dolphin, the chances are that it will be found to be in captivity and therefore already reduced to the awful indignity of having to perform all kinds of futile and demeaning tricks on the promise of a slither of stale cod and a pat on the nose, a kind of prostitution in itself which more and more people are looking on as quite as lewd, obscene and disgusting as any private act of poolside, moonlight passion.
It is not for me to read motives of the purest love into what may, after all, have been a squalid and bungled affair. When animals behave improperly with humans, as stallions and bulls often will, magistrates often take a lenient view; their lusts are excused, ours are not. Perhaps this is just.
On a legal note, I believe one can never be indicted for committing, or attempting to commit, an act which is impossible. A man some years ago was found not guilty of behaving indecently with a duck on the grounds that it is actually a physical impossibility to do any such thing, whether because ducks as a species are generally held to be so lost to shame and so sunk in sin that they are incorruptible or because of the limitations of their physical dimensions I have no idea. In any case it was a startling precedent.
As usual we fail as a civilisation to take into account our heritage. We happily accept from the Ancient Greeks all those principles of logic, mathematics, democracy, architecture and equilateral triangles, thinking we can also escape the inheritance of blood-feuds, incest and barbarism. These things are bred in the bone. Zeus performed acts with swans and heifers that would debar him from every London club except the Garrick or possibly the Naval and Military. We inherit our culture from a people who said ‘A woman for necessity, a boy for pleasure and a goat for ecstasy’. Somewhere in that heady spectrum there may well be room for dolphins, ocelots and, given suitable clothing, hedgehogs and spiny anteaters too.
I wonder if history will judge it a worse crime for one man to try to do to one dolphin what we have been successfully doing to the whole species for years.
My Sainted Aunt
It is curious, is it not, how an entire nation can change its habits, its personality and even its pathology, within a generation? Not long ago men wore hats and smoked. It was almost a rule. Look at news-reel of any public meeting, from Ascot to the hustings, and you will see men topped by headjoy of all kinds and cupping cigarettes in their hands as they walk and talk. Cinemas, music halls and theatres had hanging over them a permanent blue mist of smoke. Good news was greeted by a wild up-throwing of hattage; what scrambles for repossession occurred seconds after these impulsive acts, I have no idea. Hats and smoking materials were so universal that no self-respecting comedian would take the stage without being master of hat and cigarette material. W.C. Fields, the master, could do things with a boater, a cane and a cigar that put one in mind of what Mozart could do with crotchets, accidentals and a borrowed treble clef.
I had a great-aunt, now gathered to God, I am sorry to say, whom I used to visit as often as I could. Whenever I crossed her threshold she would sit me down and push towards me a silver box which contained a handful of cigarettes of incalculable vintage.
‘No really, Aunt,’ I would protest.
‘Fudge and fiddlesticks,’ she would say, there was always something of David Copperfield’s Aunt Betsy about her, ‘I like to see a man smoke.’ So I would be forced to take one of her monstrously stale gaspers and smoke it, while she looked on, nodding contentedly. All was as it should be: she was sipping sherry, I was smoking. She had never herself smoked, and I suspected that her nonagenarian lungs would, if offered a vote, have rather that I refrain from billowing clouds in their direction, but conditioning is all.
Today conditioning is working in the opposite direction. The circumstance is at its most noticeable in theatres. There are many plays, notably anything written between 1900 and 1970, which call for the consumption of cigarettes. Noël Coward plays have cigarettes written into them at what one suspects were strategically timed moments for the comfort and convenience of Noël himself, as actor.
There is nothing more pleasurable in life than acting in a play set in a drawing-room. Those poor dears who work for our great subsidised theatre companies are always having to perform without legitimate cigarette moments, on abstract rostra, dressed in leather often with (my personal nightmare) bare arms. Those locked forearm Roman salutes that RSC actors are forced to give each other as they march on stage babbling of mighty Caesar’s power growing in the north are the very reason that I have always eschewed the great classical roles. That and not possessing the kind of calf that can carry off a pair of tights. Looking back on this last sentence I am given to wonder what a foreigner learning English would make of it, after consulting a dictionary. ‘That and not owning the sort of young cow that is able to transport away two drunks,’ would be a possible and baffling translation.
However. Coward, Maugham, Rattigan, Orton, Pinter, Osborne, Gray and Stoppard all wrote cigarettes into their plays. What happens today when an actor lights a cigarette on stage? In a picosecond, before the smoke has had the opportunity to travel into the actor’s lungs, let alone the lungs of anyone else, dozens of people go into loud, disapproving coughing fits; kind of ‘how dare you, did you not know that my doctor has officially told me that I am allergic to smoke?’ fits. Those same people, had they been born a generation earlier, would have sat, as a matter of course, in public places swirling with smoke and failed to cough. Today they splutter like a cuckolded water buffalo at the very sight of what is usually only a herbal cigarette anyway, actors like everyone else being abstainers these days. Conditioning again.
With the anti-smoking lobby seriously attempting to force Hollywood to cut smoking scenes out of their past films (imagine Casablanca and Now, Voyager without cigarettes) and the general and no doubt laudable bans on smoking in public places, one wonders how soon it will be before plays have cigarettes written out of them. Fictional characters can be seen to murder their wives, embezzle from their employers and wear appallingly ill-cut suits and no complaints are heard. Let them be seen with a cigarette dangling between their lips, however, and we never hear the last of it.
Fiddlesticks, as my aunt would say. Fiddlesticks and humgudgeon.
A Simple Backwardsman
Last week I was given a ride in an RAF Jaguar. This week I was at a literary festival in the West Country. From way on high to Hay-on-Wye.
In the company of that very nice Nigel Forde who presents Radio 4’s Bookshelf, Philip Howard of The Times, and Jane Mills a feminist etymologist who will need, I know, no introduction from me, I had been invited to talk about ‘The State of the Language’.
There was a great deal of unanimity on the panel. We all thought that language was alive and well. It is, as Philip Howard pointed out, the only true democracy, changed by those who use it. The audience was less sure, many f
elt that it was degenerating. Hopefully, disinterested, different to, different from, different than and many other bugaboos were raised. It is, of course, hard sometimes to be confident about the future of the language when the President of the largest English-speaking nation on earth is capable, as George Bush is, when opening a museum extension in Houston, of saying ‘this wonderful institution of which we are all so proudful’.
I was able to lower the standard even further by contributing a sentence that ends with seven prepositions one after the other. Perhaps you know it? You must imagine a young child whose mother has gone downstairs to find a book for the bedtime story. She comes up with a volume about Australia. The child cannot understand such a monstrous choice. ‘Mother, what on earth did you bring a book to read out of about Down Under up for?’
While we are on the subject there is a sentence of perfectly good English which contains the word ‘and’ five times in a row. Again there is a scenario to be imagined. I want you to picture two cheerful sign-writers; we shall call them Miroslav and Neville because we are in that sort of mood. Miroslav is doing the lettering for the Pig and Whistle’s new pub-sign in a small village just outside Nailsworth, whose name I forget. Neville looks on. He cocks his head to one side, then to the other. He takes a step back. He is worried about the spacing between the words. Neville is very much the perfectionist of the pair. Miroslav is sometimes a disappointment to him. Miroslav looks anxiously as Neville continues to gaze at the sign. At last Neville speaks.
‘It’s all wrong, Miroslav. The spacing. It’s all wrong.’
‘How is it wrong?’ asks Miroslav, stung.
‘You want a bigger gap between “Pig” and “and”, and “and” and Whistle,’ says Neville.
I suppose such games and puzzles are frivolous but I have to confess that I adore them and, at the risk of turning into the Gyles Brandreth of the party, for whom everyone tiptoes silently away, I will offer a palindrome for you. Palindromes, words or phrases that read the same backwards and forwards, are usually interesting only if they make good sense. The first words ever spoken were of course a palindrome, ‘Madam, I’m Adam’. Not many other palindromes that I know are especially coherent. ‘Niagara, O roar again,’ and Napoleon’s lament, ‘Able was I ere I saw Elba’, have a charm of course, but my favourite palindrome, while being a true sentence, makes very little sense at all, I am sadful to say. It has the compensating distinction, however, of including the word ‘oscillate’. I don’t know about you, but I think there is something uplifting, ennobling almost, about a universe which allows for the possibility of a palindrome which contains the word ‘oscillate’. I will reveal the sentence in about the only context in which it can make sense in a moment.
The Dog Days are upon us, so I am holding a competition. Whoever comes up with what is, in my opinion, the best new palindrome, will win a cassette of the recently departed Wilhelm Kempff’s recording of three Beethoven sonatas, numbers 8, 14 and 15. This recording has been digitally remastered onto the best quality metal tape. This is not inconsequential detail, but highly relevant, as you will see. In order to qualify, the palindrome should be a proper sentence: the more sense it makes the better. The closing date for entries will be Friday 21 June.
The proudful winner will be in a unique, or an unique if you prefer, position. He or she will be able to place his or her prize cassette on a table, draw the curtains, light candles and offer up this prayer to the Evil One: ‘Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.’
Goodbye, Fat Owl
So Billy Bunter bites the dust. Banned from the shelves of Lincolnshire school libraries (Telegraph 10 June) because he is ‘old hat’. Of course, as every schoolboy knows, Bunter was never new hat. Frank Richards his creator was not a public school man nor were most of the readers who followed the exploits of the Fat Owl and his tolerant contemporaries, Nugent, Wharton, Mauleverer, Cherry, Quelchie and the rest. For a time Richards occupied, and may still, the pages of the Guinness Book of Records as the most industrious writer that ever was. The Bunter written about at such breakneck pace lived in a fantastically implausible world, shorn of credible social or local detail, a world which revolved solely around stolen cakes, common rooms in which to frowst, expected postal orders from Bunter Court and cellars filled with tuck-boxes. To call such pleasingly ludicrous drivel ‘old hat’ is itself foolishly outdated and comically inappropriate.
There are embarrassing emendments in the current Penguin editions of the two great P.G. Wodehouse school stories, Mike and Mike and Psmith. These noble pearls on the necklace of literature were produced in 1909 and originally contained references to contemporary cricketers of the Golden Age. As a result of some lamentable rush of blood to the head on the part of the publishers these references were updated in the 1950s. The language was not, nor the mention of servants, nor the description of a retired soldier who had served on the North-West Frontier: only the references to cricketers. The editions available in bookshops today contain therefore the anomaly of a credible Edwardian world that inexplicably features Trueman, Sheppard, May and Compton. This is not old hat, it is odd hat: the kind of hat that even Gertrude Shilling would baulk at wearing. It may occur to the present publishers that the neatest solution to this problem would be to update once more and replace Trueman with de Freitas, Sheppard with Ramprakash, May with Gooch and Compton with Hick. Should they decide to do so I swear, here and now, on the souls of my grandchildren as Don Corleone used to say, that I will devote the rest of my life to hunting these publishers down like animals and stabbing their softer parts with the sharp end of a cricket stump.
It is the mark of a confident and prosperous society that they adhere to the great American adage ‘if it ain’t bust, don’t fix it’. Nothing could prove more to the world how hesitant and unsure of ourselves we are than our futile interference with things that would be best left alone. Telephone boxes and Routemaster double-decker buses are an obvious, indeed hackneyed, example: stamps and currency notes another. It is a rule that the larger, bolder and more fluorescent the postage stamp, the more fragile and uncertain the society. When I collected stamps as a child I was entranced by those vast, triangular Day-Glo nonsenses with ‘Polska’ or ‘Uruguay’ written in large letters across them. When it got to the point that you could barely fit two to a page, you could be certain that there was about to be a bloody coup d’état or a more than usually merciless purge in that particular nation state. Britain continued on its gracious course of small, dull-coloured oblongs with discreet cameo-style busts of the reigning monarch until the dread arrival of those hideous Christmas stamps painted by four-year-old children. There followed a succession of horrors depicting Great British Monuments; Shakespeare, the GPO, Churchill, antiseptic surgery, vaccinations and all the rest of it. Proud achievements all, but how lowering it is to realise that we have become so paranoid and insecure that we have to crow about them.
America, supposedly the land of the brash and vulgar, sees no need to put Bogart and Edison on the back of its dollar bills, indeed it is happy to let its currency worry along as it has done for most of this century; green, grave, modest and positively vibrating with power and assurance. We sad British have repeatedly to squeak the word ‘heritage’ and swank to the rest of the world, but chiefly to ourselves, about our former glory, indulging in pitiful squabbles about whether it should be Shakespeare or Faraday who ‘makes it’ to the back of our twenty-pound notes.
Bunter was the walking, or at least bouncing, embodiment of greed, indolence, dishonesty and whining vulgarity. If I weren’t in such a good mood after Monday’s victory at Headingley1 I would be inclined to suggest that he would be the best candidate yet for a brand new British twenty-pound note.
1England had just beaten the West Indies in a Test Match at home for the first time in twenty years.
And the Winner is …
In a spirit of cautious enquiry I wondered, two weeks ago, whether any Telegraph readers might be able to come up with some original p
alindromes. The response has been awesome. For the simple reason that God decided to put a measly twenty-four hours into a day and no more than seven days into one week it is sadly impossible for me to reply to every one of the hundreds of letters I have received on that, and related, subjects.
Over a hundred wrote with variations on the ‘Smith, where Jones had had had …’ scenario, which contains eleven hads in a row, and many readers offered sentences containing seven consecutive ands, as well as other word puzzles of intriguing diversity and ingenuity, for all of which I am very grateful.
It was pleasant to learn of W.H. Auden’s facility with palindromes; I suppose it is natural that so great a logophile and prosodist would have had a natural turn at all verbal tricks. His view of T.S. Eliot is worth reprinting here. According to Mr Phillips of Hampshire and others he cabled a friend this opinion: ‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I’d assign it a name: “Gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.” ’ Auden is also credited with ‘Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus’ and this rather neat summing up of the rival claims of photography and art from the point of view of a resentful painter. ‘A limner, by photography dead bent in competition, thus grumbled: “No, it is opposed, art sees trades opposition.” ’ According to Mr Phillips the first sentence of a romantic novel by Auden entitled I Can’t Have Norm begins, ‘Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.’
