Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  We all stare at Mr Rushdie with open mouths, awestruck. We are not awestricken by his courage or even by the sight of an Asian complexion now white from withdrawal from the sun. We stare instead, if we are honest, like those who drive past the aftermath of a car-crash, like those who gawp at photographs of AIDS victims in the press.

  Just as Mr Rushdie’s skin is blanched from years in the shadows, so his case now has been deprived (if you will pardon Analogizer™ once more) of the ultra-violet of public attention. It is rickety with neglect.

  Whether you have read his book or not, whether it is a consummate work of art and the imagination or pretentious opportunistic nonsense, whether he is right wing or left wing; whatever our national policy on ‘normalisation’ of relations with Iran, whatever our views on fiction, religion, politics or race the simple truth remains that Mr Rushdie is a hostage in his own country. The cell he inhabits is as real and as horrible as those that imprison Jackie Mann and Terry Waite: more real and more horrible perhaps because it appears more permanent and less open to negotiation. He is, according to the laws and usages that make us proud of our country, as innocent of crime as the most blameless citizen among us.

  Yet his Japanese translator was murdered this year and his Italian translator was beaten to death by assailants who wanted to know his address. The day will come when some will start begrudging the expense of the policemen detailed to protect him, when the Rushdie Affair will be incapable of earning so much as a ‘News In Brief’ couplet in a newspaper, when we forget the awful simplicity of his case.

  It may be that it is impolitic to raise the Rushdie case internationally until the Lebanon hostages are finally released. Then perhaps we might be free to remind the world of the outrage done and the insensitivity shown by the mullahs towards our religion, a religion of free speech and tolerance.

  Today is no particular anniversary of the Fatwah, it is just another day of imprisonment and fear for Mr Rushdie and therefore a day as meet as any other for us to remember it.

  Analogizer™, if it existed, would allow the man at least one or two days of sunshine a year.

  A Signing of the Times

  Take this business of books. As it happens, heedless of the protesting screams of the populace, I have just plopped out a novel. Now, I am deeply sensible that it would be most atrociously bad form to use the space entrusted to me here as some kind of platform from which to peddle this frightful effusion, so let me say as clearly and boldly as I can that my book is dreadful nonsense, stearine bilge, as the Master would say: you simply must not even dream of contemplating the idea of considering the thought of entertaining the notion of putting yourself in the way of wondering about the vaguest possibility of expending a suspicion of a scintilla of a particle of a hint of an iota of a smell of a vestige of the smallest part of a fraction of your fortune on such ineffable hogwash.

  The experience of being published is a remarkable one, however. The arrival on one’s kitchen table of an early copy, complete with cover, is quite as exciting as you might suppose. ‘Lordy,’ you think to yourself. ‘There it is. I mean, there it actually is. Complete with ISBN, copyright notice, Library of Congress Catalog number and everything.’

  You prop it up against the mantelpiece and walk backwards to obtain the effect, as it were, in longshot. You place it on its side and squat down to peer at it on its own level; you toss it casually on a sofa; you insert it between Ulysses and The Looking Glass War on your bookshelf; you squint at it through half-closed eyes; you smell it, lick it, prod it, stroke it and poke it; you address it shyly; you open it up and bestow a reverent rabbinical kiss upon its title page; you offer it a glass of sherry and a biscuit; you take it for a drive; you balance it on your head, tuck it under your arm and stuff it in your pocket; you do everything, in short, but dare to read a single word of it.

  Then, after publication, begin the furtive visits to the bookshops to see if anyone can be spotted actually buying it. This is rendered more difficult for me by having a face that has been more whorishly put about than that of proper, respectable authors. If a bookseller sees you he might easily suspect you are there to complain about the inadequacy of the display – something writers are notoriously given to doing – or he might press you into signing his stock. Equipped, however, with some kind of hat, a pair of dark glasses and a false moustache borrowed from a friendly make-up artist, one can loiter around a Picador carousel for hours observing the habits of the book-buying public. The alternative for me is to replicate exactly the clothes I was photographed in for the embarrassingly gigantic cut-outs that currently infest many of the bookshops, stand stock still next to a dump-bin (as the display receptacles are disrespectfully called) and pretend to be made of cardboard. I think, however, that this stratagem only really works in Abbott and Costello films.

  I had such difficulty in deciding to whom to dedicate the fruit of my novelistic loins that I hit upon the notion of having ‘To ……………………… (insert full name here)’ printed on the first page so that each reader becomes the dedicatee. This has had the unexpected benefit of making signing sessions a simpler matter than otherwise they might be.

  Signings are potentially minefields of embarrassment. Kind, decent people line up in front of a desk and you sit there, pen in hand, ready to inscribe to order. Some customers, collectors probably, have very firm views about what must be written: ‘ “With every good wish” and then your name please,’ they demand. ‘Nothing else.’

  ‘With every good wish’ is not quite me, somehow. It smacks of a Christmas letter from a coal merchant thanking you for your very esteemed good favour. But better a wilderness of ‘with every good wishes’ than some of the personalised inscriptions requested. ‘Could you just put, “To Martin, Up yours, fatso, and the devil take the hindmost,” and then sign it please?’ Or, ‘Put “This’ll teach you to laugh at my melamine surfaces, you slag. Yours till hell freezes over.” ’ One is happy to oblige, naturally. As the Master also observed, the poet’s eye may well be in a fine frenzy rolling, from earth to heaven, from heaven to earth, but the other is always firmly fixed on the right-hand royalties column.

  But I must catch a train to East Anglia, where I am signing tomorrow.

  With every good wish.

  Good Egg

  I think of myself as an optimist, almost a eudæmonist; cheerful and sanguine to the point of Pollyanna-ism. This is not an achieved state, a point of view arrived at by thought or principle, it is an attitude inculcated by experience. If you were to fling a sachet of non-dairy coffee-whitener in a busy high street I contend it would be likely to fall at the feet of a good egg, a decent, kind, tolerant and likeable soul, someone, roughly speaking, on the side of the angels.

  Perhaps this is because I grew up near Norwich, a city long renowned for being the politest, most affable settlement in this here United Kingdom. A daily newspaper once sent a journalist there specifically to test the courtesy and amiability of the average Norvicensian. This hound of hell tried barging to the front of queues in shops and bus-stops to see if he could elicit outrage and impatience. The reaction was always the same, ‘That’s all right, go you on ahead, my man … that’s clear you’re in a hurry.’

  In Norwich, I suspect, you could still try out P.G. Wodehouse’s method of posting mail. He used, in the London of the thirties, after writing his morning letters, to throw them out of the window into the street. He reasoned that the average Englishman, on seeing a sealed, stamped and addressed envelope on the pavement, would pick it up and pop it in the nearest post-box. He claimed never to have had a single letter go astray using this method.

  People today like to claim that we have become a ruder, more selfish nation: they believe that if you were to collapse in the street the populace would simply ignore you, possibly even crossing the street in disgust. The ritual repetition of this belief is as hackneyed and universal as going on about how winter always catches us by surprise or swapping eulogies on the magnificence of Marks &
Spencer’s. But if everyone expresses revulsion at the growing callousness of the British, who then are those Britons who actually evince this callousness? Or are we to believe that the same people who ventilate their contempt for others’ indifference are the very ones who, at the drop of a pedestrian, will themselves pass by on the other side?

  It is true that there is not a driver alive, including you and me, who has not said, ‘Tut! I was on the motorway the other day in thick fog and you should have seen the speed at which people were driving! Maniacs, simply maniacs.’ You can guarantee that those castigated by the judiciary the other day for the dreadful driving in appalling conditions that caused the tragic M4 crash earlier this year had said more than once in their lives, ‘I cannot believe how some people drive in motorway fog … maniacs, they are. Maniacs.’

  So perhaps we are all hypocrites. We damn others for what we fear as faults in ourselves. We rehearse the shortcomings of ‘people’ as a means of warding off the evil spirits that threaten us. It is certainly observable that those who most notice another’s excessive drinking, for instance, are those most worried about their own habit.

  But by projecting our own fears, inadequacies and self-loathing onto others we perpetuate those failings. Any doctor will tell you the first step to the cure of an addiction is to confess out loud, to others, that you have it.

  So let it be with other problems. Paradoxically, the moment you tell others what a lousy driver you are, you cease to be a lousy driver at all. ‘I must be careful here,’ you say to yourself, like any good driver, ‘it’s rather foggy and I’m a hopeless driver.’ Any workaholic will tell you he drives himself hard because he is so terribly lazy.

  G.K. Chesterton, the modern master of the paradox, realised this when he ended a long newspaper correspondence on the subject ‘What Is Wrong With This Country’ by writing, ‘Sir, I know exactly what is wrong with this country. It is me.’

  If everyone had written to say that it was their fault that the country was in a mess, rather than blaming it on the young, the rich, the parents, the poor, the teachers, the experts, the media, the politicians and anyone but themselves, there would have been nothing wrong with the country in the first place. A nation of Chestertons, a country whose citizens blame themselves and not others, would be a Utopia or, possibly, the Kingdom of God.

  Mind you, Chesterton would probably add that the best way to ward off evil spirits is to drink them.

  Mad as an Actress

  I hope one day to edit the next edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. This is not because I would enjoy the hours of grind and research it would involve, nor because I fancy myself as having any particular insight into the English synonym. There is only one reason to take on this job, chore, work, post, position, function, office, situation, duty, task, assignment, vocation, profession, calling, discipline, labour, line, livelihood, occupation, role, pursuit. The opportunity would allow me finally to clear up a long-standing omission in standard editions of the great work. For my first task would be to include in the category Madwoman the word ‘actress’.

  How previous editors from Roget himself onwards have neglected to set their official seal on the indelible ink between those two sorts and conditions of person, I have no idea. My editorship would at least give me the chance to do that service for scholarship and science.

  No longer, after the arrival of my edition, need anyone say, ‘I met an actress the other day, she seemed to me to be absolutely potty.’ Such a statement would be as redundant as ‘Extraordinary thing! Went dark last night. Sun simply disappeared in the west,’ or ‘Saw a chap in tinted spectacles yesterday: frightful tick.’

  One would not want to make the falsely syllogistic claim that all madwomen are actresses. That would, of course, be nonsense. It is nonetheless hugely, beautifully and entirely true that all actresses are madwomen.

  I have absolutely nothing against the mad at all. Anyone who has been watching Jonathan Miller’s excellent programme on the mentally excited will see that, throughout history, they have been given the rawest of raw deals. If they’re not being restrained in tight-fitting waistcoats they’re having electricity forced through them or being trepanned. I would wish none of this on actresses, who are for the most part charming, generous and good. Daffy to the eyebrows, of course, but utterly enchanting.

  But why do I say actresses are mad? It is not because so many of them believe in astrology: that is not a sign of madness, merely of stupidity; a condition afflicting the sane and insane alike. Nor are they mad in that dreary sense of ‘Hah! You have to be crazy to do this job!’ We all know there is no one on earth more depressingly sane than the person who has a sticker proclaiming ‘You don’t have to be mad here – but it helps!’

  In my experience there are many more good actresses around than there are good actors. Being mad in no way conflicts with or militates against good acting. Quite the reverse. The madness springs from the very way they approach their work.

  In the rehearsal room most actors are, quite properly, highly embarrassed. Picture the initial read-through of, say, Oedipus Rex. The actor playing Oedipus comes to that mighty passage where he realises he is a parricidal mother-snogger. Sophocles demands a scream. A great scream, a monumental ‘Aieeeeeeeeeee’, a keening, shrilling howl of agony. Any British male confronted with this moment out of costume, with only cast and general support staff for audience, will, quite naturally, blush, grin and shuffle his feet, muttering ‘And then there’s the scream, er, we’ll come to that later, um, obviously,’ and get on with the rest of the reading. The actress playing Jocasta, however, in the cold of the rehearsal room, confronted with her big scene will, a polystyrene cup in one hand, the script in the other, let out such a heart-rending, naked wail as to make the soul of the beholder quiver. No embarrassment. If there is a definition of madness that satisfies it is the complete absence of any sense of social embarrassment.

  English male actors, like the characters they play, are highly embarrassed creatures. Irony, self-hatred, shame, guilt and embarrassment are the qualities of which the English actor is the acknowledged dramatic master. Macbeth wailing about Duncan and daggers, and Hamlet hiding behind wit and feigned eccentricity, they both are shown by Lady Macbeth and Ophelia to be remarkably sane. Lear is an exception of course, but then, as we all know, Lear is unactable, at least by a British actor. That’s the point.

  Naturally the embarrassment, resistance to emotion and spiritual constipation that are the hallmarks of the British male might, viewed through the other end of the telescope, be shown to be the truly insane properties and it could, with some justification, be shown that it is all actors, like me, who are howling, barking mad, while the unembarrassable, emotionally open actresses are as sane as teaspoons.

  The thesaurus will have to decide.

  Motor Literacy

  A friend of mine once showed me a feature in a 1930s Boy’s Wonder Book of Science which speculated, with the appropriate style of boyish wonder, on the new phenomenon of electric motors. Electric motors, the article claimed, were set to change the world. Soon everyone was going to have to accustom themselves to their magical properties. A large pen and wash illustration depicted the House of the Future: the attic was shown with a gigantic electric motor, off which ran a system of belts driving water pumps, lawn-mowers, salad spinners, washing-machines, mousetraps, food blenders and the lord knows what else besides.

  The article was right in one respect: electric motors have changed our lives. What the authors failed to foresee, however, was that we would not need to accustom ourselves to them, they would need to accustom themselves to us. Instead of a vast controlling electric motor in our attics, we have today dozens of little ones all over the place, each working invisibly. Every video player, dishwasher, garden strimmer, electric shaver and cordless instrument for personal recreation and massage has one. We are, as a civilisation, no more electric motor literate than were the Phoenicians.

  Dire prognostications were made when
the home computer took its stand in the market-place. ‘Oh my lordy,’ people cried, ‘the home computer has taken its stand in the market-place and I’m too old ever to be able to catch up. VCRs are bad enough – I have to get my four-year-old daughter to programme mine – but computers …’

  Everyone imagined that the population would be divided into the computing and non-computing classes and that those in the former would flounder hopelessly in a world they could not understand.

  These pessimistic forecasts were as unfounded as those made for the electric motor. Most electronic appliances today contain chips that, functionally speaking, are computers, working transparently in the background.

  We should remember that when we find it difficult to get a video recorder to record or a computer to compute, it is not our fault, but the machine’s. A steam iron, for instance, that required an alphanumeric keyboard, monitor and programming language to be able to function would be ridiculous. It would be badly designed, primitive and useless. A computer that requires a flashing cursor at the command-line, a low-level operating system language and a thick user’s manual is ridiculous too. Those monstrous IBM PC’s that flooded the market a few years back were like the early motor cars, primitive and noisy; requiring enthusiastic amateurs to do the equivalent of putting the bonnet up every six miles to fiddle with the magneto.

  A group working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in the seventies posited the existence of a device which they called the Dynabook: this would be a computer about the size of a paperback which had no keyboard and which could be used by anyone, intuitively and simply. The PARC team never expected to produce the device itself, it was a Platonic paradigm towards which they could work. On the way they devised a system called WIMP, standing for Windows, Icons, Mice and Pull-down menus. This was a Graphical User Interface which allowed a computer user to treat a screen as an analogue of a desktop. We humans work best with analogues. Which of us would not rather tell the time by an analogue watch which shows us a representation of time as existing in three hundred and sixty degrees, enabling us at a glance to see time elapsed and time to come, than be told in bald terms by a digital display that the time is 19.38:07? Thus, when Apple Computers took over the WIMP technology and brought out the first Macintosh computer in 1984, it was clear that, as their advertising blurb ran, ‘the computer for the rest of us’ had arrived.