Moab Is My Washpot by Stephen Fry

Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry play chess - Cambridge, 1980

The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs, and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle-class at a middle-class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else's. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

-Moab Is My Washpot

When I wrote about Jude Law's Hamlet, I mentioned that I had first come to notice him when I rented Wilde as a teenager. Wilde was also where I first came across Stephen Fry. I find it funny in retrospect that I have known of him for so long, whereas I only discovered his comedy partner Hugh Laurie, now much more famous here in America, about five years ago. * I assume, after House, it's much more common now to discover them the other way round.

Anyway, I've long liked Fry. If he'd done nothing but Jeeves and Wooster, he'd be in my good books, but that's only one of his many accomplishments. He's immensely, almost unbelievably clever, in a way that makes one despair about one's own education. To read Moab Is My Washpot, Fry's account of his youth and coming of age, is to delight in the company of someone who loves language and plays ever so nicely with it. The man can wield a word. It's actually quite difficult to carry on about well he writes without noticing that my own writing looks so lumpish and ungainly put next to his. Oh, difficulties.

Fry, in addition to being a clever-clogs - he wrote an epic poem in his teenage years in which he rhymed "Hitleresquely bad" with "picturesquely had" - is also disarmingly frank. His life story doesn't play entirely as one might expect. Oh, some of it does, yes - the public school**, the house in the countryside he takes care to describe as not too "Bridesheady." And even his schoolboy penchant for nicking pence from the pockets of his classmates might not seem too out of the ordinary. It starts to become evident, though, as time goes on, that things are starting to go awry - and this is long before he tries swiping credit cards, though it does come to that.

Clearly I have no idea how honest Fry is being in his account, but it certainly feels quite heartfelt. The shame he recalls at some points just radiates off the page - as does the love he feels for one of his classmates, the beautiful Matthew Osborne. Fry's love for Osborne (a pseudonym) was the all-consuming passion of his teenage years - and, in his recollection, possibly fuel for his increasingly reckless behavior.*** In any case, it's hard for a reader to stay indifferent in the face of any of it - even if you were otherwise totally unfamiliar with Fry, I don't see how you could come away unsympathetic.

I met Fry once, at a book signing last year - a little different from meeting him at a cocktail party, of course, but still exciting for me. As with every author signing I've been to, I found it a rather intimidating experience. He was very kind, though, and all the fans I saw walked away from meeting him with their signed books clutched tightly to their chests and smiles on their faces. Just another reminder of how lucky we are to have him around.

Up next: P.D. James's Talking About Detective Fiction, which I suspect I will breeze through quite quickly.


*Heck, I even knew about their fellow Cambridge Footlights member Tony Slattery, little known here, before I'd ever heard the name Hugh Laurie; I was a huge devotee of Whose Line Is It Anyway? (UK) during my senior year of high school. Tony Slattery in any Party Quirks sketch was always the best - especially the one where Rory Bremner plays Tony Slattery.

**It's amazing to me how much of Harry Potter is really true, minus the magic - just swap in double Maths for double Potions and rugby for Quidditch.

***Although his late-in-book spending spree, for instance, is classic manic behavior, and Fry has been diagnosed with manic depression. (He actually made a documentary about manic depression that I should seek out, as it sounded interesting. Quite interesting, even.)