The Fry Chronicles

Also by Stephen Fry

FICTION

The Liar

The Hippopotamus

Making History

The Stars’ Tennis Balls

NON-FICTION

Paperweight

Moab is My Washpot

Rescuing the Spectacled Bear

The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within

Stephen Fry in America

with Hugh Laurie

A Bit of Fry and Laurie

A Bit More Fry and Laurie

Three Bits of Fry and Laurie

Fry and Laurie Bit No. 4

MICHAEL JOSEPH

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

MICHAEL JOSEPH

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London
WC2R 0RL
, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2010

Copyright © Stephen Fry, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-14-196957-2

To M’Coll

Introduction

C is for C
₁₂
H
₂₂
O
₁₁
for Cereal, for Candy,
for Caries, for Cavities, for Carbohydrates, for Calories

C is for Cigarettes for Convict, for Cundall,
for Corporal Punishment, for Common Pursuit, for Cessation

1. College to Colleague

Cambridge

College and Class

Chess, Classics, Classical Composers, Curiosity and Cheating

Caledonia 1

Cherubs, Coming Out, Continent

Challenge 1

Corpus Christening

Chariots 1

Caledonia 2

Conveniences

Committees

Cycle

Comedy Colleague, Collaborator and Comrade

Continuity and Clubroom

Comedy Credits

Cooke

Chariots 2

Corpsing Chorus

Cellar Tapes and Celebration

Cheerio, Cambridge

Caledonia 3

2. Comedy

Carry on Capering

Clash of Cultures

Chelsea, Coleherne Clones and Conscience

Colonel and Coltrane

Computer 1

Commercial

Create!

Car

Challenge 2

Cinema

Church and Chekhov

Cockney Capers

Chichester 1

Crises of Confidence

Celebrity

Commercials, Covent Garden, Compact Discs, Cappuccinos and Croissants

Crystal Cube

Columnist

Cryptic in Connecticut

Contortionist

Critics and Couriers

Confirmed Celibate

Characters and the Corporation

Colonel and Mrs Chichester

Computer 2

Conspicuous Consumption

Country Cottages, Cheques, Credit Cards and Classic Cars

Carlton Club Crustiness

Courtly Comedy

Coral Christmas, Cassidy, C4, Clapless Clapham, Cheeky Chappies and Coltrane’s Cock

Clipper Class, Côte Basque and Choreography

C

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Index

I really must stop saying sorry; it doesn’t make things any better or worse. If only I had it in me to be all fierce, fearless and forthright instead of forever sprinkling my discourse with pitiful retractions, apologies and prevarications. It is one of the reasons I could never have been an artist, either of a literary or any other kind. All the true artists I know are uninterested in the opinion of the world and wholly unconcerned with self-explanation. Self-revelation, yes, and often, but never self-explanation. Artists are strong, bloody-minded, difficult and dangerous. Fate, or laziness, or cowardice cast me long ago in the role of entertainer, and that is what I found myself, throughout my twenties, becoming, though at times a fatally over-earnest, over-appeasing one, which is no kind of entertainer at all, of course. Wanting to be liked is often a very unlikeable characteristic. Certainly I don’t like it in myself. But then, there is a lot in myself that I don’t like.

Twelve years ago I wrote a memoir of my childhood and adolescence called
Moab is My Washpot
, a title that confused no one, so clear, direct and obvious was its meaning and reference. Or perhaps not. The chronology
took me up to the time I emerged from prison and managed somehow to get myself accepted into university, which is where this book takes up the story. For the sake of those who have read
Moab
I don’t mean to go over the same ground. Where I mention events from my past that I covered there I shall append a superscribed obelus, thus:
^†
.

This book picks up the threads and charts the next eight years of my life. Why so many pages for so few years? It was a late adolescence and early manhood crowded with incident, that is one answer. Another is that in every particular I fail Strunk’s
Elements of Style
or any other manual of ‘good writing’. If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to go back and ruthlessly prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words – strike that, I
love
words – and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too. After all, as you will already have noticed, I am the kind of person who writes things like ‘I shall append a superscribed obelus, thus’. If my manner of writing is a self-indulgence that has you grinding your teeth then I am sorry, but I am too old a dog to be taught to bark new tunes.

Between Mama and Papa with a rather long-haired Roger on the right.

I hope you forgive the unedifying sight of my struggle to express some of the truths of my inner self and to measure the distance between the mask of security, ease, confidence and assurance I wear (so easily that its features often lift into a smirk that looks like complacency and smugness) and the real condition of
anxiety, self-doubt, self-disgust and fear in which much of my life then and now is lived. It is a life, I suppose, as interesting or as uninteresting as anyone else’s. It is mine and I can do what I like with it, both in the world in the real plane of facts and objects and on the page in the even more real plane of words and subjects. It is not for me to be so cavalier with the lives of others, however. In much of my life from 1977 to 1987 people appear who are known in the public world and to whom I cannot give convincing pseudonyms. If I told you, for example, that at university I met a man called Lew Horrie and that we embarked on a comic career together it might not take great insight or too much Googling on your part to know that I was writing about a real person. It is not for me to go blabbing about his life and loves, personal habits, mannerisms and modes of behaviour, is it? On the other hand, were I simply to say that everyone I met in my journey through life was darling and gorgeous and super and lovely and talented and dazzling and sweet, you would soon enough be arcing streams of hot vomit all over the place and in every probability short-circuiting your eBook reader. I don’t doubt for a minute that my publishers have already made it clear in the small print of the contract I signed with them that I, the author, am responsible for all lawsuits appertaining to, but not restricted to, emetic and bodily fluid damage to electronic reading devices in this and all territories. So I am sailing between the Scylla of protecting the wholly reasonable privacy of friends and colleagues and the Charybdis of causing you, the reader, to sick up. It is a narrow course, and I shall do my best to steer it safely.