How is that possible, you ask me? Secondly, does Stephen Fry even know you, and third, from what anyone can gather from his fabulous autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry hates no one. Absolutely no one.
Which, ironically, may be where my real trouble comes in because, unlike Stephen (and apparently his mother), there are many many (did I say many?) people that I do not like. Sadly for me and for some of the people I don’t like, I did not inherit the sort of gene that lets people slide off hooks, long or short. In fact, I am still siding with Don on this one: to never judge is amoral (which makes me, come to think of it, positively high-minded).
I do wonder if Stephen Fry suffers a little from a hint of benevolent omnipotence, but he is so generous, so utterly sweet-natured, so jolly in some ways, so depressed in others, and so so so willing to forgive everyone but himself, I think there is, that there can be, nothing truly omnipotent about him at all.
Moreover, his facility for and with words; his enviable eidetic memory; his alarming and scintillating risk-taking adventures; his genius; his fervour; his techno-wizardry; his maleness, and even his favourably financial background – all of these things mark him as otherworldly, at least from where I sit – polar opposite it seems – on the planet.
How I longed to know him, however, page after glorious page – even when he didn’t understand what meaning the interjectory ‘though’ had, stuck as it was, on the end of that woman’s sentences (I do), or how a person can know where he was and what he was doing upon hearing a certain piece of classical music (I can), or how not all people interested in tarot divination or rune deciphering are spiritless idiots (God help me).
How I shouted with delight and surprise every time I read another title of a poem or novel or movie or song, or a catchphrase, that resonated. From The Go-Between to The Godfather to Groundhog Day, through the span of Dickens and Forster and Sim, I wished with all of my heart that somewhere in my life there had been and would always be a Stephen Fry.
How I wept alongside of him, with him and for him, and for myself, and for my mother and for children over and across all of those 18th birthdays: mine spent alone, as far as I can feebly remember, working at the restaurant, my mother withering away in an Ontario mental hospital, my long-estranged father off somewhere trotting the globe, years away from me or from any knowledge of me. And oh, how I wept for my son…
What a shame, then, that Stephen Fry hates me – I, who am the very depiction of the rare (for him, not of me) sort of person he cannot stand. He, who so seldom despises anyone. I, without memory, drowning in memories; shrivelling from risk; opinionated and critical and wistful. He, joyful and skilful and – just as he wished – exuberantly moving through life.
Stephen Fry, cotton to me or not, radiates in a light of his own making, his tender-hearted nature rendering him one of the dearest individuals with whom I have ever spent seven magical and heartbreaking nights, laughing and crying and wondering throughout why he also, by times and along with that exuberance, hates himself so.
Moab is my washpot; over Edom will I cast out my shoe; over Philistia will I triumph. Psalm 108-9
