The Fry Chronicles

Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles (Michael Joseph)

Stephen Fry only got a 2:1 and so I'm just as clever as him. And rarely can bare statistics have been used to contrive such a misleading conclusion. The very nearly First from Cambridge, top in Shakespeare, two dissertations -on Byron and Forster- bashed off in an evening each just before their due date, because he was appearing in every play that the student body could put on, taking wine in his rooms with friends on long afternoons and all sorts of other activity, does not bear comparison with my steady scraping of an adequate mark at Lancaster at the same time. It was always an outrageous lie, presumably put about by lesser universities, that a 2:1 was a 2:1 and a First a First wherever you took them and I've never seen it more graphically illustrated than here.

When he actually read any books in between all his other projects is hard to say but he remembered it all with an awe-inspiring capacity for academic work that he passes off as 'plausible' roguery. On the one hand it is a shame that academic work can be demeaned by such a mind but in the end I'm glad to see there is a level of intellect that can treat it thus.

This volume of autobiography takes us through Stephen's Cambridge years, recapping bits of the wonderful Moab is My Washpot, and up to the age of 30 when he has already established himself as an entertainment polymath, as writer, actor and comedian. After introductory sections on his addictions to sweets and cigarettes, he divides the book into two larger halves, on Cambridge and Comedy. He leaves us as he makes his first acquaintance with cocaine.

It is at first appealing that Stephen wears his erudition and talent so lightly as to be apologetic about them. In fact, he confirms my uncharitable view that he might have been capable of better. Although I'm as confirmed in my admiration of him as all but the most devoted of his army of followers, I wonder if his role as Oscar in Wilde isn't far and away the most authentic and profound thing that he's done. The journalism collected in Paperweight is marvellous and, of course, his roles in Blackadder and QI, and his general standing as liberal, downright fine chap make him worth his considerable stature each on their own but it all seems to have come to him so easily and without trying that one wonders if he shouldn't have been T.S. Eliot or Wittgenstein or someone of equally colossal status rather than just an all-round good egg.

And this, or something like it, seems to trouble him, too. How unkind I am to say so, but he seems to agree. If he had only once or twice digressed to explain his guilt and self-loathing at his lack of confidence, body shape, and feelings of unworthiness at his privilege and innate facilities, it would have been a touching and disarming aside, making us even more sympathetic to someone we thought we loved enough already. But he does it time and again, apparently needing to stop every so often to enter a confessional to unburden himself of himself. So, big, rich, famous people can be insecure, too. Now we know.

One can hardly call it name-dropping to mention that one's friends are Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, then Rowan Atkinson and everybody else who played a part in that generation, my generation, of entertainers because their memoirs will be equally pleased to say they worked with Stephen but he is able to include illuminating anecdotes of Alistair Cooke, Harold Pinter, Olivier, Stephen Sondheim and Douglas Adams not for the sake of their names but for the value of the episodes they appear in.

I've rarely read a book that has used so many words I didn't know (maybe half a dozen or so) unless it was either by or about Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein or Stephen Hawking but I didn't bother looking them up. The context allows you to guess at a suitable synonym and it's all done in such a casual manner that you know you're not going to be examined on it at the end of term. It's a bit like reading a book in French and, not knowing what an ornithorynque is, register that the author had some kind of domestic pet although you do end up missing the point that it was a duck-billed platypus.

It's every bit the book you thought it would be- so friendly and approachable that you read it into the night long after you would have put other books down. And so you are disappointed to have finished it so soon. Like his hero, or one of them, Alan Bennett, it would be nice to just be able to switch him on and take part in his world but books and plays are finite and finished things and one's own world comes back to you once you've closed its covers. It was no more and no less than the book I had been looking forward to, a nice, warm blanket of kindly, well-judged chat from a world that few of us have the ability, potential or possibility to take part in but they do it for us, these people, and we are thus glad that they take the time to tell us about it.

Although it's adorable and deliciously lovely, it isn't the best in its genre, which will always or until further notice for me be Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, which was much more laugh out loud and had a different view of Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The value of Stephen Fry is that he appreciates things and does things because he loves them without recourse to consultants, systems analysts or even, dare I say, profit motive because he enjoys a profit as much as any of us would if we could come out as far ahead as he has. But The Gatekeeper is the best book I've ever read and so it would be unfair to say that Stephen has again failed to produce the very best work in this somewhat self-regarding field.