Stephen Fry is funny and rude, clever and incredibly knowledgeable. I know who he is, of course I do. He’s entertained me on the telly for three decades, but did I want to read his autobiography? Not especially, I don’t really read biographies except of the artists I’m researching.
However when I saw this salmon pink paperback on a bookseller’s shelf, I bought it for the cover. I might well have bought it even if I was quite unfamiliar with Stephen Fry and despite the obscure title. Who is Moab, why does he/she/they matter? And what in heaven or hell is a Washpot? Yes I guessed the reference was from the Old Testament, but I had no intention of re-reading that tome to find out.
My main reason for the purchase was because the cover was largely filled with the monstrous, wise, preposterously ugly but somehow charming visage of a bull elephant seal, with a proportionately tiny blackbird staring up his bulbous nose. An elephant seal, Lain name Mirounga angustirostris - there's my one bit of erudition. As a child I had seen one in Berlin Zoo, as far as I know Stephen never visited Berlin in his childhood. So why an elephant seal? Just why?
The autobiography encompasses the first 20 years of Fry’s life and no elephant seals are involved. It’s an intense, highly personal, self-deprecating book. He writes an eruditely meandering – or maybe I mean meanderingly erudite – and excruciatingly honest story.
He presents us with his family, who he basically loves but, especially as a teenager, refuses to get on with and who love him but find him often hard to comprehend. We see him in middle-class boarding schools, and how he coped with school life, not always well or honestly but mostly he coped, by using his wits to dodge the system and outwit authority. And we see his love life as his sexuality begins to emerge.
I did enjoy Stephen's book, it’s poignant, scathing, funny and engrossing, occasionally self indulgent bit I forgive him. I skimmed here and there, mostly through the meanderingly erudite sections. I don’t have the advantage of his classical education, if it is an advantage. The Washpot is mentioned in the afterword, as a metaphorical container for the author’s dirty linen, and I believe Moab was a sinner. But the vast elephant seal, I still have no idea because it looks nothing like him!
Will I read it again? I might , but probably only after I’ve read what comes in the next volume.
