Well now, this is a sort of farewell. An au revoir more than an adieu but a valediction all the same. This morning I switch off most of my connections with the outside world, for I have work to do. I must deliver a book to my publishers by the end of April or my soul and testicles will be forfeit.
Some people can write with ease in whatever circumstances they find themselves. Up a tree, on a bus, in a log cabin, a steamy-windowed café or a tropical beach. Some don’t mind noise, distraction or a broken up day. I, unhappily, am not made of this material. I need peace, absolute peace, an empty diary and zero distraction. I enter a kind of writing purdah, an eremitical seclusion in which there is just me, a keyboard and abundant cups of coffee, all in a room whose curtains have been drawn against the light. I would have added tobacco as a constant and necessary companion, but I stopped smoking some two and half years ago, so no longer will there be the pleasure of having a pipe clamped between the teeth as I grope for the Flaubertian mot juste.
I have a single appointment in London towards the end of January and another in Barcelona a month or so later. Otherwise I shall be as one wiped from the map of human existence. This is how it must be.
All this is a way of saying, of course, that my twitter stream will dry up for that period. No doubt this will come as a relief to some, but I am not so sunk in false modesty as to be unaware that there are loyal followers who will emit long, loud wails of “Noooooooo!” and who will feel pained and dispirited . But I hope they will understand that this is a) imperative and b) temporary. I shall return.
And what of this book? Twelve years ago I wrote a volume of autobiography called Moab Is My Washpot. It is essentially a memoir of childhood and adolescence and ends after our hero is released from prison and contrives, with a year’s probation still to run, to get himself a place at university. The book I must now write will follow on from this. Whether it will be chronological or thematic, first person or third I have no idea. That is the adventure, if I can call it such, that lies before me. The loneliness of writing, or of my kind of writing at least, is absolute. The other week, the excellent @wishdasher tweeted me a line by Paul Tilich: “Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.” Whether my reclusive isolation will be painful or glorious remains to be seen. Accept my apologies for what must be and believe me, no one yearns more keenly for the day when I will be able to be back amongst you all.
I, too, wondered where you’d got to. Watching the Delia Smith bio thing on TV this week reminded me that I’d not seen you tweet for yonks. Good luck with the book and looking forward to your return…just like everyone else!
Gary
congrats on the NTA awards stephen, but i do have a kind of unrelated but yet related question, when your were being interviewed a tall white haired man was with you, i do believe he is actually a relative of mine from a city in ireland known as waterford , now i could have been very mistaken , as i have been on a number of occassions in my life to date.
please confirm my request ,
yours forever laughing with and not at,
barry wadding
ps. your depression programme has helped me with my life and with the help of QI i hope to keep laughing for ever more…………without the use of meds, lol
Well done last night
A beautiful person in a ugly world.
A sequel to Moab? YES! Awesome and everything! Drop everything else and work on it nonstop, I officially can’t wait for it to come out. Moab was great support 2 years ago and since I am now entering the stage of life where Moab left off I must say I am very eager to read what and how youve experienced and developed
Also, might you somehow read this, I am interested to know whether you’ve heard of Hans Teeuwen? Him and a few others of the Comedytrain, based in Amsterdam, have recently led an expidition into the London circuit and apparently met with great reviews too, so I was wondering if the extent of him and their success was as far to have reached your ears, and maybe your eyes? I would love to hear your opinion on him
Cheers and of course good luck with all endeavours!
Shhhh, I am only whispering, don’t want to disturb genius at work but has anyone made Stephen a cup of tea or made him a little snack?
‘Moab Is My Washpot’ is one of my absolute favourites – I can’t wait to read, mark, and inwardly digest what will no doubt be a lovely sequel. Goodspeed, young Fry! xxx
My comment is not in response to your most recent post – rather, I’ve wanted to thank you for your writing of, “The Ode Less Travelled”. Have been teaching Year 7 students (12 and 13 yo) English and in this, my fourth year, finally felt brave enough to ‘teach’ them poetry. My husband had bought me the Ode…. in my first year of teaching, thinking that it would be useful. Too scared to look at it till I was already brave enough to take the plunge with the students.
I started the book and loved it, and found that I couldn’t use it as my going-to-sleep book as I got too excited! So I had the joy of sharing with my students iambic pentameters, tetrameters and trimeters, and writing a ballad. (As you can see by this, I only got into the first part of the book, but this was stacks to work with and had wonderful results.)
When I was a secondary school student, I was encouraged, and loved writing, poetry, but as this was in the 60’s, it was all in the ‘go with the flow’ spirit, which I embraced. Writing poetry, (and playing the recorder) was what kept me sane as an adolescent.
I had no idea how I would teach poetry, or what ‘form’ I would teach, but I knew that what had worked for me and my best friend 40 years ago was probably not going to work today. I didn’t want to ‘do’ diamond poems or haiku or acrostic poems, as the students tend to have done these to death at primary school. I wanted to extend them, but I wanted them to understand that poetry wasn’t ‘just about rhyme’.
And then I had the pleasure of working with the idea that it is about meter.
One day I’d like to look at my adolescent poems in relation to meter, but what was brilliant for me was seeing kids being excited and writing wonderful poems with depth of feeling and image, funny, desolate, beautiful, silly, mundane, bizarre, warm – as they played with different metric forms. It seemed to give them a freedom to write, and I certainly encouraged them to just ‘go with the flow’, but having a metric flow to create a structure! It was particularly noteworthy among the boys who went from having no clue at all what a poem should look or sound like, to being able to write poetry.
I’m not teaching English this year. (I’m a French teacher as well, and this year that’s the focus). But I’m looking forward to teaching it again, and working with the Stephen Fry method of teaching poetry, cos I know it works! I have of course spread the name of the book amongst my fellow teachers… Again, many thanks.
Poke your head above the parapit every once in a while, if only to take in a breath of normality. Good luck with your endeavours.
I love you.
Hurry back soon. The pikelets are getting cold.
I’ll be in deep mourning until you come back, Mr. Fry. But a sequel to Moab is more than I could ever hope for! Moab was a wonderful book. Even though I haven’t gotten my hands on a physical copy, I listened to the audiobook with great pleasure. It may even have been better, since I love the sound of your voice as much as your writing. Hope you come back to us soon!
It looks wonderful – and if I didn’t already own a MacBook Pro, I’d seriously consider going for an iPad instead. However, I think you’re missing a fundamental issue with the thing: how do you make it part of your daily life? With an iMac, the answer’s easy: you go to your desk and use it. MacBook? Carry it around in a laptop bag slung over your shoulder for use in wifi hotspots (or offline anywhere). iPhone? Easiest of all: carry it in your pocket like any other phone-sized mobile device. But the iPad? Its size means carrying it in a small laptop bag. Heck, not just its size: its fragility! That glass screen means dropping it is a game-over situation, so a padded shoulder bag is essential. Which means it fits exactly the same-shaped hole in your daily life as a laptop. Fabulous screen interface notwithstanding, it’s too similar to a lidless laptop to justify owning both an iPad AND a MacBook. I mean, if I didn’t already own a MacBook, it would be nooooooo contest. And THAT’s why I don’t see me buying one until it’s time to retire the MacBook.
iWorked iMac; iTuned iPod; iLoved iPhone; and i’llBe iPad
- Don’t dis-believe the hype.
Hope you’ve achieved great feats during your period of self-imposed exile… If you get any blocks – give us a hoy (you never know where your muse may be – joking right).
I cant wait to enjoy the latest creation , a book tour of australia would be very much appriciated ( a vist to Kambalda would also be great )
I still can’t get the failed Apple Newton out of my head. And only now, in writing this, have realised the correlation between apples and Newtons and gravity theories.
is this one of those connections that everyone else made in the 90’s?