An Interview with Stephen Fry
Bibliomania: The Stars' Tennis Balls seems more openly conscious of the peculiar English hobby-horse of the class divide than any of your previous novels like The Hippopotamus where moneyed eccentricity was taken for granted. Why is this?
Stephen Fry: I think that the tone of a novel is more or less dictated by the point of view of the characters in it. In the Hippo the characters took their world for granted: The Stars' Tennis Balls is peopled with characters who are either guiltily involved or angrily alienated from the English class system. The "hero" if that's the right word is punished and exiled as a result of the perceived ease and felicity with which he moves in a privileged sphere.
Bib: Greying old men are littered around your novels, but we always view events from the perspective of a child or a young man. Do the young see things more clearly, or is this just a coincidence?
Fry: It's been drawn to my attention that there seems to be this thread running through all my novels. It is not something I have been consciously aware of while writing. It's certainly true that my favourite novel, Ulysses, is the grand exemplar of this great mythological and Homeric theme. The father's search for a son and the son's search for a father is, (to a male at least), a very powerful subject.
Bib: Making History, though sewn together with fantasy and educated whimsy, seemed in its German chapters to imply that a dictator in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s was inevitable - fated even. Do you believe that another National Socialist with a gift of the gab could in fact have taken Hitler¹s place?
Fry: Well, that is certainly the novel's "argument". It would be absurd to say that I am sure of it, but can we be positive that if that one little sperm of Aloïs Hitler's had not smacked into that one egg at that one instant of time in Brunau, Austria that there would have been no 2nd World War and no attack of European Jewry? Given the extremity of the Treaty of Versailles and the enormity and range of Thulist pan-Germanic anti-Semitism abroad in Austria and Germany from 1900-1930 it seems to me that the argument rests with those who wish to prove that it was Hitler's existence and Hitler's existence alone that caused the war and the outbreak of anti-Semitism around it. The earliest atrocities against Jews in the Baltic states took place despite the objections of the "liberating" German army. Of course, the nature of the war, its prosecution and the particular horrors of the Holocaust were Hitlerian, but it seems to me a fair "what if?" on which to base a novel.
Bib: The authors with whom you are most associated, Oscar Wilde and PG Wodehouse, were both surrounded by controversy (for homosexuality and "co-operation" with the Nazis respectively) that has distracted from their writing. Do you think that personal affairs have any bearing on an author¹s work and are skeletons in the closet better than an empty closet?
Fry: Oscar Wilde famously remarked that he put his talent into his work and his genius into his life. He was homosexual, not something that any sane person now regards as a crime. We look at his work through the prism of his persecution. In the case of Wodehouse he was unfairly traduced and anyone who looks at his output as the work of a fascist sympathiser or traitor is severely misinformed. George Orwell made that point years ago, Malcolm Muggeridge (who debriefed him after the liberation of Paris) also reported on PG Wodehouse's innocence. But, in answer to your question, I - like most people - simply don't know. It upset me to discover that Dickens, for example, was cruel to women and in many respects hypocritical: on the other hand the old Biblical saw "by their fruits shall ye know them" seems to me to be useful here. It is nearly always true that an artist's work is wiser than the artist. Indeed, that might serve as a distinction between the artist and the hack. The hack's work is what the hack wants it to be, the artist's is greater than he can conceive. I can't think of a worse or more egotistical and bigoted companion than Richard Wagner, yet his work (to my ears at least) remains the most towering and persuasive monument to love over power that exists outside Shakespeare.
Bib: What moments in other people¹s books have most inspired you to write in the form of the novel?
Fry: I've already mentioned Ulysses. Great Expectations and (I am not embarrassed to admit it) the works of Conan Doyle, were also hugely influential on myself as a younger reader.
Bib: Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller begins, like with a person being thrust randomly into the affairs of the criminal underworld. Do you think the desire for such Hardy Boys-like adventure is even more pronounced in middle age than in youth?
Fry: Almost certainly. How sad and fantacising we men are ... Actually The Stars¹ Tennis Balls is an updating of The Count of Monte Cristo, which also involves espionage, intrigue and conspiracy. That ducks out of the question however: why did I choose to write a modern version of the Monte Cristo story in the first place? I think many male writers are interested in affairs of state and their influence on the hero. Shakespeare and others could write about statecraft itself and kingship, we are more bourgeois these days and look to that twentieth century invention the spy thriller. Secrets, lies, evasions and betrayals are at the heart of the "feminine novel" (which includes many male novels - I use the term as short hand -
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