Tony Deyal | A mutual taste in literature

“I don’t need you to remind me of my age. I have a bladder to do that for me.” This was by Sir Stephen John Fry, an English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer who is 67 years old. Me, as I head into 80 on August 10, this year, I have a ladder so I could look taller and higher than everyone else. However, what I feel we have in common is how he sees himself – a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.” He then added, “Generally, we admire the thing we are not.”

Before I could think about myself and what I am not, Sir Stephen added, “To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.” He got me and my other friends who are still alive and kicking. However, I shut up knowing, as Sir Stephen said, “The beauty of the brain is that you can still be as greedy as you like for knowledge and it doesn’t show.”

What I showed in the last two articles of my column – Saturday July 21 and 28 – is that in the Caribbean I’m one of the few remaining writers who mix the hard core journalism (which, in my case, I learned from my schooldays and universities) with humour or jokes. The mix, as I learned in more than 32 years as a part-time journalist at the beginning, makes it easier for readers to learn and enjoy at the same time. It also helped me to do my day-time job for major organisations like the World Bank/CARICOM, Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) and the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), and still put together a column for several newspapers, starting with the Barbados Nation News and even now with others. My fun mix is both a newspaper in Canada and a Western Canada Fan Club. I am telling all of you, my friends, and readers especially, that I do not want you not to have others like me when I am out and heading to God’s Grandstand. Now that I dropped two columns on you and now giving you a background, let us go back to this week’s special.

For me it started with Shakespeare. I will never forget Hamlet being asked by Polonius, “What do you read, my lord?” and Hamlet replied, “Words, words, words.” But for me, it was Stephen Fry who made it tasty and forever for me, “Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”

Yet, even so, Fry was not happy. “The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful of Chaucerian, Shakespearean, Miltonic, Johnsonian, Dickensian and American. Military, naval, legal, corporate, criminal, jazz, rap and ghetto discourses are mingled at every turn. The French language, like Paris, has attempted, through its Academy, to retain its purity, to fight the advancing tides of Franglais and international prefabrication. English, by comparison, is a shameless whore.” But even so, it was not lost. As Fry added, “We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing- an actor, a writer- I am a person who does things- I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”

In addition to the noun, Stephen Fry, admitted, “I have written it before and am not ashamed to write it again. Without Wodehouse I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be. In my teenage years, his writing awoke me to the possibilities of language. His rhythms, tropes (metaphors), tricks and mannerisms are deeply within me. But more than that, he taught me something about good nature. It is enough to be benign, to be gentle, to be funny, to be kind.” I am sure that many of you who are reading and following these articles, as I was when from the age of three I started with the newspapers and Wodehouse (among others), it was, as Stephen Fry said, “deeply with me” and all the rest of us.

Wodehouse (Sir Pelham Greenville Wodehouse) was a comic writer whose main canvas was an English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. I found it interesting, as many others who are readers in the region, that when an interviewer asked Wodehouse, “Did you always know you would be a writer?” the answer was, “Yes, always. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I do not remember what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.” While I spent time with my friends playing cricket, football, liming, stealing mangoes and making noise to wake up people, I always had to read, and sometimes write, regardless of what time it was. Interestingly, in all the Caribbean countries where I worked, there were many boys and girls who did the same. As I realised wherever I went, there was, and still is, no foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature. In fact, for what I learnt is that it was good to make sure your girls had enough brains for two because this is the exact quantity the girl who married my friends in those days needed. As one of the ladies said after, “The voice of Love seemed to call to me, but it was a wrong number.”

Just to remember P.G. Wodehouse who died when I was 40 years old and counting, “Everything in life that’s any fun, as somebody wisely observed, is either immoral, illegal or fattening.” What I also learned but it took long, “At the age of 11 or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.” Even on the edge of 80, I am still waiting.

Tony Deyal learned from P.G. Wodehouse who always advised people never to give advice. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com