Stephen Fry: Heroes
Who are your heroes?
I think all the people I admire, are themselves, people who admire others. I have very little time for people who don't have heroes. I once heard someone-quite well known, I won't tell you who it is- say "no I don't have any heroes,". I said, that's naff, having heroes. I'm unafraid of worship of others, I mean not unconditional worship; very often, they're faults. My heroes are quite obvious, they're very common to people of my age and culture and generation. People like, Winston Churchill, and Oscar Wilde, if you like, they're hard to avoid. The more surprising ones, I suppose would be, I've always admired enormously, and I met her once and it sent me into a slight shiver; Martina Navratilova. I'm not quite sure why, it's certainly not sexual, I can assure you. It's not because I'm an avid tennis fan, it's something to do with her mixture of competitiveness... I'll tell you what it is, I'll tell you that my heroes are human beings who are a hundred percent themselves all the time. My heroes don't have that self conscious look about them where you think they know someone's watching them, and they're, in that sense more like an animal. A tree frog spends all its time being a tree frog, it doesn't wake up in the morning saying "am I a good tree frog, or a bad tree frog? Do I do well? Gosh, I wish I were a walrus." They just get on with being a tree frog. And Martina Navratilova is a supreme example of just someone who is herself at all times. She brings herself to the party.
What qualities do your heroes have?
I like heroes who are generous. It always saddens me when you find a great artist who is also a son of a..., because it seems naive to say so, but you always expect a hero who's capable of great art or great achievement to have the insight to know how to deal with other people properly and be generous. You read of Dickens beating his wife, you think, "how could someone who exposes the folly, vanity, wickedness and weakness of others so brilliantly, not be more generous and behave better? How bizarre. If he was a character in his own book he would hate himself. How can that be? Why can Wagner be such a great artist? He produced the most perfect art of the nineteenth century, but he was a pig". It's really annoying to me, that.
Where does your inspiration come from?
I suppose because I was not, physically very adept at school, and because I was not musically very adept, the one thing that I felt was my domain was language, and I drew inspiration from it. I loved words, not necessarily the power or the knowledge or even the reason that one could employ them to impart and to generate, but actually the physical texture of words, and the dance words led on the tongue, the way words could be used to seduce, to amuse, to entertain, I'm naturally talking of Wilde- I remember seeing a film of the Importance of Being Earnest, and the character of Algernon saying "Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be the visible personification of absolute perfection?". I was about ten; I remember thinking 'Good God! I did not know that language could do that. That you could do that with words. You could make something so beautiful.' That it was like a dance coming out of the tongue. It was just the most seductive and beautiful thing. So I set myself to the pleasure of language; poetry and reading, and being amused by the sheer rhythms, just the sound of words hitting the tip of the tongue. And so my greatest influences and inspirations were people who used language magisterially and brilliantly, sometimes lightly, like P.G Woodhouse, but with exceptional skill and caused great wonder.
How do you make big decisions?
I would always say that when I make decisions, and this sometimes surprises people, because they think of me, if not as an intellectual, certainly as some sort of poncy person who uses long words a lot, and possibly therefore analytical, I think feelings is always held primacy in making decisions, they always do. So it's really that problem I've mentioned before on one that you run up against all the time in life, is identifying your own feelings to make decisions. It's so odd you'd think you'd be able to more easily than identify what you know, but its a lot easier to know what you know than it is to know what you feel. Am I happy at this moment? Would I be happy doing that? Do I feel ashamed of this? Or is it embarrassment? Is it guilt? There are different things, different feelings. What am I really feeling? Am I really angry with this person, or do just think I ought to be angry and therefore I'm puffed up in this faux anger? Very hard to say. Do I love this person? Hell, that's the hardest one of all. Do I want to be loved, more than I want to love? All these questions. Absolute, they're the ones, the only ones really, that matter to one.
How do you live up to your responsibilites?
My responsibilities are the many things that I have to do every day that I don't want to do, and very often I look at my diary and I see I'm doing some afternoon speech, or I've got to go, and I would desperately love to hear the phone go, and someone say it's been cancelled. I get very close to thinking, 'can I pretend I've got flu, can I say I'm ill?' And then think, 'No I can't'. Duty, obligation, responsibility, these are all words that I've fought against all my life, because I'm not sure how true they are. If you feel you're doing something out of responsibility then don't do it. But do project how you'll feel if you don't do it, and then realize that actually, the responsibility is something you want to do. So, me cancelling things, me not doing the things I've agreed to do, me reneging on my word, would make me deeply unhappy. It's the point, I suppose. Even unhappier than having to turn up and do it. And I think drugs and alcohol are things that overcome a sense of responsibility, you no longer care so much about whether or not you let people down. And so I think that's one of their dangers, is that it stops you having a sense of responsibility, really. We used to say it degenerates the moral self-- the Victorians used to say of alcohol, or of drug users. It's not quite that, I think it's sadder; you don't care. And ultimately not caring about yourself is not caring about other people. When you're not caring about letting other people down, it means you don't care living with yourself, having let people down. Cause we all know that any purpose of virtue is to be happy, I mean that's the earliest philosophy of Plato, exactly that. Noticing that virtue of itself is not the end; happiness is the end. And its very hard to be happy if you're not good, facing responsibilities, and its very easy to be good if you're happy.
