The Fry Chronicles by Stephen Fry
Simon Callow revels in a warm and finely crafted work, but longs to glimpse the real man beneath it

Simon Callow The Guardian, Saturday 2 October 2010

Stephen Fry at this year's Guardian Hay festival. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images


Each section of this cunningly constructed causerie of a second autobiographical volume is headed with a word or words starting with the letter C. One word is conspicuously absent from the catalogue of Cs: cleverness. So clever is he — and he is the cleverest by a mile of all my contemporaries — that he has written a book which reviews itself.
There is nothing that anyone could say about him, or his book, that he does not say, and say more cruelly, of it and himself, in its pages. Early on, he even disparages his literary style. Quite unnecessarily: it is verbal Vivaldi, gurgling and burbling deliciously along in its perfect cadences, its occasional unexpected harmonies, its calculated quirks, ever and anon modulating into a more tender, more reflective passage, hinting at, but never too deeply exploring, emotional depths, before speeding off into a joyous allegro vivace of infectious comic bravura.

His only stylistic vice is his constant apologising, for which, in the first sentence of the book, he apologises. He has, it is true, much to apologize for: charm, wit, inventiveness, enthusiasm, generosity, an encyclopaedically well-stocked mind, astounding good luck, considerable wealth. He is convinced that we hold all these things against him, but we don't. His expansively amiable, slightly professorial, presence in our lives is nothing but a blessing, and his book gives nothing but pleasure.

If it is something more than pleasure that you want — if you want an insight into what has made him the uncommon creature that he is — you may be a little frustrated. You will get reams of brilliant and often unflattering self-description, but of probing you will find little: a great deal, as he himself might say, of what, but almost nothing of why. This is who I am, he cries, isn't it extraordinary?

And extraordinary it is. From an early age, he followed his impulses with reckless indifference to the consequences, till finally they led him to a cell in one of Her Majesty's prisons. There is some recapitulation of this here, including a memorable account of one of his schoolboy truancies in London, when, instead of attending the proceedings of the Sherlock Holmes Society, he spent a few days propping up the bar at the Ritz, dressed in his grandfather's clothes, smoking Balkan Sobranies.

This is so fantastically strange that one begs for him to tell us more: there is something almost schizoid in his attempted erection of an indestructible shell of personality around himself.

He is, of course, expelled as a result of the escapade. Eventually, he gets a place at Cambridge, but before going up, he becomes a school-teacher in a minor northern public school, in which role he effects another sort of disguise: tweeds, pipe, archaic and allusive backchat with the students (some of this persona has evidently rubbed off on him permanently). Then Cambridge itself, where — despite a little initial anxiety about being, as he says, "found out" — he finds himself deeply at home, both in the rituals of the university and in the extracurricular theatrical activities so plentifully available. He describes all this in affectionate and engaging detail, celebrating the camaraderie that is such a central part of his life.
Full review - The Guardian.