The Lit Connection

This the book I am reading right now and while prepping myself for another tedious and emotionally retarded day this morning, I came across an absolute jewel of a paragraph within the book. It pretty much sums up my thoughts, sentiments and attitude towards a particular English person right now and I am stoked at the idea of it coming from another Englishman, Stephen Fry.

Fry is quoting E M Forster in order to express his thoughts on the typical middle-class Englishmen who attends public school and thereafter is unleashed into the world of adulthood to torment the 'lesser mortals'. Fry's own opinion at the very end is so fucking perfect that I could weep with joy.

Excerpt:

This is how Forster finishes.

... the English character is incomplete in a way that is particularly annoying to the foreign observer. It has a bad surface - self-complacent, unsympathetic, and reserved. There is plenty of emotion further down, but it never gets used. There is plenty of brain power, but it is more often used to confirm prejudices than to dispel them. With such an equipment the Englishman cannot be popular. Only I would repeat: there is little vice in him and no real coldness. It is the machinery that is wrong.

I hope and believe myself that in the next twenty years [this was written in 1920] we shall see a great change, and the national character will alter into something which is less unique but more loveable. The supremacy of the middle-classes us probably ending. What new element the working classes will introduce one cannot say, but at all events they will not have been educated at public schools...

The nations must understand one another, and quickly; and without the interposition of their governments, fot the shrinkage of the globe is throwing us into one another's arms. To that understanding these notes are a feeble contribution - notes on the English character as it has struck a novelist.

Fry's response to this is as follows:

Well, have we seen 'a great change'? Has the supremacy of the middle-classes ended? In a pig's arse has it ended. Even today, mutatis mutandis, the character of the English is defined by the character of its (still rising) middle-classes and even today, the character of those middle-classes is defined by the character of the (still disproportionately) poweful public-school product. The schools of course have changed, to the extent that public schoolboys wear baseball caps and expensive Nike footwear, listen to rap music, raise the pitch of their voices at the end of sentences in that bizarre Australian Question Intonation picked up from the TV soaps, and say 'Cool' and 'Slamming' a lot. That is nauseating certainly, embarrassing obviously, but fundamentally it alters nothing. No one can seriously suggest that the average English public schoolboy emerges from his school with a South Central Los Angeles sensibility, or the outlook, soul and character of an unemployed working-class spot welder. The body is probably even better developed, the brain is fairly developed but the heart just as undeveloped.

Thank you, oh thank you Stephen Fry for so eloquently putting into words all that I stupidly struggle to express. I heart you.