My dread was that someone would ask me my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake.
Having left the year before he came up, I could have reassured him there was little danger. Everyone, as he puts it, was in the same punt. Cambridge in the late 1970s featured only the usual sprinkling of genuine intellectuals and egregious talents — of whom Fry was an outstanding example. His opinions were perfect for the time and place. He considered F. R. Leavis a ‘sanctimonious prick’, abstained from D. H. Lawrence and Hardy, wallowed in T. S. Eliot and Shakespeare and took an informed, but sceptical, line on the ‘Parisian post-structuralists and their impenetrable evangels’. Elsewhere it might have mattered not to follow the Clash, but not in Cambridge.
Fry also had a sex life, at a time when female undergraduates were scarce and homosexuality often still repressed. Despite his later celibacy from 1982-96, he enjoyed a long relationship with Kim Harris, a handsome classicist, chess grandmaster and fellow Wagner enthusiast. And yet still he considered himself a miserable failure: not merely inadequate as a singer, dancer and looker, but an intellectual fraud to boot. He even claims to have cheated at exams, although his crime turns out to be nothing more than cannily preparing universal answers which could be adapted to almost any question.
By the end of his third year he had organised the college May Ball, written a successful play, won the Perrier Award (with Hugh Laurie) for best comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, and was taken on by a top agent, who helped him earn ‘preposterous’ amounts of money. Poor, cringing Fry shares his agonies before every exam, audition and opening night but almost invariably emerges triumphant whether with the top Shakespeare tripos mark, lead in Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, or hugely lucrative script for Me and My Girl.
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