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The Hippopotamus by Stephen Fry (1994) (read in 2016)

Published by marco on

Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I’ve pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I’ve failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I’m happy for you.

Edward is the “Hippo” and the star of this novel, so-called because of the combination of his girth and his penchant for long baths. He is a one-time up-and-coming poet reduced to a theater critic by waning talent, insufficient gumption and a teensy problem with alcohol. He is swept up in the affairs of his rich-and-famous family when they variously ask him to help discover the secret behind the seeming miraculous workings of his godson. He goes to the stately manor of his old friend, the child’s father and proceeds to surreptitiously investigate the matter, collecting information and impressions from the various other hangers-on. He slowly forms a theory, dispensing disputable wisdom and folly all the while, until the story culminates—as you would expect—in a revelatory conclusion at a large dinner party, in which the Hippo explains all and solves the mystery.

Citations

“You can’t imagine, if you’re younger than me, which statistically speaking you are bound to be, what it is like to have been born into the booze-and-smokes generation. It’s one thing for a man to find, as he ages, that the generations below him are trashier, more promiscuous, less disciplined and a whole continent more pig-ignorant and shit-stupid than his own—every generation makes that discovery— but to sense all around you a creeping puritanism, to see noses wrinkle as you stumble by, to absorb the sympathetic disgust of the pink-lunged, clean-livered, clear-eyed young, to be made to feel as if you have missed a bus no one ever told you about that’s going to a place you’ve never heard of, that can come a bit hard.”
Page 7
“She brought them over, folded a leg under herself and sank down on an ottoman, which was moronically tricked out in a design which would turn out, I supposed, to be taken from some Mayan funeral shroud or mystic Balinese menstrual cloth. The grand idea behind such a squalid episode of cultural rape and the other equally feeble, equally impertinent conceits that littered this appalling room, I supposed, was that Jane would dispose herself there, surrounded by friends, the diversity of whose drinking habits would justify the ludicrous range of unopened liqueur, aperitif and spirit bottles on display, while gentle yet probing conversational topics were flicked like shuttlecocks about the room.”
Page 23
““Well, my darling. If you’ve made peace with your enemies and said goodbye to your friends, you shouldn’t be too sorry to leave the party early. It’s a grotty world and a grotty age and we’ll all be joining you soon enough.””
Page 24
“there was a boy sitting half-way up the baroque steps that poured from the front portico like a thick stream of molten lava.”
Page 66
“The rare words often annoy the punter, but they never think, they never stop to think about a poet’s life. A painter has oils, acrylics and pastels, turpentine, linseed, canvas, sable and hog’s hair. When did you last employ such things routinely? To oil a cricket bat or mascara an eyelid, perhaps. Come to think of it, you’ve probably never oiled a cricket bat in your life, but you know what I mean. And musicians: a musician has entire machines of wood, brass, gut and carbon fibre; he has augmented sevenths, accidentals, Dorian modes and twelve-note rows. When did you ever use an augmented seventh as a way of getting back at your boyfriend or a bassoon obbligato to order pizza? Never. Never, never, never. The poet, though. Oh, yes, the poor poet: pity the poor bloody poet. The poet has no reserved materials, no unique modes. He has nothing but words, the same tools that the whole cursed world uses to ask the way to the nearest lavatory, or with which they patter out excuses for the clumsy betrayals and shiftless evasions of their ordinary lives; the poet has nothing but the same, self-same, words that daily in a million shapes and phrases curse, pray, abuse, flatter and mislead. The poor bloody poet can no longer say “ope” for “open,” or “swain” for “youth,” he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse. Is it any wonder that, from time to time, we take refuge in “gellies” and “ataractic” and “watchet”? Innocent words, virgin words, words uncontaminated and unviolated, the very mastery of which announces us to possess a relationship with language akin to that of the sculptor with his marble or the composer with his staves. Not that anyone is ever impressed, of course. They only moan about the “impenetrability” or congratulate themselves for being hep to the ellipsis, opacity and allusion that they believe deepens and enriches the work. It’s a bastard profession, believe me.”
Page 73
“You catch sight of something perfectly ordinary, such as it might be bluebells nodding on an embankment, or a family picnicking in a lay-by, and suddenly your mind can no longer support the notion of a whole world full of life and objects and fellow-humans. The very idea of a universe appears monstrous and you become unable to participate. What on earth does that tree think it is up to? Why is that heap of gravel sitting there so patiently? What am I doing, staring out of a window? Why are all these molecules of glass hanging together so as to allow me to look through them? The moment passes, of course, and we return to the proper realm of our dull thoughts and our duller newspapers: in less than a second we are part of the world again, ready to be irritated into apoplexy by the stupidity of a government minister or lured into caring about some asinine new movement in conceptual art; once again we become a part of the great compost heap.”
Page 90
“Simon, for whom poetry is a closed book in a locked cupboard in a high attic in a lonely house in a remote hamlet in a distant land,”
Page 136
““It was so sweet,” he went on, once Podmore had departed, “Gianni, for such was his name, anxiously explained, in one of those divinely dusty Italian voices, that he was afraid he might hurt me. ‘Carissimo,’ I said, ‘I’ll grant you it’s a monster, but after what I’ve been through this last week you’ll be lucky if it touches the sides. It’ll be like a paper boat up the Grand Canal.’ Still, that’s enough of me. You much of a traveller, Bishop?””
Page 153
“For all I know, no one in the world has ever been pleased to see me,”
Page 308
“One is always hearing a great deal of liberal waffle about the terrible state of the National Health Service. Waiting lists, cuts, low morale: you can’t help but soak up the thrust of the moronic yapping we have to put up with every day from the professionally disenchanted and humourlessly self-righteous wankers of the left. Even a sceptical old reactionary like me is, willy-nilly, influenced by this kind of talk into imagining that all NHS institutions are crowded with desperately sick patients lying about in the corridors on straw palliasses waiting for the health authority’s one overworked, under-rested teenage doctor to come and tell them to pull themselves together. Not a bit of it. Not a bloody bit of it. It may”
Page 334
“when Davey and I walked in through the automatic electrically operated doors and reported to the reception desk I felt less like a soldier dragging his wounded comrade into the filthy Crimean field-hospital of popular left-wing imagination and more like Richard Burton checking in to a five-star hotel in Gstaad with a tipsy Elizabeth Taylor on his arm.”
Page 335
“They call me a cynic and sceptic too, but that’s because when I see a thing I call it what it is, not what I want it to be. If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There’s none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved”
Page 343
“He is not quite as intelligent as he would like to be, but then which of us is? He is not unintelligent, you understand, he is intelligent enough to glimpse valuable and serious ideas and to be maddened that they are beyond his reach. Because so much that he prizes is out of his intellectual grasp he imagines he can leap at the truth of things by intuition or with the help of some deeper agency, some spirit of nature.”
Page 369
“Davey decided that he had to be as pure and natural as an animal. Pure and natural as a ladybird, of course, not pure and natural as the ladybird’s cousin, the dung-beetle. Pure and natural as a gazelle, not pure and natural as the hyenas that bite into the gazelle’s eyeballs and feast on its intestines. His ideas of purity and naturalness seem to have more in common with a Victorian hymnbook for children than any real understanding of the physical world.”
Page 378