Insight

‘The wanton prancing of words’

By Tom Teepen
07-08-2005

Christopher Fry, 97, died recently, raising everywhere the question, “Who?” Fry was a busy figure in English theater from the late 1920s into the ’80s, as actor, director, head of theaters and of touring troupes. He was best known as a playwright. Little was heard from or of him for the last 40 or so years. He had fallen out of fashion. The high arc of his career and creativity ran from the late ’40s though the ’50s. It was at about midpassage in that period that I tumbled to him. Not yet exactly apprenticed to the language, I was nonetheless besotted with it. My great enthusiasm in junior high had been Classic Comics, with its versions of Dickens, James Fenimore Cooper, Victor Hugo and so on. When my allowance was bumped up a bit and I had begun to earn small change, I started buying 25-cent paperback books. I bought novels and classic works. I still have some. (“The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” for instance.) But my purchases also ran strongly to books with titles along the lines of “Ten Words a Day to a Better Vocabulary.” My usage was hit or miss but incessant in either case. I was, I am fairly sure, insufferable, tossing words out like the elder Rockefeller tossing shiny dimes to the curbside poor. We both thought of that as charity and perhaps even largess. It was, looking back, a mercy that few of my contemporaries recognized the offense when I used an “anxious” where a “eager” should have been, and most adults weren’t listening anyway, just nodding as if they were. Fry was among the fairly small number of playwrights who tried their hand at verse drama after T. S. Eliot wrote “Murder in the Cathedral.” The best known of his plays are “The Lady’s Not for Burning,” “Venus Observed” and “A Phoenix Too Frequent.” Of the lot, “Lady” is the only one still performed, and it not very often. Most of his work is no longer in print. I was introduced to Fry by a girlfriend, who was close to giddy over his musical language, playfulness and loping cadences. A poet herself and a sometime actress in college productions, she would read the plays aloud and we would both thrill when, in an especially exciting passage, Fry would reach back and just fling the language into the sky, where it would sail like a bird planing on the currents. We managed to half-convince ourselves that Fry was no less than Shakespeare reborn. There are no enthusiasms like youthful enthusiasms. Every one threatens to break into ecstasy. The danger is always high and the adventure wonderful. Fry, a Quaker, wrote on behalf of a gentle morality and a broadly understanding and quietly optimistic Christianity, with modern cares often reset into medieval settings where they could be looked at and thought about with less heat of the moment. Times, as they will, changed, and England’s theatrical angry young men school, with its women in dingy flats ironing in their slips, overran Fry’s more amused and amusing take on the world. One influential reviewer disdained his writing as “the wanton prancing of words.” That was supposed to be a criticism. I always thought it was the point. Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: eepencolumn@coxnews.com