Here, Stephen Fry gives us an entertaining introduction to the motives behind his exploration of America for his latest TV series and book – Stephen Fry in America.
I was so nearly an American. It was that close. In the mid-1950s my father was offered a job at Princeton University – something to do with the emerging science of semiconductors. One of the reasons he turned it down was that he didn’t think he liked the idea of his children growing up as Americans. I was born, therefore, not in NJ but in NW3.
I was ten when my mother made me a present of this momentous information. The very second she did so, Steve was born.
Steve looked exactly like me, same height, weight and hair colour. In fact, until we opened our mouths, it was almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. Steve’s voice had the clear, penetrating, high-up-in-the-head twang of American. He called Mummy ‘Mom’, he used words like ‘swell’, ‘cute’ and ‘darn’. There were detectable differences in behaviour too. He spread jam (which he called jelly) on his (smooth, not crunchy) peanut butter sandwiches, he wore jeans, t-shirts and basketball sneakers rather than grey shorts, Airtex shirts and black plimsolls. He had far more money for sweets, which he called candy, than Stephen ever did. Steve was confident almost to the point of rudeness, unlike Stephen who veered unconvincingly between shyness and showing off. If I am honest I have to confess that Stephen was slightly afraid of Steve.
As they grew up, the pair continued to live their separate, unconnected lives. Stephen developed a mania for listening to records of old music hall and radio comedy stars, watching cricket, reading poetry and novels, becoming hooked on Keats and Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and P G Wodehouse and riding around the countryside on a moped. Steve listened to blues and rock and roll, had all of Bob Dylan’s albums, collected baseball cards, went to movie theatres three times a week and drove his own car.
Stephen still thinks about Steve and wonders how he is getting along these days. After all, the two of them are genetically identical. It is only natural to speculate on the fate of a long-lost identical twin. Has he grown even plumper than Stephen or does he work out in the gym? Is he in the TV and movie business too? Does he write? Is he ‘quintessentially American’ the way Stephen is often charged with being ‘quintessentially English’?
All these questions are intriguing but impossible to settle. If you are British, dear reader, then I dare say you too might have been born American had your ancestral circumstances veered a little in their course. What is your long-lost nonexistent identical twin up to?
Most people who are obsessed by America are fascinated by the physical – the cars, the music, the movies, the clothes, the gadgets, the sport, the cities, the landscape and the landmarks. I am interested in all of those, of course I am, but I (perhaps because of my father’s decision) am interested in something more. I have always wanted to get right under the skin of American life. To know what it really is to be American, to have grown up and been schooled as an American; to work and play as an American; to romance, labour, succeed, fail, feud, fight, vote, shop, drift, dream and drop out as an American; to grow ill and grow old as an American.
For years then, I have harboured deep within me the desire to make a series of documentary films about ‘the real’ America. Not the usual road movies in a Mustang and certainly not the kind of films where minority maniacs are trapped into making exhibitions of themselves. It is easy enough to find Americans to sneer at if you look hard enough, just as it is easy to find ludicrous and lunatic Britons to sneer at. Without the intention of fawning and flattering then, I did want to make an honest film about America, an unashamed love letter to its physical beauty and a film that allowed Americans to reveal themselves in all their variety.
Anti-Americanism is said to be on the rise around the world. Obviously this has more to do with American foreign policy than Americans as people. In a democracy however, you can’t quite divorce populace from policy. Like any kind of racism there are the full-frontal and the casual kinds.
I have often felt a hot flare of shame inside me when I listen to my fellow Britons casually jeering at the perceived depth of American ignorance, American crassness, American isolationism, American materialism, American lack of irony and American vulgarity. Aside from the sheer rudeness of such open and unapologetic mockery, it seems to me to reveal very little about America and a great deal about the rather feeble need of some Britons to feel superior. Alright, they seem to be saying, we no longer have an Empire, power, prestige or respect in the world, but we do have ‘taste’ and ‘subtlety’ and ‘broad general knowledge’, unlike those poor Yanks. What silly, self-deluding rubbish! What small-minded stupidity! Such Britons hug themselves with the thought that they are more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than Americans because they think they know more about geography and world culture, as if firstly being cosmopolitan and sophisticated can be scored in a quiz and as if secondly (and much more importantly) being cosmopolitan and sophisticated is in any way desirable or admirable to begin with. Sophistication is not a moral quality, nor is it (unless one is mad) a criterion by which one would choose one’s friends. Why do we like people? Because they are knowledgeable, cosmopolitan and sophisticated? No, because they are charming, kind, considerate, exciting to be with, amusing… there is a long list, but knowing what the capital of Kazakhstan is will not be on it. Unless, as I repeat, you are mad.
The truth is, we are offended by the clear fact that so many Americans know and care so very little about us. How dare they not know who our Prime Minister is, or be so indifferent as to believe that Wales is an island off the coast of Scotland? We are quite literally not on the map as far as they are concerned and that hurts. They can get along without us, it seems, a lot better than we can get along without them and how can that not be galling to our pride? Thus we (or some of us) react with the superiority and conceit characteristic of people who have been made to feel deeply inferior.
I do not believe, incidentally, that most Britons are anti-American, far from it. Many are as fascinated in a positive way by the United States as I am, and if their pride needs to be salvaged by a little affectionate banter then I suppose it does little harm.
So I wanted to make an American series which was not about how amusingly un-ironic and ignorant Americans are, nor about religious nuts and gun-toting militiamen, but one which tried to penetrate everyday American life at many levels and across the whole United States. What sort of a design should such a series have? What sort of a structure and itinerary? It is a big country the United States and surely …
The United States! America’s full name held the clue all along, for America, it has often been said, is not one country, but fifty. If I wanted to avoid all the clichés, all the cheap shots and stereotypes and really see what America was, then why not make a series about those fifty countries, the actual states themselves? It is all very well to talk about living and dying, hoping and dreaming, loving and loathing ‘as an American’, but what does that mean when America is divided into such distinct and diverse parcels? To live and die as a Floridian is surely very different from living and dying as a Minnesotan? The experience of hoping and dreaming as an Arizonan cannot have much in common with that of hoping and dreaming as a Rhode Islander, can it?
So, to film in every state. I had a structure and a purpose. It suddenly seemed so obvious and so natural that I was amazed no British television company had ever done it before. But how would I get about? I often drive around in a London taxi. The traditional black cab is good and roomy for filming in and perhaps the sight of one braving the canyons, deserts and interstate highways of America could become a happy signature image for the whole journey. A black cab it would be.
There is no right tempo for a project like this. The whole thing could be achieved in two weeks by someone who just wanted to tick off the states like a train-spotter, or it could be done over the course of years, with great time and attention given to the almost infinite social, political, cultural and physical nuances of each state. The pace at which my taxi and I zipped along provided me not with definitive portraits but with multiple snapshots of experience, which I hope when taken together will cause a bigger picture of the country and its fifty constituent parts to emerge.
Between these pages I have been more anxious to convey the experience than to interpret it – in other words, while this is a book about a journey, it does not presume to draw conclusions. I would not dare to suggest that my trip, though as exhausting and exhaustive as we could make it, has granted me a definitive insight into so complex and gigantic a nation as America, nor even a definitive insight into each state. I do hope however, that it will communicate the scale of the nation, the diversity, depth of identity and wealth of pride that prevails in every one of its fifty distinct states. I hope too that it will fill in some gaps for those of you, who – like me – might have been rather unsure where Wisconsin, say, or Nebraska exactly fitted on the map, who wanted to know a little more about the Deep South, the Heartland, New England, the Pacific Northwest, the Delta and the Great Lakes, the Rocky and the Smoky Mountains, the wide Mississippi and High Plains and the people who live out their lives in these remarkable places. You can, of course, use this book as a quick reference when you need to remind yourself where Vermont is, or what the state capital of Kansas might be and you can try your hand at the two little quizzes I have included. If you use a gentle pencil to fill in your answers, then others can have a go too…
Having said that this book presumes to draw no conclusions, I will offer this: the overwhelming majority of Americans I met on my journey were kind, courteous, honourable and hospitable beyond expectation. Such striking levels of warmth, politeness and consideration were encountered not just in those I was meeting for on-camera interview; they were to be found in the ordinary Americans I met in the filling-stations, restaurants, hotels and shops too.
If I were to run out of petrol in the middle of the night I would feel more confident about knocking on the door of an American home than one in any other country I know – including my own. The friendly welcome, the generosity, the helpfulness of Americans – especially, I ought to say, in the South and Midwest – is as good a reason to visit as the scenery. Yes, Americans are terrible drivers (endlessly weaving between lanes while on the phone, bullying their way through if they drive a big vehicle, no waves of thanks or acknowledgement, no letting other cars into traffic), yes they have no idea what cheese or bread can be and yes, strip malls, TV commercials and talk radio are gratingly dreadful. But weighing the good, the kind, the original, the enchanting, the breathtaking, the hilarious and the lovable against the bad, the cruel, the banal, the ugly, the crass, the silly and the monstrous, I see the scales coming down towards the good every time.
If you are an American you will, I hope, accept my apologies for such statements of the obvious, such errors of fact and judgment, such generalisations and misapprehensions as will be painfully evident to you, privileged as you are with that almost unconscious knowledge and instinctive understanding of your native state and nation that comes with citizenship. Human nature, after all, dictates that you turn straight to the entry in this book that covers your own state and you will doubtless find that your home town has been ignored and that I have passed over all the ingredients you regard as essential in the make-up, character and identity of your state and this might poison your mind against my judgement, My eyes, those of an outsider looking in, are bound to miss and to misinterpret. As it happens, I enjoy reading impressions of Britain written by visitors to our shores, the mistakes and misreadings only add to the pleasure and often make me think about my country in new ways, so perhaps my sweeping inaccuracies and dumb failures to grasp the essentials can be taken in that light, as revealing rather than obscuring. Sometimes the spectator sees more of the game. In any event, few if any Americans I met in my travels had ever visited all fifty states, or anything close to that number, so perhaps even you will find something new here.
There is one phrase I probably heard more than any other on my travels: “Only in America!”
If you were to hear a Briton say “Tch! only in Britain, eh?” it would probably refer to something that was either predictable, miserable, oppressive, dull, bureaucratic, queuey, damp, spoil-sporty or incompetent – or a mixture of all of those. ‘Only in America!’ on the other hand, always refers to something shocking, amazing, eccentric, wild, weird or unpredictable. Americans are constantly being surprised by their own country. Britons are constantly having their worst fears confirmed about theirs. This seems to be one of the major differences between us.
We began filming the series in Maine in late September 2007 and finished in Hawaii in the first week of May, 2008.
At 6.45am on my very first morning I was sitting in the WaCo Diner, which styles itself ‘America’s east-most dining-room’. Marvelle prepared a Seafood Scramble for me while her colleague Darna replenished my coffee cup for the third time. Endless free refilling or ‘bottomless coffee’ as they call it is the norm in diners all across the United States. How outraged Americans are when they come to Europe and find themselves charged for each cup. Anyway, the television at the end of the counter was running a commercial for a local telecoms company. And that is where I heard a refrain that, mutatis mutandis, followed me over the next eight months as I travelled from sea to shining sea: ‘In Maine we don’t always follow the rules. We sometimes make our own. In Maine we think different.’
Those words, surely somewhat overblown in the context of a television advertisement for a local phone network, confirmed my suspicions about American statal pride. ‘We think different in Tennessee’, ‘South Dakotans march to a different drum’, ‘We don’t follow the pack in New Mexico’, ‘I guess you can call us Missourians mavericks’… and so on.
We all like to think ourselves different, ‘I’m unconventional like everybody else,’ as Wilde once almost said, but it seems particularly important to Americans to remind themselves of their separateness, their uniqueness, their rebel spirit and they do it, not so much as a nation, but state by state.
And which of the states is my personal favourite? I have been asked that a great deal and I have yet to come up with a smart, snappy answer. A combination of Montana, northern California, Arizona, Maine and Alaska would be pretty impressive. But I have left out Utah, Wyoming and Massachusetts and where are Vermont and Kentucky? Am I saying I didn’t like Pennsylvania and South Carolina? Oh dear. Without the loyalty that comes from being actually born in one of the states it seems impossible to choose between them. I could live in most of them perfectly happily. Living the life I do, I would have to make my choice according to conveniences like proximity to a major American city. Thus to have Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco or New York within reach would tilt the balance away from Montana, Arizona and Maine, for example. Yet I could live happily in any of those three if I were to retire from the kind of work that makes access to a large urban centre necessary.
As the taxi and I travelled around America I pictured myself in an adobe on the edges of the Saguaro Park outside Tucson, Arizona, in an artfully luxurious beachfront shack on the New England coast, in a Colorado condo in the shadow of the Rockies, in an Italianate villa in the Napa Valley, in a gracious antebellum residence in the lowlands of South Carolina, in a modern glass-fronted creation built into the hillside overlooking Puget Sound in Seattle, Washington, in a Ted Turner-style ranch house in Montana, in an elegant townhouse in a historic square in Savannah, Georgia or in a traditional clapboard, clinker-built home with a view over Chesapeake Bay, Maryland. Any one of those would suit me fine.
Damn, I was lucky to be able to do what I did. I hope you find in the pages to come information and experience which will encourage you to think again about America. Maybe you will even consider following in my tyre-treads on your own trip of a lifetime. Take your own cheese.
Epilogue
Fifty states. Fifty cultures, societies, accents, cuisines, landscapes and more. I shall never be able to think of America in quite the same way again. I cannot claim to have done more than scratch the surface of this enormous land, but the scope of my adventures and the variety of people I have met have convinced me that it is almost as meaningless to call someone American without specifying their state as it is to call them European without specifying their country. The great metropolitan areas stand on their own as unique entities, but journeying through the rest of the United States I found that statehood mattered and that locality and terror, as the French would say, seared its brand into everything and everyone.
I loved America before this trip and I love it now more than ever. The obvious characteristics that we celebrate and bemoan – the brashness, the vulgarity, the worship of money, the gun obsession, the distressing religiosity, the ignorance of the rest of the world, the deafness to linguistic nuance, the lack of banter, the whining self-regard, the blame culture, the junk food and the strip malls – yes, these are all to be found, but alongside we encounter the hope, the self-belief, the optimism, the warmth, consideration, kindness, sharpness of wits, will power, pride, wry self-awareness, independence, openness, generosity and charm. There is nothing you and I can observe about America that most Americans haven’t observed for themselves. I met very few fools on my travels, save perhaps the British I encountered who thought themselves naturally superior: I still shiver with embarrassment at the memory of their imbecile arrogance. America is not perfect, and I do not love Britain any less for loving America more. As all travellers know, the experience of a foreign country teaches you about your own.
See Stephen Fry’s list of things he did in America.
Get your copy of Stephen Fry in America.
Images: Copyright: Stephen Fry and West Park Pictures Ltd 2008; photographs by Vanda Vucicevic.
Author: Stephen Fry
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Historical former residents include astronomer Johannes Kepler, composer Anton Bruckner and poet Adalbert Stifter, while Mozart’s Linzer Symphony has immortalised the name of the town in which it was composed.
California’s Sierra Nevada is one of my favourite mountain ranges. They rise abruptly from a flat valley at sea level to 14,500 feet in a matter of miles. It is one of the most dramatic mountain ranges and only a few mountain roads cross them.
The institution of the summer camp is well established in the USA. Every year millions of kids go for week or two to spend some time in the natural environment – most of the camps are located in the mountains, forests or by lakes. Our camp was a bit unusual because it was designed for kids as well as their parents. The idea is that while kids are playing supervised under the instructors, parents have time to relax. Of course they can join in with play and activities if they wish. Most of the families spent one week at the camp each summer and some of these families come back year after year, and some of the parents have been here as kids.
A great way to explore Sequoia National Forest is riding mountain bikes (note that they are prohibited in the neighbouring national parks). One of the best excursions I did was a trip to the Buck Rock fire lookout. It was a very slow and tiring climb using narrow back roads; at this elevation mountain biking (and any physical activity in fact) is much more difficult than at sea level.
It was really one of my best summer vacations. I was there to work but in such a place work and play blend together easily. For example, staff dines together with the guests, and we could also take part in all the activities in our off-duty time. Most of the staff members were students of Californian colleges or foreigners attending various student programs (like me). We lived in wooden cabins between the trees, not far from the guests’ area (but far enough to have some sort of privacy). The food was good, the weather even better – almost paradise. But the best part of the camp was an open-air Jacuzzi. Especially after dark (when all the kids went to bed) with a view of the stars and a drink in your hand, it was an ultimate experience – the best after a whole day spent hiking, biking or horse riding. Highly recommended. Sierra Nevada should be on the list of things to see for everyone who is going to visit California. For me it is actually the best part of this remarkable state.
Stephen Fry, the much-loved comedian, actor and writer, embarked on an epic journey across the USA for his TV series and book – 
For my holiday, I travelled back in time. Or at least, that’s how it felt. I stayed in a whitewashed village in Spain where mules laden with panniers plod the narrow lanes; men sit in doorways weaving basketware, while women in black dresses sweep the paths outside their homes.
Guide books and maps are, of course, necessary if we are to get the best from our holidays. They tell us what to see and how to get there, and if we buy them early enough they can also help us choose a good hotel in a convenient location.