Quentin Crisp (1) (1908–1999)

Mr. Crisp goes to the movies with "our Mr. Steele" of Christopher Street Magazine (for which Mr. Crisp was a film reviewer), and provides us with a slew of amusing and insightful comments.

There is nothing quite like an acid-tongued queen as critic!

Crisp on "Miss Crawford"*: "Age could not wither her nor custom stale her infinte monotony."

*He refers to everyone this way: "Miss Crawford", "Mr. Welles", "Monsieur Depardieu", even "Mr. Divine"!!

So which is better, the book or the movie? Says show more Crisp, and I agree, "It is impossible to produce a satisfactory film from a really good book. What renders literature great is at least partly its power to evoke places, faces, objects so that we see them with the eyes of the imagination, which bestow on everything the luminosity of a stained-glass window. Mr. Proust says of the jewelry worn by the Duchess of Guermantes that it looked like tiny glasses of claret. In the movie, even if we had seen actual rubies, we would have beheld them with the eyes in our skulls. We could have praised the thoroughness of the art director, but we would have experienced no wonder." show less

It’s amazing the lack of interest Crisp claims to have had in books and reading, because he had literary style in piles and piles. I love a good “writer’s voice” and this author most definitely has one of the most recognizable I’ve ever come across. About halfway thru the book I took to YouTube to find a video of an interview with Crisp, and his voice and style were exactly as I imagined. This was clearly a naturally gifted writer.

So much of his life was about one century ahead of show more its time. Some people might claim this is why the book, told in such a wry and funny way for most of its length, ends on a rather bleak note. But I think the modern reader can be too influenced by our contemporary obsession with identity when considering Crisp - I sure had to avoid that pitfall. Instead of making this a book about being gay in the dark ages, It seems that the writer would rather it be a record of someone who was unabashedly unique, to the point of self endangerment. We follow the author’s life as it swings from absolute persecution to muddled acceptance (soured by what Crisp seems to feel is a kind of appropriation of the “hooligan” aesthetic by the so called counterculture) with only a brief period of “good times,” (which happened to be during the London Blitz) to bridge the two. It would have been easy for Crisp to “tone it down” in order to make his existence more tenable for others - yet he simply refused. Rather that making this book a pure paean to individuality, we instead get a realistic picture of the sacrifices you make when you can’t fit into the constraints of your time.

In the words of Thelonius Monk: “The genius is he who is most like himself.” By that criteria, Crisp would do more than qualify. show less

Crisp is a more or less self-avowed narcissist, and not as witty as he thinks he is, but it's impossible not to admire his cojones and his embodiment of "be yourself, no matter who you are". He's also in the true lineage of English eccentrics, not so much because of who he was (had he been born 80 years later he'd never have risen from obscurity) but because of who he was when he was. Spending time in his autobiographical company isn't exactly pleasant, but I'm still glad I did.

This is the book that made Quentin Crisp famous (and infamous) and that gave him the title of England's Stately Homo. Quentin was an out homosexual even before the word 'out' was coined, and this is an ironic, and most of the times sarcastic, auto-biography on being a notorious effeminate man in the pre-70 "victorian" London days. Quentin's self-derogatory humour is, of course, only a way of criticising everyone and everything around him and getting away with it. In a Wilde kind of way this show more is a very very funny book, full of quotable material. show less