Quentin and I

In 1968, The Naked Civil Servant was published. Apparently, in the same year, its author, Quentin Crisp, was approached by Denis Mitchell to make a documentary. Book and documentary together formed the world's formal introduction to Quentin Crisp, though many had been introduced informally to Quentin before.

It was not until 1975 that the television film version of the book was released, starring John Hurt in the title role, and bringing to Quentin Crisp a wider celebrity as one of "the stately homos of England".

Somewhere between 1968 and 1975, I was born. My family name being Crisp and my given name Quentin, I became the second Quentin Crisp, although in a way I was the first, since the one who had been born before me had been born Denis (or Dennis?) Pratt, in 1908, to be precise, and on Christmas Day. (There is, of course, a susperstition that it bodes ill to be born on Christmas Day. I wonder if Quentin would have agreed. Apparently he originally wished to give his autobiography the title I Reign in Hell – a Miltonic reference, I suppose – but was persuaded otherwise.)

There are many ironies attached, for me, to my name, such as that above – that the second Quentin Crisp should be the 'real' one. Another of these ironies is that I have never felt myself able – at least, not so far – to choose a pen name under which to write. The fact that I have been given a name made famous or notorious from before my birth as a result of being claimed by a flamboyant outsider – a unique individual – has made me peculiarly attached to that name. I feel, all the more, that it is truly mine.

I should repeat here what I have said elsewhere, that the name was bestowed upon me in ignorance. I have questioned one of those responsible for my presence in this world on this matter and her reply was that she had, indeed, known of Quentin Crisp before I was born, but not by name. She had known of him in the informal way that some had prior to his formal introduction as made by the book and the documentary – because he had been a notoriously colourful character on the streets of… High Wycombe, I believe was the place cited.

Quentin Crisp the first, was, apparently, not infrequently beaten up as a result of his appearance. I have been much luckier than this, but there are aspects of his life and his mentality with which I feel myself in some sympathy. If I have not been badly beaten, I have sometimes found myself the object of aggression because of my appearance (which is certainly very bland in comparison to that of my predecessor), and discover, upon enquiring, that I meet verbal abuse in the street more often than others I know. (As a result of this I hate England, the country of my birth, as I believe my predecessor also did.) Perhaps more notably than the aggression, however, I have experienced something that the first Quentin, I suppose, did not. Very often, people refuse to believe that my name is, in fact, my real name. This has caused people, for instance, to hang up the phone on me, or, upon being introduced, to imagine that I am playing a joke of some kind. It's peculiar because, as far as I am concerned, I have always been Quentin Crisp, and have never been anyone else, and yet the world expects me to prove this. I remember phoning up, for instance, to apply for a teaching job. I gave my name, and the person answering, the prospective employer of English teachers, snarled back at me, "And you expect me to believe that?" "Yes," I said. "I do."

Returning to the family home for a week at the end of November, I found my copy of The Naked Civil Servant lying about quite conspicuously in my dusty old room, which is quite possibly slovenly enough in aspect to make my accidental namesake proud. I began to leaf through it again, remembering and admiring the author's way of writing almost entirely in aphorisms. There was something else, though, beneath the foppish exterior. An obituary describes Quentin Crisp as a cross between Sartre and Sun Ra. This seems to me an inspired and appropriate description.

Recently, of course, An Englishman in New York was broadcast in Britain. My perusal of The Naked Civil Servant in November and this new film have combined to reignite my interest in the man with whom I share a name. Just this morning, I found on YouTube the original documentary mentioned above. I have watched the first three parts and am enjoying it immensely. I intend to watch all the parts and possibly give some commentary below. Let me begin by saying that one aspect of the documentary I am enjoying is the visual aspect, the faded colours of the early seventies, the decade in which I was born, and which shall forever represent my temporal home (although, actually, some of this, at least, must be late sixties, the sober documentary style pushes it towards the seventies as I knew them). People need to feel those seedy, low-key colours, they need to wear them against their skin. After wearing such colours for a while, they will begin to eschew the kind of glossy colours – and the aesthetic that is their corollary – that have made the new Doctor Who instigated by Russel Davies such a travesty. Let us begin:

We must make a world in which everyone is equally beautiful, equally desirable, equally lovable

Later…

I have just written perhaps a thousand words here and, with a single click of a mouse, lost them all.

Let me start again, and this time I will do what I should always do when writing anything of any length on a computer – I shall back it up.

I left this room, after writing the entry above, some time after one o'clock, in my nightclothes. I made myself breakfast, and saw through the kitchen window that the sun was shining in what could be called an unseasonable way (there had been frost outside when I first woke). I wondered if I would have time to take a walk before the daylight ended. However, it was almost five o'clock when I first began work on this addendum, and it was growing dark then. At four o'clock, after doing a little revision on a novel, I descended the stairs again to make myself lunch. The house was silent and slightly chill (the heating had perhaps not been turned up), with that empty chill that brings a frisson of gooseflesh. No word has been spoken to me today, though there has been, at times, the sound of fingers upon keyboards, and the silence of concentration. Now the hands of the clock are moving towards six pm and it is entirely dark outside. It has been a day in atmosphere very like the day captured in the documentary above.

For some reason it previously escaped my notice that the first three parts of the documentary are also the last three parts, in other words, that there are only three parts. This seems somewhat brief, and I was hoping for more. However, such hibernal brevity can be attractive. It can turn a document into a poem.

Actually, I'm not sure that the documentary does represent only one brief day in the life of. It is certainly shot in such a way as to suggest that it is all done on a single day, with Quentin consulting his diary at the beginning (the date being Monday the 21st of something), the film crew being filmed arriving and setting up, and leaving again (though the film crew that filmed the film crew leaving is not filmed), but there are some things that confuse me. For instance, at the beginning there is the caption, "Granada 1970", but later the caption "Quentin Crisp 1968". Does this footage really span two to three years? That seems difficult to believe. Nonetheless, Quentin does undergo a number of changes of outfit during the proceedings, and while it is conceivable that all of these were effected in one afternoon, I rather suspect that they indicate different days of shooting.

I was intending, of course, to make some kind of commentary on the documentary, but I'm not sure that I can add very much that would not be redundant. Quentin, of course, is eminently quotable, to the extent that, if I started, I could easily end up quoting almost or entirely every word uttered in this film, in the slightly annoying way that people quote lines that amuse them under YouTube clips, in order to 'share'. Some of the lines are not exactly aphorisms, but made me laugh aloud for reasons I cannot exactly explain, such as the one about being able to live a life of wild debauchery on five pounds a week.

There were two especially notable ways in which I felt myself similar to Quentin Crisp. I will name one of these. At one point, Quentin describes himself as a walking Oxfam shop, since most of his clothes are given to him. The same is true of me, although I hope to regain control of my wardrobe soon.

It seems to me that this film consists of two very attractive elements. The first is that of colour – the seedy environment that I have mentioned, with its fading hues. The second is Quentin's diction. Whenever I encounter someone who actually loves words, who clearly lives through words and therefore treats them as living things, as an eccentric recluse would treat his precious tribe of Persian cats, I feel at once grateful and slightly sad. It seems to me that the number of English speakers able to apprehend language as a living and beautiful thing, and who are therefore able also to speak beautiful English as Quentin Crisp does, is rapidly diminishing. Here, in this film, at least, we have documentary evidence that such people can exist, and once did. Now people have no respect for language. They treat it with scorn. Words have become battery hens rather than Persian cats, and people coop them up in the cages of text-message speech, so that language becomes deformed, degenerate, ugly and unhealthy. I am in favour of free-range English.

Here is a small example:

Denis: It's all rather dusty, Quentin.

Quentin: Truuue. Unkind friends say that I have the dust sent in from Fortnum and Mason's.

What a wonderful way to start a spoken sentence, not with, "My friends", or, "A friend of mine", but with an adjective modifying the noun: "Unkind friends". Of course, it's not just the noun that is modified, but the whole sentence, that single word at the beginning exerting such influence that the entire statement is at once beautifully simple and elegantly arch.

I've mentioned the colours and the language, but there is also the sound, most of which is that gooseflesh frisson of silence, such as reigned in this house today before the dying of the brief daylight. The silence draws its richness, its tingling towards frisson, from sounds such as the ticking of a clock and the striking of a match in front of the old gas fire, which then whooshes alight. Steam hisses from the spout of a kettle. Tea is stirred clinkingly.

All this together is most certainly poetry. It offers what true poetry (in its autumnal and hibernal modes) always does: consolation, in deep, calming, fatalistic caresses.

It seems that so far this addendum has come to 980 words. That's more or less how much I lost with that click of a mouse.

Now let me find something constructive to do with what remains of the day – now that the radiators have come on and all is darkness outside.