posted on 06 May 2018

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Even during his own rather rackety lifetime, Quentin Crisp the writer was somewhat overshadowed by Quentin Crisp the character. Latterly the writer was further overshadowed by John Hurt as Crisp in the superb 1975 film of The Naked Civil Servant – overshadowed to such a degree that it sometimes seems we may have collectively forgotten what made Crisp notable in the first place: the fact that he was a remarkable prose stylist and truly, as many have said, an heir (in more ways than one) to Oscar Wilde.

I have been reminded of this recently by rereading Crisp’s extraordinary 1968 memoir, The Naked Civil Servant. It is a much finer and far more complex book than I remembered.

To describe Crisp as eccentric, a contrarian, a gay icon, a wit, doesn’t really begin to do him justice. Writing in 2009, Peter Tatchell slammed Crisp as a “self-hating, arrogant, homophobic gadfly” and certainly “no gay hero” (not a description Crisp would have had much use for in any case). Personally, I think this says more about Tachell’s conventional gay politics (and perhaps personal puritanism) than it does about Crisp. The bracing, astringent and sometimes shocking pleasures of Crisp’s memoir lie precisely in the fact that one can never quite predict what he will say next. This is why it is so enjoyable; and also why it is worthy of attention  and will continue to be read long after many other gay polemics have been forgotten.

The real clue to what makes Crisp such a fascinating writer can be found in the first half-dozen lines of his book: unable to ignore his “predicament”, he says, the way he chose to deal with it “would now be called existentialist”. He chose to become not just “a self-confessed homosexual, but a self-evident one” – and this, bear in mind, from around 1931, when he was 23. The world was darkening, Wall Street had crashed and even in London “[t]he sky was dark with millionaires throwing themselves out of windows”. Yes, he saw homosexuality as an illness, a predicament, “my disgrace”. But I don’t for one moment think he was self-hating – I imagine he would have said: “Self-hating – when there are so many other deserving targets?”

Nonetheless, it does seem the case that he embraced a sort of radical pessimism. His aim was not – certainly not – gay rights, but perhaps a kind of contrarian gay autonomy, a life of radical unconventionality that refused deception or discretion, a triumph of the gay will, of the refusal to be cowed. But this did also include – and I think this is perhaps what so disgusted Tatchell – a refusal to elevate his personal dirty protest to anything approaching sainthood. There may have been some element of personal sacrifice, but even this is far more complicated than I suspect Tatchell would have time for. At one point Crisp writes:

“I assumed all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first, I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause…By the time I was twenty-three I had made myself into a test case.”

He realised that being queer in Soho or the West End – where everyone was an outcast of some kind – was pointless, but thankfully the rest of England was untapped “missionary country”, full of millions of people whose outrage and fear could be guaranteed. “I went to work on them,” he says. Sometimes – at least in the 30s and 40s – it seems that Crisp craved nothing quite so much as an audience to shock with his stigmata of queerness.

Yet for or all his effeminacy he despised “camp”. The long line of publicly acceptable campness that stretches from music hall to light entertainment – from Frankie Howerd and Larry Grayson to Graham Norton and Alan Carr and Julian Clary – would surely have been subject to his bile, if he could have been bothered. And in some senses this begins to get close to the heart of the man and his mission. Having been “an object of mild ridicule” from birth for his gestures, speech and mannerisms, what Crisp decided was in its way valiant, courageous. These “natural outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual disgrace” would henceforth be badges of honour. He wanted the world to know that he was not ashamed and therefore chose “to display symptoms that could not be thought to be accidental”.

And thus began a life of radical queer honesty. Its strangeness lies in the fact that Crisp is almost impossible to relate to contemporary gayness; indeed, in part he is fascinating precisely because he lies outside or beyond gay politics. Yes it’s true that his media celebrity in the 70s and 80s turned him into something of a harmless spectacle, but the man who emerges from this memoir of the darkest ages of gay oppression is far stranger and more contrary than that. Indeed, what makes this memoir such a great read is that it isn’t the book we expected. It is a lone, outsider voice – almost a queer Beckett or a more genteel Jean Genet – offering up its own dark and paradoxical version of the truth.

Alun Severn

May 2018