On our way to see Larry Clark's "Kids."
JANUARY 1997
Sage New Yorkers know “The Native” has folded. With it, “Christopher Street,” “Theatre Week” and “Opera Monthly” are also no more.
I deeply regret their demise.
I used to think it so encouraging that Mr. Steele had become a kinky Lord Beaverbrooke at such an early age. It is not, of course, from any fault of his that his empire has collapsed, but simply because now that kinkiness has become mainstream, the unique appeal of such papers as “The Native” has become obsolete.
The “shocking” things it said can now be read in “The New York Times,” “The Wall Street Journal” and other respectable daily papers.
Finding myself an orphan, so to speak, I have been instructed by a Mr. Bell to write my diary on Internet. Mr. Bell is employed by — or possibly owns — the brewery in Perth, Scotland, which has adopted the ruse of producing a whisky with my name and my photograph on the label, in an attempt to win the “gay” liquor market of the world.
This new enlarged readership of my humble diary alters irrevocably the rather parochial (if it is possible to think of Manhattan as a parish) nature of my diary. What I asked myself could I possibly write that would amuse and inform the whole world?
To start in a small way, I have seen a play called “Making Porn” to which I was taken by a young man my agent calls “my millionaire.” It contains inevitably a lot of well-endowed young men simulating various sex acts, the sight of which I was prepared to greet with a puritanical yawn when a plot emerged.
The hero, a man called “Blue Blake” (I think) has a girlfriend (Joanna Keylock) to whom he has represented the films in which he stars as “educational.”
She is suspicious and demands to see one of them being made.
The experience tells her that her lover and his outstanding equipment are the essential ingredients of the film. She asks for more money for his services, and she and the producer argue as to the payment, arriving at the figure of $6,000 per picture.
At this, I became very excited.
I am always far more easily aroused by a large sum of money than by a great quantity of sex. Of course, by the time the world reads these words, the play will have come and gone. I mention it only in detail so that no one can ignore any subsequent plays by the author, Ronnie Larsen.
I wish I could recommend with equal enthusiasm the film “The English Patient,” which has received such high praise from everyone in America. I found it noticeably long and strangely confusing. But this could have been due to the special circumstances in which I saw this film.
I had been with a Texan gentleman to see Mr. Allen’s film “Everyone Says I Love You,” which I liked.
On leaving the cinema where this film was being shown, I encountered a gentleman in the foyer who greeted me with a boisterous hello. I replied with a “Uh, uh, uh, hel.. hello.”
He said he had interviewed me at some time in the past, but I had no recollection of our encounter at all. He offered me a free seat to see “The English Patient.” Wishing not to seem ungracious — and to do anything that was free — I accepted his kind offer and went back into the cinema. Thus spending nearly six consecutive hours in the dark. This may have sapped my critical sense.
I left the cinema on the arm of the woman who had sat next to me and we went to a neighboring cafe to discuss what we had seen, and to pool our bewilderment.
I think that American moviegoers have recently taken up British films in a fit of snobbery similar to that displayed by the English over continental films claiming that the actors looked more natural meaning hideous, and the plots more realistic meaning boring.
The only subject which I can think of as having world importance is the trial of Mr. Simpson. I saw the first installment of the trial on television, but after that could watch no more. It seems to me too shameful that the anxiety of this great man should be made into a mini-series for the delectation of people who had no right to experience it. I was delighted when he was declared innocent, but my happiness was short-lived. Apparently it is possible in America to try someone a second time in a civil court and we then beheld a man with a moustache like a sneeze proceeding to wreck Mr. Simpson’s life.
That’s the trouble with America. It will never recover from slavery. If Mr. Simpson had been white and his wife had been black, there would have been no fuss. The result of the trial would have ended the matter completely. Now we have lost three great men.
Mr. Tyson convicted of rape on the testimony of a woman who went to his hotel bedroom in the middle of the night. What did she expect — that they were going to play Scrabble?
Secondly, Mr. Gotti.
Convicted on the evidence of one of his confederates. I would not mind confessing that I had murdered my rivals, but I could never happily admit to having betrayed one of my confederates merely to shorten my own sentence.
JUNE 1997
It is with great reluctance that I now drag the fair name of Mr. Bell through the mud of these diaries, but I force myself to do so to show that I am following his orders and have not chosen to describe myself or my adventures as a form of soliciting the world for immoral purposes. I say this because recently I have received telephone calls from strange men with foreign accents inquiring about my private life. Not vaguely, not generally, above all not romantically, but crudely and in detail using the shortest words forthe longest things.
I hate to do this because it is rude, but could not be embroiled in such obscenities. There is also a lot of hostility. Someone telephoned me recently to say, “The will to be a star coupled with self-hatred is pathetic.” Or perhaps he used a worse word, is obscene or is revolting or something. He then rang off leaving me no opportunity to explain or excuse myself. I do exhibit the will to be a star, it is my only means of survival. I came to this country when I could bare England no more at 72 years of age with very little money, it would have been ludicrous to look for a job at that advanced age. So I became a shameless freeloader. I tried to give good value for the money that kind strangers spent on me by posing as a celebrity. It worked and so became my profession.
I apologize.
Self-hatred, which in other countries is regarded as a virtue, I could not foresee it to be regarded in America as a vice. In England, I was accused of self-love — that I spoke to hear the sound of my own voice — that I lavished on my appearance as much time as if it were a work of art. So I was bewildered by the reception my behavior has enjoyed here. There is also an added confusion that my dislike of sex which I would have thought was a personal matter has been construed as a political posture.
How did sex become political?
These accusations have been hurled at me between visits to other states -- Minneapolis where in a closed car advertising “Homo Heights,” a film in which I play a small part, I rode through the streets in a howling thunderstorm between ranks of sopping wet fans cheering and waving.
In San Francisco, I met another phenomenon — books with crumbs in them. I liked this phenomenon. A visit to a library is usually a scholastic pursuit, where the only greeting received is “Shhh!”
In San Francisco, reading is a social past-time. A cup of coffee and a bun, and a book — all obtained in the same place make reading into a pleasure. I think this is a good thing.
I originally thought that writing my diaries on Internet might be fun, but I have now revised my opinion. It has led to several very nasty conversations with strangers.
I have explained that I do not have a sex life and have not had one for 50 years. Why the strangers asked? Because of the expense, I replied.
The fact this answer causes him some bewilderment, shows that he is not a homosexual man but is eaten up with curiosity on the subject. In the end he asks if do I still believe in homosexuality.
I say that it is a predisposition — not a religion. After a while, I realize that he wants me to say the filthy words to describe the filthy practices and I ring off.
I do not like being homosexual, this is the cause of another kind of conversation. I am regarded as hating homosexuals which is not true. I hate nobody, not even the people who hate me.
But surely dislike even revulsion from certain sexual practices is purely a personal matter. So I shall not write my diaries on Internet unless I can be guaranteed some freedom from this harassment. I find this disturbing and never dreamed that this would happen.
Thank you.
APRIL 1997 — SPRING
Spring comes when Spring comes — never anymore
Over the barren plough land of my years
But I, who always feared the Spring before,
Have found at last an ending to all fears.
When God, when knotted-winds across the sky
Scourges the white or weeping clouds of rain,
Or, from the bed from which it loved to lie
Drags by its emerald hair the sleeping grain,
Convulses in an agony of birth
Trees that were old and only longed to die
Or with a rash of flowers infects the earth,
These things are like a rainbow in the sky.
If God ordained all this, he did ordain
That I who wanted love, should be alone.
I am some kindred miracle of pain.
I asked for bread. He gave me precious stone.
Mr. Purdy has been called “the outlaw of American literature.” If he is, he is the most gentlemanly urbane outlaw I have ever met. He has sent me over the years a number of his novels, which I read and liked. Now he has written a play called “Foment,” possibly his first and only drama.
I rushed to see it. It is about a cult religion and the disciples who vie with one another for the attention of their leader — at least I think that is what is about, because (even in the tiny Greenwich Street theatre) the actors could not be heard. This is because of the difference between American and English dramatic training.
When I was only English and lived in a rooming house in London, a girl stayed for a little while in our house. One day while sitting in my room, she confessed that she had been to a drama school in Miami.
I pounced forward because I hold that you cannot teach anybody how to act. To my question she replied, “They taught me to be a burning candle in an empty room.”
I’m glad to say she was laughing when she said it but she meant it.
In England you do not learn to be a candle in an empty room. Instead, you learn how to make a huge noise for a long time without becoming tired.
The day after I saw “Foment,” the television news was full of a story about a cult somewhere in America whose devotees all committed suicide.
A journalist in England called to ask my opinion about this phenomenon. I seem to have become a latter-day Bernard Shaw — with all the loquacity but none of the wisdom.
My opinion is sought about everything. I said that if one found one had great power over other people, it must be tempting to see how far one could go.
Could one persuade them to part with all their money?
To give up their lives?
The journalist seemed to have accepted that, but it remains a mystery.
The word “charisma” presumably has been hiding in the pages of the dictionary for ages, but has recently crept out into the open. I take it to mean the power to convince without the use of logic. Before there was this latest event, there was a Mr. Jones who’s followers were convinced to commit suicide, which they did.
Then there was Waco.
After that disaster, a televisonary interviewed two people who had tarried for some time in the compound in Texas. They looked just like ordinary people (they didn’t even wear sandals). In reply to the interviewer’s question they said, “Well everything seems so awful, and he seemed to have something.” “What did you think he had,” they were asked — not “what was so awful” which would seem to me to be the revealing question.
This seems so strange a viewpoint, especially in America where everything is so wonderful, where happiness reigns down from the sky, and everybody is your friend — if you are white. I have lived in Manhattan for 16 years, I have never worked. I wonder about looking ridiculous, smiling fatuously at strangers. What more would anyone want? Why go into a sort of a cross between a prison and a convent and submit one’s children to the unwelcome attentions of a prophet-shaman-high priest. I will never understand it. Recently, I went at the invitation of Ms. Arcade to the ruined school on First Avenue where she gave a performance which would have got her and her entire audience arrested, and then said that “Life in America was awful.”
I forbore to point out that she and I had both come there in our own street clothes, sat on chairs, said whatever came into our heads, and received loud applause.
What did she want, for God’s sake?
After all this, I went to see the “Trails of Oscar Wilde.”
What a difference! Every word spoken with inescapable and grim clarity. I had forgotten there were three trials: first the one in which Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensbury for libel; the second where Mr. Wilde was sued by the Crown, which could not reach a verdict; and the third, where all of the weird little friends of Mr. Wilde were called as witnesses which condemned him to two years imprisonment.
What a hypocrite he was!
He even deceived his counsel pretending he was innocent making a long speech about the love that dare not speak its name. It was surely too late to speak of love.
When I was young (if I ever was) and was swanning about the West End of London, all of the boys “on the game” thought that Wilde was an English lord who had thrown the world away for the love of a beautiful boy called Alfred Douglas.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Wilde was an upstart Irishman, getting to know a lot of East Enders in braille in darkened rooms in Oxford who had been procured for him by Lord Alfred, with whom he was involved in a murky squabble about money.
In “De Profundis,” Wilde accuses Lord Alfred for causing his downfall.
Why they ever met again after the imprisonment, I cannot imagine. Lord Alfred’s father promised his son financial support if he never saw Wilde again. Mrs. Wilde did the same for her husband if he never saw Lord Alfred again. Both lost a steady income certainly not for love.
With no scenery and precious few changes of costume, all this is made shockingly clear in this play.
It is a masterpiece.
FEBRUARY 1997
February and still no snow.
When I expressed my horror of the beastly stuff to an unknown woman, she said, “It’s cleansing.” She had to be joking. But this winter the streets of Manhattan, which usually at this time of year are awash with gray mud, are dry. One of the mysteries of New York is that there is no drainage. When it rains for a day and a night there are small lakes and rivers at the edge of the sidewalk. You find yourself running along the curb like a cat looking for a place to jump off without getting water in your shoes. Looked at from afar,especially from the sea, New York appears to be a splendid citadel of steel and glass.
When you live here, it’s a wreck -- a noisy, smelly, crowded, wonderful wreck.
I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which people are trying to call The East Village -- over my dead body. It is what solitaire players call “the discard pile.” The residents are hopeless cases. It is mercifully free of that arty flavor of Greenwich Village.
But though the denizens of the Lower East Side are so poor that in the summer they sleep on the sidewalks, there are expensive restaurants shoulder-to-shoulder all the way from where I live to 14th Street where the Lower East Side ends.
However poor you are you never cook.
People ask me if I cook, but “cook” is a strong word. I can fry an egg, I can boil a potato, I can open a tin of soup (at least I could until my left hand became useless), but I wouldn’t say that I cook. I would merely hate to live in such a way that I had to go out because I got so hungry.
This month I enjoyed a wonderful free supper. At the invitation of Mr. Sting I saw “Gentlemen Don’t Eat Poets,” a film in which he was featured. The opening was a very grand affair with the ushers dressed as butlers in black tail coats and striped trousers, photographers and journalists by the hundreds and the crowned heads of the entertainment business where there in the smiling and nodding racket.
The film, by contrast, was subdued and very English with Mr. Sting engaged as a butler in a large country home owned by Mr. Bates.
Someone has been murdered and his body served to the pigs and the pigs served to the guests. Mr. Bates has a stroke — and not of luck! In one of his fantasies a camel appears.
At a great banquet to which, after the film, we were all invited, I asked Mr. Sting about this exotic animal. He replied, “It was very expensive.” Mr. Sting remains quite unchanged by all the glory and all the fame by which he is perpetually surrounded.
It is wonderfully refreshing to be with him even if for a moment.
All that happiness took place before I was involved in a scandal.
A journalist telephoned me from England and told me about a certain Dr. Watson (not the little friend of Mr. Holmes) but a Scotsman who had discovered DNA. If there turned out to be a gay gene, I was asked, and if taking the fantasy still further, it were possible to detect this gene in a foetus while it was still in the womb, would the mother be justified or perhaps he said should she be allowed to abort it?
Without hesitation, I said, “Yes.”
How any would expected I would say anything else, I cannot imagine. I hold that life is not the best of things that could happen to anyone. I said that I never understood why anyone could emerge from a train derailment or an airplane crash with one arm and no luggage and say “I’m lucky to be alive.” I have always said that death is our only friend.
Had I known that my agent and my publisher would have been upset with this statement I suppose I would have modified it. But I would not have said the opposite. I have, since this news emerged, had a long discussion with my agent. She points out that life in America is much easier now and I couldn’t help being amused, in spite of the gravity of this situation, when she told me that there was a gay character on Miss Roseanne Barr’s show.
What a pitiful compensation. To me the every word uttered in this discussion confirms my opinion, the term acceptance doesn’t occur in the conversation of real people. When you ask anyone why he is doing anything, he replies, “Everybody does.”
My niece when asked why she was getting married, replied, “Everybody does.” This world belongs to normal people, they don’t have to establish their rights to it, they live in it.
My agent also said that my opinion encouraged persecution, this was certainly not my intention. Nothing does that. I did not say that all homosexuals should be killed, I said they should not have occurred, which is quite different. But my view on abortion generally seems contrary to popular belief. I have never understood how anti-abortionists can be seen lying like porpoises on the pavement outside clinics when, on the same news program, it is possible to see that a garbage collector has found a baby four hours old in a carrier bag in a dumpster.
There are too many of us in the world. We have passed the population size that Mr. Huxley considered impossible for the earth to support and we are still increasing. It is obvious that teenagers will become pregnant whatever the warning. If we are not to die of overcrowding and starvation, we must abort.
Nature, which I do not worship as most people do, is ruthless. It intends to survive and does so in the most brutal way, producing thousands of everything on the heartless grounds that something will survive. And we must try to defy nature instead of conniving with it in this merciless process.
Of course, I didn’t make this statement to an English journalist to annoy my agent or my publisher, I simply did not think of them. I am not in the business of selling books, only of writing them. Undoubtedly, we shall hear more on this subject.
Night Thoughts upon Reading “Final Exit”
For some time now, I’ve been intending to take Mr. Shakespeare’s advice to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” It’s time to retire my point-of-view and make room for more brazen wits. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens with death that the spirit is willing to keep the rendezvous but the flesh is tardy and acts as if it has lost its datebook.
The first thing I notice about Mr. Humphry’s much talked-about best seller, “Final Exit” is that its title is much more inviting that Mr. Sartre’s claustrophobic play “No Exit.”
Such “positive thinking” may account for the book’s immense popularity; Mr. Humphry is saying there is a way out of here. That is very comforting to someone like myself who, at 84, is beginning to think that eternal life may already have commenced.
Does anyone who lives on New York’s Lower East Side really need this book? Couldn’t I throw caution to the winds and make my “final exit” in the streets? There are restaurants in my area where the food is supposed to be fatal — to say nothing of those who loiter with dark intent in the doorways.
Frankly, I long for death and tempt it at every opportunity. Everyday I saunter forth, up the Bowery, past the crack houses, through the street gangs — hoping that someone will oblige me with a good bop! on the head. But nothing ever happens.
Street gangs part politely like the Red Sea when I walk down these supposedly mean streets - and then go right on threatening one another with their lethal weapons as soon as I have passed. Contrary to New York’s image abroad, the truth is that you can never find a criminal when you want one.
I travel abroad frequently on TWA or whatever high-risk airline I can find - but the odds are against me it seems. I keep landing safely, without incident. Short of writing a letter to the I.R.A. and begging for a bomb in my mailbox, I’m afraid that my life is doomed to be a farce in which the terrorists are always chasing the wrong people.
Mr. Humphry says I can change all this; that I can take charge of my life and my death. And unlike some writers of the past who have flirted with death, Mr. Humphry really means it. Dorothy Parker, you may recall, itemized the ways of making one’s “final exit” along lines like these in her poem “Resumé:”
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Gun’s aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live
Mr. Humphry, if I understand him correctly, might be rendered into verse like this (his style is more pedestrian than Miss Parker’s so you have to make allowances):
In order to make death as certain as taxes
You should follow this Hemlockian prophyllaxis:
Death by shooting is not so hot,
You may discover (alas) that you’re a poor shot.
Death by drowning is rather rude,
Suicide is no excuse for being found in the nude.
Slashing away with razor or knife
Is an obnoxiously messy way to end your life.
Carbon Monoxide may make you smile
But it also takes a very long while.
In short: when for you conclude that life is a drag
Reach for Phenobarbital and a plastic bag.
Leave a note and be polite
And don’t forget to turn out the light.
Mr. Humphry prefaces his book with a quotation from the works of Mr. Keats who was “half in love with easeful death.” I would not dare to make any comparisons between myself and the English poet. But I have always liked death — especially other people’s death but recently I have begun to look forward to my own demise with a certain amount of eagerness.
When I voiced this attitude during a television interview, it caused a stranger to ask me how I have come to be so bored with life that I wish to die. This was a natural question because the gentleman who asked it was young.
Ennui is a disease that frequently afflicts youth. It often claims to be “bored to death.” The prevailing malady of old age is fatigue. In my case, it is a malady, which lingers on.
I am now ready to die but I realize even as I write these words that, if I looked up from my typewriter and saw a crack in the ceiling ominously widening, I would move aside.
As with most people, my body wants to live forever. It is my mind that sometimes longs for death and on such occasions I keenly feel that I ought not to be the slave of my physical self but it is very much easier to think and write about liberation from corporeal limitations than to achieve it.
However, I am working at it and it was in this spirit of preparation for the end that I read Mr. Humphry’s latest book with such interest. It is so refreshingly free from religious platitudes, so totally unsentimental and so practical. Above all, it refuses to accept the notion that life is wonderful come what may. This myth rears its fuzzy head in all sorts of surprising circumstances. People who, in some disaster have lost everything, sometimes including an arm or a leg, often say, “I’m lucky to be alive.”
Can they really mean it? If I lost all my worldly possessions-- let alone a limb, in a fire or a plane crash, I would certainly not consider myself fortunate to have survived.
In England, the people are hostile but the system is compassionate. The very old, the very young and the ill-equipped-to-live will always be looked after somehow. In America, the reverse is true: everyone is your friend but the system is ruthless: as soon as you cease to be productive, the state abandons you. This makes an early and, in particular, a tidy death especially desirable. Already I am aware that I am using up space in Manhattan where that commodity is so scarce and that I am spending money that could more usefully be bequeathed to younger people. In other words, I have become part of that deplorable world populated almost entirely by the elderly, the redundant.
As someone who at best can claim to be having only “near-life” experiences these days, I’m available anytime that Death knocks on my door .
Of course, the perfect solution to this almost universal problem is more drastic than anything suggested by Mr. Humphry. The state should set a legal term to human life. Mr. Bush should decree that no one may live beyond the age of, say, seventy-five.
This might cause an outcry at first and a few undignified scenes might occur but soon the public would accept the rule and, ultimately, would welcome it. It would make life so much easier: it would solve almost all the financial problems that beset elderly Americans — how to eke out dwindling resources for years on end while paying heavy tithes to the medical profession.
The only point on which I find that I disagree with almost all books on the subject of suicide is the role allotted to the relatives of the person in question. I do not think that they should be consulted at all. Their emotions, by no means always friendly, may be aroused. Furthermore, they may stand to profit from the death of an ancient parent and may therefore feel guilty about conniving at or even consenting to the suicide of that person.
The issue should ideally involve no one but the person intending to end it all and the doctor. If anyone else must be consulted, it should be a panel of totally disinterested people, all under the age of forty-five — the age at which one realizes that one is not immortal.
A reporter once asked me for my thoughts on the “hereafter.” I replied that one of the many paradoxes of the human race which I will never under stand is that those who most loudly proclaim their belief in a glorious hereafter are the ones most reluctant to get there. As for me, I devoutly pray for eternal silence. When the party’s over, I don’t want to spend another lifetime analyzing what went wrong with the first. That would be like seeing “The Big Chill” 20 times in a row.
As someone who at best can claim to be having only “near-life” experiences these days, I’m available any time that Death knocks on my door. Assuming He can find his way to my rundown neighborhood. Death is so busy these days. What — with 55,000 Americans each year picking up Death like a hitchhiker on the highways; and another 300,000 puffing away and finding surcease of sorrow in tobacco; and countless thousands embracing death through high fat diets or high risk sex (it’s all the same really: Sara Lee kills more people than unsafe sex) it’s no wonder that He forgets to come and collect me.
There’s so many pushy people these days who simply refuse to queue — even for Death. I imagine that Final Exit is most popular with people like myself, who increasingly look forward to leaving but who don’t want to leave a mess behind.
It offers death with decorum — if not quite genuine dignity. Being a theatrical person at heart, however, I think I will take another stroll outside and see what I can do to tempt fate. The streets have brought me fugitive joys all my life. Why not now?
QUENTIN CRISP first became known in America through the much-acclaimed dramatization of his life, The Naked Civil Servant, which later went on to win an international Emmy for actor John Hurt. He is (still!) an occasional contributor to The New York Times and writes film reviews for Christopher Street.
"Night Thoughts Upon Reading 'Final Exit'” was commissioned by Last Rights magazine and appeared in Issue #4 (June-July 1992). Copyright Last Rights Magazine.
Sage New Yorkers know “The Native” has folded. With it, “Christopher Street,” “Theatre Week” and “Opera Monthly” are also no more.
I deeply regret their demise.
I used to think it so encouraging that Mr. Steele had become a kinky Lord Beaverbrooke at such an early age. It is not, of course, from any fault of his that his empire has collapsed, but simply because now that kinkiness has become mainstream, the unique appeal of such papers as “The Native” has become obsolete.
The “shocking” things it said can now be read in “The New York Times,” “The Wall Street Journal” and other respectable daily papers.
Finding myself an orphan, so to speak, I have been instructed by a Mr. Bell to write my diary on Internet. Mr. Bell is employed by — or possibly owns — the brewery in Perth, Scotland, which has adopted the ruse of producing a whisky with my name and my photograph on the label, in an attempt to win the “gay” liquor market of the world.
This new enlarged readership of my humble diary alters irrevocably the rather parochial (if it is possible to think of Manhattan as a parish) nature of my diary. What I asked myself could I possibly write that would amuse and inform the whole world?
To start in a small way, I have seen a play called “Making Porn” to which I was taken by a young man my agent calls “my millionaire.” It contains inevitably a lot of well-endowed young men simulating various sex acts, the sight of which I was prepared to greet with a puritanical yawn when a plot emerged.
The hero, a man called “Blue Blake” (I think) has a girlfriend (Joanna Keylock) to whom he has represented the films in which he stars as “educational.”
She is suspicious and demands to see one of them being made.
The experience tells her that her lover and his outstanding equipment are the essential ingredients of the film. She asks for more money for his services, and she and the producer argue as to the payment, arriving at the figure of $6,000 per picture.
At this, I became very excited.
I am always far more easily aroused by a large sum of money than by a great quantity of sex. Of course, by the time the world reads these words, the play will have come and gone. I mention it only in detail so that no one can ignore any subsequent plays by the author, Ronnie Larsen.
I wish I could recommend with equal enthusiasm the film “The English Patient,” which has received such high praise from everyone in America. I found it noticeably long and strangely confusing. But this could have been due to the special circumstances in which I saw this film.
I had been with a Texan gentleman to see Mr. Allen’s film “Everyone Says I Love You,” which I liked.
On leaving the cinema where this film was being shown, I encountered a gentleman in the foyer who greeted me with a boisterous hello. I replied with a “Uh, uh, uh, hel.. hello.”
He said he had interviewed me at some time in the past, but I had no recollection of our encounter at all. He offered me a free seat to see “The English Patient.” Wishing not to seem ungracious — and to do anything that was free — I accepted his kind offer and went back into the cinema. Thus spending nearly six consecutive hours in the dark. This may have sapped my critical sense.
I left the cinema on the arm of the woman who had sat next to me and we went to a neighboring cafe to discuss what we had seen, and to pool our bewilderment.
I think that American moviegoers have recently taken up British films in a fit of snobbery similar to that displayed by the English over continental films claiming that the actors looked more natural meaning hideous, and the plots more realistic meaning boring.
The only subject which I can think of as having world importance is the trial of Mr. Simpson. I saw the first installment of the trial on television, but after that could watch no more. It seems to me too shameful that the anxiety of this great man should be made into a mini-series for the delectation of people who had no right to experience it. I was delighted when he was declared innocent, but my happiness was short-lived. Apparently it is possible in America to try someone a second time in a civil court and we then beheld a man with a moustache like a sneeze proceeding to wreck Mr. Simpson’s life.
That’s the trouble with America. It will never recover from slavery. If Mr. Simpson had been white and his wife had been black, there would have been no fuss. The result of the trial would have ended the matter completely. Now we have lost three great men.
Mr. Tyson convicted of rape on the testimony of a woman who went to his hotel bedroom in the middle of the night. What did she expect — that they were going to play Scrabble?
Secondly, Mr. Gotti.
Convicted on the evidence of one of his confederates. I would not mind confessing that I had murdered my rivals, but I could never happily admit to having betrayed one of my confederates merely to shorten my own sentence.
JUNE 1997
It is with great reluctance that I now drag the fair name of Mr. Bell through the mud of these diaries, but I force myself to do so to show that I am following his orders and have not chosen to describe myself or my adventures as a form of soliciting the world for immoral purposes. I say this because recently I have received telephone calls from strange men with foreign accents inquiring about my private life. Not vaguely, not generally, above all not romantically, but crudely and in detail using the shortest words forthe longest things.
I hate to do this because it is rude, but could not be embroiled in such obscenities. There is also a lot of hostility. Someone telephoned me recently to say, “The will to be a star coupled with self-hatred is pathetic.” Or perhaps he used a worse word, is obscene or is revolting or something. He then rang off leaving me no opportunity to explain or excuse myself. I do exhibit the will to be a star, it is my only means of survival. I came to this country when I could bare England no more at 72 years of age with very little money, it would have been ludicrous to look for a job at that advanced age. So I became a shameless freeloader. I tried to give good value for the money that kind strangers spent on me by posing as a celebrity. It worked and so became my profession.
I apologize.
Self-hatred, which in other countries is regarded as a virtue, I could not foresee it to be regarded in America as a vice. In England, I was accused of self-love — that I spoke to hear the sound of my own voice — that I lavished on my appearance as much time as if it were a work of art. So I was bewildered by the reception my behavior has enjoyed here. There is also an added confusion that my dislike of sex which I would have thought was a personal matter has been construed as a political posture.
How did sex become political?
These accusations have been hurled at me between visits to other states -- Minneapolis where in a closed car advertising “Homo Heights,” a film in which I play a small part, I rode through the streets in a howling thunderstorm between ranks of sopping wet fans cheering and waving.
In San Francisco, I met another phenomenon — books with crumbs in them. I liked this phenomenon. A visit to a library is usually a scholastic pursuit, where the only greeting received is “Shhh!”
In San Francisco, reading is a social past-time. A cup of coffee and a bun, and a book — all obtained in the same place make reading into a pleasure. I think this is a good thing.
I originally thought that writing my diaries on Internet might be fun, but I have now revised my opinion. It has led to several very nasty conversations with strangers.
I have explained that I do not have a sex life and have not had one for 50 years. Why the strangers asked? Because of the expense, I replied.
The fact this answer causes him some bewilderment, shows that he is not a homosexual man but is eaten up with curiosity on the subject. In the end he asks if do I still believe in homosexuality.
I say that it is a predisposition — not a religion. After a while, I realize that he wants me to say the filthy words to describe the filthy practices and I ring off.
I do not like being homosexual, this is the cause of another kind of conversation. I am regarded as hating homosexuals which is not true. I hate nobody, not even the people who hate me.
But surely dislike even revulsion from certain sexual practices is purely a personal matter. So I shall not write my diaries on Internet unless I can be guaranteed some freedom from this harassment. I find this disturbing and never dreamed that this would happen.
Thank you.
APRIL 1997 — SPRING
Spring comes when Spring comes — never anymore
Over the barren plough land of my years
But I, who always feared the Spring before,
Have found at last an ending to all fears.
When God, when knotted-winds across the sky
Scourges the white or weeping clouds of rain,
Or, from the bed from which it loved to lie
Drags by its emerald hair the sleeping grain,
Convulses in an agony of birth
Trees that were old and only longed to die
Or with a rash of flowers infects the earth,
These things are like a rainbow in the sky.
If God ordained all this, he did ordain
That I who wanted love, should be alone.
I am some kindred miracle of pain.
I asked for bread. He gave me precious stone.
Mr. Purdy has been called “the outlaw of American literature.” If he is, he is the most gentlemanly urbane outlaw I have ever met. He has sent me over the years a number of his novels, which I read and liked. Now he has written a play called “Foment,” possibly his first and only drama.
I rushed to see it. It is about a cult religion and the disciples who vie with one another for the attention of their leader — at least I think that is what is about, because (even in the tiny Greenwich Street theatre) the actors could not be heard. This is because of the difference between American and English dramatic training.
When I was only English and lived in a rooming house in London, a girl stayed for a little while in our house. One day while sitting in my room, she confessed that she had been to a drama school in Miami.
I pounced forward because I hold that you cannot teach anybody how to act. To my question she replied, “They taught me to be a burning candle in an empty room.”
I’m glad to say she was laughing when she said it but she meant it.
In England you do not learn to be a candle in an empty room. Instead, you learn how to make a huge noise for a long time without becoming tired.
The day after I saw “Foment,” the television news was full of a story about a cult somewhere in America whose devotees all committed suicide.
A journalist in England called to ask my opinion about this phenomenon. I seem to have become a latter-day Bernard Shaw — with all the loquacity but none of the wisdom.
My opinion is sought about everything. I said that if one found one had great power over other people, it must be tempting to see how far one could go.
Could one persuade them to part with all their money?
To give up their lives?
The journalist seemed to have accepted that, but it remains a mystery.
The word “charisma” presumably has been hiding in the pages of the dictionary for ages, but has recently crept out into the open. I take it to mean the power to convince without the use of logic. Before there was this latest event, there was a Mr. Jones who’s followers were convinced to commit suicide, which they did.
Then there was Waco.
After that disaster, a televisonary interviewed two people who had tarried for some time in the compound in Texas. They looked just like ordinary people (they didn’t even wear sandals). In reply to the interviewer’s question they said, “Well everything seems so awful, and he seemed to have something.” “What did you think he had,” they were asked — not “what was so awful” which would seem to me to be the revealing question.
This seems so strange a viewpoint, especially in America where everything is so wonderful, where happiness reigns down from the sky, and everybody is your friend — if you are white. I have lived in Manhattan for 16 years, I have never worked. I wonder about looking ridiculous, smiling fatuously at strangers. What more would anyone want? Why go into a sort of a cross between a prison and a convent and submit one’s children to the unwelcome attentions of a prophet-shaman-high priest. I will never understand it. Recently, I went at the invitation of Ms. Arcade to the ruined school on First Avenue where she gave a performance which would have got her and her entire audience arrested, and then said that “Life in America was awful.”
I forbore to point out that she and I had both come there in our own street clothes, sat on chairs, said whatever came into our heads, and received loud applause.
What did she want, for God’s sake?
After all this, I went to see the “Trails of Oscar Wilde.”
What a difference! Every word spoken with inescapable and grim clarity. I had forgotten there were three trials: first the one in which Wilde sued the Marquis of Queensbury for libel; the second where Mr. Wilde was sued by the Crown, which could not reach a verdict; and the third, where all of the weird little friends of Mr. Wilde were called as witnesses which condemned him to two years imprisonment.
What a hypocrite he was!
He even deceived his counsel pretending he was innocent making a long speech about the love that dare not speak its name. It was surely too late to speak of love.
When I was young (if I ever was) and was swanning about the West End of London, all of the boys “on the game” thought that Wilde was an English lord who had thrown the world away for the love of a beautiful boy called Alfred Douglas.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Wilde was an upstart Irishman, getting to know a lot of East Enders in braille in darkened rooms in Oxford who had been procured for him by Lord Alfred, with whom he was involved in a murky squabble about money.
In “De Profundis,” Wilde accuses Lord Alfred for causing his downfall.
Why they ever met again after the imprisonment, I cannot imagine. Lord Alfred’s father promised his son financial support if he never saw Wilde again. Mrs. Wilde did the same for her husband if he never saw Lord Alfred again. Both lost a steady income certainly not for love.
With no scenery and precious few changes of costume, all this is made shockingly clear in this play.
It is a masterpiece.
FEBRUARY 1997
February and still no snow.
When I expressed my horror of the beastly stuff to an unknown woman, she said, “It’s cleansing.” She had to be joking. But this winter the streets of Manhattan, which usually at this time of year are awash with gray mud, are dry. One of the mysteries of New York is that there is no drainage. When it rains for a day and a night there are small lakes and rivers at the edge of the sidewalk. You find yourself running along the curb like a cat looking for a place to jump off without getting water in your shoes. Looked at from afar,especially from the sea, New York appears to be a splendid citadel of steel and glass.
When you live here, it’s a wreck -- a noisy, smelly, crowded, wonderful wreck.
I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan which people are trying to call The East Village -- over my dead body. It is what solitaire players call “the discard pile.” The residents are hopeless cases. It is mercifully free of that arty flavor of Greenwich Village.
But though the denizens of the Lower East Side are so poor that in the summer they sleep on the sidewalks, there are expensive restaurants shoulder-to-shoulder all the way from where I live to 14th Street where the Lower East Side ends.
However poor you are you never cook.
People ask me if I cook, but “cook” is a strong word. I can fry an egg, I can boil a potato, I can open a tin of soup (at least I could until my left hand became useless), but I wouldn’t say that I cook. I would merely hate to live in such a way that I had to go out because I got so hungry.
This month I enjoyed a wonderful free supper. At the invitation of Mr. Sting I saw “Gentlemen Don’t Eat Poets,” a film in which he was featured. The opening was a very grand affair with the ushers dressed as butlers in black tail coats and striped trousers, photographers and journalists by the hundreds and the crowned heads of the entertainment business where there in the smiling and nodding racket.
The film, by contrast, was subdued and very English with Mr. Sting engaged as a butler in a large country home owned by Mr. Bates.
Someone has been murdered and his body served to the pigs and the pigs served to the guests. Mr. Bates has a stroke — and not of luck! In one of his fantasies a camel appears.
At a great banquet to which, after the film, we were all invited, I asked Mr. Sting about this exotic animal. He replied, “It was very expensive.” Mr. Sting remains quite unchanged by all the glory and all the fame by which he is perpetually surrounded.
It is wonderfully refreshing to be with him even if for a moment.
All that happiness took place before I was involved in a scandal.
A journalist telephoned me from England and told me about a certain Dr. Watson (not the little friend of Mr. Holmes) but a Scotsman who had discovered DNA. If there turned out to be a gay gene, I was asked, and if taking the fantasy still further, it were possible to detect this gene in a foetus while it was still in the womb, would the mother be justified or perhaps he said should she be allowed to abort it?
Without hesitation, I said, “Yes.”
How any would expected I would say anything else, I cannot imagine. I hold that life is not the best of things that could happen to anyone. I said that I never understood why anyone could emerge from a train derailment or an airplane crash with one arm and no luggage and say “I’m lucky to be alive.” I have always said that death is our only friend.
Had I known that my agent and my publisher would have been upset with this statement I suppose I would have modified it. But I would not have said the opposite. I have, since this news emerged, had a long discussion with my agent. She points out that life in America is much easier now and I couldn’t help being amused, in spite of the gravity of this situation, when she told me that there was a gay character on Miss Roseanne Barr’s show.
What a pitiful compensation. To me the every word uttered in this discussion confirms my opinion, the term acceptance doesn’t occur in the conversation of real people. When you ask anyone why he is doing anything, he replies, “Everybody does.”
My niece when asked why she was getting married, replied, “Everybody does.” This world belongs to normal people, they don’t have to establish their rights to it, they live in it.
My agent also said that my opinion encouraged persecution, this was certainly not my intention. Nothing does that. I did not say that all homosexuals should be killed, I said they should not have occurred, which is quite different. But my view on abortion generally seems contrary to popular belief. I have never understood how anti-abortionists can be seen lying like porpoises on the pavement outside clinics when, on the same news program, it is possible to see that a garbage collector has found a baby four hours old in a carrier bag in a dumpster.
There are too many of us in the world. We have passed the population size that Mr. Huxley considered impossible for the earth to support and we are still increasing. It is obvious that teenagers will become pregnant whatever the warning. If we are not to die of overcrowding and starvation, we must abort.
Nature, which I do not worship as most people do, is ruthless. It intends to survive and does so in the most brutal way, producing thousands of everything on the heartless grounds that something will survive. And we must try to defy nature instead of conniving with it in this merciless process.
Of course, I didn’t make this statement to an English journalist to annoy my agent or my publisher, I simply did not think of them. I am not in the business of selling books, only of writing them. Undoubtedly, we shall hear more on this subject.
Night Thoughts upon Reading “Final Exit”
For some time now, I’ve been intending to take Mr. Shakespeare’s advice to “shuffle off this mortal coil.” It’s time to retire my point-of-view and make room for more brazen wits. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens with death that the spirit is willing to keep the rendezvous but the flesh is tardy and acts as if it has lost its datebook.
The first thing I notice about Mr. Humphry’s much talked-about best seller, “Final Exit” is that its title is much more inviting that Mr. Sartre’s claustrophobic play “No Exit.”
Such “positive thinking” may account for the book’s immense popularity; Mr. Humphry is saying there is a way out of here. That is very comforting to someone like myself who, at 84, is beginning to think that eternal life may already have commenced.
Does anyone who lives on New York’s Lower East Side really need this book? Couldn’t I throw caution to the winds and make my “final exit” in the streets? There are restaurants in my area where the food is supposed to be fatal — to say nothing of those who loiter with dark intent in the doorways.
Frankly, I long for death and tempt it at every opportunity. Everyday I saunter forth, up the Bowery, past the crack houses, through the street gangs — hoping that someone will oblige me with a good bop! on the head. But nothing ever happens.
Street gangs part politely like the Red Sea when I walk down these supposedly mean streets - and then go right on threatening one another with their lethal weapons as soon as I have passed. Contrary to New York’s image abroad, the truth is that you can never find a criminal when you want one.
I travel abroad frequently on TWA or whatever high-risk airline I can find - but the odds are against me it seems. I keep landing safely, without incident. Short of writing a letter to the I.R.A. and begging for a bomb in my mailbox, I’m afraid that my life is doomed to be a farce in which the terrorists are always chasing the wrong people.
Mr. Humphry says I can change all this; that I can take charge of my life and my death. And unlike some writers of the past who have flirted with death, Mr. Humphry really means it. Dorothy Parker, you may recall, itemized the ways of making one’s “final exit” along lines like these in her poem “Resumé:”
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Gun’s aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live
Mr. Humphry, if I understand him correctly, might be rendered into verse like this (his style is more pedestrian than Miss Parker’s so you have to make allowances):
In order to make death as certain as taxes
You should follow this Hemlockian prophyllaxis:
Death by shooting is not so hot,
You may discover (alas) that you’re a poor shot.
Death by drowning is rather rude,
Suicide is no excuse for being found in the nude.
Slashing away with razor or knife
Is an obnoxiously messy way to end your life.
Carbon Monoxide may make you smile
But it also takes a very long while.
In short: when for you conclude that life is a drag
Reach for Phenobarbital and a plastic bag.
Leave a note and be polite
And don’t forget to turn out the light.
Mr. Humphry prefaces his book with a quotation from the works of Mr. Keats who was “half in love with easeful death.” I would not dare to make any comparisons between myself and the English poet. But I have always liked death — especially other people’s death but recently I have begun to look forward to my own demise with a certain amount of eagerness.
When I voiced this attitude during a television interview, it caused a stranger to ask me how I have come to be so bored with life that I wish to die. This was a natural question because the gentleman who asked it was young.
Ennui is a disease that frequently afflicts youth. It often claims to be “bored to death.” The prevailing malady of old age is fatigue. In my case, it is a malady, which lingers on.
I am now ready to die but I realize even as I write these words that, if I looked up from my typewriter and saw a crack in the ceiling ominously widening, I would move aside.
As with most people, my body wants to live forever. It is my mind that sometimes longs for death and on such occasions I keenly feel that I ought not to be the slave of my physical self but it is very much easier to think and write about liberation from corporeal limitations than to achieve it.
However, I am working at it and it was in this spirit of preparation for the end that I read Mr. Humphry’s latest book with such interest. It is so refreshingly free from religious platitudes, so totally unsentimental and so practical. Above all, it refuses to accept the notion that life is wonderful come what may. This myth rears its fuzzy head in all sorts of surprising circumstances. People who, in some disaster have lost everything, sometimes including an arm or a leg, often say, “I’m lucky to be alive.”
Can they really mean it? If I lost all my worldly possessions-- let alone a limb, in a fire or a plane crash, I would certainly not consider myself fortunate to have survived.
In England, the people are hostile but the system is compassionate. The very old, the very young and the ill-equipped-to-live will always be looked after somehow. In America, the reverse is true: everyone is your friend but the system is ruthless: as soon as you cease to be productive, the state abandons you. This makes an early and, in particular, a tidy death especially desirable. Already I am aware that I am using up space in Manhattan where that commodity is so scarce and that I am spending money that could more usefully be bequeathed to younger people. In other words, I have become part of that deplorable world populated almost entirely by the elderly, the redundant.
As someone who at best can claim to be having only “near-life” experiences these days, I’m available anytime that Death knocks on my door .
Of course, the perfect solution to this almost universal problem is more drastic than anything suggested by Mr. Humphry. The state should set a legal term to human life. Mr. Bush should decree that no one may live beyond the age of, say, seventy-five.
This might cause an outcry at first and a few undignified scenes might occur but soon the public would accept the rule and, ultimately, would welcome it. It would make life so much easier: it would solve almost all the financial problems that beset elderly Americans — how to eke out dwindling resources for years on end while paying heavy tithes to the medical profession.
The only point on which I find that I disagree with almost all books on the subject of suicide is the role allotted to the relatives of the person in question. I do not think that they should be consulted at all. Their emotions, by no means always friendly, may be aroused. Furthermore, they may stand to profit from the death of an ancient parent and may therefore feel guilty about conniving at or even consenting to the suicide of that person.
The issue should ideally involve no one but the person intending to end it all and the doctor. If anyone else must be consulted, it should be a panel of totally disinterested people, all under the age of forty-five — the age at which one realizes that one is not immortal.
A reporter once asked me for my thoughts on the “hereafter.” I replied that one of the many paradoxes of the human race which I will never under stand is that those who most loudly proclaim their belief in a glorious hereafter are the ones most reluctant to get there. As for me, I devoutly pray for eternal silence. When the party’s over, I don’t want to spend another lifetime analyzing what went wrong with the first. That would be like seeing “The Big Chill” 20 times in a row.
As someone who at best can claim to be having only “near-life” experiences these days, I’m available any time that Death knocks on my door. Assuming He can find his way to my rundown neighborhood. Death is so busy these days. What — with 55,000 Americans each year picking up Death like a hitchhiker on the highways; and another 300,000 puffing away and finding surcease of sorrow in tobacco; and countless thousands embracing death through high fat diets or high risk sex (it’s all the same really: Sara Lee kills more people than unsafe sex) it’s no wonder that He forgets to come and collect me.
There’s so many pushy people these days who simply refuse to queue — even for Death. I imagine that Final Exit is most popular with people like myself, who increasingly look forward to leaving but who don’t want to leave a mess behind.
It offers death with decorum — if not quite genuine dignity. Being a theatrical person at heart, however, I think I will take another stroll outside and see what I can do to tempt fate. The streets have brought me fugitive joys all my life. Why not now?
QUENTIN CRISP first became known in America through the much-acclaimed dramatization of his life, The Naked Civil Servant, which later went on to win an international Emmy for actor John Hurt. He is (still!) an occasional contributor to The New York Times and writes film reviews for Christopher Street.
"Night Thoughts Upon Reading 'Final Exit'” was commissioned by Last Rights magazine and appeared in Issue #4 (June-July 1992). Copyright Last Rights Magazine.
