Watts refers to Crisp as ‘very much a victim of the time in which he lived’, not simply because his homosexual lifestyle was outlawed, but because there was little understanding of trans identity which could have helped him to make this identification sooner. Crisp opens by discussing his identity, and making a remarkable declaration: ‘At the age of ninety, it has finally been explained to me that I am not really homosexual, I’m transgender. However, Last Words does bring something new for long-term readers. Based on this, we may not expect much beyond the familiar witticisms which had become Crisp’s meal ticket. In his second memoir, Resident Alien, Crisp noted that his public statements are ‘ aphoristic, not in order to conceal my meaning, but because they have been made so often that they have become crystallized – if not fossilized’. So what compelled him to work on this final document, at the age of 90? Crisp was aware of, and indeed welcomed, his imminent mortality he maintained a frugal lifestyle, but had amassed over $1 million in savings, and had no immediate need of money. Unable to type, due to paralysis in his left hand, he dictated the manuscript, giving it the feel of a monologue. Interestingly, The Last Word is the only book which Crisp wrote because he wanted to, rather than because he had been commissioned. Which makes me wonder if he would have been able to resist the temptation to tweet similarly vile, offensive things, knowing that they would be so much more likely to trend on the back of a wave of outrage than any more benign witticism he could come up with.’ But he never said sorry, or took it back. He privately made large donations to AIDS charities in his later years, after proclaiming to an audience in the 80s that “AIDS is a fad, nothing more”. ‘Crisp was someone for whom it was inconceivable to admit he had been wrong. In a 2013 blog post, Cathy Leech asked ‘if Quentin Crisp was on Twitter, would we all hate him?’: It also ensured that he faced less scrutiny, compared to the omniscient media of the present day. Crisp’s fame was in large part a product of the era in which he lived: he put the success of The Naked Civil Servant down to the fact that, when it was first screened by the BBC, there were only two television channels available in Britain, providing him with a near-captive audience. His strongly individualistic viewpoints tended away from solidarity and towards reaction, while his contrarian nature led him to make damaging statements about AIDS and the abortion of homosexual foetuses in particular. However, as Watts acknowledges, whether Crisp was ‘ the kind of gay icon that the emerging global gay community wanted or needed‘ is very much up to question. In his foreword to The Last Word, Laurence Watts eulogises Crisp in his later years as ‘ an openly gay man who hadn’t been imprisoned and broken like Oscar Wilde, who didn’t take his own life like Alan Turing, who wasn’t associated with “boys” like Bill Tilden, who didn’t remain closeted liked EM Forster or John Maynard Keynes, who wasn’t disgraced like John Gielgud and who didn’t succumb to AIDS like Rock Hudson‘ – a gay man who had survived decades of oppression, triumphed by outliving his opponents, and lived out his old age in comparative freedom. His own death was probably closer to Panza’s than he would have liked, but this final volume of memoir, published some 18 years after his fatal heart attack, allows him to make a final statement of his own, and it is an appropriately idiosyncratic and contradictory epigraph. You want to die in such a way that everyone knows and remembers your death‘. In The Last Word, Crisp muses ‘a significant death is a death which somehow gets into everybody’s mind so that nobody says “isn’t he dead? I thought he was dead”. Rather than attempting to save himself, he merely said ‘ Don’t let it end like this.
Gunned down during an armed uprising, Panza was found lying in a broken shop window. In response, he told the story of the Mexican revolutionary Sancho Panza. During one of his public speaking engagements, recorded as An Audience with Quentin Crisp, Crisp was asked how one could die with style.
0 kommentar(er)
