The Naked Civil Servant
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THE QUENTIN KIND: VISUAL NARRATIVE AND THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT MARK ARMSTRONG PhD 2012 1 The Quentin Kind: Visual Narrative and The Naked Civil Servant Mark Armstrong A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Research undertaken in the School of Arts and Social Sciences February 2012 2 Abstract This thesis offers a close reading of Quentin Crisp’s auto/biographical representations, most particularly The Naked Civil Servant. Published in 1968, Crisp’s autobiography was dramatized for Thames Television in 1975, a film that would prove seminal in the history of British broadcasting and something of a ‘quantum leap’ in the medium’s representation of gay lives. As an interpretative study, it offers a scope of visual and narrative analyses that assess Crisp’s cultural figure – his being both an ‘icon’ in gay history and someone against which gay men’s normative sense of masculinity could be measured. According to particular thematic concerns that allow for the correspondent reading of the visual and the literary auto/biographical text, this thesis considers the reception of that image and the binary meanings of fashioning it embodies. It explores not the detailed materiality of Crisp’s figure but its effects – the life that his fashioning determined and the fashioning of that life in textual discourse and media rhetoric. Observing Crisp as a performer of the auto/biographical, the following themes are addressed: the biopic, its tropes and ‘the body too much’; desire, otherness and the ‘great dark man’; the circumscribed life of the art school model; the ‘exile’ of a Chelsea bedsit; and the drag of a queer dotage. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 5 Author’s declaration 6 Introduction: ‘Someone like Quentin’ 7 Chapter I: Becoming Quentin: The biopic 29 Chapter II: ‘There is no great dark man’: Fashioning the masculine other 63 Chapter III: A Specialised Subject: Quentin the model 96 Chapter IV: A Room in Chelsea: Quentin at home 127 Chapter V: Death Scenes: The drag of Crisp’s dotage 163 Conclusion 190 Figures 196 List of references 219 Bibliography 238 4 Acknowledgements The advice and kind assistance of the staff at the Hall Carpenter Archives, at Middlesex University and London School of Economics, was invaluable in this research, as was that of the staff at the National Portrait Gallery’s Heinz Archive. Very special thanks is due to the principal supervisor of this thesis, Cheryl Buckley, who has given both direction and encouragement throughout the research and writing process. 5 Author’s declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas and contributions from the work of others. Name: Mark Armstrong Signature: Date: 31 January 2012 6 Introduction: ‘Someone like Quentin’ I find it hard to take a prolonged look back and not attempt to excuse results by rearranging causes. Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses. D. H. Lawrence said that it was not living life that mattered but watching it being lived. I would say that it was not watching life that mattered but explaining what you saw (Crisp, 1977a, p.215). In exploring Quentin Crisp’s queerness and its fashioning, its representations and self-representations, this thesis stands at an intersection of several academic discourses, including auto/biographical theory, gay studies, queer theory, and the inter-disciplines of visual culture. Each of these offers a lens through which particular visual narratives of Crisp’s life can be examined. In synthesis, these establish a methodology that allows for the liberal reading of the machinations behind this visually reconstructed life, and thus a consideration of the meanings which it acquired, drawing on Crisp’s life as a text in which the body at its centre reveals discreet conflicts of ideology – a body at once political/apolitical, and culturally representative/liminal. In proposing Crisp’s public figure to have been defined by visual narratives, it is the 1975 biopic of his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant (1968), which stands as primary text here. While there is narrative evident also in the media representations of Crisp that were the consequence of that film, and which are critical to this thesis, those original writings held their own persuasive sense of the visual. Recent studies such as Maria Tamboukou’s Nomadic Narratives, Visual Forces: Gwen John's Letters and Paintings (2010), and In the Fold Between Power and Desire: Women Artist’s Narratives (2010), and Tzu Yu Allison Lin’s Narrative and Visual Arts in Virginia Woolf's London Writings: The Aesthetics of Words and Arts (2011), employ approaches to visual narrative that allow their authors to look at the lives of their subject’s as all- encompassed by politics of ‘being’. Indeed, what is revealed in these histories is the complexity of unravelling representation from self-representation, and of the questions that have to be asked to understand what such lives mean, circumscribed as they were by gender, sexuality, period and societal position. Such a reading of Crisp’s life adds to the body of literature on the historicization of twentieth century gay lives, and develops an understanding of how, from their 7 abbreviated, and seemingly heterogeneous, visual, media, and literary representations, more nuanced meanings can be recovered. Crisp’s autobiography (figure 1) held vivid dramatic potential, considering the difficulties through which he had lived. In the wake of the film’s success, with John Hurt persuasive in the role (figure 2), and the public celebration that Crisp himself experienced – unexpected for someone so relatively obscure and now in their sixties – he would produce a further volume of autobiography, How to Become a Virgin (1981). In this he reflected upon the belated celebrity he had found and the means through which he had achieved such cultural visibility. He was attentive particularly to the received image of queerness that he had come to personify. He suggests that if the ‘housewives’ prototypical of Britain’s social mores at that time were asked what they expected a gay man to look like, the response would be ‘someone like Quentin’ (Crisp, 1981, p.83). Indeed, in Crisp’s image, in the 1970s, the public found a byword for queerness – the very name Quentin become the embodiment of an effeminate nature, and indeed a schoolyard taunt.1 Elizabeth Wilson considers the material expression of queerness to have been significant among ‘the great struggles of the twentieth century’, a resistance of the heteronormative that engendered a critical shift in ‘the definition of what it means to be a man or a woman’, and she summons the explicit language that queer more recently has at once recovered and veiled in its synonymity of gender and sexual dissidence; ‘we may look back and say that it has been the gay century … in which the figures of the dyke and faggot have come out to challenge the inevitability of heterosexuality’ (Wilson, 1994, p.176). Crisp’s figure was principal amongst visual representations of queerness in 1970s Britain, and the essentialism with which his life was re-presented to a mass audience would seem a radical re-claiming of sexual otherness in a medium that had long been cautious of the ‘homosexual question’. Indeed, scriptwriter Philip Mackie‘s adaptation of Crisp’s writings was rejected several times at the BBC; but while the film would be five years in the making, there was great faith placed in the story at Thames Television. It would prove seminal in the history of British broadcasting – and a ‘quantum leap’ in the representation of gay lives (Howes, 1993, p.534). Crisp’s figure would however antagonise elements of the newly mobilised gay ‘community’. In his celebrity, he was portrayed as martyr as much 8 as icon, and would anticipate this in his writings, describing how his fashioning had become ‘a Carnaby Street hair-shirt’ (Crisp, 1977a, pp.216-217). While such a referent of place may have been very much of that moment – the late-1960s in which The Naked Civil Servant was published – the allusion to which it was bound was not. Crisp’s narrative of the fashioned self was defined by both the freedoms and the intolerances of London as he had experienced them, from the late-1920s, but that illusory cloth, with the intimations of martyrdom it wove, was even more anachronistic amidst the emerging topography of gay masculinity.2 That Crisp’s autobiography was written just before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adult men in Britain, a decade after the Wolfenden Committee’s report had advised such legislation, and would be published just months afterwards, is resonant in his own allusion to the advocates of such reform, summoned at the close of his writings as he reflects on why the effeminate queerness he had fashioned should have elicited the violent censure it did – and its apparent political inefficacy now, in the late-1960s; What happened? What went wrong? This is the question that, from a throat parched by brick dust, I ask the rescue party as they lean for a moment’s rest on their Reform Bills and their Acts of Parliament. When they see me tottering toward them they find it difficult not to recoil. I am the survivor they hoped they would not find—something too broken to be restored to active life but not quite ready for decent burial. My lips still move (Crisp, 1977a, p.215).