Guy Kettelhack
Email Guy Kettelhack: GuyBlakeKett@aol.com
These images were supplied by Guy and re-produced here by his kind permission.
This article was written by Guy and first appeared in the January 2001 issue of Middlebury Magazine, Middlebury, Vt.
It is re-produced here by his kind permission.
My mentor, Mr. Crisp
I first met Mr. Crisp in New York in the early spring of 1982 when, as his agent Connie Clausen's assistant, I opened the door at about 5:30 p.m. on a Friday to let him in. He had arrived for what I later understood was a ritual spaghetti dinner (he'd come up once a month for spaghetti and scotch and to discuss Hollywood movies and stars with "Miss Clausen"). I'd known Mr. Crisp not only from the film version of Naked Civil Servant but because Connie had "encouraged" me to read the book (it was required reading at the Clausen agency) -- which had enthralled me from the first word and made me one flustered sweaty-palmed bearded 31-year-old when I let him that evening into Connie's office and home. I think I was expecting some sort of unreachably erudite (maybe slightly bitchy) latter-day version of Noel Coward. I was completely disarmed by his self-effacing gentleness.
Thus began my seventeen-year acquaintance, working relationship and friendship with Mr. Crisp. Not long after this meeting Connie somehow got it into her brilliantly lively but often exasperating mind that I'd be an apt cowboy to corral his many bons mots into a book that later became The Wit & Wisdom of Quentin Crisp. I've been hooked to the literary Crisp ever since. During my six-year tenure at Ms. Clausen's agency I also booked him into a bewildering variety of theatrical venues across the country and managed - through sheer haughty chutzpah (fed by my conviction that he was worth ten times what anyone was offering) - to get him a good deal more money than he'd previously gotten (largely because, before this, he had so often said yes to any request made by anyone who'd offered him carfare and a meal). He was genuinely amazed that anyone wanted to pay him anything for anything.
What a wonderful time this was for me! Pursuing material for Wit & Wisdom I roomed with him twice (to tape performances of his one-man show) in New Orleans -- sharing a great French Quarter appartement, swagged with brown velvet, seeing him (as if on a Toulouse Lautrec poster) sprawled in full unselfconscious deshabille; I took him to Cherry Grove on Fire Island, which he found extremely strange -- although he rather liked that it was entirely "on stilts" (his way of referring to the boardwalk); I hooked him up with the estimable Tom Steele, editor of Christopher Street and The New York Native, because one of the few desires he ever expressed was that "it might be nice to write about the movies" (his reviews led to a wonderful book called How to Go to the Movies, and indirectly to his collection of New York Native columns, Resident Alien); and I cajoled him into taxis bound for countless clinics and doctors' offices (always a grim prospect to Quentin, who had never received medical attention he hadn't found ineffectual, unaffordable and embarrassing) -- urged on by Connie, who kept locating new specialists in the naïve hope that they might finally cure Quentin of his three eternal afflictions: rheumatism, eczema and bronchitis.
And, oh god -- the bronchitis! There has never been a stauncher soldier than Mr. Crisp when ("well, I had to do it -- they gave me two chicken dinners!") he played Lady Bracknell in a stifling August run of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Soho Rep (it was not his finest hour; one reviewer likened him to Mr. Magoo) where he suppressed a volcanic cough throughout great excruciating stretches of Oscar Wilde's dialogue until he could be got safely backstage, at which point he erupted like an entire tubercular ward on its collective last legs.
Immersed in Mr. Crisp as I became, I began to acquire the unwarranted label of "Crisp expert" and tried, even after I left the Clausen agency, to wield some slightly guiding hand in the interesting tangled messes into which his persistent "yes-saying" continually got him. He was unstintingly generous to me -- for example conferring far too kind an endorsement on my book about gay men and sex, Dancing Around the Volcano, in view of his truer opinion (confessed to me in private): "Oh dear - don't tell gay men to have more sex." Once he even bought me lunch. (It wasn't that Quentin was "cheap," exactly -- he merely had depended for so long on the kindness of strangers that he forgot, I think, that there was any other way to get a meal.)
His opinions continued to get him into trouble, and sometimes Connie would plead with me to help her figure out some way to bail him out of one perceived gaffe or another. This was most recently and notoriously the case back in early 1997 when, in response to a London tabloid journalist's question about whether he'd advise a pregnant mother to abort if it could be genetically determined that her child would be gay, Mr. Crisp (not missing a beat) said: "Of course!" (This nearly caused one of his publishers to cancel all his book contracts.) At Connie's urgent behest, in her hope that I could induce him to come up with some soothing response that would appease all the liberals he'd infuriated (not to mention his book publisher), I had lunch with him at his usual East Village diner. He was bewildered that he'd caused so much fuss: "What did they expect me to say?" And I realized: yes (of course!) -- Quentin had always made his position clear not only about being gay but being alive. Who would choose to put up with the humiliations, distresses and pains of being an incarnate being - much less one whose sexuality and (far more damning) mode of self-presentation were held in contempt by so many others?
He had admitted any number of times that he wished he'd never been born. This may sound like self-hate, but it wasn't really: self-hate would have been too passionate a self-regard. Mr. Crisp was much cooler and more pragmatic about himself than that. Like the good British trouper he was, he responded to the unhappy accident of his existence with a large sigh but also the determination to "carry on" anyway. Having found oneself alive, what could one do but live? (To the hilt, might as well, while one was at it.) And what resource (or weaponry) did one have to do it with other than oneself?
Mr. Crisp operated, I believe, from two premises that illuminate everything he ever said or wrote:
1) Life is entirely physical,
and;
2) All you've got is your own point-of-view.
Believing life to be "physical," he could of course find no solace in any sentimental idea of the "spiritual:" life was pure cause-and-effect, power struggle, strong-vs.-the-weak. His solution to this dilemma seemed to him self-evidently simple: "I have thrown myself on the mercy of the world," he once said to me. "And oh, the relief!" (The relief?) "When you accept whatever comes your way, never initiate a single thing in your life, you cannot be held accountable. You are free." What about having any "rights" -- whether you were weak or strong? Not in Quentin Crisp's pragmatic view: "I don't think anyone has any rights," he once said. "I think you fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, you grab at what you want, if you don't get it you go without, and you flop into your grave." He gave voice to the second premise (all you've got is your point-of-view) most succinctly (and profoundly) in How to Have a Life Style: "Style, in the broadest sense, is consciousness." Style and content were not only the same to Mr. Crisp: "style" -- i.e., the way you saw things -- entirely determined what you saw, what you believed, everything about you. This being (to him self-evidently) the case, why should anyone take offense at anyone else's opinion? What choice did one have but to say what one saw the way one saw it? ("Say what you've come to say," he frequently advised us.) The only worthwhile human enterprise to Mr. Crisp was, in fact, conversation: sharing what one "saw" with others. Everything else (sex, music, going to any country where they didn't speak English, spicy food, basket-weaving, etc.) was "a mistake." It didn't sufficiently connect you to people. This is why he so often admonished us to "learn the words." They were our only meaningful currency.
So I wasn't much help to Connie, I'm afraid. I never thought Mr. Crisp needed an apologist. He said what he believed perfectly clearly. The adamantine truth at the center of every observation I heard him make, his unerring insight into human motive (and Hollywood!), have always, to my mind, been perfectly expressed. Certainly he'd honed his own point-of-view to such idiosyncratic sharpness that you could not make him a spokesperson for, or an icon symbolizing, any group -- gay or otherwise. "I do not regard myself as a symbol of anything except myself," he said. "If I represent anything beyond that, I represent the idea of living your own life without doing any particular harm to the world."
Oddly -- from a man who had no truck with conventional notions of romantic love and who believed, as I've suggested, that "life is entirely physical" -- Quentin offered some of the most profoundly generative and satisfying takes on love and spirituality I've ever heard. Asked what he thought was the remedy for a broken heart, he replied: "The quickest remedy is that you must learn not to value love because it is requited. It makes no difference whether your love is returned. If you have love to give, you give it and you give it where it is needed. Once you've got that in your head, the idea of your heart being broken will disappear."
He lives in my heart.
These images were supplied by Guy and re-produced here by his kind permission.
This article was written by Guy and first appeared in the January 2001 issue of Middlebury Magazine, Middlebury, Vt.
It is re-produced here by his kind permission.
My mentor, Mr. Crisp
I first met Mr. Crisp in New York in the early spring of 1982 when, as his agent Connie Clausen's assistant, I opened the door at about 5:30 p.m. on a Friday to let him in. He had arrived for what I later understood was a ritual spaghetti dinner (he'd come up once a month for spaghetti and scotch and to discuss Hollywood movies and stars with "Miss Clausen"). I'd known Mr. Crisp not only from the film version of Naked Civil Servant but because Connie had "encouraged" me to read the book (it was required reading at the Clausen agency) -- which had enthralled me from the first word and made me one flustered sweaty-palmed bearded 31-year-old when I let him that evening into Connie's office and home. I think I was expecting some sort of unreachably erudite (maybe slightly bitchy) latter-day version of Noel Coward. I was completely disarmed by his self-effacing gentleness.
Thus began my seventeen-year acquaintance, working relationship and friendship with Mr. Crisp. Not long after this meeting Connie somehow got it into her brilliantly lively but often exasperating mind that I'd be an apt cowboy to corral his many bons mots into a book that later became The Wit & Wisdom of Quentin Crisp. I've been hooked to the literary Crisp ever since. During my six-year tenure at Ms. Clausen's agency I also booked him into a bewildering variety of theatrical venues across the country and managed - through sheer haughty chutzpah (fed by my conviction that he was worth ten times what anyone was offering) - to get him a good deal more money than he'd previously gotten (largely because, before this, he had so often said yes to any request made by anyone who'd offered him carfare and a meal). He was genuinely amazed that anyone wanted to pay him anything for anything.
What a wonderful time this was for me! Pursuing material for Wit & Wisdom I roomed with him twice (to tape performances of his one-man show) in New Orleans -- sharing a great French Quarter appartement, swagged with brown velvet, seeing him (as if on a Toulouse Lautrec poster) sprawled in full unselfconscious deshabille; I took him to Cherry Grove on Fire Island, which he found extremely strange -- although he rather liked that it was entirely "on stilts" (his way of referring to the boardwalk); I hooked him up with the estimable Tom Steele, editor of Christopher Street and The New York Native, because one of the few desires he ever expressed was that "it might be nice to write about the movies" (his reviews led to a wonderful book called How to Go to the Movies, and indirectly to his collection of New York Native columns, Resident Alien); and I cajoled him into taxis bound for countless clinics and doctors' offices (always a grim prospect to Quentin, who had never received medical attention he hadn't found ineffectual, unaffordable and embarrassing) -- urged on by Connie, who kept locating new specialists in the naïve hope that they might finally cure Quentin of his three eternal afflictions: rheumatism, eczema and bronchitis.
And, oh god -- the bronchitis! There has never been a stauncher soldier than Mr. Crisp when ("well, I had to do it -- they gave me two chicken dinners!") he played Lady Bracknell in a stifling August run of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Soho Rep (it was not his finest hour; one reviewer likened him to Mr. Magoo) where he suppressed a volcanic cough throughout great excruciating stretches of Oscar Wilde's dialogue until he could be got safely backstage, at which point he erupted like an entire tubercular ward on its collective last legs.
Immersed in Mr. Crisp as I became, I began to acquire the unwarranted label of "Crisp expert" and tried, even after I left the Clausen agency, to wield some slightly guiding hand in the interesting tangled messes into which his persistent "yes-saying" continually got him. He was unstintingly generous to me -- for example conferring far too kind an endorsement on my book about gay men and sex, Dancing Around the Volcano, in view of his truer opinion (confessed to me in private): "Oh dear - don't tell gay men to have more sex." Once he even bought me lunch. (It wasn't that Quentin was "cheap," exactly -- he merely had depended for so long on the kindness of strangers that he forgot, I think, that there was any other way to get a meal.)
His opinions continued to get him into trouble, and sometimes Connie would plead with me to help her figure out some way to bail him out of one perceived gaffe or another. This was most recently and notoriously the case back in early 1997 when, in response to a London tabloid journalist's question about whether he'd advise a pregnant mother to abort if it could be genetically determined that her child would be gay, Mr. Crisp (not missing a beat) said: "Of course!" (This nearly caused one of his publishers to cancel all his book contracts.) At Connie's urgent behest, in her hope that I could induce him to come up with some soothing response that would appease all the liberals he'd infuriated (not to mention his book publisher), I had lunch with him at his usual East Village diner. He was bewildered that he'd caused so much fuss: "What did they expect me to say?" And I realized: yes (of course!) -- Quentin had always made his position clear not only about being gay but being alive. Who would choose to put up with the humiliations, distresses and pains of being an incarnate being - much less one whose sexuality and (far more damning) mode of self-presentation were held in contempt by so many others?
He had admitted any number of times that he wished he'd never been born. This may sound like self-hate, but it wasn't really: self-hate would have been too passionate a self-regard. Mr. Crisp was much cooler and more pragmatic about himself than that. Like the good British trouper he was, he responded to the unhappy accident of his existence with a large sigh but also the determination to "carry on" anyway. Having found oneself alive, what could one do but live? (To the hilt, might as well, while one was at it.) And what resource (or weaponry) did one have to do it with other than oneself?
Mr. Crisp operated, I believe, from two premises that illuminate everything he ever said or wrote:
1) Life is entirely physical,
and;
2) All you've got is your own point-of-view.
Believing life to be "physical," he could of course find no solace in any sentimental idea of the "spiritual:" life was pure cause-and-effect, power struggle, strong-vs.-the-weak. His solution to this dilemma seemed to him self-evidently simple: "I have thrown myself on the mercy of the world," he once said to me. "And oh, the relief!" (The relief?) "When you accept whatever comes your way, never initiate a single thing in your life, you cannot be held accountable. You are free." What about having any "rights" -- whether you were weak or strong? Not in Quentin Crisp's pragmatic view: "I don't think anyone has any rights," he once said. "I think you fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, you grab at what you want, if you don't get it you go without, and you flop into your grave." He gave voice to the second premise (all you've got is your point-of-view) most succinctly (and profoundly) in How to Have a Life Style: "Style, in the broadest sense, is consciousness." Style and content were not only the same to Mr. Crisp: "style" -- i.e., the way you saw things -- entirely determined what you saw, what you believed, everything about you. This being (to him self-evidently) the case, why should anyone take offense at anyone else's opinion? What choice did one have but to say what one saw the way one saw it? ("Say what you've come to say," he frequently advised us.) The only worthwhile human enterprise to Mr. Crisp was, in fact, conversation: sharing what one "saw" with others. Everything else (sex, music, going to any country where they didn't speak English, spicy food, basket-weaving, etc.) was "a mistake." It didn't sufficiently connect you to people. This is why he so often admonished us to "learn the words." They were our only meaningful currency.
So I wasn't much help to Connie, I'm afraid. I never thought Mr. Crisp needed an apologist. He said what he believed perfectly clearly. The adamantine truth at the center of every observation I heard him make, his unerring insight into human motive (and Hollywood!), have always, to my mind, been perfectly expressed. Certainly he'd honed his own point-of-view to such idiosyncratic sharpness that you could not make him a spokesperson for, or an icon symbolizing, any group -- gay or otherwise. "I do not regard myself as a symbol of anything except myself," he said. "If I represent anything beyond that, I represent the idea of living your own life without doing any particular harm to the world."
Oddly -- from a man who had no truck with conventional notions of romantic love and who believed, as I've suggested, that "life is entirely physical" -- Quentin offered some of the most profoundly generative and satisfying takes on love and spirituality I've ever heard. Asked what he thought was the remedy for a broken heart, he replied: "The quickest remedy is that you must learn not to value love because it is requited. It makes no difference whether your love is returned. If you have love to give, you give it and you give it where it is needed. Once you've got that in your head, the idea of your heart being broken will disappear."
He lives in my heart.