Armstrong, Mark (2012) The Quentin Kind: visual narrative and The Naked Civil Servant. Doctoral ...

263 Pages·2016·3.12 MB·English

by  Mark Armstrong

Citation: Armstrong, Mark (2012) The Quentin Kind: visual narrative and The Naked Civil
Servant. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.
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THE QUENTIN KIND:
VISUAL NARRATIVE AND
THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT

MARK ARMSTRONG

PhD

2012
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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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
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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
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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
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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).

Crisp received the opinion from Gay News that his autobiography should have
been published posthumously as ‘a literary way of saying, ‘Drop dead’’ (Crisp,
1981, p.84). Gay News was a symbol of the newly emancipated gay culture, and
of its increasingly commercial as much as political nature – a landscape in which
Crisp’s figure, for some, was quite obsolete. The extraordinary past that was the
consequence of his being so visibly queer revealed for a mass audience a
representative of an apparently vanishing sexual terrain; in many ways its most
trophy survivor, Crisp was equally a figure of the nascent panorama of sexual
and gender permissibility that so defined the 1960s and 70s. The objective of this
thesis is to position Crisp’s figure within these debates, and in the historicization
of gender and sexual dissidence, and to consider the interstices between
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