The Naked Civil Servant (Quentin Crisp, 1968)

I really don't read as many autobiographies as I probably ought to.  There's a lot to be said for being able to get a look at someone's life through their own eyes, especially when they're a person who has a vastly different lifestyle to your own.  Add in a remarkably self-deprecating sense of narration, and it's difficult to say that The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp's autobiography (actually the first of three), isn't worth spending the time to read.

Prior to this, I didn't actually have an idea of who Crisp was.  I'm in the middle of doing the local library's 'Own Voices' challenge, where they want participants to read literature coming from various marginalized communities, and one of the categories was LGBTQ+.  I was reasonably certain at the time that my shelf didn't actually contain any queer literature, so I did a quick search to see what options exist in Penguin Classics, and this one stood out, largely because the description mentioned the author's dry wit.  I'm always down for a bit of dry wit.

Yeah, I've been focusing almost exclusively on Penguin Classics lately.  It's a good way to curate a selection of literature, even if it's taken until comparatively recently for them to start getting a decent selection of non-European literature.  I'm trying to reflect that at least somewhat on my shelf when I buy online rather than getting what I can find at thrift stores/used book stores, but it's slow going.  It does give me a good, inexpensive way to fill the gaps in what I've read, with solid translations and (usually) plenty of context notes, though I wound up reading this book with my phone at my side so I could look up names and unusual terms when necessary, as there weren't any notes whatsoever in this one.

Anyways.  This covers about the first 50 years of Crisp's life, starting with his realization that he was "different" and the difficulties in dealing with that, quickly moving into his decision to lean into his effeminacy, a decidedly problematic choice to make in 1930s Britain, particularly when homosexuality was very much against the law in that country.  He goes over his difficulty in maintaining employment, his struggles with keeping financially afloat during the first half of his life, and his general view that, well... everything that wasn't himself was pretty hard to maintain interest in.

I don't really get the sense that Crisp was a particularly likeable person to get close to.  There's a general tone to the work where he's sort of leaning into this; he's rather open about how he was almost confrontational about his camp aesthetic, and being out in the open with it rather than keeping it to the underground clubs that most gay men of the era limited their expression to, but it's very much camp; he outright states that he only actually dressed in drag once, and doesn't seem to have enjoyed the experience.

Crisp spends much of the book going through various art/design-related jobs, doing book covers and logotypes for films and the like; he outright states at several points that a large part of why he perhaps struggled to keep these jobs was the combination of 'no formal training', 'rushes to get it done quickly', and 'never learned how to be detail-focused'.  He has a general dislike of art and, in fact, all culture; the brief period he talks about in which he was going to movies on a regular basis is explicitly described as not having included anything with English-language audio, but also he actively refused to go to anything alone, preferring to have a companion, as if the idea of being alone in attending a film was somehow anathema.

During the Second World War, Crisp was actually quite willing to go, but received a discharge when he reported, due to "sexual perversion," so that he instead remained in London.  This resulted, however, in his first encounters with Americans, and particular with the many gay servicemen who passed through Britain when on leave, especially sailors.  This actually surprised me, in large part because of the numbers of servicemen involved; given the U.S. Military's rules at the time, congregating as groups could easily have resulted in mass delivery of blue discharges, which could have been seen as an easy way off the frontlines, but just as easily caused a lot of problems upon returning home, given that such discharges were treated as 'dishonorable' in many cases.  And yet, here are large groups of sailors aiming to sleep with Crisp, even if he was much more interested in just talking.

It's clear, in fact, that he's very interested in talking about himself.  He states as much, it's true, but we're talking about someone who wrote three autobiographies, had a successful one-man stage show, and had a healthy career as a raconteur in his later life, after this particular book's timeline ends.  The beginnings of that career are visible as he has his first few times speaking, as it were, during the period covered (though rather than public speaking as one might expect, they were instances of speaking at a mental institution).  He's quite open that he's not sure what anyone expected out of him in that case, especially as he told them up front that he wasn't much good at talking about any other topic.

The book's title comes from his primary employment during the second half of the book, working as a (mostly) nude model for various figure-drawing classes at local universities, a job which eventually came to feel less as exhibitionism and much more as a sort of government job.  He acknowledges the difficulties involved early on, the physical demands necessary for maintaining a pose for hours, and that his flamboyant style made the students actually dislike him because he tended to make exaggerated poses that were anything but 'usual' for the classes.

The overall feeling that one gets from reading Crisp's autobiography is that he didn't much care what anyone else thought of him, really; his more public later life included a number of controversies when he made comments that seemed either tone-deaf or actually anti-gay, and refused to retract them.  That would largely seem to be material in the other two autobiographies, which cover his life after this book was made into a film starring John Hurt, his relocation to New York, and the end of his life (the third autobiography having been published posthumously and actively worked on during the last year of his life).  That he lived to almost 91 may be surprising after the way this book ends, however; he gripes openly about the state of elder care, that nobody should be forced (or even allowed) to live past 60, and that there ought to be a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style "Ministry of Heaven" which would enforce this.

I'm definitely left with a good idea of why Crisp seems to have been a divisive figure, at the very least; his sardonic writing style at least kept me interested in seeing where his life went, and I could definitely see myself reading the other two autobiographies at some point, but for the moment, I think I'm more interested in just moving on to my next book.