Portland Public Library

The naked civil servant, Quentin Crisp ; preface by Michael Holroyd

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

The naked civil servant

36919520

Quentin Crisp ; preface by Michael Holroyd

Penguin twentieth-century classics

Published at the height of the sexual revolution -- 1968, to be exact -- Crisp's memoir flaunting his homosexuality nonetheless raised plenty of eyebrows, even though he had been completely open about it for more than 30 years. Punctiliously polite and urbanely offensive, Crisp's singular vita induces a desolate shudder. A fabulously plumed and heavily mascara-ed ostrich, Quentin Crisp recounts a life spent as homosexual provocateur in the streets of London where he walked with the infinite care of a man deliberately adorned to attract the taunts, kicks, and blows of the uncomprehending. And in the 1920s, when Crisp first took to flaunting his sins, the uncomprehending included just about everyone. Once begun, the life could not be dropped despite the penury to which his frequently jobless condition reduced him. When he worked, it was as a commercial artist and artist's model, living in a series of rooms-to-let, cultivating by degrees the advantages of squalor, finding friends among those sufficiently reckless, curious, or down-and-out to accept his company