And took down all the rags

  That he’d used as a black-out for years.

  ‘Of all joy and all happiness robbed,

  We live,’ the poor Kangaroo sobbed,

  ‘(And I hope there’s no harm

  In misquoting a psalm)

  Our life as a tale that is bobbed.’

  He lives now on the edge of the town

  Where at dusk he will walk with a frown

  In the loneliest street

  On the weariest feet

  And, whenever he can, he looks down.

  And he said to me, ‘Though I’ve succeeded

  In finding out how we’re impeded,

  It does puzzle me

  That the posters I see

  Still say, “KANGAROOS URGENTLY NEEDED.”’

  .

  COME AND TRY TOO![69][70]

  Keep up to the mark and don’t get slack,

  Intelligence here we ought not to lack!

  Never be feeble and never be slow,

  Girls and women are, that you know!

  Sums and French are a bit of a fag

  When you feel you’d rather be having a rag,

  Of course you know this cannot be done,

  Out of school is the time for fun;

  Drawing’s the nicest thing in the day,

  Hours and hours at that I could stay!

  Other lessons are not so bad;

  Used up are our brains so when finished we’re glad,

  Still it’s alright, not too much to do,

  Everyone else ought to come and try too!

  ONE-MAN SHOW

  20. AN EVENING WITH QUENTIN crISP

  New York City, 1999

  Thank you and good evening. I’ve been forbidden from describing this occasion as a straight talk from a bent speaker. So instead we’ll say it’s like a sermon from a priest who is more sinful than his congregation. Or like a consultation with a doctor who is more ill than his patient. I am here to try to cure you of your freedom because I am convinced that it’s an excess of freedom that has made everyone in the world so miserable.

  I come from a time when there was so little liberty, if a girl wanted to wear nail varnish she had to leave home for good. And if a man wore suede shoes, there was nothing for him to do but to join the Foreign Legion. Now, you all wear, do, say whatever you like. Unlike other people of my generation, I would be happy for all the people who find themselves in these blissful circumstances, if I felt that they were happy. But wherever I look, people are not rejoicing. They are complaining.

  In fact, throughout the world, protest has become a game any number can play. One weekend in London, my landlady got into the wrong march. That’ll show you what’s going on there. So, I must assume that what has made everybody in the world so angry is the element which has been added to their lives in recent times: their freedom.

  Now, I know it’s too late to ask you to abide by restrictions handed down to you by your pastors and your masters, your elders and your betters. So, what I think we need are chains of our own making. However heavy these may be, they will never feel as irksome as restraints placed by others. And not any old chains. We will have to have a system, and that begins with each of us trying to decide what it is that makes him the way he is. And then agreeing not to do, wear or say anything that doesn’t reinforce this image.

  This involves a journey to the interior. Not altogether a pleasant experience. Why? Well, because as well as totaling what you consider to be your assets, you will also have to take a long hard look at those things that your friends call, “the trouble with you.” For the whole purpose of life is to try to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the terrible things other people say about us. The synthesis between these two opposing opinions will be your identity.

  But that’s not quite enough. Your identity is like your fingerprints. These too are your very own, but if they are discovered they may be used against you. Therefore, you will have to polish up your new identity until it becomes a style. Something interesting by which you are prepared, by which you are proud to be identified, and something with which you can barter with the outer world to get from it what you want. I won’t say what you deserve, because if we all got what we deserved, we would starve. This polishing-up process will make your days so formal that, compared with them, the life of a Trappist monk would seem like an orgy.

  Now, I know I’m rattling on about problems which by world standards would be trivial. This I understand. But I do so because never a day goes by…well, never a month goes by…without someone coming to me and saying, “Oh, you do have a nice life.” Me! A nice life? This would be a reasonable remark if I lived as you do in mansions riddled with standard of living. But I don’t. I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, just beyond redemption, in a small room which has never been cleaned in fifteen years.

  Which brings me to my first message of hope: never sweep the place where you live, because after the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse! It’s just a question of not losing your nerve. I’m sure I’m right about this. The other day a woman said to me, “No wonder you’re so nice to everybody, you never do any housework.” So, now it transpires that all the middle- and upper-class housewives in the world are in a blind rage by half-past ten in the morning, worn out, I shouldn’t wonder, with all that sweeping, dusting, and washing the dishes.

  Now there’s no need to wash the dishes unless you find that you’ve passed the fish barrier. It works like this. When you’re hungry and you look at your plate and it says “bacon,” you think I could eat an egg. And the next day, when your plate says “egg,” you think I could eat a fish. But when you look at your plate and it says “fish”, it’s time to wash the dishes.

  I’m only telling you these things by the way, so as to set you free from your boring domestic rituals. I want to give you some time each day when you can stop looking outward and start looking inward. Then you can decide who you truly are.

  Now the next thing that my visitors say is, “Oh, you do know such wonderful people.” And I do. But this too would only be a logical comment if my room was stuffed with people of wealth, influence and status. And it isn’t. It’s full with the denizens of the Lower East Side. And that brings me to my second message of hope: never try to keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level. It’s cheaper!

  Then I’m asked where do I meet these wonderful people. And I say, “As a rule, in lay-about cafes.” Those marvelous places where you can sit through lunch, tea and supper with one cup of coffee. I used to offer to take my friends to one of these places, but they would always mutter something like, “Of course, when we get there, you’ll have to tell me what to say.”

  I hope I am painting for you a thoroughly depressing picture of someone who has reduced himself to the level where he envies me, and who seems to be living like a kidnapped victim in unwanted isolation only a few yards from where the traffic of the world is going by, with nothing more substantial boarding up the windows than self-doubt. The words “you’d have to tell me what to say” are a clue. They show us that we are not dealing with a dreary old search for true love. The person who wants to make friends doesn’t have to think what to say, he has to learn how to listen. Now, we’d all like to have friends, but if it means you’ve got to listen to them, the price is ridiculous.

  So what does he want? As I see it, he longs for somewhere to go and, when he gets there, for somebody to be. But where and who? When modern man looks around in search of a destiny nothing presents itself to him, as it did when I was young, as being suited to his age, his sex, his nationality, his class, and his station in life. Nowadays, whichever direction he looks in, he finds himself in a landscape without signposts, without milestones, without roads. The sheer vastness of the terrain that lies before him may make him feel small.

  Now, if we are going to develop our own style, we must banish forever all thoughts that are self-diminishing. We mustn’t imagine that anything we discover, when we make our journey to the interior, is too trivial or even too distasteful to present to the world. The curiosity of your neighbors is a tribute to your individuality and you should encourage it.

  Never defend yourself. I am appalled by the lust for evasion, which seems to be absolutely everywhere. Even among actors, who presumably are a nation of exhibitionists. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were so great that they brought style to marriage. A difficult thing to do. And then, they brought style to divorce. But even they express the fear that the paparazzi in Rome might take pictures of them in the lavatory. Now the way to deal with that problem, if you think it is one, is not to build a higher and higher wall around your villa, but to learn to urinate with style.

  All concealment is wrong. If there were none, half of the world’s problems would disappear overnight. There would be no snooping, no fixing, no blackmail, and no fear in the world other than physical fear. That wouldn’t be a bad start. And not only is all secrecy a sin, but it doesn’t work.

  My spies tell me that there are already machines which exist that can collect and tabulate all the details of everyone’s private lives and store it in a space that big. Now if this can be done, it will be done, because machines are greater than men and their watchfulness is tireless and invincible. And if this is so, our attitude toward them should be existential.

  Do you understand that word? An existentialist is somebody who realizes that he can only exercise his free will by swimming with the tide but faster. Therefore, if the machines will triumph in the end, why don’t we make ourselves over to them from the very beginning?

  George Orwell, who wrote the book 1984, envisioned a situation in which every private room in every house would have riveted into the wall a one-way television screen, through which you will see nothing - which might be a relief - but you would be watched by Big Brother. Orwell became completely neurotic about this, but why?

  I don’t know how things are here, but in London we waltz around the city with half our hair painted pink and the other half painted green, jingling with amulets, razor blades and safety pins, creating no sensation whatsoever. And when we get home we feel thoroughly defeated. But when the George Orwell setup occurs, when you get back to your room and you start to dismantle yourself, you will realize you are still of abiding interest to someone.

  All you have to do to get this situation on your own terms is to decide what image of yourself you are going to present to the powers-that-be. No excuses are acceptable. I say this because whenever I suggest to anyone that he should develop his own style, he immediately says, “I am not wise enough, witty enough or handsome enough.”

  Beauty is a complete waste of time. Because even now, without knowing it, we still cringe in the shadow of classical ideals of beauty. The Greeks were mad about the human body, so much so that during its heyday Athens must have looked like an outfitters’ window during a weavers’ strike. But it didn’t help. Not one of the great classical statues has the least physical individuality, which would make it interesting or desirable. So, beauty, you will never need. And I can give you further proof.

  There was once a man whose name was Mr. Tillet[71], but he was known as ‘The Angel’. He was shorter than I am, but he was twice as wide, and his head was as long from his chin to his crown as the skull of a donkey. His pate was bald, but the rest of his body was covered with fur, right down to his fingernails. When a prospective employer first saw him, she fainted. Nevertheless, he made more money as a wrestler in four short years than the divine Joe Louis made out of a lifetime in the boxing ring.

  Now to me, Mr. Tillet’s life was a positive parable of style. He took that which made him so like himself, regardless of whether it made him better or worse than other people in their eyes, and he put it in its appropriate setting. He put it where it would do the most good. And that, to my mind, is what all of you have to learn to do.

  I’ve been forbidden to rattle on about the amount of money that Mr. Tillet made. I’ve been told that I equate wealth with style. I don’t, but I would say this: to a physicist money would be the solid state of style. There’s no other connection between the two. And of this, also, I can give you proof.

  Until recently, there was in Soho - the hooligan district of London - a woman known as The Countess. But in spite of her imperial style, she had in fact no fixed address, no means of support, and her body was perpetually bent double from a lifelong habit of looking through trash cans to see whether she could find something she could sell to a kind friend or, if not, that she herself could use.

  One day, in a trashcan in the most expensive part of London, she found a complete backless bead dress. She longed for night to fall, so that she could nip into a dark doorway and try it on. But by about half-past six, her patience had worn out. It was barely twilight, so she went into a churchyard in the middle of London and there she proceeded to take off her clothes. This attracted a crowd, which in turn attracted a policemen. And the next day in court, when the magistrate said, “And what exactly were you doing, stripping among the dead?” She replied, “I was doing what any woman would be doing at that hour. I was changing for dinner.”

  So you see, however grandiose the style you may choose for yourself, you will not need any actual money to support it. And more than that, you won’t even need talent.

  Now, I never saw Sarah Bernhardt on the stage, but I have seen a strip from a movie, showing her coming into the home stretch in Camille. The death scene. On a rather tacky Empire couch sits Armand, and he supports Ms. Bernhardt in a very defensive sort of way, as though she was some kind of a firecracker. Which in a way she was. And she lies opposite him wearing a minimum-risk nightdress, and she has on clown’s makeup, and her hair is right down into her eyes.

  Now someone must have told her it was a silent movie, but did she care? No. The moment the cameras began to run, her black lips started to move faster than those of a policeman giving corrupt evidence. And when her lips moved, her eyes began to roll. And when her eyes moved, her hand shot out into the air returning later to give her a terrible blow to the chest. Sometimes it was one arm, sometimes it was the other arm, and sometimes it was both arms together. And then as abruptly as all this activity had begun, it stopped. Her arm swung down in front of the couch, like the limb of a rag doll.

  Now I am not trying to foist upon you my own philistine reactions. This movie was shown at the National Film Theatre in London, and that is a building so highbrow that no one can obtain admission to it unless he can prove that he comes from one of the cheese-and-wine belts of England. But it made no difference. The audience choked with derisive mirth. A man near me fell out into the gangway, his feet twiddled in the air. La Divine, indeed.

  It wasn’t her acting that made Ms. Bernhardt divine, it was her nerve. Oh, and it was the coffin that she slept in at night, and it was the cheetah that dragged her on a gold chain through the rooms of her house. Not that I am suggesting that any of you should keep a pet. We’ve got enough dumb friends without them. I’m merely explaining that you won’t need any talent in order to be able to project your chosen style. And nowadays, you don’t even need virtue.

  You no longer have to be an object of public veneration or even affection. You can be the focus of contempt, or downright hatred. After all, as a test of whether you still mean something to somebody, being loved can never be a patch on being murdered. That’s when someone really has risked his life for you. And if you’ve decided on depravity as the fluid in which you will suspend your monstrous ego, then you will have the most wonderful examples before you. Or rather behind you, because nearly all of them are in history.

  In medieval France, living at the same time as Joan of Arc, there was a great French nobleman called Gilles de Rais, and he murdered 150 choirboys in a lifetime. Now quantity is not style. All the same, it’s difficult not to be impressed, isn’t it?

  When he was caught, de Rais did something which I wouldn’t advise any of you to attempt if you’re just beginners. He reversed his style. Now before you can do this, you must be absolutely sure that the image that you’re taking up is more blinding than the one that you’ve abandoned.

  On the first day of his trial, de Rais was his usual dreary imperious self, refusing to take any notice of what his accusers told him on the grounds that they were not his social equals. On the second day, he repented. He confessed so long, so loud and so much, that the bishop who was trying his case rose and covered with a cloth the face of the crucifix hanging on the courtroom wall. Now I dwell on this dramatic gesture only to show you that style begets style. That means that when you’ve completed your image of yourself, you won’t be surrounded by born-receivers of the news. Your style will magnetize toward you other stylists, and you will be able to enjoy them and yourself.

  Finally, when he was condemned to death, de Rais cried out, “I am redeemable!” And this brought people from far and wide throughout France to pray for his soul. And some of those people were the parents of the children he had murdered. If this is not style, it is at least gesture on a national scale, all brought about by one great man.

  Of course, before you can build some such dizzying, dazzling structure as a monument to yourself, you must first get the foundations of your private life absolutely solid. From now on, I think you should try to regard your home as your dressing room and the world as your stage. And at home, there must be nothing which doesn’t represent the kind of person you have decided to become. It doesn’t matter if your home is full of gadgets which are advertised on television every twenty minutes. They’ve got to go!

  And when you’ve gotten rid of the superfluous things, you start on the unnecessary actions. From now on, there should be no doodling, and no hobbies, and I used to say there must be no daydreaming. But now I have changed my opinion, and I think you are allowed your daydreams up to the age of twenty-five, but after that they may become an alibi. You understand me? It’s no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years, while saying “really I was meant to be a ballet dancer.” By that time, pigs will be your style.