Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Q and A with Q

Well, back from muddy old Devon.

Considering the fact that this is the blog of a fairly active published writer, I think I actually give you, my dear readers, very little news about what I’m doing on the publishing front. Well, let me fill you in a little. Much of my recent news surrounds a short story called 'The Cypher'. It appears in the latest issue of the new magazine Midnight Street, and it has also been translated into German for an anthology by German publisher Medusenblut. The story has been translated by the talented German writer Eddie M. Angerhuber. She wrote to me recently for a writer’s biog to put in the anthology. I obliged, but there was some information missing from the biog I sent. Eddie wrote back with some extra questions for me to answer, which I did in a fairly off the cuff, but, I hope, informative fashion. It occurred to me as I did so that, since no one ever interviews me, I might as well use this brief question and answer session as an interview on my blog. The fact is, I enjoy interviews very much, and I’m sure there’s no better reason to be famous than to sit with a glass of water and have someone ask you endless questions as if you’re the most fascinating person in the world. You may be wondering, if no one ever interviews me, how I know that I enjoy interviews. Well, apart from the fact that I’m an incorrigible daydreamer, I think I have arrived at this conclusion from my experiences through the years with various professionals and volunteers whose duty it is to listen for the sake of the emotional and mental well being of their... erm... patients??

Anyway, if you want to know more about 'The Cypher' before seeking it out, I shall state briefly that it is about drugs and dictionaries. Now the interview:

Q: What are your main interests in life?

A: I am interested in Japanese literature, especially the writers Mishima Yukio, Nagai Kafu, Higuchi Ichiyo, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro and Dazai Osamu. Apart from that my interests are not very clearly defined. I like to go for walks and listen to music. I enjoy certain sci-fi programmes from my childhood, such as Doctor Who and Blakes 7. I can speak, read and write Japanese. I drink a great deal of tea, green and otherwise.

Q: Where do you currently live? (Do you still live in Japan?)

A: I live in Twickenham, which is on the south-west edge of London. I often take walks along a particularly leafy stretch of the River Thames where there are many swans, geese and moorhens.

Q: Perhaps you could tell me a bit about Japan; why did you move there?

A: I have lived in Japan twice, both times in order to study. The first time I was studying Japanese language, the second time Japanese language and literature. I have a general fascination with Japanese culture, and with Japanese literature in particular. Also, I had been unemployed for over five years, and I thought that I wanted to change my life. I thought going to university, studying Japanese and – as part of the course – living in Japan, might achieve this end. It did change my life to some extent, but not really in the way I had hoped. Now I am back from Japan I am still unemployed, and not really using my Japanese, except in a private capacity.

Q: Or had you been born there?

A: No, I was born in Devon – the English countryside.

Q: How old are you?

A: Thirty-two and counting.

Q: Tell me about your profession.

A: I really don’t have a profession. I am simply the least professional – most amateur – human being that I know. Of course, I will need to make money somehow to survive, but I just don’t know how I’m going to do this. It seems to be a very big problem for me.

Q: Why did you choose to write horror fiction?

A: I didn’t. I really didn’t choose to write horror fiction at all. I find myself in a frustrating position because I’m not really a genre writer and not really the kind of writer who is accepted by the mainstream. I just write what I write, which is fairly deranged and childish fiction about totally imaginary events. I tend to think of it as personal mythology. The first two stories I happened to get published were – by chance – very gothic horror. And John B. Ford noticed one of these stories – 'The Psychopomps' – and very kindly got in touch with me and helped to introduce me to the horror scene. So that is where I find myself. I don’t hate horror. I am very fond of the good stuff in the horror genre, and I LOVE the gothic tradition of Maturin, Lewis, Shelley, Poe, Lovecraft, Ligotti and so on. But I’m really no more than a deranged child in an adult’s body finger-painting whatever daydreams I happen to have.

Q: What else do you write? Do you have other occupations or hobbies?

A: Well, see above. I’m hoping that what I write will become clearer to readers over time, but I’m not having much luck in convincing publishers to invest in me so far, so it’s hard to reach a readership in the first place. Anyway, I’m hoping to champion new forms of fiction, mixing narrative with essay and autobiography. I am very much influenced by the ‘zuihitsu’ or ‘miscellaneous writing’ style in Japanese literature.

I’m also hoping to branch out into manga, but this remains a pipe dream at present [NB since the 'interview' took place this hope has shifted status from pipe dream to plan]. I like the idea of mixing media. I have many plans.

I don’t really have any other occupations. Writing and writing-based creativity takes up most of my spare time. But I am an omnivorous reader. I want to know everything there is to know. I haven’t got very far in this goal.

Q: Could you give the link to your personal web site?

A: So far I only really have my weblog. The link is here.

I hope to have a proper website in the future.

Christmas Break

I thought I would post another episode - due to time restrictions, a mini-episode, I'm afraid - of my truly dreadful serial, The Sex Life of Worms as my sardonic little Christmas present to you all. I shall be away for a while, and therefore not really much in electronic contact with the rest of humanity. I feel so nervous.

Anyway, you will find episode four below, back by popular demand (no, honestly!).

The Sex Life of Worms (Episode Four - A Jiggle of Mould)

In that place, gazing at the gills of the hogspawn toadstool, those delicate orange ribs whose shadows held a million spores, I was aware of other times and other places. I was taken back to the age of Gymsmuhl, who was before Yqstlss, though I did not know these names. In orange darkness Gymsmuhl inscribed sh-his words akin to fungi, kindling a little more of the glow-worm light of self – enough illumination to crawl through the tunnels of thought and interact with others as individuals only.

At the academy was a master who collected microdilia. Was it a test, an amusement, that occasion? A mollusc shell chased with benthic arabesques and gummed tight shut. Unsealed and it disclosed a trove of sensual treasures, that, until told, I did not guess was food. Whorled and crinkly sponges, gem-shining roe, balls of paste-like substance, jelly helixes, unfamiliar weeds and embryonic unidentifiables, all preserved in a nacreous milky fluid. The master bade me eat. But it was not like eating at all. An aquamarine salty-sweetness peppered with the incense of an antiquity that belonged to a far and wholly separate history. A burgeoning thirst which made me eager for more. Textures and shapes both exquisite and seemingly indigestible, like swallowing geometric diagrams made jelly. These things slip through.



Did I dream of undersea microdile civilisations, of monarchs quick and deadly in their sinuous water-squirming as wild centipedes, with gills and frills streaming like silken banners along their length? Did I glimpse in my imagination their weed-girded gardens of pearl? Did I wonder about the realms of upper air, where all wormkind is naked and lost? And at the cold stone pews of examination, did the sheer stone before me provide an inkling of the chasm of eternity and inaccessible worlds therein, ancient and dizzy in their otherness?

After all, I am purple-sick.

A glistening hatchling beaded with curling pearl reflections in skin-saliva and threaded with my own feebleness, trembling amidst the fixities of this age. Superior genes resting precariously on oblivion. Even flat surfaces spin with nausea. Perhaps flat surfaces most of all. The enigma of time and growth. Outspread scrolls and documents form a pavement, pile up like rock strata. I crawled into this, receiving name. The dizzy clockwork of the academy hard and sharp all around while in courtyard gardens grew the fungi of antiquity. My pipette excelled like vertigo. My ambient pieces were placed in the steamrollered journals of time. The critics polished off their notices with lip-smacking lyrical flourishes praising the slime-kiss of my acid-trail. My pipette, without credentials, was outstanding. Accumulating articles. Spinning my own mantle.

What happened?

Qsshflrrch, author of Acid Meditations. The tip of my pipette like a tender, burrowing head, eating away the curving letters on the scrolls, as worms first ate away the stone to excavate a city. Letters themselves like tiny curling worms, eaten away into nacreous oblivion. An anatomy of tunnels and the worms therein. Peeling back the flaps of skin. Extracting the organs like the fungal shrubs of an ornamental garden. Here where the tunnel curves, I am pulverised. Purple veins smeared into rock, coated with a sickly, spittle light. A blight in the reviews that spread like spores. The pipette of an uncredentialed master – philosophically corrupt.

Beneath the solar crack, wasting like a sun in darkness. Billowing flares, nebula-coloured tracery of gills, pendulums of fire which circumscribe the bubble limits of this floating eternity. There is a trickling away, a closing in. Sealed forever in the unstable moment. The bubble elapses and leaves the residue of me behind. Continuously stranded. There is a shifting and a running out. This breathing is paralysis and escape. Alone is an eroding island. Space debris, the ghosts of flaking skin. A chain of bubbles made by time and respiration. These links are heavy. I trace letters in the ever-collapsing, a bridge I build as I cross upon it, falling away behind. This is the inner-sanctum of my writing. Is this quiet, empty place out of bounds? There is a stipple of outer light on the tunnel wall.

*****

Refused service at a fungi bar – is this too literary for you? (You can imagine me in a dusty hologram with my tentacles protruding from my mantle in twisted bunches like comets’ tails.) The massy pendulum of fate, that I should like to describe as worm-eaten, had swung again, this time doubling me up with a winding blow.

I sought to console myself with solitude, outside the bounds of time and duty, but could not remain forever in that slippery, shifting abeyance. Instead I had to return to the slippery, shifting pyramid of worm society. In true literary style – how painful! How delicate! – as if composing an inscription, I took stock of my situation and proceeded with emergency measures. The first of these was to stop by a little potato-hole of a dried-fungi shop close to my apartments and buy up as much in the way of provisions as possible in a single transaction. Next I put in a call for an appointment with my mentor, Dr Jsshloamgs. I also took certain measures in the form of contingency planning and mental preparation.

My work-shift was on the ennead time track and there was still some leisure remaining to me. In a swaying stupor, the centre of a looped vibration, I revolved upon the unprecedented thing that had taken place. Nothing but the dripping of the unsculpted apartment walls. I say unprecedented, but perhaps not unsignposted. Yes, now that the matter had congealed about me I saw that lesser clots of ambiguity had been floating about in time’s arteries before. There had been times, cloudy in my recollection, when worms of one calling or another had examined my seal book and their antennae had curled as at something fiercely putrid, puzzling, or both. Technically, there was nothing wrong with my book. I knew this. I was thoroughly conversant with the rules. And knowing what I could in theory get away with, I liked to keep my seal book as neat, which is to say, as empty, as possible. How I relished those blank, shiny pages! I had no stomach for actively seeking out patrons and guarantors. And I mistakenly assumed that in a society with few absolute rules, worms would take a rather passive attitude to prosecuting the theoretically elastic rules that otherwise abound. I thought that a benefit-of-the-doubt principle would come into play, meaning that I was left to my own devices, was allowed to pass without let or hindrance, as long as I did nothing actually to snap the elastic. Now it seemed my personal fastidiousness in keeping my seal-book free of unnecessary clutter had caused a social anomaly to arise. Something in the hydra-like way this anomaly undulated its tentacles gave me pause of a most septic nature. Perhaps it was not merely the guillotine swish of my neatness. Perhaps there was something else.

As if the guillotine of my neatness had rebounded upon me, I was sliced in two, and the unknown something tickled about my feelers like transmissions from the farthest corners of the universe. I immersed myself for some gelatinous duration in the slime pit, suspended slow and clammy-unctuous as exfoliation. I had not changed the slime in the pit since my last major discharge, some separated-by-shadow ago, and it was marbled by all manner of cloudiness. In that stagnant and rock-enwombed amnion, my senses, without distinction between them, identified themselves with a white streaking like a jiggle of mould gelled into stillness. At great length I emerged, then re-submerged, repeating this procedure a number of times.

Up Pompeii!

The Victorians invented pornography. This was the central assertion of a documentary on the history of pornography that I found myself watching last night, and, well, they seemed to have a very good case. Pornography, it seems, has its inception with the archaeological uncovering in the eighteenth century of the previously buried city of Pompeii. Those who uncovered the city were shocked and ashamed to discover that their ancestors, who had bestowed upon them their culture, lived their daily lives surrounded by 'obscene' artefacts and murals. These were, it appeared, on full public view. In other words, sex, or at the very least, images of sex, were simply not seen as something to be separated from the rest of life in any way. The programme showed one statuette in particular as an example of what so shocked those early excavators. It depicted the god Pan in sexual congress with a nanny-goat. This, like the other artefacts and images, was something that would have been on full public view. One of the scholars interviewed went so far as to say that the very idea of privacy was lacking in Roman society, that this was a later, Victorian invention. The Victorians, it seems, were afraid that images such as those found at Pompeii might encourage people to indulge in masturbation (gasp of horror!). The Romans, apparently, would never have dreamed of using the images for such purposes. They were simply pleasant and humorous works of art. You could say, therefore, that the Victorians invented privacy to accommodate their need to masturbate.





Now, how much of this is speculation and retrospective interpretation, I don’t know. But what does seem certain is that the discovery of the 'obscenity' prevalent in the ancient world led eventually to the coining of the word 'pornography' and to the Obscene Publications Act (1857). The artefacts collected from Pompeii and from other countries were circulated amongst an elite of middle-class male scholars (purely for research purposes, you understand). They considered themselves the arbiters of taste. In other words, it was necessary that someone should look after this very important cultural material, but it must be kept from the eyes of the vulnerable and the ignorant, whom it might tend to corrupt. And so it was sectioned off into 'secret museums'. This, in effect, is the invention of pornography, the empowering of sexual concepts and images by making them forbidden.

Watching this programme I felt vindicated. I have long held an instinctive belief that, sexually speaking, we are still living in the Victorian age. Everything in the programme seemed to support this belief. At first I was overcome with anger and indignation at the barbarism and hypocrisy of the Victorians who would take it upon themselves to call a whole area of life and art obscene. Then I discovered that my feelings were more ambiguous than that. I am, after all, very much a product of this Victorian society. Let’s restate our central assertion – the Victorians invented pornography. Perhaps we should even be grateful to them. I am reminded immediately of Woody Allen’s quip, "Sex can be dirty, but only if it’s done right." Did the Victorians, then, 'do it right'? And now I am thinking of quote from Larkin, describing women’s undergarments as "natureless in ecstasies".

The gentlemen connoisseurs of the Victorian age who were the custodians of pornography, it seems, had the attitude that they must control their animal natures, they must contain it with the coolness of their intellects. It seems to me that this is an attitude central to British (certainly to English) identity and to the image of the English internationally. The Victorian English shock at the sexual images of foreign cultures has something about it of penis envy, by which I mean, the Woody Allen version of penis envy, which obtains in the male rather than the female. The English envied more virile cultures that made them feel rather limp in comparison. In order to cover up their limpness, the English began to cast a cold, ironical eye on life, and appeared to other cultures as somehow inherently homosexual.

This tradition of impotency manifest as coldness, irony and homosexuality (real or apparent), is also easily discerned in English comedy and art. The first example to leap to mind – for obvious reasons – is the comedy Up Pompeii!, which featured the talents of homosexual comedian Frankie Howerd.

"Up Pompeii! Up Pompeii! I can never get it Up Pompeii!"

So runs the gloriously un-subtle theme tune. Frankie Howerd plays the slave Lurcio, who lives in old Pompeii before the eruption of Vesuvius. He is surrounded by sexual farce, upon which he casts, yes, a cold ironical eye as he makes his double-entendres (which smack somehow of Woody Allen penis envy) and his knowing, long-suffering asides to the camera throughout. On the one hand, he seems to be faintly disgusted by the bodies that surround him. On the other he gives off the sighing sense that he's 'not getting any'. He can 'never get it up'. Witness how he averts his eyes in horror in this picture:



We see a similar pattern in Kenneth Williams, another homosexual English comedian. Whatever his onscreen persona, I believe Frankie Howerd was actually rather highly-sexed in real life. Kenneth Williams, on the other hand, was in real life the embodiment of Howerd’s onscreen persona. He was a homosexual who avoided sex all his life because he felt it to be somehow wrong or dirty.

Both of these comedians, with their innuendo, create a secret museum of comedy in which sex is humorously empowered because it is always alluded to, but never talked about in an open, direct manner. They are the direct descendents of the earlier connoisseurs who administered the real secret museums in the Victorian era.

My namesake, Quentin Crisp, can also be said, to some extent, to belong to this tradition. Witness his remark at how he had found the Americans to be angered by the book and film The Naked Civil Servant, because both had treated the sexual element too coldly.

And let us not forget Morrissey, who summed up the whole impotence/coldness/real-or-apparent-homosexuality in the song Pretty Girls Make Graves, which is replete with lines such as, "Sorrow's native son, he will not rise for anyone."

I rather think that, like it or not, I must also fall into this tradition. Anyone who reads my work might discover that I am, in fact, the custodian of a nation's sexuality in a secret museum whose artefacts I handle with cold leather gloves.