Sunday, January 27, 2013

Review: "An Englishman in New York"



Two watchings now of An Englishman in New York and I’m still processing what to make of it.  It isn’t straight-forward, at least for me.  The Naked Civil Servant, which dealt with Quentin Crisp’s life in England seems simpler, more funny.  Its sequel strikes me as more problematical, more ambiguous.  Of course, the story of a man growing old is bound to be different from the story of a man coming of age.  But the films also deal with different places and times.  New York is not London.  And the 1970s and 1980s are not the 1930s and 1940s.

For now, I just want to say a few things about the second film, the film about New York, share my initial reactions, and suggest some deeper issues.

With the BBC broadcast of The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp has become a celebrity.  He is invited to New York to speak.  This is around 1980.  Arriving in Manhattan, he immediately falls in love with it.  And New York seems to fall in love with him.  But not for long.  Crisp misjudges the growing AIDS epidemic.  Fearing that the straight world will once again saddle homosexuals as the bearers of disease, Crisp suggests that AIDS is just the latest “fad.”  His remarks spark outrage, event cancellations—and even threats of violence against him personally.

In the meantime, Crisp has been introduced to the New York gay scene, and been asked to leave a gay bar because he and his friend were not dressed in the “appropriate” garb—in this case, construction outfits, leather, or shirtless.  It’s a change for Crisp, who in England had always been bullied for not looking “straight.”  But this is New York after Stonewall.

Now, feeling like a relic of a bygone time, he meets Susana Ventura, aka Penny Arcade, who invites him to join in her performance art.  He is still relevant, she tells him, pointing out the prevalence of gay-on-gay discrimination, pointing out the rise of the commercialism of the “pink dollar,” decrying the party culture of body building and drug taking where deviation from the new gay “norm” means expulsion.  Crisp continues onstage into his eighties.

He has also met a young artist, Patrick Angus.  Crisp helps to win him some recognition, despite mainstream feedback that his paintings are “too gay” and “dirty.”  Angus lives long enough to see some success, before dying from complications of AIDS.

By the end of the film, Crisp has become an icon all over again.  He is now donating thousands to AIDS research.  Speaking at a gay club in Florida, he sums up his attitude towards life, urging people to ask themselves, “Is there anything inside that you have not yet unpacked?”  He dies having returned to England for a speaking tour.

That’s the outline.  Within this lie questions about the value of being yourself, being who you are; questions of how to behave when you are part of a despised minority.  What is the value of art and artifice for an individual?  What is the value of politeness and civility?  

Crisp had an oddly Calvinist attitude.  He said he didn’t believe in “rights.”  If everyone got what they deserved, he said, everyone would starve.  And he didn’t believe in an afterlife.  He made other controversial remarks in addition to the “AIDS fad” remark, but they aren’t covered in this film.

I plan a report, though, on the related documentary, Resident Alien.  Curiously, the documentary was released in 1990, when Crisp was still alive.  An Englishman in New York appeared in 2009, ten years after his death.  In some ways the film builds on the documentary.  Curious also is the interaction between Sting and his song/video (“An Englishman in New York”), and Crisp, and the documentary (in which Sting appears).   But more on that later.

Friday, January 25, 2013

Getting to Know Quentin


As I get further and further into watching films about Quentin Crisp, I realize the depth of the questions raised here.  
 
Now you may ask, “Why should any of us care about Quentin Crisp?”  For myself I can say that I was profoundly affected by watching The Naked Civil Servant.  And why was that?

It was that a man who was profoundly different—because homosexual and effeminate—chose to live openly and take the consequences.  He believed that people didn’t understand effeminate homosexuals and so feared them.  He was determined to show people that effeminate homosexuals were nothing to be afraid of.  

But here, already, we run into a quandary.  He was indeed no one to be afraid of.  He was beaten up by men, or gangs of men, on multiple occasions.  He always remained polite, considerate—and never hit back.  After release of the film The Naked Civil Servant he was asked, “So you never struck back because that would have reduced you to their level?” and he replied, “Oh no.  I never hit back because they would have killed me.”

Having grown up in the time of Martin Luther King, and having also been deeply affected by watching the film Gandhi, the idea of standing against oppression appealed to me.  The idea of non-violent resistance appealed to me.

But Quentin avoided “movements.”  He did not attempt political action.  He simply asserted who he was, and took the consequences.  This strikes me as much more problematical.  And yet this idea exerted a strong influence on me in the years after I learned about Quentin.  And yet:  Had any of his attackers actually killed Quentin, we would probably never have heard of him.

I’m currently rewatching the sequel to The Naked Civil Servant.  More on that shortly.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

Martin Luther King Day 2013


So I have tomorrow off for Martin Luther King Day, and perhaps I will see or hear President Obama’s inauguration.  It’s iffy since I don’t have cable TV service and my roof antenna isn’t attached.  But I’m interested to hear what the President will say; who knows what the next four years will bring us?  Meanwhile, there are suicide attacks in Kabul, Afghanistan; the hostage debacle in Algeria, and the continuing turmoil in northern Mali.

I have an old college friend whose husband was supposed to take up a position in Mali last year; I suppose that is indefinitely on hold.  I keep wondering whether my friend has ever read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles.  Though it begins and ends in a place much like Tangiers, Morocco, long sections take place in the Sahara.  The film version was shot, I think, in Mali and Niger.  It’s not the kind of movie that would encourage anyone to go there.

I’ve watched An Englishman in New York, about the later years of Quentin Crisp, for a second time; and I’m planning, tonight or tomorrow, to rewatch a documentary on the same subject, Resident Alien.   Meanwhile, I continue to read Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer From The Dance, built around the gay party experience on New York’s Fire Island in the 1970s.  At the same time, I continue reading Delicacy, a novel by the French writer David Foenkinos.

They remind me of classical music in the early 1900s.  Holleran’s book is achingly beautiful—so painfully beautiful that it’s painful to read.  It reminds me of Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht, where Schoenberg had pushed Wagnerian harmonies so far (encouraged no doubt by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler) that every phrase practically breaks apart from the intensity.

Whereas, after World War I, composes wanted to throw off that oppressive Wagnerian influence.  People like Erik Satie, who had already revolted against Wagner, wrote straight-forward, enchanting music.  For me, that’s David Foenkinos.  His 250-page novel contains 150 chapters, some only one or two sentences.

But what about Martin Luther King?  And Obama?  Although I sympathize with the “social gospel,” I’m also inclined to mysticism.  I worry about putting too much emphasis on material well-being.  I do think we have to do what we can for the poor and downtrodden; but I hope we won’t forget the spiritual aspect of our natures.  Give us bread—but give us roses too.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Experiences Poly…Gay



I’ve been back rereading some books and rewatching some films of gay literature, in particular Andrew Holleran’s novel Grief and the film The Naked Civil Servant, dealing with Quentin Crisp.  I tried to go on to the film’s sequel, An Englishman in New York, made thirty years after the first film, but the DVD was damaged.  I’ve also read the autobiographical novels of Edmund White, and one of his memoirs; plus the earlier novels of Christopher Isherwood.

Isherwood left England in 1929 to live in Germany.  When Hitler came to power, he spent some years moving from country to country, before settling in California in 1939.

Crisp spent most of his life in England, where homosexuality was illegal, but spent his last years in New York, in the time “after Stonewall.”

Andrew Holleran was a member of the “Violet Quill,” a group of gay writers who met and exchanged ideas in New York in the early 1980s.  Several have since dealt with life since the AIDS pandemic.

One theme I’ve picked up on is the great sense of liberation which followed the gradual loosening of anti-gay laws, leading to many people feeling that “anything goes.”  Edmund White remarks that, during the first years of the AIDS epidemic, he was puzzled by the advice to “know your partners.”  Wasn’t the whole point that you could just have sex with anyone, as many strangers and however often you wanted?  Holleran’s novel Dancer From the Dance apparently deals with drugs and gay orgies at Fire Island.  In An Englishman in New York, Quentin Crisp and his friend are asked to leave a gay club in New York because they’re dressed “normally” rather than bare to the waist or in leather.

I’m still tossing around the question of how much “poly” is an orientation (“I’m naturally happier with several lovers”) and how much it’s an ethic we can choose.

For me, “anything goes” has to have limits:  I need openness and honesty.  I need mutual respect and caring.  Then “anything that works for all involved goes.”

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Reading Holleran, Again



Just finished reading Andrew Holleran’s short novel (or is it a novella??) Grief.  I believe this is the third time I’ve read this book.  My first time was probably less than two years ago.  Clearly, I like this book.
 
But I continue to ask myself why I like it.  I don’t mean this is any unkind way.  Sometimes I like things in spite of strong annoyance about certain aspects of the work in question, things that simply antagonize me somehow.  The issue with Grief is nothing like that.  It’s a more technical writing issue.  I could almost feel it was my own flaw, and fault myself rather than the book; and maybe that is the truth.

I suppose the main uneasiness I feel is about the nature of this book itself.  What is it?  Is it a novel?  And does that even matter?

Generally, fiction is called a “novel” if it runs over 50,000 words—about 200 pages.  Grief comes in at 150.  I don’t have the statistics on other famous works of fiction, but I suspect quite a few famous “novels” come in under 50,000 words.  The Great Gatsby, in the editions I’ve seen, comes in slightly under 200 pages.

A novel often involves a fairly large cast of characters.  A Passage to India introduces around twenty characters just in the second chapter!  Yet something like The Stranger or The Immoralist contains a minimal number.  Indeed, Andre Gide, after writing multiple long works of fiction, called The Counterfeiters his “first novel.”  And Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his “first novel,” when he had already written War and Peace!  He didn’t know what to call War and Peace!

And I’m not sure what to call Grief.  But it’s beautifully written, and I enjoy reading and rereading it.  It’s a long monologue, involving the narrator and a few characters (fewer than ten, I’d say), as the narrator teaches a class at a Washington D.C. university and tries to get over his mother’s death.  Meanwhile he muses on his own life—that of an unattached, aging gay man at the end of the twentieth century—and the life of various famous Americans (Mary Tood Lincoln, Henry Adams) who were devastated by the deaths of loved ones; and his own friends who have been lost to AIDS.

Novels generally involve a plot.  I can’t put my fingers on a plot in Grief.  The narrator arrives in Washington, meets his landlord, walks around the city, reads about Lincoln and Adams, visits the mother of a friend who died of AIDS, discusses homosexuality and AIDS with students, finishes teaching, returns home.  Does this constitute a plot?  Do I care?

Frankly, I don’t.  I don’t care if this book runs “only” 150 pages.  I don’t care if the cast of characters is minimal.  I don’t care if not very much “happens.”

I love the mood of the book; I love the writing; I love the thoughtfulness.  Perhaps because I used to live relatively close to DC?  Perhaps because I’m a thoughtful, sometimes moody, person, who cares about relationships to family and friends and lovers?

I enjoy it; not everyone will.  Some people enjoy genre fiction; I enjoy this.  Whatever.