Quentin & Philip
by Andrew Barrow
572pp, Macmillan, £18.99
On a wintry night in New York, February 1991, with the Gulf war raging, a figure passed me on Bleeker Street. Everyone else in the city was hunched against the icy winds whipping down the Manhattan canyons, but this man held his head high, as if the mere matter of an Atlantic-driven blast could not sway him.
Only as he drew near did I recognise the face - surrounded by wisps of candy-floss hair, crowned by a velvety fedora - as Quentin Crisp, with whom I'd dined on the previous evening. That night, at the Book-Friends Café, he had held forth over his supper, although, as Andrew Barrow so accurately observes, everything he said had the air of having been said before.
Baroque, theatrical, totally constructed and littered with "abstract embellishments", Crisp's was a self-scripted monologue for a production in which he played himself, as he had done for practically all his life. By then he had become something approaching an automaton, existing on Complan as a kind of space food (merely to nourish rather than to stimulate the senses), going to the cinema sometimes twice a day as a "forgetting chamber".
It is apt, therefore, that the public remembrance of Crisp comes through someone playing him on film: John Hurt's portrayal of Britain's stately homo in The Naked Civil Servant, a piece of television history which coincided with a burgeoning gay liberation to reinvent the way "we" thought about homosexuality. It is, perhaps, a familiar story - virtually a modern parable - but in its retelling, Barrow, who knew Crisp, enters unknown territory in a bravura attempt to link this most celebrated bohemian life to that of the practically unknown Philip O'Connor - the man indirectly responsible for the book on which the 1975 Thames TV film was based, and another close friend of Barrow's.
Alternating, chapter by chapter, between his two characters, Barrow builds a twin portrait in which the lives of the protagonists inform each other. Both were disjointed and disconnected from society: in Crisp's case, an overtly gay figure devoted to Garbo and Dietrich, dressed in waisted jackets, his hair teased into a flaming henna bush; in O'Connor's, a vaguely bisexual surrealist poet of early promise and long overcoats, intermittently mad and perennially alcoholic, given to a life of tramping and scrounging.
O'Connor was a histrionic Withnail to Crisp's Ziggy Stardust, and in telling his story, Barrow neatly introduces a third and unifying factor into the equation: his own relationship to these two characters who, in their own ways, become his icons.
Born in Sutton in 1908, Crisp escaped his prosaic birth-name of Dennis Pratt via infant prodigy and teenage performance, already drawing attention to himself at his minor public school by dancing on Derby station and making outrageous statements such as "What is cricket?". Having "given up trying to be a schoolboy", Crisp concentrated on his self-construction, leaving Sutton for the city centre, the appointed arena for his act.
As Barrow points out, the image of Crisp sashaying down Soho streets (often in his bare feet) is counterpointed by a surprising application. Never without a job, Crisp did illustration work for graphic companies and in 1942 published his own satirical pamphlet, All This and Bevin Too (which he persuaded Mervyn Peake to illustrate), before moving into modelling. Far from being penurious, he was often able to lend or even donate quite large sums to friends; unlike O'Connor, for whom the reverse was true, and who enters the story with an even more entangled upbringing.
Born in 1916, O'Connor was taken as a boy by his mother to France, and was subsequently "adopted" by a strange character called Camden Field, who took young Philip to live with him in a hut on Box Hill. Overtones of abuse are never far away, yet never quite stated, and O'Connor's subsequent vagrancy seems to have owed as much to his own mental instability as to his fractured background.
Drawn, like Crisp, towards Soho's social melting pot, O'Connor found expression for his poetic talent in the British surrealist movement and, after a spell in Maudsley on a charge of "fashionable madness", his verse - which he described as "whispering to God" - was acclaimed by such people as Herbert Read and Stephen Spender. Spender subsequently championed O'Connor's Memoirs of a Public Baby, although its author's inability to edit his prose delayed publication for 20 years until 1958 when, like Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant, its appearance merely confirmed the semi-public stardom O'Connor had always had in the select circles of Soho and Fitzrovia.
In Barrow's deft and cleverly constructed text, the two dance in and out of each other's lives and his own imagination. O'Connor's sporadic radio pieces for the BBC (on ostensibly uncommissionable abstract subjects such as "Laughter" and "Laziness") took him to 129 Beaufort Street and the doorbell marked "Crisp: two rings". The recording he made, broadcast in 1964 as A Male Artist's Model, sparked Crisp's own book.
Meanwhile O'Connor escaped the city for Suffolk and Wales and a sequence of inconstant relationships. One of the more frustrating aspects of his character is his inability to fund himself and his consequent expectation that his friends should step into the financial vacuum. Every letter includes a demand for 10 shillings or a fiver, sums which only his last alliance, with the New England heiress Panna Grady, can repay.
Grady, giver of parties for 500 in her Dakota Building apartment - at which guests included Warhol, Mailer, Burroughs and John and Yoko - was determined to experience bohemia. Meeting O'Connor was a fatal attraction. Her money sapped his will to write, and fuelled his will to drink. Subsuming his talent into private performances (to which the youthful and endearingly hapless Burrow is witness), it's a salutary reminder of the fact that alcoholics are the funniest people in the world - for the first hour or two.
· Philip Hoare's latest book, Spike Island, is published in paperback by Fourth Estate
