The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

I recently read the new posthumus autobiography of Mr. Crisp called The Last Word.
That was so good that I wanted more and I had not read his first book to be published, the one that made him the international celebrity he became for the last 30 or so years of his life.

So off to the library I went after asking my branch to locate it for me. Yes, The Naked Civil Servant is even available in Nassau County Long Island, New York USA.

As he discusses in The Last Word, Quentin is more trans than gay, but given the fact that the variety of gender orientation had not been much explored by the time of The Naked Civil Servant’s publication in 1968 he was not fully aware of his own place on the spectrum.
I not really aware of the culture of the UK in those post Stonewall years after USA gay liberation had its defining action in 1967, but the feeling I had personally as a bisexual identified teen at the time was that the popular notion was that there are two sides, a person is one or the other; gay or straight. This didn’t fit me but anyway, that was the general impression I got and I think that is what the USA culture at the time thought.

Yet reading The Naked Civil Servant it is clear that even then Crisp knew he was something other than the one slot or the other categorization. He claims to have very early on worn makeup, but he is not really a crossdresser. He is not dressing as he is to act more like a woman to attract men really in any way, but rather to express what he felt within himself and what he ought to do and be.
The Naked Civil Servant is the work of an outsider critical to the workings of the society he found he had to live in. No doubt his gender feelings were part of the impulse that set him in the outsider direction, but what he becomes by the time of this writing is someone who looks at the world around him, does not really want to participate in it if he can avoid it and describes it in endless critical witticisms.  

So readers, this is not primarily a gay book. This is a work of an outsider that I would encourage other outsiders, whatever their sexual proclivities may be, to read. He is most definitely one of us who takes to the pages, his stage here, in a manner most entertaining and fortifying for the rest of us.

Of particular interest to me was the art model stuff as well as his other attitudes toward work. He is only willing to work because he has to. I think this should be the natural human response to the wage slave cycle we are forced into in our modern civilized world. If one looks into anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer people, which is the way human life was for 6 million years until the agriculture thing started just 10,000 years ago, one can find that people simply didn't “work” all that much. Maybe a few hours a day, and not every day, were necessary to get what was needed to sustain. The remainder of the time given over to hanging out, telling stories, resting , sex, whatever.
I like to think that Crisp, like myself was old school in that way.
Art modeling is the closest thing I have found for being paid for doing nothing. The model just sits there, the mind remains one's own, unsold.  

I first saw Quentin on The Dick Cavett Show in my youth and loved his not bullshit stance since.

Anyway, fine book.

The White Rose: a novel by B Traven

After reading this I have only one Traven novel yet to read. Actually two, but his final novel that came some years after the others is not yet translated to English and I don’t read German. I clearly really like his stuff.

The White Rose is a study in contrasting worldviews. The main players, symbols of their classes, are an indigenous man who through family tradition holds the title to a large Mexican hacienda. This is presented as more of a long standing commune rather than a feudal set up. It’s as if the egalitarian, sharing, roots from hunter-gatherer times have somehow survived in this instance into a stable, and atypically fair, agricultural system. Things are shared and it is taken as a given that the title holding family has a duty to the other families as caretakers of the property. They are not seen as winners entitled to profit from this ownership of things that everyone shares. All the people are very close to the land.
They are of the land, the human creatures who emerge from the land, live by it, and return to it in constant cycles of renewal.

The contrasting entity is a USA businessman who has maneuvered himself into a position of enormous power heading an international oil company. He is portrayed in a way that highlights his need for status among his peers. Part of his aura involves his outside women and their needs. The fact that he has outside of marriage women is seen as a positive status symbol among the board members of his corporation. He has to procure symbols of wealth for his main lover. She wants a nice car, but then it needs a garage, but the garage must be attached to a house and not an ordinary house, a mansion. So our oil man has to go through a lot of money for this stuff. I also want to mention that the woman is shown as being more intelligent, and better educated than her lover. She is not a dumb airhead floozy like we see often in movies about this sort of situation, like in Citizen Kane. The big time businessman is not at all involved in the land, other people take care of all that. He is a modern North American. Except he needs land for drilling oil.

And he needs the hacienda, Rosa Blanca, The White Rose.

There is the contrast and the conflict of the novel.

The industrialist is driven by emotions: Fear, Greed, how others see him.
The indian is contained in love for the land and the people and things from it and the wish to see it go on for the sake of the people of the past who took care of it for the people of the present. They must care for it to assure the survival of those to come.

In The White Rose Traven approaches storytelling devices of mystery and suspense, the day just might be saved. It was good to hope that the miserable inevitable might somehow, through law, caring people, not occur.

Although it is clear where Traven’s heart lies in the conflict, his style is not particularly agitprop. He is not rallying comrades behind a particular banner. He is rather coolly showing the situation from various sides. There is no feeling of soft peddling the issues. He describes in detail what is going on rather matter of factly no matter how horrible, cruel, unjust, or plain nasty, that might be.

I like this tone. I feel I am asked to go along and look through his eyes rather than be verbally rhetorically persuaded. I read him with a recurring sarcastic edge that I think he intended.

B Traven was an outsider. The man who only wanted to be known for the work was not a Mexican and although distorting whatever his real biography was with USA root claims, he was not an American. Perhaps witnessing first hand events in German in the early part of the 20th Century and then landing in Mexico in the mid 1920s and absorbing that world, doesn’t put one in a mind that “if just this or that happened all would finally be well”.

He presents people who have lived a certain way for many years being suddenly confronted and challenged by international modernity, the machine that rode the rails that conquered Norte was on the next little  stop in it’s global voyage, and gathering endless momentum.

The book is from 1929. Surely I would look upon it as quaint and a period piece, if he offered me an easy solution to the complicated intricacies of modern global life that dazzles us with wonders and the endless brutalities that come with it.

We are in uncharted extremely complicated territory and anyone who is offering an answer to making things better, like the old days, or some glowing vision, ought to be viewed with suspicion.
Nobody knows what to do.