Quentin Crisp writes in his stunner of an autobiography The Naked Civil Servant:

"As soon as I was a few days old I caught pneumonia. I was literally as well as metaphorically wrapped in cotton wool. From this ambience I still keenly feel my exile. When I was well again, I saw that my mother intended to reapportion her love and divide it equally among her four children. I flew into an ungovernable rage from which I have never fully recovered. A fair share of anything is a starvation diet to an egomaniac. For the next twelve years I cried or was sick or had what my governesses politely called an "accident" -- that is to say I wet myself and worse. After that time I had to think of some other way of drawing attention to myself, because I was sent to a prep school where such practices might not have seemed endearing."

Ungovernable rage. Egomaniac. Drawing attention to himself. Wetting himself "and worse." Denis Pratt -- as Quentin Crisp was first called -- was one angry little two year old. And (at least judging by his outer trappings) a very different being from the creature he was to reveal to a much greater portion of the world than Denis or Quentin ever dreamed was accessible.

The ungovernable rage part is particularly striking. Who struck a more pacific stance than Quentin? At least by the time he gratefully hit the shores of his beloved New York City. Even his appearance, by the time he arrived in the USA (he began living here in 1981), a full decade and more after Carnaby Street and the first stirrings of punk rock and gender fuck, no longer seemed that peculiar or provocative. His mantras: "I want what you want" and "I shall try to say the words you've come to hear" proclaimed the gentlest of prophets. It's true that his opinions -- for example, his repeated assertions that everything from gay people and basket-weaving to music and especially sex were a mistake -- didn't always turn out to be quite those of the people he addressed; some vestige of epater le bourgeoisie still arguably adhered to them and the man who uttered them. But not much. Quentin was self-evidently a gentle man.

In fact, Mr. Crisp was, I think, genuinely bewildered that people ever mistook his opinions for deliberate provocation. He really did think he said the words we wanted to hear. His takes on life -- and especially on how to be happy -- had become so clear to him, and he had taken such care to explain them to us, that I don't think he ever quite grasped why people didn't always "get it" -- if not out-and-out agree with him.

The Only Human Enterprise That Isn't a Mistake

I have always agreed with him.

I am a fairly accomplished musician, and yet I agree with him that music experienced as a lone pursuit is a mistake. I am a rampantly active sexual gay man and yet I share his misgivings about the limits of sex and the concept of "gay." Gay "pride" makes as little sense to me as it did to him. It is the notion of being "proud" of anything that Quentin may really have wished us to call into question here. I may like or dislike having hairy forearms and may display them proudly or hide them, but, finally, they're a fact about me, not an achievement. Pride, in most of its manifestations, is a little infantile -- at any rate doesn't have a lot of meaning or place in the sort of completely self-realized life Quentin lived and wanted us to live. Why not just be ourselves and let the "product" of that do what it's going to do anyway: speak for itself?

In fact, I can't think of anything he said that hasn't hit home for me. His animating premise seemed and still seems to me inarguable: that connecting to people describes the most illuminating, pleasurable pursuit and experience we can know. Anything that doesn't enhance this connection is thus a "mistake." This doesn't mean we can't be born-again basket-weavers or bi-sexual saxophone players. But we understand and embrace whatever activities our temperaments impel us to pursue most profitably, Quentin suggested, when we employ them as aspects of a much larger and infinitely more interesting enterprise: that of becoming, and then being, ourselves. "I am in the profession of being," Quentin proclaimed.

Quentin knew the importance of connecting with other people not least because, over the long span of his life, so many people were afraid to connect with him. Why, he wondered? What was there really to fear? Why did we need the distractions of music, basket-weaving, limiting ourselves to someone else's idea of Who We Should Be (man, woman, gay, straight, saxophone player)? At best these might be turned into colorations, made expressions of our particular styles -- but, too fondly clutched, they became impediments to achieving what he knew by the lessons of his own battered life would truly make us happy.

Which was simply this: Being ourselves with others who are being themselves. No greater pleasure was available to us, Quentin believed, than that. This is why the only human enterprise that wasn't a mistake -- the only one that made any sense to Quentin -- was conversation.

How many of you have had lunch with him? Or spoken with him at a party? I'd suggest that even if you met him only once -- and were paying attention to him -- you got the full man. You'd have as much right, as a result of that single encounter, to be expounding on him as I do now. Why? Because he gave himself so completely and without impediment that you got the essentials of the man in the space of a moment. Quentin gave himself equally and completely to everybody.

What tactics did he employ to accomplish this complete giving-of-self? Well, we can deduce some of them by attending to what he admonished us to do: for example, "learn the words." Language is our only currency: the most direct means we have of conveying who we are to anyone else. This is all so that you might "say what you've come to say." He even offered us a foolproof two-word instruction manual about how to do that: "Never defend." To Quentin, we are completely and essentially the products of our own temperaments. We cannot escape our points-of-view: what, therefore, is there to do but embrace them -- and find entertaining, candid and verbal means of expressing them? He delighted in finding so many temperaments in the world: he wanted to meet them all. His ideal was to have 365 friends a year. There wasn't enough time on earth, alas, for him actually to meet everyone in the world -- as he dearly wanted to do -- but he gave it a damned good try.

"Two Chicken Dinners" -- The Rigors of Being Quentin

Being Quentin took enormous energy. It was an asset of his own inborn temperament that he had so much of it. Think of what he lived on! Canned beans and Guinness and whatever salted peanuts were available at the endless parties he attended. Think of how few doctors he went to! The physical afflictions he somehow found the fortitude to ignore and rise above! To wit: his appearance as Lady Bracknell ("I had to do it -- they gave me two chicken dinners!") in a stifling August run of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Soho Rep back in the early '80s. Not his finest hour; one reviewer likened him to Mr. Magoo. He had such a volcanic case of bronchitis that you thought his esophagus would split when he coughed. But -- through some Herculean willpower known only to him, as he attempted to portray Mr. Wilde's quintessential grande dame -- he somehow managed to repress that cough onstage (he erupted like a tubercular ward every time he stepped off it). No wonder he sounded like Mr. Magoo.

The man nearly reached 91 not because he was a paragon of health, but because he had enough energy to split an atom. That rageful two-year-old he once was never quite went away. It fueled one of the most remarkable lives, and some of the most remarkable ideas, not to mention some of the most beautiful, incisive, incredibly funny writing we've been privileged to receive -- ever.

Quentin Crisp was a genius. I don't say this to invite you to kneel reverently at the wax feet of the figure of him you'll find at Mme Tussaud's (although I have done exactly that). Genius, by the definition I apply to it, means being fully realized. It means being everything you already are -- but consciously. Quentin wanted all of us to be the geniuses we could be for a simple reason: he knew finding and cultivating our "genius" gave us the only chance at "happiness" we were likely to know. We are all remarkable by virtue of existing as the idiosyncratic creatures each of us is. All we have to do to find this out is to be true to ourselves. A banal admonition from anyone else. But from Quentin it has bite.

It has bite because of the example of his own life -- and the words he's left describing nearly every nook and cranny of that life. The lesson that finding, trusting and cultivating our "genius" -- our potential for self-realization -- was essential to living a satisfying life was in Quentin hard-won. Indeed, when Quentin calls for us to be rigorously self-honest, he's careful to warn us (from his own painful experience, recorded in Naked Civil Servant) that "the journey to the interior this entails is not an altogether pleasant experience, because you not only have to take stock of what you consider your assets but also have to take a long look at what your friends call 'the trouble with you.'"