It is of course the effort to abandon everything else that sometimes stops us cold -- there lies the "difficulty." But it's our only way through -- the only way to find the geniuses Quentin believed we all are. Why would he have wanted to meet so many of us if he didn't believe this of us?

"When I Saw Manhattan I Wanted It" -- The Slow Trip to Paradise

Understanding Quentin's own efforts to "abandon everything else" brings us back to his anger. Reflecting on Quentin today, I now think it was one of the most important things about him. In fact, how he managed to transmute his rage into the powerful completely self-accepting presence he eventually became offers one of the most amazing examples of "abandoning everything else" we could wish for.If Quentin could do this, anyone can.

Disguised as a much more pronounced (and slightly bitchier) pessimism than he was later to express, his anger was, I believe, a bit more evident when he first trod London's streets in the 1930s and '40s -- when and where, by his own admission, he was pretty much bent on scaring the horses. The earliest writing I've been able to find of his was something I put into our book The Wit And Wisdom of Quentin Crisp and bares this darker more cutting tone -- thus giving us a tiny glimpse of the younger man he may have been. It's a piece he called "The Declining Nude," published in London in Little Reviews Anthology in 1949 when Quentin was 40. A few lines at the end describing "a man" (who clearly was Quentin) make the point:

At Toynbee Hall there is a four-hour sitting room from six till ten in the evening, at the beginning of which a model was once asked if he could not stand with arms outstretched "in a kind of crucifixion pose."

"Willingly," the man replied, "but I died after only three hours the last time, you remember."

It comes to this. You can either take easy poses and die of boredom or take difficult poses and die of an enlarged heart. "To each is given what defeat he will."

It's worth noting that among the afflictions from which Quentin Crisp ultimately suffered one of them was, in fact (and he loved telling you this), "an enlarged heart." But the ready embrace of defeat here -- an embrace even more loudly proclaimed at the end of The Naked Civil Servant -- bespeaks a very different man than he became later on. Listen to these bleak lines at the end of Civil Servant:

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing. We think we write definitively of those parts of our nature that are dead and therefore beyond change, but that which writes is still changing -- still in doubt. Even a monotonously undeviating path of self-examination does not necessarily lead to a mountain of self-knowledge. I stumble toward my grave confused and hurt and hungry.

By the time he wrote Civil Servant, Quentin's anger seems to have completely transmuted into a kind of dramatic, even showy -- though no less authentically felt -- despair. Certainly his style had crystallized in this book into something paradoxically adamantine and supple -- completely suited to the task of "saying what he'd come to say." It was a style he was to employ to wonderful avail for the rest of his life. But the man, if not the book, still lacked something essential.

Something Quentin Crisp would find when he moved to New York.

"When I saw Manhattan, I wanted it."

If Quentin Crisp had a profoundly happy life -- and I believe he did -- it was importantly because he moved to New York City. He would not have written -- indeed, did not write -- anything like the last lines of Naked Civil Servant here in New York. I often wonder what his observations would have been about the 9/11 World Trade Center debacle and only know they would not have been anything you expected. But one reaction I am virtually certain he would have felt and expressed was an even more acute affection for and attachment to Manhattan than the prodigious ones he already felt. He loved New York. And he loved Americans. Moving here, he truly felt he had entered a Hollywood movie. "America is more like the movies than you ever dreamed" he wrote to his friends abroad. And he meant it.

"I Shall Try To Think of It In This New Way"

John Hurt says Quentin Crisp was the only true philosopher he'd ever met because he was the only one who actually lived what he believed. Amen. He's in the company of Freud and Henry James for the completeness with which he examined his life -- arguably outdoing them in the living of his life according to what he found. Thank god his style was more like -- well? who? Dorothy Parker? -- than Freud or James (someone funnier, anyway). But his style -- like the man himself -- was and is inimitable.

Indeed, one of the great truths Quentin wanted us to learn is that comparisons really are odious. Do not make them. Our idiosyncrasies defy categorization and we are happiest when we accept them and use them for barter -- bartering to sit down and have lunch and a nice chat. But Quentin's example teaches us something else, too.

I sometimes joke that when Quentin really wanted to say "Fuck you!" he instead intoned, "I shall try to think of it in this new way." It is a funny line. But it's also true. If Quentin prided himself on anything -- and again, for anyone as Zen as Quentin, "pride" is automatically suspect and problematic -- it was his "infinite availability." As I've suggested -- and if you knew him, or went to his memorial to see the astonishingly large and varied crowd who attended it, you know this for yourself -- he managed to an incredible extent to make himself infinitely available. But making oneself infinitely available is no easy task: it means living in the moment to a degree that most of us would find insupportable. Although his own style and opinions had long been etched into exquisitely precise form, Quentin truly did "try to think of it in this new way" when he encountered an idea he could not at first understand or endorse. And sometimes he changed. Sometimes he truly was able to "think of it in this new way."

Even at the end of his life.

Proof can be found in the last essay he wrote, which we have thanks to Phillip Ward's loving transcription of words Quentin spoke (his hand was by this time so crippled with arthritis that he could no longer wield a pen or press keys on a typewriter) in 1999 -- all to provide the content of an essay he'd been asked to produce entitled What Does It Mean to be Human? At one point he writes:

Those who are not hopeless are worried that one day their lives will end. And, if you live long enough, of course, you long for it to end. That's been my desire in recent times. I only hope to become extinct. But before all that, you must try everything. Have children. Behave in such a way that monuments are built to you. Rule the world! Have streets and theaters named after you. Write your autobiography. These are ways to stay alive.

This is a very different Quentin Crisp from the man who wrote about stumbling hurt and hungry to his grave. The prism of his experience and his point-of-view has turned his head in a quite new direction. The prism shifted in another way as well. I know, not long before he died, he quietly admitted that there was one realm of human experience in which he had not partaken -- ultimately, he realized, to his disadvantage. He had made himself "infinitely available" to the world -- but not to the love of one other human being. This more intimate love it was not his temperament, perhaps, to pursue, but it is a measure of his ability "to see it in this new way" that he was able to acknowledge something he had pretty much, throughout all of his preceding ninety years, dismissed. And, perhaps, by acknowledging it, beckon to us not to make the same -- mistake. Or, at any rate, not to leave unexamined the one aspect of life he realized he had not himself been able to embrace.

This was a courageous man.

Courageous enough now, even after death, to take you on. In his writing, in tapes of An Evening With Quentin Crisp, in his various films -- he invites you to take him on with the same vigor and energy with which he gave himself to you. Do so and I can pretty much guarantee you will be transformed.

At the very least, you'll have begun to think of things in a new way.

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Guy Kettelhack has contributed to, authored or co-authored more than thirty nonfiction books, including DANCING AROUND THE VOLCANO Decoding the Enigma of Gay Men and Sex: Freeing Our Erotic Lives. Guy's authority is varied, and enthusiastic: He has been frequently interviewed about Quentin Crisp, and speaking appearances have ranged from a talk at Middlebury College about "alcoholism, recovery and the college student," to a presentation as part of the Sexuality Series at New York's Lesbian and Gay Center (topic: "Why Does That Turn Me on? The Iconography of Sexual Fantasy) in which he appeared in jockstrap, black leather jacket, playing Czardas on the violin -- to demonstrate one of his animating premises, expressed in E.M. Forster's famous line: "Only connect". A graduate of Middlebury College, he has done graduate work in English literature at the Bread Loaf School of English and Oxford University, graduate work in psychoanalysis at the New York and Boston Centers for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies and studied violin at the Juilliard School of Music and New England Conservatory. Mr. Kettelhack lives in New York City. Email: GuyBlakeKett@aol.com

all black and white photographs by Phillip Ward ©2002. All Rights Reserved. Used with kind permission and featured exclusively on the official website, The Quentin Crisp Archives. www.crisperanto.org

except for the photograph featuring John Hurt -- courtesy of the author ©2002. All Rights Reserved

all color photographs of Quentin Crisp and Guy Kettelhack from the author's private collection ©2002. All Rights Reserved