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ALSO IN SALON:
No more magic realism
A young Latin American novelist says no more flying grannies.
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resident alien:
BY QUENTIN CRISP
BY CHARLES TAYLOR wit and generosity do not often go hand in hand, wit usually coming at someone else's expense. The two are on intimate terms in "Resident Alien," Quentin Crisp's record of his social and professional wanderings in his adopted home of New York City, where he's determined to treat nearly everyone with the tolerance and friendliness he claims to have found there. Crisp, who's now 86, left England for New York when he was in his 70s. Since then he's lived in a rooming house near the Bowery, on the same block as a local chapter of Hell's Angels. Crisp reports that there have been a half dozen or so threatening phone calls over the years, but the figure doesn't unduly trouble him because in England, he received half a dozen or so face-to-face threats per day. The greatest danger he seems to face now is getting around town in the snow. "Resident Alien" is a chronicle of Crisp's speaking engagements, publicity trips and social forays, along with the unexpected encounters that Manhattan tosses everyone's way. The book is chatter, but chatter of a very high order, chatter that never grows tiresome. And there's more to "Resident Alien" than Crisp's self-described "fatuous affability." In the guise of a diary, Crisp has written a luxuriantly entertaining and keen piece of bemused and grateful social criticism. As he sees it, life in America is a comedy of manners, most of those manners large-spirited and kind. Where he provoked open hostility in England, here, waiting for the Third Avenue bus, he encounters a large black man who laughs appreciatively at his outfit and says, "Well my! You've got it all on today." It's no wonder Crisp is open to the people who call him up at all hours to ask advice or to make a confession. "People are my only pastime," Crisp writes. "I do not walk about the streets lost in thought ... so no one interrupts my train of thought by speaking to me. I welcome them. When we say of anyone that he is boring, it is ourselves we are criticizing. We have not made ourselves into that wide, shallow vessel into which a stranger feels he can pour anything. I have said no one is boring who will tell the truth about themselves."
You can't help feeling a bit sad as Crisp mentions this or that aspect of his physical decline, but like all his writing, "Resident Alien" is bereft of self-pity. It is, of all damn things, a new version of that old, satisfying tale, the story of an immigrant who finds happiness in his adopted homeland. "What I want is to be accepted by other people without bevelling down my individuality to please them ... I want love on my own terms. Here I have it." Let England debate the future of the monarchy. America has claimed the only British queen worth saving.
Charles Taylor lives in Boston. He is a regular contributor to Salon. |
