I never hesitated to tell him anything, and many of the things I told him were shocking because I lived a very sordid life - I was a male prostitute for six months.
I don't think I've ever shocked him as he isn't shockable, he's very sophisticated and very civilised. He likes to tell me things which are an expression of the folly of human beings. I think he's a very good writer, though he writes very cynical books and that worries me, because I don't like too much cynicism, it's too glib. I like Tennyson's poetry, and he finds it too emotional, so we are different temperamentally. I don't think I've got much in common with Donald. And it's rather annoying because I get on very well with people's wives and mothers and so on, but I never get to know a Mrs Carroll really well because they are always gone by the time I've got to know them. There's nothing really that I don't like about him, though I think it's unwise that he gets married so often. So I think he's not satisfactory to women because he's not emotional. If they asked him "Do you really love me?" he would evade the question. I think they like to be told a lot of rubbish. He is so cynical and says exactly what he thinks and I don't think women like that. He's got married an awful lot, and I've met all of his wives. The tour had been badly arranged, so that we turned up where they weren't expecting us, but though he was contemptuous he never flew into a rage. I have never seen him lose his temper, but I have seen him scornful of people. He never objected to anything I had written, or if he did he objected very quietly. We even slept in the same room on the odd occasion, and I snore terribly, but he never complained. We went on a tour around America to publicise Doing It With Style and got on very well, which surprised me. He had undertaken to write a book on lifestyles, and he asked me to help him. I don't know why, because his work was done. I had wanted to call it My Reign in Hell, because everywhere I go I have to explain that I never worked in the Civil Service, that I was a male model, but that it was just like being in the Civil Service.Īfter the book was published, Donald stayed around. My book took about six months to complete, and I wasn't very pleased with the title, The Naked Civil Servant. But Mr Carroll spoke very little, he was very unemphatic, he just encouraged me to speak. Mr O'Connor, for example, was a Hungarian. When I first met Donald I was surprised because he was just like a human being, and most of the people I knew were not. Within six weeks he had sold it to Mr Maschler at Jonathan Cape. Donald told me that if I wrote a few hundred words every week, he would collect it all together and find a publisher.
He was with his first wife then, and she took one look at me and swept their two tiny children out of the way. I telephoned Mr Carroll and he said, "You'd better come and see me." So I crossed the river from Chelsea to Putney. He said that if I gave him the 2,000 words that had frightened Mr Kimber and a transcript of what I had said on the radio, and photographs of myself, he would undertake to sell the book. I was describing all this to the art masters of Maidstone College, and a man called Citizen Kaine, Bob Kaine, said, "I have my spies and I will put them out." And he came back with the name Donald Carroll. When he read my 2,000 words he fainted dead away and said he could never publish such a book, it was too scandalous. He said that if I wrote a 2,000-word synopsis of my life story he would let me know whether he would give me a contract. A publisher, Mr Kimber, telephoned me and said I should write a book. I had spoken words on the radio about my life, on the Third Programme, for Phillip O'Connor. QUENTIN CRISP: I first met Mr Carroll on the telephone. Now a full-time writer of humorous books, he lives in Gloucestershire with his fifth wife he has four children from previous marriages He worked as an editor at Thames & Hudson, and then as a literary agent. Donald Carroll was born in Texas in 1940 and read philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book was The Naked Civil Servant his latest, Resident Alien, is his edited diaries. He now lives and performs one-man shows in New York.
After a spell as a male prostitute, he was an artists' model from 1930 until 1978. Quentin Crisp, born in 1908, went to art school, but never earned his living as a painter. How we met - Quentin Crisp & Donald Carroll
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