Divine Misfits

...To the proverbial "they"—those others who judge us—we all fear, but who the Cowards and the Beatons of the world, with their half-wish to outrage and their half-wish to please, must especially take into account Beaton's is a remarkably fastidious eye, he is forever noticing the teapot?thick, chipped-spouted, yellow earthenware"—out of which the tea is poured, and he is unflaggingly attentive to revelatory detail, whether it be the Duke of Windsor's "red, slightly horny hands that looked surprisingly like a mechanic's," or the hue of Garbo's skin "Her waxen complexion and her thighs were sunburnt to a rich biscuit colour " Of course, this sort of exquisite sensibility presupposes an existence free of base anxieties and Beaton accordingly surrounds himself with dotty, aristocratic ladies who have a great deal of time and money to spare Emerald Cunard, for instance, calls him at four in the morning to air the most rarified of observations Of "a well-known amoureuse" she says " 'She knew all the arts of seduction She would often display her tongue she didn't put it out, but she'd let one have a tantalizing peep—just so that one should know she had a tongue You forget that most people do have tongues because you never see them, but a tongue is a charming addition if you like a person '" Beaton's dearest friend is Lady Diana Cooper, the third daughter of the 8th Earl of Rutland, who is given to exotic hobbies and whimsical pronouncements "Alter childhood—which never tails—there's nothing else ' There is, in general, a "clubby" atmosphere pervading these diaries, a banding together ot people who see themselves as exempt from normal standards and obligations To perceive oneself as above and beyond entails, however, a certain ongoing vulnerability, when Beaton steps outside his charmed circle he suddenly finds himself peripheral rather than special "The evening," he writes after being present at a dinner whose guest-list included Winston Churchill and Brendan Bracken, "had upon me the salutary effect of making my own troubles seem unimportant But it also made me realize with quite a shock of humiliation the limitations of my specialized existence Here was a group of men who are uncommonly varied in their wide range of interests, yet with none of them was I able to converse with authority or ease I realized how remote I have become from the ordinary man of intelligence Not only in the field of politics and government, but in history, in social problems, and in the events of the day, I found myself tongue-tied and with no opinions to voice " Amid the "creative frivolity," as Beaton called it in his declining years, a considerable amount of serious work got done Although his camera would always favor subjects who were royal, celebrated or beautiful, Beaton was willingly recruited to work for the British government during World War II He did a photographic study of the RAF for the Ministry of Information, traveled under conditions of some danger to the fronts in the Middle and Far East, and collaborated on several books that focused on the privations and sacrifices at home, with texts by James Pope-Hen-nessy and Peter Quennell Still, a certain chilly detachment from the humanly-significant is discernible "The heavy walls crumble and fall in the most romantic Piranesi forms," Beaton writes of a bombed-out area of London His is an essentially apolitical view of things, he is struck primarily by the visual effect, almost as though life were a stage-setting replete with well- or badly-matched actors "Servants of different categones in scarlet, white and gold liveries stand like poppies behind chairs and tables," he writes of a 1943 visit to Delhi, "or appear in the distance of vast halls and marble enfilades looking as small as figures in a landscape " Beaton went on to design extensively for the theater, wrote an unsuccessful play, created the costumes for My Fair Lady and Gigi, and kept up with the '60s by hobnobbing with Mick Jagger But despite his maintaining a sincere interest in the new up until his recent death, one feels that Beaton's real affinity was with the old order—that era of eclipsed grace and privilege epitomized by Mrs Patrick Campbell's rumination during a lunch he had with her in 1938 "In my day, beauties were poetic looking They wore long, pre-Raphaelite tea gowns They moved and spoke very slowly, giving the impression that they had just been possessed " Quentin Crisp's How to Have a Life-Style (Methuen, 178 pp , $8 95) is an attempt to impose the values of foppishness on the ignorant It is a bitter and witty book by a notoriously campy homosexual who fluttered his lashes and wiggled down the street back in the days when the word "gay" still designated an emotional rather than a sexual condition Crisp is, to begin with, a genuine aphorist "Revolt is a perpetual process seldom increasing the amount of liberty m any society but merely pushing it around a bit " He is also an iconoclast who, by dint of Swiftian inversions of bourgeois precepts, makes a convincing case for abandoning the straight and narrow "The search for a life-style will occupy a great deal of your day It would therefore be wise not to waste time on domestic rituals It is quite unnecessary to clean the place where you live because, after four years, the dirt doesn't become any worse It's just a question of not losing your nerve " The one point I don't believe him on is his purported indifference to moral considerations "In a book of this kind," Crisp declaims, "the heart is under suspicion", a page later he insists, "Stylists can never concern themselves with ethics " The truth is that Crisp is a man of?erratic?principle His quarrel with contemporary license may be couched in preternaturally arch language, but it is essentially the traditionalist line of argument "Instant sex is a time- and labor-saving device, but as leisure and energy are what we now have to excess, this is no recommendation For flavor it will never supercede the stuff you had to peel and cook This is one of those unpleasant truths that the permissive society has brought to light We are now all dangerously aware that sexual intercourse is a bit of a bore What kept the 'divine woman' lark going for all those long, dark centuries was not an unquenchable erection but romance " As to the book's professed credo of toughness, Crisp's embrace of gesture and flamboyant mannerism would seem to stem from his very inability to deal with the harsh images of life he has constructed for himself "Well, first of all I don't think anyone has any rights I think you fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, you grab at what you want, and if you don't get it you go without, and you flop into your grave " Sam Spade might agree with that, but I don't think Crisp has any intention of letting his own dour projections cramp his style He goes to the movies instead—and writes brilliantly about the nature of stardom and screen-presence, especially Mae West's "She could be imitated (and frequently was) by men in drag, but no woman would have had the nerve to seriously attempt to convert to her own private use such luxurious self-glorification, nor would any man I can think of have felt able to cope with her demands There was in all her work an element of self-mockery " Like Beaton, Crisp is inveterately nostalgic, in his case, it is for "that golden age when the world was full of whatever is spare, original, strange—when muffin men rang their bells and lavender sellers sang in the streets " One is forced to conclude with Proust that the only paradises are lost ones and that fops, unlike the rest of us, are intent on restoring them...

...Writers & Writing DIVINE MISFITS by daphne merkin Just as being born is not a matter of choice, so most of us have little say in the making of our childhoods What is negotiable is how we use the consciousness that emerges from those earlier years Whether we turn out to be artists or bankers or candlestick-makers is a reflection of the way we adapt both to what we have been told and what we have seen for ourselves Thus those wishing—or needing—to emphasize the discrepancy between their individual vision and the prevailing one frequently become professional misfits Among the more interesting types to be found in the idiosyncratic gallery is the fop or aesthete—who, although not indifferent to substance, waxes passionate only about style "The secret of life," wrote Oscar Wilde, a model buck if ever there was one, "is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming " If this sounds somewhat hard-hearted as a prescription, it is deliberately so, to belittle anguish it is first necessary to recognize its potential incursion "To become a spectator of one's own life," wrote the same Wilde, "is to escape the suffering of life " One of the earliest entries in Self Portrait with Friends The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926-1974 (Times Books, 435 pp , $ 17 50) records some advice offered the rising young photographer by Noel Coward "You should appraise yourself," he tells Beaton shortly after they meet in adjacent deck chairs on a New York-bound ship "Your sleeves are too tight, your voice is too high and too precise It's hard, I know One would like to indulge one's own taste I myself dearly love a good match, yet I know it is overdoing it to wear tie, socks and handkerchief of the same color I take ruthless stock of myself in the mirror before going out A polo jumper or unfortunate tie exposes one to danger " Here, in a sardonic nutshell, is the philosophy of the committed fop (who may be—and often is—a legitimate artist) He believes in the importance of being earnest about the frivolous, because it is the frivolous that gives him away To whom, exactly...