Book Review: The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp

Book Review by Bud Gundy

My friend Marion recommended this book, with the polite but unmistakable admonition to return it soon, and in good condition.  When someone like Marion (a remarkable woman) loves a book so much that she must have it by her side whether or not she’s opened it in years, it gets my attention.

I read the book in a single day, the first time since I was a teenager that I’d been so absorbed by a story I finished it within 8 hours.

I’d been meaning to read The Naked Civil Servant for years.  I had a vague idea who Quentin Crisp was, but only that he was some sort of early 20th century gay pioneer.  In the 1990’s he made a series of controversial statements about gay people, dismissing calls for equality and insisting that homosexuality was an illness.  Like many others, I put these comments aside as the remarks of an elderly man who didn’t understand the way new generations of gay people looked at the world.  Men like Crisp were dinosaurs, the lumbering pioneers who had carried ideas forward but had collapsed with exhaustion and were no longer useful.

I was right, but only partially.  There was much more to the story than that.

Crisp was born in 1908, and while he covers his early years with insight and wit (he declares that those who are thought witty are those who laugh and listen politely to others – an insight I’ll have to test) the story really takes flight when he moves to London.

By this time, Crisp has accepted that he is a homosexual and has decided to confront the world with his existence instead of shading himself in public, his head down.  He slathers his face with make-up, styles his hair in dramatic waves and wears flowing, feminine fashions.  He monitors every step, one foot precisely in front of the other (I experimented with this gait last night, and realized that it required a steady rocking of the hips).

Thus he sets out in 1930’s London, often drawing crowds of people who follow him hurling insults, catcalls and rocks.  He is often attacked, and relates in a dispassionate voice the techniques he used to get out of trouble, when possible.  Of course, it was often not possible.  Several times he is beaten, he often fears for his life and danger is ever-present.  His presence inside large buildings would often cause a tumult and shopping is an obstacle course of insults and rude clerks.

But still, he often finds work – in commercial art, publishing houses and even an engineering firm.  This is no mean feat – his description of arriving for job interviews is a delight to read, but I suspect it wasn’t nearly as amusing to live the experience.  Eventually he becomes a model for art students, a civil servant in his mind and thus the title.

Along comes World War II, and he is called in for his physical.  I laughed out loud several times, the first being when a doctor told him with a hectoring voice meant to induce shame that he exhibited all the signs of sexual perversion.  Crisp happily agrees, telling him upfront that he is a homosexual.  This destroys the doctor’s authority, and he huddles with others to discuss what to do.  The whole scene is delivered with witheringly precise descriptions of one absurdity after another.

His conflict with masculinity and femininity are interesting, but maddening, delivered in a voice of authority that in the end he lacked.  I’d have to read the book at a slower pace to delve more deeply into what he meant by his somewhat contradictory approach to gender roles.  He idealizes the feminine side of himself, and indeed with all homosexuals, but at the same time, he is fervently in awe of masculinity, assigning it the treasured word of “normal”.  And he is by turns dismissive and protective of masculine gay men.

I admire his defiance of the world’s efforts to shame him, but years of being followed by screaming mobs and inspiring chaos wherever he went must have warped his mind.  No human is capable of withstanding that sort of abuse without acquiring scars, but Crisp writes of his deepest disappointment with other gay people who criticized his open defiance of convention.

Is this the root of his amorphous contempt for gay people who seek equality ?  For all of his courage, at heart he accepted that he was a lower form of life than straight people, so his defiance was based on acceptance of his status – the defiance of the scullery maid who resents the intrusion of a parlor maid.  He’d love that comparison, probably.  Or hate it.

In the end, Crisp walked with his head up, but didn’t dare look around, and while he was careful to place each foot just so, he was still watching every step.

Book Review: The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons

Book Review by Bud Gundy

I ripped through The House at Tyneford in a matter of days.  It was a beautiful read and I admire Solomons' powerful descriptive gift.  I thought the story was quite good in many ways, and the emotional pull was real.

I know many people who will love and cherish this novel, but it veered dangerously close to romance for me – in that improbable and unsatisfying way. 

Elise is a 19 year-old Jewish girl whose family is forced apart by the vicious anti-Semitism in Vienna just before World War II.  Her sister departs to America with her husband, while Elise heads to England to work as maid at a country manor.  Her gifted parents are left behind, waiting for visas that will allow them move to New York.

The set-up is irresistible: Elise must learn to adapt to her new life in greatly reduced circumstances.  While her parents were celebrated artists in Austria and she had grown used to a life of finery, she has become just another servant for a wealthy but untitled Englishman and his son in a great manor, complete with a Tudor wing. 

Here, the story soared into a life-affirming testament as Elise struggles with her reduced position, finding a very shaky but workable balance.

The son Kip eventually becomes a love interest, and the novel took a turn for the worse, at least for me.  While individual scenes were incredibly fun (especially a ball during which Elise and Kip scandalize the local gentry in the only scene where I was rooting for them) the overall arc of the story flattened until the inevitable war time conclusion to this doomed love affair arrived with a thud.

After this point, I lost nearly all interest in the story but kept reading because Solomons has an enormous, seemingly limitless power to bring scenery and people to life.  And I’m happy I finished the book, because the revelation of Elise's father’s secret (hidden in a viola) was a shocking and breath-taking metaphor that Solomons handles with incredible grace.

I feared this worthy book would become just another hackneyed romance, but all in all, The House at Tyneford was worth the read.  If nothing else, the compelling descriptions of life in the English countryside are worth your time.

Available online: click here

Book Review: Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Book Review by Bud Gundy

Anne Boleyn, like Marie Antionette, was innocent.  If anyone was guilty, it was King Henry VIII.  He was guilty of a childlike temper, immense vanity and a singular inability to see the world from anyone’s perspective but his own.

The Tudor court still fascinates after nearly 500 years.  In half a millennium, hardly any royal court has inspired more speculation and unease, if only because it is such a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the monarchy.

In her latest book, the second in her Wolf Hall trilogy, Hilary Mantel continues the story of Thomas Cromwell, the loyal royal aide who helped dispatch Katharine of Aragon and set three subsequent queens on the English throne.

Born a fighter and a scraper, Cromwell found himself Secretary to the king, an amorphous position that we are left to conclude simply meant, “the guy who gets things done.”  And done he gets things.

As this story picks up from the last book, Henry and Anne’s marriage has been a disaster.  Although Henry shattered the religious foundations of Europe to get rid of Katherine and wed Anne (by forcibly breaking England from the Roman Catholic faith) the couple did not prosper.  Anne’s sole successful pregnancy resulted in Elizabeth, the unfortunate child who would go on to become one of the world’s most legendary and brilliant monarchs. 

But Henry’s purpose in shunting Katharine to the side was to have sons.  Anne, being young and vivacious, offered him every hope of feverish love and many sons.  Roughly halfway through this volume, Anne’s latest pregnancy holds England in suspense.  A boy will smooth the roughness of their marriage.  A boy will give Henry an heir, and everything will change, but not necessarily for the better for those who hold to Catholicism and despise Anne.  Everyone calculates at every turn and Cromwell is usually there to observe.

But Anne miscarries on the very day of Katherine’s burial, an ominous omen for everyone.  The old queen was loved and admired by the common man, whereas Anne was distrusted.  And though Mantel does not get specific, it seems this latest miscarriage (the fetus was male) turns Henry away for the final time.

Anne was no saint.  She was overbearing, imperious and reckless.  But aren’t these also the signs of desperate fear?  Don’t they underscore that Anne had begun to realize that the king was her sole source of power, that his displeasure could mean her ruin?  Perhaps she realized this too late, after nearly three years of an unhappy match, and thus three years of indulging her tantrums.  When the king was through with her, there was nobody else to offer support.

Cromwell glides through the story, always following one step behind the king’s motives, but also one step forward in the execution of his desires.  This requires some hopping about, but Cromwell turns what could be an awkward display into a nimble dance of diplomacy and threats.

As I said, I doubt that Anne was guilty of adultery and incest, treasonous crimes in a queen who could give birth to children who would inherit the throne.  Actions that are wholly innocent in one perspective are warped in another so that even an innocent Christmas party, shadowed by the nervous tension between the king and queen, becomes a traitorous debauch.  And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Anne and Marie Antionette were accused of incest (Anne with her brother, Marie with her son) so that the shock of the charge would stain their reputations beyond repair, for who would accuse a queen of such monstrous immorality without merit?

Henry, that’s who.  The idea did not originate with him, but one word from him would have silenced such slander.  The word never came.  Henry was a weak man, his passivity and despair masking his laziness.  The ease with which his subjects eagerly provided him with reasons for doing what he so clearly wanted does not absolve Henry of responsibility.  In fact, it is an indictment of his courage.

Cromwell, however, has his own motives for agreeing to pretend these ridiculous charges are true, and in a breathtaking sequence, we see him talk to Anne’s accused lovers while they await what they already know will be a guilty verdict and their executions.  It is a mark of Mantel’s skill as a writer that although all the men are clearly innocent, and Cromwell clearly knows it, you end feeling almost no pity for these men all while your admiration for Thomas grows.

There is much to admire about Thomas Cromwell.  Mantel brings him to life in a vivid, technicolor way.  Here he is counseling the king’s bastard son with a wise course of action to satisfy his lust, and there he is telling his own son how to improve his standing at the court.  Then you see Cromwell fighting for the dignity of the common man, and afterwards he is nimbly manipulating ambassadors by acts of kindness, which are apparently a rare thing in Tudor England.  You wonder how such a man can participate in such wanton cruelty and the scenes of Anne’s trial and execution are painful to read.  Why does Thomas Cromwell, a brilliant and humane man, agree to do these things?

And then the answer comes: he cannot choose his king.  In the court of Henry VIII, where favor alights in strange places and downfalls come swiftly, the only sensible thing to do is survive.

Book Review: Education of a Princess: A Memoir by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia

Book Review by Bud Gundy

I first read this book 20 years ago, when a dear friend recommended it with the promise of a story I’d never forget.  She was right.  She was right about so many things, but that’s another story.

I recently re-read this book and it was just as engrossing as I remember.

The Grand Duchess in question was Maria Pavlovna (known by intimates her entire life as Marie).  She was the Tsar’s cousin, and in the bloated monarchies of pre World War I Europe, that was close enough to earn her the style of “Imperial Highness” and bring her into the world on a cushion of privilege and comfort.

When she was not yet two years old, her younger brother Dmitri was born, and her mother died as a result of childbirth.  Thus was forged one of those sibling bonds that raises eyebrows and carries a suggestion of unsavory possibilities, but is in reality almost certainly nothing more than the excessive and desperate love of a sister so set apart from the real world that she clung her entire life to the one person who fully understood her own isolation, however gilded.

 After her father was banished from Russia for re-marrying without the Tsar’s permission, Marie and her brother were raised by an aunt and uncle, Serge and Ella, a regal couple that by her own description share that peculiar bent for obsessive concentration on their own neurosis, an apparently common affliction for those who grow up surrounded by scraping obedience.  She describes her uncle as almost fanatical in his love for the children, jealous even of their playmates, while her beautiful, ethereal aunt devoted herself to jewels and fashion.

A bomb would change everything.

In her early years, Marie was shielded from the knowledge of the revolutionary forces afoot in Russia, although the dark reality is so pervasive it makes itself known in small but sinister ways, even to a girl who spends her life behind palace walls. 

While living in a palace on the grounds of the Kremlin itself, she and her brother heard the bomb that assassinated her uncle as he left for a meeting.  The explosion was powerful enough to send her life reeling off into unimaginable directions.

This change of course wasn’t evident at first, and like other royal princesses of the day she found herself engaged at 16 to a Swedish prince, William – a man she had met earlier that day.  The wedding photo in the book shows the young couple on their wedding day, awkwardly standing apart, bedecked in robes, jewels and ribbons.  The stiff formality might be expected, but the apprehension and tight smiles are impossible to miss.  It is a photo almost comical in its ironic contrasts of wary faces and regal splendor, and the royal trappings fail utterly to hide the unhappy reality, giving the impression of a couple in Halloween costumes.

Her description of life as a Swedish princess is a ripping yarn, full of the playful antics corrupted by unblinking public attention.  But there her stories are oddly empty of emotion, and even the birth of her son, a cause of national celebration, is treated in an offhand manner.  Indeed, she devotes more time to her art classes than to her relationship to her son, and it is no surprise that the marriage falls apart and she goes to the strenuous effort to secure a divorce that was much frowned-upon.  She is circumspect about the reasons for her deep unhappiness, but my own online research reveals that she told various friends that her husband was having affairs with men.

She returns to Russia just before the start of World War I, and joins the Red Cross to train as a nurse.  It’s fascinating to read about her adventures in hastily prepared hospitals in the early months of the war and she claims to have pitched in with everybody else, engaging in the most menial work.  Of course, her identity is often discovered and she claims to be shocked and horrified when various actors who had treated her normally at first find out she is a princess and thereafter strain with the etiquette that she reliably disdains.

But her royal connections always intrude, most especially when the war turns disastrous for Russia.  Here her story takes an epic turn, when Rasputin (the mystic who was hated the length and breadth of Russia except in the rarified confines of the Emperor’s house) is murdered and her brother Dmitri is implicated in the plot.  While the Russian public cheers his death, the Imperial reaction of punishing the killers by exile and banishment destroys the rationale.  In the end, Rasputin’s murder hastened the revolution by cementing the impression that the Tsar and Tsaritsa were alien beings, the only people in the land to mourn the man known as the mad monk.

When revolution comes, the change in her standing with the public is instantly clear to Marie, and her authority soon collapses.  While her immediate co-workers have spent nearly three years observing her work ethic and her fearless efforts in miserable conditions, everyday soldiers and civilians have no such experience to fall back on.  The terror for her family mounts as the Bolsheviks take power and every last comfort is taken away.

She marries again and gives birth to another son, but events soon force her to flee Russia in fear of her life.  The story is gripping and filled with tension, but her memoirs end abruptly soon after her escape.

I’m thankful for the internet, where I was finally able to answer many nagging questions about her life that she avoided in the book, such as her first husband’s homosexuality.  She was known for the rest of her life as an aloof woman and her Swedish son claimed that he barely knew her and that their few meetings as adults were awkward and strained.  She moved from place to place, including New York City where she wrote this memorable and fascinating memoir, but one suspects that she was always a person who lived in excruciating isolation, a lifelong result of coming of age cosseted in a corrupted monarchy that was dying even as she was born.

Book Review: The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport

Book Review by Bud Gundy

The assassination of the Romanov family is one of those tales that ushers a person into adulthood, a shocking revelation that forever warps your sense of justice and hardens the edges of the world around you.  The visual is too terrible to not leave scars: the former Tsar surrounded by his wife, his frail son, his four daughters and a handful of remaining loyal servants lined up against the wall and gunned down.

The reality was far worse than I ever imagined.

Over the years, I’ve read several books about the fate of the Romanovs, my favorite being, The Education of a Princess by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia. She was the Tsar’s cousin, and published her memoirs in 1930.  A photograph in the front pages shows a melancholy woman looking off with a vacant stare, a fitting visage for one of the few Romanovs to escape Russia with her life.  An engrossing story of a pampered girl who grew into a sharply insightful woman, she was frank about the lost intellectual opportunities that she squandered early in life, and her perspective on the fall of the Romanov throne was enriched with a familial take - especially the Tsaritsa Alexandra's disastrous obsession with the mystic Rasputin.  Her escape from Russia was a dramatic and heart-stopping account.

Helen Rappaport’s The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg filled in many details for me about the Imperial family’s final days, replaying their last 11 days with a careful and incisive eye for enlightening moments.  It also gives brief and comprehensible overviews of the political and military forces at work, no small feat given the mind-boggling number of actors in this story.  By clearing away much of the ancillary information, Rappaport makes the political intrigue easier to navigate.  Even those alive during that period must have found the sheer number of conflicting forces a whirlwind of confusion, and I admired the way she dealt with these issues forcefully, without resorting to the easy solution of giving us a highly romanticized and poignant family tale instead.

But poignancy abounds, most especially in her descriptions of the four Arch Duchesses.  I’ve seen newsreel footage of the Tsar’s daughters, and they looked for all the world like the refined and stiffly formal girls you would expect them to be, which is also how Tsarist propaganda portrayed them.  But Rappaport gives them life, and you discover how the girls, isolated first by their positions, then by the health demands of their mother and brother and finally by their imprisonment, turned to each other, and inward, for the strength to rise each day. 

The most memorable scene in the book comes the day before their brutal murders, when the Soviet functionary in charge of the household sent local peasant women to clean the family rooms, to give the royals a sense of normalcy and routine and deflect any suspicion of imminent doom.  Cheerfully, the daughters helped the women move furniture and pitched in with the cleaning, managing a few brief, whispered comments because conversation was forbidden – a rule enforced by lurking Soviet guards.

Rappaport also gives us the essential history of the Tsar and Tsaritsa, enough for us to get a sense of their personalities and the influences that shaped the way they looked at the world.  The young Alexy, heir to the misbegotten throne so ill-managed by his hapless father, also comes to life but sadly as a gravely ill and frustrated child who was also spoiled by the scraping attention his hemophilia demanded of his family and minders.  I was thankful that Rappaport did not dwell on Alexandra’s obsession with Rasputin, whose supposedly magical powers made her a fanatical devotee in a desperate hope for a miracle to cure her son.  While Rasputin is a fascinating character, he is such an obvious megalomaniac that I find his particular role in the story to be tiresome.  Why give so much attention to a man who would be happy to let the world burn if it brought him more notice?

As I described above, the family’s murder is a shocking event.  But nothing prepared me for the gruesome reality of the scene.  I thought I knew the story – the rifles aimed by an execution squad at the family who had a moment of fear as they realized what was about to happen.  A hail of bullets, a few screams and some smoke. 

I had no idea.

First, there were no rifles - just pistols.  The execution took 20 minutes.  Most of the squad was drunk.  All four daughters survived the first round of bullets.  It was a gruesome bloodbath and included a raging Bolshevik, a berserker of the first order, filled with such hatred for the monarchy he waded into the pile of corpses to finish off the survivors by slashing with his bayonet and even then failing to give them final peace.  Rappaport’s description of the execution is horrific and terrifying, a heart-breaking and disturbing tale.  You rage at the sloppiness and inhumanity, the pointless suffering and excruciating length.  Perhaps this was the moment that the Soviet Union became cursed forever, when the seminal event of its birth was handled with such monumental incompetence.  And even after everyone had been slain, the sloppiness goes on and on and on, with a tale of burial so shoddy and poorly managed that it is amazing to read.

I admire monarchy to a point, as long as it understands its proper role in the modern world – to project an image, to provide solace, to be a living embodiment of national aspirations and pride.  The idea of being born into a position of leadership is ridiculous and infantile, and I know the Tsarist regimes were not kindly and benevolent.  They were repressive, stained with autocratic impulses, anti-Semitism and other deep corruptions.  I don’t think I would have liked the Tsar and Tsaritsa very much if I had known them. 

But it is indisputable that the Bolsheviks were even more brutal and repressive from almost the moment they took power, and in time became perhaps the most corrupt society so far in the history of the word, and there’s some fine competition for that ignoble title.

Perhaps that’s why the legend of the Romanovs has reached a fever pitch since the fall of the Soviet Union and why they’ve been canonized as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church.  The town of their final imprisonment has become a shrine to their memory.  Both of their burial sites (yes, both – you have to read it to believe it) are places of pilgrimage today.  Their remains were moved to the beautiful church of Sts. Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, to lie with their royal ancestors, in a ceremony beamed across the world.  All this adulation is a bit overdone for my taste (although I am sorry that I visited St. Petersburg before their bones were interred there – I would have liked to visit their graves) but it is completely understandable.  Who doesn’t want a chance to atone for a dreadful mistake?