Memoirs of A Public Baby

By Philip O'Connor and Philip (wiuth an introduction By Stephen

Book Overview

This memoir by an English surrealist poet astonished the literary world when it was first published in London in 1958. A classic account of O'Connor's tormented life: his father's death; his mother's... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393027635
• ISBN13: 9780393027631
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 229 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The original dense, skanky memoir

When I read Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant many years ago I was struck by the singularity of the prose style and narrative structure. Dense, oblique, and full of obscure references and rhetorical curlicues, it seemed to be narrated by someone with his rear-three-quarters profile to the audience. But it wasn't a unique performance at all. Crisp's book was largely modeled on Memoirs of a Public Baby. Impressionist horror, black humor, a sniff of the sinister and the squalid, and the vaguest possible sense of chronology--these were all bespoke for Mr. O'Connor long before Crisp ever put them on. If you get the first editions of each, you see that the books are even alike in size and typography. It was through a 1963 BBC interview between the Public Baby and the Naked Civil Servant that the latter first attained that glimmer of media fame that launched his career as a memoirist and raconteur. But Crisp, the imitator, is much more appealing than the original. Beginning with his tales of woe as an abandoned and neglected child, and moving on to his adult career as a professional sponge, O'Connor is too self-pitying to be a good observer of the world around him. Back in the 1960s Crisp and O'Connor were often spoken of together as exponents of the layabout life, but really Crisp was a hard-working charmer who never failed to make some insightful point about the world around him, while O'Connor was scarcely aware of anything outside his own skin. As a result I've never been able to read this book all the way through.