Joe Orton: Baby Lotion

You’d be sorely mistaken if you presumed that because something is written in private, it represents the man as he truly is. All writing is a performance, whether the audience is large or a lone reader. Letters are written for the purpose of being read by a recipient: a reflection of how the poet wishes to be understood by that single reader and, as such, prone to flattery, exaggeration and lies.

Historians and biographers should be equally mistrusting of diaries. Some diaries are a place where writers wallow in sentiment or kick around ugly ideas. Others are written for eventual publication and so are about as trustworthy as a Lib Dem manifesto. The diaries of Joe Orton, the playwright, for example, are a self-serving (and frankly boring) series of sexual adventures that cast him as an adolescent Priapus. In reality, people who met him saw a thirtysomething, giggling oddity who rubbed baby lotion into his face to make it shine.

Tim Stanley in the Sunday Telegraph's review of Philip Larkin: Life, Love And Art.

Timmy is such a posh silly-billy he is literally incapable of judging either Larkin or Orton. 

And I don't think Joe regularly put baby lotion on his face, and if he did if was just a bit of zooshing up for the cameras.

A bit like Mr Stanley's heavily Photoshopped pic here.