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. 

1963: Fifty Years On (And On And On And On)

Today the Guardian celebrates 1963, "a year that defined the modern world and its impact on civil rights, music, sex and feminism".
Cue the obligatory Philip Larkin quotation about sexual intercourse, and photo of Christine Keeler, and a rumination on "How a political storm and a piece of verse transformed our sexual relationships forever".
But it wasn't all fun and games if you were gay, you know?
"In 1963 if you were gay, it was better to be in Prague or Budapest than in ostensibly swinging London," we're told in passing, "the Czech and Hungarian governments had decriminalised sodomy two years earlier..."
And that's about it for us - it seems homosexuality didn't begin until 1967. 
WOOT! - as no-one said back then. 
Not quite sure why they've picked today of all days, but it's always a good idea to have a few features in hand after a slow bank holiday weekend.
It's all pretty good stuff, but whilst avoiding just regurgitating the usual cliches, perhaps this series proves how 1963's real cultural significance was as a Year Zero for baby boomer nostalgia.

• And lest we forget, Max Miller - the Cheeky Chappie who was singing and joking about sexual intercourse long before 1963 - died fifty years ago today.
Some signs have just been put up on the middle bit of Madeira Drive, now re-named the Max Miller Walk.
Rather handily it starts near both Max's and Fagburn's humble abodes, and leads to The Bushes.
I like to think Max would have liked that. 

Philip Larkin: Wants

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone
However the sky grows dark with invitation cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites
The costly aversion of the eyes from death
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.