Quentin S. Crisp is an English writer undaunted by the prospect of following his own muse, wherever it might take him. His fiction might best be classified as horror/supernatural, but has its own unique perspective as he lends his interest in Asian cultures to his work. In 2001, while he was teaching English in Taiwan, his first collection, The Nightmare Exhibition, was published by BJM Press. Morbid Tales (Tartarus Press) and Rule Dementia! (Rainfall Books) followed in 2004 and 2005 respectively. After researching Japanese literature on a scholarship at Kyoto University, he returned to Britain in 2003. Living for a period in Twickenham, he had a number of jobs, including a low-paid job knocking on doors to promote environmental issues. He currently lives in a miner’s cottage in Wales. I’m pleased that Quentin was able to answer a few of my question for The Fix.

Tell us about your background and upbringing.

I seem to have a Romantic streak in me, and I mean that in what I suppose is the proper sense of the word, rather than the roses-and-chocolate-box sense, and I think that if this streak is due to nurture rather than nature, then it must be at least partly down to growing up in North Devon, England. I feel like my imagination is fundamentally Arcadian. People who have grown up in the North Devon countryside will probably understand what I mean. If I think about being buried in North Devon soil, death doesn’t seem too bad. (I mean, it’s life that’s the hard thing, not death, anyway.)

Until the age of about ten, my home was a coastal village called Combe Martin, then we moved to the nearby Victorian seaside resort of Ilfracombe. The very first house that I grew up in was quite large (about four storeys, if I remember correctly, not including the attic and cellar that it also had, and with a reasonably large garden) and my parents ran it as a guest house. I’m told it was the only vegetarian guest house in the country at the time. I believe, in those very early days (I was about five when that life ended) I was quite gregarious and liked the attention from the guests who stayed. I was very aware, though, of dark presences in the house. In adult life it has been confirmed to me that some of the guests saw ghosts there.

I’m not sure how much to reveal about my family life. Perhaps I could say that my father was and is quite well known to a certain section of the Devon population. Most people, on first meeting me, will joke about my name, or question it, or refuse to believe it, and will say things like, “Any relation to the other Quentin Crisp?” A number of times, however, I’ve met people for the first time who’ve grown up in Devon, and they’ll say, instead, “Any relation to Tony Crisp?” I am. He has a public profile, so I feel I can say that much.

We were never a wealthy family. At the infants school I attended, for instance, I was the only child in my year (and my siblings and I, were, I believe, the only children in the school) to receive free dinners. We were also set apart because we were brought up vegetarian. There were other, similar, factors. You know how children get singled out at school for things like that—and this was back in the seventies, mind you, when almost no one was vegetarian in Britain. I remember, also, one assembly at that school when the headmaster asked, incidentally, if anyone of us had seen the film Gandhi. I put up my hand, and looked around. Mine was the only raised hand out of hundreds. A small detail, but it typifies my life at that school.

Apparently I was a very happy, outgoing child in many ways up until a certain age, when something happened, and I changed quite considerably. That’s how I remember things, and that’s how outside witnesses remember it, too. I’ve never forgiven school for destroying my innocence and basically ruining my life. It’s really been all downhill from there.

What inspired you to study in Japan? To teach in Taiwan?

A number of factors conspired to make the first of these things happen. I had been in a band called The Dead Bell, on which all my hopes at the time were pinned, and the band split up. My attempt to “go out into the world” after this, to do my own thing, was disastrous. I was unemployed, and, having conceived an interest in Japanese literature, decided to learn the language, just to keep my brain active. I did this with books and CDs from the local library at first. Eventually my life situation proved untenable, and I knew I had to make a change, so I decided to go to university (as a “mature student”) and learn Japanese. I knew it would also give me the opportunity to go to Japan, and so I thought that, after all, and at last, I would see the world.

Towards the end of my four-year degree in Japanese, I had to think about the terrifying question of what I would do next in life. In my panic I could only think of a stop-gap measure—teach English abroad. I chose China, because I had been learning Mandarin, too, and wanted to improve it. I ended up going to Taiwan because the process of finding a job teaching English there was easier. Recruitment seemed to be year round, pay was better, and so on.

You’ve studied Japanese literature in-depth. What are a couple of important ways that it differs from Western literature? Story structure, style, narrative intent, theme?

I’m going to attempt to answer this question differently to how I normally would. When I was a research scholar at Kyoto University, I got kind of homesick, and I picked up a copy of David Copperfield and began reading it, and, however much England has changed, I really feel like Dickens is still there in England. Anyway, I was researching Japanese literature at the time, and hadn’t read any English literature for a while, and, as I read, it really struck me how far ahead of Japanese literature of the same period David Copperfield was. The characterisation was fantastic, the dialogue was genius, there was a social conscience at work, and so on. You just wouldn’t get an idiosyncratic and finely drawn character like Mr. Dick in the Japanese literature of that period.

Then, after a while, it also occurred to me that you would never have got some of the things then commonplace in Japanese literature in the English literature of the time (or even now, for that matter). You would not have got this incredibly mature apprehension of the kind of mystical beauty of nature that is to be found, for instance, in the work of Basho. In haiku, the “I” is almost absent—as the subject is usually absent in Japanese sentences—and there is just experience, sensation, etc., which really evaporates any barriers between the subject and the natural world.

In Kusamakura (sometimes translated as The Three-Cornered World) Natsume Soseki muses on art and so forth, and says that in the West, everything is about “society” and that Western art is often kind of sordid as a result. Western artists, he says, never quite allows themselves just to drift into a tranquil dream in the manner of artists of the East.

For some reason, that dream (tranquil or otherwise) has always been much more my world than “society,” and perhaps that is one thing that drew me to Japanese literature in the first place.

I think one of the keynotes of Japanese literature has been a kind of philosophical resignation. Fatalism, if you like. That’s something else I can relate to. This life is transient and full of sorrow. It passes like a dream. Nagai Kafu, in his Amerika Monogatari (Tales of America), relates in one story how wonderfully pleased he is, staying with an American family, to find that they are playing the piano, singing and so on (unlike the families whose lives are ruled by grim Confucianism back home) and that the women are not expected to sit quietly in the corner (you must remember this is around the beginning of the twentieth century). Kafu seemed to be a big fan of American women, by the way. In another story from that volume, one Japanese guy is advising another that for “sheer horseplay” an American girl beats a Japanese girl hands down. Anyway, I’m getting off the track. Later in the same tale, the narrator is reading some American bestseller of the time (I can’t remember what it was, but probably the equivalent at the time of Chicken Soup For the Soul), and he observes in passing that a country as industrious and optimistic as America will never produce great literature. Some of my favourite writers, actually, are from the States, but I would agree that, aesthetically speaking, “self-help” is pretty much the enemy of great literature.

I’ve written at some length, and I still haven’t mentioned structure, but this is important, too. Early on in my exploration of Japanese literature, I read Nagai Kafu’s A Strange Tale From East of the River. The way the title is translated, I think, leads the Western reader to expect some kind of wild, improbable escapade, perhaps even full of “thrills and spills,” but it’s not really like that. I liked the story, but, at the time, I couldn’t quite understand where the “tale” part of it was. The narrator basically wanders into some unfamiliar streets, makes the acquaintance of a prostitute there, whom he notes has something about her of the style of prostitutes of a former age, and continues to visit her over the course of the summer, until, eventually, his visits come to an end. The story doesn’t go anywhere in particular, but it contains all kinds of things, including a tale-within-a-tale, essay-like passages and so on. This story—in many ways typical of Japanese literature—has ended up influencing me a great deal.

As an Englishman, how have you incorporated these qualities into you own work?

I have noticed, with some disappointment, that in a lot of what might be called “Orientalist fiction” in English literature, the only thing that is really “Oriental” is the setting. Most of these writers are writing like tourists in the culture, not influenced by it at all, except as an exotic place where you can have the kind of experiences that’ll give you something to tell your grandchildren. I do think I’m different in this regard and have absorbed a great deal of Japanese literature, and in the original, too, not only in translation, and I understand the atmosphere from the inside. (To say one understands a foreign culture is often a dangerous assertion; okay, I don’t understand everything, but I feel in significant sympathy with native aesthetics and so on.) I don’t want to write clipped, stiff-upper-lip colonial kind of prose. The entire aesthetic of Japanese literature, traditionally, is different to that of the West, and I do believe I’ve assimilated this and made it my own, partly because I was very much in sympathy with it in the first place. I feel I’ve done something that no literary Orientalist—that I know of—has done, and not only written stories in Japanese settings and so on, but written stories in non-Japanese settings that are steeped in Japanese aesthetics. Perhaps I’m not unique in this. If someone can point me to another Western writer who has actually done this, I’d be very interested in reading him or her.

(Actually, I think Justin Isis goes one further than me in this regard. I think my writing could still be called “Orientalist” in a possibly negative way, because I like to exoticise. In his work, there are Japanese and other Asian settings without a hint of the exotic.)

Much of this assimilation and so on is done instinctively, and it would be hard for me, at short notice, to give a lesson on the “how” of it. I suppose it’s a way of seeing, first of all. But in very general terms, I would say that Japanese literature is more inclined to lyricism than Western literature. You don’t find the hard rap-rap-rapping of prose that is so much a feature of English novels. There’s a great deal more emphasis on suggestion and atmosphere. I think we’re becoming more familiar in the West with some of the vocabulary of Japanese aesthetics, such as “wabi” and “sabi.” though how well understood they are is another question. I’m also very interested in “yuugen,” and, in fact, the sequel to Shrike (written, but not yet revised or published) contains a great deal of examination of this aesthetic.

In her introduction to your latest collection, Lisa Tuttle talks about how she came across you as a young writer years ago when she was an instructor at an Arvon writing course. She said that out of all her students you stood out as different, a writer who couldn’t be pigeonholed into the neat labels of fantasy fiction. She also advised you as to commercial expectations that you should not get your hopes up, and that years later she was thrilled to discover that you hadn’t sold out or lost touch with your powerful, idiosyncratic imagination. Can you tell us about your struggles in this regard and how you’ve dealt with your own uniqueness as a writer?

Well, it hasn’t been easy. It might have been easier if I were better at things like promotion and networking, but I think even this is only part of the story. I do feel as if I’ve been swimming against the current, very much, and I’m at a loss as to understand why. That is—and this may sound obvious—I don’t write stuff that I find boring. I have sacrificed many things—things that other people find essential to their lives—in order to pursue my writing, and I would not have done so if it had been a mere hobby, like doing crossword puzzles or something. In my writing I pursue precisely those things that I find to be the most captivating, beautiful, and urgent in existence, and it’s peculiar to me that this is not always apparent to people. Of course, this could always be a failing in one’s skill as a writer, but I’ve had enough corroboration that it’s not this—lack of technical skill—that has made some people scratch their heads and say, “Pass.” That whole “commercial” thing seems to be the key, but I honestly don’t understand why—as we’re told—writing by those who are not following what is most captivating, beautiful, and urgent in existence sells more. It’s one of those ways in which human nature—apparently—shows its perversity. I do feel as if, the higher the standard you set for yourself—avoiding clichés, trying to explore new frontiers of literature, and so on—the more likely people are to judge you harshly over minor failings that they would not have noticed in the writing of someone who just strings together clichés according to a prescribed formula.

In saying all that, I feel as though I’m doing myself the disservice of emphasizing my unpopularity, but there’s really no point in trying to persuade people to like you. I think the people who are likely to appreciate my fiction will not be put off by what I’ve said here.

Instead of making it about me, I would simply like to register my protest against people staying sheep-like within their comfort zones of genre and so on. Over the years I’ve come to feel very strongly about this. Literature should not be the slave of marketing labels, and nor should readers. Read trash by all means, but please don’t read trash exclusively, because if you do, you are actually making the world a worse place to live in, and you should be losing sleep on that account.

I feel like I’ve strayed from the question slightly. How I’ve dealt with the struggle against the current… Well, I feel like I’ve had no choice, really. Again and again people have told me to research the markets and so on, and I have seen the advantages of trying to write some kind of best-selling pot-boiler, but it just doesn’t seem to be in me to do that. I suppose you could say, if you wanted to be lofty about it, that the call of the Muse is very strong for me. I have been lucky enough, anyway, to find some who have published my work, and I haven’t yet resorted to so-called vanity publishing, and I also seem to have a few people who have been following my writing career, if I can call it that. This has kept me going, I suppose, though I still feel a bit like the beginning of Bowie’s “Changes.” I’ve certainly never “got it made.” There’s not that much in life about which I can feel proud, but if there’s one thing, it’s that I haven’t compromised artistically in my writing, and if I ever do feel like I’ve “got it made,” well, it will have been on my own terms. I wonder how many people can say that.

Your current novella, Shrike, released by PS Publishing, concerns one Brett Stokes, an Englishman in Japan making use of a few weeks away from home to try to discover himself. How much of this is autobiographical? What led you to tell this story?

Well, I never really try to write autobiography. That is, to me, the story has its own life, and it is the life of the story that comes first. That’s what I’m in pursuit of—I’m not trying to record events. Inevitably people will read the story and wonder “which bits” are autobiographical, and nod their heads in places, and say, “This bit definitely is.” But surprisingly often people are wrong about these things.

My experiences in Japan were very useful to me for things like setting, mood, incidental detail, and so on, and inevitably I have drawn on my own life where it fits the jigsaw puzzle of the story, because it’s always reassuring to know that you have put in something that is definitely lifelike. However, the real autobiography that a story provides is the same as the autobiography of a person’s dreams. It can, if read properly, tell you a great deal about a person, but not necessarily that they actually spend every night in front of a melting mirror trying to chase centipedes through the maze of their own teeth that suddenly looms large and crooked to devour them.

I felt I had to write Shrike for personal reasons, and didn’t think other people would be interested in it. It’s a fairly introspective piece, I think you’ll agree. I’m not sure if I can really explain much on that point. It was just necessary for me to write it, to deal with certain things. Anyway, it turned out that PS Publishing were interested in it, and reactions have been pretty good so far.

Of your short fiction, what is your favorite short story and why?

Probably “Italiannetto,” which is included in the forthcoming collection All God’s Angels, Beware!, published by Ex Occidente Press. It was a story that I wrote at record speed for me (in under a week, I think), and, for the span of perhaps three or four pages, possibly more (in longhand), I was weeping profusely. I like it perhaps because it came to me in such a natural way, and is natural, and not intellectual, and is much closer to “the idea,” as David Lynch might say, than most of my stories are. I think Woody Allen gave this as the reason that The Purple Rose of Cairo was his favourite of his films, too—it was the closest to his original vision. So, maybe “Italiannetto” is my Purple Rose of Cairo.

Of the basic fictional elements—plot, character, narrative prose, descriptive detail—which come more easily and which do you find the most challenging?

I think I can say without fear of inaccuracy that description is my strong point. Possibly this fact is central to my feeling excluded and so on in what might be called “the scene.” There appears to be a particular divide in literature that has “description” and all it implies, as its focus. Some people hate “fancy writing,” and just want to “cut to the chase,” and so on. This attitude deeply irritates me. If you can’t try and take words to their limit in the field of literature, then where can you? I actually think that variety is good, but it’s usually the enemies of “fancy writing” who also seem to deplore variety and believe that there’s only one way to write—without adverbs etc. etc.

There’s also an attitude that description is old fashioned. This is utter nonsense. Look at the development of gothic literature, for instance. The earlier pieces, like The Castle of Otranto or, say, Vathek, were very scant on description, and I personally consider this a failing in them. Too much is assumed, and since the assumptions of the day are not the assumptions or our day, the texts have dated in this respect. Poe, who is more descriptive, has dated less. I could give other examples. To describe things—for me—means that you are not taking them for granted, and the less you take things for granted, the better your writing is likely to age.

Anyway, description seems to come to me very naturally—the other things I’ve had to work at. And I have worked at them, for years and years. I actually think I’m something of a late bloomer, although I started writing very early. I only started consciously trying to strengthen my weaknesses and develop robust writing technique in adult years, and I’ve pretty much had to teach myself. Writing is not as easy as some people seem to think. I think that characterisation is perhaps what I have found most difficult, but I feel like I’m beginning to get the hang of it. It does seem to take a kind of intuitive leap, in a way. You can’t be shy or timid about it, and think, oh, but I don’t know anything about this kind of person. You just have to make the leap, and hope you land safely. Or land well, anyway.

What are you working on now?

All kinds of things. I’m not (touch wood) someone who has difficulty in coming up with ideas. If I despair in my writing, it’s more likely to be from the “teeming brain” effect. I have thirty or forty story ideas in my notebooks waiting to be written, and those are just the ideas I’ve written down.

As to what I’m in the middle of, there’s a novel called The Lovers, which is kind of a prequel to Shrike. I shall also need to revise Susuki, the sequel to Shrike, when I can. I’m also collaborating with Justin Isis on a story called “The Cutest Girl in Class.” I must get back to that one, actually, as I’ve been preoccupied with other things. I’ve also been writing lyrics for the band Kodagain; the fruits of this collaboration will be released as an album called Letters From Quentin. As we speak, I am working on an essay about Annette Funicello. There’s also the literary blogzine thing that I do with Justin Isis, called Chomu. Really, the list is almost endless. I’m just waiting for demand to catch up with my supply.

What are your future aspirations? Goals?

I think, the older I get, the fewer goals I have. I’ve pretty much given up hope on just about everything. However, at the same time, I feel the need, more and more strongly, to make a living from my writing, and from my writing alone. People are ALWAYS telling me to forget it, and that it can’t be done. But it is simply something that my nature demands I do. Or die trying, as the expression goes.

Apart from that, I don’t know. I almost feel as if the world has destroyed my capacity to dream, in the sense of dreaming of something you want to come true. I wouldn’t mind doing more music-related work, or branching out into other media. I’d like to find some country in the world where I feel “this is my proper ground, here I shall stay.” I would like, as a writer, to be considered as a “case study.” That’s from the introduction to a collection of Lovecraft tales, actually. The guy said Lovecraft was more a “case study” than a conscious artist. I suppose that he was thinking the conscious artists are all the bland, Booker Prize-winning humanists who seem to believe they are lactating some kind of nobility and wisdom. But I’d prefer not to be considered a milky fount of wisdom. I’d like priggish humanists to read my work and stroke their chins seriously as at a sad dilemma, sympathizing with terrible compassion as they decide that a lethal injection is the most humane thing, and that, at all costs, they should keep such texts away from their children.

I’d also like to do more collaborations with cool creative people and to be adored by millions of young people whom I do not understand, and have them light bonfires in tribute to me upon every hilltop, and so on, as if I were Frankie Howerd.