("Naked Civil Servant", "The Story of San Michele")

[fiefoe]

Quentin Crisp writes piquantly in short chapters about being self-evidently gay decades before it's the done thing, so by all rights I should have finished the book before it was due.Alas.

• In major issues I never had any choice and therefore the word regret had in my life no application.
• I was able to move with a little more of that freedom which T.S. Eliot says is a different kind of pain from prison. These crippling disadvantages gave my life an interest that it would otherwise never have had.
• My father remained invincibly ignorant.
• The gentleman said, "Oh, I know this young man is an artist. The other day I saw him in the street in a brown jacket."

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Henry James himself suggested that Axel Munthe write it, and the first chapters are just as picturesque as you would imagine a 'building a house in Anacapri' book would be.  (There's Maria Porta-Lettere the letter carrier who had to guess where the letters go each time - because she only knew her clients by their nicknames - 'Lemonhead', 'the wife of Bread and Onions', 'the lame Woman'.)  But then the author went back to Paris to detail his medical practice catering to the idly ill, and I lost the fight to stay interested.

__ A piece of real good luck had been when quite unexpectedly he had come upon a large subterranean room just under his house, with red walls just like that piece there under the peach tree all painted with lots of stark naked 'dancing like mad people', with their hands full of flowers and bunches of grapes. It took him several days to scrape off all these paintings and cover the wall with cement, but this was small labour compared to what it would have meant to blast the rock and build a new cistern.