If you read his diary all will be explained.
P.S. Especially the latter part.
Kenneth Halliwell, 9th August 1967.1
I think they are the best diaries of the post war period - full stop - in terms of the culture, because they’re brilliantly written, hilarious and caustic.
John Lahr, editor, The Orton Diaries.2
Are you a defacer of books? Are you happy to see a dedication on a flyleaf, notes scribbled in margins and dog-eared pages, or is a book a sacred object? I must admit that for me it is counterintuitive to make a mark on a book, whatever its purpose. My husband takes it even further, and never breaks the spine whilst reading - I’m not sure how that’s even possible - however it is useful for the purpose of this article that years ago I did not feel quite so scrupulous about sullying a book with my pen, since I occasionally come across one inscribed with my name and the year I bought it.
The memory of how I discovered the work of the British playwright Joe Orton had escaped me, but two of my books give me a hint, since the inside covers are annotated as follows:
K-U-T stands for Kingston upon Thames, the town in southwest London where I bought the book.
Joe Orton was a defacer of books. So was his partner and collaborator, Kenneth Halliwell, and they spent six months at Her Majesty’s pleasure for hilariously and sometimes obscenely modifying library books borrowed from the Islington Central Library, an imaginative crime that produced art works that now constitute one of the special collections at Islington Local History Centre. The two men disapproved of the books being stocked by the library and this vandalism was a way of expressing their contempt for the type of reading matter on display. Since the first book I bought appears to have been John Lahr’s biography Prick Up Your Ears, I assume that it was as a result of seeing the 1987 film adaptation directed by Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett. Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina played Orton and Halliwell in a superbly realised account of the meteoric rise of the working class boy from Leicester who became a celebrated playwright before being bludgeoned to death in an act of jealous, suicidal despair. At the time of his death he was just thirty-four years old.
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