PHILIP O’CONNOR, 81,
ACERBIC MEMOIRIST, DIES
During a life in which he dabbled in painting and poetry, turned out a series of published and unpublished works, flirted with Communism, did a turn as a radio interviewer, succumbed to a succession of adoring women and supported himself largely by sponging off friends and various of his six wives, Mr. O’Connor wrote incessantly, mainly about himself.
The material, at least, was there.
By his own account in “Memoirs,” which covered the first 25 years of his life, Mr. O’Connor was lucky to survive his childhood with a sense of humor, albeit a distinctly acerbic one.
The son of a well-educated Irish father he never knew and a woman of mixed Irish and Burmese ancestry whose aristocratic tastes exceeded her reach, he was born in Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire and taken almost immediately to France, where his mother abandoned him for two years in the care of a woman who ran a pastry shop.
When he was 7 his mother reclaimed him, took him back to England and then, after setting up housekeeping in a Soho cellar, abandoned him again, this time, he recounted, to the care of a one-legged bachelor civil servant who lived in a hut in Surrey.
Leaving school at 17, Mr. O’Connor plunged into the bohemian life in the artistic quarter of London known as Fitzrovia, declaiming doggerel at bars frequented by Dylan Thomas and others, giving impassioned, if not always comprehensible, speeches at Hyde Park Corner, tramping across England and Ireland and receiving treatment at a mental hospital for schizophrenia, a possibly erroneous diagnosis of a condition later aggravated by chronic alcoholism.
Along the way he took up with a woman who earned her living taking baths with older men, then improved his lot by marrying a wealthy woman who financed a high-living fling that ended when her money and her sanity ran out. (After she tried to kill him, she was confined to a mental hospital and Mr. O’Connor went on to charm other women.)
Mr. O’Connor, who began his literary career turning out surrealistic poetry, also took to buttonholing literary lions, not always to their delight.
He once sent a note up to Aldous Huxley’s hotel suite demanding five pounds and on another occasion jumped out from behind a door and shouted “Boo!” at T. S. Eliot.
One literary figure who did not shrink from such antics was Stephen Spender, who wrote an admiring introduction to “Memoirs” and another when the book was reissued by Norton in 1989.
The book, hailed for its uncompromising honesty, was greeted in England with almost unremitting acclaim, which included an entire BBC broadcast devoted to its merits and lavish praise from Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee.
The book eventually drew praise from the disparate likes of Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Joseph Brodsky, William Burroughs, Arthur Miller and Dorothy Parker, but generally the appreciation on this side of the Atlantic was not unremitting.
Indeed, the daily book reviewer for The New York Times, Orville Prescott, couldn’t seem to decide which he loathed more, the “sickening book” or the “sick man” who had produced it.
Mr. O’Connor, who emerged from his childhood with a lifelong disdain for the British middle class, fared better in the Times’s Sunday Book Review, where John W. Aldrige, a professor of literature at New York University, likened Mr. O’Connor to Yeats, praised him for his “sharply epigrammatic wittiness” and hailed him for revealing himself as “an unspeakable cad, scoundrel and snob—in short a brutally honest man.”
Two autobiographical sequels, “The Lower View” (1960), about bicycle visits to writers and artists, and “Living in Croesor” (1962), describing his sojourn in a Welsh village, were less well received. But “Vagrancy” (1963), a study of those on the bottom of British society, enjoyed a vogue on university reading lists.
During the early 1960’s Mr. O’Connor conducted a series of radio interviews with drug addicts, alcoholics and other misfits, including Quentin Crisp, the flamboyant eccentric who credited Mr. O’Connor with inventing him.
By 1967 Mr. O’Connor professed to find life in Britain so stultifying that when he caught the eye of Panna Grady, a wealthy New York woman 20 years his junior, he allowed her to take him to a comfortable refuge in France, where he lived for the rest of his life, writing thousands of letters to friends, often with abject apologies for past hurts, and keeping a daily journal that runs to millions of words.
He is survived by his companion, Mrs. Grady; his daughter Allaye, also of Uzes; seven other children and eight grandchildren.
June 4, 1998