Philip O'Connor

O'Connor in 1947

Philip Marie Constant Bancroft O'Connor (8 September 1916 – 29 May 1998) was a British writer and surrealist poet, who also painted. He was one of the 'Wheatsheaf writers' of 1930s Fitzrovia (who took their name from a pub). He married six times and fathered "an unknown number of attractive and intelligent children".[1]

His Memoirs of a Public Baby (1958, Faber and Faber) threw light on his early life. It is dedicated to Anna Wing, the actress and his third partner with whom he had a son, Jon, now (2009) an educator.

This was followed by The Lower View (1960), Living in Croesor (1962) and Vagrancy (1963). He was a heavy drinker and (at the very least) massively eccentric, living a mainly parasitic life. In his own words, he "bathed in life and dried myself on the typewriter".

In 1963, O'Connor interviewed an acquaintance, Quentin Crisp, for the BBC Third Programme. A publisher who happened to hear the broadcast was impressed by Crisp's performance, and as an indirect result of O'Connor's interview, Crisp ended up writing The Naked Civil Servant.[2]

He met the American heiress Panna Grady in 1967 and settled with her in France; they never married.[1]

Works

Books

  • Memoirs of a Public Baby (1958)
  • The Lower View (1960)
  • Steiner's Tour (1960)
  • Living in Croesor (1962)
  • Vagrancy (1963)

Radio

Biography

  • Andrew Barrow, Quentin and Philip (2002), Macmillan, 559 pages, ISBN 0-333-78051-5. Dual biography of Quentin Crisp and his friend Philip O'Connor.

References

  1. 1 2 Andrew Barrow, "Obituary: Philip O'Connor", The Independent, 2 June 1998.
  2. ↑ Andrew Barrow, "A peculiarly outrageous act to follow", The Daily Telegraph, 11 September 2002, retrieved by the Wayback Machine on 2 March 2010.
  3. 1 2 3 4 BBC Third Programme Radio Scripts
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.