Rentist Book Club - 'Outsider: Almost Always, Never Quite' by Brian Sewell (Quartet, 2011)

Brian Sewell is known to most as the 80 year old provocative art critic, from the oldest of old schools. He is legendary for his contempt for modern art ("when Tracey Emin makes a neon sign, that's not the "worst art", it just isn't art") and seemingly for women in general ("had [Frida Kahlo] been Fred Kahlo, she'd have been forgotten"), is legendary. His two page spreads in the Evening Standard in which he savages the latest Tate Modern or Royal Academy pageant almost make the free rag readable. But it is with his autobigraphy, 'Outsider: Almost Always, Never Quite', that Sewell takes on more human qualities and becomes someone to love.

Admittedly, it was published in over two years ago, but Rentist has never been about the cutting edge. After digesting this read, it is our recommendation that it is immediately made into a film. Here are the reasons why - or more realistically, the reasons it never will...

School tales

The most obviously unfilmable (and scarcely printable) section of the book deals with Sewell's adolescent fumblings; culminating in an account of dining with his erstwhile schoolchums decades later. When all around the table announced their disgust for homosexuality, Sewell played the trump card - announcin to the assembled wives "there is not a man at this table with whom I did not have sex when we were boys" before departing post-haste.

Army life

Sewell goes to great lengths not to honestly describe the turmoil his homosexuality caused him, and his struggles against the seemingly-inevitable included a long term plan to join the priesthood, and his two years in National Service. These years were almost entirely celibate, but that leads Sewell to describe the amateur struggles of his straight colleagues to immerse themselves in the sexual waters of this era; it's odd to realise there was a time when it was almost more unacceptable for straight people to have casual sex than for gays. These were times when the only entertainment ranged from "photographs of a hefty whore with a white mouse emerging from her hirstute vagina" to "an orgasm between the breasts of an Aldershot trollop." 

Gay sex pre-decriminalisation

Sewell's description of what it was like to be a gay man in late fifies/early sixties London are disarmingly frank, and in a world which seems to revolve around Vauxhall, the Joiners and Grindr, almost inconceivable. His was a world of personal introductions, where one partner might introduce you to a circle of other potentials, who then passed you on like some strange, illicit parcel. Sewell descibes being introduced by author James Courage to a "pretty youth... from his belly-button almost to his knees he was coal black." Another scene recounts his unhappiness "when undressing a butch little toughie, only to find him clad in a woman's scarlet underclothes." Sewell's was also a world where you could not rely on a smartphone to get laid; "there were... the contacts made in the open, effected with nothing more than a glance, a turn of the head and a pause in the stride." Most fascinating of all is the description of his "transformation from celibate to whore" at the hands of a civil servant, who spent exactly three months providing an incredibly specific sexual education. Film-makers will probably balk at depicting the acts hinted at, "from the security of the bedroom to the thrilling risky business of doing it while standing up in a canoe" but quite frankly, the public deserve it.


Four maids

A section which quite possibly deserves a film of its own deals with Sewell leading four elderly American art-lovers around England and France. Their characters are beautifully rendered in his fine, sparse prose; the tale begins with the deafest, most unpleasant of the visitors falling between a train and the platform and bellowing "WHO DO I SUE?", and continues "with a wearying sameness... breakfasts that none of them wished to eat, coffee that if available was never to their liking... the 'Oh, you're in my seat' squabbles, another country house of little interest and another provincial museum with even less." The story culminates with an astonishing revelation of Sewell's seduction by the youngest of the party, and the chilling image of "the interruption of pleasure when her diamante spectacle frames occassionally plucked a pubic hair." For years afterward, this elderly South Carolinian continued to send Sewell parcels containing cookies and "letters so explicitly pornographic, so minute in detail... that I was appalled by them."

This magnificent book stands as a document of a completely different era, and is required reading for every modern gay man who needs comfort that life is not that bleak; praise be that there is a sequel which hopefully spills even more beans. Stand-by for a review of it in another two years time.