One of the most remarkable diaries ever to be published in modern
times, this book was produced, in manuscript, at the inquest on the
deaths of Joe Orton, the brilliant young British playwright, and
his lover, the ambitious but failed writer Kenneth Halliwell, who
had battered Orton to death and then committed suicide. The diary
covers the years during which, with the production of his
best-known plays bringing financial success after a life of
considerable hardship, Orton was living the life of extravagant,
promiscuous homosexual, Orton's vivid descriptions of his sexual
liaisons in London 'cottages' and his brief intense affairs with
Arab boys while on holiday were among the most sensational ever to
be published when the book came out 20 years ago. It was not
Orton's affairs, but his apparent scorn of his friend's literary
ambition that seemes to have driven Halliwell to murder. The book
offers an extraordinary insight into a curious, tortured, extremely
funny man (the humour is wickedly effective), and the long
biographical preface by John Lahr an additional insight into the
character of one of Britain's finest farceurs. (Kirkus UK)
John Lahr, New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer reconstructs
both the life and death of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic
playwright, whose plays scandalised and delighted the public, and
whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely
death. 'I have high hopes of dying in my prime,' Joe Orton confided
to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's
most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the
London flat they had shared for fifteen years. In PRICK UP YOUR
EARS, originally chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in
1978, Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stage
struck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early
professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his
blistering comedies, ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE, LOOT, and WHAT THE
BUTLER SAW.
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