Volume 34, Number 14 · September 24, 1987
Changeling
By Gabriele Annan
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton
by John Lahr
Random House/Vintage, 360 pp., $4.95 (paper)
Prick Up Your Ears
a film directed by Stephen Frears, screenplay by Alan Bennett
The Orton Diaries
edited by John Lahr
Harper and Row, 304 pp., $19.95
Head to Toe
by Joe Orton
St. Martin's, 187 pp., $13.95
'I'm inclined to think,' Joe Orton wrote in his diary in March 1967, 'that the main fascination of Swift (as with Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and many other writers and artists) is with his life. His art certainly doesn't warrant the merit attached to him.' It would be ironic if this turned out to be Orton's own epitaph. Doubly ironic, because the two lumpish, lusterless sentences are exactly the kind he was training himself not to write.
Review, 2322 words
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