A Whim and a Prayer :: Philadelphia City Paper. 25 Years of Independent Journalism.

For 12 years, Victor Allen Crawford III has lived in an old Army barracks in the piney town of New Egypt, N.J. There, the 38-year-old spends his time with the woman he's long wooed, his hobby of photographing wild orchids and a garden filled with butterflies and hummingbirds. He dresses in the rarified style of a dandy as he runs errands on his customized highwheel bicycle past horse paddocks and farms. As he lives, so does Crawford, aka Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy, write — gingerly, decorously and with a gorgeously exacting sense of the arcane. He does this not for effect. He doesn't consider his title merely a nom de plume. His prose — found throughout issues of the late Philadelphia Independent or his newly issued The Affected Provincial's Companion, Volume One (Bloomsbury, $14.95) — is as exacting as it is funny. It looks at Whimsy's unmodern manner of living through the present day's popular culture and social graces. Or gracelessness, as Whimsy — with unbridled pedantry and jaunty verse — takes on the often slobbish Bohemian-Dandy Continuum and the Perils of Sportswear with snide cunning and an ornate, picayune writing style. Is it a guide to being or becoming an Affected Provincial? Only if you have the stomach and dilettante-ishness for it.

: Michael T. Regan

City Paper: Are there occasions where you are just Victor Allen? Or is Victor Allen no longer there?

Lord Whimsy: People are configurations of "selves," constellations of traits that are in constant flux, adapting to their setting or company. There's no "core" in any of us — just a repertoire of personality clusters. Far too much is made of the "nom de plume." Not to draw any unseemly, presumptuous comparisons, but I don't make any more of a distinction between Victor Allen Crawford III and "Whimsy" than Samuel Clemens may have with "Mark Twain," or Franklin did when he donned a beaver hat and played the part of rustic, avuncular colonial to charm the French from their money. Such people are sincere phonies, but not frauds; there's a difference between self-dramatization and the outright misrepresentation of oneself. "Whimsy" is just a face that is often taken for a mask.

CP: So your formulation of Affected Provincialism — like dandyism — is more methodology than philosophy.

LW: Yes. Brought about through necessity rather than choice. Affected Provincials are eclectic creatures: autodidacts and amateurs not accredited in their fields of study, living on the margins of where the action is purported to be. Affected Provincials may know the city well, but will choose to withdraw from it in order to "get it wrong" — with the hopes of creating something fresh and new. If you can't "get it wrong," you can never get it right. Mine is an amalgamation of naturalist, philomath, dandy and aesthete, modeled loosely on the 18th-century gentleman amateur. It incorporates the classic dandyish vision of an urbane, aristocratic parlor vulture, but has more in common with the image of a country gentleman, puffing a clay pipe under a sweetgum tree, breezing through a field guide on wildflowers.

CP: I'm a clothes horse. It can get expensive. Even when shopping vintage. What have you done to support the peacock's existence?

LW: We are working-class dreamers: aesthetes of very little means. I have always supported myself by being a creative jack of all trades — illustrating, designing, writing. I live in an outpost in the sticks not only because I prefer it, but because I can live both meagerly and graciously. One may embrace "haute dandyism" and spend a great deal of money, or practice what I call "tramp aestheticism," whereby one can select thrift items and combine them in a distinctive way with more expensive items. Of course, adopting a livelihood that allows your clothes to be partially tax-deductible also helps.

CP: Why cultivate facial hair now?

LW: I have grown weary of smiling, so now my moustache does it for me. Besides, I'm tired of looking like a Thomas Nast caricature of an Irishman.

CP: I'm tempted to ask if you are trying a bit too hard to be this lord.

LW: I am certainly trying too hard by contemporary standards. The sartorial bar is presently set so low that trying at all is going to be seen as "trying too hard." Dressing well in any way is going to call attention, so Brummell's old adage that equated dressing well with being inconspicuous no longer holds true. At the present time, a T-shirt and jeans is what's truly inconspicuous. That said, I do think sprezzatura is sound policy. I observe it, but I sometimes consciously defy it out of annoyance with people who misinterpret this ideal of effortless grace as permission to be either insufferable bores or slobs in expensive clothes. I feel that this lowering of expectations — this mandatory, aggressive casualness — has in itself become confining, for to dress in anything other than default attire or casual frumpwear is now viewed as "trying too hard."

CP: What is Volume One meant to take you from and to? And what should a Volume Two do?

LW: The book can be read as a distillation of my daily life — a collection of fragments that together constitute an artifact of "personal folklore," if you will. And like all folklore, it has roots in fact. This is the life I live. We'll see how viable a Volume Two is a few weeks from now, after the book's sales are made known to my publisher. Either way, I didn't know I was writing a book until two years into the process the first time around; we'll see if I'm a bit quicker on the uptake next time.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)