J. R. Ackerley

May 9, 2007 at 11:43 pm (Gay Activism, Our heroes, Uncategorized)

J. R. Ackerley

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The cover of My Dog Tulip showing Ackerley and Queenie as photographed by James Kirkup at his Wiltshire cottage. (NYRB Classics, 1999.)
Born:	November 4, 1896 London, England
Died:	June 4, 1967 London, England
Occupation:	Writer and editor

J. R. Ackerley (November 4, 1896 – June 4, 1967; his full registered name was Joe Ackerley; Randolph was added later as a tribute to an uncle^[1]) was arts editor of The Listener, the weekly magazine of the BBC, and an important author in his own right.

// Early Life, World War I, and India

Joe Randolph Ackerley’s memoir My Father and Myself, begins: “I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.” His father, Roger Ackerley, was a fruit merchant, known as the “Banana King” of London. Roger had been previously married to an actress named Louise Burckhardt who died early probably of tuberculosis^[2] and childless in 1892. Shortly afterward he met another actress named Janetta Aylward (known as Netta) in Paris, and the two of them moved in together in London. Three years later she gave birth to a boy, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. Peter’s birth, and possibly Joe’s and Nancy’s as well, was the result of an “accident” according to Joe’s Aunt Bunny, Netta’s sister: “Your father happened to have run out of french letters that day,” she said. ^[3] Roger Ackerley had “a cavalier attitude towards contraception.”^[4] All this led Ackerley in darker moments to consider his entire life an accident.

Ackerley was educated at Rossall School, a public and preparatory school in Fleetwood, Lancashire. While at this school he discovered he was attracted to other boys and realized he was homosexual. His striking good looks earned him the nickname “Girlie” but he was not sexually active, or only very intermittently, as a schoolboy, though there was ample opportunity. He described himself as

a chaste, puritanical, priggish, rather narcissistic little boy, more repelled than attracted to sex, which seemed to me a furtive, guilty, soiling thing, exciting, yes, but nothing whatever to do with those feelings which I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love.^[5]

Failing his entrance examinations for Cambridge University, Ackerley applied for a commission in the Army, and as World War I was in full swing, he was accepted immediately as a Second Lieutenant and assigned to the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment, part of the 18th Division, then stationed in East Anglia. In June 1915 he was sent over to France. The following summer he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme on the first day, July 1, 1916. He was shot in the arm and an explosion caused shards of a whiskey bottle in his bag to be imbedded in his side. He lay wounded in a shell-hole for six hours but was eventually rescued by British troops and sent home for a period of sick-leave.

He soon volunteered to go back to the front. He had been promoted to captain by now and so in December 1916, when his older brother Peter arrived in France (Peter’s entrance had been delayed due to illness) Ackerley was his superior officer. Reportedly the cheerful and kind-hearted Peter was not resentful and saluted his brother “gladly and conscientiously.”^[6] In February, 1917, Peter was wounded in action on a dangerous assignment, heading into No Man’s Land from a dangerous ditch (where Ackerley said goodbye to him) ominously called the “Boom Ravine.” Though Peter managed to get back to the British lines, Ackerley never saw him again.

In May 1917 Ackerley led an attack in the Arras region where he was again wounded, this time in the buttock and thigh. Again he was obliged to wait for help in a shell-hole, but this time the Germans arrived first and he was taken prisoner. Being an officer, his internment camp was located in neutral Switzerland and was rather comfortable. Here he began his play, The Prisoners of War, which deals with the cabin fever of captivity and the frustrated longings he experienced for another English prisoner. He was not repatriated to England until after the war ended.

On August 7, 1918, two months before the end of hostilities, while Ackerley remained in dreary captivity, Peter was killed, “decapitated by a whizzbang.”^[7] Peter Ackerley’s death and World War I haunted Ackerley his entire life. Peter had been closer to Roger Ackerley, and was already preparing to enter the fruit business alongside his father, something Joe never considered. Ackerley suffered from survivor’s guilt and thought his father might have preferred his death to his brother’s. One result of Peter’s death was that Roger and Netta were convinced by Auny Bunny to get married in 1919, because Peter had died a bastard.

After the war Ackerley returned to England and attended Cambridge for a time. Scant evidence remains from this time in his life as Ackerley wrote little about it. He moved to London and continued to write and enjoy the cosmopolitan delights of the capital. He met E. M. Forster and other literary bright lights, but was lonely despite a plethora of sexual partners. With his play having trouble finding a producer, and feeling generally adrift and distant from his family, Ackerley turned to Forster for guidance.

Forster got him a position as secretary to a Maharaja he knew from writing A Passage to India. (Ackerley did not do much secretarial work or work of any sort while there, however. Indeed the maharaja had a secretary already.) Ackerley spent about five months in India, still under British rule, and met a number of Anglo-Indians for whom he developed a strong distaste. The recollections of this time are the basis for his comic memoir Hindoo Holiday. The Maharaja was also a homosexual, and His Majesty’s obsessions and dalliances, along with Ackerley’s biting observations about Anglo-Indians, account for much of the humor of the work.

Back in England, Ackerley had the satisfaction of seeing Prisoners of War finally produced to some acclaim. Its run began at The Three Hundred Club on July 5, 1925, then transferred to The Playhouse on August 31. Ackerley capitalized on his success, carousing with London’s theatrical crowd, and through Cambridge friends met the actor John Gielgud, and other rising stars of the stage.

Working at the BBC, and the Secret Orchard

In 1928 Ackerley joined the staff of the BBC, then only a year old, in the “Talks” Department, where prominent personalities gave lectures over the radio. Eventually he moved on to edit the BBC’s magazine The Listener, where he worked from 1935 to 1959, discovering and promoting many young writers who were to become important, including Philip Larkin, whom The Listener was the first to publish, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood. Ackerley was one of Francis King‘s two mentors (the other being C. H. B. Kitchin).

In October 1929 Roger Ackerley died. After his death, his son discovered that his father had been leading a double life, and had a second family with whom he would visit occasionally when supposedly travelling for business, and when walking the family dog. The mother of this second family was Muriel Perry, who served as a nurse during World War I. She had three daughters, Ackerley’s half-sisters, by Roger: Sally, Elizabeth, and Diana. They thought Roger was their uncle, their much-loved “Uncle Bodger” who brought them gifts and money, though they began to suspect he was their father as they grew older. Sally (later to become Duchess of Westminster) and Elizabeth were twins, born in 1909. Diana was born in 1912.

Shortly after Roger’s death, Ackerley found a note in a sealed envelope addressed to him which ended:

I am not going to make any excuses, old man. I have done my duty towards everybody as far as my nature would allow and I hope people generally will be kind to my memory. All my men pals know of my second family and of their mother, so you won’t find it difficult to get on their track.

Ackerley, indeed, had met Muriel during his father’s final illness and faintly recalled hearing her spoken of over the years. Roger wanted Joe to look after this second family and he did so, without ever divulging their existence to his highly strung mother, who lived until 1946. In 1975 Diana Perry, now Diana Petre, wrote a memoir of her life as part of this second family, called The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley. (The term “secret orchard” was Roger Ackerley’s, from one of his final notes to his son.)

His relationship with his father was something of an obsession for Ackerley in later life. They had considerable friction between them, stemming from the son’s hidden homosexuality and his father’s aggressive and domineering heterosexuality. (My Father and Myself explores the possibility that Roger had some homosexual experience as a young guardsman — a group that, indeed, provided the younger Ackerley with many sexual partners — but this was ultimately never proven.) Feelings of guilt and grief over Peter’s death, and the stress of maintaining both their hidden lives kept father and son at a distance until it was too late. But few sons have given their father such a fair hearing and explored their relationship as deeply and tenderly as Ackerley himself did when he wrote his poignant memoir.

Later Life, Queenie, and the Ideal Friend

Ackerley’s later life was accented by alcoholism, depression, loneliness, and financial worries. He accepted financial responsibility for his unstable sister Nancy, who was divorced and helpless, and his aging Auny Bunny. In 1946, the year his mother died, he acquired an Alsatian named Queenie from a sometime-lover, Freddie Doyle, who was going to prison for burglary. This scene, with Ackerley visiting Freddie at the police station, is how Ackerely’s only novel, We Think the World of You, begins. (“Johnny” in the novel is closely modelled on Freddie.)

To say Queenie dominated Ackerley’s life for the next fifteen years would be a timid understatement. In many ways she fulfilled Ackerley’s lifelong quest for the Ideal Friend. (This was particularly true since Ackerley suffered greatly from impotence as he aged.) His old friends melted away as Queenie jealously shielded Ackerley from all comers, friend and foe. His reduced social obligations made the Queenie years the most productive of his life, revising Hindoo Holiday (1952), completing My Dog Tulip (1956), We Think the World of You (1960) and working on drafts of My Father and Myself.

Ackerley was never prolific and in dark moods considered himself a failure as a writer. Discussing this, W. H. Auden wrote of Ackerley: “He discovered that he could not create imaginary characters and situations: all his books were based on journals, whether written down or kept in his head.”^[8] Ackerley was indeed rather narcissistic as a writer, focusing on himself and later, on Queenie. He blamed his egotism for his loneliness and unrealistic expectations of other people (his mother too was often depressed and overly fond of dogs, as she was disappointed by other humans) but it made him a great and searching memoirist. As a writer Ackerley combined an elegance of phrase, mastery of construction, and a startling frankness to great effect. The focus never strayed far from himself, but few writers have mined their feelings so ruthlessly and laid them bare so fearlessly for the world to see.

Ackerley left the BBC in 1959 and, though he often complained about the job while there, a period of emptiness opened in his life. He took a long trip to Japan in 1960 to visit his friend Francis King, and was very taken with the beauty of the scenery and even more with the beauty of Japanese men.

But then the long-expected disaster happened. On October 30, 1961 Queenie died. Ackerley, who had lost a brother and both parents, described it as “the saddest day of my life.”^[9] He said: “I would have immolated myself as a suttee when Queenie died. For no human would I ever have done such a thing, but by my love for Queenie I would have been irresistibly compelled.”^[10] In 1962, We Think the World of You won the W. H. Smith Literary Award, which came with a substantial cash award, but even this did little to stir him from his grief. (He thought Richard Hughes should have won, and also thought little of the award’s previous recipients.^[11])

His life darkened and quieted after Queenie’s death. He worked on his memoir about his father and drank oceanic quantities of gin. His sister Nancy found him dead in his bed on the morning of June 4, 1967. Ackerley’s biographer Peter Parker gives the cause of death as coronary thrombosis^[12].

Toward the end of his life, Ackerley sold 1075 letters that E. M. Forster had sent him since 1922, receiving some £6000, “a sum of money which will enable Nancy and me to drink ourselves carelessly into our graves,”^[13] as he put it. Ackerley did not live long enough to enjoy the money from these letters, but the sum, plus the royalties from Ackerley’s existing works and several published posthumously, allowed Nancy to live on in relative comfort until her death in 1979. The annual J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography was endowed by funds from Nancy, starting in 1982.

Sexuality

Importantly, and rarely for his time, Ackerley worked hard to plumb the depths of his sexuality in his writings. Exploring his “sexual psychology” was not merely a selfish exercise in navel-gazing, but more like a patient dissecting himself on the examining table for all to see. He was openly gay, at least after his parents’ deaths, and belonged to a circle of notable literary homosexuals that railed against the bigotry and closed-mindedness that kept gay men in the closet or exposed openly gay men to persecution.

The search for his never-to-be-found Ideal Friend consumed his life for many years, and though he had numerous lovers (he himself estimated in My Father and Myself, that there had been “several hundred”, while at another point he specifies “two or three hundred”) none of them met his high expectations for the Ideal Friend. Despite this he had a number of long-term relationships. Ackerley was a “twank,” a term used by sailors and guardsmen to describe a man who paid for their sexual services, and he describes in humorous and human detail the ritual of picking up and entertaining a young guardsman, sailor or labourer.

My Father and Myself serves as a guide to the understanding of the sexuality of a gay man of Ackerley’s generation. W. H. Auden, in his review of My Father and Myself, speculates that Ackerley enjoyed the “brotherly”^[14] sexual act of mutual masturbation rather than penetration. (Ackerley described himself as “quite impenetrable.”)^[15]

Works

The Prisoners of War (first performed 5 July, 1925), a play about Captain Conrad’s comfortable captivity in Switzerland during the First World War. Conrad is tortured by his longing for the attractive young Lieutenant Grayle. Contains the memorable bon mot when a Mme. Louis refers to “the fair sex” and Conrad replies, “The fair sex? And which sex is that?” Ackerley claimed to prefer the title The Interned to The Prisoners of War.^[16]
Hindoo Holiday (1932, revised and expanded 1952), a memoir of Ackerley’s brief engagement as secretary to an Indian Maharaja in the city of Chhatarpur, called Chhokrapur (meaning “City of Boys”, a joke of Ackerley’s) in the book. The spelling of Hindoo was the publisher’s choice. Ackerley preferred Hindu.
My Dog Tulip (1956), a detailed and moving account of living with his difficult dog Queenie. Eventually his relationship with Queenie becomes all-consuming and pushes aside most of his human relationships. The dog’s name was changed to Tulip when the editors of Commentary, who had purchased an excerpt, became concerned that using the dog’s real name might encourage jokes about Ackerley’s well-known homosexuality. An animated feature based on this book featuring Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini is due out in 2008.
We Think the World of You (1960), Ackerley’s only novel, which concerns the relationship between an educated middle-class man based closely on himself and a working-class London family. The story is built around a fictionalized account of how Ackerley acquired Queenie (called “Evie” in the book) and learned to live with her. The book also traces the largely frustrated relationship between the homosexual narrator and Evie’s (mostly) heterosexual former owner. The novel was made into a motion picture in 1988 starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman.
My Father and Myself (1968), published posthumously. Especially revealing memoir of Ackerley’s life and relationship with his father. Its disjointed chronology is superb, allowing the author to isolate concurrent events for impact. Ackerley’s stylistic approach to his and his father’s sexual exploits and other intimacies is at once frank and tender. Along with a memoir by Ackerley’s half-sister Diana, it was the source of the 1979 TV movie Secret Orchards.
My Sister and Myself (1982), published posthumously. Selections from Ackerley’s diary, edited by Francis King. The bulk focuses on Ackerley’s difficulties with his sister Nancy West (née Ackerley), but there is also a long section about Ackerley and Queenie’s difficult stay with Siegfried Sassoon, the model for “Captain Pugh” in My Dog Tulip.

Other Works

Somewhat ironically, as he himself endured his captivity quite placidly, Ackerley was chosen to edit and write the introduction to Escapers All, fifteen first-person accounts of World War I POW-camp escapees (published by The Bodley Head in 1932).

Ackerley wrote a short biography of his friend E. M. Forster, called, E.M. Forster: A Portrait which was published posthumously in 1970.

A volume of his poems, Micheldever and Other Poems, was published posthumously in 1972. He was one of the poets included in Poems by Four Authors (1923).

Ackerley’s letters were published posthumously as The Ackerley Letters, edited by Neville Braybrooke, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

In the United States, his books are published solely by NYRB Classics.

Quotations

“If you look like a wild beast, you are expected to behave like one.” (My Dog Tulip)
“To speak the truth, I think that people ought to be upset, and if I had a paper I would upset them all the time; I think that life is so important and, in its workings, so upsetting that nobody should be spared.” (Letter to Stephen Spender, December 1955.)
“If there is good to be said of me, others must report that.” (Notebook for My Father and Myself)
“I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919.” (My Father and Myself)
“‘The fair sex? And which sex is that?'” (Captain Conrad to Mme. Louis in The Prisoners of War)
“About all I knew of [India] when I sailed for it was what I had been able to recollect from my schooldays—that there had been a mutiny there, for instance, and that it looked rather like an inverted Matterhorn on the map, pink because we governed it.” (Hindoo Holiday)
“How arrogant people are in their behaviour to domestic beasts at least. Indeed, yes, we feed upon them and enjoy their flesh; but does that permit us to make fun of them before they die or after they are dead? If it were possible, without disordering one’s whole life, to be a vegetarian, I would be one.” (My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J. R. Ackerley)
“I had gone with him as far along that road as I intended to go; I had indulged in front of him a coarse appetite; it was quite another matter to share with him my satisfaction.” (Hindoo Holiday)
“My chance of finding the Ideal Friend was, like my hair, thinning and receding.” (My Father and Myself)
“I have lost all my old friends, they fear her [his dog Evie] and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no; yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about…. But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind.” (We Think the World of You)
“It is spring, it is winter, it is summer… Through twilight darkness, through the rain, through sunshine, frost, or heavy dew, I make my way with her across the plateau to the birch woods to give her everything she wants, except the thing she needs.” (My Dog Tulip, referring to his dog’s frustrated instinct to mate and have children.)
“And when the time of their arrival drew near, I went out on to my verandah so that I might steal from Time the extra happiness of watching them approach.” (We Think the World of You)
“If Johnny came at all he was always late, and today was no exception; half-past two struck, and ‘Not this day,’ I said aloud, as though someone stood beside me under the great arch of the sky. ‘Take all my other days, but not this one.'” (We Think the World of You)
“I distrust myself so deeply, that is what I mean. How does one know what one is like? I hide from other people. I hide, too, from myself. The savage, the monkey within me , it cleverly conceals itself. That is civilization, of course. But not cleverly enough. Crises occur, and the façade breaks…” (My Sister and Myself)
“The rich are very strange.” (My Sister and Myself)

Notes

^ Parker, Peter, Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley, p. 7. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989
^ Parker, p. 10.
^ Ackerley, J. R., My Father and Myself,, p. 65. New York Review of Books Classics, 1999 ed.
^ Parker, p. 7.
^ Parker, p. 16.
^ My Father and Myself, p. 75.
^ My Father and Myself, p. 97.
^ Auden, W. H. in the introduction to My Father and Myself, p. x
^ Ackerley quoted in Parker, p. 380
^ Ackerley quoted in Parker, p. 379
^ Parker, p. 391
^ Parker, p. 431
^ Ackerley quoted in Peter Parker’s Ackerley, p. 431.
^ My Father and Myself, p. xiv.
^ My Father and Myself, p. 180.
^ The Ackerley Letters, edited by Neville Braybrooke, p. 112. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.