Originally published in a zine in 1998; the version here is slightly modified. The novel reviewed here is now better known than in 1998. Tomorrow I will post a review of a novel that is still unprofitably neglected.
The literary department has spent a good part of its time in recent months developing its knowledge of gay British authors of the mid-twentieth century. We have in fact acquired so much knowledge about gay British authors of the mid-twentieth century that we will soon be releasing a set of Gay British Authors of the Mid-Twentieth Century Action Figures.
Each figure will come with characteristic accessories (or, as we say these days, its own individualized accessories). Collect J. R. Ackerley and his dog! C. H. B. Kitchin and his briefcase full of stock certificates! E. M. Forster and his closet!
Or, if you prefer, you can pick up a copy of our forthcoming publication, Gay British Authors of the Mid-Twentieth Century for Dummies.
For now, though, we'll regale you with two articles (the second tomorrow) about forgotten masterpieces written by two of these men. Our interest in this group had its origin in a visit to the Deer Park Library. Having looked through a few volumes of Kathy Acker's to see what all the fuss was about (we still don't know, so, if you do, please write), our eye was attracted by the first book next to Acker's on the shelf, which was We Think the World of You by J. R. Ackerley.
Never heard of the man, never heard of the book. Nevertheless, we gave it our usual test, which is to see if, after reading the first paragraph, we want to read the second. It passed, so we took it out.
We read all the paragraphs very quickly. The novel is so well constructed that our attention was riveted to the pages. Ackerley skilfully exploits the conventions of the novel to impel the reader through a carefully planned development of his themes. He enters the last paragraph with these themes unresolved, and then neatly resolves them so offhandedly that the literary department was left in awe, mouthing the word "Wow." Okay, we're often left like that, but it was still pretty impressive.
Anyway, we went on an Ackerley rampage. Not only did we read the greater part of Ackerley's oeuvre, we also read, against our usual principles, a great deal of biography about him and his circle.
And, we concluded, how could you not admire a man who traded shamelessly on his good looks and on the susceptibility of others to outrageous flattery? How could you not admire a man whose friends and proteges (with the notable exception of James Kirkup) seem consumed by envy of his looks and by anger at his awareness of their susceptibility to outrageous flattery?
Ackerley was born in London in 1896, and his entire legal name was Joe Ackerley (he added the R as a tribute to his uncle Randolph). He was wounded twice in the First World War, and believed for the rest of his life that he was a coward because, the first time he was wounded (in two places), he didn't get up from the bomb crater in which he was lying and continue fighting. The second time he was wounded, he was taken prisoner. After the war, he lived openly as a homosexual at a time when that was more or less a crime. While supporting his mother, aunt, and sister, he established a reputation as the finest literary editor in Britain (he was arts editor of The Listener) and wrote an outstanding novel and an outstanding animal book. He wrote a peculiar memoir. He encouraged many important young writers, including Francis King and Simon Raven. The most important and satisfying emotional relationship of his life was with his dog. He won the W. H. Smith Prize for We Think the World of You. He was widely regarded as one of the finest stylists in the English language. He is, of course, forgotten.
In fact, finding all his books would have been impossible were it not for the Toronto Public Library, which has all the books entirely written by him (missing is a collection of which he was editor and to which he was a contributor). It also has his one play, The Prisoners of War.
Ackerley's first book was Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal, an account of a very brief stint he had in his and the century's twenties as secretary to a pedophilic maharajah. This book has always been highly regarded, but it suffers by comparison with his later ones (it was published in the early Thirties), its chief deficiencies being in structure and in intellectual analysis. In short, it is aimless and pointless.
These are characteristics which the literary department admires in life, but not in literature. The book does claim only to be a journal of Ackerley's life in India, and his life there does seem to have been pretty pointless. However, some of us still hold to the old-fashioned belief that there has to be some literary reason for writing a book - telling a story, for example - and the literary reason for Hindoo Holiday remains unclear.
On the other hand, Hindoo Holiday is written in characteristically elegant English. Many of the passages are striking and many are informative, particularly those where Ackerley is not writing about himself but about India and Indians. One wishes that he had devoted more of the book to that and less to his attempts to get the prettier men in the maharajah's service to kiss him.
Ackerley waited over twenty years to publish his next book. This was the story of him and his dog. James Kirkup reports that at their first meeting Ackerley described himself as a homosexual in love with an Alsatian bitch. The bitch's real name was Queenie, but the first magazine to publish an excerpt from Ackerley's manuscript insisted that the name be changed. The editors were afraid that British literary types, all well aware that Ackerley was a homosexual, would find the real name too frightfully amusing.
So the dog became Tulip, and the book My Dog Tulip. After his introductory chapter, Ackerley plunges into the topic of dogshit. Among other things, this chapter explains a phenomenon which first struck one of the members of the literary department many years ago – in 1972, to be exact. In those days, the streets of London were lined with signs warning dog owners that there was a fine of £20 for "fouling the footpath." Within a leash's length of each of these signs would be about £200 worth of evidence. Ackerley's explanation of this phenomenon greatly altered the literary department's opinions of the dog owners of London.
The burden of the book is that J. R. Ackerley really loved his dog. Many proclaim themselves to be animal lovers, but Ackerley quite simply thought, or at least he professed to think, that Queenie should be given the same consideration as a human being. My Dog Tulip is an account of his honest, intelligent, and reasonable attempt to understand an animal. For example:
I realized clearly,perhaps for the first time, what strained and anxious lives dogs must lead, so emotionally involved in the world of men, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they are expected unquestioningly to obey, and whose mind they can never do more than imperfectly reach and comprehend. Stupidly loved, stupidly hated, acquired without thought, reared and ruled without understanding, passed on or "put to sleep" without care, did they, I wondered, these descendants of the creatures who, thousands of years ago in the primeval forests, laid siege to the heart of man, took him under their protection, tried to tame him, and failed – did they suffer
from headaches?
The comic effect of the last phrase is no doubt intentional, since Ackerley was no great lover of the solemn, and it drives home forcefully the point he is making about the proper human attitude towards animals.
My Dog Tulip provides a lot of interesting and useful information about dogs, interpreted from the point of view of what is best for the dog. You will never, for example, look at a bitch in heat the same way again. The book is elegantly written and carefully constructed. Its chief attraction, though, is its account of the free exercise of a trained and unprejudiced intellect.
His and Queenie's story served as the foundation of We Think the World of You, his next book. It is the story of a gay man, the narrator, whose married lover is sent to prison. The narrator becomes disturbed at the way his boyfriend's family is treating his boyfriend's dog. The narrator buys the dog and takes it
home.
That's pretty well the story, but Ackerley was a dab hand at the writer's craft and he turned it into an absorbing, entertaining, and thoughtful novel. If the single tasteful description of a homosexual tumble were removed (as it was from the first edition), and the erotic aspect of the relationship between the narrator and his boyfriend toned down a bit, the novel would border on the Victorian – an instructive account of manly friendship and love of animals.
Of course, that's what a lot of manly friendship is about, anyway, eh? How about all those weekend athletes who get out on the ice at two in the morning, play hockey for fifteen minutes and then sit around in the dressing room naked drinking beer for four hours? Hmm?
The book, though, is not about homosexuality, but rather about love, friendship, morality, and, because it is by an Englishman, social class. Its clear-eyed and objective analysis of these topics would be salutary reading for the young, but it is unlikely ever to appear on any high school reading lists in this country because of the narrator's failure either to agonize or to exult about his homosexuality.
Ackerley wrote the book as a comic novel, and the narrator, whom he modelled after himself, is quite the ass. Interestingly, he gave Frank, the narrator, his own scornful attitudes toward the working classes, but made it clear that Frank's attitudes were more mythological than factual, and almost entirely counterproductive. In the end, Frank gets everything he ever wanted, but feels himself as much a prisoner as his boyfriend was at the beginning of the book.
We Think the World of You has been widely praised for its structure, and its structure is probably as near to flawless as it is possible to get. Ackerley, who did not think very highly of anything else he had written to that time, himself compared it to "an eighteenth-century cabinet, everything sliding nicely, and full of secret drawers," and that bit of self-flattery is becomingly modest.
Once again, though, another important attraction of the book is its intellectual complexity and coherence. In fact, the perfection of its structure is largely due to the coherence of the intellectual analysis of which it is an expression.
The book was released to rave reviews, and it won the W. H. Smith Prize. To his and his circle's great amusement, Ackerley received his cheque from none other than Lord Longford. Ackerley then sank almost immediately into obscurity. In 1965, his income from writing totalled £2/18/8.
He published no more books during his lifetime (he died in 1967), and his one posthumous book probably tied an anvil around the neck of what was left of his reputation and dropped it into the deepest trough of the vast ocean of literary oblivion. This book was My Father and Myself, a memoir, and its unusual approach to family history probably left too many bad tastes in too many mouths. In this book, among other things, he conducted a serious investigation of the vexed question of whether his father had ever turned tricks for homosexuals during his career as a Guardsman.
While much has been made of Ackerley's frankness in this book about his homosexuality, the purpose of My Father and Myself seems to have been primarily to rehabilitate Ackerley's father, Roger, who was quite simply a cad and a bounder. When Roger died, his family discovered that he had for years been supporting a second family about a mile from where they lived, and that much of the money he had intended to settle on his wife he had instead been persuaded into giving to the mistress who neglected his other three children.
Much of My Father and Myself consists of Ackerley's comparison of his father's productive life (success in business, six acknowledged children, and so on) to his own obsessive prowling of public houses in search of impoverished servicemen willing to earn a few quid by letting him have his way with them, but in fact Ackerley ended up spending the rest of his life after his father's death supporting his mother, aunt, and sister, whom his father had failed to provide for adequately.
Ackerley's half-sisters were raised as if they were simply occupational hazards, malnourished and ignored for months on end by their mother. When My Father and Myself was published, Roger Ackerley's duplicity was much more shocking than his son's homosexuality. For example, Ackerley had to change his half-sisters' names to protect the one who had married the Duke of Devonshire.
While the book is as usual well written, its chief fascination is morbid. The details of Ackerley's predatory sexual habits and of his father's amoral egoism, which was manifested in many ways not mentioned here, are titillating, but they are not enlightening. Ackerley obviously wanted to square his admiration for his father (who had, by Ackerley's account, been very indulgent of him) with his knowledge of the sordid reality of his father's life, but if he succeeded, he still cannot have managed to persuade anyone else what a great guy the old man was.
In the course of its research, the literary department ran across several biographical publications about Ackerley. Ackerley biography is actually more extensive than Ackerley's collected works, which tells you something about the literary industry, and which would probably have left Ackerley helpless with laughter. Peter Parker's Ackerley, an example of the familiar ragbag literary biography, in which detail is piled on detail until suddenly you realize that you
still don't know any more than when you started reading, is by itself more extensive than Ackerley's oeuvre.
Much Ackerley biography is based on the reminiscences of jealous acquaintances and on the carefully guarded statements of friends who had to reconcile their loyalties to both him and his sister, Nancy West, with whom Ackerley had a troubled relationship, and whom Ackerley's friends also admired. A foolproof sign of the jealousy is the grudging quality of any acknowledgment of Ackerley's sterling qualities such as honesty and generosity, combined with the taking of an indulgent tone about his less than sterling ones, such as his inclusion of adolescent boys among his sexual prey. As for the outrageous flattery mentioned earlier, the extracts from Ackerley's diaries published by Francis King as My Sister and Myself suggest that Ackerley considered flattery simply to be a civilized way of making people feel comfortable.
So the literary department reached the stunning conclusion that the best approach to J. R. Ackerley is to read J. R. Ackerley. However, the search for biography had one serendipitous result. On the shelves of the Deer Park library, next to a novel by James Kirkup, was The Auction Sale by C. H. B. Kitchin. Kitchin turned out to have been another gay British author, who disliked Ackerley but who, like Ackerley, served as mentor to Francis King. Tomorrow we'll look at this other forgotten masterpiece.
One Man and his Dog © John FitzGerald, 1998
Posts
