A house is not a home

In our last post, after waxing ecstatic, if inarticulate, about We Think the World of You, we promised a review of an excellent novel by another gay British author of the mid-twentieth century, one who, like J. R. Ackerley, has sunk into undeserved oblivion. The author is C. H. B. Kitchin, who, if he is remembered at all today, is chiefly remembered for his mystery novels. The most highly regarded of those is Death of my Aunt, a country house locked-room mystery published in the 1920s.

In The Politics of Literary Reputation, John Rodden has persuasively argued that the usual approach used by critics to establish a dead writer's reputation is to concentrate on one of the writer's characteristics to the exclusion of all others. In this way Orwell, who is the subject of Rodden's book, acquired
four posthumous reputations, as saint, rebel, prophet, and common man. Belief in any of these reputations, though, requires a willing suspension of interest in the man himself or in any item of his work which is inconsistent with the reputation.

The literary department's forays into Ackerley biography have persuaded it that J. R. Ackerley's reputation is the product of jealous concentration on his stunning good looks, as a result of which he has acquired a reputation as an egoistic narcissist. The obvious contradictions between this reputation and the known facts of his life are of no importance to the people who have established his reputation.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, Kitchin seems not to have been a colourful man. The longest passage of Kitchin biography the literary department was able to find was Francis King's affectionate but brief reminiscence, and the characteristic of Kitchin's of which the literary department retains the best memory as a result of reading this reminiscence is his preference for starting the day by reading the stock exchange listings. Kitchin was wealthy, generous, and considerate, but he did not cut anywhere near the figure Ackerley did.

Consequently, Kitchin's posthumous reputation long ago became extinct. His novels are not quite extinct, but they are almost impossible to find, at least in Toronto. They are not sold by dealers of either new or used books. The erstwhile Toronto Public Library has his mysteries, but the only other work of his in its circulating collection is The Auction Sale.

Luckily, The Auction Sale is a very good book. However, discussing its content is difficult because, just as it was difficult in the previous post to discuss the plot of We Think the World of You without undermining Ackerley's painstaking construction of the novel, it is difficult to discuss Kitchin's book without betraying the epiphany which it is the point of the novel to evoke.

Again we will try to be vague. The Auction Sale was published in 1949, and on the surface appears to be about the changes in everyone's lives as a result of the war. The central figure, Miss Elton, spends a weekend in 1938 attending a sale of the effects of Ashleigh Place, the wealthy country household in which she has
until recently worked as a private secretary. She avoids talking to the people around her because they are caught up in the European news which strongly suggests that war is inevitable. She prefers to dwell on her memories of the genteel and happy life she led at Ashleigh Place.

Superficially, the book appears to be about a subject of great interest to the British literary classes throughout the ages, the replacement of the traditional standards of the genteel classes by more democratic and supposedly heartless ones. Ashleigh Place is a symbol of the genteel life once lived in it, just as the country house has been a symbol of gentility in English literature throughout the last two hundred years.

To Trollope, for example, the family in the country house clearly represented the ideal of British civilization which he thought was being lost in the onslaught of industrial society. For Jane Austen, the family in the country house was the only type of family worth writing about. In genre fiction, the pre-war English literary classes would have had us believe that the murder rate in English country houses was higher than in Chicago in the Twenties. The reason, of course, is that genteel people lived in country houses, so their deaths – representing to the literary, and to their audience, the crushing of one of gentility's fragile flowers – were more important than other deaths. The murder is often, if not usually, performed by an outsider. Since the Second World War English mystery writers have most often set their stories in the homes of the upper middle class, so we can see who really won the class war.

In general, the English upper classes have for centuries believed that country life was superior to urban. According to Renzo Salvadori, the development of upper-class London around leafy parks and squares was an attempt to create rus in urbe. The English upper classes have always had their chief residences in the country, and the country house has therefore become a symbol of what the upper classes considered to be their elegant and cultured existence.

The structure of the novel is all derived from a development of the theme of the value of genteel life. Kitchin develops this theme as obviously as he can. Much like the magician who has a beautiful assistant do something that distracts attention from the dirty work of subterfuge being performed elsewhere on the stage, Kitchin carefully makes every detail of his novel relevant to an analysis of the value of genteel life while at the same time developing his main theme without our really noticing it.

The danger for Kitchin, of course, was that the novel would be taken as merely a discussion of gentility versus democracy. In a country where one's social class may be quickly deduced from a matter as trivial as the disposition of one's handkerchief, people easily assume that if some aspect of social class is a theme of a book, then it must be the principal theme of the book. That certainly was how Lord David Cecil, who wrote the introduction to an edition of 1971, took the book:

For [Kitchin], the ideal life is a life given up to contemplation
and fine feeling, and symbolized by the picture entitled The
Pleasures of Love and Retirement which Miss Elton takes away at
the end as a memento of her stay in Mrs. Durrant's house. House
and garden had been a temple dedicated by Mrs. Durrant to
whatever god may preside over love and retirement. Further, this
temple is set in the context of the period. The story takes place
just before the second world war and we are made aware only too
keenly of how valuable is such a shrine, how the contemplative
life is threatened by the brutality of public events....But
indeed, as Kitchin goes on to suggest, no Hitler is needed to set
such a life in danger. It is always and inevitably threatened by
the nature of things. The world is a risky unstable place in
which it is impossible to maintain for long, a life given up to
contemplation.

And so Trollope, who believed that gentility was a fragile flower that would be destroyed by too rapid a transition to democracy, might have written. However, Lord David has ignored an important detail. The simple fact is that nowhere in the book does Kitchin suggest in any way that the Durrant house is a temple of love and retirement.

For example, the painting of which Lord David writes does not hang in the family rooms, but in the "best spare bedroom." It is an item displayed for honoured guests but not something the family wants to live with. And while the Durrant household is at least making a show of retirement, it is devoid of love.

The Durrant household is in no sense a temple of love and retirement, but The Auction Sale is not a tract, and neither was Kitchin attempting to mock the ideal of the genteel life. Kitchin describes his characters' actions objectively, and extenuating circumstances abound.

Kitchin's assessment of the value of gentility is ultimately irrelevant, since he was in fact not writing about a specific ideal, but about the effects of ideals in general. "I fear those big words which make us so unhappy," Stephen Dedalus said. Kitchin fears those big words which we are told will make us happy.

Love is certainly a big word, a word which inspired a detailed code of conduct in the middle ages. This code still haunts us any time we listen to popular music or watch popular television shows. And of course love is the chief duty of the Christian to God.

Retirement has of course also been considered important for the last couple of millennia. Christ went into the wilderness, holy men lived in caves, and rich widows retired to the contemplative life of the convent. Today we no longer aspire to retirement as a way to attain communion with God, but simply as a respite from the rat race.

Kitchin wrote about a specific ideal, one which in 1949 was considered highly relevant, so that he could write about all ideals. By relating every detail of the book to the theme of the value of gentility he was even able to make his climax out of a highly abstract speech by the vicar's wife, Mrs. Rivett. By the time it arrives, we are so used to taking an academic approach to deciphering the novel that we overlook the utter improbability of anyone delivering herself of such a speech over lunch.

And what does Mrs. Rivett say? She talks about how the Church has botched the idea of immortality. Yes, that's the climax of the novel, and it works.

So, Miss Elton does not overcome discrimination on her way to the top in a traditionally male field, there are no scenes of outlandishly described sexual intercourse, and nouns are not used as adverbs. Nevertheless, the book is interesting and engaging (and, come to think of it, Kitchin's depiction of his women
characters transcends sexual stereotyes, if you insist on that in a book). Kitchin's analysis of his theme is in no sense profound (the literary department couldn't have understood if it had been), but it is intelligent and humane. The Auction Sale is the masterly work of an author who seems to be fundamentally as Francis King described him - generous and considerate. Fifty years later, those characteristics are no longer much admired, but when mixed with a generous helping of intelligence they make a pretty good novel.

A House is not a Home © John FitzGerald, 1998

One man and his dog

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