J. R. Ackerley

J. R. Ackerley
Portrait of J. R. Ackerley by Howard Coster
Born	(1896-11-04)4 November 1896 London, England
Died	London, England
Occupation	Writer and editor

Joe Randolph "J. R." Ackerley (4 November 1896 – 4 June 1967) was a British writer and editor. Starting with the BBC the year after its founding in 1927, he was promoted to literary editor of The Listener, its weekly magazine, where he served for more than two decades. He published many emerging poets and writers who became influential in Great Britain. He was openly gay, a rarity in his time when homosexuality was forbidden by law and socially ostracized.

Ackerley's extramarital half-sister was Sally Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster.

Family and education

Ackerley's memoir My Father and Myself, begins: "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." Registered at birth as Joe Ackerley, he later took the middle name Randolph after an uncle. As an adult, he published under his first two initials and surname. His father Roger Ackerley was a successful fruit merchant known as the "Banana King" of London. (Roger was first married to an actress named Louise Burckhardt, who died young in 1892, probably of tuberculosis, and before they had children).

His mother was Janetta Aylward (known as Netta), an actress whom Roger met in Paris; the two returned to London together. They had an intermittent relationship and three years later in 1895, she gave birth to a son, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. According to Joe's maternal Aunt Bunny, Peter's birth, and likely all of them, were "accidents." She told him, "Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day," (when Peter was conceived). His father set up a household with his mother starting in 1903, after which the children saw him more regularly. His business did very well and the family had a "butler, a gardener, and, evidently, a very good table."

Ackerley was educated at Rossall School, a public and preparatory school in Fleetwood, Lancashire. During this time, he discovered he was attracted to other boys. His striking good looks earned him the nickname "Girlie," but he was not very sexually active as a schoolboy. 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."

His father gave him a generous allowance and never insisted that he follow him into business.

Failing his entrance examinations for Cambridge University, Ackerley applied for a commission in the Army and went off to the First World War. After the war, he returned and attended Cambridge but never wrote much about it.

In October 1929 his father Roger Ackerley died of tertiary syphilis. Shortly afterward, Ackerley found a sealed note from his father addressed to him, which concluded:

"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 thus discovered his father had had a second family for more than 20 years. Roger would visit his daughters three or four times a year when supposedly traveling for business, and sometimes when out to walk his first family's dog. His mistress, Muriel Perry, served as a nurse during the First World War and was busy with her career; she seldom saw their three daughters: Sally and Elizabeth, twins born in 1909, and Diana, born in 1912; all were cared for by a Miss Coutts. The birth of the youngest was never registered; but they were all given their mother's surname. Ackerley described the lives of his half-sisters in his 1968 memoir: "They had no parental care, no family life, no friends." For years, the girls thought his father Roger was their much-loved "Uncle Bodger", who occasionally brought them gifts and money.

Joe looked after his father's second family without telling his mother, who died in 1946. For years, Ackerley was obsessed with his relationship with his father, both because of the tension of the son's covert homosexuality and what he described as his father's domineering personality. In his memoir, My Father and Myself (1969), which one reviewer termed the "mystery" of the son on the track of his father, Ackerley speculated that his father had some homosexual experiences as a young guardsman, but never proved it. In trying to understand his father's life, he grappled with his own.

In 1975 Diana Perry, then Diana Petre, published a memoir called The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley. The term "secret orchard" was Roger's for his second family, used in one of his final notes to his son Joe.

World War I

As World War I had begun, Ackerley 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 to France. The following summer he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916. He was shot in the arm and suffered shards of a whiskey bottle becoming imbedded in his side from an explosion. After lying wounded in a shell-hole for six hours, he was rescued by British troops and sent home for sick-leave.

He soon volunteered to go back to the front. As he had been promoted to captain, when his older brother Peter arrived in France in December 1916, Ackerley was his superior officer. He later wrote that the cheerful Peter saluted his brother "gladly and conscientiously." In February 1917, Peter was wounded in action on a dangerous assignment. Though he got back to the British lines, Ackerley never saw his brother again, as he was killed on 7 August 1918, two months before the end of the war. Peter's death haunted Ackerley all his life; he suffered from survivor's guilt.

In May 1917 Ackerley led an attack in the Arras region where he was wounded, this time in the buttock and thigh. While he was waiting for help, the Germans arrived and took him prisoner. As an officer, he was assigned to an internment camp in neutral Switzerland, which was relatively comfortable. Here he began his play, The Prisoners of War, which expresses the cabin fever of captivity and his frustrated longings for another English prisoner. Ackerley was not repatriated to England until after the war ended.

Career

After the war, Ackerley attended Cambridge. He moved to London after graduation, where he continued to write and enjoyed the cosmopolitan capital. In 1923 his poem was included in a collection of young British writers, so he began to get recognition.

He met E. M. Forster and other literary bright lights, but was lonely despite numerous 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, who he knew from writing A Passage to India, arranged a position as secretary to the Maharaja of Chhatarpur.

Ackerley spent about five months in India, which was still under British rule. He developed a strong distaste for the several Anglo-Indians he met. Ackerley's comic memoir Hindoo Holiday explores some of his experiences. The Maharaja was homosexual, and His Majesty's obsessions and dalliances, along with Ackerley's observations about Anglo-Indians, account for much of the humor of the work. During these months, he developed sexual relationships with the 20-year-old Narayan and 16-year-old Sharma, servants of the maharaja.

In England, Prisoners of War was finally produced in 1925, to some acclaim. Its run began at The Three Hundred Club on 5 July 1925, then transferred to The Playhouse on 31 August. Ackerley enjoyed his success, returning to London to carouse with its theatrical crowd. Through Cambridge friends, he met the actor John Gielgud, and other rising stars of the stage.

In 1928, Ackerley joined the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), then a year old. He worked in the "Talks" Department, which arranged radio lectures by prominent scholars and public figures, and helped create the new organization, which had extensive influence on British literary and cultural life. In 1935 Ackerley was selected as Literary Editor of the BBC's magazine, The Listener, and his work with it was the mainstay of his career; he served in this position for more than two decades until 1959. During this time, he discovered and promoted many young writers, including Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood. Ackerley was one of Francis King's two mentors (the other being C. H. B. Kitchin).

Later life

From 1943, Ackerley lived in a small flat at Putney overlooking the Thames. Almost all his significant work was produced during this period. He had a stable job at the BBC and ended the unsatisfying promiscuity of his younger years. What remained was his search for what he called an "Ideal Friend".

Ackerley took financial responsibility for his sister Nancy, who was unstable, and his aging Aunt Bunny. In 1946 (the year his mother died) he acquired an Alsatian named Queenie, a dog that became his primary companion of the next 15 years. These were his most productive years, when he revised Hindoo Holiday (1952), completed My Dog Tulip (1956) and his novel, We Think the World of You (1960), and worked on drafts of My Father and Myself.

Ackerley left the BBC in 1959. He visited Japan in 1960 to see his friend Francis King; he was very taken with the beauty of the scenery and even more with Japanese men.

On 30 October 1961 Queenie died. Ackerley, who had lost a brother and both parents, described it as "the saddest day of my life." 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." In 1962, We Think the World of You won the W. H. Smith Literary Award, which came with a substantial cash prize, but 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.)

In the years after Queenie's death, Ackerley worked on his memoir about his father and drank too much. His sister Nancy found him dead in his bed on the morning of 4 June 1967. Ackerley's biographer Peter Parker gives the cause of death as coronary thrombosis.

Toward the end of his life, Ackerley sold 1075 letters from Forster, dating from 1922, for which he received ₤6000; as he said, it was "a sum of money which will enable Nancy and me to drink ourselves carelessly into our graves." Ackerley did not live long enough to enjoy the money but, together with the royalties from his existing works as well as several published posthumously, it allowed Nancy Ackerley to live in relative comfort until her death in 1979.

Sexuality

Ackerly was openly gay after his parents' deaths, having realized his homosexuality while interned in Switzerland during World War I. Ackerley plumbed his sexuality in his writings. He belonged to a circle of notable literary homosexuals who flouted convention, specifically the homophobia that kept gay men in the closet or exposed openly gay men to legal persecution.

While never finding the "Ideal Friend" he wrote of so often (at least in human form), 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. He described the ritual of picking up and entertaining a young guardsman, sailor or labourer. Forster warned him, "Joe, you must give up looking for gold in coal mines."

His memoir serves as a guide to 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" sexual act of mutual masturbation rather than penetration. Ackerley described himself as "quite impenetrable."

Works

• The Prisoners of War (first performed 5 July 1925), a play about Captain Conrad's comfortable captivity in Switzerland during World War I. Conrad suffers most from his longing for the attractive young Lieutenant Grayle. Ackerley claimed to prefer the title The Interned to The Prisoners of War.
• 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, which he called Chhokrapur (meaning "City of Boys") as a joke in the book.
• My Dog Tulip (1956), an account of living with his dog Queenie. Her companionship enabled him to give up seeking casual sex. The dog's name was changed to Tulip in the title when the editors of Commentary, who had purchased an excerpt, became concerned that using her name of Queenie might encourage jokes about Ackerley's sexuality. The book was adapted as an animated feature released in 2009 and starring Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini.
• We Think the World of You (1960), Ackerley's only novel; it explores a middle-class intellectual man (based closely on himself) and his working-class London family. It includes a fictionalized account of Ackerley's experience with his dog Queenie (called "Evie" in the book). It explores the frustrations of the relationship between the homosexual narrator and Evie's former owner, who was (mostly) heterosexual. The novel was adapted as a motion picture by the same name in 1988, which starred Alan Bates and Gary Oldman.

Works published posthumously:

• My Father and Myself (1968), a memoir of Ackerley's life and relationship with his father. Together with a 1975 memoir by his half-sister Diana Petre, it was the basis of the 1979 TV movie Secret Orchards, about their father's two sets of children.
• E.M. Forster: A Portrait (1970), short biography of the writer.
• Micheldever and Other Poems (1972), poetry volume.
• The Ackerley Letters (1975), edited by Neville Braybrooke.
• My Sister and Myself (1982), selections from Ackerley's diary, edited by Francis King. Most material refers to Ackerley's relationship with his sister Nancy West (née Ackerley).

Other works

• Ackerley edited and wrote the introduction to Escapers All (1932), 15 first-person accounts of World War I POW camp escapees (published by The Bodley Head).

• In the United States, his books have been reissued and are published solely by New York Review of Books Classics.

Legacy and honors

• His sister Nancy Ackerley Davis endowed the annual J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, which was awarded beginning in 1982.

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)
• "'The fair sex? And which sex is that?'" (Captain Conrad to Mme. Louis in The Prisoners of War)

Sources

• Miller, Neil (1995). Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. New York, Vintage Books. ISBN 0-09-957691-0.
• Murray, Stephen O. "Ackerley, Joseph Randolph", Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. Dynes, Wayne R. (ed.), Garland Publishing, 1990. p. 9
• Parker, Peter, Ackerley: The Life of J. R. Ackerley. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1989.

Further reading

Archival Resources

• J. R. (Joe Randolph) Ackerley Collection, 1924-1983 (187 items) is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
• W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman Collection, 1929-1976 is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
• Peter Burton papers, circa 1960-2008 are housed at the Cornell University Library.
• Sir John Collings Squire Papers, 1910-1958 (15.5 linear ft.) are housed at the Charles E. Young Research Library at the University of California, Los Angeles.
• Roy Broadbent Fuller Poetry manuscripts, 1965-1969 (ca. 50 items) are housed at the Columbia University Libraries.
• E. M. Forster Collection, 1908-1971 is housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

External links

• J. R. Ackerley on glbtq.com
• My Dog Tulip Movie Official Website
• My Dog Tulip IMDb page
• New York Review of Books Classics
• Secret Orchards IMDb page
• We Think the World of You IMDb page