{"id":1175,"date":"2013-10-08T01:13:46","date_gmt":"2013-10-08T01:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stanford.edu\/group\/bookclub\/cgi-bin\/wordpress\/?p=1175"},"modified":"2013-10-09T01:06:19","modified_gmt":"2013-10-09T01:06:19","slug":"the-many-loves-of-j-r-ackerley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/?p=1175","title":{"rendered":"The Many Loves of J.R. Ackerley"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

With a young friend in Athens<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/strong>J.R. Ackerley was sitting on a park bench with Forrest Reid in Hyde Park, when the older writer asked him, \u201cDo you really care about anyone?\u201d<\/p>\n

In My Father and Myself<\/em>, Ackerley says he pondered the remark long afterwards. \u201cTo this searching question I do not know the answer, it goes too deep; since people and events vanish so easily from my memory it may be no.\u201d\u00a0 Not everyone shares his assessment. \u201cIt is characteristic of him to report against himself \u2013 he fears<\/em> he is an uncaring person,\u201d said Edwin Frank, founder of the New York Review Books Classics.<\/p>\n

When accused of hating the human race, however, Ackerley was quite startled: \u201cI am not<\/em> a misanthropist,\u201d he insisted. \u201cI like people and get on well with them; I am only a numerical <\/em>misanthropist.\u201d To stem the rising population tide, he recommended homosexuality. No one could be entirely sure how serious he was.<\/p>\n

In his own life, he adopted his recommendation seriously and with enthusiasm: he restlessly cycled through men \u2013 hundreds, by his own account. Yet, in My Father and Myself<\/em>, few even get a first name.\u00a0 Most of them got money \u2013 \u201ca pound was the recognized tariff for the Foot Guards then, the Horse Guards cost rather more.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

His father and himself.<\/p><\/div>\n

He admitted that his \u201clove\u201d was entirely self-serving.\u00a0 \u201cI was not out to give pleasure but to get it.\u201d He describes it as a quest for the \u201cIdeal Friend,\u201d but recites a list of requirements, as if he is ordering the appointments on a customized computer: \u201cHe should not be effeminate, indeed preferably normal; I did not exclude education but did not want it, I could supply all that myself and in the loved one it had always seemed to get in the way; he should admit me but no one else; he should be physically attractive to me and younger than myself \u2013 the younger the better, as closer to innocence; finally he should be on the small side, lusty, circumcised, physically healthy and clean: no phimosis, halitosis, bromidrosis.\u201d<\/p>\n

He did, in the end, find his ideal friend, and it was to drive away all the other loves for a very long time.\u00a0 Ackerley has been accused of misogyny, yet his beloved was exactly the kind of female he had always loathed. Jealous, capricious, and demanding \u2013 yet he adored her.\u00a0 Like so many previous occasions, this love had a pricetag.\u00a0 For Ackerley, she was a link to an estranged lover he couldn\u2019t quite relinquish. Hence, he bought the lover\u2019s abused dog.\u00a0 Soon his love for Queenie supplanted all.\u00a0 In typically solipsistic fashion, \u201cit is not she herself but her effect upon me that I find interesting. She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life, constant, single-hearted, uncritical devotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

In Japan’s Nara Park<\/p><\/div>\n

He had probably always had a heart more greatly touched by animals \u2013 the kind of man who would open a window to let a wasp escape.\u00a0 Kindness to creatures was a family trait.\u00a0 After his father\u2019s death, his mother befriended a housefly, for which she would leave breadcrumbs on the edge of a bathtub.\u00a0 After his Queenie\u2019s death, Ackerley\u2019s craving for love eventually settled on a common sparrow.<\/p>\n

When he found a fledgling bird outside his flat, with a damaged leg and almost entirely bald, he took it into his room and fed it with bread and milk, offered via a pen nib.\u00a0 His friends noted with horror the transformation of his flat to accommodate the bird: he made a playpen with cardboard boxes, old files, and an Oxford atlas. He made a perch, and used an earth-filled flowerpot, so the sparrow would have the luxury of a dirt bath.\u00a0 The bird slept in the woolen folds of an old sock.\u00a0 A bowl of seed and another of water were on the hearth. The bird defecated freely as it flew about the newspaper-covered apartment.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

His mother in the 1920s<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI expressly said I did not hate people,\u201d he explained again. \u201cI only wanted to tease them about the superior attitude they adopt, the distinction they make between themselves and the animals. I make no distinction, and I think if the word \u2018human\u2019 had never been invented we might all be a great deal happier than we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

So where did that leave the humans in his life? If the confessions of My Father and Myself<\/em> sound a little cold-blooded, they should be taken with a grain of salt.\u00a0 In the eternal courtroom of his mind, Joe Ackerley himself was always the defendant in the dock.<\/p>\n

\u201cJoe Ackerley in his later years railed at mankind, just as he railed at the \u2018horrid, tatty, ungrateful little bird\u2019 that he rescued and lovingly cared for for months. His tongue was acerbic, not his heart,\u201d recalled his friend Donald Windham. \u201cCertainly I remember him as anything but forgetful of all he owed his friends, especially Forster. Arranging frequent meetings, writing frequent letters, he was self-forgetting, self-knowing, self-merciless, and about his own faults one of the funniest men alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The young Nancy<\/p><\/div>\n

In My Father and Myself<\/em>, love appears in unexpected places.\u00a0 At the death of his father, Ackerley faithfully attended a raft of quarrelsome and quirky people \u2013 including his dotty mother and a down-to-earth aunt.\u00a0 Between the lines, one can see he loved them all.<\/p>\n

Love isn\u2019t martyrdom, of course, but sometimes martyrdom can be the best proof of it \u2013 that is, how we behave when love ceases to be fun or a pleasure, and becomes\u00a0\u00a0 an effort of will.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the surest test is often illness, or rejection, or dementia. Perhaps that word that surfaces almost inevitably when Ackerley describes a woman \u2013 \u201cjealous\u201d \u2013 offers the biggest clue.\u00a0 It takes us directly to perhaps the most important woman in his life, and one of his earliest models for love.<\/p>\n

Ackerley\u2019s beautiful sister Nancy was a heartbreaking case of a woman who started out with everything and ended with nothing.\u00a0 She was clearly mentally ill, and so emotionally draining that a half-sister said that visiting her was like losing a pint of blood.\u00a0 Nancy was jealous of Ackerley\u2019s attentions to his aunt, to his dog, to all the others in his life.\u00a0 She was exacting, sensitive to slights, smotheringly possessive, eternally ungrateful, sometimes violent.\u00a0 Ackerley pitied her, loathed her, resented her \u2013 and took care of her.\u00a0 He dutifully performed the rituals and necessities of loving service, long after it had ceased to be rewarding\u2026 if it ever had been.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The drawings made a few years before his death by Christopher Isherwood\u2019s companion, Don Bachardy, show them to be almost mirror images of each other, two angular, elegant elderly people with haunted, shell-shocked eyes. Each looks to be the other, re-sketched into the opposite sex.\u00a0 It was an anguished, tortured relationship in which one must give everything and expect nothing in return.<\/p>\n

My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J.R. Ackerley<\/em> describes the relationship in two hundred pages.\u00a0 Ackerley paws over their history together, blaming himself for each failure of love, blaming her for each outburst.\u00a0 Again and again, he justifies and exonerates himself, then returns to a ruthless self-denunciation. The entire book is his futile attempt to come to grips with a character he will never comprehend. Forty pages are devoted to the 1949 suicide attempt that left her in a hospital and him at the local police station for questioning.\u00a0 The police grilled him, in particular, about Nancy\u2019s suicide note, \u201ca long letter, which began with firm writing, and then straggled off into incoherency.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe seems to have been jealous of your wife as well as your aunt,\u201d said the constable.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cI have no wife; I\u2019m not married.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cWell, another woman is mentioned.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I looked at him blankly. \u201cWho?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cSomeone called Queenie.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cQueenie\u2019s a dog, my Alsatian dog.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The friend and editor of the volume, Francis King, recalled, \u201cClearly, Nancy loved Joe; and, when I once said that to E.M. Forster, he gently corrected me, \u2018Nancy is in love with Joe.\u2019 No less clearly, Joe loved Nancy, and was perhaps, in some measure, also in love with her; but since that love and that being in love both frightened him, they were transformed, in the years when first I knew him, into what often seemed cruelly near to hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

True love<\/p><\/div>\n

She achieved a measure of peace after his death in 1967.\u00a0 Friends encircled and protected her \u2013 even refurbishing the rundown apartment Nancy had inhabited with her brother so that she could receive visitors once again.\u00a0 And visitors came: she became one of the keepers of her brother\u2019s legacy before her own death in 1979.<\/p>\n

Most of Ackerley\u2019s closest friends are dead now.\u00a0 His older brother Peter died during the First World War.\u00a0 Nancy left behind an only child, Ackerley\u2019s nephew Paul West. No one seems to know his whereabouts or well-being.\u00a0 The author seems to have disappeared without a trace, except in the legacy of his books.\u00a0 Edwin Frank describes Ackerley\u2019s oeuvre<\/em> simply, this way: \u201cIn a way, the books are all a meditation on love, and the difficulties of love.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2013 Cynthia Haven<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

J.R. Ackerley was sitting on a park bench with Forrest Reid in Hyde Park, when the older writer asked him, \u201cDo you really care about anyone?\u201d In My Father and Myself, Ackerley says he pondered the remark long afterwards. \u201cTo … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anotherlook.stanford.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}