Restoring the gaiety
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
A LIFE OF J. R. ACKERLEY by Peter Parker eople ought to be upset,' wrote J. R. Ackerley. `Life is so important and, in its workings, so upsetting that nobody should be spared.' Peter Parker has loyally adopted that quotation as his epigraph, despite the fact that Ackerley's devotion to the upsetting truth has posed peculiar problems for him. As he admits ruefully `it is perhaps rare to write a biography with- out ever feeling that one is prying. . . or simply going too far.' The fact is that Ackerley himself, to the agitation of more circumspect friends, made a life-long prac- tice of going too far. His small, scintillat- ing, almost entirely autobiographical oeuvre is full of revelations which still shock — not now because of the sexual irregularities concerned but because of the ruthlessness with which he sacrificed vanity and seemliness alike to the prerogative that the truth should prevail.
He wrote not only about his father's double life (it was not until the old man's death that Ackerley discovered that he had three half-sisters) but also about the impur- ity of his own motives in gleefully claiming his father for the party of the disreputable. He was candid about his homosexuality (and this at a time when the very word `homosexual' was taboo — to Ackerley's furious indignation it was excised from a review of a scholarly study of Proust in the Listener, of which he was literary editor for 24 years). He anatomised his relationships With exploitative young working-class men, confessing not only to his abject passions but also to the snobbery which sometimes made him flinch from his own idols. His misogyny was outrageous — but that it was grounded in jealousy (most of his beloved boys were heterosexual) and anxiety about his own compromised masculinity he was well aware. He described his love affair With an alsation bitch without dissembling the fact that the relationship, though stop- ping short of full sexual consummation, was an intensely erotic one. His own Psycho-sexual nature tormented and fas- cinated him and he wrote about it with a morose and lucid brilliance which has given us a handful of exquisite comic master- pieces. In the circumstances it is not
Constable, £16.95, pp.465
'P immediately evident what there can be left for a biographer to do.
But an important task does remain, that of rehabilitation. Ackerley, as his friends clamoured when My Father and Myself was published after his death, did not do himself justice. He concentrated — as diarists, analysands and self-examiners of all sorts tend to — on those aspects of himself and his experience which gave him trouble. That which was easy, delightful, even illustrious, he left undescribed. Par- ker redresses the balance.
Ackerley in his prime was uncommonly beautiful, and charming with it. `I fear that in my life I have disappointed a great many people' he wrote. The disappointments would have been fewer and less intense had he not had such power to attract. He was generous and tolerant. Bitterly though he grumbled about the female relations who battened on him, he never failed to house and provide for them. He was always a soft touch, not only for his lovers but also for their parents and pregnant girlfriends.
He was also a worker. At the Listener Ackerley battled incessantly against the prudery and philistinism of his employers. Parker's account of BBC office politics is fascinating because of, not despite, its mundanity. This section of the book, covering material which Ackerley himself never bothered to write about, is the freshest and — providing as it does a glimpse of the way official morality was promulgated during the second quarter of this century — at one level the most interesting.
Others, of course, are more sensational. Ackerley himself wrote about London's homosexual sub-culture in the '20s, '30s and '40s with acidulous detail. Parker puts the gaiety back into that earlier (but still easily recognisable) version of the gay life, pointing out that Ackerley had some close and affectionate amities amoureuses as well as the mutually destructive liaisons with sailors and burglars of which he was to make such coruscating literature. And even his most squalid encounters were sweetened by the illusions which he brought to them. As Harry Daley, a policeman and close friend, fondly remon- strated, for one who wanted 'endless romantic talk about eternal friendship (with thee beneath the bough 0 my love etc) one must know that a soldier offering himself in a pub for a quick wank at ten shillings a time is unlikely to be suitable'. Good advice, but Ackerley's refusal, or inability, to take it makes him the more appealing.
At the age of 48 he gave up on human love, being made entirely happy, for the first time, by a dog. His friends dis- approved, but he 'stoically reflected that few people had approved of his choice in human partners either'. With 22 years of his life (and nearly 200 pages of Parker's book) still to turn, he embarked on a progressive retreat leading eventually to a state of mind which, misanthropic and despairing though it was, yet was founded on far too much intellectual strength to be dismissed as crankiness. In old age he read Gulliver's Travels and hailed it as 'my book'. At about the same time he was putting forward a modest proposal of his own, that homosexuality should be encour- aged so that the ill-deserving human race might dwindle, and when canvassed for his opinion on America's intervention in Viet- nam answered that his only concern was for the 'inconvenience, worry, fear, pain and death caused to the lower beasts in their peaceful pursuits'.
It is a melancholy story. 'How I live in other people's lives!' wrote Ackerley. 'Well, I much prefer them to my own.' He was a much-prized friend and a greatly- respected editor but his own love affairs were often wretched and his own books, though sufficiently brilliant to earn him a permanent place in literary history, few and slender. But melancholy has its own pecular grace. In old age Ackerley wrote to E.M. Forster, complaining that his days 'disappear into history, carrying nothing in their delicate hands but a yawn': Forster justly queried 'Can the day that produced such a sentence be lost?' Peter Parker is not quite another Ackerley, but in this book he repeatedly demonstrates that, like his subject, he has the ability to transmute humiliation and disappointment into ele- gant prose.
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