J. R. Ackerley

J. R. Ackerley (4 November 1896 – 4 June 1967; his full registered name was Joe Ackerley; Randolph was added later as a tribute to an uncle) was arts editor of The Listener, the weekly magazine of the BBC. He was also openly gay, a rarity in his time.

Early Life, World War I, and India : Ackerley's memoir My Father and Myself, begins: "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." His father, Roger Ackerley, was a fruit merchant, known as the "Banana King" of London. Roger had been previously married to an actress named Louise Burckhardt who died young and childless, probably of tuberculosis, in 1892.

Shortly afterward, he met another actress named Janetta Aylward (known as Netta) in Paris, and the two of them moved in together in London. Three years later she gave birth to a boy, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. Peter's birth, and possibly Joe's and Nancy's as well, was the result of an "accident" according to Joe's Aunt Bunny, Netta's sister: "Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day," she said. Roger Ackerley had "a cavalier attitude towards contraception."

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

Failing his entrance examinations for Cambridge University, Ackerley applied for a commission in the Army, and as World War I was in full swing, he 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 over 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 an explosion caused shards of a whiskey bottle in his bag to be imbedded in his side. He lay wounded in a shell-hole for six hours but was eventually rescued by British troops and sent home for a period of sick-leave.

He soon volunteered to go back to the front. He had been promoted to captain by now and so, in December 1916, when his older brother Peter arrived in France, Ackerley was his superior officer. Reportedly the cheerful and kind-hearted Peter was not resentful and saluted his brother "gladly and conscientiously." In February, 1917, Peter was wounded in action on a dangerous assignment, heading into No man's land from a dangerous ditch (where Ackerley said goodbye to him) ominously called the "Boom Ravine." Though Peter managed to get back to the British lines, Ackerley never saw him again.

In May 1917 Ackerley led an attack in the Arras region where he was again wounded, this time in the buttock and thigh. Again he was obliged to wait for help in a shell-hole, but this time the Germans arrived first and he was taken prisoner. Being an officer, his internment camp was located in neutral Switzerland and was rather comfortable. Here he began his play, The Prisoners of War, which deals with the cabin fever of captivity and the frustrated longings he experienced for another English prisoner. He was not repatriated to England until after the war ended.

On 7 August 1918, two months before the end of hostilities, Peter Ackerley was killed in battle Peter's death haunted Ackerley his entire life. Ackerley suffered from survivor's guilt and thought his father might have preferred his death to his brother's. One result of Peter's death was that Roger and Netta got married in 1919, reportedly because Peter had died "a bastard".

After the war Ackerley returned to England and attended Cambridge. Scant evidence remains from this time in his life as Ackerley wrote little about it. He moved to London and continued to write and enjoy the cosmopolitan delights of the capital. He met E. M. Forster and other literary bright lights, but was lonely despite a plenitude of 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 got him a position as secretary to the Maharaja of Chhatarpur who he knew from writing A Passage to India. Ackerley spent about five months in India, still under British rule, and met a number of Anglo-Indians for whom he developed a strong distaste. The recollections of this time are the basis for his comic memoir Hindoo Holiday. The Maharaja was also 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 also developed a short friendship with the twenty year old Narayan and sixteen year old Sharma, who were servants of the King of 'Chokrapur'. Of one evening with Narayan he wrote, 'he suddenly laughed softly and drew me after him. And in the dark roadway, overshadowed by trees, he put up his face and kissed me on the cheek. I returned his kiss; but he at once drew back, crying out: 'Not the mouth! You eat meat! You eat meat!' 'Yes, and I will eat you in a minute,' I said, and kissed him on the lips again, and this time he did not draw away.'

Back in England, Prisoners of War was finally produced to some acclaim. Its run began at The Three Hundred Club on 5 July 1925, then transferred to The Playhouse on 31 August. Ackerley capitalized on his success, carousing with London's theatrical crowd, and through Cambridge friends met the actor John Gielgud, and other rising stars of the stage.

Working at the BBC, and the Secret Orchard : In 1928, Ackerley joined the staff of the BBC, then a year old, in the "Talks" Department, where prominent personalities gave radio lectures. He was Literary Editor of the BBC's magazine The Listener from 1935-59 discovering and promoting 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).

In October 1929 Roger Ackerley died of tertiary syphilis. After his death, his son discovered his father had a second family who he visited occasionally when supposedly travelling for business, and when walking the family dog. The mother of this second family was Muriel Perry, who had served as a nurse during World War I. She had three daughters, Ackerley's half-sisters- Sally, Elizabeth, and Diana. They thought Roger was their uncle, their much-loved "Uncle Bodger" who brought them gifts and money, though they began to suspect he was their father as they grew older. Sally, later Duchess of Westminster, and Elizabeth were twins, born in 1909. Diana was born in 1912.

Shortly after Roger's death, Ackerley found a note in a sealed envelope addressed to him which ended: 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 had met Muriel during his father's final illness and recalled hearing her spoken of over the years. Roger wanted Joe to look after his second family and he did so, without ever divulging their existence to his highly strung mother, who died in 1946. In 1975 Diana Perry, now Diana Petre, wrote a memoir of her life called The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley. The term "secret orchard" was Roger Ackerley's, from one of his final notes to his son. Ackerley's relationship with his father was something of an obsession. There had always been tension between them, stemming from the son's covert homosexuality and his father's domineering personality. My Father and Myself explores the possibility that Roger had some homosexual experience as a young guardsman, but this was ultimately never proven.

Later life : Ackerley spent the last 24 years of his life in a small flat overlooking the Thames, at Putney. Almost all his significant work was produced during this period. He had a stable job at the BBC, and the unsatisfying promiscuity of his younger years faded. What remained was his search for what he called an "Ideal Friend". Instead he accepted financial responsibility for his unstable sister Nancy and his aging Aunt Bunny. More importantly, in 1946 (the year his mother died) he acquired an Alsatian bitch named Queenie from a sometime-lover, Freddie Doyle, who was going to prison for burglary. This scene, with Ackerley visiting Freddie at the police station, is how Ackerely's only novel, We Think the World of You, begins. ("Johnny" in the novel is closely modelled on Freddie.)

Over the next decade, Queenie was Ackerley's primary companion. His reduced social obligations made these years his most productive, revising Hindoo Holiday (1952), completing My Dog Tulip (1956), We Think the World of You (1960) and working on drafts of My Father and Myself.

Ackerley left the BBC in 1959. He visited Japan in 1960 to visit his friend Francis King, and 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 even 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, Ackerly worked on his memoir about his father and drank too much gin. 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 that Forster had sent him since 1922, receiving some £6000, "a sum of money which will enable Nancy and me to drink ourselves carelessly into our graves," as he put it. Ackerley did not live long enough to enjoy the money from these letters, but the sum, plus the royalties from Ackerley's existing works and several published posthumously, allowed Nancy to live on in relative comfort until her death in 1979. The annual J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography was endowed by funds from Nancy, starting in 1982.

Sexuality : Ackerly was openly gay, at least after his parents' deaths, having realized his homosexuality while interned in Switzerland as a prisoner of war. Ackerley worked hard to plumb the depths of his sexuality in his writings and belonged to a circle of notable literary homosexuals that flouted convention, specifically the homophobia that kept gay men in the closet or exposed openly gay men to persecution.

While he never found the "Ideal Friend" he wrote of so often, 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, and he describes in detail 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."

My Father and Myself serves as a guide to the understanding of 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."