Born November 4: J.R. Ackerley

At prep school in the 1910's Joe Ackerley was so extremely good looking he was nicknamed Girlie, and decades later he named the love of his life, his Alsatian, Queenie. So why is his classic book called My Dog Tulip [Kindle]? Because the magazine editors who bought first-serial rights worried Queenie would inspire jokes about Ackerley's homosexuality. Other books' revisions went the right way. In 1952 (after his parents' deaths) he rewrote and expanded his 1932 memoir Hindoo Holiday [Kindle] to be more open about his six months as secretary to a gay maharaja in Chhatarpur.

Earlier he had served in two tours of duty in WWI, with two serious injuries, nearly two years as a prisoner of war, and surviving the death of his older brother who had been their father's favorite. Later, he became editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, where he could promote the works of many nascent gay writers including Auden, Isherwood, Larkin, King, and Spender. 

More out in his homosexuality than many after him, Ackerley openly pined for a longterm relationship with what he called an Ideal Friend. Failing that, he paid for sexual encounters with young guardsmen, laborers, and sailors. E.M. Forster, who had gotten Acklerley his job in India, told him, "Joe, you must give up looking for gold in coal mines," but it was through one of these rough trade lovers, Freddie Doyle, that Acklerley at 49 inherited Queenie, as Doyle was being sent to prison for burglary. Ackerley tells their story in his only novel, We Think the World of You [Kindle]. The recent animated movie of My Dog Tulip is a quiet charmer, voiced by Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave.

A bit of a perfectionist, Ackerley spent 34 years working on his final book about his father [Kindle], who was a closet bigamist (having three children by his other wife) and secretly was a gay hustler during his years in the Guards. When, late in life, Ackerley tried to come out to him, his father interrupted with, “It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.”

In his writing, Ackerley refused to be cut off and insisted on oversharing. For one, his sexual relations -- "fantastically promiscuous," always with himself fully clothed and the young trade fully naked, never ever oral -- were ruined by premature ejaculation. In the New Yorker, Joan Acocella pondered the moral dimensions:

"How do you survive the humiliation of always having your body go against your will? Do you have to succeed at sex in order to feel that you have succeeded in life? And how do you tell your partner, who at that moment is innocently taking off his clothes, that the act for which he is preparing has already been completed?"

More importantly, she realized, "The real fruit of Ackerley’s candor, however, is the power it lent his writing: the richness of characterization, the tartness of metaphor, the protection that honesty gives against sentimentality, or just a stupid simplicity."

Read his biography by Peter Parker which Acocella calls "superb."