My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley

Author:J.R. Ackerley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781590175262
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-10-30T22:00:00+00:00

1. This animal, about whom I have written two books, has no place in this one, yet I have dedicated it to her, for reasons which may be found in the Appendix.

2. Ejaculatio praecox. For a fuller discussion of this see Appendix.

3. A note in the Appendix carries it still further and beyond the confines of this memoir.

13

HOW MUCH ABOUT my nature and behavior did my father perceive or guess ? It was a question that interested me only after his death when I could obtain no answer. He was a shrewd man and there must have been clues in plenty. Though I had a few women friends, usually married or lesbian, girls in my life were conspicuous for their absence. There had, it is true, been one in the early ’twenties with whom I was very thick; it was on her account that my mother, with her innuendoes and insinuations, earned her lecture on Otto Weininger, which should have been clue enough. An intellectual literary girl, met with during a short sojourn in Charlotte Street, an artists’ colony in those days, where I was to be seen about in my carabiniero’s black cloak, she became one of my constant companions and a frequent visitor to my Richmond home. She was far from being a pin-up girl and although my parents, in their thoughts, may have made the best of her as a prospective daughter-in-law, I am sure that neither of them was deeply disappointed when our friendship came to an abrupt end. I had not concealed from her my active homosexual predilections, which she seemed to accept easily enough at first; but as time passed she became increasingly carping and bitter about them: “Poor old Joe! You and your boys!” One evening she said, “I suppose it would disgust you to go to bed with me?” I said, “Yes.” A heroic conversation in its way, for we both uttered unflinching truths, though the heroism was more on her side than mine, for whereas she must have considered her question and the risk of it, I did not consider my reply at all, it was shocked out of me.

With her broad, heelless shoes, thick stockings, and rather scurfy, unwashed appearance, she belonged, I fancy, in my father’s ideas, more to the category of “rum ducks” than to that of “plump little partridges”; rummer ducks than she were to be introduced by me into his house, literary, theatrical, musical and other folk, bachelors all. A constant visitor was a retired air-commodore, L. E. O. Charlton, with a charming young male companion, not quite of the same class, to whom he sometimes referred as his secretary, though one might have wondered why he should need one; there were also a young actor, who rendered my father momentarily speechless at dinner one evening by asking him, “Which do you think is my best profile, Mr. Ackerley”—turning his head from side to side—“this, or this?”; a brilliant talkative Irishman, of encyclopedic knowledge, with a

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