J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967)

I'm guessing the 'major motion picture' doesn't stick too closely to the book, because the book is mostly about smearing vaseline on Tulip's vagina in the hope that she will successfully mate with another handsome German Shepherd. Spoiler alert: she gets off with a mutt instead.

For the first chapter, I thought this would be the kind of book dog-lovers would love, and everyone else would shrug at and move on. The first chapters were mostly about shitting in public, and Tulip's facial show more expressions. This, I found delightful. I have a mutt, at least part German Shepherd, and she makes those facial expressions, and I love her deeply.

Then, enter the vagina, and that's it for the rest of the book.

There are all kinds of reasons one might want to write about one's dog's vagina, the most obvious one being that you're not getting any yourself. And sure enough, as reliably as Freud is photographed chomping on a cigar, wikipedia tells me that Ackerley was gay, and never found a husband. On the other hand, he was openly gay, so this can't just be the return of the repressed.

I actually think Ackerley wrote the book this way because he's a horrible person, and perhaps knew that.

Consider the chapter on shitting in the streets: at no point does he seem to consider the possibility that he could, say, pick up the shit in a paper bag or shovel, and deposit it somewhere more suitable than a shop-owner's doorway. Why not? Isn't this the obvious thing to do?

Tulip is horrible to other people. Could he perhaps restrain the dog? Train her? Of course not.

Could he spay her? Certainly not, though there's no reason given for this astonishing decision (though perhaps social norms have changed, and nobody desexed their dogs in the post-war).

Moving on, Ackerley's attitude towards (his words) "the working classes" is... well, it's even more disgusting than his insistence that his dog get fucked by a German Shepherd. Which is already disgusting. He does describe the tremendous inherited diseases and so on that pure breed dogs suffer from, and yet, he's determined to create more pure-bred dogs. But fear not. He plans to kill the puppies.

To be honest, Ackerley seems like the worst kind of English stereotype: dismissive of people who have to work to pay their bills, dismissive of other people in general, and with an astonishing inability to think about anything other than facts. Too bad he writes so nicely. show less

'a fairy story for adults'
By sally tarbox on 8 Jan. 2013
Format: Hardcover
Absolute gem of a book set in London just after World War 2.
Middle class Frank is visiting his lover, Johnny, as he begins a year in prison. From the start we feel Frank is being used; he ends up helping out Johnny's unpleasant wife and children. As he visits Johnny's parents, he begins to get concerned about his friend's dog, Evie, which has been billetted on them, along with one of the children. The tension in the show more book as he tries to get custody of the poor animal which is kept inside for weeks at a time and beaten becomes almost unbearable. Although members of the family often utter the refrain 'we think the world of her', Johnny later observes:

'She guessed, as I now did, what that world amounted to, and that what he had just done for us...was the most she would ever get, and that she could not count even on that.'

A quick read (155 pages) but absolutely unputdownable. show less

A good many questions have been asked, few receive answers. Some facts have been established, much else may be fiction, the rest is silence. Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing. Nevertheless, I preserve it, if only because it offers a friendly, unconditional response to my father’s plea in his posthumous letter “I hope people will generally be kind to my memory.”

The quote above could either start this memoir, or end it. It’s that kind of thing. show more Unknowability is at the heart of the entire work. It’s not tragic, it’s simply the one truth we can take from our own observations. And for that reason, I thought this a wonderful book. Near the end, Ackerley (the younger) round off his story with the final years of his mother’s life - she lived for seventeen more years after his father died. She left behind a few personal things: trunks, boxes, bags etc, all precious to her. When the son examines the contents after her death, he finds packages of neatly tissue wrapped papers with bows. Inside were the torn remnants of all the documents the mother ever had, from letters, personal writings, cards, programs etc etc. All mashed up together and incomprehensible. The mother had left the best metaphor of all to round off the story. We simply can never piece it all together, regardless of how much we know.

We can’t know everything. And then after much examination, we could say we hardly know anything. This applies as much about those we know and our own lives. That’s the way it is, we have imperfect information to go on.

I hardly read biographical or memoir material but I have taken a little interest lately – my own father being dead over ten years now – in the telling of the lives of fathers. Having done a little examining and writing myself in this very field of enquiry, I had to hunt this book down. Though reprinted by those good folk at NYRB, still, it’s not a big seller.

One thing I did take an interest in was the observation that the Victorian era dwindled and didn’t quite diminish until about the middle of the 20thC. Much of England seemed unchanged until WW2. Ackerley grew up in an upper middle class, mercantile family. His father a businessman, made his money in banana imports. They all lived well, without much worry for money if at all. About the only thing that this means for Ackerely is that he has nothing at all to lose from honesty, and probity is irrelevant to him. His family all dead by the time he wrote this in 1969, and given to a lifetime of openness in his sexuality, there’s not much hidden. There’s not much left to speculate on after Ackerley talks about his own sexuality. It’s a fascinating chapter or two on the revelations of being a gay man in England, well worth reading just to know how differently some people had to live.

The father subject of the memoir started off in the military and then had a couple of odd relationships with ‘friends’, older men with means, who basically kept him housed, and financed just so he can be around them. These men turn out to be homosexuals, but at the time Ackerley thinks in relation to one (fellow who was a count) that he may well have been only exploring his homosexuality from a distance, so keeping a likable and handsome young man around – Ackerley’s father – was as close as he needed to get to this ‘unspeakable’ matter. Our memoirist himself has no qualms about explaining his sexuality from boarding school masturbation, to his own unfulfilled search for love among the working class, trade and sailor types he tried so hard to know and love. He wanted no more than a special friend, the homosexual man’s equivalent to marriage in a land where sodomy laws were actively prosecuted late into the 20thC.

Who the father is, becomes a quest for the son here. The young father’s strange relationships for a young man in Victorian times getting by on nothing more than a brief military career, no capital, no education to speak of, the elder Ackerley is a fascinating example of a social climber using nothing more than his wits, his looks and a capacity to take risks that work. He marries into minor royalty, his first wife dies, he has a fling with an actress and fathers three children with her living together. All ‘accidents’. Marries her after WW1 in what seemed an act of remorse after the loss of the eldest son to the war, and as we discover later, dies with a second ‘wife’ and three other children living around the corner unknown to anyone. So you can see that the unknowable is everywhere. Ackerley the son has nothing but curious secrets at his disposal and a father with whom three or four near ‘intimate conversations’ never quite happened between father and son.

The basis of this story is fascinating and there have been recently a couple of TV shows that revel in this kind of thing. But for Ackerley the son, it’s an intellectual exercise. What can one ever know about anyone. An entire book leaves us with that worthwhile puzzling but compelling thought.

I might read Edmund Gosse and Turgenev next. show less

"I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919."

A most intriguing memoir of what-ifs and no resolution. Upon his father's death, Ackerley realises how little he knew about his own father's past and explores it with what personal and public resources available (it's not everyday that one's father is known as the Banana King of London).

A little historical aside: England and Wales decriminalised same-sex sexual relations in 1967, while this book was published posthumously in 1968 show more (although Ackerley claimed he had written it 20 years earlier and just chucked it in a drawer).

As an openly gay man at his time of writing, Ackerley grapples with the lost opportunities of discussing his sexuality with his father. He however was very open with the reader (surprisingly explicit at times - but maybe not surprising when I consider his weird book My Dog Tulip and his father's sometime bawdiness).

As he does, I also wonder how this memoir would've been like if Stockley hadn't convinced him to burn his father's desk of letters. Considering his father's absolute support of him, wanting to read his basically-autobiographical works and not pressuring him to join the fruit business, I think the father and son would've had even more to bond over.

Despite the title, the book actually delves into more than just the two titular people. At times disjointed, its blend of family unconventionality and good writing launches it into the realm of a classic memoir. Knowing next to nothing about Ackerley is probably the best way to get into this. show less