My father and myself

This heartfelt gay memoir about an adult son uncovering his father’s secrets is “a cross between Dickens’s David Copperfield, Rousseau’s Confessions, and the new pornography” (Donald Windham).
 
When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self—making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.

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'What a book! Father and son are a fascinating pair.

Ackerley's rather famous for his numerous and unsatisfying raids on the rough trade and excursions amongst the Guardsmen in and around Victoria and Knightsbridge. We know that he eventually finds happiness with an Alsation (and "Alsation" isn't polari for something more interesting). The focus here is his father. We learn that he was known as "the Banana King" (which also isn't polari for something more interesting); he was, in fact, an early director at Fyffes, the company we all know and love from the stickers on our bananas. We see Ackerley Senior as a charming, well-to-do man with a grey Edward VII bowler, a beautiful wife, two strapping sons and assuredly hetero.

Of course, there were always whisperings that all was not as it seemed in his father's life but it was only after his death that J.R. was told, in a couple of letters, that there was another family just up the road. A "secret orchard" of three charming daughters. So charming, in fact, one of them went on to marry a future Duke of Westminster! Ackerley Junior also learnt that, a Guardsmen from the age of 16, his father seems to have been bought out by the millionaire homosexual the Comte de Gallatin! They then lived together for the next five years and only fell out when Ackerley wanted to marry (someone else, of course. A woman. It was 1888.)

The things Ackerley and his father could have talked about, if only they'd been frank with each other!

But I agree with Auden, who writes the introduction to the NYRB edition, that it's difficult to see that their relationship could have been much improved upon. There's absolutely no doubt Senior knew everything about Junior, with all of the sailor friends and young men in eye make-up coming to tea. So I'm not sad for either of them and it's nice to have read this after his other books because now I'm starting to think J.R. wasn't such a sad sack after all. And he had sex with Ivor Novello! Having sex with a famous heartthrob is something to smile about, I don't care who you are.


"In a few years' time I myself might be sighted in London dressed in a voluminous black carabiniero's cloak, cast over one shoulder in the Byronic manner, and trailed by children calling out rude remarks."

"While they were scratching away, like hens, with their trench tools, at the hard French soil, the Germans counter-attacked in considerable strength, firing from the hip as they advanced. The very sight of them was enough for my company. Rising as one man they deserted me and bolted. I bolted after, shouting 'Stop!' - not that I wanted them to. The vain word may have taken a shriller note when a bullet struck me in the bottom, splintering my pelvis, as was discovered later, and dealing me a wound where, my father had sometimes remarked, echoing Siward, no good soldier should bear one. With a flying leap that Nureyev might have envied I landed in a shell-hole which already contained one of the things I most detested, a corpse, and was soon to harbor another wounded officer named Facer, and a man bleeding to death of a stomach wound."

"It was a wounding word, but kinder than the right one."

"indeed it took one's breath away, and if you take people's breath away much else goes with it. Retrospective memory is flummoxed, tears become absurd, recrimination knows not where to begin"' - David, Goodreads review