Volume 23, Number 14 · September 16, 1976
The Cult of Joe
By Stephen Spender
The Letters of J.R. Ackerley
edited by Neville Braybrooke
Duckworth (London), 354 pp., £9.50
The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley
by Diana Petre
Braziller, 183 pp., $6.95
In the early Thirties when Christopher Isherwood and I used to go every summer to Sellin on the Baltic island of Ruegen, we would walk on the beach discussing writers who had become legendary to us. A figure whom we much speculated about was J. R. Ackerley, author of a play called The Prisoners of War (rather inaccurately so, since it was about a group of English prisoners interned in a rather comfortable pension in Switzerland). What intrigued us about this play was its, for that time, extraordinarily open and candid, grimly ironic, treatment of the theme of homosexuality. Questioned by the young man who is the object of his passion about his attitude to 'the fair sex,' the hero (obviously a self-portrait of the author) retorts: 'Which sex is that?' In such a fragment of dialogue a writer seems to sum up an attitude which challenges some readers to reject him, others to make him the object of a cult.
Review, 4241 words
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