Vol. 4 No. 9 · 20 May 1982
pages 3-5 | 3020 words
Women
Christopher Ricks
- My Sister and Myself: The Diaries of J. R. Ackerley edited by Francis King
Hutchinson, 217 pp, £8.95, March 1982, ISBN 0 09 147020 X
‘Women are bitches.’ It was odd and ugly of J. R. Ackerley to put it like that, since both the sentence before this terse rancour and the one after it dote upon a bitch, his dog Queenie. Much-loved Joe Ackerley was not much-loving, but he did love his dog, loved her even more than he loathed his sister Nancy. Nancy loathed them both back. She also loathed their old aunt Bunny, whom Ackerley only intermittently hated. When Ackerley took a break, he contrived a busman’s Roman holiday, since he went to stay with Siegfried Sassoon, who was fully occupied loathing his wife, as she him. ‘He was obviously very wrought up over her emotional persecution of him, and described at much length her jealous rows, resentments, emotional blackmail, etc. He was describing Nancy.’ Nancy was chagrined at not having been invited, so Ackerley gave it her straight:
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Letters
Vol. 4 No. 11 · 17 June 1982
From Francis King
SIR: In his review of J. R. Ackerley’s My Sister and Myself (LRB, Vol. 4, No 9), Christopher Ricks makes much of Nancy West (Ackerley) remarking on her death-bed that she has been reduced to ‘a rag and a bone and hank of air [sic]’. Unfortunately, misprints are common these days and what, in fact, she said, quoting correctly from Kipling, was ‘a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’. A pity, I agree. Like Tennyson’s ‘the iron grates of life’ for Marvell’s ‘the iron gates of life’, the emendation has, as Professor Ricks has demonstrated, its subtle resonances.
Professor Ricks has described my Introduction as ‘accommodating’. I have recently been doing some work on Strindberg, whose misogyny is weirdly akin to Ackerley’s. The world has learned to ‘accommodate’ Strindberg; and I am convinced that it will learn to ‘accommodate’ Ackerley as well, even if Professor Ricks has been unable to do so.
Francis King
London W8
Christopher Ricks writes: Mr King has his own way of admitting that his sentence was in error and was ignorant. I had suspected as much. In my own words: ‘if Mr King is to be exactly believed … If Mr King has got it right (odd of him to say “in her own words”)’.
Vol. 4 No. 13 · 15 July 1982
From Francis King
SIR: When I wrote in my Introduction to J.R. Ackerley’s My Sister and Myself that Nancy West had died ‘reduced (in her own words) “to a rag and a bone and a hank of hair” ’, I was aware, though Professor Ricks may choose to disbelieve it, that she was quoting from Kipling. If I had written merely ‘reduced “to a rag and a bone and a hank of hair’ ”, then readers less perspicacious than Professor Ricks might have thought that it was I who was quoting from Kipling. The structure which Professor Ricks erected on the misprint ‘a rag and a bone and hank of air (sic)’ continues to delight me and I see no reason why he should feel defensive or offensive about it.
One further point in Professor Ricks’s review: he implies that, when I write that many of Ackerley’s friends were women-haters, I am using a euphemism for homosexuals. Women-haters and homosexuals are no more synonymous than professors and prigs. One of Ackerley’s friends, Wyndham Lewis, was a misogynist but a heterosexual; another, a homosexual writer still alive, once declared publicly that he felt far more at his ease with women than with men.
Francis King
London W8
