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DIANA TRILLING-The uncomplaining homosexuals |
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Contributed by Diana Trilling
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J. R. Ackerley's My Father and Myself is the simplest, most directly
personal report of what it is like to be a homosexual that, to my
knowledge, has yet been published. This in itself makes it
sufficiently noteworthy. But it also appears in the same year as
Philip Roth's spectacularly popular Portnoy's Complaint, a
collocation which, although fortuitous; adds enormously to its
interest. I am not suggesting that the two books, or their authors,
have much in common. On the contrary. Mr. Roth is American, Ackerley
is English. Mr. Roth's book is fiction, a work of the imagination;
Ackerley's is half-memoir, half a reconstruction of his father's
life. Mr. Roth is a young man, from whom we can expect other books;
Ackerley is dead-he was born in 1896 and died in 1967; until this
posthumous publication his reputation rested on four books, in
particular on two small volumes regarded in his own country as minor
classics but little known in America: Hindoo Holiday, first
published in 1932, a journal of his visit to India as
secretary-companion to a Maharajah, and My Dog Tulip, published in
1956, a remarkable account of his relations with a beloved Alsatian. . . .
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