J R Ackerley W H Auden Popular Books

J R Ackerley W H Auden Biography & Facts

Joe Randolph "J. R." Ackerley (4 November 1896 – 4 June 1967) was a British writer and editor. Starting with the BBC the year after its founding in 1927, he was promoted to literary editor of The Listener, its weekly magazine, where he served for more than two decades. He published many emerging poets and writers who became influential in Great Britain. He was openly homosexual, a rarity in his time when homosexual activity was forbidden by law and socially ostracised. Ackerley's extramarital half-sister was Sally Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster. Family and education Ackerley's memoir My Father and Myself begins: "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." Registered at birth as Joe Ackerley, he later took the middle name Randolph after his uncle, Randolph Payne, first husband of his mother's sister Bunny. As an adult, he published under his first two initials and surname. His father, Roger Ackerley, was a successful fruit merchant known as the "Banana King" of London. Roger Ackerley was first married to a young Swiss woman of wealthy parentage named (Charlotte) Louise Burckhardt (1862-1892) who died probably of tuberculosis, before they had children. Louise was the subject of John Singer Sargent's painting, Lady with the Rose. His mother was Janetta Aylward (known as Netta), an actress whom Roger met in Paris; the two returned to London together. They had an intermittent relationship, and three years later, in 1895, she gave birth to a son, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. According to Joe's maternal Aunt Bunny, Peter's birth, and likely all of them, were "accidents." She told him, "Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day," (when Peter was conceived). His father set up a household with his mother starting in 1903, after which the children saw him more regularly. His business did very well, and the family had a "butler, a gardener, and, evidently, a very good table." Ackerley was educated at Rossall School, a public and preparatory school in Fleetwood, Lancashire. During this time, he discovered he was attracted to other boys. His striking good looks earned him the nickname "Girlie," but he was not very sexually active as a schoolboy. He described himself as "a chaste, puritanical, priggish, rather narcissistic little boy, more repelled than attracted to sex, which seemed to me a furtive, guilty, soiling thing, exciting, yes, but nothing whatever to do with those feelings which I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love." His father gave him a generous allowance and never insisted that he follow him into the business. First World War After the First World War broke out in August 1914, Ackerley was commissioned as a second lieutenant in September 1914. He was assigned to the 8th Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment, part of the 18th Division, then stationed in East Anglia. In June 1915, he was sent to France. On 1 July 1916, he was wounded at the Battle of the Somme. He was shot in the arm and suffered shards of a whisky bottle becoming imbedded in his side from an explosion. After lying wounded in a shell-hole for six hours, he was rescued and sent home for sick-leave. He soon volunteered to go back to the front. He was promoted to captain, when his elder brother Peter, also an officer in the East Surrey Regiment, arrived in France in December 1916. At the time, Ackerley was his superior officer. He later wrote that the cheerful Peter saluted his brother "gladly and conscientiously." In February 1917, Peter was wounded in action on a dangerous assignment. Though Peter got back to the British lines, Ackerley never saw him again, as he was killed on 7 August 1918, two months before the end of the war. Peter's death haunted Ackerley all his life; he suffered from survivor's guilt. In May 1917, Ackerley led an attack in the Arras region where he was wounded, this time in the buttock and thigh. While he was waiting for help, the Germans arrived and took him prisoner. As an officer, he was assigned to an internment camp in neutral Switzerland, which was relatively comfortable. Here he began his play, The Prisoners of War, which expresses the cabin fever of captivity and his frustrated longings for another English prisoner. Ackerley was not repatriated to England until after the war ended. Temporary Captain Ackerley relinquished his commission on completion of service, 24 April 1919. Career From the autumn of 1919, Ackerley attended Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was in the same year as Patrick Blackett, Geoffrey Webb and Kingsley Martin. After graduating with a third-class degree in English in 1921, he moved to London, where he enjoyed the cosmopolitan capital and continued to write. In 1923 his play The Prisoners of War was included in a collection of young British writers, so he began to receive some recognition. He met E. M. Forster and other literary bright lights, but was lonely, despite numerous sexual partners. With his play having trouble finding a producer and feeling generally adrift and distant from his family, Ackerley turned to Forster for guidance. Forster, whom he knew from A Passage to India, arranged a position as secretary to the Maharaja of Chhatarpur. Ackerley spent about five months in India, which was still under British rule. He developed a strong distaste for the several Anglo-Indians (British people living in India) he met. Ackerley's comic memoir Hindoo Holiday explores some of his experiences. The Maharaja was homosexual, and His Majesty's obsessions and dalliances, along with Ackerley's observations about Anglo-Indians, account for much of the humour of the work. In England, Prisoners of War was finally produced in 1925, to some acclaim. Its run began at The Three Hundred Club on 5 July 1925, then transferred to the Playhouse Theatre on 31 August. Ackerley enjoyed his success, returning to London to carouse with its theatrical crowd. Through Cambridge friends, he met John Gielgud and other rising stars of the stage. In 1928 Ackerley joined the staff of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). He worked in the Talks Department, which arranged radio lectures by prominent scholars and public figures. He helped to create the new department, which had an extensive influence on British literary and cultural life. In 1935 Ackerley was appointed Literary Editor of the BBC's magazine The Listener. He served in this position until 1959, discovering and promoting many younger writers, including W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Philip Larkin, and Stephen Spender. Ackerley was one of Francis King's two mentors (the other being C. H. B. Kitchin). Later life and death From 1943, Ackerley lived in a small flat at Putney overlooking the Thames. Almost all his significant work was produced during this period. He had a stable job at the BBC and ended the unsatisfying promiscuity of his younger years. W.... Discover the J R Ackerley W H Auden popular books. Find the top 100 most popular J R Ackerley W H Auden books.