James Kirkup (1918–2009)

James Kirkup divided his memoirs into numerous short parts, which sometimes jump backwards and forwards in time in confusing ways. A poet could not but be gay is the fourth in publication order, and it deals mostly with his time teaching in Sweden and Spain in the mid-1950s, but there are numerous flashbacks to England in the early fifties and a few looks forward to the next phase of his life, in Japan.

There's a lot of very entertaining gossip about sexual adventures in the public lavatories of Britain and the continent, as well as two more serious love affairs in Spain. But of course there's also a lot about Kirkup's progress as a writer and his literary friendships, most importantly that with Joe Ackerley, who acted as a kind of literary godfather to him and placed a number of his poems in the Listener, usually over the shocked objections of his clerical staff and/or the nervous BBC bureaucracy.

Kirkup reproduces quite a number of letters from Ackerley, most of which either didn't get included in Neville Braybrooke's edition of the Letters, or were heavily cut there. This often shows us a different side of Ackerley from the "official" one: still warm and funny and very supportive of Kirkup, but also liable to become rather cutting about other people who had annoyed him in one way or another.

A particularly enjoyable feature of the memoir is the very natural way Kirkup includes his own poems in the text, in the context of the situations where they were written.

Great fun, but you need to have a certain amount of background knowledge about the English (gay-) literary world in the 1950s, otherwise you're going to get a bit lost in the stream of names.… (mais)

Me all over takes up Kirkup's story around the end of 1958, at the point where Kirkup has come back from Spain and is looking for another opportunity to get out of the oppressive climate of the British Isles. Before he actually gets to the point of leaving for Japan he reverts for a while to his conviction of being persecuted and blacklisted by the British Council. As an openly gay, vegetarian, conscientious objector and founder-member of CND from a working-class background, it's just possible that there might have been things about him that rubbed the 1950s Establishment up the wrong way, so this wasn't necessarily paranoia, even if it sounds very like it. Then we get an entertaining passage in which he annihilates the characters of de Beauvoir, Sartre, Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly within the space of about a page and a half. You can almost see the smoke rising from the paper...

But most of the book is shared between Kirkup's first experiences of Japan, where he was to stay for thirty years, and the last years of his friendship with Joe Ackerley and his sister Nancy West. Again, many of Ackerley's letters are quoted — some of which also appear in Braybrooke's book, but usually with passages excised or names deleted — and Kirkup shares with us the pain of seeing a close friend in decline but on the other side of the world. But there's also a lot of fun in his encounters with Japanese culture, especially the sort of Japanese culture you find in back-alleys and seedy bars, and in his caricatures of the official British expats and the way they panic at the prospect of a loose cannon like Kirkup popping up on their doorstep...… (mais)