Sins of the father
STUART HOOD
There is a dead area in Victorian literature, a hiatus that lies at the heart of even such a great work as Middlemarch. Had we only their fiction to go by we would not know that the Victorians not only propagated the species but were as active and as diversely active sexually as men and women seem to have been throughout his- tory. The evidence lies elsewhere: in Dostoiev- sky's description of the hordes of prostitutes in Haymarket, which so astonished him when he came to visit the great industrial exhibition of 1862, in Walter's Secret Life with its matter-of- fact accounts of brothels, houses of assignation, easy servant-girls and bogus seamstresses, ready —then as now—to repair trousers 'while you wait.' Yet it is still difficult to penetrate behind
the eyes which look so fixedly at us out of the brown photographs and to speculate what memories, what vestigial caresses, lingered in their minds as the photographer stretched out from under his black tent and with a theatrical gesture of the hand froze these men and women for ever.
Joe Ackerley possessed precisely such a photograph. It showed his father—an ex-trooper of the Household Cavalry and a fine upstand- ing man—with three other young men. They are wearing boaters and open-necked shirts, their flannel trousers are supported by cummer- bunds. One of them is a Count of the Holy Roman Empires They have rented a house in New Brighton, Cheshire, for the summer in which they live as a stylish male colony, boxing, playing poker, driving about in a smart dog- cart. Behind them is an open window. Would that I had been able to peep and eavesdrop through that windoiv,' says Ackerley, 'and dis- cover their secrets, if any.'
It was a very long time before he did discover some of his father's secrets, although he could hardly escape the conviction that things were not exactly normal. 'I was born,' runs the first sentence of the book, 'in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919:' There was an aunt who kept dropping dark hiriti; an uncle burdened in his cups by some guilty confidence; a business partner—one of the four young men in the photograph—who, after the old man's death from syphilis contracted as a trooper in Egypt, said: 'If you take my advice, you will let me have your father's desk burned with all its con- tents.' Ackerley agreed. He in any case by this time knew one secret, which was that for years his father had been supporting a second estab- lishment for a woman who had borne him two daughters. It was the expense of their education that had made him, although he was by now a banana king, curiously tight with money on occasion. Not that he had been anything but generous to his son—affectionate, too, in his way—tolerant of the young man's literary in- clinations and increasingly apparent homo- sexuality. BOt there had been no reciprocity, no exchange of confidence such as might have allowed the old man to unburden himself. Father and son had not been able to find each other. It is a common enough phenomenon.
Long after his father's death Ackerley began to understand how tragic it was that the barrier had persisted between them—realised that, had they been able to speak, the help and comfort might have been mutual. He was bY now a practising homo-sextial, Caught in a long series of attachments, some casual, some more en- during, all marked by his ultimate inability to love another human being fully. He was Working', fa the in*, reasonably, well-dff, the kind of man who runs a bachelor establibnent and takes OR with working-class boys: His hi- clination.s naturally dreW him to the ranks of the Household Cavalry, that reservoir of male whores. But he still did not stumble on the clue to the photograph of the four young men or to the vindictive laW-suit fought between the Count and his father—a law-suit with baffling over- tones of emotion in which, as in a bitter divorce case, money was a terrible symbol of love de- nied. That he was still unable to penetrate the secret of his father's sexual life is not surprising; there is nothing more difficult a son may pro- pose to himself than to picture concretely his father's sexual activity. A chance reference by an old queer with whom Ackerley had found lodgings, the identification of a portrait on the stairs as that of the Count, set him on the trail. The search for certainty lasted for years. It led him back to the old man who was now 'hiding from death like a frightened animal.' Ackerley cornered him. He wanted facts, but facts were not to be had, only evasions.
The book is .a search for truths about sexual and, in particular, homosexual be- haviour. It is written with wit and honesty, coloured with sadness over the failure to achieve a human connection, clouded by human suffer- ing such as was imposed by legislation based on a mediaeval view of sexual deviation.
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