Collecting the Ackerleys

A literary prize and the books that come with it

A few years ago I became a judge for the Ackerley Prize – the PEN Ackerley Prize it then was. This is apparently the only British prize for autobiography, established in 1982 in memory of J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967) – the author of the remarkable memoir My Father and Myself (London: Bodley Head, 1968), among various other works. Between 1935 and 1959 Ackerley also served with formidable brilliance as the literary editor of the BBC magazine The Listener. The journalist Anthony Howard reckoned he was “the greatest literary editor of his time – perhaps of all time”. Geoffrey Grigson claimed that senior colleagues at the BBC tried to get rid of him more than once, “in part, I imagine, because they knew him to be homosexual”.

It wouldn’t be impossible, I suspect, to build a decent collection of Ackerley’s books. At the time of writing, for example, PsychoBabel in Didcot has a few tempting items in stock: Escapers All: Being the personal narratives of fifteen escapers from war-time prison camps, 1914–1918 (London: Bodley Head, 1932), £29; Hindoo Holiday: An Indian journal (London: Chatto and Windus, 1932), £25; and a play, The Prisoners of War (London: Chatto and Windus), £75. The first two of these books come from the collection of Ian Angus, the George Orwell scholar; Orwell had numerous book reviews and several BBC broadcasts published in The Listener, all of which appeared during Ackerley’s time on the magazine. The third, “in good condition for its age”, belonged to the publisher and translator Roger Senhouse, a Bloomsbury connection who had known Ackerley. My impression is that first editions of other titles of his, such as his transparently autobiographical novel We Think the World of You (London: Bodley Head, 1960), wouldn’t be too difficult to track down, with a little time and effort.

No doubt there is much more to be said on this score – about Ackerley and modern gay literature, about The Listener and its contributors, etc. Pictured above and below, however, are some considerably newer and less precious volumes: my reading copies of various books that have been called in for the Ackerley Prize itself.

Many judges on literary prizes will well know the experience of receiving a small deluge of parcels from publishers or a prize administrator. Some of them know this experience as a one-off. (“Never again . . .”, they may be heard muttering to themselves.) The Ackerley is one of those prizes that sticks by its judges from year to year, however, and so I’m starting to get a sense of seasonal repetition, as memoirs published in the past year are selected and called in. They arrive in irregular batches – six came yesterday, but none for several days before that – and come to form an odd, temporary library of their own. Themes emerge (or return). The initial promise of a book’s jacket becomes the disappointment (or joy) of its contents. Blank pieces of paper serve as bookmarks that become pages of notes.

I must, of course, draw a veil over the esoteric rites of the judging process itself; suffice to say, for me and my fellow judges, Peter Parker and Claire Harman, a certain period of reading lies ahead, to be followed by some intense discussion and the public announcement of a shortlist.

I don’t know what other prize judges do (though I’d like to know), but there is then the small question of what to do with that temporary library once it has taken over your whole desk/living room/flat. I’m more or less out of shelf space, I confess. Some Ackerley books fairly quickly go to good homes; others I cling on to but not with any especial force that prevents them, in time, from leaving.

The remainder I’m trying to keep together, though, as an assemblage of autobiography, consisting of books published in the 2020s but often inspired by much earlier times or particular moments in the author’s personal histories. Here is Roy Watkins’s Simple Annals: A memoir of early childhood (London: CB Editions, 2021), one of this publisher’s typically unfussy and smart paperbacks, that reaches back to Lancashire during the Second World War. In publishing terms, Simple Annals is a near-contemporary of Marina Warner’s Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An unreliable memoir (London: William Collins, 2021), a grander hardback in which the author recalls the post-war years, when (among many other things) her parents set up a bookshop in Cairo. These two works exemplify different approaches to life-writing – a more varied genre than is sometimes assumed, perhaps.

Not all of the books pictured here were shortlisted for the prize (or won it), but I suppose that (again, space permitting) the memoir-cluster could be modestly extended back into the Ackerley Prize’s history. Its list of past winners, more than forty of them now, includes a mixture of well-known and now obscurer titles, going back to Edward Blishen’s Shaky Relations (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981) and, a little later, Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984). As I get down to the business of reading for this year’s Ackerley successor, I shall try not to be distracted by thoughts of the deliberations/disputes of the judging panel for the prize in its past iterations . . .

At least one connoisseur-collector has won the Ackerley, meanwhile: Barry Humphries, for More Please: An autobiography (London: Viking, 1992). “Just a tiny something for Barry Humphries”, read a very short letter from Australia that I received last summer, following the comedian’s death in April. “Booksellers everywhere will miss him.” The letter accompanied an exquisitely produced keepsake in Humphries’s memory: Some Poems by Michael Field, printed at the Polar Bear Press, in Tamarama, New South Wales, by Nicholas Pounder. Not a memoir as such. But a suitable way of commemorating Humphries and alluding to the book-collecting element in his life.