J. R. Ackerley - Later Life

Later Life

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. What remained was his search for what he called an "Ideal Friend".

Ackerley took financial responsibility for his sister Nancy, who was unstable, and his aging Aunt Bunny. In 1946 (the year his mother died) he acquired an Alsatian named Queenie, a dog that became his primary companion of the next decade. These were his most productive years, when he revised Hindoo Holiday (1952), completed My Dog Tulip (1956) and his novel, We Think the World of You (1960), and worked on drafts of My Father and Myself.

Ackerley left the BBC in 1959. He visited Japan in 1960 to see his friend Francis King; he was very taken with the beauty of the scenery and even more with Japanese men.

On 30 October 1961 Queenie died. Ackerley, who had lost a brother and both parents, described it as "the saddest day of my life." He said: "I would have immolated myself as a suttee when Queenie died. For no human would I ever have done such a thing, but by my love for Queenie I would have been irresistibly compelled." In 1962, We Think the World of You won the W. H. Smith Literary Award, which came with a substantial cash prize, but this did little to stir him from his grief. (He thought Richard Hughes should have won, and also thought little of the award's previous recipients.)

In the years after Queenie's death, Ackerly worked on his memoir about his father and drank too much. His sister Nancy found him dead in his bed on the morning of 4 June 1967. Ackerley's biographer Peter Parker gives the cause of death as coronary thrombosis.

Toward the end of his life, Ackerley sold 1075 letters from Forster, dating from 1922, for which he received ₤6000; as he said, it was "a sum of money which will enable Nancy and me to drink ourselves carelessly into our graves." Ackerley did not live long enough to enjoy the money but, together with the royalties from his existing works as well as several published posthumously, it allowed Nancy Ackerley to live in relative comfort until her death in 1979.