We Think the World of You

by J. R. Ackerley

  J. R. ACKERLEY (1896–1967) was for many years the literary editor of the BBC magazine The Listener. His works include three memoirs, Hindoo Holiday, My Dog Tulip, and My Father and Myself, and a novel, We Think the World of You (all available as New York Review Books).

  P. N. FURBANK is the author of nine books, including biographies of Samuel Butler, Italo Svevo, and E. M. Forster.

  WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU

  J.R. ACKERLEY

  Introduction by

  P.N. FURBANK

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1960 by J. R. Ackerley

  Copyright renewed © 1988 by Francis King

  Introduction Copyright © 2000 by P. N. Furbank

  All rights reserved.

  Reprinted by arrangement with the Estate of J. R. Ackerley

  First Published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head 1960

  Cover image: Anonymous, Jerome Ltd. studio; collection of Tom Phillips

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Ackerley, J.R. (Joe Randoph), 1896–1967.

  We think the world of you / by J.R. Ackerley; introduction by P.N. Furbank.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-940322-26-9 (paperback :alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-395-4 (paperback: alk. paper)

  1. German shepherd dog Fiction. 2. Dogs—Great Britain Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6001.C4W4 2000

  823'.912—dc 21

  99-34916

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-59017-525-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU

  INTRODUCTION

  Advancing age has only intensified her jealousy. I have lost all my old friends, they fear her and look at me with pity or contempt. We live entirely alone. Unless with her I can never go away. I can scarcely call my soul my own. Not that I am complaining, oh no; yet sometimes as we sit and my mind wanders back to the past, to my youthful ambitions and the freedom and independence I used to enjoy, I wonder what in the world has happened to me and how it all came about. . . . But that leads me into deep waters, too deep for fathoming; it leads me into the darkness of my own mind.

  THE ARRESTING AND minatory last words of We Think the World of You let us into the secret of this remarkable novel. Its protagonists are the narrator, an “educated” man of the professional class named Frank; Johnny, a gentle and inefficient petty criminal, who is his young working-class lover; Johnny’s wife Megan; and Johnny’s beautiful dog (a bitch), who eventually deserts him for Frank. We read it as a history of a set of relationships, a tale of jealousies and cross purposes; but to see it thus is, as the narrator perceives at last, an illusion. It is a story, really, only about Frank himself— about the “darkness” of his own mind and a discovery, or rather two related discoveries, to which, too late, he is brought.

  Thus, though the novel has a heroine, in the shape of the dog Evie, the truth emerging from the tale is nothing about “feminine psychology.” The predatory Evie is a mere stereotype of the feminine, as much so as the pantheress who takes amorous possession of a human being in Balzac’s Une Passion dans le desert—a novel it amused Ackerley to think he was rivaling. (“She [Evie],” Ackerley wrote in a private note, “is Eve, the prototype, Shaw’s tigress.”) The meaning of the book lies, rather, in a discovery that Frank makes about himself—about the exorbitance and mad extravagance of his desire to be given his due, to have justice done to him.

  A desire of this kind, of course, lies behind most childhood quarrels; but it takes on another aspect, growing dangerous and also farcical, when it survives into adult life. We Think the World of You is often wonderfully funny, and its comedy lies in Frank’s dogged and irascible self-commiseration. Frank rages to himself that Johnny’s wife and family, and even Evie, seem to be allowed a larger say in things than himself. Johnny is in jail for housebreaking, and of course visits to him are strictly rationed; but it seems not even to enter anyone’s mind that Frank might have a claim to one. Johnny is allowed to write only so many letters, and he promises one to Frank, as “the only pal I got,” but it never seems to arrive. Will no one, no one, Frank exclaims to himself, admit that he has rights? Thus the nemesis which overtakes him when at last someone (Evie) volunteers to grant him his rights, and more than his rights, has a frightening logic. For this first discovery leads to another, a general truth that we witness Frank perceiving in that final paragraph. It is that, in emotional matters, it may be quite fatal to get what you want.

  I have said that he perceives this. It would be truer to say that he only glimpses it, so in a sense the discovery is as much the reader’s as his. At any rate the suddenness with which it is sprung upon the reader is most telling.

  Ackerley was rightly proud of his novel. He wrote to Stephen Spender that “it has a kind of structural perfection, like an eighteenth-century cabinet, everything sliding nicely and full of secret drawers.” The equation of a human bitch (Megan) with a canine one (Evie)—which is one of its “secret drawers”—is done always indirectly, engendering hilarious cross-purpose conversations. As Peter Parker has pointed out,[1] it is almost as a private joke that Ackerley (or we should rather say Frank) plants a contrast between Megan’s two-piece costume and Evie’s “near sable-gray one.” Equally subtle and inventive is the way the novel is held together by variations on its title phrase cliché, “We think the world of you.” An exceedingly inadequate expression, the exasperated Frank tells himself, typical of Johnny’s whole family’s refusal, or inability, to say, or even think, anything clearly. Does Johnny’s stepfather often beat Evie, asks Frank, with a sick feeling?

  “I wouldn’t say often,” replied Millie mildly. “. . . . He’s a kind man at heart, and he’s fond of her. Oh yes, he thinks the world of her, he do.”

  “Just like Johnny does of me!” I said, getting up.

  “Well, Frank, how are you keeping?” runs Johnny’s so long-awaited and typically hopeless letter.

  “As for myself I am okay but I wish to God it was over. I shall never be able to thank . . . . Megan thinks the world. . . .” There was not a word about Evie. I tore it up and put it in the wastepaper basket. Whatever I might be thinking of Johnny at the moment, it was certainly not the world.

  But eventually the phrase is given to the dog Evie, to describe her feelings about Johnny, and then it sounds right and touchingly in place. “She had perceived instantly the truth about him, that, as Millie once angrily declared, he was a gentle, tender-hearted boy, and that he thought the world of her.”

  How exactly Ackerley knew what he was doing with his novel is shown by some calm comments he made in the margin of a (stupid) report by a publisher’s reader. “The story,” he wrote, “is subtly contrived to turn completely over so that his [Frank’s] ‘persecutors’ can be viewed in a sympathetic light.” He has in mind the moment, very effective in its context, when Frank briefly comes to his senses: “Say what one might against these people, their foolish frames could not bear the iniquity I had piled upon them; they were in fact perfectly ordinary people behaving in a perfectly ordinary way.”

  On
e should not take these craftsmanlike comments of Ackerley’s as spelling detachment. This novel, like My Father and Myself (1968), was, as you might say, written with his heart’s blood. For a writer of his talent, Ackerley’s output was meager, a yawning gap of twenty-four years separating his Hindoo Holiday (1932) from My Dog Tulip (1956). His writing was always long worked over, and only done to free himself from some longstanding obsession. In My Father and Myself (1968) the obsession was with all the things about his life that he might so easily have told his father, had he had the wit to do so.

  When I say that it does not greatly affect matters that the “she” in his novel is a dog, rather than a woman, I mean affect them artistically. As regards Ackerley personally, it hardly needs saying, his having had a long and checkered “affair” with a dog mattered vastly; and since not just one but two of his books were inspired by this affair, one is perhaps justified in saying a word about it.

  In his earlier life Ackerley was, in a way, much favored by fortune. He was very good-looking, had indulgent parents and devoted friends, among them his guru E. M. Forster, and was a highly regarded literary editor. It is true that he had a complicated and harassing love life, being incorrigibly promiscuous (though he did not see it that way himself). Every three weeks or so, he would have found the love of his life. He also had a passion for telling the truth at the wrong moment. If a lover of his got into trouble—for instance for housebreaking or deserting from the army—he would picture a magnificent courtroom role for himself, such as would infallibly have doubled his friend’s sentence, and perhaps land himself in jail also.

  “Joe,” his friends would say ruefully, “would never change.” They meant he had no capacity for learning from experience, and in this they may have been right. Nevertheless they were wrong in saying that he would never change. His real-life liaison with a dog (an Alsatian called Queenie) changed him radically. It turned him into a misanthrope, irascibly championing the animal kingdom against the human one.

  Which is a clue for saying something else in praise of Ackerley’s novel, though it may not have been part of Ackerley’s conscious intention. Frank, so implacably and even hilariously determined to think the worst of Megan, is plainly a misogynist; and the novel provides a startlingly clear demonstration of what misogyny is. The misogynist is someone looking for a woman, someone wanting to figure magnificently in a woman’s eyes and to arouse possessive feelings in her, but for whom this desired female conquest has to appear in a disguised shape. This represents a serious problem if the shape is masculine—or indeed a whole set of problems. But it would not be so, the devil whispers, if the shape were canine. Of course, in actual fact, dogs do not have gender, which is a human construction. But they have sex, upon which fantasies of gender can comfortably play. It was absolutely essential that the animal to which Frank transfers his affections from his lover Johnny should be female. There could be no writing a We Think the World of You about a “Towzer” or a “Rover.”

  — P. N. FURBANK

  1. Peter Parker, Ackerley: A Life of J. R. Ackerley (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), p. 348.

  WE THINK THE WORLD OF YOU

  To My Sister Nancy

  with love and gratitude

  JOHNNY WEPT WHEN I was taken down to visit him. It was a thing that I had never seen him do before. I sat down beside him on the hard bench and took his hand in mine.

  “I’m so sorry, Johnny,” I said.

  “It couldn’t be ’elped, Frank,” he replied. That was characteristic anyway and, no doubt, in the circumstances, a decent thing to say; but I was in no mood to accept, even in absolution, a spineless fatalism which, repugnant in itself to my more determined nature, might also have provided an epitaph for the tomb of our friendship. But this was no moment to argue.

  “What happened?” I asked. I had not gathered much from vile Megan’s incoherent phone call the previous evening. He told me.

  “If only you’d come to see me!” I said bitterly.

  “I wish I ’ad now, Frank. I let you down, I know.”

  “I suppose I let you down too. If I’d lent you that money——”

  “It wouldn’t ’ave made no difference,” he cut in, thrusting back the tangle of dark curly hair that had fallen over his eyes. “I needed more than that.”

  Yes, he was a good boy and he was exempting me, not from blame—the disturbances of the past had been none of my making—but from the very hint of it, the faintest shadow of doubt. The magnitude of the disaster suddenly overwhelmed me.

  “Oh, Johnny, why didn’t you confide in me? Why on earth did you keep away? I’d have given you the money if I’d known how badly you needed it. Or anything else you wanted. But you turned me down. You gave me up.”

  “I know you would, Frank. You’ve been good to me. But I didn’t ought to ’ave asked you, not after the way I let you down, and I couldn’t ask you no more. Besides, I didn’t like to go on taking your money. I know you don’t ’ave a lot. I wanted to make some of me own.”

  “Your own!” He had been caught house-breaking.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” said he, with a disarming smile. “I worked for it, didn’t I?”

  “And look where you are!”

  “Some bastard shopped me,” he said morosely. “I’d ’ave got away with it otherwise.”

  “Oh, Johnny, we were so happy once. Why did you let it all go? I’d have done anything for you, anything, you know that.”

  “It was me own fault. I was a mug. I’ve no one but meself to blame.” I didn’t say anything. “It was the beer too,” he added. I let it all pass. What was the good of going back into it now? He wanted it that way. “What d’you think I’ll get?” I murmured some comfort about first offenses. “Will you do something for me now, Frank?”

  But that was too much. That revolted me.

  “Johnny! You’re not going to ask me to help that disgusting woman of yours!”

  “You don’t want to take no notice of ’er,” said he mildly.

  “That’s just what I’m saying,” I retorted. “I don’t want to!”

  “She don’t mean nothing.”

  “She means trouble for me and always has. If she hadn’t stopped you coming to see me, all this would never have happened.”

  “She’s jealous, that’s where it is,” said Johnny, blowing his nose. “She can’t ’elp it.”

  “Johnny!” I cried again, exasperated. “The last time I saw you you called her a bloody cow!”

  “Women!” he exclaimed, with a flash of the old spirit. “They’re all the same!” Then he added: “But she’s sorry now for what she done, I can see that. And she’s been good to me since this ’appened. Ah, you can’t ’elp feeling sorry for ’er.”

  “I can, easily. Is she in it too?”

  “No, she ain’t!” he rapped out with sudden vehemence. “She didn’t know nothing about it, see? You want to be careful saying things like that!”

  “Anyway I wouldn’t lift a finger to help her, so don’t ask me to.”

  “It wasn’t what I was going to ask you, Frank,” said Johnny in his equable way. “I was going to ask you if you could mind Evie for me till this lot’s over?”

  “Evie?” I was astonished. “Who on earth’s Evie?”

  “You know,” said he reproachfully. “She’s my dog. Don’t you remember? I showed ’er to you last time you come.”

  I vaguely recollected then that, a month or more ago when, unwilling to assist him, unable to give him up, I had paid him one of those all-too-frequent visits to find out what had happened to him, what had happened to me, I had inadvertently trodden, in the darkness of his passage, on something that had squeaked and taken refuge elsewhere. If he had shown me the animal afterwards I had no memory of it. I had been in no mood to notice trivialities.

  “Dear Johnny,” I said smiling, “how can I possibly keep a dog?”

  “She wouldn’t be no trouble.”

  “But you know how I live. Who’s to look a
fter her?”

  “She wouldn’t want no looking after. Couldn’t she just stay there?”

  “But who’s to feed her and take her out? Besides, I don’t know anything about dogs, and don’t want to for that matter.”

  “Couldn’t you feed ’er when you come ’ome of an evening?”

  “But I don’t always come home of an evening.”

  “She’d be all right,” said Johnny tenaciously.

  “I’m awfully sorry.” I tried to give the question serious thought. “Why can’t Megan keep her?”

  “ ’Ow can she? She’s got the twins and Dickie to look after. And she’ll ’ave to go to work now, too.”

  First to be pushed out by her; now, it seemed, to be left out by him; it was insufferable!

  “So have I!” I said abruptly.

  “I think the world of ’er,” muttered Johnny.

  “Yes,” I said acidly. “I noticed you’d changed your mind.”

  “No, Evie,” said he. “Anyway, Megan don’t want ’er.”

  “Nor do I, Johnny.”

  He gnawed at his nails.

  “I don’t know what to do for the best.” After a moment he added: “She’s expectin’.”

  “But I thought she was only a puppy?”

  “No, Megan.”

  I struck my forehead.

  “What, again!” This would be the fourth. “I thought you weren’t going to have any more?”

  “We wasn’t. But you know ’ow these things ’appen.”

  Then he burst into tears.

  “Johnny . . . . Johnny . . . .” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to tell you, Frank,” he sobbed; “but she’ll ’ave to turn out now, too. We owes some back rent. God knows what’ll ’appen.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “About two months, I think.”

  “Christ! What a muddle!” I sat for a moment holding his limp hand and trying to assimilate these new disasters. Then I said: “Well, Johnny, I’m sorry I can’t take your dog, but I’ll see you don’t lose your home. And I’ll go and talk to your mother. I expect we can fix things up between us. Does she know, by the way?”