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We Think the World of You is a story of unnatural love
between a man and his dog. J. R. Ackerley's novel, published
in 1960 but generally unavailable here until this recent
paperback re-issue, concerns a middle-aged man whose ex-sailor
boyfriend goes to jail for housebreaking -- leaving Frank,
the older man, to look after his working-class parents, his
passive-aggressive wife Megan, and their three children,
including her twin daughters from a previous marriage. Frank
performs these obligations with a stolid mixture of natural
generosity, homosexual guilt, and cold-blooded calculation.
He gets along fine with Johnny's shabby parents, Millie and
Tom -- at least with Millie, who is only too happy to sit and
badmouth the despised Megan, with her filthy legs and her
sullen ten-year-olds. But his fantasy -- his fixation -- is to
rescue his handsome sailor from this dreary existence, from
Millie's stuffy kitchen, from Megan's shrill helplessness, and
go off to live together in some primitive paradise as Ideal
Friends. Trouble is, Johnny is serving a 12-month sentence in
the slammer where the restricted numbers of letters and visits
generally go to wives rather than Ideal Friends. And when
Johnny fails to show any imagination in dealing with this
complicated emotional situation, Frank turns his attentions to
a more accessible if unlikely surrogate: Johnny's dog Evie.
"How pretty she was! How elegantly tailored her neat
sable gray, two-piece costume! Her sharp watchful face was
framed in a delicate Elizabethan ruff, which frilled out from
the lobes of her ears and covered all her throat and breast
with a snowy shirt front." In Evie, Frank finds not only
another beautiful object fit for worship, another jewel ripe
for rescue from the suffocating ordinariness of working-class
life, but a kindred spirit. Taking Evie on the daily
constitutional that cranky old Tom can't be bothered with,
Frank soon discovers the dog is a warm, friendly, horribly
neglected beast whose bounteous love is going to waste.
"Day after day, day after day, nothing, nothing: the
giving and the never getting; the hoping and the waiting for
something that never comes; loneliness and frustration...I
ground out the hideous words aloud as I hurled the stick for
the last time." In detailing the transference of Frank's
affections from Johnny to Evie, Ackerley masterfully portrays
the power of romantic obsession: the rediscovery of
"delight," the creation of a world unto itself, the
reckless disregard for anything besides the loved one
(including oneself). The minuscule details accumulate -- he
extracts Evie from her keepers for periods of time, endures
the insulting silent of Johnny and the whiny phone calls from
Megan -- as he plans for the day when he will have his two
loved ones all to himself, a scene in which Ackerley's prose
reaches the height of its delicacy: "And when the time of
their arrival drew near, I went out on to my veranda so that I
might steal from Time the extra happiness of watching them
approach."
Have you ever loved someone so much that you stood in the
window to "steal from Time the extra happiness of
watching them approach"?
The passion contained in We Think the World of You is
equaled only by its devastating self-awareness. The reader
begins to detect early in this brief tale (Ackerley referred
to it as an "Adult Fairy Tale") the delusions of the
narrator: his idealization of Johnny, his transparent
self-projection onto Evie, his odious class-consciousness and
condescension toward Millie and Tom, his misogyny and
irrational hatred of Megan, his utter impatience with their
dogged (sorry) loyalties and flimsy emotions, his all-round
superior attitude. So it comes as a shock when he turns his
penetrating gaze inward and acknowledges what had seemed
entirely unconscious. "Say what one might against these
people, their foolish frames could not bear the weight of
iniquity I had piled upon them; they were, in fact, perfectly
ordinary people behaving in a perfectly ordinary way...Their
problems...had been real problems, and the worlds they so
frequently said they thought of each other apparently seemed
less flimsy to them than they had appeared to me when I tried
to sweep them all away." It's that overused expression of
Millie's -- the casual endearment that makes up the book's
title -- that haunts Frank the most; he learns the hard way,
and somewhat to his horror, how every individual viewpoint
changes the meaning of "we," "the world,"
and "you."
Certain aspects of We Think the World of You -- the
intricately streamlined prose, the graceful narrative style
("its combination of the reminiscent and the
dramatic," as Ackerley's lifelong friend E.M. Forster
termed it), the sexual predilections, the canine connection --
will be familiar to readers of My Father and Myself,
Ackerley's 1968 posthumous memoir, and My Dog Tulip,
his semi-legendary animal study depicting the habits of his
Alsatian bitch Queenie (also known affectionately as "Loonie
Weenie" and "Weenie Woonie"). Ackerley didn't
write much in his 70 years: one novel, one autobiography, one
dog book (all mentioned above), one travel book (Hindoo
Holiday), one play (The Prisoners of War), and one
volume of poetry (Micheldever & Other Poems). He
spent most of his professional life as literary editor of the
BBC's publication, the Listener, which one could only
learn about from his one book of correspondence (The
Ackerley Letters). For his paltry output, Ackerley
considered himself a failure, yet Christopher Isherwood has
pronounced that "each (book) in its different way is a
masterpiece." These books are hard to come by -- I found
a battered paperback of My Dog Tulip for 50 cents in
Harvard Square once, and I think the letters (published by
Harcourt Brace) are on remainder at the Strand, while Hindoo
Holiday is an expensive rarity. But they are decidedly
worth the search, not just for the quality of writing (perfect
elocution could be taught by reading his sentences
aloud) but also for the quality of passion Ackerley sought to steal
from Time.
Soho News, September 1, 1981
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