THE ACKERLEY LET-

For contrast one could hardly do better than J. R.

TERS, edited by Neville Ackerley's letters. Here is

Braybrooke,

Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 354 pp., $15.·

literary London, a world of books and talk rather than rocks, snow and ice, where for a good many years Ackerley edited the art and book section of the BBC's weekly Listener. He was a close friend of E. M. Forster was homosexual editor and friend carried on a wide correspondence.

like him he and as

Of his memoir, My Father and I, Ackerley said in one of the letters: "It is ever so sad, but rises above itself in a cackle of laughter. That is the way to look at life, I believe." He was not a happy man.

He professed to prefer animals to people, cherished his dog Queenie and wrote a fine book about this "darling friend." Yet "when I think back over the 15 years of our life, oh dear what hell much of it. was: I feel I could never face it again, the responsibility and anxiety of it all. Far better to be dead." Late in life he dwelt more and more on death: “To be old, on the shelf, half deaf, written out ... there isn't much left."

Nevertheless, said W. H.