Kirkup, James.

The Love of Others.

First Edition. London, Collins, 1962. 20.2cm x 13.5cm. 319 (2) pages with the beautiful printed dedication: “To someone, somewhere”. Original Hardcover with original illustrated, unclipped dustjacket in protective Mylar. Unusually excellent condition with only minor signs of external wear. Name of preowner on endpaper.

This novel reveals a boy at that indefinite and indeterminate age when sexual and physical development, having advanced so far, seems to pause before the final assertion of manhood. Pat Lawrence feels himself to be an outsider, one who is unable to respond to, or enter into, the various forms of love or passion offered him or displayed to him by others. The reason for this disability lies partly in the fact that he is suffering a long and difficult adolescence; it is also the result of the clear-eyed commonsense peculiar to certain children. As a literal-minded, lively but totally unromantic boy, Pat is unable to accept the different versions of an emotion suggested to him by devoted parents, relations, strangers, crazy parson and a group of older boys and girls. Love, he feels, instinctively, is a lot of unnecessary fuss and bother. The theme of this story is who or what will awaken him. Set in a large industrial port, the characters and the autumn and the early-winter settings are vividly deployed in brilliantly natural dialogue and description. Scenes of wild comic invention and erotic fantasy alternate with chapters of cnadid relaism and frank pathos.

James Falconer Kirkup, FRSL (23 April 1918 – 10 May 2009) was an English poet, translator and travel writer. He wrote over 30 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays. He wrote under many pen-names including James Falconer, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
James Kirkup was brought up in South Shields, and educated at South Shields Secondary School and Durham University. During World War II he was a conscientious objector, and worked for the Forestry Commission and on the land in the Yorkshire Dales and at the Lansbury Gate Farm, Clavering, Essex. He taught at The Downs School in Colwall, Malvern, where W.H. Auden had earlier been a master. Kirkup wrote his first book of poetry, The Drowned Sailor at the Downs, which was published in 1947. From 1950 to 1952 he was the first Gregory Poetry Fellow at Leeds University, making him the first resident university poet in the United Kingdom.

In 1952 he moved south with his partner Derek to Gloucestershire and became visiting poet at Bath Academy of Art for the next three years. Moving on from Bath, he taught in a London grammar school before leaving England in 1956 to live and work in Europe, the Americas and the Far East. In Japan, he found acceptance and appreciation of his work, and he settled there for 30 years, lecturing in English literature at several universities.
Kirkup came to public attention in 1977, after the newspaper Gay News published his poem The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name, in which a Roman centurion describes his lust for and attraction to the crucified Jesus. The paper was successfully prosecuted in the Whitehouse v Lemon case, along with the editor, Dennis Lemon, for blasphemous libel under the Blasphemy Act 1697, by Mary Whitehouse, then Secretary of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association.
After writing simple verses and rhymes from the age of six and the publication of his first poetry book, ‘The Drowned Sailor’ in 1947, Kirkup’s published works encompassed several dozen collections of poetry, six volumes of autobiography, over a hundred monographs of original work and translations and thousands of shorter pieces in journals and periodicals. His skilled writing of haiku and tanka is acknowledged internationally. Many of his poems recalled his childhood days in the North East, and are featured in such publications as The Sense of the Visit, To the Ancestral North, Throwback, and Shields Sketches.

His home town of South Shields now holds a growing collection of his works in the Central Library, and artefacts from his time in Japan are housed in the nearby Museum. His last volume of poetry was published during the summer of 2008 by Red Squirrel Press, and was launched at a special event at Central Library in South Shields. (Wikipedia).

• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 50174AB

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