|
Myers Literary Guide:
|
The North-East
|
|
JAMES KIRKUP (1918 - 2009) Kirkup, the only son of a carpenter, was born in Cockburn Street, South Shields and later moved to 3 Ada Street. After the South Shields High School, He attended Durham University, taking a degree in modern languages. During WWII, he became a conscientious objector, and worked for the forestry in the North Tyne Valley. Kirkup later held many academic appointments, particularly in Malaysia and Japan. The Only Child (1957) is an enchanting memoir of a child’s life in 1920’s South Shields, and was followed up by a sequel, Sorrows, Passions and Alarms. He later re-wrote these memoirs, laying much greater stress on his sexual proclivities, a theme he continued with startling frankness in autobiographical works published in the 1990s. Kirkup was a fine translator and also wrote books on Japan. His poetry books include A Correct Compassion (1952) and Paper Windows (1968). He caused considerable controversy in 1977 when his poem ‘The love that dares to speak its name’ occasioned the first prosecution for blasphemous libel for fifty years. It concerns the ruminations of a homosexual Roman soldier gazing on the body of the crucified Christ. The editor of Gay News was fined and given a suspended prison sentence. Kirkup gave a reading from his A Bewick Bestiary in the Hancock Museum, Newcastle in 1971, and was brave enough to be photographed on the Newcastle streets in a kimono. This provoked a heckler at the reading. He probably did himself no favours either by describing his recreation in Who’s Who as: ‘standing in shafts of moonlight’. From 1977 until his retirement in 1988, he was professor of English literature at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. For the latter period of his life he lived in Andorra, and wrote obituaries for the Independent.
|
|