James Kirkup divided his memoirs into numerous short parts, which sometimes jump backwards and forwards in time in confusing ways. A poet could not but be gay is the fourth in publication order, and it deals mostly with his time teaching in Sweden and Spain in the mid-1950s, but there are numerous flashbacks to England in the early fifties and a few looks forward to the next phase of his life, in Japan.

There's a lot of very entertaining gossip about sexual adventures in the public lavatories of Britain and the continent, as well as two more serious love affairs in Spain. But of course there's also a lot about Kirkup's progress as a writer and his literary friendships, most importantly that with Joe Ackerley, who acted as a kind of literary godfather to him and placed a number of his poems in the Listener, usually over the shocked objections of his clerical staff and/or the nervous BBC bureaucracy.

Kirkup reproduces quite a number of letters from Ackerley, most of which either didn't get included in Neville Braybrooke's edition of the Letters, or were heavily cut there. This often shows us a different side of Ackerley from the "official" one: still warm and funny and very supportive of Kirkup, but also liable to become rather cutting about other people who had annoyed him in one way or another.

A particularly enjoyable feature of the memoir is the very natural way Kirkup includes his own poems in the text, in the context of the situations where they were written.

Great fun, but you need to have a certain amount of background knowledge about the English (gay-) literary world in the 1950s, otherwise you're going to get a bit lost in the stream of names. ( )