Me All Over: Memoirs of a Misfit

Kirkup, a British poet who has also written plays, travel books, novels and a memoir ( A Poet Could Not But Be Gay ), here describes his life in various countries during the late 1950s and early 1960s. After teaching English literature for two years in Japan, he lived in Vienna and later briefly taught in Malaysia. His views on the underground gay male culture in these countries are lively and witty. Of less interest is Kirkup's repetitive sniping at the British Council, an organization he feels deliberately hampered his chances of foreign employment, and his personal attacks on writers he holds in disdain, such as Simone de Beauvoir. Kirkup also focuses on minute and occasionally tedious details of his troubled friendship with the writer Joe Ackerley, who died in 1967. (July)