Of All People

'I'll give it you back next week when I see you,' I said. 'Oh, no, don't worry, keep it for the summer,' my friend said. She'll get it back on Thursday okay. Very readable and a couple of days well spent, was James Kirkup's memoir, I, of All People. I knew about Kirkup's poems without being an admirer but I didn't know about his other writing of which I am and am likely to seek out more.

Conscientious objector and mis-fit almost determinedly set against the conservative attitudes of the world he found himself in, he was promiscuous enough to take up prostitution as an income stream when necessary but whereas the easy access availability of  'trade' in the Thom Gunn letters was enough to diminish him, it is such an habitual thing for Kirkup, and is never held up as any solution to his isolation, that it caused no equivalent offence. But since I never held Kirkup's poems in anything like the sort of regard I did Gunn's, there was no such reputation for it to damage.

It is more reason to think of people who write as 'writers' rather than writers of a particular genre. As in Larkin's gravestone, which says 'writer', not 'poet', it matters less what form the writing took but that they were worthy of the name.