My Life And Loves, vol 5

by Frank Harris

Before going on to Japan, I stayed for a couple of months with an English friend and his wife in Hong Kong, but the residence there made little or no impression on me. They told me I should find nothing worthwhile in Japan, but in that they were not soothsayers. Still, for the time being, they gave me rest and change and I was in need of both.

  I write all of these things quite frankly because I believe that Puritanism is not only dead, but deserved to die, and I feel sure that bodily pleasures of all sorts will be more and more sought after in the future.

  CHAPTER VI

  Looking back over my life, I realize with dismay that there are many people and places of which I have not had the opportunity to speak. In this volume therefore there was from the beginning a kind of dual purpose. In the first place, I wished to continue the true story of my life and loves and, in the second, to make up for the unfortunate omissions in the earlier volumes I'd written. Thus, formally speaking, this last, and in a sense, most final of my expressions, will doubtless lack the purposeful continuity of the earlier. In a summing up, that is only to be expected. I make no apologies for it. I should be untrue to my purpose were I to do otherwise than I am doing. For the truth is that I am not satisfied with what I have written; I might have done it better. I am obsessed by the desire to make each chapter of this volume memorable by some new thought.

  The greatest omission as I see it has been amongst some of the great names with whom I was off and on acquainted throughout my colorful life. Without hesitation, therefore, and despising a mechanical chronology, I move now into the consideration of some of the men who have inspired me and whom, not seldom, I have numbered among my friends.

  I was more interested in Meredith than in any other man of my time. I thought him one of the greatest of men, worthy to stand with Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He was one of the handsomest of men, just above middle height, slight and strong of figure with a superb head and face, the head all outlined in graying hair, but excellently shaped and the face noblestraight nose, incomparable blue eyes, now laughing, now pathetic, excellent mouth and chinin sum a very good-looking man, sane and strong. When Grant Allen sent him one of my earliest stories, “Montes the Matador,” he praised it as better than the “Carmen” of Merimee because, he explained, I had given even the bulls individuality. He ended his praise with the words: “If there is any hand in England that can do better, I don't know it.” As I have said somewhere, I regarded that judgment as my knighting. No contempt touched me afterwards; Meredith to me already stood among the greatest.

  Born in 1828, he brought out his first book of Poems in 1851 and I think he was always more of a poet than a prose writer. But good as his best poetry iseven “Love in the Valley” has stanzas I can never forget and Modern Loves with the entrancing “Margaret's Bridal Eve” is greater still; yet neither in poetry nor in prose has Meredith reached the highest or given his full measure.

  The reason always escaped me. When I knew him first about 1885 he was the reader for Chapman and Hall and made his?500 or?600 a year out of this easily enough while his books added perhaps as much more to his income. He had a house on Box Hill in Surrey, and lived like a modest country gentleman. Nothing in his circumstances hindered him from reaching Cervantes or Shakespeare.

  His conversation was astonishing. He touched everything that came up from the highest standpoint; he praised the Irish as if he had been bred in Ireland and the Welsh as if from the highest of the Celtic stock. Once indeed he went so far as to suggest merrily that the English should invade France in order to get some French women to enlarge their matter of fact narrowness of mind. He was in favor of the Boers too, and a passionate advocate of women's suffrage; he wanted feminine influence in government as in the home. Once he went so far as to advocate the making of Britain into one state of the American Union, “the Eastern Star in the Banner of the Republic,” as he said, for he was profoundly convinced that the British were dropping back, were indeed no longer leaders of the world. “Their fatal lack of imagination,” he said, “dwarfs them.” In every question he was an unprejudiced and most interesting guide.

  Every man he mentioned lived unforgettably in his judgment. Who can ever forget his criticism of Tennyson's “dandiacal flutingthe great length of his mild fluency, the yards of linen drapery for the delight of women.” And then “the praises of the book shut me away from my fellows,” and the superb return: “To be sure, there is the magnificent Lucretius.” Then he sees Irving as Romeo: “No loveplay but a pageant with a quaint figure ranting about.” His judgment of Gladstone: “This valiant, prodigiously gifted, in many respects admirable old man is, I fear me, very much an actor.”

  And finally he touches the height in a letter to his son:

  “Don't think that the obscenities mentioned in the Bible do harm to children. The Bible is outspoken upon facts, and rightly. It is because the world is pruriently and stupidly shamefaced that it cannot come in contact with the Bible without convulsions.

  “Look for the truth in everything and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.”

  To an acquaintance he writes protesting against the charge of cynicism:

  “None of my writings can be said to show a want of faith in humanity, or of sympathy with the weaker, or that I do not read the right meaning of strength. And it is not only women of the flesh, but also women in the soul whom I esteem, believe in, and would aid to development”

  I once pressed him for his views of women and found him as wise as Goethe: “We learn the best from those we love,” he said. “We have doubled Seraglio Point, but have not yet rounded Cape Turkthe Turkish idea is very strong in the male breast.”

  Personally I must always speak of Meredith as the most interesting of companions. We agreed in almost everything, but the flashes of his humor made his conversation entrancing. I still regard him with Russel Wallace as the wisest men I've ever met. But Wallace's belief in another and larger life after death shut him away from me while Meredith's love of nature and his delight in nature studies all appealed to me. I remember how I met him for the last time in his little pony-chaise on Box Hill shortly before his death.

  “People talk about me as if I were an old man. I don't feel old in the least. On the contrary,” he went on in his humorous sardonic fashion, “I do not believe in growing old, and I do not see any reason why we should ever die. I take as keen an interest in the movement of life as ever. I enter into the intrigues of parties with the same keen interest as of old. I have seen the illusion of it all, but it does not dull the zest with which I enter into it and I hold more firmly than ever my faith in the constant advancement of the race. My eyes are as good as ever they were, only for small print I need to use spectacles. It is only in my legs that I feel weaker. I can no longer walk vigorously, which is a great privation to me. I used to be a keen walker; I preferred walking to riding; it sent the blood coursing to the brain, and besides, when I walked I could go through woods and footpaths which I could not have done if I had ridden. Now I can only walk about my own garden. It is a question of nerves. If I touch anything, however slightly, I am afraid that I shall fall; that is my only loss. My walking days are over.”

  He did not need to go beyond his garden to be in the midst of the Garden of the Gods. As a young man he wrote:

  When the westering sun is leaving the valley in gloom

  Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping

  Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star

  Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle note unvaried.

  Brooding o'er the gloom,
spins the brown eve-jar.

  Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:

  So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.

  There in the midst of all living, singing, flowering things, he lived alone and marveled that people thought him lonely. His wife had been dead for many years. His daughter was married and lived between Box Hill and Leatherhead. His son, who was in London, came to see him every fortnight.

  “I do not feel in the least lonely,” he told me. “I have my books and my thoughts, and besides, I am never lonely, with Nature and the birds and beasts and insects, and the woods and the trees, in which I find a constant companionship.”

  And on this occasion he went deeper than ever before:

  “I see,” he said, “the revelation of God to man in the history of the world, and in the individual experience of each of us in the progressive triumph of God, and the working of the law by which wrong works out its own destruction. I cannot resist the conviction that there is something more in the world than Nature. Nature is blind. Her law works without regard to individuals. She cares only for the type. To her, life and death are the same. Ceaselessly she works, pressing ever for the improvement of the type. If man should fail her, she will create some other being; but that she has failed with man I am loath to admit, or do I see any evidence of it. It would be good for us,” he added thoughtfully, “if we were to take a lesson from Nature in this respect, and cease to be so wrapped up in individuals, to allow our interests to go out to the race. We should all attain more happiness, especially if we ceased to care so exclusively for the individual I. Happiness is usually a negative thing. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.”

  In this passage I think Meredith reaches the highest: “There is something more (and higher) in the world than Nature.” I put on record the farthest reaches of Meredith's faith which I share. To me this life is all that man knows or can reckon upon, but it is surely in love and spirit-growth a gift incomparable and higher than what we know as Nature. It is the Wallaces and the Merediths who have made it divine to me and perchance in my time, I have made it more worthwhile to certain of my younger companions.

  Of the two, I have always felt myself nearer to Meredith than to any other man I have known personally.

  ***

  I have written little about the greatest English and French actresses of my time; little about Ellen Terry whom I love, and little about Sarah Bernhardt, who for twenty years was the idol of civilized Europe. No two women could be more dissimilar. Whatever height Ellen Terry reached as an actress, she was before and above everything a woman, whereas Sarah was always an actress pure and simple, even when she was most a woman. I knew both women pretty intimately, though Sarah was far nearer to me than Ellen.

  Ellen Terry was the best actress in half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays that I have ever seen. She even made Ophelia interesting.

  Very early in her career I noticed that she talked on the stage, now giving directions to some other actress, now criticizing even Irving. She was the acme of naturalness even on the stage, or rather the stage was the true scene of her life and triumphs. Now she is eighty-odd years old and just as charming and attractive as ever.

  Her first marriage with the great painter, Watts, took place when she was sixteen. Watts was thirty years older. She sat for him in a dozen characters and he painted her magnificently, but what caused the rupture between them he never told. She was almost as reticent, though once she admitted that she “never loved Watts,” which perhaps was confession enough. “He was charming,” she said, “and I loved the pictures he made of me, but I never cared for him.”

  The first time I saw Sarah was in 1878, I think, in the Comedie-Francaise. After the play I went backstage with Marguerite Durand and she introduced me to Sarah. Sarah treated me with very mild interest, but it was destined that I should know her better, though that need not concern us here. I mention it by way of explaining ensuing events.

  I had met the Damalas in Athens; they were all staying at the Hotel d'Athenes just opposite the Royal Palace where I also had a room. The son was in the Corps des Pages; his sister had married a Scot and, deserted by him, was living with her mother. They had all come from Marseilles and were as good-looking a trio as one could meet in a day's walk. The unhappy events surrounding the sister had happy results for me. We came to know each other intimately. I can't forget our first private meeting. She was so eager to feel the hardness of a man between her thighs due to the deprivation she'd recently suffered.

  She came to my room one afternoon while I sat on the balcony admiring the view of the distant Acropolis. It was sunny and hot and I had discarded my shirt. The girl, Ariane, had knocked and entered unbidden, and stood before me wordlessly. She was a beautytall and willowy with dark hair that fell to her shoulders, rounded hips, and lush breasts that thrust against the thin cloth of her dress. I was anxious to see what she would do next as she swayed in front of me, and she didn't disappoint. She slipped the straps of her garment over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She was naked underneath. I stiffened instantly. Her breasts were full and pale and capped expansively with dark nipples that sprang erect under my smoldering gaze. Her thin waist flared into the swell of enticing hips and the sweeping lines of luscious thighs. Between her legs nestled a mossy treasure that I wished to explore.

  I fell to my knees and dove at her tasty fruit, licking and sucking at it like a man dying of thirst in the desert. Ariane threw her head back as my tongue separated the lips of her pussy and probed her depths.

  “I want you to fuck me,” she whispered heatedly.

  Who was I to deny her that which she so eagerly sought? I pulled her to the floor of the terrace with one hand; with the other I loosened my trousers and let them fall. I shuffled forward, leaving them tangled in her dress, and moved between her opened legs. She was exquisite. Her pussy was a smile that was so enticing that I dispensed with further preparation and simply brought my cock to its target. I levered it down and put the head against the pouting lips. Then I thrust forward until that swollen cap was just inside her slit. She gasped and begged me to let her have more, more, more. I reared back and rammed into her, driving the entire length of my ramrod into her lovebox. She immediately clamped her legs around me as if afraid that I would leave her before the final act of our play.

  I began to fuck her forcefully, driving all the way in and pulling nearly all the way out. My hands were clamped onto her heaving tits, crushing them and pinching the enormous nipples that I found so delectable. “Yes, yes,” she moaned, “fuck me like you mean it. Fuck me hard. Ohhh, I had almost forgotten”

  I drove into her with a fury that surprised me. Every fiber of my body, every sense, seemed centered in my cock at that moment. I could feel the pressure building, and knew she was experiencing much the same thing if her writhings were a fair indication. Her breathing came in staccato gasps when she flooded my rod with her pearly nectar. At the same time I shot a copious amount of sperm into her thirsting pussy.

  Sadly, I didn't see Ariane again once I left Athens, but it was not the end of my association with her family.

  The son eventually threw up the page business and went to Paris. Six months later we met in that city, where he soon became the accredited admirer of Sarah Bernhardt. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen and Sarah fell for him to a degree that was almost incredible. She got him to act on her stage and took him on one of her journeys through Eastern Europe. In Trieste, I think it was, she noticed that he was deceiving her with a young actress in her company and at once accused him before the whole troop. Damalas heard her to the end in silence, and then said simply, “Madame, you will never again have the opportunity of calling me names.” His ideal was always the perfect gentleman. He left that same evening for Paris. Without him, she could not continue her tour and returned to Paris disconsolate and begged me to bring about a meeting with the only man she had ever loved. I did as she wished, but Damalas would not
go back to her. “A great talent,” he said to me, “but a small nature and a foul tongue.”

  It was almost her epitaph: I never thought her as great an actress as Ellen Terry.

  In these years in London between the beginning of the century and the Great War, there were many men of ability that one ought to write about. First and foremost of course, Sir Edward Grey, and then Abe Bailey and Barney Barnato, and J. B. Robinson. Grey, of course, was an English aristocrat, whereas the other three were South African millionaires. The first time I met Grey was at dinner at Sir Charles Dilke's. Dilke had a high opinion of him; Grey was good-looking, above medium height, slightly but well built, with a mind that seemed very receptive. In reality, he had no measure of those that talked to him. He accepted Dilke's opinions of South Africa as readily as mine, and when Harold Frederic talked to him of the United States, he accepted some things and rejected others according to his original conceptions. Consequently, he learned nothing valuable. He listened most pleasantly but I soon found out that he had learned nothing except an argument or two to defend his original view. Grey had one of the closed minds of the world and that is almost as bad as to have no mind at all. I rate him now below almost any of his contemporaries.

  Abe Bailey was a Transvaal millionaire, and Barney Barnato had not only made one fortune in Kimberley, but another and larger one in Johannesburg. He lost a million or so bucking against Rhodes and Beit, and he finally threw himself overboard on the steamer returning to England and perished miserably. But Abe Bailey was better balanced, if not so rich; he resolved to make a second home in London, and now for more than 25 years has been an important figure there.

  J. B. Robinson, too, pursued the same course, though for one reason or another he was disliked by most of his fellows. Since the beginning of the century he has been a resident in Park Lane, and is strong and well, though he was over fifty years of age in 1900, a slight weakness of hearing being his chief physical defect. Robinson, curiously enough, was the first man to find and buy diamonds in Kimberley and also was the first to discover and exploit the gold mines of the Rand. He can tell the romantic story of South Africa's wealth better than any other man.