My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  I saw this perfectly exemplified in the Archbishops Manning and Newman. I had gone to see Manning at Westminster because of an article on the poor of the East End, in whom he professed to be greatly interested. He kept me waiting that first time and then had little knowledge to give me, indeed, had to summon an attendant priest in order to be coached. I shrugged my shoulders and soon rose to go; then he dropped the pontifical air and assured me that he would be much obliged if I sent him whatever I wrote about the East End. From that time on he was perfectly courteous and sympathetic, but I could not but contrast my first impression of him, seated in his great chair and with an attendant priest standing by him, with the perfect simplicity of Newman, who was unaffectedly pleased with my enthusiastic praise of his Apologia and almost immediately wanted to know where I stood, what school of thought I favoured, what my opinions were on the great themes.

  When he learned of my utter disbelief, he seemed distressed: I hastened to admit that man's respect for unselfish loving-kindness and indeed for all that is above him showed a touch of the Divine, but Nature red in beak and claw was appalling, and- Newman nodded gravely. "Doubts are stepping stones to faith," he said, nursing his chin on his hand. "Faith is priceless, wings above the abyss, making us one with the universal soul."

  "That reminds me," I said, "of the noblest words in the Religio Medici:

  There is surely some piece of Divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage to the sun.

  "Magnificent!" the old saint cried, his whole face lighting up with a sort of supernal radiance. "Magnificent! Noble words, magnificent; but did you ever read his Christian Morals and his Vulgar and Common Errors? I like them both."

  "No," I replied, "but I'll get them. I love his Hydriotaphia; the last chapter of the Urn Burial is glorious, full of passages finer even than Bossuet (Newman nodded smiling); Browne is an enigma to me, a country doctor commanding magical phrases, and yet though as a boy he may have seen Shakespeare, he never mentions him, so far as I know."

  "He was a great man, nevertheless," said Newman, "and we are all his debtors.

  Do you remember one thing he said: 'I love to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an O, altitudo?' "t I shook my head, and towards the close of our talk he counselled me, smiling, "You should not depreciate memory as you did the other day: it's ungrateful when you can carry about with you in memory's satchel such priceless jewels as that sentence of Browne. Such words enrich life."

  I had only said that great verbal memory often hindered one from thinking for oneself, but the memory of great things said greatly do indeed enrich life, as Newman said, and there are few more notable jewels in all English prose than this of Sir Thomas Browne. Whenever I think of Newman and his passionate faith, I am reminded of the great verse: … Life's truer name Is "Onward." No discordance in the roll And march of that Eternal Harmony To which the stars beat time- Only great souls can be so persuaded!

  CHAPTER XX

  Memories of Guy de Maupassant

  It was in the early eighties that Blanche Macchetta, or Roosevelt, as she was before her marriage, made me intimate with Maupassant in Paris.

  Blanche was an American who had come abroad to Milan to study singing; she was extraordinarily good-looking, a tall well-made blonde with masses of red-gold hair and classically perfect features. She had deserted music for matrimony, had married an Italian and lived in Italy for years, and yet spoke Italian with a strong American accent and could never learn the past participles of some of the irregular verbs. French she spoke in the same way, but more fluently and with a complete contempt, not only of syntax but also of the gender of substantives. Yet she was an excellent companion, full of life and gaiety, good-tempered and eager always to do anyone a good turn. She wrote a novel in English called The Copper Queen, and on the strength of it talked of herself as a femme de lettres and artist. She evidently knew Maupassant very well indeed and was much liked by him, for her praise of me made him friendly at once.

  His appearance did not suggest talent: he was hardly middle height but markedly strong and handsome; the forehead square and rather high; the nose well cut and almost Grecian; the chin firm without being hard; the eyes well set and in color a greyish-blue; his hair and thick moustache were very dark and he wore besides a little spot of hair on his underlip. His manners were excellent, but at first he seemed reserved and unwilling to talk about himself or his achievements. He had already written La Maison Tellier, which I thought a better Boucle de Suif.

  Let no one think my inability to trace De Maupassant's genius in his appearance or manner was peculiar; Frenchmen who had known him for years saw nothing in him, had no inkling of his talent. One day Zola told me that even when the "Medan" stories were being written, no one expected anything from Guy de Maupassant. It was naturally resolved that Zola's story should come first and the other five contributors were to be classed after being read. Maupassant was left to the very last; he read Boule de Suif. As soon as he had finished, all the six called out that it was a wonder and hailed him with French enthusiasm as a master-writer.

  His reserve at first was almost impenetrable and he wore coat armour, as I called it to myself, of many youthful pretences. At one time he told me he was a Norman and had the Norman love of seafaring; at another he confessed that his family came from Lorraine and his name was evidently derived from mauvais passant. Now and then he would say he only wrote books to get money to go yachting, and almost ha the same breath he would tell how Flaubert corrected his first poems and stories and really taught him how to write, though manifestly he owed little to any teaching. Toward the end he had been so courted by princes that he took on a tincture of snobbism, and, it is said, wore the crown of a marquis inside his hat, though he had no shadow of a right to it, or indeed to the noble de which he always used. But at bottom, like most talented Frenchmen, he cared little for titles and constantly preached the nobility and necessity of work and of the daily task; in fact, he admired only the aristocracy of genius and the achievements of artists and men of science.

  He dined with me and I told him I wanted to publish his stories in English and would pay for them at the highest French rate. He seemed surprised, but he had need of money and soon sent me stories, some of which I published later in the Fortnightly Review.

  One winter Dilke lent me his villa at the Cap Brun near Toulon. I invited Percy Ffrench of Monivae, who had once been British ambassador at Madrid, to pay me a visit, and while he was living with me, we ran across Maupassant in Cannes. Ffrench spoke French as well as English and his praise of me and of my influence in England seemed to affect Maupassant; at any rate, he agreed to come to us on a visit for a few days. He stayed a week or so and I began to know him intimately.

  One evening I remember I was praising L'Heritage to him. He told me what I had guessed, that the bureau life depicted in the story was taken from his experiences in the Ministry of the Marine in his early days in Paris. I suggested that the ending was too prolonged, that the story ended inevitably with the heroine's condemnation of the girls who proposed to do exactly what she had done. "Comme ces creatures sont infames" should have been the last word of the tale. He hesitated a little and then, "I believe you're right: that gives snap and emphasis to the Irony." After reflecting a little, he asked,

  "Why don't you write stories?"

  "I haven't the art," I replied carelessly, "and I love hie more than any transcript of it."

  "You couldn't be so good a critic," he went on, "unless you were also a creator.

  Get to work and we'll have the pleasure of criticizing you in turn."

  "I'll think of it," I replied, and indeed from that day on the suggestion never left me. Could I be a writer? I had always known that I could be a good speaker and political thinker, but to write was to measure myself with the greatest; had I genius? If not, I'd be a fool to begin. Suddenly it came into my head that I might tell a tale or two and see what effect they'd have. But I didn't take
the work seriously for some time; not indeed until the idea of a seat in Parliament became silly to me, but that's another story.

  The better I knew Maupassant the more I got to like him. He was a typical Frenchman in many ways; kindly, good-humoured and fair-minded. He liked rowing, was very proud, indeed, of his strength and exceedingly surprised to find that my early English school training and the university life in the U.S.A. had made me, if not stronger, certainly more adroit, than he was.

  It was from him I first heard the French proverb, ban animal, bon homme. His physical vigour was extraordinary; he told, for instance, of rowing all the night through after being the whole day on the Seine. Horseplay always appealed to him, too, even when he happened to be the victim. One morning on the river at Argenteuil, when he rose to take another's place at an oar and stepped on the gunwale of the stout boat to pass on to his thwart, the steersman, seeing the opportunity, threw himself on the gunwale at the exact moment and Maupassant was tossed into the water. "I couldn't help laughing," he said. "It was so perfectly timed."

  "Had you a change of clothes?" I asked.

  "Oh, no!" he crowed. "I simply rowed hard till I got hot and the clothes dried on me. In those days I never caught cold…" It was this abounding physical vigour, I think, that inspired his kindly judgments of his contemporaries and rivals: he found genius even in Bourget. The only person I ever heard him criticize unfairly was E. de Goncourt: he always spoke derisively of his ecriture artiste. "The people who have nothing to say are naturally very careful how they say it," was one of his remarks. "It's when the two powers are found together, a deep, true vision of life and a love of words, as in Flaubert, that you get the great master." Goncourt was even more prejudiced; after Maupassant's death he denied vehemently that he was a great writer.

  As soon as Maupassant found that I was muscularly very strong, fully his equal indeed, he began to talk of amatory performances. He was curiously vain, like many Frenchmen, and not of his highest powers.

  "Most people," he said, "are inclined to think that the lower classes, working men and especially sailors, are better lovers than those who live sedentary lives. I don't believe that; the writer or artist who takes exercise and keeps himself in good health is a better performer in love's list than the navvy or ploughman. It needs brains," was his thesis, "to give another the greatest possible amount of pleasure."

  We all three discussed the matter at great length. I told him I thought youth was the chief condition of success, but to our surprise he would not agree to that, and clinched the matter by talking of a dozen consecutive embraces as nothing out of the common. Laughingly, I reminded him of Monsieur Six-fois in Casanova, but he would not accept even that authority.

  "Six-fois," he cried contemptuously. "I've done it six fois in an hour." I cannot but think that some such statement as this grew into the story told me in Nice in 1923 by my friend George Maurevert, the writer, that Maupassant, excited by Flaubert's disbelief, went once with a huissier as witness to a brothel in Paris and had six girls in an hour. Flaubert was singularly ascetic, yet very much interested in Maupassant's astounding virility.

  Believe this story or not as you please, but no one should take it as a libel on Maupassant-still less on contemporary French manners-for Lumbrose tells in his book how Bourget and Maupassant paid a visit to a low brothel in Rome, where Bourget sat in a corner, he says, and was mocked by Maupassant, who went off with a girl.

  Time and again Maupassant told me he could go on embracing as long as he wished.

  "A dangerous power," I said, thinking he was merely bragging.

  "Why dangerous?" he asked.

  "Because you could easily get to exhaustion and nervous breakdown," I replied. "But you must be speaking metaphorically."

  "Indeed I'm not," he insisted, "and as for exhaustion, I don't know what you mean; I'm as tired after two or three times as I am after twenty."

  "Twenty!" I exclaimed, laughing. "Poor Casanova is not in it."

  "I've counted twenty and more," Maupassant insisted.

  I could do nothing but shrug my shoulders. "Surely you know," he went on after a pause, "that in two or three times you exhaust your stock of semen so that you can go on afterwards without further loss?"

  "There would be increased nerve exhaustion, surely," I countered.

  "I don't feel it," he answered.

  As we separated for the night, Ffrench declared that the whole thing was French braggartism. "They love to show off," he insisted.

  But I could not be so sure; Maupassant had made an impression on me of veracity and he was certainly very strong.

  On reflection, the idea came to me that perhaps he had begun to care for women very late in life and that in boyhood he had never practiced selfabuse and so had arrears to make up. I determined to ask him when I got a good chance, and a day or two later, when Ffrench happened to be out somewhere and Maupassant and I went for a walk to Toulon, I put the question to him.

  "No, no," he replied. "I learned to excite myself by chance. When I was about twelve a sailor one day practiced the art before me, and afterwards, like most healthy boys, I played with myself occasionally. But I did not yield to my desires often."

  "Was it religion restrained you?" I asked.

  "Oh, dear, no!" he cried. "I was never religious; even as a boy religion was repulsive to me. When I was about sixteen I had a girl, and the delight she gave me cured me of self-abuse. I believe that my experiences were fairly normal, save that I learned from E- that I could go on longer than most men.

  "I suppose I am a little out of the common sexually," he resumed, "for I can make my instrument stand whenever I please."

  "Really?" I exclaimed, too astonished to think.

  "Look at my trousers," he remarked, laughing, and there on the road he showed me that he was telling the truth.

  "What an extraordinary power," I cried. "I thought I was abnormal in that way, for I always get excited in a moment, and I have heard men say that they needed some time to get ready for the act; but your power is far beyond anything I have ever seen or heard of."

  "That is the worst of it," he remarked quietly. "If you get a reputation, some of them practically offer themselves. But one often meets women who don't care much for the act. I suppose you meet that sort oftener in England, if half one hears is true, than in France. Here the women are generally normal. But it's seldom they feel intensely: however, some do, thank God."

  Naturally I spent a great deal of thought on his abnormality.

  I soon noticed that he did not admire girls as I did. He seemed to prefer women and to keep to one or two. I half came to the conclusion that he husbanded his powers more than most men. But this he denied absolutely.

  "Temptation is there to be yielded to," he declared. "I deny myself nothing that suits or pleases me in life; why should I?"

  He was as much given to the pursuit of the unknown as anyone could be. I remember once, when we were talking of hunting big game in America or in Africa, he broke in, declaring that woman is the only game in the wide world worth pursuing. The mere hope of meeting her here or there, in the train going to Cannes or out walking-the Hoped-for One, the Desired- alone gives interest and meaning to life. "The only woman I really love," he went on, with a certain exaltation, "is the Unknown who haunts my imagination- seduction in person, for she possesses all the incompatible perfections I've never yet found in any one woman. She must be intensely sensuous, yet selfcontrolled; soulful, yet a coquette: to find her, that's the great adventure of life and there's no other."

  I was astonished to discover that he was vainer of his amatory performances than even of his stories. "Who knows," he'd say, "whether these tales of mine are going to live or not? It's impossible to tell; you may be among the greatest today but the very next generation may turn away from you. Fame is all chance, the toss of a com, but love, a new sensation, is something saved from oblivion."

  I would not accept this for a moment. "The sensation is fleeting
," I cried, "but the desire of fame seems to me the highest characteristic of humanity and in our lifetime we can be certain of enduring reputation and an influence that lives beyond the grave."

  Maupassant shook his head, smiling. "Tout passe; there is no certainty."

  "We know," I went on, "the whole road humanity has travelled for tens of thousands of years. The foetus in the womb shows our progress from the tadpole to the man, and we know the millenniums of growth from the human child to the thinker and poet, the God-man of today. The same process is still going on in each of us; have you become more pitiful than others, largerhearted, more generous, more sympathetic, more determined to realize the highest in yourself? Put this in your book and it is sure to live with an everwidening popularity. Goethe was right:

  Wer immer strebend sich bemuht

  Den konnen wir erlosen.

  "And Rabelais?" he retorted sarcastically, "and Voltaire? How do they fit in your moral Pantheon?"

  "Voltaire defended Galas," I replied, "and Rabelais would be as easy to praise as Pascal, but your objection has a modicum of truth in it. It is the extraordinary, whether good or evil, that is certain to survive. We remember the name of the Marquis de Sade because of his monstrous, revolting cruelty as surely as that of St. Francis. There's lots of room for scepticism everywhere in life. I was only stating the rule which gives ground enough for hope and encourages to the highest achievement. Three or four of your stories will be read a thousand years hence."

  "We can hardly understand Villon," he retorted, "and the speech of the He de France in the twelfth century is another language to us."