My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  Perfect health I have won back, but age, though kept at bay, is not to be denied. The worst part of it is that it robs you of hope: you find yourself sighing instead of laughing: the sight of your tomb there just before you on the road is always with you; and since the great adventure of love no longer tempts, one tires of the monotony of work and duties devoid of seduction.

  Without hope, life becomes stale, flat and unprofitable.

  The worst of all is the hopelessness. If you needed money before, there were twenty ways of making it: a little thought and energy and the difficulty was conquered; now, without desire, without joy, without hope, where can you find energy? The mere notion of a crusade fills you with distaste. "Why?

  What for? What's the good?" come to your lips as the tears rise to your eyes.

  Now, too, my memory for names has suddenly become very bad. Often I remember words I want to quote, but for the moment I can't recall the writer's name. Or I go to the shop to buy a book and I've forgotten the author. All this increases my labor and is worse than annoying.

  I try to think it balances another weakness of mine which is exceedingly agreeable. All my life long I have forgotten unpleasant events and ordinary people in the strangest way. My wife often says to me, "You remember Mary or Sarah"-a servant who had done this or omitted to do that: I've forgotten her altogether. I remember my wife getting very angry with me in New York once because a second-rate writer followed me to our gate and got me to lend him ten dollars. "Don't you remember," she exclaimed, "how he spoke and wrote against you not six. months ago?" I have forgotten the whole occurrence; the petty miseries of life are all overwhelmed in oblivion to me very quickly after they occur, and I count this among the chief blessings of my life. The past to me is all sweet and pleasant, like a lovely landscape sunveiled.

  But the present gets steadily darker; and the future! Whitman's plaint over his Leaves of Grass at the very end echoes in my heart.

  Begun in ripen'd youth and steadily pursued, Wandering, peering, dallying with all-war, peace, day and night absorbing, Never even for one brief hour abandoning my task, I end it here in sickness, poverty and old age.

  I sing of life, yet mind me well of death.

  Today shadowy Death dogs my steps, my seated shape, and for years Draws sometimes close to me, as face to face.

  And yet something, is it what Goethe calls "the sweet custom of living," holds one in life.

  I for one cannot accept the solace: with the loss of virility the glamour has gone out of life. One notices that a girl's legs are nothing wonderful; even well formed ones don't thrill and excite as they used to thrill: the magic is almost gone!

  Ten years ago I read the announcements of Paris theatres with vivid curiosity; now I would hardly cross the street to witness the bepuffed sensation of the hour.

  Nearly all the glamour is gone. Five years ago, I'd take up a book I had just corrected, hot from the press, with intense interest: is there anything new and extraordinary in it? Now I read and the critical sense is extravagantly keen because the glamour has gone, even from my own work. I see plainly that my fourth book of Portraits is not so good as the first two; I see that this book of short stories, Undream'd of Shores is nothing like so good as its predecessor, Unpath'd Waters!

  The skies are discrowned of the sunlight The earth dispossessed of the sun.

  Why then continue the struggle? Why not make one's quietus with a bare syringe? I have no fear of the undiscovered country. None! Why hesitate? I can't hope to write better at seventy than at sixty; I know that's not likely.

  Why lag another hour superfluous on the stage? I don't know:

  I pace the earth and breathe the air and feel the sun.

  And there's a certain attraction in it, but very slight: the first hard jolt and I'll go. As it is, my wife's future restrains me more than any other factor: I should grieve her, hurt her? Yet I owe her all kindness!

  There's the hypodermic syringe; tomorrow, I'll buy the morphia.

  Is there, then, no pleasure in life? Oh yes, one; the greatest, keenest, and wholly without alloy, reading! And in the second line, listening to great music and studying beautiful paintings and new works of art: all pure joy without admixture. I go into my little library and take down a Chaucer: it opens at The Persones Tale and in a moment I am in a new world; I read of the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride first, "the rote of all harmes"; for "of this rote springen certain braunches, as ire, envie, accidie or slouthe, avarice or coveitise, glotonie and lecherie…"

  I have no pride whatever, whether within the heart or without, and none of its branches, in especial "no swelling of herte which is when man re-joyceth him of harme that he hath don"; no trace of any branch, except it be lecherie, though how that pleasant sin can be said to be affiliated to pride, I am at a loss to understand.

  I read first of the "stinking sinne of lecherie that men clepen avoutrie" (adultery) "that is of wedded folk and the avouterers shall bren in helle."

  My withers are unwrung; I never coveted another man's wife! But then I read "of lecherie springen divers species, as fornication, betwene man and woman, which ben not maried, and is dedly sinne and ayenst nature."

  "Ayenst nature?" Why? "Parfay the reson of a man eke telleth him wel that it is dedly sinne; for as moche as God forbad lecherie and Seint Poule… "

  Worse follows: "another sinne of lecherie is to bereven a maid of hire maidenhed… thilke precious fruit that the book clepeth the hundreth fruit; in Latine hight centesimus fructus," and I smile, for this sweet pleasure is not specially forbidden by "Seint Poule."

  Finally I glance at the Wif of Bathes' confession:

  I wol not lie;

  A man shall win us best with flateries

  And with attendance and with besinesse

  Ben we ylimed bothe more and lesse, or as I learned it at school, And with a close attendance and attention Are we caught more or less the truth to mention.

  Suddenly another great phrase, especially addressed to women, I believe, catches my eye, warning the fair ones not to dress so as to show the "buttokkes behinde, as it were the hinder part of a she ape in the ful of the mone."

  Laughing merrily, I resolve not to grieve for the fullness of life or for the full moons I have missed!

  Chaucer is but one of many sorcerers who can change the whole world for me and make of heavy, anxious times, joy-brimming, gay hours of amusement and pleasant discourse. And this entertainment I can vary at will; pass from smiling Chaucer to rapt Spenser and hear him telling of … her angel face That made a sunshine in a shady place.

  Thank God! There are hundreds of books I want to read: I must learn Russian and see a new part of God's world; and I've heard of a new Spanish poet from Nicaragua, Ruben Dario, a love poet of the best, whose prose also is remarkable.

  And Arno Holz, whom I met in Berlin, has honey at the heart of him; and Schopenhauer is there, whom I've not listened to for five and twenty years, and so many, many others, thank God. Enough for years! I hate my ignorances: there is Willie Yeats, a compatriot and certainly one of the greatest poets writing in English today, the winner last year of the Nobel prize. And above and beyond them all, Heinrich Heine, whose life I almost wrote and always wished to write-Heine, after Shakespeare, the most lovable of men, "the best of all the humorists," as he said himself, the wisest of moderns, save in his own affairs. I wonder why Heine never wrote any dramas or novels? His keen, impartial vision might have given us wonderful dramas or stories. Why did he never try a novel with that exquisite prose of his, a prose as perfect as Shakespeare's? One of these days I shall give a whole month to Heine, though I know dozens of his poems by heart.

  And so I am bathed again in the profound pleasures of the soul, the joys of art and artistic endeavor and accomplishment, that for us moderns just coming of age outweighs all the comforts and solace of religion. Here at last we mortals are on firm ground, with the profound conviction that at length we have come into our inheritance. For by dint of living to the
highest in us, as artists should, we men can not only make a new world fairer and more soulsatisfying than any ever pictured in the future by the fanatic, but we can enter into and enjoy our paradise when we will. And love is written over the door in luminous, great letters; and all who care to enter are welcome; and one cannot be too hopeful, for here all desires are realized, all forecasts overpassed.

  Now at long last I must take myself seriously to task. Thank God, by taking thought one can add something to one's stature. What is my message to men?

  Men my brothers, men the workers, ever doing something new That which they have done but earnest of the things that they shall do.

  Partly it is the bold joy in love and frank speech, partly the admiration of great men, and especially of the great benefactors of humanity, of the artists and writers who increase our joys, and of the men of science and healing who diminish our pains. Here in this world is our opportunity: here in these seventy years of earthly life our noble, unique inheritance.

  And because of this conviction I loathe wars and the combative, aggressive spirit of the great conquering race, the Anglo-Saxons with their insane, selfish greeds of power and riches. I hate then" successes and dread the life they're building with blood for plaster. I want all the armies disbanded and the navies as well and the manufacture of munitions made a criminal offence everywhere.

  And I want new armies enrolled: the moneys now spent in offense and defense should be devoted to scientific research; schools of science must be endowed in every town on the most liberal scale, and investigators installed for original research and honored as officers. I want schools of music and art too in every city and opera houses and theatres where now are barracks; and above all hospitals instead of our dreadful prisons, and doctors instead of gaolers, nurses instead of executioners. And I want, want, want food and lodging assured to everyone and no questions asked in our poorhouses, which are merely the insurance of the rich against disaster.

  My ideals are all human and all within reach, but realized, they would transfigure life.

  And if this new ideal is not soon brought into life I am frightened, for the abyss yawns before us. Here is Sir Richard Gregory, the famous scientist, sounding the alarm in the daily English press of this year 1924. He tells us,

  "We are on the threshold of developments by which forces will be unloosed and powers acquired far beyond our present imaginings, and if these gifts are misused, mankind must disappear from this planet."

  Yet England and America, too, are spending thousands of millions on armies and navies, sets of false teeth that are no good even to bite with, as I told President Harding-to his horror.

  What can I do to commend the new Ideal State and the new Ideal Individual? Very little and that little will be effective in measure as I better myself and take the motes out of my own eyes.

  Death closes all; yet something ere the end Some work of noble worth may yet be done.

  And so by way of art and letters and belief in a future millenium, on this friendly earth of ours, I reach love of life again and settle down to do the best in me. Can one ever forget that little verse?

  The kiss of the Sun for pardon

  And the song of the birds for mirth-

  One is nearer God's heart in a garden

  Than anywhere else on Earth.

  What do I need after all but a little money to give me security, and even that is not impossible to come by, for my wants are few and I am satisfied with little so long as the spirit is interested and delighted.

  And I have been helped by friends again and again. American friends whom I did not even know have sent me moneys and loving encouragement and time and again brought tears to my eyes, sweet tears of gratitude and affection. I can only do my best for them in return, better than my best if possible. And I begin with this humiliating confession.

  Shakespeare said that he was more sinned against than shining. I wish I could say as much, but I feel that I have sinned against others, at least as deeply as I have been sinned against; and I am not even sure now, as I used to be, that I have been more generous to others than men have been to me.

  A few will surely read this, my book, in the spirit in which it was conceived; some will even see what it has cost me.

  They talk of making money by an outspoken book: it's absurd. If the book is in English, you lose by writing it; you lose by publishing it; you lose by selling it.

  In French it is possible to make money by it, but even there it entails loss of prestige. Victor Marguerite, the son of the famous General, was cut out of the Legion of Honor for publishing La Garconne last year, 1923. And a professor, Edmund Gosse, knighted for mediocrity in England, writes about "the brutality of La Garconne and the foul chaos of Ulysses," though both Victor Marguerite and James Joyce are children of light, above his understanding.

  A year or two ago I was honored on all hands: wherever I came I felt that men and women spoke of me with interest, curiosity at least. Since the first volume of My Life appeared, everywhere I feel the unspoken condemnation and see the sneer or the foul, sidelong grin. I have paid dearly for my boldness.

  All pathmakers, I say to myself, must suffer, but unjust punishment embitters life: the Horridges in England and the Mayers in America are foul diseases.

  Still, my reward is certain, though I shall never see the laurels. Many men and some few women will read me when I am dust and perhaps be a little grateful to me for having burst the fetters and led the way out of the prison of Puritanism into the open air and sunshine of this entrancing world of wonders.

  The other day here in Nice, I heard a delightful limerick:

  If the skirts get any shorter

  Said the Flapper with a sob;

  I'll have two more cheeks to powder

  And a lot more hair to bob.

  Is there not a laugh in it? And a good laugh is something in this ephemeral life of ours.