by Frank Harris
Frank Harris
My life and loves Vol. 3
For thilke cause, if that ye red
I wolde go the middle wey
And write a boke between the twey
Somewhat of lust, somewhat of lore.
"Moral" Cower (1325–1408)
FOREWORD
Give me the man that on Life's rough sea Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind, Even till the sail-yards tremble, the masts crack, And the rapt ship runs on her side so low That she drinks water while her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man who knows What life and death is; there's not any law Exceeds his knowledge, nor is it lawful That he should stoop to any other law.
Chapman
At length the oracle has spoken. Mr. Justice Levy of the Supreme Court in New York has looked into the second volume of My Life, and "found it necessary to read but a few passages to arrive at the inevitable conclusion that it is neither literature nor art."
Now who made Levy, with his "inevitable conclusion," a judge of literature and art? He may be a judge of what is legal or illegal; but what does he know of literature or art?
Levy proceeds to declare that my book "is not only obviously and unquestionably obscene, lewd, lascivious, and indecent, but it is filthy, disgusting and utterly revolting," and he adds, not seeing that he is contradicting himself, "I purposely refrain from naming it, as I am averse to enhancing its sale"; but if it is "disgusting and utterly revolting," then surely no sale need be feared. Levy, why play Dogberry and write yourself down an ass!
But this New York judge has given the police the power to raid private printing establishments without a search warrant and arrest the printers of a book about which nothing is known! "The police," he declares, "do not merit the criticism leveled at them" for exceeding their constitutional powers.
"Quite the contrary, they are to be commended," for the book turned out to be obscene. Justice Levy's law is as ridiculous as his view of literature. I can only hope the police may raid his house and arrest him for having in his possession a Bible, the obscene passages in which are known to every schoolboy!
Is there any way of arriving at an impartial and definitive judgment on what should be allowed and what should be forbidden in writing of sexual matters? It will scarcely be denied that there is far less freedom of speech in England and the United States than anywhere else in Christendom, and this Anglo-Saxon prudery is hardly more than a century old. It came with the increase of women readers, coincident with the vast growth in wealth and numbers of English-speaking people since the French Revolution. It is manifestly founded on Puritanism and is supported by the middle classes and has no deeper or more rational sanction. In France, and indeed in every country of Europe, the man of letters today can treat sexual facts as freely as the painter or sculptor treats the nude: it is only in England and the United States that he would be advised to speak of his "little Mary" instead of his stomach.
And since this prudery has come into power, English literature has lost its pride of place. French books and Russian books have taken the position once held by English books. If it were worth the trouble, it would be easy to trace the emasculating effect of this prudery throughout English and American literature; but the main facts are manifest and indisputable.
Let us see what the best Frenchmen have to say about their wider liberty, do they praise or condemn it?
Anatole France, who died recently, held for a dozen years the foremost place in French literature. He was, by almost universal consent, the foremost man of letters in the world. A book on him has been published lately by Jean Jacques Brousson, who was for many years his secretary. He calls it Anatole France in Slippers. Again and again Anatole France expresses himself on questions of sex with complete freedom.
"A sad prudery reigns over literature; a prudery more stupid, more cruel, more criminal than the Holy Inquisition." (La triste pudeur regne sur la litterature, la pudeur plus sotte, plus cruelle, que la Sainte Inquisition.) And he goes on:
"I want Venus from head to foot. Her face is good enough for relations and friends and children, and the husband, but her body must be ready for caresses. For I hope you are not one of those fools who would limit the lover to a kiss on the face, as if she were a holy relic. Lovers can claim all the unedited places and the first editions, if I may so speak… (Hark to that, Levy!) "People praise my learning; I only want to be learned now in the things of love. Love is now my sole and particular study. It is to love that I devote the remains of my continually diminishing power. Why can I not write everything that the little god inspires me with?
"For me now a woman is a book. There is no such thing as a bad book, as I have already told you. Going over its pages, one is sure to find some place that will repay you for your trouble. Page by page, my friends, I love to go over it slowly." And while saying this, "he wet his fingers and made the gesture of caressing some imaginary pages, his eyes sparkling with youth," Brousson adds.
Again and again he returns to this theme: here is his advice to his young secretary:
"Make love now, by night and by day, in winter as in summer… You are in the world for that and the rest of life is nothing but vanity, illusion, waste. There is only one science, love; only one riches, love; only one policy, love. To make love is all the law and the prophets."
It must be remembered that Anatole France, when he complains of the prudery and reticence in literature, is speaking of French literature, the frankest in the world. Again and again Anatole France has written and spoken as frankly as I have written in any page of My Life, and yet he complains of French prudery as "stupid, cruel, criminal," and no Judge Levy dares to assail him.
There is another example one should cite. In his last book, published since his death, Paul Verlaine, perhaps the greatest of French poets, certainly one of the immortals, sings the delights even of unnatural passion, and yet the Upton Sinclairs will read us Sunday school lectures of what we must say and what leave unsaid in describing normal human desire.
And if the authority of Anatole France and of Verlaine is not enough, I can comfort myself with the saying of Michelangelo: "The great indiscriminating masses always honor what they should despise and love what they should abhor"; or the saying of perhaps the wisest Frenchman: "The value of any work of art can be gauged by the Indignation it excites among ordinary folk."
When Rubens was criticized by the Archduke Ferdinand, the governor of the Low Countries, for his bold painting of The Three Graces, the great artist answered frankly, "It was in painting the nude that the power of the artist could best be seen" (c'etait au nu qui se voyait le merite de la peinture). And this was said at almost the end of his life.
I leave Sinclair to his Mammonart and communist tracts, for already the new time is upon us and the new paganism is making its claim felt. The old paganism was emphatic enough: Aristophanes wrote stage scenes that would have made Sinclair shudder, and Plato, "the divine one," as Barrett Browning called him, declared in the fifth book of his Republic that the man who condemned women exercising naked was like "unripe fruit" on the tree of life.
And the new paganism, with its creed of self-development, is just as emphatic: we see its first fruits in Anatole France and Verlaine, in La Garconne of Marguerite, in the Ulysses of James Joyce, and in this Life of mine.
There are other signs of the great awakening that the Sinclairs and Levys know nothing about. In the summer of 1921 in Berlin, I was invited by a society to come to one of their meetings in which men, women and children bathed naked and afterwards sat and talked and even lunched in the open air, clad only in their skins. Of course I went and found two hundred and fifty persons of all ages enjoying themselves naturally. The p
rofessor who invited me and his wife beside him and two daughters, one of fifteen and the other of eighteen; we bathed and lunched together, and round us were two hundred others, young and old of both sexes, naked and unashamed. There are, I was assured, over a hundred of these societies in Berlin alone, numbering over one hundred thousand adherents.
As I sat there I became curiously conscious of the fact that the first reformation in religion came from the Germans, and Luther in the sixteenth century was hardly so far in advance of his time as Goethe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Perhaps these Germans, I said to myself, are again leading the world to a new paganism. One thing is certain. Doctors not only in Germany but all over Europe are preaching sun baths and the immense benefit to be derived from sitting naked for some hours a day in hot sunshine.
Of course, England and America will stick to Puritanism and prudery long after they have abandoned all belief in Christ and his commandment.
My professor and his pretty daughters seemed in no doubt as to the future.
One and all declared that the sun bath not only abolished colds and coughs but all sorts of rheumatic aches and pains; the professor declared: "I have never been so well in my life as since I began toasting myself every day in the sun."
But American and English people would naturally ask another question: admitting all the doctors say about the benefit of sun baths, why not take them in private? It does not appear to affect it. The eldest daughter of my professor was engaged to a young chemist, and towards the end of luncheon he joined us and sat with his betrothed, as Adam might have sat with Eve.
Even Germans, well read as they are, do not appear sufficiently to appreciate that in all this they are going back to the old traditions of their race. The chastity of German women surprised the Romans: Tacitus speaks of the German children who ran about the houses naked as when they were born (nudo et sordido), and of the girls as well (eadem juventa); and a century and a half before Tacitus, Caesar in his Sixth Book describes the primitive custom still more startlingly. "They make no secret of the differences of sex"; he writes, "both sexes bathe together in the rivers, and under their fur wraps and little coverings of skin they are completely naked."
The mere fact ought to reassure the prudish majority who seem to think that nudity and shamelessness are intimately connected. Of course I shan't convince the Levys; they are beyond reason and beneath humanity; but I may give pause and thought to some who wish to see things as they are. For plainly we are at the parting of the ways. The World War has taught us many things-taught us, as the great American orator put it, to take new mental bearings and so ascertain when and how far we have gone astray.
I am afraid of repeating myself; but I must confess frankly that my use of complete freedom has not helped me in painting women: reticence in sexual matters has become second nature with them; till some woman breaks through the convention there is little to be done; but surely no unprejudiced person will deny that in painting men, freedom of speech is absolutely essential. Let any one try to paint a Maupassant in conventional terms and he must soon see that he can make nothing of him but a conventional lay figure with the soul of him unexpressed. And, as Anatole France says, "All great artists and writers are sensualists, and sensual in proportion to their genius."
Is it possible to say something new on this question, something that will strike people who wish to think fairly?
The other day in my reading I came across this verse of Heine:
Doch die Kastraten klagten
Als ich meine Stimm' erhob;
Sie klagten, und sie sagten:
Ich sange viel zu grob. (Ever the eunuchs whimpered When I sang out with force, They whimpered and they simpered:
My singing was much too coarse), and his wit inspired me to try once more to explain from a new angle why freedom of speech should be conceded to the literary artist as it is given to the painter or sculptor, whose revelations are surely more exciting than words can be.
There are two essential desires in man: the one is for food, the other for reproduction. While both are imperious, the one is absolutely necessary, the other, to some extent, adventitious. But while the desire for food is necessary and dominant, it has very little to do with the higher nature, with the mind or soul; whereas the sex-urge is connected with everything sweet and noble in the personality. It is in itself the source of all art; it is so intimately one with the love of the beautiful that it cannot be separated from it. It is the origin of all our affections. It redeems marriage, ennobles fatherhood and motherhood, and is in very truth the root of the soul itself and all its aspirations.
Now if religion had set itself to restrain eating and drinking, and to render immoral all descriptions of feasting or of every possible pleasure of the palate, it would have been, it seems to me, within its right. Doctors tell us that men commonly dig their graves with their teeth. The sad results of too much eating and drinking are seen on all sides: women and men at forty or forty516 five go about carrying twenty-five or even fifty or seventy pounds of disgusting fat with them that destroys their health and shortens their lives.
Moreover, no one gets anything from eating and drinking but the mere sensuous gratification; they are not connected with any of the higher instincts of our nature. Religion could have condemned indulgence here, it seems to me, in the most stringent way, and been more or less justified.
But instead of that, Christianity, mainly because of Paul and the fact that he was impotent, has attacked the sexual desire and has tried to condemn it root and branch. It doesn't preach moderation here as it should, but total abstinence; and condemns every sexual provocation and all sensuous desires as if they were contrary to human nature, instead of being the very flower of the soul.
If Paul had been a dispeptic or even of weak digestion, instead of being impotent, there is small doubt that he would have condemned any immoderation in eating and drinking, instead of sexual indulgence. And what a difference this would have made in all our lives, and how much more rational ordinary Christian teaching would have been.
Self-indulgence in eating and drinking is simply loathsome and disgusting to all higher natures, and yet it is persisted in by the majority of mankind without let or hindrance. What preacher ever dares to hold the fat members of his congregation up to ridicule, or dreams of telling them that they are not only disgusting, but stupidly immoral and bent on suicide? Indulgence in sex pleasure is much less dangerous to the individual. It is indeed only when indulgence is carried to excess that sexual pleasure can be harmful.
And what I want to know is, why shouldn't one speak just as openly and freely of the pleasures and pains of sexual indulgence as of the pleasures and pains of eating and drinking? Religion, it seems to me, or our duty to our neighbor, has little to do with either of these dominant desires of humanity. In each of them, religion should preach moderation and due regard for the welfare of our neighbor, and nothing more. For the temptation to excess in any sexual desire is only a sign of natural vigor and is therefore closely allied to virtue: as the Bible says, "Out of strength comes forth sweetness."
Our ordinary convention of speech is simply stupid. I am allowed to talk in any company of the pleasure of eating young partridge, or well-kept pheasant, or high grouse, but I am forbidden to talk in the same way of the pleasures of sexual intercourse. One cannot contrast the thrills of the novice with the delights of the experienced without incurring the condemnation of all and sundry. I can study indigestion and talk of its causes and consequences; I can push my investigations to apoplexy and death; but I must not talk of diseases brought on from sexual promiscuity, nor warn against them. For fifty years now the whole of the prohibitions of society and religion, in this respect, have seemed to me perfectly idiotic. I blame every father and mother for letting boys and girls go into life unschooled and unwarned.
And when in the story of My Life I began to treat sex matters freely and honestly, I was overwhelmed by the preposterous condemnation of the En
glish-speaking peoples. Still, behind the storm of cowardly calumny and silly slander on the part of the self-styled critics, I have been encouraged by the testimony of hundreds of men and women who have written, thanking me for my outspokenness. They have all told me what I knew, that frank expression made my life story more interesting and more valuable; for without knowledge of the sexual life of man or woman, one can know little or nothing of the character. And so I begin this third volume of my autobiography, comprising the ten years between 1890 and 1900, with these words of Heinrich Heine, the first of all the moderns.
Ever the eunuchs whimpered
When I sang out with force,
They whimpered and they simpered:
My singing was much too coarse.
This decade of my life was memorable to me for the discovery of a side of life which I had hitherto almost ignored. I had found out early, at fifteen or sixteen, that if you worked as hard as you could, you came to success everywhere very quickly. So few people do their best that the one who does becomes a marked man almost at once; and thus success leads immediately to large influence. If you choose to save, you can become rich in a few years. But till this later period I had no idea of the speculative part of city life, where fortunes are made in a day by an idea. This knowledge in its complete form came to me through association with Terah Hooley — the great speculator of that mid-period in London. As Maupassant and Randolph Churchill were the heroes of my second volume, so Terah Hooley, Cecil Rhodes, Oscar Wilde, and a host of writers and artists were the dominant personalities of this period.
It was asserted by the official receiver in Hooley's bankruptcy that he had made over six million pounds in two years in London; that is why I call him one of the most successful speculators of that time. Rhodes's fortune was even larger and better based and led to all sorts of political influence which I wish to trace as fairly as I can, for I liked both these men and had good reason to like them.