FRANK HARRIS
It must have been five or six years ago that a friend came to me with
the news that Frank Harris had expressed a desire to see some of my
verse. Precisely what my friend had told Harris about me, I do not
know; something very exaggerated, perhaps; something complimentary,
doubtless; something that piqued Harris’s curiosity, it was evident. As
Harris is one of the few modern writers for whom my boyish admiration
has survived manhood, I felt subtly gratified that he should take
even a fleeting interest in me, and I sat down at once and copied out
various poems that had already appeared in _The Academy_, under Lord
Alfred Douglas’s editorship, and in _The English Review_ in the days of
Ford Madox Hueffer, and, more recently, when edited by Austin Harrison.
With my verses I sent a letter, hypocritically modest as regards
myself, honestly full of admiration as regards Harris. He replied from
his villa in Nice, sending me a long letter in which he did me the
honour to enter fully into the supposed merits and demerits of my work.
Of one poem he said that it was not sufficiently sensual, and I have
never been able quite to understand what he meant, for I had, with some
particularity, described seven naked ladies swimming in a pool, and I
had felt that my verses had obviously enough expressed my feelings.
The correspondence continued until, one day, Harris wrote to tell me
he was returning to London and to invite me to visit him there. In the
event, however, my first meeting with Harris was in Manchester, whither
he came to lecture on Shakespeare to the local dramatic society. Jack
Kahane (a great friend of mine) and I met him at the Midland Hotel upon
his arrival, and from the very first moment he intoxicated me. Whilst
he changed from his travelling clothes to evening dress he talked and
ejaculated, beseeching us to remain with him as he had had “a rotten
journey from London and felt unutterably bored.” I remember very little
of what he said except that, with some venom, he called Browning “a not
unprosperous gentleman.” He refused to eat or drink before his lecture
and, presently, we went down to the large room in the hotel where he
was to speak.
We found there a mixed assembly. Everybody in Manchester, it should
be explained, writes plays; at least, I never yet met a man in that
delectable city who does not. Moreover, they “study” them. They weigh
and compare the merits of Stanley Houghton and Ibsen, Harold Brighouse
and Strindberg, Allan Monkhouse and Bjornson, Arnold Bennett and
Hauptmann, Laurence Housman and Brieux, and so forth. They search
for “inner meanings”; the more earnest of them hunt for “messages”;
the more delicate seek to perceive Fine Shades. They are veritable
disciples of Miss Horniman—priggishly intellectual, self-consciously
superior. And, of course, the rock of their salvation is St Bernard.
Innocuous people enough, but impossible to live in the same city with.
To this assembly of earnest, pale men and spectacled women Harris was
to lecture, and I looked from them to Harris and from Harris to them
with joyful expectations. From the very first sentence he was fiery and
provocative, throwing out daring theories, anathematising all forms
of respectability, upholding with unparalleled fierceness a wonderful
ideal of chivalry and nobility and condemning, _en bloc_, the whole
human race, and particularly that portion of it seated before him.
Ladies rustled; men stirred uneasily. Then, having delivered himself
of a passage of hot eloquence, he paused. A clock ticked. He looked
defiantly at us and still paused. A fat lady in the front row, palpably
embarrassed by the long silence and, no doubt, feeling that she had
reached one of the most dramatic moments of her existence, banged her
plump hands together and ejaculated: “Bravo!” A few other ladies of
both sexes joined her, but Harris was not to be placated. Thrusting
out his chin, he began again. And this time he attacked the Mancunian
literary idol, Professor C. H. Herford, a great scholar, but a more
than suitable object for Harris’s ridicule. Herford is a man who has
not lived fully: a semi-invalid, asthmatic, bloodless and spectacled;
a man of books and rather dusty books; in effect, a professor. He
had recently reviewed Harris’s book, _The Man Shakespeare_, in _The
Manchester Guardian_, and had called it “a disgrace to British
scholarship.” Why this should have annoyed the author I cannot tell,
but Harris is at times a little unreasonable. Indeed, “annoyance” but
feebly describes the feeling that spent itself in scalding invective
and the most terrible irony. Each sentence he spoke appeared to be the
last word in bitterness; but each succeeding sentence leaped above
and beyond its predecessor, until at length the speaker had lashed
himself into a state of feeling to express which words were useless.
He stopped magnificently, and this time the room rang with applause.
It is probable that not half-a-dozen people present believed his
attack on Professor Herford was justified; indeed, it is probable that
not half-a-dozen were qualified to form any opinion of value on the
matter. Nevertheless, they applauded him with enthusiasm, and they did
so because they had been deeply stirred by eloquence that can only be
described as superb and by anger that was lava hot in its sincerity.
Briefly, the lecture was an overwhelming success.
I was soon to discover that Harris, like all the men of genius I have
met, is vain. I do not mean that he overrates his gifts: he does not;
nor that his recognition of his own genius is offensively insistent:
such is very far from being the case. I mean that he is inordinately
proud, innocently and childlikely proud, of things that are not of the
least consequence. At supper in the French Restaurant the head waiter
slipped noiselessly across to the table at which Harris, Kahane and I
were sitting. (Harris is the kind of man who acts as a magnet to all
head waiters—a high tribute to his dominating personality.) When our
orders had been given the waiter, turning to go, said: “Very good,
Mr Harris.” On the instant Harris looked up. “So you know me?” he
asked. “Yes, sir. I have had the pleasure of waiting on you in Monte
Carlo and, if I am not mistaken, in New York as well.” It is difficult
to describe the naïve pleasure Harris took in this: it stamped him at
once as a man of the world—he who, of all people, required, in our
opinion, no such stamp.
For six hours we talked—talked long after every other visitor in the
hotel had retired, and we were left alone in the Octagon Court in a
pool of dim light. Harris is the only brilliant talker I have met who
has not made me feel an abject idiot. To begin with, though he has a
pronounced strain of violence, almost of brutality, in his nature, he
is always infinitely courteous. He will listen to your (I mean my)
feeble contributions to a discussion with interest which, if feigned,
is so admirably feigned that you are completely deceived. And he can
keep this sort of thing up indefinitely. Moreover, though his mind is
agile enough, his speech is rarely quick; it is slow and deliberate,
but without hesitation, without a single word of tautology.
I cannot hope, after so long a lapse of time, to reproduce, however
faintly, the true quality of Harris’s conversation, but I remember the
substance of it most vividly. In his lecture earlier in the evening he
had mentioned Jesus Christ, and the reference to our Saviour had been
so original in its implication, yet so reverent in its manner, that I
felt he must have much that is new to say on a subject that has aroused
more discussion than any other during the last two thousand years. So I
broached it tentatively. He was aroused immediately, and skilfully drew
me out to discover if I had anything new to say. I had not. I merely
voiced what must be an age-long regret, that only one side of Christ’s
nature has been presented to us in the Gospels; that the feasting,
joyous Christ has been only faintly indicated; and that His tolerance
towards the weaknesses of the body’s passions had always been shirked
by those of the priestly craft. I thought it possible that at some
future crisis in the world’s history Christ might come again and, on
His second coming, present to the world a more complete embodiment of
all the potentialities inherent in human nature.
With much of this Harris agreed, though I soon perceived that his mind
had for long been intuitively building up, and giving true proportion
to, those elements in Christ’s nature that are only hinted at in
the Gospels. He was all for a full-blooded, passionate Jesus, for a
Jesus who had tested the body’s powers, for a Jesus who was crucified
by passion before He was crucified by Pilate. In a word, he applied
to Jesus the same intuitive method that he had already applied to
Shakespeare. The danger of this method, of course, is that one is
tempted (and it is almost impossible not to succumb to the temptation)
to project one’s own personality into that of the man one is studying.
“My next book shall be about Jesus Christ,” said Harris. “No man in
these days has written honestly about Him.”
“Shall you write as a believer?” I asked.
“Most assuredly,” he replied.
Then Harris told us some stories—stories he had written, stories he
had yet to write. I remember Austin Harrison once saying to me: “Frank
Harris is the most astounding creature! He will tell you a story
and tell it so marvellously that, when he has finished, you say to
yourself: ‘That is the most wonderful thing I have ever heard.’ And
you say to him: ‘Why, in God’s name, don’t you write that?’ Well, he
does write it, and when you read it you see that, after all, it is by
no means so wonderful a thing as you had thought it.” But this is only
half true. The story that is told is a very different thing from the
story that is written: so different, indeed, that one cannot find any
basis for comparison. In telling a story Harris is elliptical; a faint
gesture serves for a sentence; a momentary silence is an innuendo; a
lifting of the eyebrows, a look, a dropping of the voice, a slowness
in his speech—all these take the place of words. He is an exquisite
actor and he is at his best when he is sinister and menacing. One
need scarcely say that the effect of one of Harris’s stories, told in
private, with only one or two listeners, is extremely powerful, for his
personality, so quick to melt and suffuse his speech—colouring it and
vitalising it—is strong and strange and full of tropical richness....
But the actor’s gift is not rare, whereas that combination of
talents that makes a great short-story writer is met with only once
or twice in a generation. Harris’s claims to greatness in this
direction cannot justly be denied, though of late years there has
been a noticeable tendency to treat his work as though it were not
of first-rate importance. His choice of subject, the violence of his
thought, his strict honesty of mind, his open contempt for many of his
contemporaries—these have brought him enemies whose only method of
retaliation is to decry work they will not understand.
But Harris could not be happy without hostility. There is something of
the jaguar in his nature; he must, for his soul’s peace, have his teeth
in the flesh of an enemy. And, if he is not fighting an individual, he
is offending society at large. Years ago, so Harris told me, when he
was editing _The Fortnightly Review_ with such distinction, he printed
one of his own short stories in that magazine—a story that, for one
reason or another, gave great offence to a large section of readers.
Within twenty-four hours he had a hornet’s nest about his ears, and
the directors of the firm, Messrs Chapman & Hall, who published the
_Fortnightly_, met in solemn conclave to discuss what should be done
with so injudicious and reckless an editor. Needless to say, Harris
stood by his guns, and one can imagine the splendidly arrogant way
in which he would uphold his right to insert anything he chose in a
magazine edited by himself. But discussion made matters only more
critical, and Harris told me he would have been compelled to hand in
his resignation if an unforeseen event had not occurred. That event
was the entrance of George Meredith, who, at that time, was a reader
for Messrs Chapman & Hall. As soon as his eyes lit on Harris he held
out his hand, and walked quickly up to him, saying: “My warmest
congratulations! Your story in the new number is quite the finest thing
you have done—an honour to yourself and the _Fortnightly_!” That left
no further room for discussion and, needless to say, Harris retained
his editorship of the great magazine.
My first meeting with Harris was of the friendliest nature, and on his
return to London he wrote to me thanking me for something I had written
about him in _The Manchester Courier_. (I noticed with amusement that
_The Manchester Guardian_, unable, no doubt, to forgive Harris for
attacking Professor Herford, had absolutely ignored the Shakespeare
lecture, except to announce baldly that it had been given.)
Very soon after this meeting in Manchester I went to live in London,
and called on Harris in Chancery Lane. He was running a curious
illustrated weekly, entitled _Hearth and Home_, and I remember sitting
in a little back room in his office turning over the files of his
magazine and wondering what on earth he hoped to do with such a
production. It was tame; it was watery; it was feeble. I looked at him
quizzically.
“What do you think of it?” he asked.
“Well, don’t you see?...” I began hesitatingly; “don’t you see that ...
well, now, look at the _title_!”
“Title’s good enough, don’t you think?”
“Oh yes, good enough ... good enough for Fleetway House. Why not sell
it to Northcliffe? But you’ve got no Aunt Maggie’s column, and no
Beauty Hints, and no Cupid’s Corner! Oh, Harris!”
He laughed, and invited me out to lunch.
I never discovered what strange circumstances had conspired to make
him the possessor of this extraordinary production. No doubt he bought
it for nothing, with the intention of rapidly improving it and selling
it for something substantial later on. But I believe it died soon
after—perhaps urged on to its grave by some verses of mine which were
printed close to an advertisement of ladies’ ——.
On our way out of the office we were joined by a very beautiful lady
who, it soon transpired, shared my admiration for Harris’s genius. We
jumped on to a bus running at full speed and alighted, a couple of
minutes later, at Simpson’s.
Harris should write a book on cookery. Perhaps he will. Harris should
run a hotel. But he has already done so. Harris should be induced to
print all the indiscreet things he says over coffee and liqueurs....
It was a close study of Simpson’s menu that started the cookery
discussion. The Beautiful Lady and I were told what was wrong and what
was right with the menu. And then there began a discourse, profound,
full of strange knowledge and recondite wisdom, a discourse that
Balzac should have heard, that the de Goncourts would have envied.
We listened, amazed. And a waiter, having rushed to our table in the
stress of his work, stood anchored, his mouth slightly open, his whole
attention riveted on the Master from whom no gastronomic secrets were
hid. Truly, Harris was amazing!
After a considerable time his enthusiasm evaporated and we began to
eat. And then ensued a long talk, full of indiscretions, of most
enjoyable malice. Harris told us many things that, perhaps, it would
have been wiser if he had kept to himself. But, in spite of his venom,
his real hatred of certain individuals, he never for a moment permits
himself to be blinded to the quality of a man’s work.
“So-and-so is the most detestable person,” he said, speaking of a
well-known writer, “but he is one of the few real poets alive.” Again:
“X is the most generous-hearted man I have ever met; it’s a pity he
can’t learn to write.”
Mention of Richard Middleton, who had only recently died by his own
hand in Brussels, troubled him, and it was clear that he had not yet
recovered from the shock of this tragedy.
“He killed himself in a mood of sheer disgust—disgust at his lack of
success. True, he was still young, and was becoming more widely known
month by month; also, he had many friends. Nevertheless, life did not
give him what he asked and, tired of asking, he ended life. I remember
him coming to me just before he left England. He wanted to get away.
Some mood of loathing had come to him; he was fretful, yet determined.
I offered him my villa at Nice; it was empty, the caretaker would
attend to his wants and he would have ample leisure for his work. He
hesitated, stayed in London a day or two longer and then disappeared to
Brussels.... I know the poison he used, and a score of times I have
gone over in my mind the tortures he must have endured.”
Harris paled; his face twitched and, involuntarily, as it seemed,
his shoulders twisted themselves. Brooding, he was silent for a few
minutes, and then, collecting himself with a little shudder, began to
speak of other things.
A little later the Beautiful Lady departed and we were left alone.
“And now,” said Harris, “tell me about yourself. What are you doing?
Why have you left Manchester?—but there is no reason to ask that. Tell
me this—are you making enough money for yourself?”
“Well, I’ve lived in London just one week,” said I, “and my tastes are
rather expensive. Just before I left Manchester a very experienced
journalist told me I should be making a thousand pounds a year at the
end of eighteen months; another, equally experienced, declared I should
never make more than six pounds a week. I hope the second one won’t
prove correct.”
He mused for a few moments.
“You ought to make a thousand pounds a year pretty easily, I should
think,” he said at length. “Whom do you know?”
I knew nobody, and said so. He thereupon took a piece of paper from his
pocket and wrote a list of names; at the top of the list stood J. L.
Garvin; at the bottom, Lord Northcliffe.
“Northcliffe’s away,” he said, “buying forests in Newfoundland to
make paper with. However, he’ll be back in a week or two, and in the
meantime I’ll write you a letter to give to him. And now we’ll take a
taxi and see people.”
Harris gave up the whole of that day to me and, largely owing to him,
I had within the next few days more work offered to me than I could
possibly get through. From time to time, months later, good things
would come my way, and nearly always I could trace them to something
generous and fine that Harris had said of me.
It was chiefly because he was so generous with his time that I so
rarely called upon him. Often I would curb a strong desire to see him,
feeling that however embarrassing my visit might be, he would, out of a
quixotic kindness, throw up his work and come with me to talk. For this
reason I had not seen him for some little time, when, one morning, I
received a letter from him reproaching me for my absence. “Why have you
hidden yourself for so long?” he asked. “I go to the Café every night;
come, you will find me there.”
“The Café,” of course, was the Café Royal. It so chanced that, that
very afternoon, my duties took me to a symphony concert in the Queen’s
Hall; the concert over, I found myself passing the Café Royal on my way
from the Queen’s Hall to Piccadilly Circus, and turned in on the remote
chance of finding Harris.
At the end of the passage, near the windows where French papers are
displayed, I found a crowd of a dozen excited men, all talking and
gesticulating. The rest of the Café was empty, as one would expect at
that time of the day. In the middle of the small crowd was Harris, who
caught my eye almost at once. He came to me, and I saw that he was
rather agitated.
“Come and sit over here, Cumberland,” he said. “I’ve just been through
a beastly quarter of an hour.”
It appeared that a well-known and very distinguished _littérateur_ had
quarrelled with him in the Café.... Blows had been exchanged....
We talked of money—an ever-absorbing topic both to Harris and to me. He
told me his books had brought him practically nothing. For _The Bomb_,
if I remember correctly, he received fifty pounds—certainly not more
than one hundred pounds.
“If I had been compelled to live by what my books have brought
me,” he said, “I should have starved. Yet it is not long ago that
Arnold Bennett assured me that I should be able to earn five thousand
pounds a year if I gave my whole time to fiction. But Bennett is
wrong. My books, ever since _Elder Conklin_ was published, have been
enthusiastically praised, but they have not had large sales. Most
authors must find book-writing the most unremunerative work in the
world. I put an enormous amount of labour into _The Bomb_, as I do
into all my books, and the labour was not made any the less from the
fact that much of the earliest part of the book is autobiographical.
In my young manhood I worked as a labourer, deep under water, at the
foundations of Brooklyn Bridge; it is all described in my book.”
Though I went to the Café Royal at frequent intervals after that I very
rarely saw Harris there. He had abandoned _Hearth and Home_, or it had
abandoned him, and he was now throwing away his brilliant gifts on
_Modern Society_. I was elected an honorary member of the Cabaret Club,
run by Madame Strindberg, the widow of the great Swedish writer, and I
used to look in there occasionally in the early hours of the morning,
expecting to run across Harris, who, I heard, also visited that exotic,
underground and rather riotous place. But I never chanced to see him,
and two or three months must have passed without my hearing of him.
In March, 1914, I went to Athens for a holiday. Something brave and
wonderful in that city, some ancient Bacchic madness, some fierce
exaltation of soul took hold of me, and I remember sitting down one
night, after a visit to fever-stricken Eleusis, to write to Harris,
feeling the necessity of expressing myself to one who would understand.
The reader may be amused that I should think Harris akin to ancient
Greece, but if the reader is amused he does not know Harris. Only A. R.
Orage is more Greek in spirit than he is. In reply Harris wrote at
great length, full of the fervour of a young student. He told me that
in his young manhood he had spent a year of study in that wonderful
city, and urged me to visit him on my return to England.
But I was destined not to see him again. Very soon after my return
to England he got into trouble with reference to something libellous
that he had published in _Modern Society_. He was kept in prison, if
I remember rightly, for about a month. I sought permission to visit
him there, but was refused, and I was staying in Oxford when he was
released.
Soon after the war broke out he wrote me the following letter from
Paris:—
23, Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Paris,
_29th Aug. ’14_.
My dear Cumberland,—I’m just back from the frontier.... This war
of nations is going to test every man as by fire before it’s
over. It will be long in spite of Mr Kipps and Bernard Shaw. The
Russian masses will hardly come decisively into action (they
have scarcely any railways and no good roads) till next May or
June, and long before then, or rather in a couple of months from
now, the French will be pressed back to within twenty miles of
besieged Paris, when I hope the English forces on the flank will
stop the German advance. Then will begin the slow process of
driving the Germans home, which will be quickened by the Russian
weight behind Cossack pricks. Fancy one _man_ having the power to
set 400 millions of men fighting for their lives. And then they
talk of man as a rational animal!!
Don’t say you like what I wrote in _The Daily Sketch_; all my
best things were carefully cut out and filled up with drivel,
till my cheeks burned.
Your sketch of me is very kindly; the fault you find in me is not
a fault. Jesus, Shakespeare, Napoleon—all the greatest men have
known their own value and insisted on it—perhaps because they
have all _come to their own and their own received them not_.
When you have done great work you feel it is not yours, but given
to you; you are only a reed shaken in the wind; you can judge
it as if it had nothing to do with you. Moreover, you see that
this failure to recognise greatness is the capital sin of all
time, the sin against the Holy Ghost which He said could never be
forgiven. Modesty is the fig-leaf of mediocrity—don’t let us talk
of it. Remember how Whistler scourged it.
I’m writing now on _Natural Religion_—my best thing yet: I’ve
done more than Nietzsche: don’t think I’m bragging. I am the
Reconciler; though my cocked nose and keen eyes may make you
think me a combatant. Twenty years hence, Cumberland, if your
eyes keep their promise, you’ll think differently of me. I
remember as a young man getting Wagner to praise himself and
saying to myself that no man was ever so conceited as the little
hawk-faced fellow with the ploughshare chin. Did he not say that
the step from Bach to Beethoven was not so great as that from
Beethoven to Wagner! And yet for these fifteen years past I have
agreed with him and find nothing conceited in the declaration.
Only weak men are hurt by another man’s conceit; are we not gods
also to be spoken of with reverence?
To see the world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower,
To hold Infinity in your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
The question for you is, have I quickened you? Encouraged you to
be a brave soldier in the Liberation War of Humanity? Did virtue
come out of me? or discouragement? Now at nearly sixty I am about
to rebuild my life: my own people have stoned and imprisoned and
exiled me. Well—the world’s wide. In October I shall be in New
York, ready for another round with Fate. Meanwhile, all luck to
you and all good will from your friend,
Frank Harris.
Remember this word of Joubert: there is no such sure sign of
mediocrity as constant moderation in praise. Ha! Ha! Ha! Yours
ever,
F. H.
There is not in this letter a single word to indicate that he was not,
heart and soul, in sympathy with the Allied Cause. Late in September,
1914, I was myself in Paris, having visited Amiens and the Marne. I
took the earliest opportunity of calling upon Harris, but discovered
that he had left his rooms a few days earlier, leaving no indication
of his next resting-place. On calling upon the American Consul I
discovered that my friend had already sailed for the States.
Subsequently he wrote bitterly about England in an American paper. I
never had an opportunity of reading his articles, but I read various
extracts from them in British newspapers, and was astounded both by
the views they contained and by the manner in which those views were
expressed.
Years ago Ruskin wrote Rossetti a curious letter: he said he could
regard no man as friend who did not value his (Ruskin’s) gifts as
highly as he (Ruskin) did. Harris, no doubt, adopted the same kind of
attitude towards England. England refused to accept him at his own
estimate and, at length, in fierce disgust, Harris turned his back on a
country which he deemed unworthy of him.