In the second volume I promised that I would end this volume with an account of my life up to date, and so now I must tell what has befallen me in this past year, 1926.
I was astonished one day here in Nice to get a citation to appear before a Judge Bensa, to answer a charge of "outrage aux bonnes moeurs"-an outrage on good morals; and the Judge informed me that the outrage in question was the publication of the second volume of My Life.
"Why not the first volume?" I asked.
"Oh, because that was published in Germany; we have nothing to do with it; but this volume was printed in France, so we must take note of it."
"My crime, then," I said, "is that I wished to benefit French printers and to give them work; for if I had published the second volume in Germany or Italy, I should not have been molested."
He shrugged his shoulders. "Have you sold the book in France?" was the next question.
"It was 'privately printed,'" I said, "as you can see. I didn't anticipate any sale in France and therefore I did not trouble to get the book into the shops; but later, here and there, a book-seller whom I know has told me that he has been asked for a copy of My Life by Americans or Englishmen who wished to complete their sets of my books, and so I have given these book-sellers copies to sell, always on condition that they should not be exhibited in the windows or held for ordinary sale. The sale in France has therefore been very restricted: certainly in all, I have not sold fifty copies. It has never been mise en vente (exposed for sale)."
The Judge took note of this, but said it didn't matter whether I sold thirty, or three, or three thousand; it was the fact of the sale that was important. I bowed, of course, to this judicial reasoning.
At first my advocate, Maitre Gassin, told me that the case would certainly not come before any court. It was ridiculous, he thought, to make the printing of a book in France a crime, when nothing was done with the book printed in Germany and brought into France by the thousands; but the second or third time I saw him, I found that he regarded the case much more seriously.
"We are not rich in France," he said, "and I felt they would never spend the two or three thousand francs in getting your book translated, but I have seen the authorities, and they tell me that the prosecution has been started from Paris, and the money for the translation of the book has been paid. You have got some enemy or enemies in Paris who are making their influence felt."
I had already obtained from M. Bensa, the judge, a note of the pages which were objected to in the second volume of My Life: some forty in all out of four hundred, and among these marked forty were three or four pages together.
The moment I looked them out, I found that one of them was my description of English gormandizing at the Lord Mayor's banquets in the city of London, and another dealt with the conduct of Sir Robert Fowler, who was twice Lord Mayor, and his gluttony and disgusting behavior at Sir William Marriott's table when Lady Marriott had to leave the room.
Now this episode is merely revolting, and I had put it in simply because I thought it a duty to give as complete a record of my life as I could, and the habit of over-eating and over-drinking reigns in England all through the middle classes. I have told how Prince Edward put a stop to it in the best class by introducing the habit of going at once to coffee and cigarettes after dinner, instead of guzzling bottle after bottle of Burgundy or claret, which was the custom of the upper classes till he came.
Again I found that anything I had told of Prince Edward's liking for naughty stories and for witty limericks had also got me into trouble, and was marked down as offensive. Another passage especially objected to was the account of how Lord Randolph Churchill became infected with disease.
From these indications it seemed to me that the persecution came from the English Foreign Office; and this inference I have since found to be correct.
The publicity given by the prosecution will certainly add to the sale of the book, which accordingly is now about to appear in several other European languages.
Yet the prosecution was annoying if only for the cost; and just because the accusation seemed ridiculous, I became anxious. I had once tasted prison through contempt of the English Judge Horridge by commenting on the conduct of a case which never came to trial, just because the whole thing was ridiculous. I was punished without a shadow of reason. Now I was to be punished again, just for telling some truths about England and Englishmen in a foreign country. The case, I am told, won't come on for some months, but I dread it most because of the unreason in the charge.
Here for example is a book, La Garconne of Marguerite, which tells of love between men and boys, and girls with girls, yet this book has sold five hundred thousand copies in France, and the author has not been brought before any court except the court of the Legion of Honor. Verlaine, too, the great poet, has given to the world posthumously a book of poems adorned with the lewdest illustrations, and all singing the praise of unnatural vices.
Finally, I have before me a copy of a publisher's circular, issued expressly as from the Libraire du Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres, with the sanction therefore of the Office of Foreign Affairs in Paris, wherein I find exposed for sale at low prices Le Marquis de Sade, Gamiani, Les Memoires de Suzon in French, and The Pearl in English-all frankly pornographic works.
My offense is after all nothing but the description of the normal love of man for woman; and I am to be punished for twenty pages in 400 and for selling thirty or forty volumes in France, every one of which, I believe, has been sold to Englishmen or Americans. My crime is that I have given work to French printers rather than to German or Italian printers. Yet my advocate, Maitre Gassin, tells me that the matter is serious and being pursued with fiendish earnestness.
One fact I must record here. As soon as news of my prosecution got into the press, all the French writers whom I know, notably Barbusse, Morand, Willy Breal, Davray, De Richter, Maurevert, and others, wrote in my favor, expressing their contempt for such persecution. Every French author of note appears to be on my side and all agree with the great phrase of Vauvenargues: "Ce qui n'offense pas la societe, n'est pas du ressort de la justice" (That which does not offend society, has nothing to do with justice).
But no English or American writer has taken up the cudgels for me or written one word in my defense. Far from that, not a single English or American writer has even considered the book fairly or tried to see any merit in it, and while English journals have usually taken the indecency for admitted, American journals, such as the New York World and the Nation, have covered me with cheap insults. All this, of course, was to be expected. But I may be permitted to believe that the genial conduct of the French writers shows a higher level of understanding and a nobler humanity.
A previous experience substantiates this belief. I was in Paris when Zola published his Nona, which described the life of a courtesan in Paris. The book came as a shock to every reader in the city. Not only did it sell over fifty thousand copies in the first week, but the day after it appeared, everyone who counted had read it and could talk of nothing else.
"This is the limit" was the one remark that went uncontradicted. Not only was the book outspoken, but it was indubitably salacious and unspeakably suggestive and provocative. Serious people at once began to talk of prosecution. And with this in mind I hurried to call on Daudet, Dumas fils and others.
Daudet received me with his usual kindness.
"I regret the book," he said. "I am sorry that Zola wrote it; it will give French literature a worse name than it has already in Europe, and, really, the stigma will be deserved. Zola has gone too far this time. I have only glanced at the book, but there are pages in it that are more provocative than the youthful indiscretions of Mirabeau or Gustave Droz."
"Then you would be in favor of prosecution?" I asked.
"Of course not," Daudet cried. "How can you imagine such a thing? Zola is a great writer. He must be allowed license that one would never accord to an ordinary penman. There will be no prosecution. We would all unite against that at once. No ordinary magistrate could sit in judgment on Emile Zola. But I am sorry he published the book. It can only damage his reputation."
"Yet everybody says that it will add greatly to his bank balance," I ventured.
Daudet held up his hands.
"Zola assuredly did not care for that aspect of it," he replied.
Dumas and the others agreed with Daudet, and Nana was left unpursued.
What will be the outcome of the prosecution of my book, I am unable even to guess. I can only abide the issue. Meanwhile I often catch myself reciting what Matthew Arnold called My Last Word:
Let the long contention cease,
Geese are swans and swans are geese;
Let them have it as they will
Thou are tired, best be still.
They out-talked thee, jeered thee, cursed thee, Better men fared thus before thee Fired their ringing shot and passed Hotly charged, though broke at last.
Charge once more and then be dumb;
Let the victors when they come,
When the forts of folly fall
Find thy body by the wall.
Let me now for a moment talk of old age again. I said in my second volume that old age had little to recommend it, but I find a good many authorities against me on the matter.
And many friends have reproached me for the sadness of the last chapter in my previous volume, which I wrote when I was about seventy. A dozen, at least, have written to me, asking me whether there were no consolations peculiar to old age. There may be many, but not for the man who after seventy still feels young. Fortenelle at the age of ninety-five, was asked which were the twenty years of his life that he regretted the most; he replied that he regretted none of them, but that nevertheless the period he would wish to relive, the period in which he had been happiest, was from fifty-five to seventy-five. "At fifty-five," he said, "one's fortune is made; one's reputation established; one is well considered by the many, honored perhaps by the few. Moreover, one sees things as they are; most of one's passions are cooled and calmed; one has reached the goal of one's career; done what one could for society; and one has then fewer enemies, or perhaps one should say fewer envious people, because one's merit is generally recognized."
Buff on, f too, at seventy years of age, declares that the philosopher can only regard old age as a foolish prejudice; and he goes on to paint a picture of senile pleasures.
"Every day," he says, "that I get up in good health, have I not the full enjoyment of the day as much as ever I had? If I order my appetites, my desires, my hopes according to the dictates of wisdom and reason, am I not as happy as I ever could have been; and the thought of the past and its pleasures, which seem to give some regrets to old fools, affords me, on the contrary a joyful memory of charming pictures, precious recollections of pleasurable incidents; and these pictures and memories are free of taint and perfectly pure and bring to the soul only an agreeable emotion. The restlessness, the disappointments, the mistakes which accompany the pleasures of youth have all disappeared in age, and every regret should disappear with them, for what is regret, after all, but the last quiver of that foolish personal vanity which refuses to grow old."
There is a good deal of truth in all this, but not, as I say about myself, for the man who after seventy still feels young. To him, old age is like poverty; its blessings must be sought in their rarity. Bernard Shaw writes me that he is "a ruin and that all the pre-seventy in him is dead." All the pre-seventy and the pre-fifty are nearly as much alive in me as they were twenty years ago. The keenest regret I have is that I haven't money enough to go around the world for the third time and see it all again and tell of the changes which fifty years have shown in it. I should have thought some paper would be willing to pay for my account of this journey, but no one offers to, and my autobiography and my works of the last four or five years have brought me in less than any single year's work of my whole life.
I had no idea, when I determined to write my life frankly, that I should be punished as I have been for my outspokenness. I knew, of course, that most of the foolish and all the envious would declare that I was writing pornography in my old age; they would say "Harris was always dirty, you know; filthy minded." I knew the popular verdict beforehand and smiled at it, but I had no idea that this Anglo-Saxon condemnation would injure the sale of my other books as it has. I used to receive ten thousand dollars a year from them; the publication of the first volume of My Life cut this income down to less than a thousand dollars yearly, and injured in like degree the sale value of anything I may write. Moreover, this condemnation keeps me from returning to London or New York and beginning life again if I wanted to, utilizing my knowledge of the stock exchange to rebuild my fortune.
Thirty odd years ago my friend, Burton, published his Arabian Nights, which was freer, not to say viler, than anything I have ever written, and the books went through the post freely, and he made ten thousand pounds out of the publication. But now England has copied America in one of its worst acts: every one knows that if you send an obscene book through the post in America, you can be had up and punished as if you had published the book.
But this execrable law, which allows a foolish official to judge the great innovators on the same level as the corrupters, has now been adopted by England. Twenty-five or thirty years ago she had better sense. Nevertheless, an English translation of Brantome is now being published and freely distributed in England; but the best English lawyers assure me that I could not hope for any leniency.
I remember in the prosecution of Mrs. Besant and Bradlaugh the judge stated that if the book was a dear book, it was not to be condemned like a cheap book, which might fall into the hands of boys and girls. This sane English compromise now has been tossed aside and the public prosecutor can proceed against any one for sending an obscene or indecent book through the mails, just as in America, even if one put a price on it, as I do, that should prevent it falling into the hands of any except those who really want it. But now that aristocratic England has taken on the livery of democratic America, there is no room for the man who uses English as his mother tongue to warn or to guide his fellows frankly. "God's spies" are punished as if they were the devil's minions.
I don't think I have committed any violation even of these idiotic laws, but I am assured that I should find scant justice in America at the hands of the Justices Levys and Mayers; and just as little perhaps in London at the hands of the Horridges.
He who wishes to give a true record of his life is almost compelled to leave out the most interesting incidents of it. But some amusing ones, the brave soul may still record.
Heine has left on record how he was treated by the vile swarm of Suabian critics, but none of them ever attacked him as venomously as I have been attacked in America. I
want to give some specimens of it. Here is an editorial article in the Evening World of New York, of August 23, 1926: it is headed: The case of Frank Harris
At the autumn assizes at Nice, Frank Harris, the writer, will face charges of offending public morals, and possible imprisonment. Many years ago, he was a figure of some importance in the literary life of London. Editor of an important periodical, he associated on terms of more or less intimacy with many of the most distinguished writers of England and France. In those days the only thing scandalous about him was his insufferable egotism. His connection with Oscar Wilde led to the writing of a biography of the dramatist which has much merit. In later life he has distinguished himself in the writing of entertaining character studies of literary and political celebrities, albeit he is charged with taking liberties with the truth.
Then, old, world-weary, broken in health, he wrote the first volume of an autobiography, published first in Germany, which was disgusting in its frankness and its crudity. The attempt to circulate this nauseating collection of dirty stories in America led to some arrests.
It appeared that the disgust of even his well-wishers taught him nothing, for his arrest in France follows the publication of the second volume. Always a sensualist, it is impossible to believe that he presented himself in undress from any motive other than a desire for money. Having put himself in the class of street-walkers, he is entitled to no sympathy. The Frank Harris of years ago died long ago, and it is his cadaver that has been writing recently. The odor proves it.
This editorial is a mere collection of slanderous lies: so far am I from being broken in health that I never enjoyed better health in my life, and in this very August walked over twenty miles one day without feeling even tired. I was never arrested in France-that is another invention of the Evening World.
Before I began writing My Life, I knew that frank speech would not bring me in any money; but even "street-walkers" would have my sympathy: with Anatole France, I believe that they will be set above Queens in the Kingdom of Heaven. Instructed by the English Foreign Office, the French authorities found thirty pages to object to in four hundred and thirty-a slightly larger proportion than Whitman's; but hardly enough to make an honest man talk of a book as a "nauseating collection of dirty stories."
No decent journal in the world, except in New York, would have allowed an anonymous and cowardly slanderer to write such an editorial-a mere tissue of foul lies and fouler insults. Nor does this stand alone. The Saturday Review of Literature, the most widely circulated literary organ in the states, in its issue of February 13, 1926, gives more than a page to an outpouring of similar lies and abuse. And, worse still, Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, which I have praised, wrote to me that "I think it is the vilest book I have ever laid eyes on: I think it is absolutely inexcusable… I regard the book as a poisonous one."
I put all this silly abuse on record just to comfort those of God's spies who come after me and who will no doubt be persecuted by the brainless and envious as I have been.
I have been asked what I mean by the term "God's Spies!"
Whoever will be one of "God's Spies," as Shakespeare called them, must spend years by himself in some solitude of desert or city, resolutely stripping himself of the tune-garment of his own paltry ego, alone with the stars and night winds, giving himself to thoughts that torture, to a wrestling with the Angel that baffles and exhausts. But at length the travail of his soul is rewarded; suddenly, without warning, the Spirit that made the world uses him as a mouthpiece and speaks through him. In an ecstasy of humility and pride-"a reed shaken by the wind"-he receives the message. Years later, when he gives the gospel to the world, he finds that men mock and jeer at him, tell him he is crazy, or worse still, declare they know the fellow, and ascribe to him their own lusts and knaveries. No one believes him or will listen, and when he realizes his own loneliness, his heart turns to water, and he himself begins to doubt his inspiration. That is the lowest hell. Then, in his misery and despair, comes one man who accepts his message as authentictrue; one man who shows in the very words of his praise that he, too, has seen the Beatific Vision, has listened to the Divine voice. At once the prophet is saved: the sun irradiates his icy dungeon; the desert blossoms like a rose; his solitude sings with choirs invisible. Such a disciple is spoken of ever afterwards as the beloved and set apart and above all others.
Fortunately for me, I have found several such disciples: Esar Levine, Ben Rebkuhn, Raymond Thomson and Lyngklip. These young Americans came to my lectures in New York and offered me their services. For years now they have helped me in all the ways of affection, suffered even fines and imprisonment for me-and no man hath greater love than this! Esar Levine has helped me a great deal with this volume, for he knows all my writing better than I do. And now other Americans, Thomson and Lyngklip, come to me in the same sweet spirit. I think the world will soon recognize-for they are all still in the twenties-that the friendship of these men is to me a title of honor.
As I told at the end of the second volume of My Life, my chief pleasures in life are still those derived from literature and art and the intercourse with wise and loving friends. I get as much pleasure, too, from a good dinner, in spite of using strict moderation, as I ever did, and more I think than ever from a beautiful sunset or exquisite sky and mountain and sea effects; but most of all from my work, and from the resolute purpose to make each book better than the previous one at the cost of multitudinous revisions.
And now a word from my heart about my deepest belief. I have told how, as a schoolboy, just before taking my first Communion, I had come to doubt the accepted revealed religion; but still, in a vague way, I believed in a good, if somewhat ineffective, purpose in life, and for thirty years cherished a vague belief in a God and his goodness and in human progress. But between fifty and sixty when I first read Fabre and came to realize the senseless cruelties that dominate the animal and insect world, I began to doubt, and I soon lost sight of any upward way in the horror-haunted chaos. Doubts soon took shape and meaning. A hundred organs are given to man for pain, and one for pleasure: he has thirty feet of intestine, all for suffering, where one would suffice; and worse still, pain is never in any relation to welfare, has in it no warning, even; one suffers more from a toothache than from a mortal wound.
If there is a creator, he is malevolent, rather than kind.
I disliked the word "atheist," and felt with Huxley that "agnostic" was a truer description of my mental state: for if the idea of a personal God had altogether vanished from my consciousness, I still believed in a slow and gradual unfolding of a higher and nobler social life for men on this earth.
Again and again I came back to Goethe's word:
Uns zu verewigen
Sind wir ja da!
Men at least should grow in goodness and loving-kindness, should put an end, not only to war and pestilence, but also to poverty, destitution and disease, and so create for themselves a Paradise on this earth, and turn the pilgrimage of life first into a Crusade where every cross should be wreathed with roses, and at length into a sacred struggle worth of God himself to put an end to all suffering and make of existence a hymn of highest achievement.
The truth is, man must be his own God in the highest sense and must create not only a Heaven for men but for insects and plants, too, for all life, especially the so-called lower forms of it-a triumphal chant of joy-crowned endeavor.
The trees, even the humblest plants, we know struggle upward to the light; surely they should be helped-all difficulties and disorders should be incentives to the divine shaping spirit of man.
Yet Whitman praised death, "beneficent death." "Hateful death!" I cry. I hate it, as Goethe hated it, at least for the choice and master spirits. Who will make good the loss? It is irreparable for me. Death!
I prefer Browning's word here to Whitman's; it's truer. Death he calls "The Arch-fear;" I often think of it as an ocean; in the great flood another wave sinks and nothing is changed-except to the wave and the other waves near at hand!
With death before him, how any thinking man can believe in an omnipotent and beneficent God, I cannot imagine. I am not thinking now of cruelty, though it is the primary law of His creation, but simply of death that comes to all of us, no matter whether we have lived nobly or vilely. How easy it would have been for a benevolent deity to give a second life of youthful vigor to every man or woman who had lived in the main to the highest in him, and how such a reward would have quickened virtue and discouraged vice and made of man's life a sacred progress to all the heights. But as it is, death comes! And even before death, his dread heralds, decaying strength, failing faculties, loss of memory and of joy, the sunlight even drained of warmth.
And we children of an hour quarrel and dispute and show greed and envy while the days shorten to the inevitable end. How could Whitman praise death!
But after all, what does death matter? It is hideous and terrible, if you will; but few can tell when the curtain will fall and the play for them be finished.
And meanwhile one's work remains. A, B, and C look at it and shrug indifferent shoulders and the years pass and one seems forgotten. Suddenly, some one comes who is interested. "Strange," he says, "how did this work escape praise?" And he begins to praise it, and others follow him, wondering where this new teacher should be placed.
Sometimes, as in the case of Shakespeare, the recognition has to wait three hundred years. What matter? It was a century before anyone dreamed of placing Heine with Goethe: what do the years matter? Sooner or later we are judged by our peers and the judgment is unchangeable. I wait for my peers, welcoming them.
"He has written naughty passages," says one, and my friend replies, "so did Shakespeare in 'Hamlet' and with less provocation." "His life is the fullest ever lived," says my disciple, and they all realize that a supreme word has been spoken and that such a man is among the great forever.