itEVIEW OF BOOKS

Beverley Nichols on being frank about Frank Harris

Nearly fifty years ago a very young man sat in a small office off Madison Avenue, endeavouring, with singular incompetence, to edit a monthly magazine called The American Sketch. The young man was myself, and how I ever got into such a tangle would be a long and boring story, for no less fitting candidate for an editorial chair has ever been invented. The venture lasted for only six months, when the magazine collapsed in a deathly hush, having lost quite a few thousand dollars.

One of the reasons for this debacle was the subject of the volume under review', the notorious Mr Frank Harris — literary buccaneer, editor extraordinary, financial adventurer, social pirate. He was certainly one of the most colourful figures of the turn of the century. Even if he had no other claim to immortality he would have gained it by giving Wilde the opening for his shortest and most famous epigram. When Harris boasted that he had been invited to all' the greatest houses in London, Oscar nodded and said "Yes Frank. Once."

There I was, slithering about in the aforesaid chair, when the telephone rang. A deep voice boomed into my ear. "This is Frank Harris speaking." No further introduction, of course, was necessary. Could we meet? He had a story of a sensational nature that he had written specially for The American Sketch. I was the only editor Frank Harris Philippa Pullar (Hamish Hamilton £5.25)

in New York who might have the courage to print it. This statement, in itself, should have alerted me, for it carried with it a strong odour of fish. But I was very green, and very flattered. An hour later I was reading the article in a dingy apartment in the West Forties, where I gathered that he was evading the attention of the New York police. The room reeked of cheap cigar smoke and was littered with empty bottles of, bootleg Sauternes.

The article was indeed sensational. It told the full story of Wagner's relationship with Ludwig of Bavaria, which Wagner poured out to Harris in a public garden when they were both staying in Munich towards the end of 1880. Never were there such torrid revelations, such lurid details. Nor — had I not been overwhelmed by the tone of the writer's personality — so strong a smell of fish. For at the time of these disclosures, Harris and Wagner had never even met.

In short, the whole thing was a complete fabrication from start to finish. Another minor drawback lay in the fact that Harris, as we later discovered, had no right to sell the story at all; he had already disposed of the world rights to the Contemporary Review. Never mind. I bought it. For two hundred dollars.

But that was not the end of it.

After pocketing the cheque, and consuming a lot more bootleg Sauternes, Harris leaned forward, winked owlishly and said "It might surprise you to learn that I've got half a million dollars in the next room."

It surprised me very much indeed. "In cash?" -Better than cash. Letters. Two letters written by Lord Alfred Douglas to myself."

It seemed that half a million dollars might be an extravagant valuation, and I asked if there were something special about them.

-There certainly is. He wrote them at my suggestion."

"But what are they about?"

-About Oscar, naturally. About what they actually Did together."

"What they Did?"

Another owlish wink. The penny dropped. The valuation still seemed extravagant, but perhaps Harris was not so far from the truth when he assured me that there were men in New York who would be willing to pay through the nose for such a literary curiosity. "But of course" he added, "nobody is going to see them without a pretty hefty payment in advance."

At which point I decided that no power on earth would persuade me to leave that apartment without reading the letters, and eventually, after more Sauternes, and a few hints that The Sketch might be interested in further Wagnerian revelations, he produced them. They were in a tin trunk under the bed in the next room, and as he dragged out the trunk there was the tinkle of a chamber-pot which he had not emptied.

Here the reader may be disappointed. What Oscar and Bosie Did was really very schoolboy stuff, and they only Did it twice, firstly at Magdalen College and secondly at the Savoy Hotel, after which they decided that they were not each others' type. Harris's millionaire would not have got his money's worth.

But I believe that the letters were genuine and that Bosie had indeed written them at Harris's suggestion. "It is time" Harris had told him, "that you set the record straight. The legend of your beautiful friendship should not be tarnished by ugly rumours. You owe it to posterity." This was precisely the sort of nonsense that would appeal to Bosie, and he fell for it, even to the extent of assuring Harris that he was prepared to submit to a medical examination — (after forty years!) — in order that posterity should realise that as far as he was concerned there had been none of the grosser violations of propriety.

This episode is not recounted in the book I am supposed to be reviewing, but it is matched by dozens of others which are as good and probably better. It is a big meaty book about a big meaty man, packed with brilliantly coloured detail, written with superb gusto and evident affection. Weil, why not? Harris of course was a monster but he was a very endearing monster. He never did anybody any harm and he did quite a number of people a lot of good. His relationship with Wilde is typical of his essential humanity. He was so blatantly heterosexual, so besotted by the very idea of Women — their eyes, their legs, their lips, their hair, their smell, etc. etc. — (particularly their etcetera) — that one would have expected him to lead the pack of Wilde's persecutors. He had everything to gain by doing so. But no, Throughout the whole sad business he behaved impeccably — as counsellor, as friend, and sometimes as financier. And though, in after years, he made a lot of money out of the relationship, and wove an incredible fabric of lies about it, he did so with the kindliest of motives. He was very much in advance of his time. Maybe he still is.

Once when I was interviewing Bernard Shaw in Whitehall Court he said to me "Harris was by. far the greatest liar whom I ever met, and the proof of his greatness was that he not only persuaded other people to believe his lies but he came to believe them himself. One day somebody will write a masterpiece about him, and my guess is that it will be written by a woman." In this Shaw showed his percipience. One uses the word "masterpiece" with reluctance, and we need not use it now, but we must admit that Philippa Pullar's book is conceived on the grand scale and that only a woman could have written it. And that not every woman would have written it with such sympathy and such humour.

Among Harris's flickering claims on our memory was his preposterous My Life and Loves, which was one of the financial props of his declining years. It has an assured place in the history of pornography; generations of randy schoolboys have passed it from desk to desk and countless travellers have smuggled it through the Customs wrapped in woollen underwear. I always thought, even as a schoolboy, that it was rather a bore, and more than faintly unattractive, particularly in its advocacy of the use of a stomach pump as an adjunct in the successful consummation of erotic activities. After Miss Pullar's revelations we can judge it in a different light. When we realise the background against which it was created it emerges as a baroque tragedy, and Harris's last and most stupendous lie. For when he wrote My Life and Loves, he was completely impotent. It was the final flicker of a burnt out body and an exhausted brain, Harris, indubitably, was a Man and it is reasonable to suppose that we shall not look upon his like again. He sometimes walked with the devil, but by and large he was on the side of the angels, even though they were fallen angels, and even though he persistently misquoted them.