The Great Egoist

MY LIFE & LOVES by Frank Harris. 983 pages. Grove Press. $12.50.

When the first volume of Frank Harris' My Life & Loves appeared in 1925, Upton Sinclair called it "the vilest book I have ever laid eyes on," and Sinclair Lewis declared that it was "a senile and lip-wetting giggle of an old man about his far distant filthiness." The book was banned in Britain and the U.S., but Harris correctly judged that "in this matter, the time spirit is with me." This week Harris' Life is published in full public view in the U.S.

For years, Life & Loves was a prime piece of erotica in intellectual and academic circles. After all, it was not merely dirty. Harris was a literary figure, an editor of some stature in late-Victorian London, a familiar of such wits as Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm and Bernard Shaw. Between beds, his book is studded with "As I said to Lord Asquith . . ." and intimate tidbits that every conscientious scholar should know about the private life of literary personages ranging from Thomas Carlyle to Guy de Maupassant. Harris' obsession with and clinical description of his mistresses' vital organs could be construed as incidental diversion, if not downright annoyance.

Great & Strong. But before a reader lays down his $12.50 and places My Life & Loves beside Fanny Hill on his bedside shelf, he should be warned that as a stylist, Harris is no match for Cleland. Along about the seventh seduction it becomes apparent that all of Harris' women are the same--defeated enemies who surrender to his massive virility. "Oh, you great, strong dear!" cries his first conquest--and so, for 87 chapters, cry all the others (about 100, by rough count). For the discriminating reader, there is one way of telling them apart: as Harris got older and older, his girls became younger and younger. At 65, he is in Bombay examining naked, twelve-year-old virgins.

Even as literary memorabilia, the book is made suspect by Harris' ravening ego and his congenital inability to tell the truth. Son of a Royal Navy lieutenant, Harris ran away from his native Galway at 15 and made his way to the U.S. Eventually he became a European correspondent for several U.S. newspapers. When Russian General Mikhail Skoboleff gallantly galloped into the mouths of the Turkish cannon at Plevna, Harris was (he says) "naturally at his heels." Other witnesses recall that he covered the war from a brothel in Odessa.

Considerable & Unabashed. Nothing, it seemed, could dent his ego. After he became editor of London's Saturday Review, he was convinced that it was only his lack of height (he was only 5 ft. 5 in.) that barred him from Parliament. Lady Asquith noted in her Autobiography that Harris monopolized every conversation, but Harris was unabashed. "The fact that the Prime Minister and his wife were asked to meet me," he writes, "shows that I had a very considerable position in London."

Harris began his Life at 65 with the avowed intent of "showing young men how to use the machine gun of their sex." He finished it only two years before his death at 75. A visitor to his retreat in the south of France reported that at the last the old man bitterly regretted ever having written it, confessing that he did it chiefly because he needed the money. But even before he finished the last chapter, he was suffering from brief spasms of self-knowledge. "Every idiot who has ever met me," he wrote, "talks of my extraordinary conceit. Perhaps, since my revelation of Shakespeare, I have taken myself too seriously."

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