Frank Harris Banned Book My Life and Loves

When the memoirs of Frank Harris were first published, in the easily shockable 1920s, the book fell into the same notorious category as its near-contemporaries Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses: it was a book guaranteed to bring the prospect of a jail sentence to any bookseller foolhardy enough to stock it. And so it remained for several decades, a collector's item, more familiar by repute than by reading. The US and Britain banned it for approximately 40 years. The book not only failed to achieve the circulation Harris hoped for, but it also escaped the normal process of critical review and discussion.

By the time the moral climate had changed enough to permit general publication of the book, Harris was a forgotten man as well as a long-dead one, and critics could no longer muster enough interest in his recollections of the distant past to accord the book serious notice. Besides, doubt had long been cast on the veracity of Harris as displayed in his other works, such as his biographical essays. As Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge put it: "It has been shown again and again that Harris was a liar of stupendous proportions, inordinately given to recounting conversations in direct speech which never took place with people he never met."

The effect of all this is that My Life and Loves, as Harris aptly titled his book, has passed into hundreds of thousands of homes without any critical discussion of the kernel of the book: Harris's purported baring of his sex life. In the 1,000 page paperback version, his memoirs have become an international bestseller of the time, largely on the strength of his claim to have produced the most candid autobiography ever written—and by his own account he left Casanova standing at the bedpost. Yet the question remains to be answered: does his book contain more lies than lays?

Harris constantly demonstrates an elementary ignorance of female physiology, and subscribes to various fallacies concerning contraception and virility.

It is only fair to say that Harris's alleged objective was a worthy one. He contended, reasonably enough, that sex played the biggest part in the lives of men yet was always suppressed in their memoirs. He believed that an honest autobiography should tell all, and as a master journalist he sought to set the example.

"I put both my arms under her clothes and my hands were on her warm hips, and I was speechless with delight; In a moment my right hand came round in front and as touched her sex our lips clung together and her sex opened at once, and my finger began to caress her and we kissed and kissed again. Suddenly her lips got hot and while I was still wondering why, her sex got wet and her eyes began to flutter and turn up. A moment or two later she tried to get out of my embrace.

" 'Really, dear, I'm frightened.' I drew her to me, but seeing she was only half reassured, I said, while lifting her dress, 'Let mine just touch yours, and I'll let you go'; and the next moment my sex was against hers and almost in spite of herself she yielded to the throbbing warmth of it; but, when I pushed in, she drew away and down on it a little and I saw anxiety in her eyes that had grown very dear to me. At once stopped and put away my sex and let her clothes drop."

Erotic recollections of this detailed kind recur at length throughout the book, sounding as if they had been written down immediately afterwards. In fact none of Harris's accounts of his youthful sexual exploits was written down until he was 60. Many men cannot remember with as much detail the girl they had last night, but Harris presents every encounter with total recall.

Forestalling such questioning, Harris informed his readers that his memory had always been phenomenal. "The ordinary man will think I am bragging about my memory," he wrote. "He's mistaken." He alleged that when he ran away to America at the age of 15 his abilities impressed a fellow passenger, Doctor Keogh, who "went about bragging of my memory and power of reciting until some of the cabin passengers became interested in the extraordinary schoolboy. The outcome was that I was asked to recite one evening in the first-class cabin, and afterwards a collection was taken up for me and a first-class passage paid and about $20 over and above was given to me.

In the same vein is his account of how he learnt instant French: "I threw myself on French like a glutton and this was my method, which I don't recommend but simply record, though it brought me to understand everything said by the end of the first week. I spent five whole days on the grammar, learning all the verbs, especially the auxiliary and irregular verbs by heart, till I knew them as I knew my alphabet. then read Hugo's Hernani with a dictionary in another long day of 18 hours, and the next evening went to the gallery in the Comédie Francaise to see the play acted by Sarah Bernhardt as Dona Sol and Mounet-Sully as Hernani. For a while the rapid speech and strange accent puzzled me, but after the first act I began to understand what was said on the stage, and after the second act caught every word; and to my delight, when it came out into the streets, I understood everything said to me."

Uncheckable Adventures in the Wild West

The trouble is that Harris was a compulsive liar. Even his name was false. He was born James Thomas of Welsh-Jewish parents in 1856 near Tenby in South Wales. That was not romantic enough for him, so he claimed to be the son of a Galway sea captain and called himself Frank Harris. His height, too, was a sham. He was a little man of 5 feet 5 inches who wore two-inch heels to give himself a lift. Although he went to Denbigh grammar school he wore an old Etonian tie with an emerald pin. Dressed in sealskin coat, a dove-grey trilby, gold-headed cane, buckskin shoes, his mustache hanging down like cutlasses, he looked like a cardsharp working the Mississippi river boats.

He had in fact worked in the Wild West after leaving school and emigrating. In America he had a series of uncheckable adventures as a cowboy (which inspired a Jack Lemmon movie). He was bitten by a rattlesnake—and saved from a painful death by drinking whisky. He fought with Mexican cattle thieves in the best Boy's Own Paper tradition. "I heard the zip of a bullet pass my head and turning I saw pretty plainly a man riding 50 yards away from me. I took careful aim at his horse and fired and was delighted to see horse and man come down and disappear." Deadshot Harris never missed—either in bed or in the saddle.

Sexual Ignorance

Unfortunately, Harris provides continual evidence of romancing, along with his reporting. He constantly demonstrates, for example, an elementary ignorance of female physiology. Repeatedly he asserts that "her sex opened," a phenomenon that would surprise plenty of teenagers nowadays. He also seems to share the once-common belief that women ejaculate at their climax, describing numerous incidents such as the following: "Slowly pushed my prick into the full and drew it out again to the lips, then in again, and I felt her warm love juice gush down…”

A more serious fallacy under which Harris labored was the belief that contraception was unnecessary after the first ejaculation, the man's semen being no longer powerful enough to put a woman in the family way. He instructed most of his conquests in this astonishing belief, and habitually acted on it. Claiming to have reached orgasm half a dozen times with one girl, he assured her she could not get pregnant. "Doctors say that what comes from me after the first time is not virile enough to impregnate a woman. You can take that as a fact." Any doctor who gave such dangerous advice deserved to be disqualified.

How soon did Harris find out it was wrong? Apparently never. Constantly, after a first orgasm, he was proclaiming, "Now love is queen"—meaning that there was no further danger and they could make love safely again and again. And according to his own gloating testimony they always did. If his story is true, heaven knows what a trail of illegitimate progeny he must have left behind him. Yet there is no mention of a single bastard, or abortion, or even a scare, anywhere in his long, active career.

Harris also subscribed to the belief that every man had only so much virility in him. If he used it up too quickly he became sexually useless before his time. One of his heroes was the Russian general Skobelef, who told him: "I had them all, every girl and woman in the place from 13 to 50, but I liked the older ones best. If I had not had to go to school, I'd have killed myself with them: as it was weakened myself so that now, at about 40, I'm practically impotent. Since I was 25, it takes some extraordinary circumstance, such as a drinking bout to bring me up to the scratch!"

"Good God" Harris cried. "What a dreadful fate!" He added: "Till then I had no idea that the patrimony of sexpleasure was so limited." Childish rubbish, of course, and observably untrue, one would have thought, to anyone so acute as Harris pretended to be.

Did Harris Thrash the School Bully?

The fact is that when Harris wrote his memoirs he was broke. He had not had a success for more than a decade. He needed money, and he wrote his book in the hope of a bonanza. Did he invent what he thought would make it a best seller? Certainly he does not seem to have left much out. In the best tradition of Victorian schoolboy fiction, diminutive Harris even claimed to have thrashed the school bully, Jones. He wrote: "Jones struck savagely right and left as I came within striking distance, but slipped inside his weak left and hit him as hard as I could, first right and then left on the chin and down he went on his back. I never had so many friends and admirers in my life as came up to me to testify to their admiration and good will. The whole lower school was on my side and one or two of the sixth."

Jones, the soundly trounced bully, was "kept in the sick bay for days afterwards."

Taken along with his professed hobnobbing with every late Victorian and Edwardian celebrity known to history, from Maupassant to the Prince of Wales, from Rhodes to Bismarck, it is somehow too good to be true. Yet the enigma remains, for the fact is that Harris was editor of the London Evening News at the age of 27, and went on to edit numerous leading magazines besides writing plays and books, including an esteemed biography of Oscar Wilde. If he was a man of boasts he was also a man of achievement.

Also, Harris did not shrink from recounting incidents that were hardly to his credit. As he grew older he developed a passion for what we now call nymphets, and he did not hesitate to indulge it, buying young girls' bodies without a qualm. As he explained it, his "love of plastic beauty" went naturally with an "adoration of virginity''. He summed up : "It was the young and untried, and with the years the unripe, that drew me irresistibly; and once at least a little later gave myself to the pursuit for months in an orgy of lust."

Too Hot Even For the French

Frank Harris died in the South of France in 1931, aged 75. Even in France his frankness led to his prosecution for offending public morals. Mr. Justice Levy of the New York Supreme Court, banning the book in America, declared furiously: "It is not only unquestionably obscene, lewd, lascivious and indecent but it is filthy, disgusting and utterly revolting."

In our permissive society his diverting book has at last come into its own. Published for the first time in the 1960s, it is now some sort of classic—the only one of Harris's works that anyone remembers.

At the end of My Life & Loves Harris mused: "I write of all these things quite frankly because I believe that Puritanism is not only dead but deserved to die and I feel sure that bodily pleasure of all sorts will be more and more sought after in the future. We are coming to a new understanding of life and its joys, just as we are reaching a deeper realization of our duty to our neighbor. We are developing an intensified paganism of the cult of the body...We really should seek to help and benefit our fellow-man in every way, just as we naturally seek to get all possible pleasure out of life. The reconciliation of the two creeds in a higher synthesis will possibly be the religion of the future."

Frank Harris, ludicrous liar and bedroom braggart, was also a prophet. That could have been written about the swinging '60s.

Banned in the US and Britain for 40 years, Frank Harris's My Life and Loves remains an important read.