Frank Harris and Arnold Bennett*
BY E. F. BENSON.
SOME time in the 'fifties of last century, though nobody knows precisely when, there was born at Tenby in Wales, of a Jewish father, a male baby who in after years wrote in his autobiography that he was born at Galway and lived in Ireland for twelve years. He promoted his father to be a Naval Lieutenant, and said that the love and confidence that existed between his mother and himself was the noblest emotional expe- rience of his life. She died when he was three years old. When he was four, he found his nurse in a highly com- promising situation, and blackmailed her with the threat of exposure, unless she would sprinkle his bread and butter with sugar. (This we can well believe.) At the age of thirteen he was in his school cricket eleven, and, though small for his years, soundly thrashed his captain who was seventeen. The school where he was such a hero was at Ruabon in Wales, but in later life he wore an Old Etonian tie, and in unguarded moments said he was at Rugby. On leaving Ruabon-Eton-Rugby he emigrated to America, became the King of boot-blacks, and soon after book-keeper and steward in a hotel at Chicago. About this time his sexual life blossomed, and he and young girls found each other mutually irresistible. His exploits in lifting cattle and fighting Indians have, unfortunately, been shown to be wholly apocryphal.
He returned to Europe, he tells us, by two routes : by one he went westwards to San Francisco with an adoring mulatto girl and crossed the Pacific, and by the other he went eastwards across the Atlantic and coalesced with the westward pilgrim at Paris. After accidentally swallowing. sixty grains of belladonna, normally sufficient to kill fifty men, without hurt, he studied at Heidelberg and Gottingen, where he set one lecturer right about the com- parative genius of Goethe and Shakespeare, and at the request of another addressed the students on the virtues of chastity. After discovering the mortal remains of the Theban band who were slain at Chaeroneia (usually attributed to Professor Schliemann) and an amorous interlude at Constantinople, he went to Italy, and the great singing master Lamberti told him that he had the Frank Harris. By Hugh Kingsndll. Jonathan Cape. 7s. 6d.
The Journals of Arnhhl BenneZe, 1890-1910. , Newman Flower. Cassell. 10s. 6d.
most magnificent bass voice ever heard; and begged to have the privilege of training him. The name of this re- markable young man was not Munchausen but Frank Harris, and had Pontius Pilate asked him " What is Truth ? " he would have replied with all sincerity, " I haven't the slightest idea."
Mr. Hugh Kingsmill has collected these agreeable notes from Harris' autobiography, the obscenity of which prevented its publication here. Thereafter came Harris' English career, which he planned to be political. He attached himself to Lord Randolph Churchill, but being let down by his fall, he revenged himself by publishing loathsome libels about Lord Randolph's private life. He then embarked on journalism and literature, and was Editor of the Evening News, the Fortnightly Review, Hearth and Home, Modern Society and other papers. Most of these came to grief under his management, but he sold the Saturday Review, of which he was proprietor, at a handsome profit to Lord Hardwicke, acting for Rhodes and Belt. Unbeknown to them he had not dis- closed his deferred shares, which still gave him editorial control, and for these he got an additional £10,000.
He was also devoting himself to literature, and wrote The Man Shakespeare, a book of immense ability, which owed its central idea to the work of Georges Brandes. Of this he made no acknowledgement. It had a great success, and it, with some excellent short stories, gave him a sort of authority for a while in English letters : Mr. Middleton Murry, for instance, wrote that " a word of praise from him would change the whole of life for one for months, and a word of condemnation make me cry till I think my heart would break."
He married a rich wife ; he entertained ; he bawled and blustered in that magnificent bass voice ; he cooed to lions and roared to doves ; lie was a bully and a liar and a blackmailer. And withal there was about him an elemental gusto, like that of Benvenuto Cellini, that put him outside the courts of moral judgements. His end was inevit- able, for his character only confirmed itself, and his intel- lectual gifts coarsened. He went to America soon after the War broke out, became violently anti-English, re- duced the circulation of Pearson's Magazine from 200,000 to 10,000, and for the rest of his life was occupied with writing about himself directly as in Life and Loves, or in- directly in Contemporary Portraits, and his Life of Bernard Shaw. Mr. Kingsmill has given a very fair and detached portrait of this warped and gifted man.
The link between this biography of Frank Harris and the first instalment of the diaries of Arnold Bennett lies in their inextinguishable gusto for life which Harris used to construct fiction about himself, and Arnold Bennett as grist for his novels. This record of his earlier years is far more interesting than the section he himself pub- lished in 1929. It is fresher and hungrier, and whether he writes of the conversation he had with an apparently idiotic yokel, the dancing of Adeline Genee, the price of rooms in the Strand Hotel, his own bilious attacks (indeed, his description of a bilious attack is the most vivid piece of writing in the book) he brings to them all his illimitable appetite. Of really intimate revelations there are almost none : his engagement, for instance, to Eleanor Green he tells us took place at five, p.m. on June 15th, 1906, and it was broken off at eleven a.m. on August 3rd ; but of the history of his engagement and of the cause of its termination there is nothing, and when he resumes his diary he is married to someone else. His
chief pre-occupations were the earnings which attended his colossal industry, and the number of words he wrote in a given period. His ideal was to write 866,000 words a year, and every first of January he totals up his achieve-
ment. What these words were, whether poured out on drama, articles for the Press, occasional poetry or novels did not concern him : their number was the criterion of his progress. In line with that was his inability to judge the value of what he wrote. He had published at least eight novels, which, frankly, are worth nothing, before Old Wives' Tale ; but it, too, had been a mere matter of so many thousand words a day, and he had no idea that he had achieved a masterpiece of the first rank. Im- mensely he enjoyed the success of it ; hitherto no novel of his had been accepted at all by an American publisher, and he clutched with childlike gusto at fame and fortune. It gave him the keenest pang of delight that, when he gave his card to the manager of a hotel, the man started back and exclaimed : " My God ! Is it you ? "
All this is heartfelt, and it makes his diary a very
human document." But once only does he permit us any really intimate revelation, for his industry, his love of appreciation, his occasional jealousies—as when on the cover of the Windsor Magazine Anthony Hope's name was large-typed as a contributor, and his was not—were already patent. But just once he drew aside the curtain, and in a passage that outweighs in value the whole of the rest .of the diary, he writes : " It is humiliating that I cannot get through one single day without wounding or slightly abrading the sensibilities of others, without wasting time and brEiin-power on thoughts which I do not desire to think, without yielding to appetites which I despise. I am so wrapped up in myself that I, if anyone,
ought to succeed in a relative self-perfection see that at bottom I have an intellectual scorn for all sexual physical manifestations. They seem childish to me, unnecessary symptoms and symbols of a spiritual phenomenon. And even as regards spiritual affection, I do not like to think that I am dependent spiritually, even to a slight degree, on anyone. I do not like to think that I am not absolutely complete and sufficient in myself to myself."
There is the true self-revelation, as much more profound than the rest of his diary as Old Wires' Tale is than the rest of his novels, or as Frank Harris' concealment of his deferred sluires in the Saturday Review than his legends about his public school.
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