FRANK HARRIS
SIR,—In the matter of Mr. Michael Foot's attack on Mr. Waugh for his criticism of Frank Harris, is it not
possible that Shaw was paying hush-money to are un- principled rogue? 1 do not, of course, imply that there was anything disgraceful in Shaw's life, but Harris, as 1 know from men who worked with him, had no hesitation in inventing scandal and circulating it, either for pecuniary motives or from malice.
Of course Harris had 'gumption': every fraudulent rogue has a bravado of a kind. But if Shaw knew 'all the grievances of his detractors,' he knew the actions of one who was a blackmailer, the manipulator of the financial columns of the paper he edited, a porno- grapher, and, if Harris is to be believed (I agree, doubtful), the confessed keeper of a brothel in Bays- water.
I have two letters from Harris in front of me of early 1922, inviting me to pay him £1,000 as an advance against the first volume of his Autobiography to allow him to go to Russia `to spend May with my friends Lenin and Trotsky.' I asked to see something of the manuscript but nothing turned up except a letter in which, to be quite fair, Harris told me he will be franker than Casanova. 'I shall describe love's feast from hors d'teuvre.s to Savory [sic]. . . . I shall tell of love in the Yoshiwara of Kioto, in Indian and Burmese bazaars, love with Coptic Christian maidens in Cairo, and with Puritans in Californian valleys : I know the Marquesans as well as the Marscillaises and am going to write joy-books.' Perhaps Shaw (and Mr. Foot) found in that remarkable book My Life and Loves Harris's 'invariable generosity of indignation, scorn, chivalry and defiance of snobberies.' But no doubt Mr. Foot does not mind 'making an ass of himself about Frank Harris.'—Yours faithfully,
Savile Club, 69 Brook Street. W1
GUY CHAPMAN
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