Frank Harris - My Life And Loves, vol 5

In Rangoon there began for me a series of adventures which forced me to the conclusion that the Burmese half-caste girl is one of the most fascinating creatures in God's world, and she is certainly one of the prettiest and best-formed; she is cheap, too. Many are sold at age fifteen to eighteenand even youngerby their parents and seldom cost even twenty pounds. I would have bought many had I known what to do with them afterward, but I hadn't the heart to use them for a short time and then leave them penniless and free in a big city. I was thus limited by a dictate of conscience to buy only those few for whom I could provide after my eventual leave-taking. I hesitated a long time between the numbers of two and three, but finally discretion had the better part of greed and lust, and I decided to content myself with two.

Their names? I forget their original names because I heard them only at the beginning. I decided to call them Rose and Lily. Burning my boats behind me as I do, I had no need of their names, for I had no intention of writing them through the intermediary of a missionary once I was gone. It was unfortunate that we couldn't speak each other's language, but the girls seemed to have a sixth sense of knowing what it was I wanted of them, and they were ever at my side with fruit and other refreshments at the very moment when the desire overtook me. Had I a longer writing life, I would certainly spend one year writing the detailed history of my short marriage to these two Burmese maidens, both barely past their eighteenth year, but I have still much to record and daily, in spite of my will, my sight fails the more. I shall have to content myself with describing one or two of their antics.

Perhaps the strangest was the way they used to love to make a “fur collar” for me with their thighs. This was really a delightful procedure. Literally, they would twine their thighs into a kind of collar for me, my neck clamped between their soft mounds, and my head the only part of me to protrude upward between their dark bellies. The idea was that I should tickle them with my tongue until they allowed me to break free. Without exaggeration I sometimes was forced to struggle with themso tight was their holdfor as much as fifteen minutes.

Another of their favorite tricks was to smear themselves all over with a sweet-smelling oil and then to wrestle with me until the oil from their bodies covered my own. Finally, there is the trick that some Burmese women have of smearing the male member with honey at every opportunity so that it and the female lips it penetrates are always sweet and tasty.

But this was not what I was looking for. I had wearied of passion, with Winnie, with May, with Rose and Lilythe old wanderlust was awake in me. This time it was Japan and China that called. My time for traveling was limited, so I resolved to move on.

One thing I might make mention of: The custom of living with native women and having half-breed children is practiced by Englishmen and Americans throughout the East. The children are superb. The Eurasian girl or boy in Burma is often an excellent specimen, both physically and mentally. It is unfortunate that the girl's lot is almost always unhappy and often tragic. This leads me to say that the complete understanding given by the Oriental mind to the act of love is in my opinion connected with the depths of spirit attained by certain of the eastern Holy Men. The Westerner is often shallow beside the Easterner. Which only goes to show the truth of one of my lifelong thesesthat a healthy sexual life is the prerequisite of a healthy spirit. What do I mean by “spirit”? To that question I shall offer at least part answer in the next chapter.

I shall end here by saying that I believe Keats could be called as a witness for the defense of my point of view. Who can recall the lines of Ode on a Grecian Urn, an ode to the beauty of Greek youth, and still disagree?

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with breed

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity

And he ends rightly with:

Beauty is truth, truth beautythat is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

I thought of Keats quite frequently while on my travels. Burma struck me at once as a country whose gorgeous vegetation would have held magnificence for this most lush of English poets.

In my quarter of a century in London there were at least two men of conspicuous ability who came to the front by proclaiming the certainty of life after death. The one was a Mr. Sinnett who preached in a new magazine entitled Broad Views. “I know people,” he said boldly, “who not only remember their past lives, but are in a position, if it were worthwhile, to write a complete diary of every day of those antenatal lives. For all persons the faculty in due course of time will come.”

Every soul now being born into the world, Mr. Sinnett insisted, went out of the world from 1,500 to 2,000 years ago. We are therefore all contemporaries of the Apostles and the Caesars, and the antenatal autobiographies of some of us ought to be worth reading. Dr. Anna Kingsford believed she was a reincarnation of Plato, and Mrs. Besant is said to be Hypatia come to life again, but these are mere assertions.

Mr. Sinnett sets forth “what happens to the soul after the death of the body. The experiences that come on first when a human soul is emancipated from the prison of the flesh are not of a very exalted order. As consciousness fades from the physical vehicle, it carries with it the finer sheath of astral matter which has interpenetrated the coarser physical vehicle during life, and in this ethereal but still quite material envelope, it exists for a time in the region commonly called the astral plane.

“On the astral plane the soul, in a vehicle of consciousness which is insusceptible to heat or cold, incapable of fatigue, subject to no waste, and therefore superior to the necessity of taking food, continues an existence for a variable period which in many of its aspects is so like the life just abandoned that uninstructed people who pass over find it impossible to believe that they are what is called dead. But that state of things, though, as it grows familiar, and as the field of view is enlarged, may be agreeable enough, and may be associated with the renewal of friendships and affections interrupted for a time by death, is not the stage of things that corresponds to the Heaven of religious teaching.

“Nothing that has ever been said from the religious point of view concerning the blissful condition of the soul in Heaven involves any exaggeration. On the contrary, the basic fact connected with existence on the plane of nature corresponding to the Heaven of theology is bliss, absolute, complete and unalloyed.”

But surely the methods of nature provide for all cases, and not merely for those of the spiritual aristocracy. What are we to think of the condition in Heaven of, let us say, a drunken coal heaver, whose earthly life has been anything but meritorious. Mr. Sinnett might reply that even in such a man's life there may have been some little gleam of spiritual feeling, something resembling love for a woman or a child.

Mr. Sinnett concludes by declaring that this theory of his “is not theory at all, but a living fact of consciousness" still to most of us as yet it is only a theory and hardly even plausible.

Plainly the whole hypothesis depends on the antenatal biographers and they are conspicuous by their absence.

The second person to preach Eternal Life was a Frederic Myers who was much more scientific than Sinnett, if I may be forgiven for using such a word to describe either of these dreamers. His book, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, is, he tells us, the result of thirty years' close study and serious thought.