Frank Harris - My life and loves Vol. 2

One experience of my manhood may be told here and will go far to make all the unconscious or semi-conscious lusts manifest. While living in Roehampton and editing the Saturday Review, I used to ride nearly every day in Richmond Park. One morning I noticed something move in the high bracken, and riding to the spot, found a keeper kneeling beside a young doe.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Matter enough," he replied, holding up the two hind legs of the little creature, showing me that they were both broken.

"Here she is, Sir," he went on. "As pretty as a picture, ain't she? Just over a year or so old, the poor little bitch, and she come in heat this autumn and she must go and pick out the biggest and oldest stag in the park and rub her little bottom against him-Didn't you, you poor little bitch! — and of course he mounted her, Sir; and her two little sticks of legs snapped under his weight and I found her lying broken without ever having had any pleasure; and now I've got to put her out of her pain, Sir; and she's so smooth and pretty! Ain't ye?" And he rubbed his hand caressingly along her silky fur.

"Must you kill her?" I asked, "I'd pay to have her legs set."

"No, no," he replied, "it would take too much time and trouble and there's many of them. Poor little bitch must die," and as he stroked her fine head gently, the doe looked up at him with her big eyes drowned in tears.

"Do you really lose many in that way?" I asked.

"Not so many, Sir," he replied. "If she had got over this season, she'd have been strong enough next year to have borne the biggest. It was just her bad luck," he said, "to have been born in the troop of the oldest and heaviest stag in the park."

"Has age anything to do with the attraction?" I asked.

"Surely it has," replied the keepers. "The old stag is always after these little ones, and young does are always willing. I guess it's animal nature," he added, as if regretfully.

"Animal nature," I said to myself as I rode away, "and human nature as well, I fear," with heavy apprehension or presentiment compressing my heart.

Now to my experience. In the early summer of 1920, having passed my sixtyfifth birthday, I was intent on finishing a book of Portraits before making a long deferred visit to Chicago. Before leaving New York, a girl called on me to know if I could employ her. I had no need of her, yet she was pretty, provocative, even, but for the first time in my life, I was not moved.

As her slight, graceful figure disappeared, suddenly I realized the wretchedness of my condition in an overwhelming, suffocating wave of bitterness. So this was the end; desire was there but not the driving power.

There were ways, I knew, of whipping desire to the standing point, but I didn't care for them. The end of my life had come. God, what a catastrophe! What irremediable, shameful defeat! Then for the first time I began to envy the lot of a woman; after all, she could give herself to the end, on her death bed if she wished, whereas a man went about looking like a man, feeling like a man, but powerless, impotent, disgraced in the very pride and purpose of his manhood.

And then the thought of my work struck me. No new stories had come to me lately: the shaping spirit of imagination had left me with the virile power.

Better death than such barrenness of outlook, such a dreadful monotonous desert. Suddenly some lines came to me:

Dear as remembered kisses after Death,

Deep as true love and wild with all regret Oh, Death in life, the days that are no more!

As I sat there in the darkening office, tears poured from my eyes. So this is the end!

I crawled home: there, all by myself, I'd be able to plumb the disaster and learn its depth. For the first time in my life, I think, tears were rising in my heart and I was choking with the sense of man's mortality.

Tears, idle tears; I well know what they mean Tears from the depth of some divine despair.

Why "divine"; why not accursed?

Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes When looking at the happy autumn fields And thinking of the days that are no more Oh! Death in life! the days that are no more!

I would go home. And then a dreadful incident came back to me. One day, a long time before the World War, Meredith sent me a copy of Richard Feverel, all marked with corrections. In his letter he told me that he was setting himself to correct all his books for a final definitive edition. He wanted to know what I thought of the changes he had made. "I think you will find them all emendations," he wrote, "but be frank with me, please, for you are almost the only man living whose judgment on such a matter would have weight with me. Morley, too, is a judge, but not of creative work, and as you have always professed a certain liking for Richard Feverel, I send that book for your opinion."

Naturally I was touched and sat down to read, feeling sure that the alterations would be all emendations. But the first glances shocked me: he kept preferring the colorless word to the colorful. I went through the job with the utmost care. In some three hundred changes there were three of four I could approve; all the rest were changes for the worse. At once I got my car and drove down to Box Hill.

I came to the little house in the late afternoon and found Meredith had just got back from his donkey drive up the hill. He took me to his working room in the little chalet away from the house and we went at it hammer and tongs.

"You've put water in your ink," I cried, "and spoiled some of the finest pages in English. The courtship in the boat, even, you've worsened. For God's sake, stop and leave well, excellent-well, alone!"

At first he would not accept my opinion, so we went through the changes, one after the other. Hours flew by. "How do you explain the fact," he cried at last,

"that I'm still unconvinced, that in my heart you've not persuaded me?"

I had to speak out; there was nothing else for it.

"You are getting on," I said. "The creative power is leaving you, I fear. Please, please, forgive my brutal frankness!" I cried, for his face suddenly seemed to turn grey. "You know, you must know how I reverence you and every word of this scene; the greatest love idyll in all literature is dear to me. It's greater than Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Don't alter a word, Master, please, not a word! They are all sacred!"

I don't know whether I persuaded him or not; I'm afraid not. As we grow older we grow more obstinate, and he said something once later about finding pleasure in correcting his early work.

But the fact remained fixed in my soul: Meredith had passed the great climacteric; he must have been about sixty-six and he had lost the faculty even of impartial judgment.

Had I lost it too? It seemed probable.

God, the bitterness of this death in life!

The days that are no more!

From that time on, I began to mention my age, make people guess it, women as well as men, but saw no comprehension, even in thoughtful women. If you are not bald and have no grey hairs-the stigmata of senility — you are all right in their opinion, all right! Oh, God!

Yet I soon found that my judgment had not lost its vigor. My virility had decreased, was never prompt to the act as before, but it was still there, and so long as I treasured it, did not spend it, the faculty of judgment was but little changed. My worst fear was groundless: total abstinence was a necessity unless-but that's another story or two.

The want of joy, even the shuddering mistrust of the enfeebled faculties, might be borne without complaint. The general health, however, everyone tells me, begins to suffer: catch a cold and you have rheumatic pains that are slow to cure; eat something that disagrees with you and you are ill not for a few hours, as in maturity, but for days and weeks, don't take exercise enough, or take a little too much, and you suffer like a dog. Nature becomes an importunate creditor who gives you no respite.