book is good and life-worthy or not and yet need drives me to publish it
at once.
Did not Horace require nine years to judge his work?
I, therefore, want the reader to know my intention; I want to give him
the key, so to speak, to this chamber of my soul.
First of all I wished to destroy or, at least, to qualify the universal
opinion that love in youth is all romance and idealism. The masters all
paint it crowned with roses of illusion: Juliet is only fourteen: Romeo,
having lost his love, refuses life: Goethe follows Shakespeare in his
Mignon and Marguerite: even the great humorist Heine and the so-called
realist, Balzac, adopt the same convention. Yet to me it is absolutely
untrue in regard to the male in boyhood and early youth, say from
thirteen to twenty: the sex-urge, the lust of the flesh was so
overwhelming in me that I was conscious only of desire. When the
rattlesnake’s poison-bag is full, he strikes at everything that moves,
even the blades of grass; the poor brute is blinded and in pain with the
overplus. In my youth I was blind, too, through excess of semen.
I often say that I was thirty-five years of age before I saw an ugly
woman, a woman that is, whom I didn’t desire. In early puberty, all
women tempted me; and all girls still more poignantly.
From twenty to twenty-three, I began to distinguish qualities of the
mind and heart and soul; to my amazement, I preferred Kate to Lily,
though Lily gave me keener sensations: Rose excited me very little yet I
knew she was of rarer, finer quality than even Sophy who seemed to me an
unequalled bedfellow.
From that time on the charms of spirit, heart and soul, drew me with
ever-increasing magnetism, overpowering the pleasures of the senses
though plastic beauty exercises as much fascination over me today as it
did fifty years ago. I never knew the illusion of love, the rose-mist of
passion till I was twenty-seven and I was intoxicated with it for years;
but that story will be for my second volume.
Now strange to say, my loves till I left America just taught me as much
of the refinements of passion, as is commonly known in these States.
France and Greece made me wise to all that Europe has to teach; that
deeper knowledge too is for the second volume in which I shall relate
how a French girl surpassed Sophy’s art as far as Sophy surpassed Rose’s
ingenuous yielding.
[Illustration]
But it was not till I was over forty and had made my second journey
round the world that I learned in India and Burmah, all the high
mysteries of sense and the profounder artistry of the immemorial East. I
hope to tell it all in a third volume, together with my vision of
European and world-politics. Then I may tell in a fourth volume of my
breakdown in health and how I won it back again and how I found a pearl
of women and learned from her what affection really means, the treasures
of tenderness, sweet-thoughted-wisdom and self-abnegation that
constitute the woman’s soul. Vergil may lead Dante through Hell and
Purgatory: it is Beatrice alone who can show him Paradise and guide him
to the Divine. Having learned the wisdom of women—to absorb and not to
reason—having experienced the irresistible might of gentleness and
soul-subduing pity, I may tell of my beginnings in literature and art
and how I won to the front and worked with my peers and joyed in their
achievements, always believing my own to be better. Without this blessed
conviction how could I ever have undergone the labor or endured the
shame or faced the loneliness of the Garden, or carried the cross of my
own Crucifixion; for every artist’s life begins in joy and hope and ends
in the shrouding shadows of doubt and defeat and the chill of
everlasting night.
In these books as in my life, there should be a crescendo of interest
and understanding: I shall win the ears of men first and their senses,
and later their minds and hearts and finally their souls; for I shall
show them all the beautiful things I have discovered in Life’s
pilgrimage, all the sweet and lovable things too and so encourage and
cheer them and those aftercomers, my peers, whose sounding footsteps
already I seem to hear, and I shall say as little as may be of defeats
and downfalls and disgraces save by way of warning; for it is courage
men need most in life, courage and lovingkindness.
Is it not written in the book of Fate that he who gives most receives
most and do we not all, if we would tell the truth, win more love than
we give: Are we not all debtors to the overflowing bounty of God?
Frank Harris.
_The Catskills Mts., this 25th day of August 1922._
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).