King of Cads

FRANK HARRIS: THE LIFE AND LOVES OF A SCOUNDREL (246 pp.)--Vincent Brome--Thomas Yoseloff ($5).

Had he not been a thundering liar. Frank Harris would have been a great autobiographer. He shared with the major self-portrait artists--Cellini, Pepys, Boswell and Rousseau--the paradoxical but necessary combination of a surging pride and a vestigial sense of shame. But he had the crippling disqualification that he told the truth, as Max Beerbohm once remarked, only "when his invention flagged."

In his notorious four volumes, My Life and Loves--the first installment of which was published in 1923, when he was 67--Harris embellished the fantastic facts of his life with even more fantastic fictions. His accounts of prodigious sexual exploits seem to have been less Frank than Harris. Now, 70 years after Harris rocketed to fame in London, British Author Vincent Brome has recovered a nose cone of truth from the oblivion into which Harris' reputation has fallen. It is a brisk and entertaining book in which Biographer Brome wisely leaves judgment to the men who knew him best--Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw.

Sand Hog & Cowboy. Harris was a bullying bantam of a man (barely 5 ft. 5 in. without his 2-in. elevator heels) who had great gifts, a natural swagger, and a voice variously compared to a Russian choir, the organ at Westminster Abbey and the rustling leaves of a brass artichoke. Born to enchant and embarrass, bewitch and betray, seduce and swindle a whole Who's Who of famous friends. Harris was never forgotten by those who met him--and rarely forgiven.

In the present age of the specialist, a man like Harris might well have been screened out. Born in 1856 in Galway, son of a Welsh lieutenant in the Royal Navy, young Harris ran away from school at 15, having made a name for himself by hitting the class bully with a cricket ball--which was (and is) not considered cricket in an English school. Harris made his way to America, became a shoeshine boy and sand hog in New York (he worked on the Brooklyn Bridge), a cowboy in the U.S. West (he was fearless as a gun fighter, by his own account), a lawyer of sorts. He served as correspondent for several U.S. papers during the Russo-Turkish war--covering the hostilities from a brothel in Odessa, some say, though Harris insisted that he never left dashing General Skoboleff's side.

At 26, after all his adventures only a friendless, penniless clerk, Frank Harris set out to dazzle London.

Back to 14. He had a Himalayan egotism (Shaw quipped of him that Harris thought America had been discovered the day he landed there), and he needed every foot of it as he determined to scale the English Establishment, that trade union of church, state, brains, blood and money which at the time seemed the secure pinnacle of all earthly power and glory. How he made it and then slithered off the summit into jail, exile, ostracism and beggary adds up to a fascinating record.

He joined the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, and thought seriously (he later said) of bombing William Ewart Gladstone to death in the House of Commons. Instead, he took up journalism, brazened his way to the editorship of the Evening News. At first, he ran it "as a scholar and man of the world of twenty-eight"--without success; "but as I went downwards and began to edit as I felt at twenty, then at eighteen, I was more successful; but when I got to my tastes at fourteen years of age, I found instantaneous response. Kissing and fighting were the only things I cared for at thirteen or fourteen, and these are the things the English public desires."

Brilliant Bully. By this editorial principle, Harris raised News circulation from 7,000 to 70,000. He gained social standing of a sort by marrying a wealthy widow, whom he made poorer but no happier. He stood for Parliament as a Conservative but ruined his chances by making a speech on the merits of mistresses for M.P.s. By borrowing right and left, Harris managed to buy a literary weekly, the Saturday Review, tossed out its old staff, and before long had a roster of contributors including Shaw, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling.

As an editor he was a brilliant bully. Wells once confessed that he made him feel like a bankrupt undertaker; Classicist Middleton Murry cowered as Harris roared: "God's great fist! You, Murry, wrote this drivel about Paradise Lost?" But Harris befriended Oscar Wilde--though he did not share Oscar's homosexual bent--and the friendship bolstered his social success. It was a time when conversation was still considered a fine art, and Wilde and Harris were two of the greatest conversational artists in London, sought by hostesses for the wit and charm of their anecdotage.

Ideals & Swindles. Harris' social climb was not destined to last. As Wilde said of him: "Frank Harris has been to all the great houses of England--once!" There was a fatal ambiguity in Harris' character which ran through a hundred episodes in his life. He was a fire-breathing imperialist as editor of the Evening News and later a liberal pro-Boer in the Saturday Review. He both overtipped and cadged. He hated the posh and the powerful, but once he had the top hat on his own head, he was happy--until he ran out of words and credit. He loved England, yet became a pro-German propagandist in the U.S. during World War I.

He stood by his friend when Wilde's homosexuality jostled him from society into Reading Gaol. During Oscar's trial, he advised him to escape to France--there was a yacht waiting, he said, with steam up in the Thames. (Shaw suspected the steam yacht was hot air, just as Painter Augustus John thought Harris' Rolls-Royce to be, "like Elijah's chariot, purely mythical.") When Oscar went to prison, Harris defied a savage social blockade to visit the ruined man, offered him -L-500. There may have been genuine courage in his conduct, but typically, two days later, Harris withdrew his offer.

He could write "with one hand, the equivalent of a blackmailing letter [while] with the other he turned the pages of the Bible looking for an appropriate quotation. While he professed Utopian ideals, he indulged petty swindles."

Thus it went--stock frauds, scandals involving teen-age girls, plagiarism, libel suits--until the final debacle of broke exile in the south of France, when Harris was at last faithful to the wife who loved him; he was too shortsighted to see the girls, and still too vain to wear glasses. Yet he died in 1931, with his own, noble epitaph already written: "There is an end of time and of the evil thereof; when delight is gone out of thee and desire is dead, thy mourning shall not be for long . . ."

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