my other books as it has. I used to receive ten thousand dollars a year from them; the publication of the first volume of My Life cut this income down to less than a thousand dollars yearly, and injured in like degree the sale value of anything I may write. Moreover, this condemnation keeps me from returning to London or New York and beginning life again if I wanted to, utilizing my knowledge of the stock exchange to rebuild my fortune.
Thirty odd years ago my friend, Burton, published his Arabian Nights, which was freer, not to say viler, than anything I have ever written, and the books went through the post freely, and he made ten thousand pounds out of the publication. But now England has copied America in one of its worst acts: every one knows that if you send an obscene book through the post in America, you can be had up and punished as if you had published the book.
But this execrable law, which allows a foolish official to judge the great innovators on the same level as the corrupters, has now been adopted by England. Twenty-five or thirty years ago she had better sense. Nevertheless, an English translation of Brantome is now being published and freely distributed in England; but the best English lawyers assure me that I could not hope for any leniency.
I remember in the prosecution of Mrs. Besant and Bradlaugh the judge stated that if the book was a dear book, it was not to be condemned like a cheap book, which might fall into the hands of boys and girls. This sane English compromise now has been tossed aside and the public prosecutor can proceed against any one for sending an obscene or indecent book through the mails, just as in America, even if one put a price on it, as I do, that should prevent it falling into the hands of any except those who really want it. But now that aristocratic England has taken on the livery of democratic America, there is no room for the man who uses English as his mother tongue to warn or to guide his fellows frankly. 'God's spies' are punished as if they were the devil's minions.
I don't think I have committed any violation even of these idiotic laws, but I am assured that I should find scant justice in America at the hands of the Justices Levys and Mayers; and just as little perhaps in London at the hands of the Horridges.
He who wishes to give a true record of his life is almost compelled to leave out the most interesting incidents of it. But some amusing ones, the brave soul may still record.
Heine has left on record how he was treated by the vile swarm of Suabian critics, but none of them ever attacked him as venomously as I have been attacked in America. I
want to give some specimens of it. Here is an editorial article in the Evening World of New York, of August 23, 1926: it is headed: The case of Frank Harris
At the autumn assizes at Nice, Frank Harris, the writer, will face charges of offending public morals, and possible imprisonment. Many years ago, he was a figure of some importance in the literary life of London. Editor of an important periodical, he associated on terms of more or less intimacy with many of the most distinguished writers of England and France. In those days the only thing scandalous about him was his insufferable egotism. His connection with Oscar Wilde led to the writing of a biography of the dramatist which has much merit. In later life he has distinguished himself in the writing of entertaining character studies of literary and political celebrities, albeit he is charged with taking liberties with the truth.
Then, old, world-weary, broken in health, he wrote the first volume of an autobiography, published first in Germany, which was disgusting in its frankness and its crudity. The attempt to circulate this nauseating collection of dirty stories in America led to some arrests.
It appeared that the disgust of even his well-wishers taught him nothing, for his arrest in France follows the publication of the second volume. Always a sensualist, it is impossible to believe that he presented himself in undress from any motive other than a desire for money. Having put himself in the class of street-walkers, he is entitled to no sympathy. The Frank Harris of years ago died long ago, and it is his cadaver that has been writing recently. The odor proves it.
This editorial is a mere collection of slanderous lies: so far am I from being broken in health that I never enjoyed better health in my life, and in this very August walked over twenty miles one day without feeling even tired. I was never arrested in France-that is another invention of the Evening World.
Before I began writing My Life, I knew that frank speech would not bring me in any money; but even 'street-walkers' would have my sympathy: with Anatole France, I believe that they will be set above Queens in the Kingdom of Heaven. Instructed by the English Foreign Office, the French authorities found thirty pages to object to in four hundred and thirty-a slightly larger proportion than Whitman's; but hardly enough to make an honest man talk of a book as a 'nauseating collection of dirty stories.'
No decent journal in the world, except in New York, would have allowed an anonymous and cowardly slanderer to write such an editorial-a mere tissue of foul lies and fouler insults. Nor does this stand alone. The Saturday Review of Literature, the most widely circulated literary organ in the states, in its issue of February 13, 1926, gives more than a page to an outpouring of similar lies and abuse. And, worse still, Upton Sinclair, the author of The Jungle, which I have praised, wrote to me that 'I think it is the vilest book I have ever laid eyes on: I think it is absolutely inexcusable… I regard the book as a poisonous one.'
I put all this silly abuse on record just to comfort those of God's spies who come after me and who will no doubt be persecuted by the brainless and envious as I have been.
I have been asked what I mean by the term 'God's Spies!'
Whoever will be one of 'God's Spies,' as Shakespeare called them, must spend years by himself in some solitude of desert or city, resolutely stripping himself of the tune-garment of his own paltry ego, alone with the stars and night winds, giving himself to thoughts that torture, to a wrestling with the Angel that baffles and exhausts. But at length the travail of his soul is rewarded; suddenly, without warning, the Spirit that made the world uses him as a mouthpiece and speaks through him. In an ecstasy of humility and pride-'a reed shaken by the wind'-he receives the message. Years later, when he gives the gospel to the world, he finds that men mock and jeer at him, tell him he is crazy, or worse still, declare they know the fellow, and ascribe to him their own lusts and knaveries. No one believes him or will listen, and when he realizes his own loneliness, his heart turns to water, and he himself begins to doubt his inspiration. That is the lowest hell. Then, in his misery and despair, comes one man who accepts his message as authentictrue; one man who shows in the very words of his praise that he, too, has seen the Beatific Vision, has listened to the Divine voice. At once the prophet is saved: the sun irradiates his icy dungeon; the desert blossoms like a rose; his solitude sings with choirs invisible. Such a disciple is spoken of ever afterwards as the beloved and set apart and above all others.
Fortunately for me, I have found several such disciples: Esar Levine, Ben Rebkuhn, Raymond Thomson and Lyngklip. These young Americans came to my lectures in New York and offered me their services. For years now they have helped me in all the ways of affection, suffered even fines and imprisonment for me-and no man hath greater love than this! Esar Levine has helped me a great deal with this volume, for he knows all my writing better than I do. And now other Americans, Thomson and Lyngklip, come to me in the same sweet spirit. I think the world will soon recognize-for they are all still in the twenties-that the friendship of these men is to me a title of honor.
As I told at the end of the second volume of My Life, my chief pleasures in life are still those derived from literature and art and the intercourse with wise and loving friends. I get as much pleasure, too, from a good dinner, in spite of using strict moderation, as I ever did, and more I think than ever from a beautiful sunset or exquisite sky and mountain and sea effects; but most of all from my work, and from the resolute purpose to make each book better than the previous one at the cost of multitudinous revisions.
And now a word from my heart about my deepest belief. I have told how, as a schoolboy, just before taking my first Communion, I had come to doubt the accepted revealed religion; but still, in a vague way, I believed in a good, if somewhat ineffective, purpose in life, and for thirty years cherished a vague belief in a God and his goodness and in human progress. But between fifty and sixty when I first read Fabre and came to realize the senseless cruelties that dominate the animal and insect world, I began to doubt, and I soon lost sight of any upward way in the horror-haunted chaos. Doubts soon took shape and meaning. A hundred organs are given to man for pain, and one for pleasure: he has thirty feet of intestine, all for suffering, where one would suffice; and worse still, pain is never in any relation to welfare, has in it no warning, even; one suffers more from a toothache than from a mortal wound.
If there is a creator, he is malevolent, rather than kind.
I disliked the word 'atheist,' and felt with Huxley that 'agnostic' was a truer description of my mental state: for if the idea of a personal God had altogether vanished from my consciousness, I still believed in a slow and gradual unfolding of a higher and nobler social life for men on this earth.
Again and again I came back to Goethe's word:
