The one that got away ... maybe.

"Frank Harris was an objectionable little man. He was sallow as a gypsy. He had bat ears, dark hair with a crinkle in it that grew low on the forehead, and a truculent mustache. People remarked on the richness of his bass voice. His charm was great, particularly for the opposite sex. He had the gift of gab to a sublime degree and a streak of deep scoundrelism that was the ruin of him.

A natural storyteller, tall tales so permeated his private life that his biographers were hard put to disentangle any facts at all from the web of fiction he spun about himself. Particularly in the twenties, when he was editing Pearson's Magazine in New York, there used to be considerable journalistic searching for "the real Frank Harris." One wonders now if such a creature ever existed. He wrote some good short stories. He might have developed into a first-rate novelist if he hadn't been such a damn liar."    

     ...  John Dos Passos (1896-1970), American novelist






''Arriving in London at the age of twenty-six (1882), unknown, half educated, penniless, he was within two years editor of the Evening News. Very little later as editor of the Saturday Review, then a very powerful Tory paper, he was entertaining in his house in Park Lane many of the most prominent social and political personalities of the day. He went everywhere and saw everyone, and yet found time and energy both for his own writing and the conduct of innumerable intrigues. It had been suggested that his rapid progress was based like Maupassant's "Bel-Ami" on his success with women, and his first wife was a wealthy woman. But he was more than just another adventurer. He was a man of immense potentialities: yet it was all ruined - or mainly ruined - by the lie within himself.

Wilde said of him, 'Frank has dined in every stately home in London ... once.' He could capture ground with a sudden assault, but he could not hold it. He lost his friends, betrayed their trust - no one could rely on him; and that same noisiness, that ill-bred forcefulness that made him socially intolerable, spoilt him as a writer. His actual writing is poor. I did not realize quite how poor it was till I compared the French with the English version of My Life and Loves. His books are only readable because their subject matter is sensational. He had in The Man Shakespeare something new and definite to say. In several of his short stories he struck an exciting plot. In his Portraits he wrote intimately and indiscreetly of persons about whom one is inquisitive. Unfortunately you cannot believe a word he says.

His anecdotes about Maupassant's priapism and Carlyle's impotence are typical. He takes two rumours which probably have a basis in fact and makes them the subject of a confession. The men who are reported to have made these confessions are no longer in the world to contradict him or defend themselves. And who could believe the scene where he pretends to have been completely ignorant of Wilde's inclinations until the scandal broke? His memoirs are valueless as history. If he survives as a legend, as part of a pattern, as a motif in die mosaic of literary history during the close of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth centuries - that is the most that can be hoped for. But his effect in 1906 on a twenty-year-old poetess must have been apocalyptic. He was then in the middle fifties. Though his political career was ruined, his literary reputation was still untarnished. He had not yet alienated many of his more worth-while friends. He was, however, conscious of the tide's turn against him. He needed the adulation of the young to restore his self-esteem. He took trouble over the very young.

'Did you always lunch at the Café Royal?' I asked her.

'Except the last time. We lunched at Kettner's then.' She paused, hesitated. "Is Kettner's going still?' she asked. It was very flourishing, I told her.

'Is it still the same kind of place?'

'I suppose it is.'

'He took me to a private room.'

'I'm not sure if you'd find those still.'

Dinners in private rooms in restaurants went out with the modern flat. I saw the tail-end of their vogue. They would seem very unhygienic to a generation that is used to the centrally heated amenities of the modem apartment building, but there was a rakish rococo air about the whole procedure - the curtained stairway, the discreet waiters, the eighteenth-century engravings, the chaise-longue - that provided its own special stimulus; married couples got a kick out of going there and being mistaken for what they weren't.

'If that was your last lunch, I gather it wasn't a success,' I said.

She smiled, then flushed. 'I'm afraid he must have thought me very childish; girls weren't so sophisticated then. Ann Veronica seemed a very daring book. And besides, that room; it was tiny; I felt so big and clumsy. He was a little man, you know.'

She paused, smiled wryly. 'I must have been a disappointment to him. He never asked me out again. But he printed my poems: the poems I sent him afterwards. I was very happy about that. I should have been miserable if I'd thought he only accepted them because lie had thought I was the kind of girl who might-' She checked; there was an abstracted look upon her face. 'Did you read My Life and Loves'?' she asked.

I nodded.

'They say, don't they, that the things which you regret in middle age are not the things you've done but the things you haven't done. That's not always true, you know. I was so glad I hadn't, when I read that book. I used to wonder sometimes when I read his other books and when I read about him, whether if I had behaved differently he might not have been a different person. There was so much that was fine in him. It all seemed to be going to waste. I might have saved him. But when I read that book, oh, it was all so materialistic, all that love-making and no conception of what love might be. I realized that I couldn't ever have made the slightest difference. It was too late, or I was the wrong person. I don't know which. Anyhow, I was very glad I hadn't.'

'You never saw him again, not after that last lunch?'

She shook her head. 'Very soon after that I went out to India: my sister was married to a civil servant.'

'You did not say good-bye?'

'I didn't tell him I was going. I dramatized myself. I pictured myself writing a tremendous poem on the way out. He'd be astonished to get an envelope in my handwriting with an Indian postmark. Then he'd read the poem. He'd be even more astonished. He'd feel guilty and ashamed. "I never realized she was capable of that," he'd think. My next poems would be better still. He'd be impatient to get me back. He'd write me beseeching letters. I'd go on postponing my return. That's how I'd punish him, for his own good. You know how a young girl daydreams.'

'And it didn't turn out that way at all?'

She laughed. 'The third day out I met the man I married.'

'And you wrote no more poems?'

'I wrote no more poems.' ''

     ... Alec Waugh (1898-1981), British novelist [excerpt, "My Place in the Bazaar"]