Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR ELLIS AS 'FRAUD' In the many years that I have been reading THE NEW LEADER, I cannot recall anything which has had such an effect upon me as Robert E. Fitch's statement in his review...
...In the light of these facts, how are we to reconcile Ellis* humility and honesty, for which all who knew him loved him, with Hunt's accusation of his being a "fraud" and with Fitch's evaluation of the book as being "civilized, erudite . . . frank and honest...
...Possibly that biographical monstrosity, Calder-Marshall's The Sage of Sex, recently released in America and published last year in England, was not yet available to Hunt when he wrote his book...
...Her sexual relations with Ellis ceased only after she confessed in a letter to him that she was involved in lesbian activtiy with "Clare," whom she was visiting and who was but one of the several women with whom she had such relations throughout her life...
...He did not feel "confident all the time that this made for the enrichment of their" marriage...
...Since Fitch does not enter a single demur against the statement, he is hardly qualified to meet a reviewer's rudimentary requirement of ascertaining the veracity of the material with which he is confronted...
...In desperate loneliness Ellis finally found comfort in the affectionate friendship of "Amy" to which Edith gradually became reconciled...
...Ellis neither advocated nor practiced "free love" in the manner of Shelley and Hinton...
...Fitch is probably summarizing Hunt...
...This candor was part of their premarital agreement...
...I don't know who was responsible for this remark...
...In his relations with Francoise he likewise admitted that he had, in his love for her (and by implication in his writings), been remiss in not clarifying his attitude toward "free love...
...What, for instance, would DeVoto and Edman have said today, and why have former devoted followers like Peterson, Wortis and Menninger not uttered a word since the publication of Friendship's Odyssey in 1946...
...Philadelphia GEORGE KIMMELMAN...
...Contrary to the statement's in Fitch's jumbled paragraph, the facts are these...
...What later precipitated Edith's collapse, aside from complicated illnesses and a rapidly developing psychosis, was his friendship with Margaret Sanger while she was lecturing in the United States...
...though Calder-Marshall elaborates a thesis similar to Hunt's in connection with Ellis, he is listed nowhere among Hunt's sources...
...In summing up his life with Edith, he admits not knowing of her inversion when he first met her and during their early years together, and he readily acknowledges those shortcomings which all of us share as human beings...
...The source of Hunt's statement could be only Ellis' My Life and the neglected but very important autobiography, Friendship's Odyssey, by Francoise Delisle (the "other mistress and companion" referred to in the paragraph...
...Readers of Ellis should be interested in the following: Francoise Delisle informed me some weeks ago that a revised edition of her book was about to go to press in England...
...Should it be published in America, I wonder what would happen to all those "friends" of Ellis who, childishly disillusioned, ran for cover or psychoanalyzed him out of their memories when My Life was published in 1939...
...he was merely being unusually honest in telling her about his relations with other women, just as she had previously confided her lesbian affairs to him...
...But one is just as culpable as the other in traducing the memory of one of the most honest and humanistic emancipators of modern times...
...She was therefore emotionally correct, he told her, in behaving as she did with Hugh de Selincourt, Ellis' "friend," to use Fitch's term...
...Ellis' wife Edith was a confirmed invert with a latent psychosis...
...Sir Herbert Read made the accurate observation that only by reading both Ellis' and Delisle's autobiographies can one get the complete account of Ellis' life...
...DEAR EDITOR ELLIS AS 'FRAUD' In the many years that I have been reading THE NEW LEADER, I cannot recall anything which has had such an effect upon me as Robert E. Fitch's statement in his review of Morton A. Hunt's The Natural History of Love ("Amor Vincit Omnia," NL, February 8): "Surely the greatest fraud of the lot was Havelock Ellis...
...There were, incidentally, no sexual relations between Ellis and Miss Sanger...
Vol. 43 • March 1960 • No. 10
