A Travesty of a Travesty:

...His life was a montage of many events: wild promotional schemes, petty and grand swindles, gossip sheets that were the occasions for blackmail, messianic delusions, a spell in jail and other sordid encounters with and evasions from the authorities, short stories that sometimes turned out to have been plagiarized, portraits of contemporaries that were half-libelous and half-fictitious but never dull, and a book on Shakespeare that took the plays as material for biography and which the British press alternately mocked and denounced while the New York Times exulted: "This is the book for which we have waited a lifetime...

...The war over, Harris leisurely traveled through Germany and Greece, stopping at various towns to attend the local universities...

...But his natural ebullience (or destructiveness) soon reasserted itself...

...Here his arrogance and presumptu-ousness took on the aspect of genius...

...By a combination of force and lies he made his way into the offices of several journals and begged opportunities to review books...

...It is hard to think of a more promisingly lively subject, or of a more hopelessly mendacious one...

...For a short time he was subdued: Conformity seemed to be the price of his entree into society, his selection as a Conservative (!) candidate for Parliament and his marriage to a very rich and very conventional woman...

...In 1898 he disposed of the Saturday Review at enormous profit, aided by some shady financial manipulations...

...and his work on Shaw, which apparently was written by someone else...

...Whereupon, without a cent of his own, he managed to raise enough to purchase the Saturday Review...

...Reviewed by Gertrude Himmelfarb Author, "Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution" FRANK HARRIS is a biographer's dream and a historian's nightmare...

...Somehow—no one quite knew how at the time, and still less now—he wangled, after only a few months, the editorship of a London daily, the Evening News...

...it was bohemia...

...His formula was simple and remains that of tabloid journalism today: "I edited the Evening News," he said, "first as a scholar and man of the world of 28...

...The reader without a taste for paradox and wild melodrama would be well advised not to try this book...

...Everything about Harris was fabulous—in both senses of the word...

...He was then free to indulge his real talent: for sexual adventure (he did not specialize in perversity only because he did not recognize anything distinctive about 12-year-old girls or anyone else) and for financial misadventure...

...Senility reduced him to a travesty of a travesty, and one is tempted to speculate that perhaps there was nothing to him in the beginning, as there was certainly nothing left in the end...

...The rest of Frank Harris's history is almost too tedious and painful to be recounted, although it included some of the books we best remember him for now: his biography of Oscar Wilde, so libelous it could not be published in England...

...Fired because he had exposed the paper to an indictment for obscene libel, he succeeded to an even more important post, that of editor of the eminently respectable Fortnightly Review...

...This period of the 1890s was the peak of his career, when his egomaniacal eccentricities attracted the bohemians and the talented...

...Even the extravagance of his personality, when he still had a personality, rings hollow, and the violence of his life leaves one exhausted, not exhilarated...

...his autobiography, completely untrustworthy and yet also completely revealing...

...A couple of years later, having just missed winning a scholarship to Cambridge, he decided that life in Britain held nothing for him and ran off to America...

...Kissing and fighting were the only things I cared for at 13 or 14 and these are the things the English public desires and enjoys today...

...As his biographer, Vincent Brome, soon discovered, it is impossible to separate the truth from fiction when the fiction is so essentially a part of the truth...

...His first abortive sexual experience, at the age of 12 or 13, was accompanied by the noise of an explosion caused by the crash of two trains...

...later the expression was to make a grotesque appearance in one of his stories when the mother of a "main ugly" child protests: "No baby's ugly that has all its features...

...When he finally reached England once again in the early 1880s, he was 26, with no professional qualifications, friends or family, but with infinite audacity...

...Back in England at the age of 20, Harris decided to become a journalist...

...As a child in Ireland, the son of a Welsh Royal Navy Lieutenant, Harris often heard himself described as "main ugly...

...His experiences in America were no more distinguished than those of many a young novelist, if book jackets are to be believed: He ran the familiar gamut from shoeshine boy to hotel clerk, cowboy, Brooklyn Bridge sandhog and college student...

...Within two years he succeeded in increasing its circulation from 7,000 to 70,000 (Brome's figures, not Harris...

...Firing the entire staff, including such eminent stalwarts as George Saints-bury, he brought in H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Max Beer-bohm, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling...

...And since his life was as outrageous as his lies, his fantasies had the disconcerting habit of coming true...

...And bohemia could be cultivated in other ways...

...Having publicly, bawdily defended Parnell and his mistress, and having then committed the second outrage of publishing an article sympathetic to anarchism, he simultaneously lost his job, his wife and his candidacy...

...We know this now it is come and we mark the day of its publication as a red letter day in the history of literature...

...When the Russo-Turkish War broke out, he made his way across Moscow to interview General Mikhail Skobeleff and become privy to his sexual indiscretions...

...But it was not really talent that attracted Harris himself...

...Then the main line of his career came into view—if there was such a main line...

...but when I got to my tastes at 14 years of age I found instantaneous response...

...nobody wanted my opinions, but as I went downwards and began to edit as I felt at 20, then at 18, then at 16, I was more successful...