The Thinking Corner

A Book of Love

A friend of mine put Havelock Ellis's autobiography into my hands and asked me to read it and pay a tribute to its author. My friend is right in assuming that a tribute is deserved by Havelock Ellis. Perhaps the best tribute is to utter the paradox that the passing of Havelock Ellis leaves no gap in the world. It is the life either frustrated or cut short before fulfilling itself that leaves a gap. What is here left behind is a sense of rich plenitude - an achievement splendid in its calm completeness. Yes, the two characteristics of this man as embodied in his work were an unassuming poise and a thoroughgoing wide-sweeping efficiency. That combination gave him a strength which did not exhaust itself, however enormous the job it undertook. The several volumes of his studies in the psychology of sex were written with an undiminished confident vigour: the grasp over each topic was masterly and the feeling of the importance of the labour never flagged, so that in spite of severe opposition the writer's mind proceeded from start to finish without hurry, fear or weariness.

Havelock Ellis's efficiency is not mechanical, nor even merely scientific. He is no soulless collector of facts. The beginning of his career as author, a man deeply interested in the fountains of creative art no less than the springs of creative sex, he never loses the imaginative touch, the gift of vision, that is the privilege of the poet. In fact, he has written poetry, some of it unusually felicitous, most of it bearing the stamp of profound feeling though not always of expressive intensity. But his was not the vocation of the direct poet. It was through a fine balanced prose, casting clear glances in many uncommon directions, that he exercised the penetration and quick sympathy his nature possessed. And he was drawn to explore, with the eye of a scientist, regions which poetry plumbs only through a rapture of brief hurting flashes and sudden engulfing shadows - the regions of abnormal

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sex. To this exploration he devoted a large number of years; but even then he never lost contact with the experiments and adventures of art. No new genius in any sphere of art but found in Havelock Ellis an understanding that was deep as well as enthusiastic, the depth preventing the enthusiasm from being effusive, the enthusiasm saving the depth from heaviness of expression.

It is no easy task to bring a correct critical insight to the quick of one's own life. But Ellis's natural bent as well as his long psychological and analytic training helps him a good deal. So in spite of unavoidable defects his autobiography makes illuminating reading. A frankness that lacks no dignity and an emotional power that is no enemy to intellectual vision constitute its essence. Whether it will rank with the confessions of past times I cannot definitely say; I am no authority on autobiographical literature and must admit to my shame that I have not even read in full the one book which weighs so much with Ellis himself - Rousseau's. Rousseau was indeed the more dynamic genius and also the more talented artist, and surely he was a more significant figure too in the history of the human mind: according to Ellis, he was the most significant influence in the West after Jesus. I therefore dare say it would be demanding too much of Ellis to ask him to act Rousseau. But he was no mean moulder of the positive side of what has come to be known as modernism. He aided to bring sex into the sunshine, to blow the fresh air of health upon the morbid privacy into which sex had degenerated. If there is more sanity and tolerance and understanding in the world today, Havelock Ellis is responsible to a marked degree. And as man and artist he cannot be denied a substantial position - a position neither vast nor supercharged with the meaning of personality nor creatively pre-eminent, yet striking home to our sense of values with a revealing weight, intimacy and grace. His autobiography, quintessencing him, is sufficient proof of his genuine worth. Judged by the story it lays bare of a rich and serious soul in a style of varied force, it comes as a document

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of considerable light.

The story is unusual. The relation between Havelock and his wife Edith is far from being a conventional love-affair. Edith's soul is as complex as Havelock's, though set in a different key, and the entangling of their hearts follows the extraordinary curves of their characters. She is homosexual no less than heterosexual, Havelock is very exclusively the latter; he has no profound attachment to any man-friend, while she is often bespelled by women of charm and sensibility and talent. But the terms homosexual and heterosexual lose their precise and acute meanings with them because neither Havelock nor Edith is markedly sexual. Sex is not the insistent strain in the accords and discords of their emotional lives. By sex I mean here the physical act. They married without any vehement desire of body for body, and after a certain period the physical act had no place in their relationship. They felt no necessity for it - in fact, it seems to have been discarded as something slightly disharmonious for both. This is not to say that they never lived passionately. Theirs was a love more intimately moving than simple affection - and Havelock actually found that the absence of sex in the narrow sense made no whit of difference in his attachment to his wife in the most intense man-and-woman way.

"Passion transcends sex," he writes, and adds: "that is a discovery with a significance for life and for the institution of marriage which has not yet been measured." It is of course unlikely that so eminent an authority on the psychology of sex should have an utter aloofness from it. Ellis was not ah unnatural man; but he had an instinctive turn for lifting the elemental urge to a high level. All during his impressionable adolescence in Australia where the relations between men and women were often facile, that instinct was at play. One night, on board a ship, he found himself alone with a girl. They walked once or twice up and down the deck, and she remarked to him by way of opening the conversation: "Ain't the moon lovely?" Such a feeling of loathing rose up in the

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young Ellis that in a few minutes, after briefly responding, he said it was time to go below and wished her good night. That was the nearest approach he knew to intimacy with a strange woman. At another time, in London, he was asked by a streetwalker to accompany her home. Out of curiosity he went. But when he found himself in her apartment he could not fulfil her expectations. Putting his money on the table he left her forthwith. Even in his long friendship with that wonderful and beautiful woman, Olive Schreiner, the author of An African Farm, who came nearest his heart before he met Edith Lees, there seems to be a restraint in the midst of strong emotion. Both were free-minded to an extreme degree and yet they appear to have been lovers with a reservation. All this as well as his later sex-transcendence without any loss of true passion demonstrates the subtle stuff of which he was made: he was no gross animal as so many great men -like Goethe and Victor Hugo - are in spite of their lofty intellects.

But in one point Ellis fails in subtlety of spirit. The failure is associated with his having other women than his wife to minister to his emotional needs. Edith's nature - impetuous and excitable - was not quite what Havelock needed: there was in him a cry for restfulness, for a touch that would not merely kindle his mind and body and make them burn but also give them a calm soothing glow - a dawn-gleam and a sunset-shine no less than a noon-flush. These things he found in his cousin, the girl called Anne, and in later life, when Edith was no more, in the exquisite Francoise. No turmoils, no conflagrations with Anne and Francoise -therefore no such profound griefs and high exultations as with Edith, but, while the intense richness was missing, a serener and steadier and sweeter experience took its place. However, Edith remains, when all is said and done, the core of his autobiography - the years of his growth and the fulfilment of his literary and scientific destiny came with her and through her, for she was a woman of genius and the genius in him rose to full flowering under her radiance. It is a

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pity, therefore, that she could not satisfy all the cries of his heart. Was it because she was partly homosexual and consequently divided in her response to him? It is a fact that the first disappointment in their married lives fell to Havelock when he found her under the spell of another woman. Not that she grew cold to him; the same heat of attachment remained on her part but he discovered for the first time that she was two-natured and that side by side with the heat her being could feel for him she could carry on a warm self-devotion to a woman. He did not get anything fundamentally less than he had done before; but he found himself not the sole lord of her heart for the reason that her heart had two compartments of emotion, or rather, to put it more correctly though more paradoxically, there were two distinct hearts in her. In short, he saw that he could not have the whole of her, though what he had was more powerful and lasting than what women took from her. He remained to the end her paramount interest - yet it is always a blow to a man that he should be not the one and only interest with regard to sexual emotion. His own turning towards Anne happened a little after. I think it probable that if Edith had not revealed her homosexuality to him he would have felt less encouraged to give Anne that kiss with which their relationship sprouted. It is, none the less, a debatable issue whether the need of tranquil love which was in him and which Edith could not appease would not in any case have searched for an opening.

Where Havelock failed was the ease with which he satisfied that need, feeling quite justified because Edith had gone Sapphic. He says that both the instances were essen-tially alike, each person being "unfaithful" according to their sex-leanings. I detect a certain sophistry here. Havelock thought he had struck upon profundity in seeing the essential sameness of the two lapses. How he could with his fine understanding take such a viewpoint is hard to grasp. It should be clear that Edith's blow to him was much less than his to her. We must remember that she was not just homosexual: a strong heterosexuality was also at work in

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her. To this, Havelock administered a severe hurt by his attachment to other women. The element of jealousy was roused in her in a form and to a degree impossible for him because she did not wrong him at all with regard to his own sex. The wrong on either side would have been equal if both the parties had been two-natured. If she had established relations with any other man, Havelock would have known exactly what he inflicted on her by his relationship with other women. His own sufferings he could mitigate by his psychological understanding of sexual inversion and by his certitude that no man except himself ever dominated Edith's heart. Her sufferings lacked such solace: it is not easy to bring balm to a mind crossed with the shadow of infidelity by its mate. There was no adulterous extreme in the infidelity -Havelock never slept with Anne or any other woman during Edith's lifetime - but the romantic and the idealist in Edith were deeply wounded. Her health both of mind and body was sapped by the wound. That she rose in her heart high above it and let Havelock follow the path of his nature and did not permit the pain caused by her wound to prompt her to break inwardly with him shows her to be an extraordinary person and almost makes her more the heroine of the autobiography than Havelock is its hero.

To balance what I have said against him I must explain that, if Edith became capable of the subtle grace she showed, it was because she realised how great a man he was. He gave her something which she felt it would be foolish to throw away in peevish resentment over his emotional complications. These complications had so little of the base and the gross about them that they weighed little against the magnanimity of his being, the primacy he gave her in his heart, the superb sympathy and solicitude he brought her. If her genius helped him, his genius did the same to her. She knew that no man she came across wrapped her round with such warm depth. Others sought her out and even loved her but no gift came to her from so mighty a nature. Even his defects left him a finer man on the whole than any she knew

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in her entire life. This she recognised strongly enough despite the partial dementia which overtook her at the close and led her into farcical legal separation. Havelock emerges from his book with a grand stature - powerful and calm at the same time, erring yet magnificent - and for all his failure a great lover and a sensitive artist. The blend of lover and artist turns the last portion of his autobiography - the portion covering Edith's death - into a most moving testament. Every sentence rings true and beautiful, a restrained intensity of genuine love strikes again and again a Dantesque note. It is really a grand finale of golden feeling.

There is a wide store of wisdom scattered in the autobiography. Life's vicissitudes, art's complexities, problems of the individual and problems of the race are lit up by flashes of genius. I could make quite a substantial compilation of highly enlightening extracts. But the book is at bottom a liber amoris, a story of love's heart. So as a fitting illustration of the wisdom of that heart I shall pick out a passage which occurs apropos Olive Schreiner: "Olive Schreiner disliked my account of her book. She said it reminded her of a man in South Africa with a horse for sale, who, after admitting a long list of appalling defects in the animal, wound up by declaring emphatically, 'But, it's a damned fine horse!'... It seems to me that a critic who is not keenly aware of all the defects of a lovely thing which ravishes him is but a crude critic, whose opinion hardly counts. My attitude is the same even in love. The women whom I have loved and almost worshipped are women of whose defects I have been precisely and poignantly aware. The lover who is not thus aware seems to me a crude sort of lover, scarcely even a lover at all, merely the victim of a delusion, of which to rob him would be to rob him of his 'love'. I feel contempt for the 'love' that is blind; to me there is no love without clear vision, and perhaps also no vision in the absence of love."

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