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Tom Driberg in the last years of his life was still a true legend on the journalistic and cultural left. In youth, he had been an original member of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead set, while also maintaining good relations with the more radical forces clustered around W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. He had, indeed, given the young Auden his first copy of The Waste Land, and joined him in reading it aloud...Anyway, he was sometimes invited to contribute the "Londoner's Diary" to the New Statesman, and one week issued an appeal to readers to help him complete an indecent limerick the first line of which ran: "There once was a man of Stoke Poges." This highly respectable town in Buckinghamshire seemed to cry out for the rhyme "poke Doges," which in turn meant that the remainder of the limerick would have to be Venetian in flavor.Anyway, I invite you to submit your nomination for what the final line of the limerick concocted by Mssrs. Driberg, Hitchens, Fenton, and Holden might have been:
Fenton and I [poet James Fenton], assisted by our dear friend Anthony Holden, accepted the challenge and were duly invited to a lunch by old Tom held at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, above which Karl Marx had once kept his squalid lodgings. How we completed the task I don't entirely remember ("entirely resolved to poke Doges. So this elderly menace / Took steamship to Venice..." But what was the last line?). At all events [I continue quoting beyond what's necessary simply in able to get to Hitchens's mention of the actor who played Lawrence of Arabia; like Frank Harris, Hitchens seems to have known everybody]...
At all events, by the time the restaurant had finally insisted on throwing us out—this in the days when the pubs in London were not allowed to stay open in the afternoon—Tom simply took me down the street and up a flight of dingy stairs and made me a member of the infamous "Colony Room Club," an off-hours drinking establishment run by a tyrannical Sapphist named Muriel Belcher. Renowned to this day for its committed members, from Peter O'Toole to Francis Bacon, the joint at that epoch gave off an atmosphere of inspissated gloom, punctuated by moments of high insobriety and low camp.... [pp. 151-152]
Left hand panel from
Francis Bacons' 1966 triptych
Three Studies for a Portrait
of Muriel Belcher
There once was a man of Stoke Poges,
Entirely resolved to poke Doges.
So this elderly menace
Took steamship to Venice....
________________________________
A special feature of the edition of Frank Harris's life of Oscar Wilde that I finally finished reading today1 is its inclusion of George Bernard Shaw's brief account, "My Memories of Oscar Wilde." Because Shaw lived until 1950, we may not remember that he was born the same year as Harris (1856-1931) and only two years after Wilde, who died in 1900.What your book needs to complete it is a portrait of yourself as good as your portrait of Wilde....Here Harris placed a footnote: "The English paste in Shaw; genius is about the rarest thing on earth whereas the necessary guantum of 'honesty, sobriety, and industry' is beaten by life into nine humans out of ten."
Pugnacious people, if they did not actually terrify Oscar, were at least the sort of people he could not control, and whom he feared as possibly able to coerce him. You suggest that the Queensberry pugnacity was something that Oscar could not deal with successfully. But how in that case could Oscar have felt quite safe with you? You were more pugnacious than six Queensberrys rolled into one. When people asked, "What has Frank Harris been?" the usual reply was, "Obviously a pirate from the Spanish main."
...You had quite an infernal scorn for nineteen out of twenty of the men and women you met in the circles he most wished to propitiate; and nothing could induce you to keep your knife in its sheath when they jarred on you. The Spanish Main itself would have blushed rosy red at your language when classical invective did not suffice to express your feelings.
...That is why, in his relations with you, he appears as a man always shirking action—more of a coward (all men are cowards more or less) than so proud a man can have been [sic]. Still this does not affect the truth and power of your portrait. Wilde's memory will have to stand or fall by it.
...You could not have carried kindness further without sentimental folly. I should have made a far sterner summing up. I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of heaven shut against him. He is too good company to be excluded; but he can hardly have been greeted as "Thou good and faithful servant." The first thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety, and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things, and that geniuses and clever people are as common as rats.
Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration [homosexual acts] which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly. Indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per cent of its devotees.And here again Harris placed a footnote: "A characteristic flirt of Shaw's humor. He is a great caricaturist and not a portrait-painter.
...Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have the best life of Frank Harris2. Otherwise the man behind your works will go down to posterity as the hero of my very inadequate preface to "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets." [pp. 339-343, Appendix A]
With somewhat of a shock, I discovered a few minutes ago that the man who said the most flattering thing that I can remember anyone's ever saying to me died only five months ago. Born the same month as my mother (February 1908), Professor Errol E. Harris died this past June, at age one hundred and one! (My mother died in 2005, not long before her ninety-seventh birthday.)Errol Eustace Harris (February 19, 1908 – June 21, 2009) was a contemporary South African philosopher. His work focused on developing a systematic and coherent account of the logic, metaphysics, and epistemology implicit in contemporary understanding of the world. Harris held that, in conjunction with empirical science, the Western philosophical tradition, in its commitment to the ideal of reason, contains the resources necessary to accomplish this end. He celebrated his 100th birthday in 2008.My reading this year has been curiously interconnected. In Frank Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, I read a good deal of his dealings with Cecil Rhodes, whose money founded the university in South Africa from which Professor Harris earned his bachelor's degree. Then, in the course of reading Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, I learned that Professor Harris had himself written books on Spinoza: Salvation from Despair, A Reappraisal of Spinoza's Philosophy (1973), Spinoza's Philosophy, an Outline (1992), and The Substance of Spinoza (1995). These books are of course now on my reading list.
I "postscripted" him the paragraph from Wikipedia and asked whether he knew Harris. He answered that:We were good friends for many years, he contributed to my Festschrift, The Recovery of Philosophy In America, and we took part together in numerous philosophical symposia, etc. He wrote an excellent book on Hegel's Logic. I lost touch with him after I retired and did not know where he was. I did not know that he had passed away; the 101 does not surprise me.How extraordinary! And what a kind and distinguished man Professor Smith is too. I am delighted, honored to be in touch with him.
Where was Oscar when we last looked in on him in Frank Harris's account of his life? At trial, anticipating prison.[My mother] felt about prison as you do, Frank, and really I think you are both right; it has helped me. There are things I see now that I never saw before. I see what pity means. I thought a work of art should be beautiful and joyous. But now I see that that ideal is insufficient, even shallow; a work of art must be founded on pity; a book or poem which has no pity in it, had better not be written. [p. 210 in Chapter 18]By his final weeks in Reading Gaol, he had apparently achieved even a lightness of heart. A prison warder described Wilde at that time:
No more beautiful life had any man lived, no more beautiful life could any man live than Oscar Wilde lived during the short period I knew him in prison. He wore upon his face an eternal smile; sunshine was on his face, sunshine of some sort must have been in his heart. People say he was not sincere. He was the very soul of sincerity when I knew him....[p. 216 in Chapter 19]Harris added his impressions of Oscar:
All this seems to me, in the main, true. Oscar's gay vivacity would have astonished any stranger. Besides, the regular hours and scant plain food of prison had improved his health [except for an injury in one ear from a fall, which is believed to have led to his death about three years later, at age 46] and the solitude and suffering had lent him a deeper emotional life. But there was an intense bitterness in him, a profound underlying sense of injury which came continually to passionate expression. Yet as soon as the miserable petty persecution of the prison was lifted from him, all the joyous gaiety and fun of his nature bubbled up irresistibly. There was no contradiction in this complexity. A man can hold in himself a hundred conflicting passions and impulses without confusion. At this time the dominant chord in Oscar was pity for others. [ibid]My way of reading is to look for instruction or provocation to examine myself, especially these days, when I'm examining the apparent conflict between my outspokenness on religion and my essential compassion for others.
I'm Nobody! Who are you?How can I at the same time be both nobody and superior to others? A feeling of superiority to others seems in strong conflict with my understanding of compassion as "feeling no more deserving than the next person"—a definition I've shared more than once on this blog.
Are you—Nobody—too?
Trying to discuss sports fanaticism might be rather like trying to discuss religion. The best option would seem to have been to keep my mouth shut.On both topics!
As the movie and Frank Harris's book both make very clear, Oscar Wilde was told emphatically by friends that he would certainly lose in court if he sued Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie)'s father, the Marquis of Queensberry (1844-1900), for libel over Queensberry's publicly calling Wilde a sodomite. Harris seemed to have been among the most vocal in warning Oscar. 
At any rate, he describes several emotional conversations with Wilde, from which it is clear that Wilde, influenced by Bosie, who vehemently disliked his father, fully intended to proceed in court. Finally, when Wilde asked Harris, "But what can I do, Frank?," Harris replied in exasperation, "Don't ask for advice you won't take."But Oscar would have had to take a resolution and act in order to stop, and he was incapable of such energy....And here Harris told Wilde something rather extraordinary:
"I am bringing an action against Queensberry, Frank," [Oscar] began gravely, "for criminal libel. He is a mere wild beast. My solicitors tell me that I am certain to win...."
[Oscar asks Harris if he would give evidence for him, and Harris says he would be perfectly willing.]..."but I want you to consider the matter carefully...."
..."Don't forget," I persisted, "all British prejudices will be against you. Here is a father, the fools will say, trying to protect his young son [!]. If he has made a mistake, it is only through excess of laudable zeal...."[pp. 112-114, Chapter 12 of Oscar Wilde]
"...You would have to prove yourself a religious maniac in order to have any chance against him in England."I suppose it's possible that Harris was suggesting that Wilde, if perceived to be a "religious maniac," might have been able to get off "by reason of insanity," but I take it that he was rather making a point that Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins all condemned in their recent books on religion: if a person's motives are "religious," he is above criticism and all is forgiven.
Last evening I watched again the 1997 film, "Wilde," directed by Brian Gilbert and starring Stephen Fry as Oscar, Jude Law as Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie") (1870-1945), and Tom Wilkinson as the latter's father, the Marquis of Queensberry. I found it even harder to watch or enjoy than the first time, likely because I know more now about Wilde's submissive participation with Bosie in his own undoing—and also, perhaps, because there were more scenes of homosexual sodomy than I recalled the film's having. Bosie was no more forgivable for being portrayed prettily by Law, although Wilde may have been even more pitiful for Fry's pathetic portrayal.
From the blurb at the bottom of the front cover of Frank Harris's life of Wilde ("Now a major motion picture starring Stephen Fry"—see the cover photo on Thursday's post), I was expecting to see that the film was based on the book. Not so, alas; it was said to be based on Richard Ellmann's biography (which I've had for years but not read yet).Such, though, is Harris's reputation that even modern biographers are often reluctant to quote him. Harris in Chapter 4 tells the story of the famous Wilde/Whistler exchange culminating in Whistler's "You will, Oscar, you will." Hesketh Pearson's 1946 biography repeats the incident word for word and Richard Ellmann quotes it in his 1987 biography of Wilde, but gives Pearson as the source rather than the generally discredited Harris....[p. ix, Oscar Wilde]I note, however, that Ellmann gave Harris almost half a column in his index, with over thirty references.
Continuing to read Frank Harris's life of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) (before we encounter Wilde's disastrous relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas):No season, it is said, is so beautiful as the brief northern summer. Three-fourths of the year is cold and dark, and the ice-bound landscape is swept by snowstorm and blizzard. Summer comes like a goddess; in a twinkling the snow vanishes and Nature puts on her robes of tenderest green; the birds arrive in flocks; flowers spring to life on all sides, and the sun shines by night as by day. Such a summertide, so beautiful and so brief, was accorded to Oscar Wilde before the final desolation.
Having learned from Frank Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, that he was very well acquainted with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and had written a life of Wilde (who was the "greatest talker" Harris ever met—and Harris talked with the likes of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Guy de Maupassant), I decided to read it. Chapter 8 begins:The period of growth of any organism is the most interesting and most instructive. And there is no moment of growth in the individual life which can be compared in importance [to] the moment when a man begins to outtop his age, and to suggest the future evolution of humanity by his own genius....But:
This period for Oscar Wilde began with his marriage [1884]....
During this period we were often together. He lunched with me once or twice a week, and I began to know his method of work. Everything came to him in the excitement of talk, epigrams, paradoxes, and stories; and when people of great position or title were about him he generally managed to surpass himself....
As soon as he lost his editorship [of The Woman's World], he took to writing for the reviews; his articles were merely the resumé of his monologues....
[They] made it manifest that Wilde had at length, as Heine phrased it, reached the topmost height of the culture of his time and was now able to say new and interesting things...In fact, all the papers which in 1891 were gathered together and published in book form under the title of Intentions had about them the stamp of originality. They achieved a noteworthy success with the best minds, and laid the foundation of his fame. Every paper contained, here and there, a happy phrase or epigram or flirt of humor, which made it memorable to the lover of letters.
They were all...conceived and written from the standpoint of the artist, and the artist alone, who never takes account of ethics, but uses right and wrong indifferently as colors of his pallette. "The Decay of Lying" seemed to the ordinary, matter-of-fact Englishman a cynical plea in defence of mendacity. To the majority of readers, "Pen, Pencil, and Poison" was hardly more than a shameful attempt to condone cold-blooded murder. The very articles which grounded his fame as a writer helped to injure his standing and repute....[pp. 66-68, Chapter 8 of Oscar Wilde]
My friend Rolf inquires from Germany:
I planted three fruit trees about four years ago and all of them have become misshapen: the apple tree has become enormously tall, the plum tree totally misshapen by a huge number of branches, the cherry tree also goes up but not wide.
Help!
If you have any good websites on gardening advice, please let me know.
Good questions! My wife being the botanist in our family, I appealed to her for some advice for you:
Well, there's the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. But what I do when I need to find some info is a Google search on my problem and I usually find something helpful. For example, when I wanted to know what trees would survive in clay soil, I did a search on "trees for clay soil" or something like that. I found a University of Minnesota site that had done a very thorough report on the subject. It had recommendations for trees that would grow in clay soil and also for planting the tree. (That's how we ended up with some of the trees we have.) But you need to be able to recognize the kind of soil you have or take it to someone who can tell you.
I guess it's a matter of figuring out your question. Rolf's problems with his fruit trees might go back to selection. He might not have chosen an appropriate tree for the amount of sun and other conditions. Or he may have selected varieties that just grow the way his trees are growing. I recommend that he learn all he can about the varieties he has, then search for info on pruning. Pruning is not that simple. You have to figure out what you want to achieve. Do you want to maximize fruit production? Or are you after appearance?
Gardening is all about figuring out what you want to achieve and what kind of soil and how much sun you have. Also how much water, time, and money. If you've got enough money, you can just hire someone to help you do the figuring out and everything else. But where's the fun in that?
Later, my wife overheard me listening to Frank Harris's My Life and Loves and suggested—almost as quickly as it occurred to me—that I also share the following passage with Rolf:
Europe has learned what natural beauty is from English tourists. Was not Ruskin [John Ruskin, 1819-1900] the first to assert that French trees were far more beautiful than English trees? He did not give the reason, but I may. England is afflicted with a wind from the southwest that blows three hundred odd days each year. Against this attack all trees when young have to stem themselves or they would be uprooted; as it is, they are dwarfed and crooked. And the woodlands of France suffer from the same plague, though much less severely. There are no forests in the world to be compared with the American: in half an hour's drive out of New York up the Hudson one sees more varieties of exquisite and well grown trees than one can find in all France, or even Germany. [p. 371]
At the core of every religion lies an undeniable claim about the human condition: it is possible to have one's experience of the world radically transformed. Although we generally live within the limits imposed by our ordinary uses of attention—we wake, we work, we eat, we watch television, we converse with others, we sleep, we dream—most of us know, however dimly, that extraordinary experiences are possible.In his erotic way, Frank Harris attested to it in the passage I quoted from his memoir the other day. And more than once in the two hundred pages of My Life and Loves that I have read so far, he regrets that men made a religion of Jesus's teachings rather than simply followed them.
The problem with religion is that it blends this truth so thoroughly with the venom of unreason. Take Christianity as an example: it is not enough that Jesus was a man who transformed himself to such a degree that the Sermon on the Mount could be his heart's confession. He also had to be the Son of God, born of a virgin, and destined to return to earth trailing clouds of glory. The effect of such dogma is to place the example of Jesus forever out of reach. His teaching ceases to be a set of empirical claims about the linkage between ethics and spiritual insight and instead becomes a gratuitous, and rather gruesome, fairy tale. According to the dogma of Christianity, becoming just like Jesus is impossible. One can only enumerate one's sins, believe the unbelievable, and await the end of the world.
But a more profound response to existence is possible for us, and the testimony of Jesus, as well as that of countless other men and women over the ages, attests to this. The challenge for us is to begin talking about this possibility in rational terms. [p. 204]
Almost fifty years ago, in my college roommate Jim's home, in Pittsburgh, I picked up his parents' copy of My Life & Loves by Frank Harris (1856-1931). It could have been the same 1963 Grove Press edition that I borrowed this afternoon from a UNC library, for I no doubt went home with Jim that year, as I did every year I was at Yale. As a barely experienced 20-year-old, I of course pricked up to Harris's candid descriptions of his sex life. Now, at about the age of Harris when he was writing his memoir, while I can still manage a somewhat hard-on, I've at last picked up the book to read the whole thing (all 983 pages, if I peruse the index).It was the awakening of sex-life in me, I believe, that first revealed to me the beauty of inanimate nature.
A night or two later I was ravished by a moon nearly at the full that flooded our playing field with ivory radiance, making the haystack in the corner a thing of supernal beauty.
Why had I never before seen the wonder of the world, the sheer loveliness of nature all about me? From this time on I began to enjoy descriptions of scenery in the books I read, and began, too, to love landscapes in painting.
Thank goodness!...From that day on I began to live an enchanted life, for at once I tried to see beauty everywhere, and at all times of day and night caught glimpses that ravished me with delight and turned my being into a hymn of praise and joy.
Faith had left me, and with faith, I was as one in prison with an undetermined sentence; but now in a moment the prison had become a paradise, the walls of the actual had fallen away into frames of entrancing pictures. Dimly I became conscious that if this life were sordid and mean, petty and unpleasant, the fault was in myself and in my blindness. I began then for the first time to understand that I myself was a magician and could create my own fairyland....
...I find that I am outrunning my story and giving here a stage of thought and belief that only became mine much later; but the beginning of my individual soul-life was [the encounter with Lucille], that I had been blind to natural beauty and now could see; [that experience] was the root and germ, so to speak, of the later faith that guided all my mature life, filling me with courage and spilling over into hope and joy ineffable.... [p. 47]
