A somewhat facetious question, perhaps, to which the answer is firmly in the negative, yet Frank Harris was at one time numbered among those who agitated for a war against Germany. Articles he published in the Saturday Review in the 1890s were so virulent that Wilhelm II himself was perturbed by them. Harris's later opposition to the war, as expressed in his 1915 book England or Germany… continue reading
The estimable Rogues Gallery YouTube channel has begun the herculean task of giving viewers a tour of My Life and Loves. At the time of writing volumes 1 and 2 have received their delightfully entertaining treatment. Subscribe to the channel to catch the entire series. Frank Harris is in fine company with the many other dubious individuals they have covered, from Samuel Pepys to Rasputin,… continue reading
What follows is apparently an unpublished draft by Frank Harris, one of his "Contemporary Portraits", this of the poet George Sylvester Viereck. It is to be found amongst the papers of Elmer Gertz that are lodged in the Library of Congress. A correspondent sent it to me in 2006(!) and I have only just got round to putting it online.
Viereck was a strange, perverse character who did not help… continue reading
The archive of the Spectator magazine has a reproduction and transcript of what is probably Frank Harris's first printed article, a review of E. Freeman's Some Impressions of the United States (1883).
In My Life and Loves, volume 2, Frank describes how he wrote it:
... after reading Freeman with great care and finding that indeed he was the very type of an arrogant, pompous… continue reading
I just came across this passage in volume 1 of My Life and Loves, and felt it should be more widely appreciated. Here's how Frank Harris taught himself French, in a week.
I first spent five whole days on the grammar, learning all the verbs, especially the auxiliary and irregular verbs by heart, till I knew them as I knew my Alphabet. I then read Hugo’s Hernani with a dictionary in another… continue reading
After a recent upgrade to this site, the Frank Harris genealogy page disappeared. There was no mystery involved: the genealogy was displayed using a custom Drupal module which I wrote some while ago and hadn't migrated to the latest release of Drupal.
I've now updated the code and it's working again. (Should anyone be interested in how it works, it queries a set of tables derived from GENMOD data… continue reading
Secret Information by Robert Hichens (1938) is a novel with a curious Frank Harris connection: rather than Harris being featured as a character, pseudonymously or otherwise, it is My Life and Loves that performs a crucial role in the plot.
Canon Bankton, a Church of England priest, has a presumably unusual hobby for one in his position: he collects dirty books, including Ma Vie et Mes Amours (for… continue reading
A correspondent of mine asked this question recently. The answer is to be found in Philippa Pullar's biography of Harris, where she says he was interred at the British Cemetery at Caucade, Nice - Section G, Row No 11, Grave No. 1 - "high up in the aromatic hills, with a view to the sea, shaded by an olive tree".
The burial ceremony took place three weeks after his death (as usual Pullar omits to… continue reading
Here's a curiosity: I was recently contacted by a man who works in an Oxfam bookshop in Bristol. The shop had come into possession of a set of The Ilustrated Dictionary of Gardening with four of the eight volumes apparently bearing Harris's signature and the date 1885.
They'd previously had some other books in their stock that were signed by Harris, so it was possible these were from the same… continue reading
Summary:
What links Frank Harris, the Brooklyn Bridge and a recently published novel? It is a tale of one city and two - or is it three? - Frank Harrises.
The Bomb
In Frank Harris's novel The Bomb (1908), his hero, Rudolph Schnaubelt, works for a while on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge:
I suppose every one knows what working in a caisson on the bed of a river, fifty feet under water… continue reading