Letter to Frank Harris

Documents libres.

Letter to Frank Harris written by George Bernard Shaw

1930. PD (1)

Shaw—using the pen-name "G.B.S."—was drama critic on the Saturday Review when Frank Harris was its editor. After Shaw became famous and ceased reviewing Harris decided to write a biography of Shaw. This letter answers a query about Shaw's amorous proclivities.

London, 24th June, 1930

Dear Frank Harris,
   First, O Biographer, get it clear in your mind that you can learn nothing about your sitter (or Biograpee) from a mere record of his copulations. You have no such record in the case of Shakespear, and a pretty full one for a few years in the case of Pepys: but you know much more about Shakespear than about Pepys. The explanation is that the relation between the parties in copulation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously executed between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation. If I were to tell you every such adventure that I have enjoyed you would be none the wiser as to my personal, nor even as to my sexual history. You would know only what you already know: that I am a human being. If you nave any doubts as to my normal virility, dismiss them from your mind. I was not impotent: I was not sterile; I was not homosexual; and I was extremely, though not promiscuously susceptible.

   Also I was entirely free from the neurosis (as it seems to me) of Original Sin. I never associated sexual intercourse with delinquency. I associated it always with delight, and had no scruples nor remorses nor misgivings of conscience. Of course I had scruples, and effectively inhibitive ones too, about getting women into trouble (or rather letting them get themselves into it with me) or cuckolding my friends; and I understand that chastity can be a passion just as intellect is a passion; but St Paul's was to me always a pathological case. Sexual experience seemed a necessary completion of human growth; and I was not attracted by virgins as such. I preferred women who knew what they were doing.

   As I have told you, my corporeal adventures began when I was twenty-nine. But it would be a prodigious mistake to take that as the date of the beginning of my sexual life. Do not misunderstand this: I was perfectly continent except for the involuntary incontinences of dreamland, which were very unfrequent. But as between Oscar Wilde, who gave 16 as the age at which sex begins, and Rousseau, who declared that his blood boiled with sensuality from his birth (but wept when Madame de Warens initiated him) my experience confirms Rousseau and is amazed at Wilde. Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, so I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my overwhelming imagination in telling myself stories about women.

   I was, as all young people should be, a votary of the Uranian Venus. I was steeped in romantic music from my childhood. I knew all the pictures and statues in the National Gallery of Ireland (a very good one) by heart. I read everything I could lay my hands on. Dumas pere made French history like an opera by Meyerbeer for me. From our cottage on Dalkey Hill I contemplated an eternal Shelleyan vision of sea, sky and mountain. Real life was only a squalid interruption to an imaginary paradise. I was overfed on honey dew. The Uranian Venus was beautiful. The difficulty about the Uranian Venus is that though she saves you from squalid debaucheries and enables you to prolong your physical virginity long after your adolescence, she may sterilise you by giving you imaginary amours on the plains of heaven with goddesses and angels and even devils so enchanting that they spoil you for real women or—if you are a woman—for real men. You become inhuman through a surfeit of beauty and an excess of voluptuousness. You end as an ascetic, a saint, an old bachelor, an old maid (in short, a celibate) because, like Heine, you cannot ravish the Venus de Milo or be ravished by the Hermes of Praxiteles. Your love poems are like Shelley's Epipsychidion, irritating to terre a terre sensual women, who know at once that you are making them palatable by pretending they are something that they are not, and cannot stand comparison with.

   Now you know how I lived, a continent virgin, until I was 29, and ran away even when the handkerchief was thrown me.

   From that time until my marriage there was always some lady at my disposal, and I tried all the experiments and learned what there was to be learnt from them. They were "all for love"; for I had no spare money: I earned enough to keep me on a second floor, and took the rest out, not in money, but in freedom to preach Socialism.

   When at last I could afford to dress presentably I soon became accustomed to find women falling in love with me. I did not need to pursue women: I was pursued by them.

   Here again do not jump at conclusions. All the pursuers did not want sexual intercourse. They wanted company and friendship. Some were happily married, and were affectionately appreciative of my understanding that sex was barred. Some were prepared to buy friendship with pleasure, having made up their minds that men were made that way. Some were sexual geniuses, quite unbearable in any other capacity. No two cases were alike: William Morris's dictum "that all taste alike" was not, as Longfellow puts it, "spoken of the soul."

   I found sex hopeless as a basis for permanent relations, and never dreamt of marriage in connection with it. I put everything else before it, and never refused or broke an engagement to speak on Socialism to pass a gallant evening. I liked sexual intercourse because of its amazing power of producing a celestial flood of emotion and exaltation of existence which, however momentary, gave me a sample of what may one day be the normal state of being for mankind in intellectual ecstasy. I always gave the wildest expression to this in a torrent of words, partly because I felt it due to the woman to know what I felt in her arms, and partly because I wanted her to share it. But except perhaps on one occasion I never felt quite convinced that I had carried the lady more than half as far as she had carried me: the capacity for it varies like any other capacity. I remember one woman who had a sort of affectionate worship for me, explaining that she had to leave her husband because sexual intercourse felt as she put it "like someone sticking a finger into my eye." Between her and the heroine of my first adventure, who was sexually insatiable, there is an enormous range of sensation; and the range of celestial exaltation must be still greater.

   When I married I was too experienced to make the frightful mistake of simply setting up a permanent whore; nor was my wife making the complementary mistake. There was nothing whatever to prevent us from satisfying our sexual needs without paying that price for it; and it was for other considerations that we became man and wife. In permanence and seriousness my consummated love affairs count for nothing beside the ones that were either unconsummated or ended by discarding that relation. Do not forget that all marriages are different, and that a marriage between two young people followed by parentage cannot be lumped in with a childless partnership between two middle-aged people who have passed the age at which it is safe to bear a first child.    And now, no romance and above all no pornography.

G.B.S.