Studies for All

Until this week only doctors and lawyers could legitimately buy Dr. Henry Havelock Ellis' compendious topographical survey of the vast, tangled jungles of sex activities which flourish in human bodies, souls and minds. When in 1897 this inquisitive Englishman published Sexual Inversion, from which was to grow his mighty Studies in the Psychology of Sex, London police promptly arrested the bookseller and confiscated all available copies of this volume. Year later Frank A. Davis of Philadelphia, as a personal favor to Dr. Ellis, began printing his Studies, which eventually ran to seven volumes and retailed for $30 per set. Mr. Davis was very strict about selling only to the professions. Since the War, however, there has been such a great change in the U. S. attitude toward sex that Bennett A. Cerf, head of Manhattan's Random House, felt safe in bringing out this week a new four-volume edition of Studies in the Psychology of Sex and selling them to all-comers at $15 per set. This unexpurgated edition, printed from the old Davis plates, had behind it a mass of U. S. court decisions which, to Mr. Cerf, seemed to remove the last effective restrictions on the popular publication of the Ellis masterwork (TIME, Dec. 18, 1933).

No one would tell Havelock Ellis intelligible facts about life when he was a lad. Only son of good & religious seafaring English parents, when he was 16, "like many other boys of my age ... I was much puzzled over the phenomena of sex. ... I determined that I would make it the main business of my life to get to the real natural facts of sex apart from all would-be moralistic or sentimental notions, and so spare the youth of future generations the trouble and the perplexity which this ignorance had caused me."

Soon as he could he entered a London medical school, studying there for eight years, until in 1889 he was given a diploma as a physician, surgeon and midwife. While in medical school he initiated and edited the Mermaid Series of Elizabethan dramatists and a series of books called Contemporary Science. Later he wrote poetry and literary essays. His world reputation today, however, rests almost entirely upon his calm encyclopedic surveys of the love-life of men & women, of its aberrations, and of its relation to society.

In the beginning Dr. Ellis poked around London and Paris asking impertinent questions of men & women. Soon he discovered that most people like to talk about their sex life. Therefore he holed himself up with a great collection of books on the manners and customs of primitive and ancient peoples and let the concupiscent, the celibate and the sexually miserable beat a path to his study and tell him all. His marriage in 1891 to bubbling Edith M. O. Lees, who died in 1916, made his sage-in-the-study life practicable. Their only marriage vow was not to deceive one another. They confidently maintained separate homes, and she did not disturb him in his investigations.

From the questions he asked, the tales told him and the records in anthropologies, Havelock Ellis was able to finish publishing by 1910 thoroughly documented treatises on 1) the evolution of modesty, the phenomena of sexual periodicity, autoeroticism; 2) sexual inversion; 3) analysis of the sexual impulse, love and pain, sexual impulse in women; 4) sexual selection in man; 5) erotic symbolism, the mechanism of detumescence, the psychic state in pregnancy; 6) sex in relation to society. A seventh volume, on eonism, was added in 1928.

Until Dr. Ellis investigated the subject, no one could give an adequate answer to the commonplace query of why most women like strong husky men. Dr. Ellis found the answer in the craving which women have to be touched. They love gentle, caressing, firm handling, occasionally painful manhandling.

Monogamy, "the more or less prolonged cohabitation of two individuals of opposite sex," he found, "has been the prevailing type of sexual relationship among the higher vertebrates and through the greater part of human history." On the other hand, a man's proclivities and his economic condition have often led to the practice of the sexual union of one man with more than one woman. Such polygynic conditions, observed honest Dr. Ellis, "have proved advantageous, as they have permitted the most vigorous and successful members of a community to have the largest number of mates and so to transmit their own superior qualities."

A man who likes to dress in women's clothes, a transvestite, gave Dr. Ellis an illuminating explanation of his perverse craving: "Just as a clergyman is influenced by his surplice, a soldier by his uniform, so am I by my clothes. The transformation that takes place is really wonderful, for I often reflect sadly that I have no earthly chance of looking altogether like a woman. Yet my eyes and smile are regarded as truly feminine, and happiness shows itself and soon improves my appearance."

Dr. Ellis' curiosity concerning the jungle land of sex seems to have ended in 1910 when he completed the main body of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Although in 1928 he published an addendum that was made up from notes collected in his middle age, and although in 1933 he published The Psychology of Sex, that was simply an introduction to the vast Studies. For the greater part of 20 years he has been living, a childless widower, in a compact London flat, in which are hung ten small pictures, five of men, five of women. There he talks sex, writes belles-lettres. He is aware that beyond tangled fields which he long ago cleared, lie great rivers of hormones which irrigate the human body and profoundly affect the flowering of personality. But into those rivers Dr. Ellis, who last month serenely celebrated his 77th birthday, has scarcely dipped his mind.

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