Candor

MY LIFE--Havelock Ellis--Houghfon Mifflm ($3.75).

The late Havelock Ellis's seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex is one of the notable examples of clinical candor in modern writing. When he came to write his autobiography, clinically candid Havelock Ellis tried to outdo himself. Said he, "To do what I have done here has been an act of prolonged precision in cold blood, beyond anything else that I have ever written." He did not hesitate to rank his confessions beside those of Casanova, St. Augustine, Rousseau.

Readers of My Life will find plenty of candor, but not quite the kind of thing they expected. The first 250 pages are dull as dishwater--a long-winded genealogy of Havelock Ellis's ancestors (healthy, middle-of-the-road sea captains, churchmen, businessmen, who "neither rise nor fall"), of his sheltered childhood, of his innocent young manhood as a schoolteacher in Australia, medical student in London, platonic lover of Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm), who called him "my Soul's wifie." At that time, Ellis candidly confesses, he was 5' 10 1/2" tall, weighed 150 Ibs., had a 23-in. mesocephalic head, an unusually high instep, a long great toe, "scented cheeks," and his castoff shirts smelled like cedar. He was planning his life "largely and spaciously."

Soon it appears that what was intended as an absolutely honest autobiography has turned into a fearlessly candid biography of his wife. A social worker, lecturer and minor fiction writer, Edith was not (as Daudet said the wife of a writer should be) a feather bed. Petite, restless, intense, she scolded at Havelock's manners, dress, undemonstrativeness, called him a mixture of satyr and Christ, alternated between tantrums and protestations of undying love. "The worst of me is in my tongue," she reassured him, but once she kicked him in the head. He discovered strong homosexual tendencies in her. Both tried to be broadminded. ("Have a sweet time with Amy, who will do you good," said Edith.) They quarreled, made up, took extended vacations from each other, wrote passionate letters back & forth long after they had ceased to live together as man & wife. At last, ill, frenzied, half-insane, Edith demanded a separation, accused him of trying to put her in an asylum. When she died (in 1916 of pneumonia) Havelock recalled with anguish a remark of Queen Victoria's after her husband's death: "Nobody contradicts me now, and the salt has gone out of my life."

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