My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) — Background and Themes

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Authors: Harris, Frank, 1856-1931 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2019 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography; Authors, English -- 20th century -- Biography; Harris, Frank, 1856-1931; Male authors, English -- Sexual behavior; Men -- Sexual behavior -- Great Britain Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 115,989

Reading time 505 min

Text sections 19

Before opening My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) — Background and Themes, the edition data offers a quick orientation: 115,989 words, 8 hr 25 min estimated reading time, and 19 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 24.1 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #59827

Frank Harris's foreword frames this memoir as a defiant stand for sexual candor against Puritan censorship, while the excerpts show a cowboy shooting and a sudden turn to bookishness, revealing a gap between the catalog's sexual-behavior focus and the actual range of experience recounted.

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File: pg59827

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tant, omitting what is accidental or trivial. Now and then, however, she makes mistakes like all other artists. Nevertheless I take Memory in the main as my guide.

I was born on the 14th of February 1855, and named James Thomas, after my father’s two brothers: my father was in the Navy, a lieutenant in command of a revenue cutter or gunboat, and we children saw him only at long intervals.

My earliest recollection is being danced on the foot of my father’s brother James, the Captain of an Indiaman, who paid us a visit in the south of Kerry when I was about two. I distinctly remember repeating a hymn by heart for him, my mother on the other side of the fireplace, prompting: then I got him to dance me a little more, which was all I wanted. I remember my mother telling him I could read, and his surprise.

The next memory must have been about the same time: I was seated on the floor screaming when my father came in and asked: “What’s the matter?”

“It’s only Master Jim”, replied the nurse crossly, “he’s just screaming out of sheer temper, Sir, look, there’s not a tear in his eye.”

A year or so later, it must have been, I was proud of walking up and down a long room while my mother rested her hand on my head, and called me her walking stick.

Later still I remember coming to her room at night: I whispered to her and then kissed her, but her cheek was cold and she didn’t answer, and I woke the house with my shrieking: she was dead. I felt no grief, but something gloomy and terrible in the sudden cessation of the usual household activities.

A couple of days later I saw her coffin carried out, and when the nurse told my sister and me that we would never see our mother again, I was surprised merely and wondered why.

My mother died when I was nearly four, and soon after we moved to Kingstown near Dublin. I used to get up in the night with my sister Annie, four years my senior and go foraging for bread and jam or sugar. One morning about daybreak I stole into the nurse’s room, and saw a man beside her in bed, a man with a red moustache. I drew my sister in and she too saw him. We crept out again without waking them. My only emotion was surprise, but next day the nurse denied me sugar on my bread and butter and I said: “I’ll tell”—I don’t know why: I had then no inkling of modern journalism.

“Tell what?” she asked.

“There was a man in your bed”, I replied, “last night.”

“Hush, hush!” she said, and gave me the sugar.

After that I found all I had to do was to say “I’ll tell!” to get whatever I wanted. My sister even wished to know one day what I had to tell, but I would not say. I distinctly remember my feeling of superiority over her because she had not had sense enough to exploit the sugar mine.

When I was between four and five, I was sent with Annie to a girl’s boarding-school in Kingstown kept by a Mrs. Frost. I was put in the class with the oldest girls on account of my proficiency in arithmetic, and I did my best at it because I wanted to be with them, though I had no conscious reason for my preference. I remember how the nearest girl used to lift me up and put me in my high-chair and how I would hurry over the sums set in compound long division and proportion, for as soon as I had finished, I would drop my pencil on the floor, and then turn round and climb down out of my chair, ostensibly to get it, but really to look at the girls’ legs. Why? I couldn’t have said.

I was at the bottom of the class and the legs got bigger and bigger towards the end of the long table, and I preferred to look at the big ones.

As soon as the girl next to me missed me, she would move her chair back and call me, and I’d pretend to have just found my slate-pencil, which I said had rolled, and she’d lift me back into my high-chair.

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Frank Harris opens his foreword with a quotation from Sir Walter Raleigh—'The Truth shall be thy warrant'—and immediately situates his memoir as a weapon in a personal and literary war. He claims that prosecution by the Wilson administration for sedition drove him to write 'as boldly as the ideal demanded,' positioning himself as a martyr for free speech. Yet the excerpts that follow do not dwell on legal battles or erotic confession. Instead, they plunge into a Western adventure: a card-game dispute, a fatal shooting, and a cattle-drive settlement. The catalog subjects—'Male authors, English -- Sexual behavior'—suggest a sustained focus on sexual history, but the surviving text so far devotes more space to gunfights and economics than to love affairs.

A Foreword That Promises More Than the Excerpts Deliver

The foreword is the most explicitly polemical part of the excerpts. Harris attacks 'President Wilson and his Arch-Assistant Burleson' for ruining his magazine, and he invokes a tradition of 'perfect liberty' in English writing from Chaucer and Shakespeare, which he contrasts with Victorian 'tamest propriety.' He claims that poverty forced him to sacrifice 'something of Truth for the sake of kindly recognition'—a paradoxical boast that the book is both more honest and less so because of external pressure. Yet the narrative that follows the foreword does not continue this argument. The shift from political grievance to cowboy story is abrupt, and the promised sexual candor is absent from the sample. Readers expecting a sustained defense of erotic literature will find instead a picaresque adventure that only later, according to the chapter title 'Student Life and Love,' may turn to romance.

Cowboy Violence and the Economics of the Trail

The longest excerpt recounts a card-game robbery that ends in a shootout. Harris describes the scene with specific, unadorned details: the banker drawing 'a big revolver from the table drawer,' Charlie striking the lamp, and the stampede into darkness. The dialogue is terse and colloquial—'He drilled me through the stomach first go off'—and the dying man's last concern is that his thousand dollars not go back to 'that oily sneak thief.' Harris then tallies the financial outcome: six thousand dollars divided among five people, with Charlie's mother receiving a share. The passage is less about sexual adventure than about the harsh economics of cattle driving, the casual violence of frontier life, and the narrator's growing disgust with 'a merely physical life.' This section complicates the catalog's emphasis on sexual behavior, suggesting that Harris's memoir may be as much about money, mortality, and masculine codes as about erotic experience.

A Sudden Turn to Books and Self-Improvement

After the shooting, Harris receives word that his brother Willie has settled in Lawrence, Kansas, as a real-estate agent. He decides to quit cowpunching and join him. On the train to Lawrence, he picks up a copy of William Morris's 'The Life and Death of Jason' and is immediately absorbed. The excerpt breaks off as he reads, but the chapter title 'Student Life and Love' signals a new phase. This transition—from gunfights to poetry—is the most revealing structural feature of the excerpts. Harris presents himself as a man who moves between worlds: the physical life of the cowboy and the intellectual life of the reader. The catalog subjects list 'Authors, English -- 19th century -- Biography' and 'Men -- Sexual behavior -- Great Britain,' but the excerpts show a narrator whose identity is still forming, caught between the cattle trail and the library. The memoir, at least in this volume, may be less a confession of sexual exploits than a coming-of-age story about education and ambition.

The excerpts from Volume 1 of My Life and Loves reveal a memoir that is more varied than its catalog subjects suggest. Harris's foreword promises a battle for sexual candor, but the surviving narrative dwells on frontier violence, financial calculation, and a sudden turn to literature. Readers should approach the book not as a single-minded erotic confession but as a hybrid work—part adventure story, part literary manifesto, part self-justification. The relationship between the catalog's focus on sexual behavior and the actual content of the text remains an open question, one that only the full volume can resolve.

There is a peculiar honesty in old memoirs, a frankness that survives the centuries. Frank Harris’s raw boldness and the quiet steadiness of Chronicles of Chicora Wood — Edition Insights share a whispered secret: that a life’s true record lives not in its scandals, but in the ordinary, stubborn grace of its days. I have seen that truth on many a dusty shelf.