Frank Harris and I met very often in Nice. He lived in Cimiez, but came into Nice almost every day for his mail at the office of the American Express Company. Often we sat in the Taverne Alsacienne to talk. He asked me how my prose was getting along. I told him I thought I had done some good short stories, but failed of my real objective—a novel. I told him my difficulty was devising a plot.
"Don't worry about a plot," he said. "Just get a central idea or a person interesting enough and write around that. Make your writing strong and loose and try to get everything in it."
Once he saw me with a very striking girl at the American Express and he asked me if I would like to bring her to dinner with him. I said, "Very willingly," and we arranged a rendezvous for a few days later. The dinner was in one of the best restaurants. Harris had published his Life and Loves and was selling it privately. He told us he had received orders from the United States, England, Germany, the Scandinavian countries and France. It was his practice to send the book and collect afterward, he said, and all the buyers had paid promptly excepting the French.
I said, "Our guest is French." (She spoke perfect English.) Frank Harris was astonished: "Vraiment! vraiment!" he said, "Vous êtes française?" The girl said, "Yes, but that is nothing." But Frank Harris regretted the faux pas, for English enemies, he informed me, were attacking him and working to get him expelled from France for writing a dirty book. Some French journalists of the Left were defending him. He began telling us of his troubles with the English and that he was banned from visiting England again, ostensibly because of his Life and Loves, but he knew that he was being persecuted actually because he had taken a stand against England during the war.
We had a leisurely dinner: aperitifs and excellent white wine with the fish and red wine with the meat. And topping all, a bottle of champagne. Frank Harris told many Life and Loves stories, as salacious as possible. The last long one was about his first strange affair in Greece. The French girl said, cryptically, "It had to be Greece."
Outside, while we were walking through the Albert the First Park, Frank Harris declared that although he had passed seventy he was still young and active in every way. To demonstrate this he started to skip and fell down in the first movements. I picked him up. The girl lived about forty minutes down the littoral, and as the last train was due in a few minutes, I said that I had to take her to the station.
Frank Harris said: "Why don't you take her home in a taxicab?" I said that we couldn't afford it, but that if he chose to, there was no objection. Immediately he took up the challenge and called a taxicab. I put the girl in and he said to me: "You, too, get in." I said no, that one escort was enough and we could trust him. And besides, I had to sleep the liquor out of my head to go to work the next morning. So Frank Harris got in beside the girl and they drove off.
I saw him again before I saw her. "Did you have a nice ride?" I asked. An embarrassed look came into his face and he broke out, "You black devil, why didn't you tell me we were riding to the destination of Lesbos?" "Because I thought any destination was a destination for an eclectic person like you," I said, and added that we had warned him that he could be trusted.
"I didn't even have any money left to pay the taxicab," he said, "and had to give the chauffeur a promissory note."