During my second year as assistant editor on The Liberator a woman called to see me one day bringing a little book of poems. She offered me ten dollars if I would review it in The Liberator. I said that The Liberator did not accept money for printing reviews, but if her poems seemed worth while, we would review them. She said that she had paid Frank Harris a thousand dollars to get the book printed, yet he hadn't even reviewed it in Pearson's. And afterward, she said, she had seen a literary agent who informed her that the cost of printing was about two hundred dollars. She thought that Frank Harris had swindled her. I did not review the verses, because to my mind, they were not worth while.
Also, I had heard stories of Frank Harris posing as an art connoisseur and palming off fake pictures as old masters, and of his getting material for his magazine from writers who thought they would be paid and then not paying them—tales of petty racketeering that were more funny than vicious. And so, being champagne drunk with Harris on a café terrace looking out on the calm blue Mediterranean, and feeling elastic and free, I, who admired the extraordinary ways of Frank Harris more than any other intellectual of my acquaintance, was interested to hear from himself the truth. I told him the story of that woman who had visited The Liberator and complained about him.
Frank Harris was wonderful to look at under the influence of the champagne, his lion-roaring, his face like a pirate's, yet with a sublime gleam of genuine kindliness in his eyes! What I said he did not affirm or deny. He just exploded with a mighty sermon about the artist and intellectual integrity. He said that the way of the artist was hard, for if he had a talent that appealed to popular imagination, everybody desired to use him—women and men, politicians, philanthropists, reformers, revolutionists, organizations, governments. Many artists won success by sacrificing their intellectual integrity. He himself had had large success. But whenever he felt the urge and the bounden duty to declare his opinion, he could not restrain himself, and so he had not remained successful. He had not been a puritan about life. Perhaps he had done things that Jesus would not have done. But he had not given his soul entirely to Mammon. Perhaps he had taken gifts from persons who thought they had been swindled and who were better off perhaps, if they were. But whatever he did he had reserved intact his intellectual integrity.
It was a great sermon and I felt that Frank Harris was greater because of it. He was no hypocrite. He had no social pretensions, although he delighted in the company of smart and fashionable people. He was aware, that there was plenty of dross inseparable from the gold of life, and he embraced the whole. Nobody could deny that he was indeed a follower of the Jesus who dominated his mind, that he sincerely believed in sin and redemption.
"He Who Gets Slapped"
My radical days on The Liberator were sometimes rosy with romance. Friends vied with friends in giving me invitations to their homes for parties and car rides and in offering tickets for plays and concerts. And even more. I remember I had a pressing debt of honor to settle. And one day a staunch friend of The Liberator, Elizabeth Sage Hare, handed me a check for five hundred dollars. She also invited me to tea at her house in Park Avenue or Fifth, I don't quite remember, but it was somewhere in the exclusive Faubourg Bourgeoisie.