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{{TextQuality|25%}}{{title
<!--{{TextQuality|25%}}{{title
|author = George Bernard Shaw
|author = George Bernard Shaw
|title = Letter to Frank Harris)
|title = The Millionairess
|notes = 1930
 
|notes = 1936
}}
}}
{{PD-Canada}}
{{PD-Canada}}
'''Contents of <u>THE MILLIONAIRESS</u>'''


:::[[The Millionairess-Preface on Bosses | PREFACE ON BOSSES]]


To Frank Harris
:::::[[The Millionairess-Act I|ACT I]]
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
When "G.B.S." was drama critic on the Saturday Review.
his editor' was the notorious Frank Harris. Harris had
since fallen on evil days. He had tried to recoup his
fortunes with biographical sketches and his almost unprintable
My Life and Loves, and finally with a full-length life
of Shaw, which Shaw, knowing Harris to be poor and ill,
cooperated in bringing to completion.
 
                                                    London, 24th June, 1930
 
Dear Frank Harris,
  First, 0 Biographer, get it clear in your mind that you
can learn nothing about your sitter (or Biograpee)
from a mere record of his copulations. You have no such
record in the case of Shakespear, and a pretty full one
for a few years in the case of Pepys: but you know much
more about Shakespear than about Pepys. The explanation
is that the relation between the parties in copulation is
not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and
rapturously executed between persons who could not
endure one another for a day in any other relation. If I
were to tell you every such adventure that I have enjoyed
you would be none the wiser as to my personal, nor even
as to my sexual history. You would know only what you
already know: that I am a human being. If you nave any
doubts as to my normal virility, dismiss them from your
mind. I was not impotent: I was not sterile; I was not
homosexual; and I was extremely, though not promiscuously
susceptible.
  Also I was entirely free from the neurosis (as it seems
to me) of Original Sin. I never associated sexual intercourse
with delinquency. I associated it always with delight,
and had no scruples nor remorses nor misgivings of
 
Letter to Frank Harris                                                        629
conscience. Of course I had scruples, and effectively
inhibitive ones too, about getting women into trouble (or rather
letting them get themselves into it with me) or cuckolding
my friends; and I understand that chastity can be a
passion just as intellect is a passion; but St Paul's was to
me always a pathological case. Sexual experience seemed
a necessary completion of human growth; and I was not
attracted by virgins as such. I preferred women who knew
what they were doing.
  As I have told you, my corporeal adventures began when
I was twenty-nine. But it would be a prodigious mistake to
take that as the date of the beginning of my sexual life.
Do not misunderstand this: I was perfectly continent
except for the involuntary incontinences of dreamland,
which were very unfrequent. But as between Oscar Wilde,
who gave 16 as the age at which sex begins, and Rousseau,
who declared that his blood boiled with sensuality from
his birth (but wept when Madame de Warens initiated
him) my experience confirms Rousseau and is amazed at
Wilde. Just as I cannot remember any time when I could
not read and write, so I cannot remember any time when
I did not exercise my overwhelming imagination in telling
myself stories about women.
  I was, as all young people should be, a votary of the
Uranian Venus. I was steeped in romantic music from my
childhood. I knew all the pictures and statues in the
National Gallery of Ireland (a very good one) by heart.
I read everything I could lay my hands on. Dumas pere
made French history like an opera by Meyerbeer for me.
From our cottage on Dalkey Hill I contemplated an eternal
Shelleyan vision of sea, sky and mountain. Real life was
only a squalid interruption to an imaginary paradise. I was
overfed on honey dew. The Uranian Venus was beautiful.
The difficulty about the Uranian Venus is that though
she saves you from squalid debaucheries and enables you to
prolong your physical virginity long after your adolescence,
she may sterilise you by giving you imaginary amours on the
plains of heaven with goddesses and angels and even devils
so enchanting that they spoil you for real women or—if you
are a woman—for real men. You


630                                                      Letter to Frank Harris
:::::[[The Millionairess-Act II|ACT II]]


become inhuman through a surfeit of beauty and an excess
:::::[[The Millionairess-Act III|ACT III]]
of voluptuousness. You end as an ascetic, a saint, an old
bachelor, an old maid (in short, a celibate) because, like
Heine, you cannot ravish the Venus de Milo or be ravished
by the Hermes of Praxiteles. Your love poems are like
Shelley's Epipsychidion, irritating to terre a terre sensual
women, who know at once that you are making them
palatable by pretending they are something that they are
not, and cannot stand comparison with.
  Now you know how I lived, a continent virgin, until I
was 29, and ran away even when the handkerchief was
thrown me.
  From that time until my marriage there was always
some lady at my disposal, and I tried all the experiments
and learned what there was to be learnt from them. They
were "all for love"; for I had no spare money: I earned
enough to keep me on a second floor, and took the rest
out, not in money, but in freedom to preach Socialism.
  When at last I could afford to dress presentably I soon
became accustomed to find women falling in love with me.
I did not need to pursue women: I was pursued by them.
  Here again do not jump at conclusions. All the pursuers
did not want sexual intercourse. They wanted company
and friendship. Some were happily married, and were
affectionately appreciative of my understanding that sex
was barred. Some were prepared to buy friendship with
pleasure, having made up their minds that men were made
that way. Some were sexual geniuses, quite unbearable in
any other capacity. No two cases were alike: William Morris's
dictum "that all taste alike" was not, as Longfellow puts it,
"spoken of the soul."
  I found sex hopeless as a basis for permanent relations,
and never dreamt of marriage in connection with it. I put
everything else before it, and never refused or broke an
engagement to speak on Socialism to pass a gallant evening.
I liked sexual intercourse because of its amazing power
of producing a celestial flood of emotion and exaltation of
existence which, however momentary, gave me a sample
of what may one day be the normal state of being for
mankind in intellectual ecstasy. I always gave the wildest.


Letter to Frank Harris                                                      631
:::::[[The Millionairess-Act IV|ACT IV]]-->
expression to this in a torrent of words, partly because I
felt it due to the woman to know what I felt in her arms,
and partly because I wanted her to share it. But except per-
haps on one occasion I never felt quite convinced that I
had carried the lady more than half as far as she had
carried me: the capacity for it varies like any other
capacity. I remember one woman who had a sort of
affectionate worship for me, explaining that she had to leave
her husband because sexual intercourse felt as she put it
"like someone sticking a finger into my eye." Between her
and the heroine of my first adventure, who was sexually
insatiable, there is an enormous range of sensation; and
the range of celestial exaltation must be still greater.
  When I married I was too experienced to make the
frightful mistake of simply setting up a permanent whore;
nor was my wife making the complementary mistake. There
was nothing whatever to prevent us from satisfying our
sexual needs without paying that price for it; and it was
for other considerations that we became man and wife.
In permanence and seriousness my consummated love
affairs count for nothing beside the ones that were either
unconsummated or ended by discarding that relation.
Do not forget that all marriages are different, and that
a marriage between two young people followed by
parentage cannot be lumped in with a childless partnership
between two middle-aged people who have passed the
age at which it is safe to bear a first child.
  And now, no romance and above all no pornography.
                                                                                    G.B.S.


Copied from
<poem>
The Portable Bernard Shaw, Sidney Weintraub, Editor,
MALE MINISTERS EXCEPT PROTEUS. ''[rising and singing]''
Penguin Books, 40 West 23rd Street, New York, NY (1977)
::::&mdash;he's a jolly good fel-low
pp. 628-631
::::For he's a jolly good fel-low
::::For he's&mdash;
</poem>

Latest revision as of 03:41, 24 May 2008


MALE MINISTERS EXCEPT PROTEUS. [rising and singing]
—he's a jolly good fel-low
For he's a jolly good fel-low
For he's—

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