The Omphalosopher of Love

THE SAGE OF SEX (292 pp.)--Arthur Colder-Marshall--Putnam ($5).

When H. E. was twelve, his mother thrust his baby sister's warm, wet diaper in his face. This, together with mother's delight in making water on her hand because it "was good for the skin," gave H. E. a perverse and lifelong fascination with performing or watching micturition. When he married at the age of 32, he made his wife submit to the following pact: separate lodgings, no children, no mutual economic support, lengthy separations, no vows of lifelong fidelity. When his wife embarked on a series of Lesbian affairs, H. E. imperturbably gave his blessing and made some "dear friendships" with other women. These friendships never progressed beyond kisses and preliminary love play, because H. E. was sexually impotent. After a quarter-century of tormented marriage, his wife died, and past the age of 60, H. E. became potent for the first time with a French mistress young enough to be his daughter.

Such a man might be presumed to be in dire need of psychiatric help. Instead, he gave sexual counsel to millions, for H. E. was Henry Havelock Ellis, the most renowned sexologist of the English-speaking world.

In a slyly barbed study that might pass for one of Lytton Strachey's lesser portraits of eminent Victorians. British Author Arthur Calder-Marshall has done the best biography yet of the self-made sage of sex. It is not Author Calder-Marshall's purpose to debunk, but nearness lends disenchantment with a man like Ellis. The heroic side is that, leading from utter weakness, Ellis helped win such a signal victory for the study of sexual deviations as to rob posterity of its need of him.

What Thou Wilt. Apart from Mamma's quirks, Havelock's boyhood in Surrey was uneventful to the point of torpor. The boy was a bookworm; the man would be a cultural boa constrictor gorged with print. He had four sisters and an absentee sea-captain father; Ellis would be woman-handled most of his life. Papa interrupted his son's reading twice, once to take him around the world at the age of seven, and a second time at 16, to deposit him in Australia for a four-year stretch of school-mastering in the rough-and-tumble outback. Havelock roughed it, but he was a dud as a teacher. As he later reported with clinical detachment in his autobiography, he experienced his first diurnal, involuntary orgasm in Australia (while reading the Dames Galantes of Brantome).

Back in England, Ellis toyed with the idea of entering the Anglican ministry, but lost his faith and then decided to become a physician, which he eventually did. He became absorbed in a cult, the Hinton circle. Its late founder, James Hinton, had been a blend of crackpot and sexpot. Under the doctrine of "service," Hinton preached polygamy and practiced promiscuity among lonely women and errant wives. High-minded Havelock saw in this only a band of free spirits snapping the moral chains of Victorian bondage. He adopted the Hinton motto, Fay ce que vouldras (Do What Thou Wilt) as his own. As one of Ellis' women friends subsequently pointed out, it was a perfectly innocuous creed for him, since Havelock was tempted to do so little. The women who entered Ellis' life usually came for solace; they were customarily fleeing from men, or from themselves, to a sympathetic confidant.

Love Sets. It was Ellis' fate to attract a fairly odd lot. The first was Olive Schreiner, a British novelist who was unhappy about being a happy masochist. She was apparently looking for a man more virile than most, yet not a sadist, who would lead her back to normalcy. Once she heard Havelock's high, piping voice and saw his shy, reclusive ways, she guessed that he was not the man. However, they did manage a few sets of love play together, and Havelock, for whom a kiss "was as violent an action as near-rape," regarded Olive as one of the emotional high spots in his life.

The woman Ellis married was Edith Lees, a short and vibrant manic-depressive who subsequently became a novelist, playwright and lecturer. Havelock rather disliked her protrusive blue eyes, but he could not resist her New-Woman camaraderie. After a civil ceremony at the Paddington registry office on Dec. 19, 1891, Ellis tried to skip his bride's "at home" gathering that very afternoon.

From then on, Ellis skipped most of his husbandly duties on the plea that his work came first. To Ellis, marriage was a spectator sport, and so was life. He was a born navel-gazer, one of nature's omphalosophers. His wife might be heading for a mental crackup, but Ellis would be happily pottering with Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, or the latest article on the mescal button (the source of Aldous Huxley's mystic wonder drug, mescaline). The authentic Ellis touch is that he asked his wife to do research among her invert friends for the first volume of his famed Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Ellis could temporarily shelve his work when he himself made extramarital friendships with Amy Barker Smith and Margaret Sanger, the birth-control propagandist. He tried to soothe Edith's rage by claiming that the first affair did not matter because it was merely physical (only the spiritual counted), and the second did not matter because it was merely Platonic. Consistency was not the hobgoblin to terrify Ellis. Free-spirited Edith finally insisted on a legal separation, and before she died in 1916, went mad.

Afternoon of a Faun. What happened next beggared Ellis' never great expectations. He fell in love with the estranged French wife of a Russian army officer, made her his mistress, and came to know the simple joys of what was all but legally a conventional marriage. Ellis nicknamed the thirtyish null "Naiad," and she called him "Faun." She gave the Faun a remarkable afternoon. The erstwhile solitary wanted her with him all the time. To her young sons, whom he initially feared, he became a doting paterfamilias. He had lived out the classic scandal of the intellectual. After a lifetime of scholarly ferreting, he had come to the same conclusions about the emotional essentials of life that the untutored common man of the day grasps intuitively about the time he dons his second pair of long pants.

Long before Havelock Ellis died in 1939, his prestige as a sexologist had been overshadowed by Freud's. His Studies in the Psychology of Sex is so weighted with abnormal cases that to generalize from them is rather like taking a height norm from a sampling of basketball centers. His self-prized autobiography. My Life, is a talky, pseudo-candid aside. In his literary essays, e.g., on Diderot, Whitman, Ibsen, he was an appreciator but no critic. As a thinker he belongs to the age of the New Woman, with its feminists, pacifists and socialists--pressed flowers in the book of ideas. Ellis' real enemy was Victorian prudery, and the real dragon he killed was Mrs. Grundy. As a freedom fighter he was doughty enough to call for the humane treatment of homosexuals when England was still seething with the trial of Oscar Wilde. His unshockability has become a sophisticated and sometimes cynical 20th century attitude; but in Havelock Ellis it was a native generosity of mind. As he himself put it: "What others have driven out of consciousness or pushed into the background as being improper or obscene, I have maintained and held in honour."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.