Woman of Valor (16 page)

Ellis's first love affair had been with Olive Schreiner, the distinguished South African feminist and author of
Woman and Labor
and
The Story of an African Farm
, but she rejected him when she found that he could not sustain an erection and experience normal coitus. Instead, he married Edith Lees, a highly neurotic and self-absorbed essayist and novelist of considerably less repute, who as a self-avowed lesbian found an occasional diffuse intimacy with her husband satisfactory, this situation accounting, perhaps, for some of Ellis's irresolution on the subject. Edith described the unusual nature of their rapport in a thinly veiled gothic romance about a coal miner's wife who takes a lusty lover after her husband is paralyzed in an accident, but then returns to him in recognition of the virtue of their higher “spiritual” union.
²³

By contrast, the lover of Ellis's mature years, Françoise Lafitte Cyon, a French schoolmistress and translator in London, with whom at least one of his biographers claims he eventually achieved conventional sexual compatibility, explained in her memoir how her first intimacy with Ellis brought her a gratification she had never experienced despite two earlier marriages:

Within a week of meeting Margaret, Ellis was guiding her reading at the British Museum, flattering her skills as a writer and encouraging her to visit him at home again and again. After an intimate New Year's Eve together, he was writing love letters, admitting that he “sensed something” happening most unusual for him, a “reserved, slow, undemonstrative person.” The body of these notes invariably followed endearing, boyish salutations to “My little rebel,” “My darling woman,” “You wicked woman,” or “Dear twin.” In one he teases her about his fear of being “gobbled up,” an obviously erotic reference, and in another compliments the hat she was wearing, and then tantalizes her with the certainty that “if you wore nothing I should think that costume also suited you just perfectly.”
²⁵

Some fifty communications of this nature survive, all dated between December 1914 and September 1915, and what is at once remarkable and yet rather pathetic about them is that for much of this period Margaret was out of London and frequently traveling with Portet. Ellis may have agreed in a letter to Margaret dated January 13 that “passion is mostly a disastrous thing,” but only two days later he was writing anxiously wondering why he hadn't heard from her in a week, though he'd already written twice and been several times to the library to try to find her. When in mid-February she went off to Amsterdam and the Hague to investigate contraception in Holland's pioneering state-supported maternity clinics, he admitted that he had begun to miss her before she left and had rushed down to Victoria Station in anticipation of catching her before her departure. He then acknowledged some suspicion about her whereabouts in a reference to her “mysterious seclusion in some unknown spot with the unknown comrade,” which he hoped would not keep her away too long. When subsequently he learned she was in Barcelona and later in Montserrat, destinations he had extolled in a popular book called
The Soul of Spain
, he wrote that he often thought of her and tried to imagine what she was doing, regretting that he was not the one to introduce her to those lovely spots. As she kept delaying her return, he began to grow impatient and wrote salaciously that “it is all very well to send me your thoughts to eat…but when you do arrive I shall be eating you up, if you aren't careful, I shall be so hungry.” There are allusions as well to his urolagnia, of which she was apparently aware.
²⁶

Margaret's letters to Ellis from this period were, for the most part, either lost or deliberately destroyed, so it is impossible for us to know how she responded to these overtures. She did continue writing, though never as often as he would have liked, and she did lead him on flirtatiously—at one point explicitly encouraging him to go on missing her. She was, nonetheless, never duplicitous with Ellis about her whereabouts or her divided loyalties. One of his early letters, in fact, playfully accuses her of “already unwinding her scarf to wave to someone else.” In mid-March, he cautions her never to do anything brash in matters of the heart, and a month later offers only the weakest acknowledgment that her expeditions on the Continent would be profitable to her future work. When she finally returned to London in May, she appeared to be avoiding him, but he frantically searched her out again at the British Museum and other haunts, only to be disturbed that she was “shy” at their reunion. Clearly disappointed, he conceded in a letter to his wife that Margaret was “quite nice and a very pleasant companion, but she has no power to help or comfort me; I should never dream of telling her I
needed
help or comfort…. Mneme means much more to me [referring to a young girl with whom he had long carried on one of his trysts, a girl who was also, coincidentally, about to break off with him in order to marry another man]. And you know, or you never will know, the only
one
person has really hold of my heart strings, for good or evil.”
²⁷

Edith Ellis had ample need for reassurance. She had been traveling in the United States when Margaret first appeared at her husband's door, delivering lectures under the billing of “Mrs. Havelock Ellis,” an affront to feminist proprieties that always rankled in Margaret, who accused her of living off her husband's reputation. Ellis was too reserved and retiring to speak in public himself, and the fact that his wife delivered his lectures sheds considerable light on the depth of their intellectual congress and perhaps explains why the relationship endured despite its apparent sexual anomalies. For several weeks, however, Ellis neglected to mention his new friendship at all in letters to Edith but then began writing about it with a frequency and an enthusiasm that did not elude her. The terms of their marriage had accommodated past involvements confined to the physical sphere, but here the competition of a notorious, reputedly attractive, and gifted young woman suddenly presented itself. Fragile and anxious by nature, and accustomed to monopolizing her husband's emotional and intellectual life, Edith suddenly grew paranoid and wrote him of her intense feelings of abandonment and thoughts of death. She mentioned that she had heard many nice things about Margaret in America—that she was “sweet and deep and good”—but also cautioned that a few people, by contrast, had described her as “fanatical and unbalanced.” When a newspaper story appeared in New York saying Margaret was in London “studying” with Havelock Ellis, he, in turn, wrote to Spain and anxiously cautioned that Margaret not mention him again in her letters home.
²⁸

Ellis, in fact, quite quickly abandoned Edith for Margaret when the two returned to London in May within a day of one another, and despite contrary assurances to his wife, his letters testify that he remained in a frenzied emotional state until Margaret, feeling ill, fled England's damp climate in August and rejoined Portet at a French sanitarium. Edith herself was exhausted and depressed when she returned from her American trip aboard a ship that anxiously left New York only hours after the Germans had torpedoed the
Lusitania
, killing more than a thousand passengers and escalating American involvement in the war. Thereafter, her mental and physical health deteriorated dramatically, and within the year she was dead of a diabetic condition complicated by neurasthenia and at least one suicide attempt. In a deathbed letter to her husband, she pledged “love, forgiveness and eternal comradeship.” Though other women would more successfully arouse him sexually, none proved worthy of a comparable spiritual bond.
²⁹

 

When she deposited Ellis's letters in the Library of Congress to be opened after her death, Margaret apparently saw no reason to expurgate the details of their intimate relations. Until then she had been considerably more circumspect, though her response to a biographer's inquiry in 1953 admitted that when she first knew Ellis “he was alive (and) alert to all physical impulses and delights, as his relationship with two other women testified.” On the matter of his potency, she admonished her correspondent not to confuse premature ejaculation and impotence since “then about 65% of
American
men could be called sexually impotent.” (On the basis of personal experience, she subscribed to the popular stereotype that European men tend to be more satisfying lovers than Americans, though she never explained why this cultural variation should be so.) This testimony could mean that she had aroused Ellis beyond his customary habit, which would have accounted for his unusual infatuation. It could also mean that, along with Françoise Cyon, she wished to protect his reputation from further damage, for she also admitted, somewhat contradictorily, that Ellis felt himself to be an unsatisfactory lover in conventional terms. And she claimed to join with Ellis and Cyon in the belief that “there are various means of receiving physical satisfaction…the important thing to make the union perfect or satisfactory is not alone the physical method, but the reverence and the spiritual oneness created through the physical contact.”
³⁰

After the failure of her first marriage, Margaret never again demanded that any one man be all things to her, or she to him. In this regard her own oedipal disappointments may have cast a shadow, but she used Ellis's teachings to license her behavior. Often she went to bed with men like Ellis who enriched her thinking and advanced her work. She perceived herself as fully liberated in her personal and sexual life and never willingly tolerated control by any man. If she ever again yearned for the integrity of a single, enduring relationship with one individual, she did not admit it.
³¹

Margaret's intimacy with Ellis may never have been entirely satisfying, but there is no doubt of the profound intellectual impression he made. She did not always welcome his advances, but she became nonetheless one of his most devoted disciples, and through the essays and commentaries he produced with remarkable frequency for the remainder of his life, he continued to shape and educate her mature world view.
³²

On the completion of his empirical studies in 1910, Ellis turned his attention to theoretical work and attempted to extract new premises for social policy from his liberal formulations about human sexuality and behavior. He set out to prove that the rationalization of sexuality would advance, not only individual human happiness but, even more important, the interests of society as a whole. When he met Margaret, he had just published
The Task of Social Hygiene
, a series of papers that addressed significant issues of contemporary social discourse, including sexual emancipation and the family, women's rights and family limitation, as birth control was still commonly known.

Ellis had never exhibited a sustained interest in politics, though as a young man he had been a founding member of the progressive society called the Fellowship of the New Life, a faction of which later split off under George Bernard Shaw to form the more practically oriented Fabian Society. By his own claim, Ellis expressed a theoretical concern for “the socialization of all material necessaries of life as the only means of obtaining freedom for individual development.” Though never active as a Fabian, he believed in the value of educating a cadre of enlightened, scientifically minded men and women to foment change. These elites would overcome the emotions and prejudices of the masses, which stood in the way of their effecting revolution from the bottom up, as orthodox Marxist theory prescribed.

In the fractious years before World War I, as many on the British left despaired of doctrine altogether, Ellis offered an alternative to conventional social theory. Taking into account the combined influences of biology, heredity, and environment on human behavior, he advocated that conventional strategies for reform be supplanted by a program of “social hygiene” that addressed itself to the systematic prevention of social ills before they became problems in need of solution. In this respect, he endorsed eugenics, the movement founded in England in the late nineteenth century by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Taking its name from the Greek
eugenes
, meaning “well-born,” eugenicism called for the regulation of human reproduction to improve the biological characteristics of humanity, much as enthusiasts of horses or dogs, for example, might dedicate themselves to the production of a better species of thoroughbreds. At the turn of the century, eugenic theories of hereditary selection and improvement were provided a putative rationale when the botanist Gregor Mendel experimented with his peas and promulgated what were then perceived to be hard, scientific principles of genetic transfer. If, as Darwin said first and Mendel then confirmed, only the fittest were to survive, surely it was in society's best interest to improve the quality of humans, as well as plants.

Though its darker potential was always clear to some skeptics, eugenicism enjoyed a surprisingly large intellectual following well into the 1930s among liberals and progressives in the United States and Europe, who simply assumed that hereditarian principles were compatible with a commitment to egalitarianism and to social welfare initiatives in education, health, and labor, much as an enriched soil mixture made possible the propagation of Mendel's bigger and better pea. Even the prominent theorist of moderate Socialism, Peter Kropotkin, endorsed eugenicism, though he warned against arbitrary imposition of eugenic theory,
³³
and Kropotkin, in turn, influenced Emma Goldman.