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Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) |
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English essayist, psychologist, a pioneer in establishing a modern, scientific approach to the study of sex. Havelock Ellis's magnum opus was Studies in the Psychology of Sex (7 vols., 1897-1928). Until 1935 his work was legally available only to the medical profession. Ellis became known as a champion of women's rights and of sex education, but his autobiography My Life (1939) reveals his marital problems and unhappiness in his own sexual life. All advance in social reform, even when it involves surgery, is, and always has been, effected by heroic pioneers who are ready to act, and even, if need be, to become martyrs. They slowly win the world to their side. The law limps behind. (from My Confessional: Questions of Our Day, by Havelock Ellis, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1934, p. 240) Henry
Havelock Ellis was born in Croydon, Surrey, the eldest child and
onlyboy of
Edward Peppen Ellis, a sea captain, and Susannah Mary (Wheatley) Ellis,
the daughter of a sea captain. Able to read at an early age, Ellis
voraciously devoured books; for sports he had no natural talent. Ellis's years at private schools in London were uneventful, but his reading was omnivorous, from Rousseau's Rêveries d'un promeneour solitaire and Rowlandson's Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturescue to Macaulay's Essays,
Milton and Burns. At the age of sixteen Ellis voyaged to Australia in a
ship under his father's command, to begin life there on his own
account. Ships,
harbours and wharves, all the thing that belong to the sea, remained at
the heart of his vision of himself. While working as a teacher in New South Wales, Ellis underwent an
inner transformation. In the
novel Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll
(1922) and his autobiography Ellis looked back to this period: "Yet
there has
never been a moment when the foundation and background of my life have
not been marked by the impress they received at Sparkes Creek." (My Life: The Autobiography of Havelock Ellis, Houghton Mifflin, 1939, p. 167) Living
in the bush was cheap, the children gave him no trouble, and books of
all kinds fed his intellect: "poems, novels, theology, religion,
subjects of almost every class, science, strange as it must seem,
occupying the smallest place, if, indeed, any place at all, but in that
phase I was eager to grasp the whole rather than the parts; it was
synthesis I was drawn to rather than analysis. Though I bought every
book I wanted, my books were selected carefully and deliberately." (Ibid., pp. 158-159) After
four years, he moved back to England. Ellis entered St. Thomas' Hospital,
London, where he studied medicine from 1881 to 1889. However, after qualifying Ellis practiced only for a short
time. In 1891, Ellis married the English writer Edith Lees; he was
still a virgin. From the beginning, their marriage was unconventional –
the wedding breakfast consisted of porridge and at the end of the
honeymoon, Ellis settled his barchelor rooms in Paddington and Edith
lived at Fellowship house. None of Ellis's four
sisters ever married. "If men and women are to understand each other,"
Ellis once said, "to enter into each other's nature with mutual
sympathy, and to become capable of genuine comradeship, the foundation
must be laid in youth." (The Task of Social Hygiene, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912, p. 58) In 1883 Ellis met the South African writer Olive Schreiner.
He did not aswer to her
expectations, but they remained close friends until her death in 1920.
"She possessd a powerful and physically passionate temperament," Ellis
recalled. "We were not what can be technically, or even ordinarily,
called
lover. But the relationship of affectionate friendship which was really
established meant more for both of us, and was really more intimate,
than is often the relationship between those who technically and
ordinarily are lovers." (My Life, p. 185) In On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue (1921) Ellis referred to Schreiner's Woman and Labour(1911) and her theory that modern society produces a tendency to parasitism in women: " . . . they no longer exercise the arts and industries which were theirs in former ages, and so they become economically dependent on men, losing their energies and aptitudes, and becoming like those dull parasitic animals which live as blood-suckers of their host. That picture, which was of course never true of all women, is now ceasing to be true of any but a neglible minority". (Ibid., Garden City Publishing Company, 1922, p. 90) The letters of Schreiner and Ellis were published in 1992. It has been speculated that their relationship was unconsummated. Until he was about 60, Ellis suffered from impotence. With the help of a
devoted lover, he finally was able to get rid the erectile dysfunction; Ellis remained sexually
active until he was 72. "I am regarded as an authority on sex, a fact
which sometimes amused one or two (though not all) of my more intimate women
friends," Ellis said. (My Life, p. 179) During his time as a medical student, Ellis began writing for
magazines, and become a staff member of the Westminster Review.
At the meetings the Fellowship of the New Life Ellis made an acquaintance with G.B. Shaw
(1856-1950), but when Shaw was attracted
by Socialism and collective action, Ellis focused on the problems of
individuals. However, Edward Carpenter's poem Towards Democracy (1883-1902),
about the march of humanity toward socialism, inspired Ellis so much,
that he sent Carpenter a letter, which started their long friendship. In 1887 Ellis became editor of the Mermaid Series of unexpurgated reprints
of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. He worked on this project with such
writers as Arthur Symons (1865-1945) and A.C. Swinburne (1837-1909). His
first work of nonfiction, The Criminal (1890), appeared in the
Contemporary Science Series, which he edited until 1914. Man and Woman
(1894) examined the "scientific" views on women's inferiority. Ellis
revised the book in 1929, and took a clear stance in the debate about
the inherent inferiority of women: "The more comprehensive our
investigation the more certainly we find that we cannot speak of
inferiority or superiority, but that the sexes are perfectly poised in
complete equivalence." ('Preface,' eighth edition revised, Heinemann, 1934, p. v) Around the turn of the century Ellis experimented with the
hallucinogen mescal, preceding Aldous Huxley who also studied
hallucinogenic substances. W. B. Yeats, who was interested in the
relationship between dreams, visions, and drugs, co-operated in the
trials. The first result
was an article, 'Mescal: a new artificial Paradise,' published in the Cotemporary
Review in 1898, and then another, 'Mescal: a study of a divine
planet' (1902). Yeats preferred hashish to mescal. He took hashish in tablets. (W.B. Yeats: A Life I: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 by R.F. Foster, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 178) Like Freud, Ellis based many of his ideas on Darwinian
theories of evolution. His increasing concern with sexual matters let
to Studies
in the Psychology of Sex.
It appeared in six volumes from 1897 to
1910. A seventh volume was published in 1928. The work explored sexual
relations largely from a biological and multicultural perspective.
Especially Ellis was interested in the typical sexual behavior of
humans, paving way to the surveys of Alfred Kinsey and other modern
writers on sexual topics. He objected Freud's application of adult
sexual terms to infants, and tried to demystify human sexuality – most
of his English readers were raised in the asexual, ignorant, and
prejudiced Victorian climate. Masturbation, Ellis assured his readers,
did
not inevitably lead to serious illness. Ellis himself liked to watch
women urinating. Once he persuaded his lover Françoise Cyon to do so in
Oxford Circus. "I have read a good deal of Havelock Ellis on sex,"
Bertrand Russel wrote in a letter to Ottoline Morrell in January 1916.
"I think almost all civilized people are in some way
what would be thought abnormal, and they suffer because they don't know
that really ever so many people are just like them." (Autobiography by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 2009, p. 270) Sexual Inversion, which challenged popular prejudices
against homosexuals, was published in Germany in 1896 under
the title Das Konträre Geschechtsfühl. When the book eventually came out
in Britain – it was published by the Watford University Press –
George Bedborough, the bookseller, who had stocked it, was arrested for
selling "a certain lewd, wicked, bawdy, scandalous libel." ('International Sexual Reform and Sexology in Europe, 1897-1933' by Nicholas Matte, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, Volume 22 Issue 2, Fall 2005, p. 258) A British judge declare the Studies
obscene.
Just a few years earlier Oscar Wilde had been prosecuted for "acts of
gross indecency with other male persons." In his work Ellis had
presented some 80 cases of homosexual
males, concluding that homosexual behavior was not a disease or a
crime. This view was also maintained by the Finnish sociologist,
philosopher, and anthropologist Edvard
Westermarck,
with whom Ellis corresponded from 1902. Both Ellis and Westermarck
advocated for decriminalization of homosexuality. With Edward Carpenter
he established the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
(BSSSP) in 1914. Westermarck was not its member but he gave a lecture
at a meeting of the society in 1920. The subsequent volumes of the Studies were published
in
the United States by F.A. Davis Company in Philadelphia. The seventh
volume, Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies, appeared in
1928. After the ban was lifted, Random House produced to general
readers a four-volume series of the work. The last years of his life
Ellis spent in retirement near Ipswich, is Suffolk. Havelock Ellis died of an
apparent heart attack on July
8, 1939 in Hintlesham, Suffolk. His library was purchased
by Yale University in 1941. With The Task of Social Hygiene (1912) Ellis
participated in the discussion about eugenics – he supported strongly "the science and art of Good Breeding in the human race":
"Eventually, it seems evident, a general system, whether private or
public, whereby all personal facts, biological and mental, normal and
morbid, are duly and systematically registered, must become inevitable
if we are to have a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or
most unfit to carry on the race. Unless they are full and frank such
records are useless." (Ibid., p. 220) Thus Ellis did not condemn Nazi sterilization
programmes, because it was based on "scientific" motivation. ('An Intellectual Titan of our Modern Renaissance: Havelock Ellis and the Progressive Tradition' by Chris Nottingham, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift 25, 1998, p.419) When
the Nazis organized book burnings in Berlin and other German cities in
May of 1933, Ellis was one of the non-Jewish writers, whose works were
thrown in the fire. He was in the distinguished company of Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Émile Zola. The poet H.D. (Hilda Doolitle), who was married to the
writer and poet Richard Aldington, met Ellis in 1919. They corresponded
for a number of years. H.D. identified herself as the "Person" in
Ellis's essay 'A Revelation' (1924). Ellis called her "Hyacinth," she
called him "Chiron," after the mythological centaur, who was the
teacher of Achilles. In addition to his studies on sexuality, Ellis wrote on
authors such as
Casanova, Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Walt Whitman, and Leo Tolstoy. His
essays on French writers were collected under the title From
Rousseau to Proust (1935). A new edition of The Soul of Spain
(1908), with an introductory essay on the Spanish Civil War, appeared
in 1937. The Criminal introduced Cesare Lombroso's ideas to the
British public – Ellis was quite sympathetic to the anarchist
movement: "The political criminal is, as Lombroso calls him, "the true
precursor of the progressive movement of humanity;" or, as Benedikt
calls him, the homo nobilis of whom the highest type is Christ." (Ibid,. p. 1) Ellis's critical pieces from 1884 to 1932 on literature and art
were reprinted in Views and Reviews (1932). His wide correspondence Ellis utilized in My Confessional: Questions of Our Day (1934), a collection of essays. For further reading: Havelock Ellis, Philosopher of Love by Houston Peterson (1928); Friendship's Odyssey: The Autobiography of Francoise Delisle and the Story of Havelock Ellis from 1916 to 1939 by Francoise Delisle (1946); Sage of Sex: A Life of Havelock Ellis by Arthur Calder-Marshall (1959); Havelock Ellis, Artist of Life by John Stewart Collis (1959); The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters and Virginia Johnson by Paul Robinson (1976); Havelock Ellis, Philosopher of Sex by Vincent Brome (1979); Havelock Ellis: A Biography by Phyllis Grosskurth (1980); 'Ellis, (Henry) Havelock', in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 2, edited by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics by Chris Nottingham (1999); Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology by Paul Peppis (2014); 'H.D. and Havelock Ellis: Popular Science and the Gendering of Thought and Vision' by R. Pappas, in Women's Studies, Vol 38; Number 2 (2009); Sciences of Modernism: Ethnography, Sexology, and Psychology by Paul Peppis (2014); "An Abyss of Anarchy, Nihilism, and Despair": Historical Representations of Anarchists in Britain by Alexander Lee Jutila (2018) Selected works:
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