Frank Harris

Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw biographer, fled home in Scotland at the age of 14 and ended up in America. He came back to England later, but he was unwelcome among literary circles. Moreover, he was despised and mistrusted for he was considered as a crook ("clowchi" in Baghdadi dialect). Shaw was merciless in exposing and scandalising him. After all, there is something that attracts me to these "clowchis", there is something I admire about them. I also like cynics and foul-mouthed wicked persons: Marquis de Sade, Swift, AbuFaraj AlAsfahani, Jareer, Orwell. Among literary characters, my heroes are not Hamlet, Othello and Co, but Thersytes in Shakespeare's "Troilus and Cressida" whose curses and swearing amuse me immeasurably more than Hamlet's to-be-or-not-to-be and other jargons, Shylock who speaks the most eloquent, rhetorical and wonderful speeches in the play, and Jacques in "As You Like It".There is more to be said about this topic.... Here's Shylock:


To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,

it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and

hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,

mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my

bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine

enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath

not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with

the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject

to the same diseases, healed by the same means,

warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as

a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?

if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison

us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not

revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will

resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,

what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian

wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by

Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you

teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I

will better the instruction



Reminding G Wilson Knight of this Shylock speech, Knight, who had told me he was one-eighth Jewish, said to me: "Let Israel make a sign on its borders with this speech written on it so that no enemy could harm her"