Word: havelock
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Ellis In, Osier Out. Most of the verse Anthologist McDonough found was very bad indeed: she left out 20 poor poems for every good or fair one she put in. Such doctors as Edward Jenner (vaccination pioneer) and Havelock Ellis made the grade, but a list of all the doctor-poets the anthologist uncovered shows that such poetasters as William Harvey. Hippocrates, Sir William Osier, Rabelais and Morris Fishbein failed to satisfy Mrs. McDonough's critical taste. Nonetheless, a lot of doggerel got in. One of the most amusing contemporary specimens is John Fallon's Inscription...
...hard spanking of Havelock Ellis, he accuses Ellis of betraying his Puritanism by using the word obscenity-though he himself has used the whole thesaurus of sexual fear and shame...
...once called him. . . . Of course, Carl Sandburg's "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" is the biography of this or, apparently, any other year. A new edition of "The Pratrio Years" is now also available. . . . Henry Seidel Canby's "Thoreau" is a good, solid work on a great American writer. . . . Havelock Ellis' "My Life" is an undistinguished chronicle of a distinguish life. . . Henry F. Pringle makes "The Life and Times of William Howard Taft" a far more appealing and interesting book than one's impressions of the Taft administration would make one suspect. . . . Boris Souvarine's "Stalin" is less a biography...
Readers of My Life will find plenty of candor, but not quite the kind of thing they expected. The first 250 pages are dull as dishwater-a long-winded genealogy of Havelock Ellis's ancestors (healthy, middle-of-the-road sea captains, churchmen, businessmen, who "neither rise nor fall"), of his sheltered childhood, of his innocent young manhood as a schoolteacher in Australia, medical student in London, platonic lover of Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm), who called him "my Soul's wifie." At that time, Ellis candidly confesses, he was 5' 10½" tall...
...that what was intended as an absolutely honest autobiography has turned into a fearlessly candid biography of his wife. A social worker, lecturer and minor fiction writer, Edith was not (as Daudet said the wife of a writer should be) a feather bed. Petite, restless, intense, she scolded at Havelock's manners, dress, undemonstrativeness, called him a mixture of satyr and Christ, alternated between tantrums and protestations of undying love. "The worst of me is in my tongue," she reassured him, but once she kicked him in the head. He discovered strong homosexual tendencies in her. Both tried...