[W]e are performing our several parts in an intricate play, of doubtful merit, upon a stage the lofty and cavernous wings of which lead immediately into the darkest night. We know if we move into them there awaits us a precipice we should not see, but suddenly there would be nothing solid there under our feet – a chasm limitless in depth, literally with nothing at the bottom of it.1
But the lot of ’em, Yeats, Possum, Old Wyndham
Had no ground to stand on.2
When Wyndham Lewis defended satire in 1934 in his book, Men without Art, he repudiated the idea of a case based on ethics, choosing instead the apparently less emotionally charged criterion of ‘reality’: ‘Is Satire Real?’ is the title of the chapter devoted to the subject.3 Ethics, he explains, are too subjective for anything to be built on them. This is very much in line with Lewis’s customary approach to ethics, about which he was always sceptical. His resort to a basic criterion of ‘reality’ – apparently a kind of lowest common denominator or ultimate bedrock – is less straightforward than it looks, however, as, indeed, his chapter, when it eventually reaches the concept, acknowledges. ‘Reality’, too, begins to fall apart under the weight of the qualifications he starts making as soon as he turns his attention to it from his critique of ethics. And in truth, ‘reality’ is contested ground in Lewis’s work, sometimes when he claims it for his own view of the world or art (as opposed to someone else’s), sometimes (in his fiction), when his characters themselves assert conflicting versions of it in a competitive struggle.
Lewis has a recognized place in the history of modernism primarily because of his leadership of the Vorticist movement in London in 1914. While the boundaries of that movement (temporal and aesthetic) are difficult to fix, its importance as a British (and to some extent American) response to the various European avant-gardes is not in doubt. In terms of its understanding of the consequences of modernity it follows the lead of Italian Futurism, though with its own inflection and by no means uncritically. The sudden eruption of avant-gardes before the First World War reflected and reinforced a conviction that reality did not have a fixed or intrinsic character but could be changed. More than a material or political transformation was at stake; the laws of physics themselves took on a relative character. The co-dependence of states of mind and the character of physical law seemed about to be revealed, as humanity stood on the brink of emancipation from Newtonian determinism. Reality became provisional. As Lewis phrased it in Blast, ‘One feels the immanence of some REALITY more than any former human beings can have felt it’.4 This is an optimistic position: reality is to a great extent under our control, rather than something independent towards which we must adopt a fatalistic attitude.
Philosophically, Lewis had become aware of the conceptual framework by which such relativism could be understood when he soaked up the ideas of Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel and Friedrich Nietzsche before the First World War in Paris. Lewis shared with most modernist artistic practices the idea that ‘what we see is not the reality’.5 His Vorticist abstractions present an alternative reality, in close contact with the transformed modern world that had not yet fully entered the consciousness of the public. Stylistic features of Lewis’s Vorticist painting can be related quite closely to the ideas of Bergson, and to some extent they were intended to have the imaginative compulsion of Sorelian myths.6
As is well known, the actual ‘reality’ apparently anticipated by such statements as Lewis’s in Blast turned out, ironically, to be the initiation of the most traumatic half-century the world had yet seen, in the immense and destructive world war of 1914–1918, followed after a 20-year interlude by the even more terrible conflict of 1939–1945. Reality actually was only provisional, and liable to violent and destructive transformation. Although Wyndham Lewis is associated (through Vorticism) with the early optimistic version of modernist relativism, it is his double awareness of both the ameliorative possibilities of a fluid reality and of the actual (as it seemed to him) damaging consequences of it that gives his later work its critical power. At his most optimistic he could give voice to such sentiments as those contained in a manifesto written after the war, when he still hoped that war might be an aberration rather than a harbinger of the main course of twentieth-century history. A positive modernist transformation, he urged, could still be effected by art:
Every one’s reality should be what he wants.
No one worth his salt accepts the reality that he finds.
So reality could be described as ‘What you will’ (with the emphasis on the will!).
…
Reality in this sense implies personality: and the culture of self – of self-reliance, of thinking for oneself, and acting on one’s beliefs – is one of the things we wish to encourage.7
But his faith in the capacity of the arts to accomplish this was severely qualified from about 1925. Henceforward, the perceived interdependence of reality (nature and its technological supplements) and human agency had as its obverse an at times damagingly paranoid world-view. Commenting, for instance, on the mass-slaughter of World War One in an essay of 1925, ‘The Physics of the Not-Self’, he writes:
Disguised as ‘nature’, and taking on the impersonality and ‘inscrutableness’ of natural laws, a small but picked number of men have put themselves at the head of the forces of nature, as it were, in their old struggle with man. The results so far have been startling enough: but it is hoped shortly that nature will, with their help, achieve a decisive and annihilating victory.8
It is not far from such paranoia to conspiracy-theories of history, a step Lewis took in the 1930s in wild speculations about ‘The Hon. Mr X. (or Lord) and his Provocative Agents’ conspiring against the West, which justify support for Hitler (at least in 1931).9 Until 1937 Lewis maintained what was at best a guarded sympathy, and at worst something approaching straightforward support, for Nazism in Germany as a bulwark against the ‘small but picked number of men’ working against the interests of mankind. In late 1937 he visited Berlin (for the first time since 1934) and, shortly afterwards, the Ghetto in Warsaw. On his return he announced, slightly shamefacedly, that he had ‘been much deceived in politicians, and [would] never write a line for or against any of them’.10
The one novel of Lewis’s that has a conspiracy at its heart belongs to this period of maximum paranoia; The Revenge for Love was written during 1934–1935 (but not published until mid-1937). Its background – the unrest that would later lead to the Spanish Civil War and the reactions of fashionable left-wing London society to it – are pretty inauspicious, given Lewis’s troubling political sympathies during the period. And the novel does reflect his not altogether unjustified view that the arts in Britain were characterized by a ‘left-wing orthodoxy’ during the 1930s. Yet it is almost universally considered as among his greatest novels – and even his most politically astute.11 Its reputation has increased as the passage of time makes it more possible to see past its politics (or rather the political positions that Lewis took up in polemical writings of the period). Lewis himself looked forward to this situation:
I am content … that some day, when the passions of the present time are no more than feverish memories, people will take it up and read it as a novel – not glare at it with an eye inflamed by politics, which prevents proper focusing and makes the eye see something which is not there at all.12
Julian Symons, even 30 years later, though his eye was not ‘inflamed’, maintained that it ‘is a political novel, and cannot be considered as anything else’.13 But a more metaphysical interpretation of the novel is encouraged not only by Lewis’s original working title for it, ‘False Bottoms’, but by a statement on the dust-jacket of the 1952 reissue, probably written by Lewis himself: ‘But if the events of the story are turbulent, that is, as it were, its outer crust. Its kernel is another matter. It has a metaphysical centre.’14 The political surface, perhaps, is therefore itself a ‘false bottom’ that readers should pass beyond.15
On a more prosaic level, Lewis’s phrase about reading it ‘as a novel’ may be interpreted as suggesting that The Revenge for Love can be read, not exactly uncritically, but simply as a narrative which reveals its meaning through its characters and story. A sense of the metaphysical kernel inside the story may certainly be gained this way. Lewis wrote of this kind of understanding, ‘If you want to know what is actually occurring inside, underneath, at the centre, at any given moment, art is a truer guide than “politics” more often than not. Its movements represent, in an acuter form, a deeper emotional truth, though not discursively.’16 The Revenge for Love shares its emotional truth more directly with the reader than any other of Lewis’s novels except the 1954 Self Condemned.17 Neither depends upon a sophisticated interrogation by the reader of his or her own responses in order to do its work (though neither precludes such an interrogation either). Although few of the characters in The Revenge for Love escape some satirical treatment by the narrator, the novel is not a satire in Lewis’s customary mode: these are real people, not grotesques wound up by Lewis to perform and to spout meaningless garbage for his own satirical purposes. Or rather, if they are seen as grotesques, the vision is attributed to the perception of the central consciousness in the novel – that of Margot, the young woman whose love for her ‘husband’, Victor Stamp (a man-of-action who has mistakenly taken up a career as a painter) is more ‘real’ to her than anything else she experiences. It is the upper-class communists she encounters in a nightmarish party held to celebrate the return to London of the amputee communist agitator, Percy Hardcaster (shot while attempting to escape a Spanish prison), who seem to her to be such grotesques:
‘They were not so much “human persons,” as she described it to herself, as big portentous wax-dolls, mysteriously doped with some impenetrable nonsense, out of a Caligari’s drug-cabinet, and wound up with wicked fingers to jerk about in a threatening way – their mouths backfiring every other second, to spit out a manufactured hatred, as their eyeballs moved.’18
This represents a real change in Lewis’s aesthetic of fiction: it brings the reader closer to Margot instead of breaking the illusion of the fiction in a satirical strategy of alienation and ‘making strange’, as happened in his 1930 satire, The Apes of God.
The novel is set in 1934–1935, opening in a Spanish prison during a period of political unrest. From there it shifts to London and the world of fashionable art and (communist) political commitment, returning for its climax to the French–Spanish border: a gun-running expedition that turns out to be a sham. Margot and Victor, along with Percy Hardcaster (a communist who has lost his illusions), are embroiled in this; in fact it is a sideshow, designed to throw the authorities off the scent of the real smuggling elsewhere. Victor is the destined fall-guy. Margot’s attempt to head him off and warn him of the danger leads to their death in the mountains in a storm, when they fall over a precipice while evading the Spanish police. The ground that gives way beneath them is the last of the many ‘false bottoms’ of the novel.
There is a ‘discursive’ level of the novel, however, and it is this that I wish to discuss. It is connected to Lewis’s philosophical writings, which help us effect entry to its metaphysical kernel. The clue is in another of Margot’s thought-streams at the party, when she begins to question whether in fact she (and her love for Victor) have any more claim to ‘reality’ than the wax-dolls she finds so oppressive:
But if this assembly of supposed people was an effect of delirium, in the ‘fever called living’, then in that case Victor, too, he might only be another ghost person, in very fact. They were all ghost-persons together! Her love would be a passion of her brain; with no more stuff to it than the rest of the rigmarole – if nothing in time could be real, as Victor so often would say, when he put on his thinking cap and explaining to her all about Time – about becoming which was not being …19
Victor (somewhat out of character) has apparently been reading Lewis’s 1927 critical polemic, Time and Western Man, which was precisely an attack on philosophies of ‘becoming’ for their tendency to dissolve both the individual personality and the external world into a stream of events, none of which has any more reality than any other. For Lewis this was a struggle between ‘classical’ common sense and a kind of dogmatic primitivism. The proponents of ‘time’ views want to return us to a world of pure sensation, where identities dissolve, and there is no coolness of separation between you and me or between either of us and the sensa that compose the empirical world. As I suggested earlier, the downside of a ‘reality’ that is dependent on individual exercise of will is now becoming apparent to him. He would now like an objective reality ‘out there’ and not closely geared to states of mind (as it was in Futurist doctrine and in the philosophy of Henri Bergson).
The Kantian solution to the problem of objectifying reality (left inadequately solved by David Hume after he had dissolved reality into a stream of naked sensation) was to secure it by installing the necessary apparatus in our minds as the unalterable conditions of experience. Happily, though confusingly, the most fundamental of these conditions, space and time, are treated in the first section of the ‘Transcendental Doctrine of Elements’ of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’.20 This use of the word ‘aesthetic’ in its etymological sense of relating to sensuous perception should be distinguished from aesthetics as the philosophy of artistic beauty, but I have called it ‘happy’ because in Lewis’s metaphysics it is above all the aesthetic (in the sense of art) that performs a similar function and keeps reality in place, perhaps even creating it.21
One of the clearest expressions of this view is in a manuscript from 1924 unpublished in Lewis’s lifetime or since, ‘The Critical Realists’. Lewis announces at the beginning of this article that his aim is to consider ‘how far illusion arises by means of some interplay between the object and us’. By ‘illusion’, as becomes clear, Lewis means reality:
The aesthetic truth or reality … exists when the datum-world does actually grow solid as it were. (Shakespeare’s datum world is a very substantial one). It is on this transference inwards of realities that we come nearest to what we mean by ‘truth’. If it comes too near or becomes too real, then we arrive at nothing – as we see when we flatten our noses against an object. … The datum world, our personal play world, if you like, is the only true one for us. And it is, of course, a world of the ONE. Otherwise it would not be a world: it would not be ‘true’ at all; and above all it would not be practically possible.
When we experience some great work of art, we are looking in to some such enclosed datum-world, or microcosm, which for all its particularity is very universal.22
The artist is not simply the ‘unacknowledged legislator’, in this view: the spell of his work actually creates our reality for us, by removing us from too close an immersion in that primitive sensationalism that for Lewis is not yet differentiated enough to be called ‘reality’. The arts supply the images that stabilize our reality, but in the West this process is failing:
Art, and civilization generally, is in a sense a refinement of the old age of the race: the objects of a great civilization like the chinese are (in the sense of Hume’s psychology) its images. (Our western youth and newness without being dignified by the blasts of ‘sensation’, hardly attains to art or civilization in the chinese sense. Our barbary seems rather to be ‘dying young’.[)]23
A society without art, or one that values an art that dissolves rather than secures reality, delivers us back to that primordial ‘sensationalism’ with disastrous results. Lewis’s polemic Time and Western Man contains criticism of writers whose aesthetics for him fit this definition. Of course, if it is the primordial that is ultimately more real, then the ‘reality’ that art secures for us becomes not so much a truth (in the normal sense of the word), but an illusion, something chosen or willed, as the manifesto with which this chapter opens declares, and as Lewis concludes in Time and Western Man: ‘the illusion must in short be our “real”’.24 Whatever his intentions, Lewis’s Nietzsche-influenced post-Kantianism cannot escape the relativism that was built in to his modernist practice from the first.
But this relativism is a long way down the philosophical road, and before it is reached there is still a chance of discriminating amongst the myths that are promulgated in culture. In a world in which our reality is inevitably ‘staged’, composed of images, some of which achieve the persuasive status of becoming Sorelian myths, it is still possible and necessary on the one hand to subject such myths to various types of criticism – to show in what respects they are inadequate and ‘unreal’ – but also to substitute alternative images and myths that are capable of functioning adequately as our real and as our future. Within Lewis’s oeuvre it is primarily in his visual works that this function is attempted, silently. His writing is where the other, critical, function occurs, the source of the primary satirical mode of his fiction. In Time and Western Man the thrust of his critique of culture is against would-be myths that are predicated on the researches of science interpreted as a means of reaching truth. The clearest example is the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who attempts to construct a metaphysic from the concepts of relativity (Whitehead’s 1924 Science and the Modern World is one of Lewis’s chief targets). As far as Lewis is concerned, such a project remains a futile attempt to present a sow’s ear as a silk purse. Scientific ‘knowledge’ is disintegrative and brings us too close to the object – in this case, to ourselves – delivering us to the primordial flux:
Our life and personality, viewed as science obliges us to, is not humanly true or personally useful, any more than is the scarified, repellent picture of our skin under the microscope. Science makes us strangers to ourselves… In its present vulgarized condition science represents simply the principle of destruction …25
Lewis’s position is complicated by the fact that he approves of the revolutionary effect of science in undermining accepted images of reality. He may be said to favour empiricism but scorn positivism. His objection to positive ‘vulgarized’ images deriving from science is that they are created by people who do not really understand the nature of the destructive material with which they are operating. He does not (or does not always) question such people’s sincerity so much as their critical acumen. Whitehead is thus for him ‘an honest sentimentalist of the “radical” English-schoolmaster type’.26 James Joyce in Ulysses ‘has written a time-book … to some extent, by accident’, for ‘I am sure that he would be put to his trumps to say how much of the time-machinery that he possesses’.27 Ezra Pound is a ‘simpleton’, a ‘genuine naïf’.28 Pound’s own images (though not those of the ancient poets who are revivified in his translations) are grounded in a kind of pompier nineteenth-century aestheticism or conventionally bluff ‘manly’ posturing. Alongside such dupes are others who quite cynically and knowingly deploy equally damaged and damaging images and myths, such as Bergson, Spengler or Gertrude Stein. The ‘sincerity’ of those who have been (as Lewis sees it) duped into incorporating damaging ideology into their artistic myths is no substitute for deliberate critical activity:
But my conception of the role of the creative artist is not merely to be a medium for ideas supplied him wholesale from elsewhere, which he incarnates automatically in a technique which (alone) it is his business to perfect. It is equally his business to know enough of the sources of his ideas, and ideology, to take steps to keep these ideas out, except such as he may require for his work.29
This was a necessary propaedeutic that he felt his all-too trusting fellow-modernists had not submitted themselves to. His own theoretical texts of the 1920s are an unsurpassed critical dismantling of the images and myths – philosophical, artistic and political – of the time, leaving him, indeed, little leeway for images to perform a positive function in his own writing. According to his polemic, at least (if not always in his actual artistic practice), the image of the concrete world that he favoured was stable, but was also the confessed product of an ocularcentric bias. It has therefore been criticized as being, ultimately, arbitrary or self-interested, being grounded in Lewis’s own vocation as a painter.30 Whether such charges are admissible or not, it is certainly true that the apparently disinterested realm of the aesthetic here resumes a quasi-ideological status, and the world of common sense, instead of being merely ‘there’ in our perceptive apparatus, becomes disputed ground. It is represented as such both in his philosophical polemics and in his fiction, to be secured (or dissolved) by argument and struggle.31
Such a struggle was dramatized in his 1928 novel, The Childermass.32 Margot’s description of herself and others as ‘all ghost persons’ applies literally to this earlier novel, set ‘outside Heaven’ where the ghosts of the recently dead await judgement. The environment is one where a ‘reality’ of the kind implied (according to Lewis) by the ‘Time Philosophers’ attacked in Time and Western Man has prevailed: all is an empirical-sensational chaos, unstable and in flux, including the subjects that experience it. This instability is an ideological imposition by the ruling power, the dictatorial Bailiff. He is opposed by a band of appellants in Greek-Norse costume, led by a character calling himself Hyperides. Much of the action of the novel is a fierce debate between the Bailiff and Hyperides’ spokesmen, covering the same philosophical ground as Lewis debated in Time and Western Man (and the sociological ground covered in his earlier The Art of Being Ruled). It is not simply a philosophical debate about aesthetics, but a struggle for power, and though we know that Lewis himself favours the arguments of Hyperides and his followers, the dramatic nature of the debate negates any possibility that either aesthetic could be seen as a priori. The Childermass as Lewis left it in 1928 ends with the decisive battle that will decide on what is ‘real’ still to take place, as Hyperides’ spokesman rhetorically addresses the crowd:
‘… So the battle for the reality can be joined at once for the idea of reality. Who is to be real – this hyperbolical puppet [i.e. the Bailiff] or we? Answer, oh destiny!’33
Just as Margot in The Revenge for Love, with her reference to ghosts, is made by Lewis to allude to his more challenging high modernist novel of 1928, so she also repeats that novel’s terms to describe the battle that she faces against the sinister powers that are ranged against her and Victor, deliberately demoralising them:
It was their reality, that of Victor and herself, that was marked down to be discouraged and abolished, and it was they that the others were trying to turn into phantoms and so to suppress. It was a mad notion, but it was just as if they had been engaged in a battle of wills, to decide which should possess most reality – just as men fought each other for money, or fought each other for food.34
What the novel attempts to show is that the ‘images’ that her culture provides her with are not adequate for this battle. Margot is not uniquely deprived, of course – nor totally deprived – but the general inadequacy as it applies to her and Victor particularly is the ultimate focus of the book. Her ‘sham-culture’ is part of a larger ‘outfit’.35
The 1930s England that Lewis depicts is one that the title of his critical book of 1934 had already constated, a place now virtually ‘without art’. That this was his personal view (or at least his fear) is confirmed by a pessimistic chapter in his autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, published the same year as The Revenge. ‘Towards an Artless Society’ asserts his belief that ‘[d]eprived of art … [l]ife instantly becomes so brutalized as to be mechanical and devoid of interest … without art – then life is utterly impossible’.36 Contrast this with his 1926 view that a society might be engineered where art could function to remove mankind from sadistic brutality: ‘As measure is the principle of all true art, and as art is an enemy of all excess, so it is along aesthetic lines that the solution of this problem should be sought rather than along moral (or police) lines, or humanitarian ones’.37 In the London of Lewis’s novel, lending libraries are closing down (Margot loses her job as a result) and painters are reduced to producing drawings for underwear advertisements or forging old masters, since there is no market for their serious work. It is not just Victor Stamp, an artist of very limited capacity (we are shown), but even the most promising of painters, such as the fictional Tristram Phipps, who are affected by this. What arts there are, are the servants of either commerce or politics. One example of this subordination, mocked by the narrator of the novel, is C. Day Lewis’s poem, ‘The Road these Times must Take’ (1934), and the interpretation of the paintings of Braque and Picasso in purely Marxist terms that Lewis finds in the work of Carl Einstein is another.38
The chief area of high culture with a lingering influence that is subjected to critique in the novel is the image of nature and its relation to humanity in cultural representations since the eighteenth century. These representations are, for Lewis, too benign. There is an irony in this, given that the function of art and its cultural images should be to remove us from too close a contact with the primordial reality that Lewis considers to be characterized by ‘Sadistic brutality’. But it is into this kind of paradox that Lewis’s unwillingness to settle for philosophical consistency leads. Contradiction – even self-contradiction – is the basis of his practice as a writer and painter, and as a strategy it enables him to practise a kind of negative capability, though of a peculiarly self-conscious kind. His fiction is a continuous act of self-deconstructive criticism, testing and sometimes demolishing the confident rationalizations and provisional theories of which his speculative and theoretical writing is full. It takes place at that point where his imagination can explore the relativism that lies beyond the critical processes that have been given free rein in the non-fiction. Not that these critical processes are abandoned, so in this sense his work is (pace Fredric Jameson) genuinely dialectical, even if it doesn’t ‘get anywhere’: ‘the mind … ultimately is marking time as much as the body [in games], it has the movements of marching forwards, but does not march, but is energetically drumming one spot all the while’, in Lewis’s view.39 He is aware, in other words, that his own rationalizations are provisional and ultimately ‘false-bottomed’.
The novel’s critique of available images of nature has two strands, roughly corresponding with genders. The exaltation of the natural man, first in eighteenth-century representations like Tom Jones and later by Rousseau, composes the ‘masculine’ strand. This critique theoretically would undermine one of the main characters in the novel, Victor Stamp, a ‘man of action’ much more than he is a painter, even if he has been driven to that role (as a gun-runner) by the forces that have made impossible his career as a painter.40 In ‘The Critical Realists’ Lewis pointed out that after Darwin, the Rousseauistic ideal of a return to nature seemed hollow (though ideologically more generally favoured than ever).41 In The Revenge for Love the same point is made. Victor becomes the natural man as alcohol weakens the barriers of civilization:
Sean’s Porter [beer] had effected a change, of the back-to-nature order preached in Emile: gin-slings and a shot or two of Schnapps … was getting him back where he wanted to get … where a man speaks a mouthful straight out of his stomach, as a man of guts would, and tells a twister where he gets off.42
For reasons of necessary dramatic sympathy, it is not Victor who bears the biggest burden of this critique, however, but a minor character called Jack Cruze who is (as W.H. Pritchard put it) ‘a true son of Tom Jones’, a village satyr who has grown up to be an urban lecher.43 In Lewis’s narrative, the indulgence with which Fielding treats such a son of nature is shown to be sentimental, as Jack’s faunish behaviour culminates in a brutal assault on a sexual rival (Percy Hardcaster), masquerading as a chivalrous rescue of a damsel in distress. Jack delivers several pile-driving kicks into the stump of Percy’s recently amputated leg. The damsel is Gillian Phipps, the upper-class wife of the painter Tristram. She too has been practising a form of ‘back-to-nature’ behaviour. Her marriage is an ‘open’ one, we are given to understand, and she has discarded most of the ‘civilized’ codes of manners – as being dishonest – that normally regulate human behaviour. She explains this ‘honesty’, which she calls ‘mental communism’, to Jack:
No thoughts hidden away from your brother-biped but all laid naked to inspection, share and share alike: so that no one could say that anyone was keeping anything away from anyone else, or claiming they had a self, as she put it. Properly considered, she said, aren’t we all just one Big Self? So nothing must be kept back and locked up, like a private possession, which is all that the self is, she said.44
The sideswipe at the communist pretension to be anti-individualist is important, for it shows that for Lewis communism, like the Time-philosophies he opposed, undermined the notion of the self.45 But it is also important that Gillian’s disingenuous strategy of ‘nakedness’ (which she carries out literally as well as figuratively) encourages Jack Cruze to behave in the ‘natural’ way that he does: ‘Old Jack’s fighting glands were all in good order, thank you, there was never any question about that. What they had in common with Jack’s other glands it would be difficult to say’, the narrator comments with mock-stupidity.46 As Jack lays out the injured Percy on the floor with the first blow, Gillian cries ‘Well done!’.
As a ‘man of action’, Victor is not so far from similarly instinctive and ‘natural’ behaviour when, escaping from the Spanish authorities who believe him to be the ringleader of the gunrunning (typically, he has been duped and betrayed by the actual controllers of the business) he runs over and kills a Civil Guard standing in the roadway with rifle raised to stop him. But Victor has become one with the car that he drives, for nature, as the Futurists foresaw, has been supplemented and transformed by the machine. The versions of nature (especially human nature) promulgated by Rousseau are shown by the narrative to be inadequate and sentimental in the face of what ‘nature’ has now become.
Margot, on the other hand, consciously tries to regulate her behaviour by means of cultural images, particularly those provided by Virginia Woolf and, behind Woolf, post-Romantic poets and thinkers like Ruskin and Tennyson. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own has been her ‘livre de chevet’, giving her an entry to a ‘highbrow feminist fairyland – purchased for five shillings at the local Smith’s’.47 Just as Lewis made an oblique connection between one ideology of nature and communism in his depiction of Jack and Gillian, so he obliquely connects feminism with debilitating nineteenth-century depictions of the feminine. Margot loses herself in the fantasy world of Woolf’s accounts of Oxbridge (for Margot, with her working-class background, they can be no more than this), dwelling particularly on the quotations from Tennyson’s Maud and Woolf’s narrator’s exclamation, ‘What poets they were!’48 Lewis then exposes further what he sees as the unreality of this image of nature and the feminine: his narrator points out that it reposed on a colonial exploitation ideologically repressed from consciousness: (‘flowering … upon the spoils of the Angloindies and the Dark Continent’). The narrative then introduces a female hearty who, like Woolf’s Mary Beton, lives on income derived from the colonies, but exemplifies instead of refinement a hearty masculine philistinism. Woolf’s feminism (as in Lewis’s Men without Art critique) becomes not so much a call for equality as an assertion of the values of the ‘feminine’ promulgated by the Victorian era against which officially she was in revolt.49
The second book that Margot reads – while lying beside a stream in the Pyrenees – is Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, particularly the second lecture, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. Ruskin’s expression of the traditional Victorian role for women, as moral prop and comforting refuge from life’s hurly-burly for the male head of the household, is coupled with a post-romantic idealization of the natural scenery of Great Britain (and denunciation of despoiling industry). For Ruskin, this island is a ‘garden’ in which Britain’s queenly womenfolk ‘can, perhaps, keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to keep them.’50 Lewis indicates that Woolf’s ‘fairyland’ derives from a similar sensibility when Margot is drawn back to Woolf from her reading of Ruskin at the point where he too quotes Tennyson’s Maud:
The spell of these lovely words could still command her tears. For these lilies and these larkspurs were not the sort that grew in common earth. What poets they were! obediently as ever she whispered to herself, in the thrilling words of that (for her) incomparable ‘queen’, Virginia.51
Faced, however, with the boisterous indifference of the mountain brook by which she lies, and with the urgent need to take practical action to prevent Victor’s folly (she has realized already that his employers intend to betray him), she turns her back on the Wordsworth-Tennyson-Ruskin-Woolf images of feminine nature and determines to do whatever is needed to save Victor.52 But it is part of Lewis’s ‘negative capability’ that the narrative nevertheless reluctantly concedes that the voice of this ‘sham-culture outfit’ is the only one available to articulate what is the closest force to reality in the novel:
She was the sigh of the last rose, and the whisper of the last lily, when the Flower-haters have decreed the extinction of all ‘luxury-weeds’. So, and in that symbolical manner, she could respond to the song of the magdalen, brought to her notice by the latter-day wolves [i.e. Virginia Woolf], who had suckled her starved intelligence and fed it with Victorian lollypops.53
Those who are not artists themselves must have recourse to whatever myths and images their culture allows. And in the final paragraph of the novel this voice, now heard only in Percy Hardcaster’s memory, is allowed (against all Lewis’s ‘discursive’ instincts) the last word.
That Margot is unsuccessful is in a way beside the point. Her attempt to stop Victor (flagging his car down just before he reaches his drop-off point in Spain) leads to the death of the civil guard and to the precipice in the mountains. The inadequacy of British culture’s dominant ‘images’ in the 1930s (including, of course, its ‘communism’) has been demonstrated, as has the need for images that are in some way adequate to the mechanized nature that has replaced Romantic nature. The tragic deaths reinforce this emotionally in a way that is beyond the reach of what Lewis called the discursive.
Any replacement image, congealing for society a new ‘surface’ that it can call its reality, will only ever have an illusory, mythical status, however. What lies beyond or underneath it (that I have called the primordial) remains unreachable. Lewis is aware that even what passes for the primordial in our experience (the flux of sensation, will and desire) is actually this side of that boundary between empirical reality and the unknowable Ding an sich (as in the Kantian metaphysics) and therefore only relatively real. But like Schopenhauer (who intuited a force that he analogized as will preceding phenomenal – that is, all – experience) and Bergson, for whom the force was élan vital, Lewis needed to signify it somehow. In The Revenge for Love he does so by repeated use of the word nothing.54 The false bottom of the precipice is Lewis’s image of what awaits us when the affirmative myths and images that make our reality are violently disrupted or no longer have the strength to sustain us and become literally incredible. And it is Margot – completely untrained in discursive reasoning, metaphysics and art – who Lewis allows to be the vessel of this intuition, that lay at the bottom of all his own convoluted and occasionally self-contradictory reasoning around the nature of reality and the role of art:
She could not reach out, to express her misgivings, into the difficult realms of speech, where all these disparities of thinking and acting would fall into place and be plausibly explained: but she was conscious nevertheless of a prodigious non-sequitur, at the centre of everything that she saw going on around her – of an immense false bottom underlying every seemingly solid surface, upon which it was her lot to tread.55
In this, her response is a model for that reader whom Lewis looked forward to in 1950, who would read the narrative in which Margot features ‘as a novel’.
It may be considered as a limitation of Lewis’s fiction that it does not really supply the needed replacement ‘myth’ by which a community might establish some sort of ‘new reality’ such as he anticipated before 1914 in Blast. No doubt this is partly because the function of warning (not to mention satire) tended to usurp the creative in Lewis’s writing after the First World War. The visionary had its own field of operation, however, as I have already intimated: that of painting, which was always for Lewis an arena for the adumbration of new myths.56 The ‘warning’ function of his writing, on the other hand, when exercised in his political polemics of the 1930s, resulted in disastrous failure to appreciate the real source of the dangers to peace in Europe. But his fiction (particularly The Revenge for Love) is another story.
1 Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-date (London: Hutchinson, n.d. [1950]), 39.
2 Ezra Pound, ‘Canto 102’, Thrones: 96–109 de los cantares (London: Faber, 1960), 80.
3 Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art, ed. Seamus Cooney (1934; reprint, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 107–13.
4 Wyndham Lewis, ‘The New Egos’, Blast, no. 1 (July 1914), (reprint; London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 141.
5 ‘We can aim at no universality of form for what we see is not the reality.’ Wyndham Lewis, ‘Inferior Religions’ (1927), in Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), 154.
6 For an account of this relationship, see Paul Edwards, ‘A Strange Synthesis: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism’, The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–1918, ed. Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene (London: Tate, 2010), 35–45.
7 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Manifesto: “Everyone’s Reality Should be What he Wants”’ (n.d.), Wyndham Lewis Annual 2 (1995), 13.
8 Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Physics of the Not-Self’, The Chapbook: A Yearly Miscellany 40 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1925), 68.
9 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 76. For an interpretation of Lewis’s oeuvre as a disguised expression of a quasi-Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, see David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). For a study of paranoia (including Lewis’s) in modernism, see David Trotter, Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
10 Wyndham Lewis, ‘A Letter to the Editor’, Twentieth Century Verse, no. 6–7 (Wyndham Lewis Double Number) (1937), n.p. [3–4]. Lewis did not keep to his resolution, but his later political writings are anti-Nazi, including The Jews: Are They Human? (London: Allen and Unwin, 1939) which, despite its title, is an attack on anti-Semitism, and The Hitler Cult (London: Dent, 1940).
11 See, for example, Timothy Materer, Wyndham Lewis the Novelist (Detroit: Wayne State, 1976), Ch. 6, Julian Symons, ‘Introduction’ to The Revenge for Love, by Wyndham Lewis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. x (‘one of the half-dozen outstanding political novels of the twentieth century’), Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Afterword’ to The Revenge for Love, by Wyndham Lewis, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (1937; reprint Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991), 390 (‘Symons’s claims for the novel, if anything, are too modest’).
12 Lewis, Rude Assignment, 215.
13 Symons, ‘Introduction’, xi.
14 Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love (London: Methuen, 1952), blurb on dust-wrapper front flap.
15 ‘Metaphysical’ discussions of the novel include Trevor Brent, ‘Keeping up Appearances: Reality and Belief in Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man and The Revenge for Love’, Textual Practice 22, no. 3 (2008), 469–86 and (less exclusively) Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 443–54.
16 Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (1927; reprint, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 116–17.
17 Critics who value The Revenge for its emotional power tend to regard it as inferior to the later novel (the first third of which is patently a far inferior performance) for its superiority in this respect. See Materer, Wyndham Lewis, where Self Condemned is commended as ‘his greatest novel’ (133).
18 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 153 (this and future references are to the Dasenbrock edition).
19 Ibid., 163.
20 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1982), 65–91.
21 For a study of Lewis that is based on a post-structuralist reading of the ‘Kantian aporia’ between aesthetics and rationality and its significance in the Enlightenment Project, see David A. Wragg, Wyndham Lewis and the Philosophy of Art in Early Modernist Britain (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2005).
22 ‘The Critical Realists’ (1924), unpublished ts, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University of Buffalo, (B1 F11), ff. 31–2. These folio numbers are those inscribed on the typescript by Lewis. The typescript begins with f. 24, suggesting that the essay is extracted from a longer work – possibly an earlier draft of what would become Time and Western Man. The section comprises four short chapters, the first of which is entitled ‘The critical realists. (1)’. Quotation by permission of the Poetry Collection, University of Buffalo and The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity).
23 Ibid., f. 36. Lewis makes clear that the artist cannot ignore the primordial world of sensation, and indeed, depends upon it: ‘It is, of course, in this neutral, abstract, element of SENSATION that the artist dips himself every time he applies himself to his art, or the thinker to his thought, as the man of action to his action …’ (f. 35).
24 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 378.
25 Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (1926; reprint, Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 24.
26 Lewis, Time and Western Man, 166.
27 Ibid., 91, 87–8.
28 Ibid., 72.
29 Ibid., 136.
30 ‘An absolute critique of culture finds itself grounded in the thoroughly relativized position of the painter, whose own vested interest lies in the desperate establishment of a more propitious ideological and cultural space in which to do his own work.’ Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis: The Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 126. Jameson goes on to accuse Lewis of having ‘an insufficiently reflexive position’, which results in a failure to become ‘genuinely dialectical’.
31 ‘I have allowed these contradictory things to struggle together, and the group that has proved the most powerful I have fixed upon as my most essential ME’. Lewis, Time and Western Man, 132.
32 Wyndham Lewis, The Childermass: Section I (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928).
33 Lewis, The Childermass, 322. The fact that the appeal is addressed by the anti-time philosopher to a temporal entity (Destiny) itself enacts the stalemate that seems inevitable within the narrative form.
34 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 163.
35 On the final page of the novel the narrator gives moving voice to Margot’s posthumous distress but notes parenthetically that it is ‘part of a sham-culture outfit’ (336).
36 Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937), 262.
37 Lewis, Art of Being Ruled, 64–5.
38 The Day Lewis poem is quoted several times in the novel (first on p. 146). Carl Einstein’s Marxist account of Cubism is implicitly derided on pp. 146–7.
39 Wyndham Lewis, ‘Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in our Time’ (1922), reprint in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings 1913–1956, ed. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 204. For Jameson’s criticism, see note 30, above.
40 See above, note 24: the man of action submerges himself in the primordial; so does the artist, but the product of his submersion is aesthetically distanced from it.
41 Bergson’s vitalism was ‘a similar doctrine to Rousseau’s “return to savage nature”. It contains as much of romance; and is founded (when genuine) on a similar misunderstanding of the savage natural state. Darwin and the psycho-analysts have intervened between Rousseau and us. It has taken on for us almost the character in consequence, not of a programme, but of a necessity’. ‘The Critical Realists’, f. 35. Lewis comments more sympathetically on Rousseauistic ideas of ‘back-to-nature’ sincerity in a discussion of T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards in Men without Art, 74.
42 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 161. Note that the passage is in indirect free style, and the emotional force is Victor’s. Throughout the novel the narrative voice is flexible and often in ironic sympathy with the consciousness it reports.
43 William H. Pritchard, Wyndham Lewis (New York: Twayne, 1968), 119.
44 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 179.
45 Wallace Stevens shared this view of communism’s effect on the self – see Chapter 11. For a discussion of the trustworthiness of the self in the works of Proust, one of the time writers Lewis criticized in Time and Western Man, see Chapter 12.
46 Ibid., 198.
47 Ibid., 213, 214. The text I am quoting follows Lewis’s typescript and substitutes ‘Boot’s’ for the first edition’s ‘Smith’s’. But Boots lent books; Smiths sold them, and the substitution on the proofs would have been in the interest of accuracy rather than something forced on Lewis by a censor.
48 Ibid., 214–15. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17.
49 See Men without Art, Part 2, Chapter 5, ‘Virginia Woolf: “Mind” and “Matter” on the Plane of a Literary Controversy’ (131–40).
50 John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, The Two Paths and The King of the Golden River (London: Dent, 1911), 69.
51 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 276.
52 Lewis was writing, of course, before the publication of Woolf’s 1938 pamphlet, Three Guineas, in which a far more robust and modern feminism would be presented.
53 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 319.
54 This was first noticed (to my knowledge) by Timothy Materer, Wyndham Lewis, 129–30. See also Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 450–451. Compare Lewis’s use of ‘nothing’ in the passage quoted and referenced at note 22.
55 Lewis, Revenge for Love, 154.
56 Many of Lewis’s visual works, including an important oil painting exhibited in the same year as the publication of The Revenge for Love had Creation Myth as their title. See Cat. 164, Creation Myth, in Wyndham Lewis 1882–1957 (catalogue of exhibition) (Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2010), 258.