VI

AT SOME TIME during this London visit, probably in 1909, Pound was introduced to Percy Wyndham Lewis, the third of Ford’s most famous discoveries among ‘les jeunes’ at the English Review and later Pound’s fellow-Vorticist.¹⁰⁹ Wyndham Lewis was both an artist and a writer, whose first short story ‘The Pole’ had appeared along with Pound’s ‘Sestina Altaforte’ in the English Review of June 1909. Ford offered more than one highly coloured account of his own first meeting with Lewis and his work. Douglas Goldring gives a version of the event that he claims Ford gave him the very night the meeting had taken place: Wyndham Lewis, ‘tall, swarthy and with romantically disordered hair, wearing a long black coat buttoned up to his chin’, fought his way through the fishmonger’s up to the English Review office; finding it empty, he went up to the next floor. Through the open bathroom door, he could see ‘reclining on his back in the bath, in two feet of hot water, with a large sponge in one hand and a cake of soap in the other … the missing editor’. Lewis, ‘announcing in the most matter-of-fact way that he was a man of genius’, asked if he could read the manuscript that he had brought with him. ‘“Go ahead”, Ford murmured, continuing to use his sponge.’ When Lewis had finished, ‘Ford observed “Well, that’s all right. If you’ll leave it behind, we’ll certainly print it”’. ‘If it didn’t happen,’ Goldring concludes, ‘it should have done.’¹¹⁰

Ford, at a later date, gave another version of this encounter, in which there is no bath and the meeting takes place in the office itself. In this scenario, he takes Lewis to be a Russian exile, selling documents about the Tsar or the secret police. Given Ford’s connections with the Garnetts and ‘Dostoevsky Corner’, this was not as far fetched a thought as it might appear. In retrospect, however, Ford’s recollections may have been coloured by the fact that Lewis developed a reputation for being a very Russian, ‘Dostoevskian’ writer. Lewis, according to Ford, certainly acted the part of a mysterious foreigner: ‘Slowly and with an air of doom the stranger began to draw out manuscripts from his coat-pockets, from his trouser-pockets, from his breast-pockets, from the lining of his conspirator’s hat … I have never known anyone else whose silence was a positive rather than a negative quality’.¹¹¹ At the time, as it happens, he referred to Lewis in a letter to his wife as ‘the new Polish genius’, which suggests he took him then to be something Eastern European; ironically, one of the points of Lewis’ piece ‘The Pole’ is that all expatriate Eastern Europeans and Russians were assumed to be Poles.¹¹² Lewis was very dark, handsome in a slightly sinister way, and certainly did not look English, and he had clearly impressed himself on Ford as an exotic outsider. Lewis himself recounts a more mundane story – he found the office empty, and just left his manuscript behind. When he returned a few weeks later to find out what Ford thought, he was delighted to find his story in proof. He had failed to leave an address, so Ford had been unable to contact him. Lewis’ version may be more accurate, but Ford’s fantastical embroideries, as so often, capture much of the man’s personality – his egoism, his paranoia, his brilliance, his disturbing, imperious, unsettling presence.

Ford’s publication of ‘The Pole’ was Lewis’ first appearance in print, but he was already becoming the quintessential modernist cosmopolitan. He once wrote that ‘At around the age of 6 I arrived in England, a small American, and left it for France about 11 years later a young Englishman. I returned to England a European.’¹¹³ Lewis was born in 1882 (a great year for infant modernists – Joyce and Virginia Woolf were also born then). His parents (American father, English mother) had separated when he was ten, his father, always a womaniser, causing scandal in the family by running away with his sister’s housemaid. Lewis and his mother were left with little to live on. Somehow the money was found to send him to Rugby, though being a poor boy at a major public school was not an enviable position. Lewis learnt little there and was beaten a good deal, something he would recount in later life with sadomasochistic relish; these beatings played no small part, one might guess, in his lifelong conviction of (and perhaps desire for) persecution.

While at Rugby he spent most of his time painting – not part of the curriculum – but one master spotted his talent and suggested that he went on in 1898 to the Slade, an art school seeming more appropriate than university. Lewis claimed later that he was bored by the academic conventions taught at the Slade. He was sent off to the Print Room at the British Museum to copy Michelangelo and Raphael drawings, but says he was much more interested in the Easter Island and African carvings that he passed on the way there. At that period the so-called ‘ethnographic’ galleries had not yet been hived off to a separate venue at the Museum of Mankind, from which they have only recently been recalled. The scramble for Africa had greatly increased the Museum holdings of African art, as it was beginning to be controversially described; if Swinburne had been uneasy about equating the value of Japanese and European artistic work, it was nothing to the anxiety caused by the linking of art and Africa. Lewis himself must have missed the great exhibition of Benin bronzes and ivories in September 1897 that followed the sacking of Benin City, but some of these remained at the Museum. Interest in their striking workmanship remained high, in spite of the fact that the Benin themselves were described in the press as bloodthirsty savages. The paradox was solved at the time by the supposition either that these works had been influenced by European art, or that the present-day Benin were the degenerate descendants of superior ancestors. If Lewis was really attracted by such works in his days at the Slade, it was earlier than Picasso by eight or nine years; whether he was rewriting the past or not, these non-European works would later suggest a new direction for his art. And even if Lewis felt such scorn for the Slade’s teaching and values, he did very well at the kind of drawing they demanded. He was given a scholarship for two years, though he only remained for one, becoming a legend at the Slade both for the skill of his draughtsmanship and for clashes with authority.

Lewis was dismissed from the Slade in 1901, in the event for smoking in the building, though, as with Hulme’s expulsion from Cambridge, that appears very much to have been the final straw. His father offered to support him while he took a university degree in America, but Lewis had no intention of giving up the artistic life, though he was hesitating between writing and painting. He remained in London for a couple of years, meeting Yeats’ friend Sturge Moore, and the painter Augustus John, whom he had seen in the distance as a celebrity former scholar at the Slade. In 1903 he headed for Europe, where he spent much of the next four years leading an impecunious bohemian existence, made possible by regular handouts from his mother and spasmodic ones from his father, plus what loans he could cadge from those he met. He spent a good deal of time in Paris, in various garrets in Montparnasse, and visited Munich, Haarlem, and Spain, where he went first, spending several months of the late summer and autumn of 1903 in Madrid with Spencer Gore, a former fellow student at the Slade, four years older than Lewis. They had come to copy the Old Spanish Masters, and though in the end they did little painting, the work of Velázquez and especially Goya, out of fashion in England then, had a profound impact on Lewis. Those two painters’ bitter vision of the savage workings of power was to be a potent influence. In Paris, he saw a good deal of Augustus John, like Gore four years his elder, someone he regarded with deeply ambivalent admiration and with whom he had a stormy friendship. He imitated John’s imposing broad-brimmed black hat (there are few extant photographs of Lewis without it), his cultivation of the figure of artist-genius and his womanising, but not his style of painting.

Lewis was more attracted by the avant-garde. He was in Paris during the time of the Fauves and the early years of Cubism. He was in Munich in the early days of German Expressionism. In Paris he heard Bergson lecture; he read, like so many artists and writers in Paris, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. He visited Brittany, still as much of a cult with artists as it had been when Gauguin was there in the late 1880s. Brittany, to the artists’ colony there, was not just a remote and unspoilt home to simple and picturesque peasants, but in Gauguin’s words, a ‘savage, primitive’ other world, a geographical and spiritual escape from modernity. Gauguin had written that ‘When my clogs echo on this granite earth, I hear the dull, muffled, powerful note that I am seeking in my paintings’.¹¹⁴ Lewis was to look for granite-like power in his paintings too, ultimately in a much harsher note than Gauguin’s; he admired the violence of the Breton fishermen, who ‘brawled about money over their fiery apple-juice’, as well as the stoical courage with which they set off to Iceland in their tiny boats ‘much at home in the huge and heaving Atlantic’.¹¹⁵ Lewis had written poetry in his Slade days, but in Brittany he began to write short stories. Although, as Paul Edwards suggests, he had probably been attracted by Gauguinesque Romantic primitivism, the stories suggest that he quickly developed a more cynical view of the Bretons than Gauguin’s. These allegedly ‘savage, primitive’ peasants, it has been pointed out, were already taking shrewd advantage of the tourist trade that their perceived pre-modern simplicity was attracting, and Lewis’ stories – half-way between travelogue and fiction, between racist stereotype and satire on racism – register this social fact. The Bretons in his stories are greedy, narrow and deeply limited innkeepers and hoteliers, though they make good money, on occasion, by selling the left-behind sketches of their artist clients; there is no touch of savage grandeur in sight. The pieces are written with great panache, and remain highly entertaining if politically questionable, full of inbred scorn for foreigners and the lower classes. Lewis would continue to exoticise the qualities of savagery and aggression, but he was a generation too late to find an unproblematic primitive in the Breton. Gauguin himself, after all, had moved on to Tahiti some fifteen years earlier. Yet Edwards argues this was a crucial period for Lewis, when he was developing a form of modernism that owed much to but radically transformed this Romantic cult of the savage other; in the 1920s he would rework his writings about the Bretons in a book significantly entitled The Wild Body.¹¹⁶

Lewis had returned for short periods to England during this period, but in late 1908 he settled back in London. He might have wondered how good a move that would be for his art, as London was artistically still well behind Paris. Augustus John, back in London earlier in the year, had been shocked to discover that ‘“Impressionism” [was] still lectured on as the new gospel by certain persons of importance’.¹¹⁷ Lewis, however, met more innovative figures such as Roger Fry, and knew the sculptor Jacob Epstein, with both of whom he would later work for a while. Lewis may have returned to escape from the demands of his German mistress, Ida, whom – as Tarr finds with Bertha in the novel that Lewis was to write about these Parisian experiences – he could neither love nor leave. She was heavily pregnant, probably though not necessarily with his child, and the urge to escape paternal responsibilities might finally have given him the resolution to make the break. His life, as his biographers point out, was beginning to follow the pattern of his father’s irresponsible womanising. He was eventually to abandon several more children and many more women. Lewis was devoted to his mother, but her miserable experience of desertion did not deter him from becoming a multiple deserter. He treated women badly, and despised them for allowing it; at some unconscious level perhaps he despised his mother for her misfortunes. His mother had, ironically, advised him to leave Ida and her child. So did his London mentor, Thomas Sturge Moore, whom he had met on a visit back in 1902, and who took a keen interest in his career.

Sturge Moore was, like Lewis, both a writer and an artist, in his case poet and illustrator; a brother of the philosopher G.E. Moore, he was thought of by all as a gentle, sensitive man, yet he wrote to Lewis saying that Ida was the kind of woman who used the ‘slop of sex’ to catch a man. With such a woman, he assured him, ‘if [a man] puts his genius between her legs she will cover it with any petticoat that takes her fancy, and no one will see it again’.¹¹⁸ So much for Edwardian gallantry. The ‘slop of sex’ is a phrase that recurs in Tarr, where it represents all that the artist must avoid; not sexual activity as such, but emotional involvement. ‘In this department of my life,’ Tarr insists, ‘I have not a vestige of passion.’ Like Hulme, Lewis distrusted emotional ties; for him, the artist had better things to be passionate about than a sexual partner. ‘With most people,’ Tarr claims, ‘not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship … The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man.’ Tarr is not wholly successful in his efforts to separate the realms of Art and Life, but womanly feelings certainly disgust him: ‘Women’s stormy weakness, psychic discharges, always affected him like the sight of a person being sea-sick.’¹¹⁹ Such a reaction suggests fear and revulsion as much as callousness, possibly true of Lewis himself, even though he regularly responded with an apparent stony indifference to the unhappiness of women in his life; he was, like Hulme, in David Trotter’s phrase that I quoted earlier, ‘anti-pathos’. He wanted to construct a hyper-masculinity for the artist which attempts to eschew personal feelings. All the artist’s libido is directed towards his art.

It was probably Sturge Moore who had headed Lewis in Ford’s direction. Pound and Lewis’ first meeting was at the Vienna Café, five minutes from the British Museum near Bloomsbury Square, which was, according to Lewis, apart from the Café Royal, ‘the only continental café’ in London.¹²⁰ It occupied the ‘wedge formed by Hart Street and Holborn’, and its first-floor room was triangular with a wonderful ‘ceiling of glass, which reflected all your actions as if in a lake suspended above your head, surface downwards’.¹²¹ Pound spent a considerable amount of time in the Vienna Café over the years, and was deeply disgusted when during the First World War it was closed down, and eventually became a bank. On this occasion, however, Pound was with Binyon, a steady habitué of the Vienna, and Lewis with Sturge Moore. Pound gave his own myth-making version of the meeting in the Cantos:

So it is to Mr Binyon that I owe, initially,

Mr Lewis, Mr P. Wyndham Lewis. His bull-dog, me,

as it were against old Sturge M’s bull-dog, Mr T. Sturge Moore’s

bull-dog.¹²²

Oh boastful Pound! In those days he perhaps could be compared to a noisy fox terrier, but he was certainly no bulldog. The two of them had nothing to say to each other at the time. They both, as Douglas Goldring put it, made ‘no secret of their calling’, playing the part of the bohemian artist to the full.¹²³ But their life experiences had been extraordinarily different. As Lewis said of himself, he was now a European; Pound was still in many ways an American provincial. Lewis was sexually experienced – in fact he had already had his first bout of venereal disease. Pound was very possibly still a virgin. While they were both short of money, even in Italy Pound had mixed mainly with the many well-to-do American expatriates; in London he was circulating through polite drawing-rooms. Lewis’ time in Parisian poverty, though admittedly also mainly with expatriates, including Augustus John’s irregular and explosive household, was another world. Pound could only rely on, in Goldring’s phrase, his ‘transatlantic brio’, whilst Lewis, as he said of himself, had ‘the tarnished polish of the English Public School, of the most gilded cafés of five or six continental cities’.¹²⁴ Pound was obsessed with the Middle Ages. Lewis was aware and already part of the beginnings of the modernist revolution. It is perhaps significant that in his wanderings through Europe Lewis never went to Italy, the mecca for Victorian and Edwardian English and American tourists. Italy represented a traditional ideal of civilisation he already wanted to repudiate. When they first met, Lewis claims, he felt no interest in this ‘cowboy songster’.¹²⁵ He found Pound ‘an uncomfortably tensed, nervously straining, jerky, reddish-brown American … The impression he made, socially, was not a good one. He was a drop of oil in a glass of water. The trouble was, I believe, that he had no wish to mix: he just wanted to impress.’¹²⁶ Lewis, of course, wanted to impress too, and neither of them had any interest in being impressed by the other. Their friendship and collaboration was still in the future.