III

THAT EVENING AT the Quest Society had convinced Pound that what he was doing in poetry had much in common with the work of Lewis, Epstein and Gaudier in the visual arts, though it would take him a few months to find a language to describe their joint programme. In March, he reviewed an exhibition of their work at the Goupil Gallery in enthusiastic but unusually inarticulate terms, saying of Epstein: ‘There is in his work an austerity, a metaphysics, like that of Egypt – one doesn’t quite know how to say it’, though he insists that Epstein’s sculptures are great art ‘because they are sufficient to themselves’. Gaudier, he said, was ‘in a formative stage’, and his carvings of animals have ‘a “snuggly”, comfortable feeling, that might appeal to a child’. Gaudier, it may be said, was not happy about these comments; by ‘snuggly’ Pound was presumably trying to convey what Lewis more aptly described as the ‘soft bluntness’ of Gaudier’s carvings, but it was a phrase that could be taken to be patronising. In addition, if Gaudier was undeniably still at a formative stage, it was tactless to point it out. Pound was equally tentative in his attempt to discuss the paintings in the exhibition, complaining that they were even more difficult to write about, but he offered the advice, in the light of Epstein’s comparison of Lewis’ pictures with sculpture, that Cubism should be understood as ‘a pattern of solids’.⁵⁶

Pound had only one noncommittal sentence on Lewis in that March review, but by June he was expansive in his praise: ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis is one of the greatest masters of design yet born in the occident. Mr Lewis has in his “Timon” gathered together his age, or at least our age, our generation, the youth-spirit, or what you will, that moves in the men who are now between their twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth years.’ Those boundaries included both Lewis, aged thirty-one, and himself, twenty-eight, but by ‘men’, Pound does not, he explains, mean ‘the man in the street’. ‘The rabble and the bureaucracy,’ he adds, ‘have built a god in their own image and that god is Mediocrity. The great mass of mankind are mediocre … If a man have gathered the force of his generation or of his clan, if he has in his “Timon” expressed the sullen fury of intelligence baffled, shut in by the entrenched forces of stupidity, if he have made in “Timon” a type emotion and delivered it in lines and masses and planes, it is proper we should respect him in a way we do not respect men blaring out truisms or doing an endless embroidery of sentiment.’⁵⁷ ‘Sullen fury’ in the face of what he saw as the ‘entrenched forces of stupidity’ would be increasingly Pound’s own posture.

Pound described Lewis in that article as ‘a man at war’, by which he meant with the forces of mediocrity, but in practice Lewis was more frequently at war with his fellow artists and intellectuals. The short association with Hulme was over. Hulme, reviewing for the New Age the same Goupil Gallery exhibition that Pound had written up for the Egoist, commented that though he found one of Lewis’ drawings, The Enemy of the Stars, remarkable, he thought the two paintings failed to cohere: ‘In Mr Lewis’s work,’ he wrote, ‘there are always qualities of dash and decision, but it has the defects of these qualities.’ He concludes that the ‘only really satisfying and complete work in this [Cubist] section is that of Mr Epstein’.⁵⁸ Lewis was deeply jealous of this preference for Epstein, but possibly even more searing to his pride was the fact that Hulme had captured the affections of his ex-mistress and patron, Kate Lechmere. The two had first met when Lewis invited Hulme to the Rebel Art Centre, deliberately choosing a day when Lechmere had a luncheon engagement elsewhere. Unfortunately for Lewis it was cancelled, and Hulme and Lechmere met and were immediately attracted. They next saw each other at the Goupil Gallery private view, where Lewis had the galling experience of watching them together at the other side of the room, discussing, and he feared mocking, one of his paintings. Paul O’Keeffe suggests he was mainly afraid that Hulme would encourage Kate to install Epstein in Great Ormond Street in his place, but in spite of his liaison with Lechmere being a thing of the past, he appears also to have greatly resented Hulme’s sexual success. Hulme and Lechmere became lovers, though Dollie Kibblewhite – and many of Hulme’s friends – never knew. Allegedly, relations between Lewis and Hulme ended when Lewis, after a furious quarrel with Lechmere in a restaurant, rushed to Frith Street and attempted to strangle Hulme. Hulme, the story goes, took Lewis out and hung him upside down by his trouser turn-ups on the railings in Soho Square. Any friendship and co-operation came to an end.

Just before the final rift between the two, however, Lewis was able to call on Hulme to do battle with a common enemy. This was Marinetti’s Futurism, to which both Lewis and Hulme were by this time highly opposed; Hulme thought it romantic mess, and Lewis denounced its art as soft, emotional and blurry. Both of them were alarmed at the celebrity status it had achieved in London. Everyone had heard of the Futurists, and in popular parlance the term was used to describe any of the current new art movements, as Pound had done in his February article on ‘The New Sculpture’, when he had identified with ‘all rightly constituted young futurists’. Marinetti had appeared frequently in London since Dorothy had gone to hear him in 1912, and continued to cause a stir, even though he was not always taken very seriously. In December 1913 Aldington had commented on one of Marinetti’s readings in the New Freewoman, ‘London is vaguely alarmed and wondering whether it ought to laugh or not’.⁵⁹ Aldington inclined to laughter, and indeed produced a highly entertaining parody, but at that stage he was loath to reject entirely any revolutionary spirit. Monro, ecumenical as ever in his support of poetry, had published a Futurist Manifesto in Poetry and Drama in 1913, as well as having Marinetti to read at the Poetry Bookshop in November that year, and in May 1914 throwing a dinner for him, at which Aldington and Flint were present, though Pound was still on his honeymoon in Stone Cottage. Aldington took Monro and Marinetti after the dinner to meet Yeats, an event he described to Pound with relish:

You missed some hell by being away. Yeats read his Helen and divers things in best Dublin fashion, and Marinetti said it was ‘tres beau, il déclame bien, vous voyez’. And Marinetti recited the Motor-car and yelled the siege of Adrianople, and Bill Butler bowed his bleedin ead an said in Stately manner ‘Very impressive, very interesting’. Naturellement, considering that it was 1 a.m. and that the place rocked and boiled in tourbillons of noise.⁶⁰

In the version of this episode which appears in Life for Life’s Sake (in which he mistakenly says Pound was present), Aldington adds that eventually Yeats had to ask Marinetti to stop as ‘neighbours were knocking in protest on the floor, ceiling, and party walls’.⁶¹ Yeats, who had declined an invitation to the dinner, may not have been best pleased.

To Aldington, Marinetti was now definitely a joke, but to Lewis he had become an arch-rival, whose position as the most avant of the avant-garde he was determined to usurp. When Lewis had first left the Omega Workshop, the previous autumn, though never a follower of Marinetti, he had been happy to be known as an admirer, largely because Fry was deeply opposed to him, and he and his friends organised a celebration dinner for Marinetti at the Florence restaurant, a noisy event at which the Italian had recited his poem about the siege of Adrianople at the top of his voice, accompanied, one observer said, ‘with various kinds of onomatopoeic noises and crashes in free verse, while all the time a band downstairs played, “You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it”’.⁶² By June 1914, however, Lewis wanted to proclaim his movement’s independence, and to arrogate Marinetti’s place as the most talked about artist in London. (Pound, until his recent close association with Lewis, had taken little interest in Marinetti one way or the other.) The crunch came when, to Lewis’ intense chagrin, one of his rebel artists, Christopher Nevinson, who had always been influenced by the Futurists, defected to the Marinetti camp. He and Marinetti published in the Observer for 7 June a joint ‘Futurist Manifesto; Vital English Art’, claiming that among the Futurist artists were Epstein, Lewis, and most of his Rebel Art Centre associates, including Etchells and Wadsworth. When Marinetti and Nevinson shared a platform at the Doré Galleries on 12 June to present their manifesto, Lewis, Hulme and about eight others went along to disrupt proceedings. According to Lewis’ Blasting and Bombardiering, an entrancing read but not necessarily a reliable factual record, they met in a Soho restaurant. ‘After a hearty meal,’ he recalled, ‘we shuffled bellicosely round to the Doré Gallery.’⁶³ Their interventions were much helped by Gaudier, who was, Lewis notes, very good at the ‘parlezvous’, quite naturally, being French, and who argued vociferously with Marinetti. Until now Lewis and his group had generally been described as the English Cubists, but during the evening it was Nevinson who mentioned in public for the first time the joint name that would designate the literary and artistic movements that Pound had recently described separately as ‘Imagisme and Cubism’. They would now both be covered by the name of Vorticism.

On 13 June, the day after the Marinetti/Nevinson event, a report in the Manchester Guardian mentioned the ‘new Seceders from the Marinetti group, Messrs. Wyndham Lewis and Co., who now call themselves the Vorticists’; on the same day it was announced in the Spectator that Blast would contain a Manifesto for Vorticism, though the public had to wait until the periodical appeared for any explanation of what that term might mean.⁶⁴ Blast, now with the subtitle, A Review of the Great English Vortex, finally came out on 2 July, appropriately a day of violent thunderstorms, much to Pound and Lewis’ delight. As Stock points out, the subtitle had not appeared in the advertisement for the magazine in the Egoist in April (though it did challengingly proclaim ‘End of the Christian Era’); it had earlier been described simply as a ‘Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and All Vital Forces of Modern Art’.⁶⁵ Blast carried the date of 20 June, its publication having been delayed because the publisher, John Lane, decided at the last minute that three lines in a poem by Pound must be deleted (the word ‘testicles’ appeared in one, and the other two contained a distinctly unerotic reference to orgasm). The two women members of Lewis’ Rebel Art Centre, Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr, were given the job of blacking out the lines before publication was allowed, though as in fact they could still be read, it only served to draw attention to them, much to Lewis’ pleasure.

Pound, whose marketing skills were as sharp as ever, had of course produced the new name, which allowed Lewis to proclaim himself the leader of an entirely separate school from either Marinetti’s Futurism or Picasso’s Cubism. As Richard Cork points out, some people have found it an oddly inappropriate name for the kind of art the Vorticists produced: ‘the visual image of a vortex, bound up as it is with the curvilinear and gyrating rings of a whirlpool, flatly contradicts the rigid, angular, diagonally orientated language with which the movement is associated’.⁶⁶ Timothy Materer, for one, however, insists that the vortex motif and spiral forms appear in Lewis’ paintings from 1912, and it is certainly true that the idea of the vortex worked on many levels for Pound. As well as the art itself, the image suggests the atmosphere out of which the art came, the turbulent energies of the metropolis, which Pound had described as ‘the Vortex’ in a letter to Williams the previous December.⁶⁷ After three months in Stone Cottage out of the metropolitan ‘whirl’, as he himself put it, Pound was no doubt very conscious on his return of the surging vitality of artistic production in the capital. But Pound had earlier thought of a vortex in more personal terms, as the building up of energy that could sweep him into a burst of creativity. He had explained this to Dorothy the previous September, when they had had a quarrel over her liking for embroidery, which Pound always figuratively condemned in poetry, and which even in a literal form he despised. It would, he told her, never generate the right sort of energy for her painting:

Energy depends on ones ability to make a vortex – genius même. Chess, Tennis, fencing all help. They demand complete attention … in chess, reason; in tennis, physics, in fencing, to a great extent psychology, i.e. in thinking the other mans thought & muscular coordination, The foils are perhaps the most concentrative – you probably need to be ‘more awake’, more versatile in shifting from one apprehension to another … Anything that demands only partial attention is useless for developing a vortex.⁶⁸

One other source of the idea, if not the term, may have been Allen Upward, who, as several critics have pointed out, denied the distinction between force and matter and said the fundamental essence of the universe consisted of whirling energies.⁶⁹ Yet for Pound, just as there was a secret doctrine of the image, there was a mystical dimension to Vorticism. He had used the word ‘vortex’ as early as in A Lume Spento to suggest the fundamental flowing energies of the universe, in a sonnet entitled ‘Plotinus’. As the title suggests, the image came out of Pound’s Neoplatonist interests, but two notes on the original typescript link the idea to both yogic and Hindu sources. Pound’s mysticism was a typical turn-of the-century fusion of multiple traditions; though the traditions he was interested in changed over time, both his religious and his artistic creed always depended on a sense of rushing energies, the artist at one with what he had called in 1912 the ‘fluid force’ of the ‘germinal’ or ‘vital universe’.⁷⁰ That element would not be part of Lewis’ view of Vorticism; he would later say, to the indignation of his fellow-artists, in a brief statement, bespattered with commas, so it sounds like a sharp volley of shots, ‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period.’⁷¹

Blast, as reviewers rapidly pointed out, owed much to the Futurists, including its bold black typography and explosive style. Its format was unusually large for a periodical – twelve and a half by nine and a half inches – partly no doubt for effect, but probably mainly for the very practical reason that the many reproductions of Vorticist drawings would have lost too much detail on a smaller page.⁷² Lewis would say later that in shape it looked rather like a telephone directory. ‘BLAST’ was written in ‘huge block capitals’, as Goldring described them, diagonally across each cover, variously described in the numerous reviews as ‘purple’, ‘chill flannelette pink’, ‘cerise’ and, in the Little Review, as ‘something between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache’.⁷³ Goldring himself called it ‘puce’. Its techniques of visual presentation were closer to contemporary newspaper headlines and advertisements than to most intellectual journals, indeed rather bolder than most of the comparatively sober advertisements of 1914; it strikingly prefigured the experimental typography of the Russian Futurists.

Blast borrowed an idea from Apollinaire, who had published a ‘Futurist Anti-Tradition’ manifesto in 1913 with lists entitled respectively merde à and rose à (intriguingly, the only English figure in the rose category was Roger Fry). This format had been used rather unimaginatively by Marinetti and Nevinson in their ‘Vital English Art’ manifesto as ‘Against’ and ‘We Want’, but it appeared in Blast as lists of things to Bless or Blast.⁷⁴ These had been compiled at a tea party for all interested supporters, described by Goldring in South Lodge, over which Lewis and Pound presided and at which Jessica Dismorr was instructed to make the tea; luckily she was only a rebel artist, not a rebellious feminist, so she complied. The items are random and frequently inexplicable; even though W.C. Wees has studiously identified most of them, it is by no means clear why they are there.⁷⁵ The inclusion of the vicar of St Mary’s – ‘Rev. Pennyfeathers (Bells)’ – among the blasted must have come from Pound. Among the blessed was ‘Bridget’, i.e. Brigit Patmore; Aldington would later tell her that he had suggested her. The blasted included Tagore, while among the blessed was Allen Upward’s friend and fellow Chinese enthusiast Cranmer Byng, indicating firmly Pound’s switching of sympathy from the subcontinent to the Far East.

Goldring points out how many of the blessed were music-hall artists; also blessed were four boxers, three aviators and one cricketer (the brilliant bowler, George Hirst, a Yorkshire man and a professional – the dashing amateur C.B. Fry was among the blasted).⁷⁶ The idea that this branch of the modernist avant-garde ignored popular culture is far from the truth. Much of the periodical was made up of pieces the length of newspaper articles, not journal-length pieces at all. Indeed, as W.C. Wees points out, like Marinetti’s Futurists, this apparently elitist avant-garde movement had a symbiotic relationship with the mass-market press, which covered their escapades with strong disapproval. The way the avant-garde functioned was in fact, he suggests, dictated by the newspaper’s desire for speed of turnover and ‘shock value’, and its demands for leaders, followers, splits, defections, then new leaders, new followers and yet more splits. ‘The metaphorical implications of “avant-garde”,’ Wees says, ‘turned art movements into battles, advances and retreats, victories and defeats’, and artists ‘were expected to “fight for” some ism that could be reduced to a simple common denominator like the “cube” or the “Vortex” … The popular press helped create the public image of the avant-garde movement as we know it today (no such image existed until there was a popular press) … The Futurists, who were most adept at exploiting the mass media of the day, paved the way for the Vorticists, who got instant publicity by publicly attacking Futurism. Under headlines like “FUTURIST SQUABBLES”, “THE FUTURIST SPLIT”, “REBELS IN ART,” and, simply, “VORTICISM,” the Vorticists’ emergence on the avant-garde scene was suitably announced to the public.’⁷⁷ James Joyce sent Pound a cutting from an Italian newspaper, in which an article on them appeared entitled ‘I VORTICISTI SORPASSANO IN AUDACIA I FUTURISTI’, so they were achieving, if not global media coverage, at least international.⁷⁸ Lewis himself acknowledged that Blast’s ‘portentous dimensions and violent tint did more than would a score of exhibitions to make the public feel that something was happening’.⁷⁹ If Pound’s imagism could be described as both pro- and anti-avant-garde at one and the same time, Vorticism was surely both populist and anti-populist.

The contents of Blast were as varied and lively as its typefaces. Ford published an early section of The Good Soldier; Rebecca West contributed a brilliant short story, ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, which the English Review had refused to publish. Wadsworth provided a review and extracts from the English translation of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, emphasising Kandinsky’s belief that colour and form have, and can convey, direct emotional significance, an idea with which Pound was very taken, realising immediately the links with his own poetic theories. Lewis wrote the first two manifestos, a series of short pieces with the overall title of ‘Vortices and Notes’, an appreciation of his friend Spencer Gore, who had died that March, and an extraordinary piece, The Enemy of the Stars, which announced itself as a play, but which in fact is more like something between a story, a film script and a long imagist poem; Paul Edwards suggests it is an Expressionist ‘elemental psychodrama’.⁸⁰ The ‘play’ is full of violence, bleakness and fear, and the setting grim, with lines such as ‘The stars shone madly on the archaic blank wilderness of the universe, machines of prey’, and ‘The night plunged gleaming nervous arms down into the wood, to wrench it up by the roots.’⁸¹ Its atmosphere fitted well with the numerous reproductions of Vorticist paintings and drawings, including Lewis’ own drawing with the same name as the quasi-play, Enemy of the Stars, which Hulme had grudgingly admired in his piece on the Goupil Gallery. As many of these paintings later disappeared, Blast remains an important record of the movement. Indeed, Wees suggested that Blast itself should be considered the most successful work of art that the movement produced. Pound, as well as a number of poems, contributed his own manifesto, in which he cited H.D.’s ‘Oread’, published in the Egoist that February, as a touchstone of Vorticist poetry:

Whirl up sea –

Whirl your pointed pines,

Splash your great pines

On our rocks,

Hurl your green over us,

Cover us with your pools of fir.⁸²

Lawrence Rainey has argued that Blast did not cause anything like the stir Pound had predicted, but if the suaver reviewers like A.R. Orage and J.C. Squire signalled their disapproval by affecting to yawn over its assault on the conventions, while Aldington excitedly exaggerated its pariah status in claiming there was ‘a dismal howl of protest’ from reviewers, it did eventually produce enemies for Pound and Lewis.⁸³

Aldington himself hailed the magazine in a brief, exuberant announcement in the Egoist on 1 July:

There is no time for detailed criticism, but from a hasty glance through the manifestoes and some of the contributions I can declare that this is the most amazing, energised, stimulating production that I have ever seen. Death to the English Review! Death to the ‘Times’! Death warrant of tedious amorphous hangers-on from past eras! (I have caught the manner!)⁸⁴

Aldington would later qualify his enthusiasm, but in its violent attack on the status quo Blast was in tune with the times. Among the blessed are figures from the three groups that George Dangerfield argues were already in the process of destroying the British Liberal establishment before the war began: the Ulster rebels, the suffragettes and the trade unionists. As Ulster Unionists were generally supported by those to the right of the Liberal Party, and the trade unions by those to its left, whilst the suffragettes had enemies everywhere, Blast’s politics were in maverick opposition to the liberal mainstream, and in general support of the widespread social – and, in the case of Ulster, potentially military – insurrection that faced the authorities in 1914. Between January and July there were 937 strikes, and over the summer miners, railwaymen and port workers were preparing for a general strike, though the war intervened before their plans materialised.⁸⁵ The suffragettes were increasingly militant, and their support was growing; the WSPU’s income had risen from £2,700 in 1907 to £36,500 in 1914, and Votes for Women sold 30,000 copies an issue.⁸⁶ In the first seven months of 1914, the suffragettes set no fewer than 107 buildings on fire, and completely destroyed several churches. They attacked a number of works of art, including the Rokeby Venus, slashed that March in the National Gallery by one suffragette; another slashed Sargent’s portrait of Henry James. Bombings and window-smashing went on unabated. Hunger strikes continued in prison, and a débutante shocked the court by demanding loudly that the King put an end to force-feeding. Pound, under the pseudonym Bastien von Helmholtz, contributed an article entitled ‘Suffragettes’ to the Egoist, a piece which dismissed the vote as a useless shadow, though one to which the suffragettes, if they wanted it, had a perfect right. ‘As for their actions of late,’ he adds, ‘it is rot to say “we deplore violence”; we all like violence so long as they don’t smash our own windows. We all like to see big headlines. We like the papers to have racy bits of news in ’em. We like to read of bombs and explosions. The undergraduate in all of us survives up to that extent – unless we have property and interests in danger.’⁸⁷ He did, as it happened, think they went too far in attacking Sargent’s portrait of his hero James, and when Blast expressed admiration for the suffragettes, in particularly large type, promising to make them a present of their votes, it asked them to leave works of art alone, because ‘you might some day destroy a good picture by accident’.⁸⁸ Suffragettes had already attacked two works in the Doré Galleries, where the Vorticists frequently exhibited, so their unease was understandable. Pound, however, was very aware of the spiritual affinities of Vorticism and the suffragettes. When he had written to tell his mother that Blast was coming out (‘delicate, sensitive work’ is how he described it), he added ‘Suffragetttes are blowing up most everything else’.⁸⁹ The most significant violent act of the summer, however, happened on the continent. On 28 June, while Dismorr and Saunders were busy blocking out the word ‘testicles’ from Lewis’ weapon of artistic mass destruction, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo.

None of the Vorticists or their associates, any more than most of their fellow-citizens, appears to have worried about that distant death. Nor did they concern themselves with the political difficulties of those who ran the country. ‘The Male mind,’ Pound had written in that article, ‘does not want to be bothered with Asquith or Wright or their kind. Politics is unfit for men, it may be good enough for women, we doubt it. The male mind does not want a state run by women, or “old women”.’⁹⁰ Much of Blast was the creation of Lewis, and reflected his concerns rather than Pound’s, but in this aim they were agreed. Blast was undoubtedly projecting itself as a product of what Pound calls ‘the Male mind’, in its blunt and aggressive typography, its harsh angular art, and the violent militarism of its language. The Vorticists were, they proclaimed, ‘Primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World’ (though just exactly who was paying them?) and would ‘fight first on one side and then on the other’ to purge England of its manifold blemishes. These included luxury, sport, ‘the idée fixe of Class, producing the most intense snobbery in the world’, the latter aim admirable enough, though elsewhere snobbery is, perhaps predictably, defined as the ‘disease of femininity’. Though England was thoroughly blasted on many counts, Lewis was putting Vorticism forward as a specifically English, northern avant-garde movement, associated with the male domain of industry. He dismissed the Futurists’ romantic cult of the machine, but claimed that ‘our industries, and the Will that determined, face to face with its needs, the direction of the modern world, has reared up steel trees where the green ones were lacking … and found wilder intricacies than those of Nature’. The English, whose country was the home of the industrial revolution, are surrounded by factories and machines, which ‘inspire them more forcibly and directly. They are the inventors of this bareness and harshness, and should be the great enemies of Romance’.⁹¹ Paul O’Keeffe has pointed out that a curious motif that appeared several times in the pages of Blast, a cone on a vertical axis, was adapted from a coastguard’s signal for a gale coming from the north; as he puts it, ‘a blast from the north. It was the English avant-garde’s answer to the Futurist invasion of London from the Latin south.’⁹²