First essays and the futility of pot-boiling
When Lewis arrived back in London in December 1908 he had just turned 26 years old. In the same month, the first issue of a new publication appeared which was to give his literary career a start. The English Review was a periodical, its editorial admitted, ‘of what is commercially described as “of the ‘heavy’ order,” . . . a periodical devoted to the arts, to letters and ideas’.
Also awaiting him was a letter from Sturge Moore which can only have encouraged his literary ambitions:
I often think of your sonnets and I wish I could read them again and had a more detailed recollection of them. Of all the poetry which I have read by my contemporaries . . . it is those sonnets which gave me most the sense of a new possibility, a new creation, and consequently there is no writer whom I more desire to accompany and communicate with.
Since Moore numbered among his friends Laurence Binyon and W. B. Yeats, this was praise indeed.
Lewis was now working on short prose pieces based upon his travels in Northern France and Spain. He would visit Moore and his wife and read them aloud. ‘The Brittany sketches often return to my mind and always strengthen my conviction of their value’, Moore told him. ‘Bring some more Ms please. It is a great pleasure to us both to listen.’
And it was as a writer, albeit one with close conections to the world of the visual arts, that Moore introduced him, in April, to W. B. Yeats. Yeats, however, recalled nothing of the conversation apart from a diatribe about Henry Lamb and Dorelia McNeill. ‘The day before yesterday’, he wrote:
I met a young poet called Lewis who is an admirer of Augustus John . . . He says that John’s mistress has taken another admirer, a very clever young painter who does not admire John’s work, and this influences her, and so she does not give John the old ‘submissive admiration’, and this is bad for John, and she has done it all for vengeance because John will not marry her. Lewis is very angry and thinks John should leave her. What does he owe to her or her children?
The fact that John had established reciprocal relations with Lamb’s wife, Euphemia, the woman who had made the jibe in the Café du Dôme about Lewis’s cleverness erupting in spots, may have escaped his notice. Lewis’s concern for John seemed a particular preoccupation. Several months later he was still telling Moore what a ‘very bad way’ his friend was in:
not so much in what he is actually doing, which seems to be portraits of Mayors and Mayoresses but in his state of mind. That cursed family of children is his excuse, but that sickening bitch he has attached himself to is the reason, or at least his accomplice in the muzzling of his genius.
A door slammed shut in Lewis’s face early the following year would show the feelings Dorelia harboured for him in return.
The May issue of the English Review devoted 11 of its 200-odd pages to the first literary endeavour to appear under the byline of P. Wyndham Lewis. Elsewhere between the dark blue paper wrappers was a tribute to Algernon Charles Swinburne, who had died the previous month, poetry by Sturge Moore and the prose of Conrad, Dostoevsky, Norman Douglas and W. H. Hudson.
If testimony of the Review’s editor, the notoriously unreliable Ford Madox Hueffer,* is to be believed, Lewis, looking like a Russian conspirator, in a black coat and cape and wearing a Latin-Quarter hat, confronted him on a dark stairway and pressed the manuscript of ‘The “Pole” ’ into his hands before departing without a word. Another version from the same source has a similarly dressed but more voluble Lewis cornering Hueffer in his bathroom, announcing himself as a man of genius and proceeding to read the essay aloud while the editor of the English Review sat in the tub, nonchalantly plying his sponge.
The following month’s English Review carried another article, ‘Some Innkeepers and Bestre’, immortalising Peron of Doëlan. Seeing it in print, Lewis was disgusted by its ‘unpardonably poor jokes . . . garrulity and carelessness’.
By July he had moved from Ealing to 14B Whitehead’s Grove, Chelsea, and was writing to Sturge Moore with the news that he had just finished writing a story which featured a duel and a German protagonist. He had not had time to work on it properly but would send his mentor the manuscript to hear what he thought of it, ‘prepared . . . for your curses and abuse at the unfinished state of the writing’. This is the earliest recorded reference to a major novel in the making. But the ‘story’ of Otto Kreisler’s duel would have to undergo considerable expansion and a great many accretions over the next eight or nine years before it would emerge as such.
A month or so later he seemed disenchanted with the English Review’s editor: ‘Hueffer is a shit of the most dreary and uninteresting type’ he told Moore. For his last article, ‘Les Saltimbanques’, published in August, he had received ‘a dirty little cheque’ for £4.10s. He admitted that he should have sent it back in disgust, but he ‘was damnably hard up’. Nevertheless it was in that unremunerative direction that his ‘Otto Kreisler’ appeared destined. ‘Because of its awkward length and tone . . . no other magazine would have it.’
Meanwhile John had been in London and taken Lewis to dinner at the Carlton with a lawyer from New York, a collector of contemporary art and literary manuscripts, by the name of John Quinn. Lewis heard that he had supported Yeats but, having quarrelled with the poet, now felt ‘a void of Genius in his life’:
So he is recklessly attaching John, with the strings of his purse: – he has bought a set of 140 etchings, a ten foot picture, a portrait of himself, thousands of drawings, and if John were twice as industrious as he is he could not satisfy the thirst for pictures that Quinn has repeatedly hinted the obscure Future will be salt with!
Eventually Lewis himself was to become a beneficiary of this man’s enthusiastic if fickle patronage. But this was only after Quinn came under the influence of a fellow American, a champion of the ‘modern’, who convinced him, for a time, of Lewis’s worth.
Despite his reservations about the English Review and ‘that ignoble fellow-being and slippery customer’, its editor, Lewis hoped to be appointed Foreign Correspondent soon. Certain of Hueffer’s remarks had at least given the impression that this was what he had in mind. ‘Troublesome as the monthly article would be,’ Lewis reasoned, ‘it would be nothing compared to the uncertainties of other work.’ He also thought of writing a Paris column for the Manchester Guardian or Liverpool Courier. But nothing came of any of these projects.
Nevertheless, with the grand total of 30 pounds already received from his articles, and with a view perhaps to gathering material for his prospective journalistic enterprises, he was able to go to Paris. He planned to spend several months there. ‘I feel it is high time I began some work of another kind’, he told Moore. ‘I shall spend the next six months, in any case, in working for myself.’
*
That autumn in Paris ‘something happened’, Lewis told John later the following year. What precisely occurred is unclear, but it appears that Lewis quarrelled with a number of people John held in high regard, resulting in yet another cooling of relations between the two men. The personalities, if not the circumstances, involved may be deduced from three long rambling reconciliatory letters. Euphemia Lamb was responsible for some of the unpleasantness. She accused Lewis of boasting in a letter that she had made love to him and, furthermore, that she had been laying loud claims to a bill for several meals he was supposed to owe her.
He had also ‘quarrelled definitely’ with Euphemia’s husband. ‘Harry Lamb’, he told John, ‘is one of the elements out of which your estrangement with me has grown.’ The reasons for the quarrel are, once again, obscure but they may have had something to do with money Lewis owed to his former travelling companion and stories spread by him ‘and received enthusiastically, of course, by the ladies’, resulting in Lewis, to his ‘great astonishment’, being viewed as ‘above all a “fellow”, a scamp’.
There was another individual, referred to as the ‘ “High Priest of Elemental Passion”, alias “The Crow” ’, that John received the benefit of his views upon:
He is a spotty-waistcoated, pot-bellied, cockney-voiced little shit, with a truculent journalistic attitude in life; just the sort of boy the girls like. He was coy and indulged in the luxury . . . of calling me names. I agree with the generality of mankind in considering that this luxury should be made as expensive as possible . . . I would take it out of his dirty carcass only a ‘High Priest Assaulted’ would be such a good advertisement for him.
*
Late in 1909 or early 1910, his money spent and ‘at the end of [his] tether’, he prepared to return to London, to plunge, as he put it, ‘dans les affaires du nouveau’. He was in grotesque company: a living comedy of dependence. ‘I am bringing some Spaniards over with me’, he announced to Moore:
one to buy six suits of clothes, – another to have his pimples cured, – a third is coming because he dare not let the man with the pimples out of his sight, as he is his only means of support, – having lived with him and on him for several years now, he is very jealous of his benefactor’s pimples, and when the latter grows despondent, or broods on some vague plan of curing once and for all his disfigurement, he who is his shadow sees ruin staring him in the face.
He promised to bring this bizarre troupe to the Vienna Café and introduce them to Moore and his circle.
Following certain abusive remarks made about Harry Lamb to Dorelia, Lewis found himself snubbed on the doorstep of 153 Church Street. ‘Dorelia is the object of my most sympathetic admiration’, he protested to John, who was staying in the South of France:
And I am quite content to maintain my admiration at a distance. Indeed, with no intention of approaching her, although filled with the most simple and respectful feelings for her . . . I went to your house to get your Arles address. I had an inner door slammed in my face, and your address brought to me by a serving woman grinning from ear to ear.
He hoped that what he had said to Dorelia of a ‘careless and haphazard nature’ concerning her friend had not been ‘mistaken for strenuous plotting’.
*
He had initial difficulties placing his stories and sketches of Breton life outside of the English Review. He sent one piece, ‘Père François’, about a deranged vagrant, to Blackwood’s Magazine, who returned it to him with thanks and the explanation that their readers were ‘chiefly army men, and that it was too subtle for them’. Thereafter he secured the services of a literary agent, J. B. Pinker. He had, by this time, written a novel, perhaps the ‘work of another kind’ he mentioned in September. It was a light-hearted adventure concerning a criminal gang’s plot to kidnap the elderly beneficiary of a will and substitute an actor to impersonate her while they laid hands on her fortune. He told Pinker he thought of calling it The Three Mrs Dukes, or Khan & Company or even A Will Happily Revised. By his own admission it was a ‘miserable pot-boiler’, written to make money and enable him to complete more serious work. ‘Otto Kreisler’, he had decided, was to be expanded into something more substantial and he was anxious, even with a novel at that conceptual stage, to differentiate its author from the writer of Khan & Company. He told Pinker that ‘James Sed’ was to be his pseudonym for the latter.
All these considerations proved academic, however, because Pinker, having given the manuscript due consideration, pronounced it ‘not marketable’. Lewis retrieved it from the agent’s office and resolved to do nothing more about it, regarding the experience as ‘a lesson showing the futility of pot-boiling’. He also requested Pinker to return him the four articles he had been trying to place, believing he could do better. ‘I can probably place all of them’, he wrote, ‘if I have them at once, and as they are unmarketable, in a different way, this chance may not recur.’
The story about the tramp found a place in the appropriately named publication The Tramp: an Open Air Magazine, edited by Douglas Goldring, as did the three other ‘unmarketable’ prose pieces and a poem over the following two years. One of these, ‘A Breton Innkeeper’, shared the pages of the August issue with a translation of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s first Futurist Manifesto, a document that included the delirious sentiments:
we wish to exalt the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, running, the perilous leap, the cuff and the blow. We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism and all utilitarian cowardice . . . We intend to glorify the love of danger, the custom of energy, the strength of daring. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
Marinetti had lectured at the Lyceum Club earlier in 1910, ‘adorned with diamond rings, gold chains and hundreds of flashing white teeth’. It is not known whether Lewis attended, but he was clearly aware of the tenor of these diatribes when he wrote to John in the spring, having heard his friend had made the acquaintance of a pioneer of experimental flight in the South of France:*
I am to tell people then that you have become a Futuriste, and that we may expect to hear any day now that you have flown in at one of the galleries of the Louvre and put your foot through the Mona Lisa?
This was Lewis’s first recorded reference to the Italian movement, but it was to be another year or so before he had direct dealings with Marinetti beyond their coincidental proximity in The Tramp.
As for the manuscript of Khan & Company, it eventually surfaced in a London junk shop in the late 1950s. It was published in 1977 as Mrs Dukes’ Millions, a title Lewis himself had never even considered.
*
For much of 1910 he was living in Chelsea, at 51 Danvers Street, off Cheyne Walk. From here he wrote the three long letters to John explaining and excusing the social intrigues of the previous autumn and winter.
Reference was also made to another bout of venereal disease. Whether this was a recrudescence of the gonorrhoea contracted in Spain, or a new infection, is not known. Lewis, however, viewed the troublesome complaint with equanimity and replied to John’s queries with a certain swagger, referring to it in the terms he might have used towards a domestic pet. ‘The clap, thank you, is growing up a fine healthy clap. The slight disturbance its entrance into my private life caused, has quieted down, and it has become in due course, and to all appearances definitely an inmate. It is not, however, at all troublesome. Its needs are few. I feed it from a bottle morning and night, voilà tout.’
Also, in the early months of 1910, he claimed to have finished what he described as ‘an “analytic novel” about a German student’. He explained to John that this was the result of ‘working over material and work a year old’ and that the language was ‘not “travaillé”, any beauty it may possess depending on the justness of the psychology, – as is the case in the Russian novels.’ He believed it to be ‘a great thing to have ready to one’s hand a good many forms, – novel, jaunty or vernacular essay, . . . etc.’
* Later Ford Madox Ford.
* Albert Bazin. See Michael Holroyd, Augustus John, London, 1996, pp. 317–18.