In December 1910 or January 1911, at the home of the painter Robert Bevan, Lewis met Kate Lechmere, a woman with whom he was later to have a brief affair and a slightly longer business partnership. He invited her to dinner, but Lechmere later recalled that he seemed distracted and hardly spoke to her throughout the meal. Afterwards, at the Café Royal, he confided to her the cause of his preoccupation. He had just learned that his relations with a ‘shopgirl’ had entered a new and potentially complicated phase.
The daughter of a bookmaker, Olive Johnson was 19 or 20 years old when she became pregnant by Lewis. Whether she was, in the strictest sense, a ‘shopgirl’ at the time is not known. In 1914 she worked for a branch of Fuller’s Ltd – the ‘American Confectioners’; in 1917 she had an unspecified job in a London hotel, and when she married in 1922 she described herself as a ‘waitress (restaurant)’.
Olive can be identified as the model for two drawings, both dated 1911. One shows her asleep, seen from below and to one side, a heavy straight line marking the edge of her jaw. The other drawing is an angular, frontal portrait in pencil and wash: eyes downcast in the broad, truncated wedge of face, a dark cedilla of hair hanging down against one side of the forehead. The title is Mamie,* a contraction of the French ma mie: ‘my beloved’. But it was Olive’s dark colouring which accounted for the other nom d’amour with which Lewis graced her. ‘Dunk’ was short for the German die Dunkle: ‘dark-haired woman’. She was the first serious atttachment Lewis had formed since Ida Vendel.
*
In March a major piece of work appeared to be nearing completion. It was a novel called The Bourgeois-Bohemians, an expansion of the ‘ “analytic novel” about a German student’ of the previous year, which, in turn, was an expansion of the ‘story’ called ‘Otto Kreisler’ of 1909. ‘It has been a long time on the way’, he told Moore. ‘It is better than it could have been at any other time. But you must wait a year or two for a really satisfactory novel from me.’ The provisional title, ‘Bourgeois-Bohemians’, would be retained for Part III of the novel as eventually published, but ‘a year or two’ was an optimistic projection for this long-awaited delivery.
Meanwhile, products of his enterprise in ‘various plastic arts’, mentioned the previous month, were soon to be held up to critical scrutiny. In spring a new Society was formed out of disaffection with the New English Art Club. Under the Presidency of Spencer Gore, with James Manson Bolivar as Secretary and with a further 14 members, the Camden Town Group came into being. The membership comprised Augustus John, Walter Sickert, Lucien Pissarro, Robert Bevan, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, Henry Lamb, Malcolm Drummond, Walter Bayes, James Dickson Innes, Maxwell G. Lightfoot, William Ratcliffe, J. Doman Turner and Wyndham Lewis. There had been some disagreement about whether Lewis should be invited to join, but Gilman, probably supported by Gore, was insistent and he was duly elected.
On 14 June 1911 the first Camden Town Group exhibition opened in basement premises at 24 Bury Street, St James: The Carfax Gallery. Members were entitled to show four reasonably sized works, space at the Carfax being at a premium.
Lewis exhibited only two. They were ink drawings and, according to the catalogue, esoterically if unimaginatively titled: The Architect (no. 1) and The Architect (no. 2).
He had, he said, assumed his contributions would go unnoticed, but was gratified when they were singled out for special vilification. In view of the treatment meted out by many critics to paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse only six months before at the Grafton Galleries, Lewis could be excused for regarding critical hostility as a hallmark of excellence and he gleefully quoted Moore the tenor of the reviews:
The critics would begin: ‘Despite the alarming announcement of the character of this “Group”, we find that amongst this band of honest, hard-working young men (with one exception) that good old English conservatism has saved them from the excesses’ etc. Then the next paragraph would begin: ‘That one exception is Mr Wyndham Lewis, whose blackguardly, preposterous, putrid’ etc. But invariably!
It was probably P. G. Konody’s review in the Observer that he was paraphrasing:
I was neither shocked nor repelled by the work of this group of intensely serious artists who, with perhaps one exception, show neither eccentricity nor a desire to épater le bourgeois, but are clearly inspired by the longing for self expression in what each considers the most suitable language. The exception is Mr Wyndham Lewis, whose pen-drawings . . . are executed in an amateurish, laboured method of crosshatching, which is painfully at variance with the artist’s grotesque affectation of archaism.
The Sunday Times reviewer found the exhibition on the whole conservative but expressed the same proviso as Konody:
A few visitors may be shocked at the elongated noses in the squarely drawn heads by Mr Wyndham Lewis . . . but with the exception of these two pen drawings I cannot recall any exhibit which could justifiably be described even as ‘queer’.
And the Morning Post critic betrayed a distaste for advanced architecture as well as advanced art:
As an imaginary portrait of the man who designed most of the modern buildings in London, it may be welcomed as a caricature nearer the truth than perhaps the artist intended . . . Mr Lewis, who enjoys a high reputation among his friends as poet and draughtsman, introduces a note of insincerity that is well enough in criticism but regrettable in serious art, and entirely foreign to the present exhibition.
But if he expected praise and reassurance from Sturge Moore he was disappointed. Although dismissing the critics’ reaction on the grounds that ‘fools will behave like bulls if you wave the proper coloured rag’, he dismissed his friend’s work equally bluntly:
As to your drawings, you know what I think of them . . . I believe you have put your head into a pudding bag, aesthetically speaking, and hope you will take it out again before it is too late.
*
Having made his first, however negative, impression upon the London art world, Lewis stayed the summer of 1911 in Dieppe with Olive Johnson. He spent over three months adding more material to his novel, expanding it to between 400 and 500 manuscript pages. This was the same novel he had told Moore that he was ‘finishing’ in March, and John the previous year that he had ‘finished’. When he wrote to Moore again from Dieppe in October, the first three chapters, as eventually published, had yet to be written and the action began with the English protagonist’s parting interview with his German mistress. It ended with another interview, presumably the one in which Tarr proposes marriage to Bertha in order to legitimise another man’s child. Between ‘these two psychological pillars’ the rest of the story – Kreisler’s running amok in Parisian expatriate society, the rape, the duel, the suicide – hung ‘like a grotesque tapestry’. He thought of calling it Between Two Interviews but, on reflection, felt that Otto Kreisler’s Death would be preferable. Although the final seven-part structure of the novel had been established by this time, considerable further expansion was to take place before publication seven years later.
Olive, meanwhile, had spent the summer preparing for an altogether less protracted labour. The vacation may have been arranged to spare her the disapproval her condition would have aroused in London, where she was known to be unmarried. In Dieppe they passed as man and wife, at least as far as the locals were concerned. As for other English visitors, Olive would probably have been subject to the same sequestration Lewis always imposed upon the women in his life. It is unlikely, for example, that he would have taken her to any of Walter Sickert’s little Saturday afternoon receptions. His eminent colleague from the Camden Town Group was on his honeymoon, having married Christine Drummond Angus at the end of July. His family were with him as well and Lewis had sport at their expense in his letter to Sturge Moore:
. . . the brother without any teeth, the one-eyed brother, the one without any brains and also his poor paralytic old mother. How with so many infirmities they manage to get even so far as Dieppe is a mystery to me.
The long letter Lewis wrote to Sturge Moore in October made no mention of Olive. Nor did it refer, except in the most oblique terms, to the birth of his son: ‘This Dieppe is . . . an odious place’, he declared. ‘I will tell you, when I see you, why I came here.’
Hoel Lewis was born at half-past four in the afternoon of 4 September at 11 rue d’Eu, in Le Pollet, the fisherman’s quarter on the eastern side of Dieppe harbour. Lewis registered his son’s birth at the Mairie two days later. Charles Ginner, who was staying four doors away, and Louis Jules Daniel, a local waiter, were the witnesses. Lewis informed the Registrar that he and Olive had been married in London on 2 June 1909. His stated occupation was ‘étudiant’. Olive, he declared, was ‘sans profession’. Their address in London was ‘Regent’s Park’. This last detail was not too far from the truth, as it could apply to either of Lewis’s two known addresses of 1911. 32 Albert Street and 34 Arlington Road, although properly Mornington Crescent, are both close to the Park.
Hoel, the only forename given in the Dieppe registration, is of Breton origin. Eighteen years later a solicitor’s clerk, on a visit to a North London prison, would learn that the boy’s full name was ‘Hoel Briniley’. From an early age, however, he went by the less exotic soubriquet of Peter.
*
‘I shall now, henceforth, devote myself to painting’, Lewis told Moore as he wrote ‘the last few pages’ of his novel. He had already, towards the end of August, managed to do a few weeks’ painting in preparation for the second Camden Town Group Exhibition. Presumably, having then taken up his novel again in late September or early October and, ‘the Lord be praised, finished it’, he spent the rest of his time in Dieppe working on the three canvases, all of them now lost, that he intended showing at the Carfax Gallery in December.
Two of the titles suggest they evolved from the Le Pollet environment of sailors and bustling fish markets: Au Marché and Port de Mer. This last was bought at the exhibition by Augustus John for 20 guineas. Lewis recalled that it was ‘a largish canvas . . . [of] two sprawling figures of Normandy fishermen, in mustard yellows and browns.’ When John died in 1961 his estate contained no pictures by Lewis but Dorelia remembered Port de Mer as showing ‘two men with a bright orange background, but it mysteriously vanished’.
The third painting, Virgin and Child, despite the title’s religious connotations, was probably based on the mundane spectacle of Olive and the newly born Hoel. A year later he painted another variation on the same theme in which, despite a considerable degree of stylisation, the broad features of ‘Dunk’ are clearly recognisable.
*
He had told Moore that he would be back in London by about 10 November. However he spent his return fare on a trip to Paris and arrived back later than expected.
The second Camden Town Group exhibition opened on 1 December. Again Lewis’s work attracted critical hostility. Even so, The Times appeared to err on the side of caution, conceding that he ought to be given benefit of doubt. ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis exhibits three geometrical experiments which many people will take for bad practical jokes. They are not that, but this geometrical art needs great beauty of material, as in mosaic or stained glass, or else a very strong emotion to carry it off. Without either or both of these it is merely diagrammatic, as in Mr Lewis’s pictures.’
The Athenaeum critic dismissed the three canvases in the final sentence of his review. ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis’s exhibits appear to us a somewhat formless compromise between two conventions hardly as yet ripe for criticism.’
Frank, if friendly, criticism came again privately from Sturge Moore:
the Fishermen I like a little only not your use of paint which lacks any approach to exquisiteness always desirable in proportion as art is empty of import. But we shall not agree yet awhile on this subject.
However, the most heated assault came from within the ranks of the Camden Town Group itself. Lucien Pissarro wrote to Gore: ‘I am quite upset by what I saw this afternoon at the . . . exhibition. The pictures of Lewis are quite impossible! Either ours is a serious movement or else a farce! I don’t feel inclined to let my pictures remain if he persists in showing these particular canvases. I was not consulted when he was asked to join our society – we all took him from Gilman’s recommendation without knowing his work. If the principle of the group were like the A.A.A.,* I would say nothing, but as we are quite a closed society I don’t see why we should put up with such rubbish.’
The day after the private view most of the Group met at 19 Fitzroy Street to decide whether membership was to be extended beyond the original 16. Lewis was vocal in the majority who favoured increase. Pissarro, finding himself in a minority of four that included Sickert as chairman, and presumably with Lewis’s three canvas atrocities still deeply branded on his memory, argued against. The debate was, however, put into perspective by Harold Gilman, who pointed out the futility of increasing membership while the basement premises at the Carfax Gallery could not provide sufficient space for even the present 16 to show more than four works each. The Camden Town Group remained ‘a closed society’.
* This was the title given in a sale catalogue of 1927. The identification of Olive Johnson as the subject of this drawing was made possible by comparison with photographs taken of her in the 1940s. Despite the passage of well over 30 years, the likeness is unmistakable.
* The Allied Artists Association, set up by Frank Rutter in 1908. It did not have a jury, there was no limit on membership, and annual exhibitions were held in the vast circus of the Royal Albert Hall.