zang – tumb – tumb – zang – zang – tuuumb tatatatatatatata picpacpampacpacpicpampampac uuuuuuuuuuuuuuu ZANG-TUMB-TUMB-TUMB-TUUUUUM
In an upstairs room of the Florence Restaurant, Rupert Street, on 18 November, at a dinner given in his honour, Signor Marinetti declaimed his poem about the siege of Adrianople, phonetically reproducing the sounds of machine-gun and rifle fire, artillery bombardment, and high explosive. Downstairs the band was playing one of the most popular tunes of 1913:
You maaade me looove you
I didn’t wanna do it – I didn’t wanna do it . . .
The melody made little impression on the Futurist leader’s vocal onslaught. ‘It was a matter of astonishment what Marinetti could do with his unaided voice’, Lewis recalled:
He certainly made an extraordinary amount of noise. A day of attack upon the Western Front, with all the ‘heavies’ hammering together, right back to the horizon was nothing to it. My equanimity when first subjected to the sounds of mass-bombardment in Flanders was possibly due to my marinettian preparation – it seemed ‘all quiet’ to me by comparison.
Christopher Nevinson organised the dinner, aided and abetted by Lewis. Fellow admirers of Marinetti at this stage, there may even have been some rivalry between the two Englishmen when it came to greeting their celebrated guest. David Bomberg remembered an argument in Madame Strindberg’s Cave. ‘Lewis was threatening to punch Nevinson for daring to claim that when Marinetti stepped off the Golden Arrow bringing him into the Victoria platform no. 19 it was Lewis and not Nevinson who kissed Marinetti’s hand first.’
The Italian had a full programme of personal appearances. Two days before the Florence Restaurant dinner he had lectured on ‘The Art of Noise’ at the Cabaret Theatre Club and he would be speaking on ‘Futurism and the Plastic Arts’ at the Doré Galleries in New Bond Street two days later, surrounded by Rutter’s ‘Post-Impressionist and Futurist Exhibition’. There were rumours that a gang of troublemakers would try to disrupt this occasion and the Doré’s director, a man called Fishburn, was nervous lest any harm come to the works of art in his care. He was especially protective of a large composition by Robert Delaunay incorporating the Eiffel Tower, a biplane, a ferris wheel and rugby players and entitled The Cardiff Football Team. Nevinson felt Fishburn’s anxiety to be groundless. ‘I don’t think they will chuck anything even if the fools come’, he told Lewis.
The identity of these anti-Futurists is not known. Nevinson could not have anticipated, however, that, seven months later, Lewis himself would lead another gang of troublemakers to the same gallery and disrupt a lecture he was giving alongside Marinetti.
*
‘I am going to the Picture Ball, if you please, as a Futurist picture designed by Wyndham Lewis!’ Edward Marsh wrote to Elliot Seabrooke on 30 November. The Private Secretary to Winston Churchill had just returned from visiting Stanley Spencer in Cookham when he encountered the sombreroed Lewis for the first time:
He is very magnificent to look at, but I don’t think he liked me, and I suspected him of pose, so we shan’t be friends. Hoping to strike a chord, I told him I had spent the day with Stanley Spencer and he said, ‘I don’t know him, is he a painter?’ which must have been put on.
Throughout November The Times had devoted many column-inches to preparations for ‘The Picture Ball’ to be held at the Albert Hall on 3 December. The purpose of this lavish event was to raise money for the London Invalid Kitchens, a scheme to relieve the sufferings of ‘the sick poor of all denominations’ in Southwark, Bermondsey, Hoxton, Stepney and Canning Town.
Carefully posed in a glittering series of living pictures and presenting what was intended to be a history of world art from ancient Egyptian to Modern, the cream of London Society would be participating in the extraordinary spectacle.
Lady Muriel Paget, Honorary Secretary of the charity, had contacted Nevinson through the Doré Galleries and he had written to Lewis:
She wants some tableaux vivants of five well known ‘cubist’ or futurist paintings! and wants to know if we will help her and she also murmured something about you and me ‘dining with her and arranging things’ but I don’t think there is any money in it . . . [She] seems to think it is a fearful difficult job and imagines it will need the combined brains of Etchells, Hamilton, Wadsworth and myself under your command . . . Though I promised her nothing I thought it as well not to refuse and offend the good Lady as I was given to understand she was a buyer.
On the night, the floor of the Albert Hall was raised to the level of the lowest tier of boxes and the orchestra and organ concealed by a vast black velvet curtain. Five ‘frames’ had been cut in the curtain and in these, standing on a specially erected platform, the participants showed themselves.
‘Exquisite beyond conception,’ the Daily Mirror gushed the following morning, ‘beautiful beyond believing, unforgettable and haunting was the brilliant picture provided by the historic Picture Ball . . . It was easily the most fashionable and the most brilliant function of the season.’ As for the eagerly awaited ‘Futurist’ contribution, Nevinson’s and Lewis’s designs, realised by a pair of Chelsea artists, the Misses Forestier, did not disappoint. ‘The costumes beggar description and include long necks and nightmare faces.’ Edward Marsh’s best friend would not have recognised him as he posed with right arm raised to shoulder height, his head completely enclosed in a high tapering tube surmounted by a curious box-like structure. A photograph of Marsh’s ‘quaint dress’ was featured on the Mirror’s back page, alongside one of Sir Denis Anson, garbed in a shiny dark robe, his face covered by a circular mask, all eyes and nose, and carrying a small abstract picture. Two drawings by Lewis had been reproduced the day before the Ball. In one, called ‘The Birth of Futurism’, designs for Marsh’s and Anson’s costumes could be made out and the correspondent hoped that the performers would ‘not be expected to remain at the impossible angles of the figures . . . as otherwise they [could not] expect to enjoy the evening’. The other drawing, referred to as ‘The Culmination of Futurism’, was a complicated improvisation of jagged and curvilinear forms. The caption read: ‘How [this] will be shown is, for the moment, a secret which is locked in the costumier’s breast.’
The Manchester Guardian reported that the Futurist tableau was ‘menacing and geometrical and disturbing’ and ‘made some people laugh’. It was ‘a good note to end on’, the Times correspondent felt, ‘a gentle let-down, so to speak, from the heights of classic art into the merriment of a Christmas carnival’. Nevinson told Lewis that ‘the crowd . . . shouted for us half an hour . . . but fortunately Tree’s Dramatic Academy stepped into the breach and gave an exhibition of dancing.’ Dressed as fairies, the children pranced in, scattering sweets and crackers to the ladies.
It was estimated that the Hall contained 4,000 people when the dancing was at its height. The startling contrasts of high art, contemporary lunacy and ragtime were not lost on ‘Rambler’, the Mirror’s gossip columnist: ‘I saw futurist figures, Egyptian maidens, Japanese flower girls and Italian ladies who might have stepped out of Botticelli, dancing to the strains of “The Robert E. Lee”.’
Unable or unwilling to attend the festivities himself, Lewis had, in Nevinson, a friend prepared to look after his interests. During the evening he ran into Lady Drogheda and all but clinched a commission for Lewis that promised to be more challenging than the designing of tableaux vivants and considerably more lucrative. She told Nevinson that if Lewis sent her his estimates for decorating her dining room she would accept them.
*
‘I hope you are considering the question of taking steps of forming an organisation of your own that will protect you from abuses that Roger Fry’s regime seemed to accentuate rather than diminish.’ The solicitor Lewis had hired in anticipation of legal action from the direction of Fitzroy Square had proffered this advice in October. At the beginning of the new year 1914 Kate Lechmere wrote from Nice with just such a proposition: an atelier of the French type, enrolling students who would paint there during the week, receiving instruction and criticism from more experienced artists at weekends. Lechmere had inherited money and was willing to get the enterprise started. Thereafter, it would be financed by student fees and by the sale of decorative objects made on the premises. It could offer serious competition to Fry’s outfit.
Plans for a journal had been initiated even earlier than Lechmere’s proposal. Nevinson had even suggested a name for it. ‘Blast’ as the title, and ‘Vortex’ as an image that would eventually be wedded to it, had been mentioned, independently, within a two-day period in the last fortnight of 1913. On 17 December Edward Wadsworth wrote to Lewis: ‘I have not been able to think of another name for Blast and I am not convinced yet really that Blast is bad . . . In any case I don’t think we ought to change the name unless for something better.’
Two days later Ezra Pound wrote to a fellow American poet, William Carlos Williams: ‘You may get something slogging away by yourself that you would miss in The Vortex – and that we miss.’
By the New Year Nevinson’s bombastic title had been definitely agreed upon and The New Age of 8 January 1914 contained the first published reference:
a magazine, to be named ‘Blast’, will shortly appear under the editorship of Mr Wyndham Lewis to provide a platform for the discussion of Cubism and other aesthetic phenomena.
Pound’s ‘Vortex’ was held in reserve for another six months.
Lewis and Pound had first encountered one another at the Vienna Café near the British Museum, probably in late 1908 and in the company of their respective mentors: Sturge Moore and Laurence Binyon. Pound recalled that Binyon effected the introduction: ‘His bull-dog, me as it were against old Sturge M[oore]’s bull-dog.’ It was a friendship begun in mutual suspicion – Lewis only spoke to the red-haired American at their third meeting – but by late 1913 they were partners in an enterprise intended to revolutionise English art. They presided over a tea party to formulate lists of people and institutions which editorial policy would support and those it would deplore. These lists were to be headed ‘BLESS’ and ‘BLAST’. Douglas Goldring was present:
It was a solemn occasion except, I suspected, for the two prophets – who, when unobserved by the disciples, occasionally exchanged knowing grins – and for myself, who had frequently to suppress irreverent giggles. There were, I suppose, more than twenty people present, and Jessie Dismorr, an advanced painter and poetess . . . was ordered by the Master [Lewis], after a counting of heads, to get tea for us.
Goldring remembered that Nevinson was present, and William Roberts, also probably Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, together with ‘several young men who resolutely wore their black hats and endeavoured unsuccessfully to look “tough” ’.
It was Goldring, with his experience as editor of The Tramp, who was chief adviser on the practicalities of publishing. He found Lewis a small printer in Harlesden ‘humble enough blindly to carry out his instructions’ for the typographically eccentric organ. For its unquestioning services, the firm of Leveridge and Company found itself among the ranks of the Blessed.
*
Also Blessed was Madame Strindberg. During the last days of the Cabaret Theatre Club, prior to the liquidation sale in February, she wrote to Lewis inviting him to what must have been something in the nature of a wake. It was to be ‘a special night . . . reuniting all the “founders” of the Cabaret’. She asked him to bring along all the ‘interesting people’ he knew and to keep them together so that she could ‘feed them safely and cheaply . . . without the others knowing it’. Otherwise she would have to invite the whole room, ‘which won’t do.’ He was to bring the Countess Drogheda if he liked, ‘and other Duchesses . . . anybody to see the thing in its greatest glory. Also critics.’
Ever optimistic, Madame Strindberg planned to relaunch the Cabaret in new and palatial premises within four weeks. She proposed renaming it the ‘Blast Club’.
But she still owed him money, and legend has it that one night, in her absence, Lewis took control of the till at the door to the Cave. When enough money had been taken in entrance fees to cover what was owed him, he pocketed it and left. Another story has an altercation, ending with Lewis kicking the lady down a flight of stairs.*
The Blast Club never opened.
*
Meanwhile, Roger Fry was still suffering from the aftershocks of the Ideal Home row. ‘The Lewis group have got hold of The New Age critic and he’s written an amazing thing’, he told Duncan Grant. An article on the Second Grafton Group show at the Alpine Club lacerated the Omega director and his coterie and the wording left no doubt as to which side of the schism the correspondent’s sympathies lay:
the departure of Mr Wyndham Lewis, Mr Etchells, Mr Nevinson and several others has left concentrated in a purer form all the worked-out and dead elements in the movement. It has become increasingly obvious that Mr Fry and his group are nothing but a kind of backwater.
And the critic was not content merely with pointing out the general failings of the group. He clearly had knives out for Fry personally:
He . . . accomplishes the extraordinary feat of adapting the austere Cezanne into something quite fitted for chocolate boxes.* It is too tedious to go on mentioning mediocre stuff.
This critical belligerent, T. E. Hulme, shared a lecture platform with Lewis at the Kensington Town Hall when they each addressed the Quest Society on the subject of Modern Art. Hulme spoke of the distinction between Vital Art and Geometric Art. He read with his face buried in his text and was barely audible. Lewis, sitting in the body of the hall with Kate Lechmere, kept whispering to her: ‘You’ve got to hold your head up when you speak in public.’ He was next to mount the platform, spoke rapidly in a husky voice and, seeming to address himself entirely to the paper he was reading from, fared no better than his predecessor. According to Ezra Pound, writing in The Egoist, both men’s remarks were ‘almost wholly unintelligible’. Lewis ‘compared the soul to a bullet’. He went on to say ‘that you could set a loaf of bread in an engine shop and that this would not cause said loaf to produce cubist pictures.’ There was a third lecturer that the Egoist correspondent modestly forbore to identify. Pound ‘stole the show’, according to Kate Lechmere, ‘made a very good speech and read some poetry’. Lewis muttered to her afterwards that the audience had only been impressed on account of his accent. ‘It’s rather a joke hearing poetry read by an American’, he told her.
*
Whatever the estimate Lewis submitted to Lady Drogheda for painting her dining room, it was accepted without question. About the same time he told Mrs Percy Harris that for a ‘large decoration’ he would ask £50, this being the sum which the Contemporary Art Society had paid him for the large gouache, Laughing Woman, which he thought ‘not exorbitant’. And six months later he agreed to paint six wall panels for a room in the American novelist Mary Borden Turner’s house for £250.
Lady Drogheda’s dining room at 40 Wilton Crescent was undergoing a funereal transformation to the Countess’s eccentric specifications. Carpet and ceiling were of so dark a green as to seem black, and the walls were covered in panels of similarly near-black velvet. Each panel was bordered by a three-inch-wide vertical strip of bevelled mirror set into the wall.
Lewis’s more colourful contribution, barely mooted by Her Ladyship on the night of the Picture Ball, was complete just under three months later.
On either side of the fireplace were thin vertical strips bearing a chevroned design in vermilion, and flanking the ebony-framed mirrored overmantel were tall abstractions on nine-inch-wide panels. High up, between the unrelieved sombre velvet of the walls and the old gold of the cornice, a nine-inch-wide frieze painted in ‘vivid light reds, dark greens and other tints’ ran almost the entire perimeter of the room. Vanity Fair described this, one of the most arresting features of the room, as a ‘rioting mass of colours, each vying with the other in brilliance, quite irrespective of form, meaning, or design – colour for colour’s sake, so to speak’. The frieze was interrupted at only one point. Filling the space between the top of the doorframe and the cornice was a rectangular abstract composition entitled The Dancing Ladies.
The Countess opened her home to invited guests on Thursday, 26 February, from 3 o’clock until 7, ‘to see the Frieze Paintings and a small collection of drawings’. A press release listed 27 notables as having been present (29 counting the artist and Her Ladyship). They included the US Ambassadress, the Spanish Ambassador, Greek and Chilean Ministers and an assortment of Barons, Baronesses and other titled persons. Sir Claude Philips, art critic of the Daily Telegraph, was there together with other representatives of the press. The only artists mentioned apart from Lewis were Jacob Epstein and John, although Wadsworth also received an invitation and promised to come early with his wife.
Many years later John recalled the afternoon for comic effect in a Sunday Times article: ‘Among the exhibits hung a picture described as a portrait. Although taken from the back, the artist had included an attractive pair of breasts, apparently attached to the subject’s shoulder-blades! . . . I thought it was going too far myself but, wisely, I think, made no comment. After all, I might have been mistaken. What I took to be the lady’s black hair might have been her face in shadow or something; you never can tell.’ That was in 1958. The day after his actual visit he had told Dorelia it was ‘a perfectly bloody show’.
The press release concluded: ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis is shortly to do wall paintings in two other well known houses.’ This claim may have been a fabrication. Further commissions were to come but only later in the year. Nevertheless it would have done no harm to impress on Lady Drogheda’s wealthy guests that the artist was willing to take on further work of a similar nature.
*
A more modest commission came from Lady Cunard. Hosting a large dinner party for an ‘American millionaire’, she required Post-Impressionist knick-knacks as little presents for the ‘rich and influential’ guests. Lewis’s appetite was whetted by the words ‘American millionaire’, ‘rich’ and ‘influential’. Wadsworth was to make 25 handkerchiefs, Nevinson 25 candle shades, Lewis 25 fans and Hamilton 25 of something else. They were to be paid 10/- per item, £50 in all, and had three days to deliver the goods. Lady Cunard said that if they could not do the job she would have to go to Omega. The prospect of taking £50 worth of business from Roger Fry would have appealed to Lewis. ‘I hope that you and your friends will be able to make an impression on Mr Roger Fry,’ the solicitor from Vandercom & Co. had told him. ‘I fancy that this can only be done through his pocket.’
In early March Fry wrote to Duncan Grant: ‘The Lewis gang do nothing else even now but abuse me. Brzeska, who sees them, says he’s never seen such a display of vindictive jealousy among artists.’
About this time ‘the Lewis gang’ occupied premises rented for them by Kate Lechmere on the first floor of a four-storey building at 38 Great Ormond Street: The Rebel Art Centre. Lechmere had a small flat on the top floor back which she decorated, according to Vanity Fair, with ‘black doors in cream walls, and black curtains in addition to the usual orgies of colour’. Downstairs on the first floor, a dividing wall was demolished and rooms enlarged. ‘The studio walls were painted pale lemon yellow and the doors Chinese red.’ Several artists, among them Hamilton, Wadsworth and Lewis, were said to be decorating the studio with large mural paintings and friezes. ‘It will be the only room in Europe’, the Prospectus claimed, ‘where artists belonging to the New Movement in art have had so free a hand, and done work on this scale.’
There was an office and, finally, ‘an extra room for Lewis and his prospective pupils to paint in’. This was to be the Art School.
*
‘The First Exhibition of Works by Members of the London Group’ opened on 4 March 1914 at the Goupil Gallery. ‘The London Group really consists of two groups’, the Times correspondent explained. ‘One of these may be said generally to derive from Mr Walter Sickert, the other from M. Picasso.’ Gore, Gilman, Ginner and Bevan comprised the former subgroup, Lewis, Bomberg, Wadsworth, Hamilton, Etchells, Nevinson, Gaudier-Brzeska and Epstein, the latter.
‘A champagne glass with something that looks uncommonly like a lady’s leg’ was how the Telegraph critic described one of three drawings by Lewis: The Enemy of the Stars. The catalogue described it as a drawing for sculpture and it may indeed have been intended to compete with Epstein’s small flenite figures that T. E. Hulme had rated so highly in December’s issue of The New Age.
At the private view Lechmere and Hulme stood in front of the drawing. She had been asked by Lewis to steer the critic towards it. Hulme professed to like it but thought it top-heavy. The couple laughed together about something or other and Lewis, watching with Wadsworth from across the room, formed the bitter conviction that they were ridiculing his work.
In his New Age review Hulme, in fact, deemed The Enemy of the Stars to be a ‘quite remarkable drawing’. But he also wrote, with reference to Lewis’s larger compositions, Eisteddfod and Christopher Columbus, that they failed because of a lack of coherence and control:
His sense of form seems to me to be sequent rather than integral, by which I mean that one form probably springs out of the preceding one as he works, instead of being conceived as a whole.
This was a passable definition of doodling.
Lewis had been the inadvertent instigator of Lechmere’s liaison with Hulme. If Lechmere’s recollections were accurate, it must have been a little before the Goupil opening that, with characteristic secrecy, Lewis arranged for the New Age critic to visit the premises in Great Ormond Street, having first ascertained that his co-director had a luncheon engagement. But her appointment fell through and he was obliged to introduce her to Hulme. They liked one another immediately, and Lewis became alarmed at a potentially dangerous shift in the system of alliances that, for him, controlled the delicate balance of power in art politics. His reasoning seemed to be that if Hulme extended his sphere of influence, through Lechmere, to Great Ormond Street, then it would not be long before he himself was ousted in favour of Hulme’s man. ‘Epstein is Hulme,’ he told Lechmere over dinner, ‘Hulme is Epstein.’
If a story told by William Roberts many years later is to be believed, there must have been considerable tension in the Goupil Gallery on the evening of the First London Group opening. While Lewis was glaring at his ex-mistress and business partner sharing a joke with the burly New Age critic, he himself was the object of vengeful intrigue from another painter.
When the Group’s pictures were hung the day before, David Bomberg secured an excellent central position for his large kaleidoscopic abstract canvas, In the Hold. This was the biggest picture in the show and he considered himself fortunate that it would be seen to its greatest possible advantage. He had made arrangements, after the private view, to spend the rest of the evening with Lewis and Roberts on his home turf, the East End. They were to dine at Harry Steinwoolf’s Jewish restaurant in the Whitechapel Road. ‘There was to be Palestinian wine,’ Roberts recalled:
Wiener Schnitzel, Russian cigarettes and Russian Lemon tea, and to make our evening’s entertainment complete, Bomberg had promised to bring a couple of black-haired, dark-eyed East End Rebeccas.
After dinner they had tickets for a Yiddish play at the Pavilion Theatre opposite the restaurant. But on the day of the opening, arriving early at the Goupil Gallery, Bomberg made a discovery which rather dampened his celebratory mood.
The coveted central position he had claimed for his picture the day before was now occupied by Lewis’s Christopher Columbus. In the Hold had been rehung elsewhere.
Justifiably furious, the painter modified his arrangements. Instead of the promised ‘dark-eyed East End Rebeccas’ he arrived at Steinwoolf’s in the company of his elder brother Mo. A professional pugilist, he exercised his ring craft under the sobriquet ‘American Mowie’.
Nothing was said until after the soup. Then, very loudly, Bomberg demanded: ‘Say, Wyndham, what do you mean by taking my picture down and sticking your own up in its place?’ Lewis attempted to protest. Then, unable to justify his action and finding himself in a part of town unfamiliar to him, in hostile company and sitting opposite a man who fought with his fists for a living, he got up, threw his theatre ticket down on the table and fled.
*
It may have been as a result of insecurity arising from the Lechmere/Hulme alliance that Lewis insisted their business be placed upon a proper legal footing. He was given a certificate for 510 deferred shares in the company called, for official, administrative and legal purposes, the Cubist Art Centre Limited. It was agreed that his controlling interest should be maintained, in the event of further shares being allotted to Miss Lechmere, by the transfer of 50 per cent of such shares to him. However, in order to safeguard her unequal investment in the company, it was further agreed and understood that any dividends accruing from his shares, for a period of six months from 3 April, would belong to her.
Miss Lechmere paid the £50 in solicitor’s fees. Mr Rayner the solicitor was formally blessed for his services to the movement several months later.
Miss Lechmere also supplied money for a new suit to be tailored for Lewis – one befitting his role as Managing Director of the Rebel Art Centre. The jacket had a black and white check lining and a fold ran down the side of the trouser legs together with a stitched band. When he wore the suit for the first time she either did not notice or neglected to comment. She remembered him with his hands in the jacket pockets, violently flapping it open and shut to show off the lining and remarking how unobservant women are.
She remembered minor arguments: Lewis stamping up and down the room growling ‘bloody bitch!’ over and over again. And once, when she was unwell and in bed in her flat on the top floor, he stood over her and whacked the mattress with a walking stick, shouting: ‘I will not be bullied!’
*
At the end of March the Rebel Arts Centre opened its doors to the press. There were photographs in the Daily Mirror: Wadsworth perched on top of a stepladder hanging one of his pictures above a mantelpiece, Hamilton looking on, Nevinson holding the ladder, and Lewis leaning on the mantelpiece hat in hand and looking nowhere in particular. Another showed Lewis, also standing on a ladder, holding brush and palette, working on a section of mural in the corner of a room. A third showed Lechmere in the act of drawing back an expanse of drapery designed by Hamilton.
A prospectus was printed offering membership of the Centre for a guinea. Privileges were ‘Free Entrance for the space of one year . . . to all Lectures, Meetings and Picture Exhibitions’ and half-price admission ‘for any dances or social entertainments that may be arranged’. Members might also attend regular ‘Saturday afternoon meetings of artists from 4 to 6 pm’.
It was impossible to supply a complete lecture programme because:
much depends, in getting such men to lecture as we intend, on arrangements that have to fit in with their stay in London and other engagements, and can be made only a week or two ahead.
Signor Marinetti was expected to lecture, and did so on Wednesday 6 May at 8.45. Admission was by ticket and cost 5 shillings. Ezra Pound lectured on 30 May, his subject, ‘ “Imagisme,” the most vital movement in English poetry to-day, and in which he is the principal mover’. It was hoped that the Futurist Painters would consent to address a meeting during the run of their forthcoming exhibition at the Doré Gallery and it was the management’s intention ‘also to ask some great innovator in music, Schoenburg [sic] or Scrabine [sic], when they are next in London, to lecture’. The experience of only one other lecturer is documented. Ford Madox Hueffer spoke ‘absentmindedly in a tail coat’, according to Douglas Goldring, who was unable to recall the topic. Kate Lechmere remembered the lecture’s spectacular climax. Lewis’s monumental nine-foot-high painting, Plan of War, fell forward off the wall behind Hueffer. The two-foot-wide heavy wooden frame detached itself from the canvas and clattered to the floor, leaving the huge abstraction balanced harmlessly on the speaker’s head.
The Art School was to open on 26 April. There were to be three terms of three months each per year and fees were payable at five guineas a quarter. Hours would be from 10 o’clock until 5, five days a week. Mr Wyndham Lewis was to visit daily as professor. The educational regime over which he would preside was liberal to say the least. ‘The principal object of this school’, the Prospectus declared:
will be to help any student to do what he most wants to do. If he prefers to play the fiddle to drawing he can do that, so long as he does not annoy his neighbour. The academic basis of drawing will not be neglected. But those who are evidently meant for a child’s paradise will be left with their wit, skill and ingenuousness. Instruction will approach them on tip-toe.
Only two prospective students presented themselves: a young man who wanted to design gas brackets and a lady pornographer too embarrassed to show her erotic drawings to Kate Lechmere. ‘Lewis had to go and look at them behind a door’, Lechmere recalled.
Lewis’s co-director complained later that he made no effort to recruit students and the Art School very quickly came to nothing.
*
Christopher Nevinson’s father, the journalist Henry Nevinson, addressed a letter to the publisher John Lane. ‘Let me introduce to you my son . . . and his friend Wyndham Lewis . . . revolutionary artists of Futurist fame, who want to consult you about bringing out an artistic magazine they have in mind.’ By May Lane had agreed to handle Blast in England, the United States and Canada and to do his best to push sales in each country. It would retail at 2/6 but Lane was to receive 1,000 copies without charge on the understanding that he expend £50 on advertising. On all copies sold beyond 1,000, the editor would be paid at the rate of 1 shilling per copy.
*
On Saturday 16 May Lewis was at the Leeds Arts Club to open an exhibition of Futurist, Cubist and Post-Impressionist work that Frank Rutter had organised. He gave a short speech in which he outlined three movements of modern painting. Cubism and Expressionism were the longest established, he said, Futurism the most recent. It is difficult to decide whether his explanation of Futurist aesthetics was as muddled and obscure as it appeared when the Yorkshire Post reported it:
Supposing they wanted to give a feeling of two human beings attracted or repelled, or without any feeling to each other, the only way was to give something of their essence, two organisms that were more than the eyes, the ears, and the legs, which one knew as the characteristics of men. In a futurist picture they got all the instincts and life of the man.
Afterwards there were questions from the floor and one wag, a Mr C. B. Howdill, suggested that ‘the man in the street’ might be excused for thinking that the paintings on show at the Leeds Arts Club were the work of madmen. He did not, he hastened to add, hold this view himself as he would not condemn anything just because he did not understand it. Then, producing a bundle of sketches that he described as ‘thought forms’, he asked for the speaker’s comments. Evidently disconcerted, Lewis replied that people who drew things that could not be seen were certainly mad and he held up one of the drawings for the audience to see. It appeared to consist of a formless blob of paint. Besides, he said that it was not the drawing of a thought but of a flower and he pointed out the stalk. Mr Howdill said that the speaker’s criticism proved that he condemned without understanding. Later in the discussion when Lewis declined, through ‘natural modesty and shyness’, to give an explanation of his own drawing Time, Mr Howdill came back at him saying it was his duty to explain the picture and accusing the artist of wanting ‘to keep his new-found heaven to himself’.
*
Another aesthetic discussion occurred in a London toilet while Signor Marinetti was sluicing himself down with cold water from the washbasin after delivering one of his strenuous public performances. Nearly everything the excitable Italian said seemed to end with an exclamation mark:
‘No’, Lewis replied.
‘Why don’t you announce that you are a futurist!’
‘Because I am not one.’
‘Yes. But what’s it matter!’
‘It’s most important.’
‘Not at all! Futurism is good. It is all right.’
‘Not bad. It has its points. But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You’re always on about these driving belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s years. They’re no novelty to us.’
‘You have never understood your machines! You have never known the ivresse of travelling at a kilometre a minute. Have you ever travelled at a kilometre a minute?’
‘Never. I loathe anything that goes too quickly. If it goes too quickly, it is not there.’
‘It is not there! It is only when it goes quickly that it is there!’
‘That is nonsense. I cannot see a thing that is going too quickly.’
‘See it – see it! Why should you want to see? But you do see it. You see it multiplied a thousand times. You see a thousand things instead of one thing.’
‘That’s just what I don’t want to see. I prefer one thing.’
‘There is no such thing as one thing.’
‘There is if I wish to have it so. And I wish to have it so.’
‘You are a monist!’
‘All right. I am not a futurist anyway. Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes.’
‘And you “never weep” – I know, I know. Ah zut alors! What a thing to be an Englishman!’
‘I hate movement that blurs the lines.’ Lewis’s riposte exposed the aesthetic and stylistic gulf between Futurism and his own sharply defined, crystalline abstractions. Allowing for a degree of caricature in the portrait of an emotional Italian whose questions emerge as exclamations, this debate, recalled by Lewis many years later, remains a fair summary of the differences between the two movements.
There was a growing realisation that if the English movement, based at 38 Great Ormond Street and led by Lewis, was to gain any credibility at all, it would not be under Marinetti’s welcoming banner. The event which turned the intellectual differences into an actual rupture was the publication in the Observer, on Sunday 7 June, of ‘Vital English Art, Futurist Manifesto’, jointly signed by Marinetti and Nevinson. It called for the ‘support, defence and glorification of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and advance-forces of vital English Art – ATKINSON, BOMBERG, EPSTEIN, ETCHELLS, HAMILTON, NEVINSON, WADSWORTH, WYNDHAM LEWIS.’
That it implied Lewis, Etchells, Wadsworth and the rest were Futurists was an affront. Nevinson’s appending of the Rebel Art Centre address to his signature made it seem as if the others concurred. Repudiation, definition and the drawing up of battle lines at once became necessary.
Five days later, at 8.45 in the evening, Marinetti and Nevinson were to share a platform at the Doré Gallery. ‘The Manifesto of Vital English Art’ was to be read aloud and Nevinson would give a lecture. Lewis made his preparations:
I assembled in Greek Street a determined band of miscellaneous anti-futurists. Mr Epstein was there; Gaudier-Brzeska, T. E. Hulme, Edward Wadsworth and a cousin of his called Wallace,* who was very muscular and forcible, according to my eminent colleague, and he rolled up very silent and grim. There were about ten of us. After a hearty meal we shuffled bellicosely round to the Doré Gallery.
That night, during Nevinson’s lecture, the word ‘Vorticist’ was heard in public for the first time. It was a measure of how out of touch he was with the discussions at Great Ormond Street that, while he was aware of the name coined by Pound and finally adopted by Lewis, he had evidently never heard it spoken. As a result he hardened the ‘c’ and pronounced it ‘Vortickist’, giving rise to Gaudier’s sibilant and repeated correction from the floor: ‘Vorticiste! Vorti-CCC-iste!’
There were other interruptions. When Nevinson declared: ‘Only bad work goes on forever. No one would take the ‘Mona Lisa’ as a gift. Nobody wants a singer to go on singing all day’, someone shouted ‘I don’t agree!’ And when, concluding a reading of the Vital English Art Manifesto, he shouted: ‘Hurrah for motors! Hurrah for speed! Hurrah for lightning!’ someone set off a fire cracker in the centre doorway.
While Gaudier stayed resolutely on his feet in the middle of the audience, hissing ‘Vorti-ccc-iste’ at the speaker, Lewis and the rest of his party ‘maintained a confused uproar’.
*
If Hulme was indeed one of that ‘determined band of anti-futurists’, standing comradely shoulder to shoulder with Lewis on the night of 12 June, then it must have been at a later date that Lewis attempted to strangle him.
The tension caused by Hulme’s relationship with Lechmere finally broke one Tuesday evening, and the serio-comic climax has become the stuff of legend. It might be imagined as a series of jerky sepia scenes from the early days of the motion picture, played out to a frenetic tinkling piano accompaniment: Lewis and Lechmere arguing in a restaurant somewhere in the West End, Lewis perhaps reiterating his assertion that ‘Epstein is Hulme and Hulme is Epstein’; at length Lewis standing up from the table and swearing his intention to murder Hulme, then rushing out into the night; Lechmere chasing him along Piccadilly, shouting silently, a caption reading: ‘PLEASE DON’T KILL HIM! PLEASE DON’T!’; Lewis arriving wild-eyed at 67 Frith Street, running up the stairs, bursting into Hulme’s first-floor salon and grasping the philosopher by the throat; finally Hulme manhandling his attacker out into the street, upending him and hanging him by the trouser turn-ups from the iron railings in Soho Square.
The legend has a tenuous claim to veracity in that it was Lewis himself who reported the humiliating incident. ‘I never see the summer house [in the centre of the Square] without remembering how I saw it upside down.’
*
Towards the end of June the Harlesden printer had completed his labours and Blast was ready for publication. It was at this late stage that John Lane discovered an obscenity at the bottom of page 48. ‘It was verbally understood between us’, he reminded Lewis, ‘that the Review would deal almost entirely with art and that there would be no sexual disagreeableness or anything which could possibly be construed into libel in it.’ It was doubtless to avoid contravening the libel laws that no reference had been made to Roger Fry.* Both printer and publisher were legally responsible and, if the esoteric drift of Pound’s short poem ‘Fratres Minores’ went unnoticed in Harlesden, it was certainly not lost on John Lane himself:
With minds still hovering above their testicles
Certain poets here and in France
Still sigh over established and natural fact
Long since fully discussed by Ovid.
They howl. They complain in delicate and exhausted metres
That the twitching of three abdominal nerves
Is incapable of producing a lasting Nirvana.
Before any distribution could take place, Lane insisted that the first line, with its intimate anatomical reference, together with the final two-line description of sexual orgasm, be inked out by hand. This piece of drudgery fell to the women at the Rebel Arts Centre: Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders. At the end the offending lines could still just be read through the ink. Lewis believed this helped sales.
‘At the moment of going to press I have received a copy of “Blast” – at last actually out.’ Richard Aldington could almost be heard panting as he beat The Egoist’s deadline. The title page was dated 20 June, but the blacking out of Pound’s indelicacies had delayed things and it was not until 1 July 1914 that Blast made its appearance, or at least had its appearance noted. ‘It is a huge pink periodical of 160 pages’, Aldington went on. ‘The title “Blast” is printed diagonally across both covers. There is no time for detailed criticism, but from a hasty glance through the manifestos and some of the contributions, I can declare that this is the most amazing, energised, stimulating production I have ever seen.’
It was edited by Lewis, who also wrote a substantial part of its contents. ‘Enemy of the Stars’ was a strange hybrid of play and novella, replete with dark metaphor. There was an appreciation of Spencer Gore, who had died on 27 March, and 20 pages of ‘Vortices and Notes’, culminating in the lines:
Our Vortex is proud of its polished sides.
Our Vortex will not hear of anything but its disastrous polished dance.
Our Vortex desires the immobile rhythm of its swiftness.
Our Vortex rushes out like an angry dog at your Impressionistic fuss.
Our Vortex is white and abstract with its red-hot swiftness.
Although uncredited, Lewis was also responsible for the two manifestos. The first, typographically the most startling, Blasted England, France, Humour, Aestheticism, and the Victorian Age. It Blessed England, France, English Humour, and the Hairdresser as one who brought order to overgrown chaotic nature. The Blast and Bless lists, compiled by Lewis and Pound, and solemnly read out over tea some months before to the young, tough-looking men in their black hats, was a catalogue of despised establishment figures and personal bêtes noires on the one hand, and friends, rebels, suffragettes, music hall performers, and prizefighters, on the other. There were more candidates for Blessing than for Blasting, and some of those favoured are puzzling choices. It is not known for instance what ‘The Pope’, Pius X, had done to impress Lewis and Pound, while the identity of ‘Jenny’ and the reason for her benediction will perhaps never be known.
The other manifesto was a more serious statement. It consisted of seven series of numbered aphorisms, combining to assert that, not only should an art be organic with its time but also with its place, ‘that what is actual and vital for the South, is ineffectual and unactual in the North.’ The harsh and austere abstractions produced by Lewis and his colleagues were claimed to be consonant with the Northern climate and fundamentally at odds with the products of Marinetti and his followers who, ‘in their . . . Futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, etc.’, were ‘the most romantic and sentimental “moderns” to be found’. Eleven names were appended: ‘Signatures for Manifesto’. As editor of Blast and leader of the movement, ‘Wyndham Lewis’ – his middle name now part of his surname – ensured that he would climactically succeed ‘E. Wadsworth’, at the end of the alphabetical list, rather than be buried in the ranks between ‘C. Hamilton’ and ‘E. Pound’.
Most commentators mentioned the cover, but there was some confusion as to exactly what colour it was. Ford Madox Hueffer writing in Outlook observed in passing that it was purple and The Times agreed. The Athenaeum, New Weekly and New Statesman, on the other hand, thought it was magenta, while The Little Review described it as ‘something between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache’. The Egoist was content to call it pink, the Observer ‘pucey pink’, while the Pall Mall Gazette attempted even greater precision with ‘chill flannelette pink’, adding that the colour ‘recalls the catalogue of some cheap Eastend draper, and its contents are of the shoddy sort that constitutes the Eastend draper’s stock.’ Poetry said it was cerise. John Cournos remembered it as ‘scarlet’. Living in Ezra Pound’s old room at no. 10 Church Walk, the young American poet did not mind the chimes from St Mary Abbots that had plagued his predecessor and led to ‘Rev. Pennyfeather (Bells)’ being immortalised in damnation. Instead, it was the Sunday hymn singing from the nonconformist household opposite that got on Cournos’s nerves, and he showed his displeasure by placing a copy of Blast in the window with its black letters filling an entire pane: ‘miraculously the noise stopped each time I tried this.’
Inside, a portentous motif appeared on a number of pages: a black cone on a vertical thread or axis. It was based on a coastguard signal consisting of shiny, tarred canvas stretched between a small wooden ring and a large one, three feet in diameter, and hoisted to warn of gales: the storm cone. Raised point downwards it was known as a ‘south cone’, anticipating a gale from the south. Point upwards, a ‘north cone’ – as in the pages of Blast – warned of a northerly gale: a blast from the north. It was the English avant-garde’s answer to the Futurist invasion of London from the Latin south.
1 July was the hottest day of the year, with a temperature, recorded at the Kensington Observatory, of 90 degrees in the shade. In the Home Counties violent thunderstorms provided an apt accompaniment to Blast’s appearance. With war only a month away such coincidence was to seem, in retrospect, ominous. Twenty-eight years later, midway through another world war, on 26 April 1942, Ezra Pound sat behind a microphone in an Italian radio studio and delivered his weekly short-wave lecture to the English-speaking world. It was an activity for which he would later be caged, threatened with the gallows and spend 12 years in an institution for the criminally insane. That evening in 1942 he recalled an anecdote told him by a niece of the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. It was a memory from a vanished ‘languid era’, a split-second vision of black, magenta and green seen through rain-blurred glass to which time and future events would lend significance:
Waaal, the Trees and their circle were havin’ tea on the lawn . . . with due paraphernalia, large silver tea urns etc. and up come a storm, thunder and lightenin’, and the family naturally plunged indoors . . . Blast had been left solitary there on the lawn, and the niece and Sir Herbert gazed elegiacally from the drawing room window on the scene . . . A FLASH of lightening lit up the lawn. There in its solitude, huge on the flaring magenta cover, the black letters vivid, the word BLAST was written. Possibly someone ventured out to rescue the treasure, now valued of second hand book sellers, but more probably no one did.
There was to be another house party later in July, in the Scottish Borders. Just south of the Berwickshire county town of Duns, Charterhall was the country home of Major Algernon Richard Trotter of Mortonhall, Midlothian. It was usually leased out during the close season, to be reoccupied by the Major’s family and friends in time for the start of grouse shooting on 12 August. That particular year the grouse were spared by the men of this distinguished military family. The Trotters did not occupy the house again until 1918, by which time two of the Major’s three brothers had been killed in action.
Mary Borden Turner, whose Scottish husband had rented it for the summer, hated the place. ‘It is like a Glasgow suburb’, she wrote to Lewis. ‘The big house is of an unclean grey colour. It is the middle class mansion: the awful and sinister mean between the castle and the hovel . . . It says “I am large and comfortable, built for breeding and my children are the backbone of the country.” I hate it.’ She also hated the great fat yew trees that hemmed the house in on all sides, ‘smug, squat, all of a uniform green, that stand about motionless, too self-possessed to be affected by the wind’. Charterhall irritated her like clothes chafing raw skin. Douglas, her husband, told her that if she made up her mind to it she could be happy there. ‘But why should I?’ she demanded.
She had already found happiness in an affair with Lewis begun a month or so earlier. ‘You make everyone else seem flat,’ she had told him, ‘just as your pictures make other pictures look dull . . . It doesn’t matter does it, whether I understand your technique or not as long as I adore you, not too stupidly? . . . I am happy with that delicious “malaise” that comes when one is obsessed by another personality.’ Her happiness was not entirely unalloyed. ‘You hurt me. I can’t go on like this. You must be considerate and human’, she told him after he had invited her to a party at John Lane’s where he got drunk and left without seeing her. ‘I could love you madly and give you pleasure if you’d take just a little trouble to be courteous.’ Nevertheless, she found him ‘nicer than anyone else, even when unshaved’.
She seized every opportunity to escape from her Scottish border exile.
*
A Blast dinner was held at the Dieudonné Restaurant, Ryder Street, in the West End of London, on Wednesday 15 July. Guests were charged ten shillings and sixpence and invited for 8 o’clock.
Kate Lechmere sat between Arthur Symons and Gaudier-Brzeska. The sculptor arrived late, after everyone else was seated, depositing a small marble fawn on Pound’s plate in lieu of payment for his meal.
A man was overheard to say that he had abandoned reading Blast and had given it to his children in the hope that they would make more sense of it. Lewis tapped the table and told the guest he had insulted Miss Lechmere, who had paid for the magazine and had 50 copies piled up underneath her chair.
Mary Borden Turner was present, grateful to be free from the stultifying atmosphere of Charterhall, where she had left her husband the day before. But the Blast dinner does not seem to have been a happy experience for her either. She and Lewis quarrelled. ‘Something ugly, unpleasant has grown up suddenly out of our intercourse’, she wrote to him the following night from the Savoy. ‘Two odourless acids mixed, may make a bad smell. We get on each other’s nerves. We are bored with each other. We offend each other.’ What happened between them at the Dieudonné is unclear but, while it did not terminate their friendship, it seems to have marked the end of their brief affair:
Let us abandon this attempted intimacy and take refuge in a more gentle formality or a more formal gentleness.
A little over a week after the Blast dinner the fragile business relationship between the two directors of the Rebel Art Centre also came to an end. The trouble started on the morning of 23 July, when Kate Lechmere called in at the studio to collect her copies of Blast. Jessica Dismorr gave them to her and she took them up to her flat. She was expecting Harold Monro to call the following day and she hoped to sell him 30 copies at cost price for the Poetry Bookshop. Later in the day, while she was out, Helen Saunders went up to the flat and retrieved them. She had been given strict instructions that no copies be allowed out of the studio and her doglike devotion to Lewis made his word law. Miss Saunders was perhaps overanxious to please.
Earlier that week she had written him a highly emotional, largely incoherent letter in which she pleaded for some clarification in their relationship. ‘I keep trying to tell you that I want you to help me out of the clouds – if you don’t want me please let me go and I will try and be something else. I can’t live in this half-way country any more – it is too pleasant.’ She seemed profoundly unsure of herself and her talents; she saw herself as an unetched metal plate inviting the bite of the acid: ‘I think you ought to help me because I am such satisfactorily unpromising raw material like a sheet of zinc – just what a good vorticist ought to like.’
She had offered to take charge of the Rebel Art Centre for the latter half of the week while he was away. ‘Will you write instructions if there is anything you want me to do.’
So when Lechmere confronted her on that Thursday demanding the return of her copies of Blast, the zealous custodian’s sole concern was the protection of Lewis’s interests. To Miss Lechmere’s claim that she was entitled to 40 copies, Miss Saunders replied ‘that Mr Lewis had told Miss Dismorr that Mr Lewis did not intend letting Miss Lechmere have these copies.’ Miss Saunders was then told that if she did not hand over the Blasts forthwith Miss Lechmere would exercise her power as co-director and shut up the Rebel Art Centre until Mr Lewis’s return.
Miss Saunders capitulated. That night Miss Lechmere wrote Lewis a full and very bad-tempered account of the affair.
Monro did not buy the disputed pile of Blasts after all. The only other outlet she could think of was John Lane. When Lewis returned and heard that she had sold copies of his journal back to its publisher he was furious. He presumably thought Lane would assume Blast was not selling well and therefore have doubts about its commercial viability.
A sheet of Rebel Art Centre notepaper was dispatched on the Saturday with the ominous message: ‘I am coming tomorrow morning to make the arrangements that your behaviour necessitates. W. Lewis’.
The row that blew up the following day, 26 July, finally persuaded Miss Lechmere to withdraw from the enterprise. ‘After your language and behaviour of this morning I think it is better that matters should be wound up as soon as possible.’
The following Thursday Wadsworth wrote to apologise for not meeting Lewis the previous afternoon. ‘I couldn’t have got there until after 3.30 . . . by which time you would be already in the new premises.’ This suggests that Lewis took Lechmere’s deadline seriously. She went out on Wednesday afternoon and returned to find the place stripped of its furnishings. ‘So ended the Rebel Art Centre.’
*
Evidently reconciled following the misunderstanding at the Dieudonné Restaurant, Lewis spent the last weekend before war was declared with Mrs Turner and her husband at Charterhall.
Ford Madox Hueffer was there with Violet Hunt, and Pound was to have come but did not. There were others in the party but neither Hueffer nor Lewis mentioned who. Not so jaded as his hostess, Hueffer thought Charterhall delightful: ‘the turf of the Scottish lawns was like close, fine carpeting and the soft Scottish sunshine and the soft Scottish showers did the heart good.’ Like many memories of the last days of peace this, recalled in 1931, evoked a paradise soon to be lost. They sat on the lawn in the sun and read aloud to each other. Hueffer read from Blast the first instalment of his novel, The Saddest Story. Mrs Turner read from James Joyce’s first novel that was being serialised in The Egoist.
The London newspapers came to Duns by way of Edinburgh, bringing word of the deepening international crisis. A conversation occurred one morning over breakfast. Mrs Turner thought a war involving England was unlikely:
‘There won’t be any war, Ford’, she said. ‘Not here. England won’t go into a war.’
‘England will’, Ford replied.
‘England will! But Ford, England has a Liberal Government. A Liberal Government cannot declare war.’
At this point Lewis joined the discussion:
‘Of course it can’t. Liberal Governments can’t go to war. That would not be liberal. That would be conservative.’
Ford was silent.
‘Well, Ford’, said his hostess. ‘You don’t agree!’
‘I don’t agree,’ came the emphatic reply, ‘because it has always been the Liberals who have gone to war. It is because it is a Liberal Government that it will declare war.’
A chauffeured Rolls-Royce was at their disposal, and on 3 August some of the party were driven off to play golf. They dropped Lewis near Duns and he walked in to town and bought a London paper: ‘GERMANY DECLARES WAR ON RUSSIA’. This event had actually occurred two days before, on Saturday the 1st, but reports in the dailies only appeared on the Bank Holiday Monday. In the regional papers, like the Northern Echo, news of the breakdown in diplomatic manoeuvres between the German ambassador and Russian foreign minister in St Petersburg had to compete with a report of the first day of the Morpeth Games, Saturday’s other noteworthy event. ‘MORPETH OLYMPIAD’, a poster for one newspaper proclaimed in violet lettering, ‘RECORD CROWD’.
By the time the party returned from the golf links to pick up their companion, Lewis had bought a selection of the London papers. As an ironic counterpoint to the grave news, he also secured the ‘Morpeth Olympiad’ poster, and this was stuck up in Charterhall. ‘It appeared to the household an adequate expression of the great Nation to which they belonged.’
Lewis left Charterhall ahead of the main party, and travelled overnight back to London. He was in a train packed with naval reservists, under mobilisation orders and making for Chatham. There were sentries lining the bridges at Newcastle and stacks of rifles on the station platform. The country would very soon, as Hueffer had so confidently predicted, be at war.
* The source of these stories was Mrs Spencer Gore. Richard Cork substantiates the first with a reference in the minute book of the Club to Lewis being employed, at £8 a week, as ‘an unofficial assistant’ to Madame Strindberg. (See Art Beyond the Gallery, p 189.) This, Cork argues, would have given him access to the till for the unorthodox settlement of his account. However, the ‘Mr Percy Wyndham’ referred to in the minutes on 25 December 1913 cannot have been the man known to everyone present at the meeting – Gore, Ginner, Konody and Madame Strindberg herself – as ‘Lewis’ or ‘Mr Lewis’. In the same Christmas Day entry ‘Mr Wyndham’ was said to be advising his employer on what other establishments charged as entrance fee to members’ guests. This ‘unofficial assistant’, with expert knowledge of London nightclubs, that Lewis would not have possessed, was, in short, merely a coincidental near-namesake.
* Fry was sometimes called, by his detractors, ‘Chocolate Fry’, because of his family connection with the confectionery manufacturers.
* Wadsworth’s cousin was in fact called Norman Wallis and his name was soon to appear among the blessed.
* C. B. Fry was blasted in his namesake’s place; at an imaginative stretch the cricketer’s initials might have been made to stand for ‘Chocolate Box’.