During the first months of the war Lewis had a studio in Fitzroy Street and was living in a two-room flat at no. 4 Percy Street let by a couple called Pierce. The ground floor was occupied by Phelon & Moore Ltd, Motorcycle Manufacturers. Three doors along the street to the left was the celebrated establishment run by Rudolf Stulik: the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel.
Inviting Jessica Dismorr to tea in early January 1915, he suggested they meet somewhere close to his home, the ABC Tea Rooms, perhaps, in Oxford Street between Frascati’s Restaurant and Rathbone Place. He referred to recent legislation brought in under the Defence of the Realm Act restricting the movement of aliens. ‘I am supposed not to wander very far,’ he told her, ‘like German subjects.’ Confinement to the close environs of Percy Street was due to his suffering considerable physical discomfort from recently contracted gonorrhoea.
Among the contents of a battered, black, metal deeds box in Dean Farrar Street, Westminster,* are three minimally punctuated letters written variously in pencil and purple wax crayon. They chart an ignoble phase in Lewis’s relationship with Olive Johnson following the birth of their second child, Betty. Carefully preserved, they were sealed in an envelope inscribed by Lewis:
Confession of infidelity . . . (It was ‘the Spaniard’ referred to who gave her the clap, and then she afterwards gave it to me. Hence the row).
Just after Easter, in April 1914, Olive was seen out with another man. ‘I am not surprised at your seeing me,’ she wrote to Lewis:
it was impossible for me to go on any longer without somebody, but at the same time it is only natural that I think much more of you than any man and that is why I should always be looking for you. I simply go with him because I am very lonely, and miserable there is no alternative I asked you and begged of you to come back to me, and you refused me time after time it is very hard when you cant have the one you love, but I want you, and I shall always want you. You practically told me to find a man and I suppose I shall go from bad to worse.
Worse indeed followed, and the man she had found for herself, an unnamed Spaniard, infected her with gonorrhoea. ‘I have had an unfortunate life,’ she told Lewis, ‘and you are the only one who could do anything for me and you wont.’
Despite her despairing tone, she still hoped they might continue to meet occasionally. She worked in a branch of ‘Fullers’, the American Confectioners, during the daytime but thereafter she was free. ‘Will you see me one evening . . . I could see you Sunday or Monday evening or any evening next week . . . I should like to go to a Cinema with you.’ The letter was signed with ‘love from your Dunkie’.
As with his first mistress, Ida Vendel, so it was with Olive. Lewis seemed incapable of effecting a clean break with her, and when he resumed sexual relations in the first months of war he contracted gonorrhoea.
Lewis was of course no stranger to the infection. His first ‘dose’ had been six years before with, coincidentally, another Spaniard responsible. He contracted it again in early 1910. Late in 1913 – around the same time, incidentally, that Olive was being delivered of their second child – he announced to Richard Aldington, over dinner, that he had clap. Aldington cast his mind back to an afternoon a week or so before when Lewis had borrowed his razor and shaving brush. After using them he declared ‘he had been copulating for three days.’ The recently married Aldington was appalled in retrospect at the potential danger to himself and his young wife of an infected shaving brush. Beyond the newlywed squeamishness of the Aldington household there was little stigma attached to the venereal condition among Lewis’s circle of friends. Frederick Etchells, about this time, apologised for some minor offence, saying: ‘Just now I’m sick to death of clap and poverty and inactivity – these can be the only reasons for any unfortunate impression I may have given you.’ And he gave Lewis the reassurance of his continued friendship: ‘Leaving cunts on one side, you’re the only person in London I really care to see or talk to.’
Late in 1914, as the discharging and stinging symptoms of his latest dose manifested themselves, Lewis took Sickert’s advice: ‘treat it as a bad cold that lasts for a long time . . . The treatments that dispose of it quickly are all of them apt to lead to complications.’*
The septicaemia resulting from this neglect immobilised him at his flat and ruled out early enlistment in the armed forces. ‘Any violent movement or exertion redoubled the septacaemia’, he wrote later. ‘I had to get well first, before my King and Country could benefit by my martial intervention. Probably the micro-organism saved my life.’ A further benefit of the micro-organism was that it enforced the painful leisure to complete Tarr, the novel he had been working on for so long.
His fitful convalescence followed a cyclical pattern. Confined to bed for sometimes ten days at a time he had his meals sent up from the Tour Eiffel. He drank no wine with his meals as this aggravated the condition. After a time he felt better. ‘There was not a sign of a discharge’, he passed water without pain and thought it was all over. He left his bed and resumed normal activities: leapt onto buses, ate his meals at the Tour Eiffel with ‘a bottle, perhaps, of one of Stulik’s less celebrated marks’. But then, oxalic acid in the red wine inflamed the barely healed urethral lesion and the symptoms returned. Another bedridden period ensued, followed by a recession of symptoms, then ‘some wine with . . . dinner, only a glass or two, and the bloody thing came on again.’
It was during the first months of war that he met Guy Baker. A former captain in the Indian Army, Baker was in his forties. He had a chronic skin condition which broke out in unsightly rashes and he was tortured by rheumatism. Later, when unaccountably accepted for active service in the army, he is said to have nearly broken his right arm energetically saluting a superior officer, and had to wear it in a sling for weeks after. He and Lewis got on famously. Baker had no artistic pretensions but sufficient money to build up a small collection of his friend’s drawings and gouaches which he eventually bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Substituting the name of one tradesman for another, Lewis wrote him into the second chapter of his novel as ‘Butcher’. They had encountered one another during one of Lewis’s intermittent bouts of mobility, at the Tour Eiffel. In subsequent periods of invalidity Baker paid regular visits to the flat with cigarettes and newspapers, and the two men would discuss the latest war news and compare symptoms, ‘cursing together the micro-organism and all its works’.
Curses were doubtless heaped upon the unfortunate carrier of the ‘micro-organism’: Olive Johnson. The content of these conversations might be guessed at from misogynistic outbursts in the chapters of Tarr being written at this time:
Think of all the . . . liaisons that you know in which some frowsy or foolish or doll-like or log-like bitch accompanies everywhere the form of an otherwise sensible man, a dumbfounding, disgusting and septic ghost!
Lewis was not content with Olive’s verbal ‘confession of infidelity’. He appeared to be demanding what amounted to a signed affidavit that she had transmitted the disease. A humiliation too far, she rebelled, lashing back at him with a sad little note in early January:
I have admitted that I had it 3 weeks before you. There is no need for me to write it down, that sort of thing would never be mentioned in my life, and I am not in a law suit or anything like that I think you are disgusting asking me to write it down, what do you think I am. I am very angry at all this it makes me feel feed [sic] up with every thing. do not depress me too much or else I shall do away with my self.
This was the most explicit written statement of responsibility he was able to extract from her and the folded scrap of paper, scrawled across both sides, was carefully preserved with the others.
The demand for such sordid documentary evidence might be explained by a desire to punish Olive with a task akin to the schoolchild’s enforced repetition of what it must not do. Or perhaps her remark about a lawsuit was nearer the truth than she suspected, and Lewis was storing ammunition to fight any subsequent action for breach of promise she might bring against him.
At the very least it may have absolved him of responsibility for Olive and assuaged any guilt he might feel when he at last succeeded in abandoning her. The scrap of paper referring to her transgression proved, despite his own infidelities, despite his negligence and carelessness of her feelings, despite any past or future cruelty he might inflict upon her, that for once, lying in bed at the top of 4 Percy Street, early in 1915, he was the injured party.
The longest in that pathetic clutch of letters labelled ‘Confession of infidelity’ was resigned to parting. She quite understood that he did not wish to see her again:
you must know at the bottom of your heart that I rearly [sic] love you I have come to the time when I must say it, and rearly feel it. If I could only have said this 2 years ago, and you could have said the same to me I am sure we should have been very very happy, but I am afraid it has all been a mistake or something wrong. Well it is no use talking. I can see what course you intend to take.
Only the injured party’s strongest conviction of righteousness could have made his emotions proof against the tugging of Olive’s farewell:
I do hope you will find life easier in future without me to worry you . . . I felt very depressed yesterday and the Manager told me I must be in love. I only just saved myself from breaking down . . . I hope this letter will not tire you, but I hope you will read it through, because it is the last long letter I shall write to you, I have said all I have got to say with every good wish for your health and happiness. From your broken hearted Dunk.
But the postscript was a reminder that certain responsibilities still existed between them. Peter and his sister Betty were still in the care of Mrs Lewis but their mother had access to them when her employment at Fullers permitted. ‘I shall have one day off next week’, she wrote, ‘if I let you know the day before will you arrange about kiddies?’
*
During one of the periods when infirmity was in recession he wrote to Pound: ‘I am doing a power of painting. If I get my head blown off when I am pottering about Flanders, I shall have left something.’ Despite the war, he felt he had reason for optimism:
The excellent Mrs Turner is going to take a large studio or hall near Park Lane and there house my squadron of paintings, until after the war a large building is constructed for them in the rear of her house. She will pay the rent, furnish it, and I suppose supply a page boy or secretary: also a stage for Theatrical Performances, Lectures, etc.
It sounded like a new and improved Rebel Art Centre under his exclusive control.
The ‘power of painting’ included the completion of work commissioned by Mrs Turner in June 1914. About the time they began their affair, she asked him to decorate her drawing room at 33 Park Lane. During preliminary discussions he told her that he intended painting six wall panels for the room, but the details of these, together with the overall decorative scheme, Mrs Turner was to leave entirely to him. She agreed to pay him £250 for his work and enclosed an initial cheque for £100 with her letter confirming the commission.
However, in the first week of the war, she informed him that she could not, after all, afford the ‘complete set of furniture, rugs, lamps, etc.’ that his designs would necessitate her buying. She had hoped to have ‘a very unusual room’ but, on reflection, decided to leave the walls bare and use her old furniture instead. She promised to pay him, by the end of September, the £150 balance for the commission. ‘This seems only fair’, she said. Three days later she sent him a cheque for £50.
Lewis may already have begun work on the six panels by this time. It was decided he should go ahead and complete them as they were to be paid for anyway. By the end of the year they were nearly finished and Mrs Turner apologised again for having to give up the Drawing Room scheme ‘for the present’, implying it might be taken up again when the war was over. She suggested that, in the meantime, he might wish to exhibit the panels somewhere. ‘People ought to have a chance to see them’, she said.
In January she paid him a further £15. It may have been then that she discussed with him the larger enterprise he told Pound about. Perhaps she intended the six pictures, originally designed as panels for her drawing room, to form the decorative focus of the projected ‘large building . . . in the rear of her house’.
*
While the recrudescence of gonorrhoea prohibited the physical exertions of painting, let alone the half-mile walk from Percy Street to his studio, Lewis wrote three new opening chapters for his novel, as well as material for the next issue of Blast.* He also cast his editorial eye over other contributions. Some ‘excellent bits of scholarly ribaldry’ had come from T. S. Eliot. ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’ included the refrain ‘For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass’, while each verse of ‘The Ballad for Big Louise’ ended with the lines: ‘Put on your rough red drawers/And come to the Whore House Ball!’ Lewis longed to publish them but, mindful of the enforced excision of even the mildly offensive lines from Pound’s ‘Fratres Minores’ in the first issue, he was determined ‘to have no “Words ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger” ’.
*
The opening of the second London Group show at the Goupil Gallery on 5 March 1915 attracted a large crowd. The New Witness correspondent ‘never saw so many folk assembled for a private view before, except at the annual academies’. It gave the lie to those who prophesied war would bring about a lessening of interest in the modern movement. On the contrary, The New Witness seemed to regard the London Group as providing essential light relief in desperate times. ‘The public that interests itself in this kind of art is amused, tickled or shocked by the works it sees. It regards these [artists] as a new sort of clowns. It does not understand them or their work, nor does it want to.’
Jacob Epstein’s towering Rock Drill, a second-hand quarrying machine, tripod-mounted and straddled by a robot-like white plaster figure, dominated the exhibition. Lewis exhibited two canvases, Workshop and the six foot by five grid-like composition in earth colours called The Crowd. According to the Times critic this was as far as Vorticist asceticism could possibly go. The anonymous correspondent even came near to making the suggestion, somewhat provocative in time of war, that Lewis and his colleagues, Wadsworth and Roberts, were unpatriotic:
in our desire to relate them to something in the actual world, we can only call them Prussian in spirit. These painters seem to execute a kind of goose-step, where other artists are content to walk more or less naturally. Perhaps if the Junkers could be induced to take to art, instead of disturbing the peace of Europe, they would paint so and enjoy it.
Lewis was advised by friends ‘that to call you a “Prussian” at the present juncture is done with intent to harm, to cast a cloud over the movement, if possible, and moreover that it is actionable’. This was not the last time in his life that Wyndham Lewis would find himself stigmatised with alleged sympathy for the Teutonic jackboot.
*
Evidence of the interruption wrought by his venereal disease in Lewis’s output of oil paintings during the first half of 1915 may be gathered from the fact that, three months after the London Group show, he included the same two canvases in the Vorticist Exhibition at the Doré Gallery. On this occasion The Crowd was renamed Democratic Composition.
The Doré opening, on 10 June, must have been blighted by the news that the only sculptor represented in the exhibition, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, had been killed in France five days before. P. G. Konody, referring to the loss in his Observer review, suggested it ‘should disarm the anger which might otherwise be aroused in a good many people by the fact that the “Vorticists” continue their antics in times as serious and critical as the present’.
On the day of the private view, Mrs Turner sent Lewis a cheque for £35, bringing the amount paid for her six pictures to £200. Two of these had been included in the exhibition, catalogued as Two Shafts – Man and Woman, while the remaining four were still in Lewis’s possession. Mrs Turner had closed up her Park Lane house and had not yet thought of anywhere they could be stored. She wrote from Dunkerque, where she was busy setting up and organising a mobile field hospital. Apologising for not sending the remaining £50 owing to him, she promised she would pay it when she could. ‘Every penny I’ve got is going into my hospital’, she told him.
The day after the private view, hearing that a second issue of Blast was due to appear, and assuming that her former business partner was financially solvent once more, Kate Lechmere issued Lewis with a writ to recover the sum of £97 she had lent him to launch the first issue. Lewis wrote to her in an injured tone: ‘do you really intend to go on throwing mud which . . . must soil you at least as much as it dirties me? Is this quite the time to squabble sordidly in public?’ While confessing to ‘vagueness in business matters’ he thought that £40 or £50 was nearer the amount she had lent him. Besides, ‘the War has stopped art dead’, he told her. As a result his finances were as precarious as ever and the debt irrecoverable:
I have no money at all . . . Short of the sale of a few tables and chairs, the most venomous proceedings on your part could have no effect.
It may have been the pressure brought to bear on him from Lechmere’s writ that prompted the ‘very extraordinary letter’ he sent to Mrs Turner on 18 June and which she received in Dunkerque on the 23rd. It demanded immediate settlement of the £50 she owed him. Apart from that blunt message, its tone and contents can only be guessed at. ‘I had no idea that you were capable of writing me such a letter’, Mrs Turner replied.
She sent him a cheque by registered post. She was instructing her solicitor to collect the pictures and store them for her. She regretted that she would not be proceeding with her plan to rent the ‘large studio or hall near Park Lane’ in which to exhibit them. And she concluded: ‘It’s not worth your while being rude to me, you only lose a friend who might have some time been of service to you.’
Lewis had told Kate Lechmere that he was ‘shortly going to the Front’, and when his solicitor wrote to her solicitor on 22 June, he would have been portrayed as a man about to fight and possibly die for his country. As a result of his solicitor’s letter, although judgement was signed against Lewis for £97, together with £4 8s. 6d. in costs, it was agreed ‘that Miss Lechmere would not take steps to enforce the judgement until six months after the termination of the war.’*
Mrs Turner had suggested Lewis’s rudeness lost him a friend who might have been of service. In early July, having received the balance of his money, he nevertheless wrote asking a service of her. Smoothing over the harshness of his former letter, he summarised and excused it in Music Hall terms: ‘the poor artist (imaginary melodramatic figure) asked the rich woman (howls from the Gallery) for the settlement of an obligation a little forcibly.’ He then outlined his case:
I must join the Army. I have as little reason to be shot at once . . . as any artist in Europe, but have certain accomplishments (such as an unusual mastery of French) that might be of more use . . . than my trusty right arm, which, I flatter myself is rather a creative than a destructive limb.
Presumably thinking that the operation of her hospital scheme gave her a certain degree of influence in military circles, he wondered if she could pull strings on his behalf. ‘Can you be of any use to me?’ he asked her. ‘Are you willing to be of any use to me?’ He understood that interpreters got shot ‘at once’, and that a Second Lieutenant’s commission in the infantry was ‘a death warrant more or less’. He reasoned that his best chance of survival was as a private soldier but anticipated he ‘should find the ennuis and fatigues of that intolerable’. On reflection, his ambitions lay in three areas, what he described as ‘places of advantage’: a commission in the Army Service Corps, a commission in the Howitzer Brigade and, lastly, the secret service. And, lest she still held his previous missive against him, he concluded: ‘If you want to say anything disagreeable just don’t answer the letter.’
Mrs Turner’s reply, if any, has not survived.
*
Late in July the second issue of Blast was published. It had fewer pages than the first and was a dour companion to that brash tome of the previous year. With the harsh angularities of its cover design, black on off-white, it matched the gravity of its block-lettered subtitle: ‘WAR NUMBER’.
Over half the contributions were by Lewis himself, including ‘War Notes’, ‘Art Notes’, a ‘Review of Contemporary Art’ and the first instalment of ‘The Crowd Master’, a fictionalised account of his train journey from Berwick-upon-Tweed to London during the mobilisation. There were poems by Eliot, Pound, Hueffer, Dismorr and Saunders.
There was also a statement, ‘written from the Trenches’, by Gaudier-Brzeska affirming the continuity of art and nature in war. It was followed by the black-bordered announcement of his death in action at Neuville St Vaast.
*
War prohibited Lewis from spending his customary summer vacation in France. In early August he went instead to stay with the Wadsworth family at High Greenwood House, near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire. A childhood memory of Barbara Wadsworth suggests that the holiday got off to a bad start. He appeared in the kitchen doorway and the four-year-old exclaimed ‘Oh! Here’s dear fat old Wyndham Lewis come to visit us!’ Lewis glowered at the child and, she claimed, caught the next train back to London. A photograph of Lewis in cloth cap, tweeds and walking boots, however, suggests his departure was not so precipitate, and his ruffled feelings sufficiently smoothed to allow him a spell of healthy exercise.
*
A ‘Notice to the Public’ following the Editorial excused Blast’s delayed appearance as ‘due to the War chiefly’ and to the Editor’s (unspecified) recent illness. Subscribers were told that, since it was a publication run by painters who ‘do their work first, and, since they must, write about it afterwards’, Blast would not always appear on time. However, two further issues were confidently promised before January 1916.
This promise came close to being honoured. A letter postmarked Thursday 16 September informed Alick Schepeler that Blast would ‘commence appearing’ the following day and copies would reach her the following Thursday. Some time in October, Lewis wrote to Rutter: ‘I am getting Blast no. 3 out in 6 weeks or so, on quite different lines again to the last: with several full size two page colour blocks’. But this did not appear and no further mention was made of it. The ‘WAR NUMBER’ was to be the last.
In the late summer of that year Lewis carried out what was to be his final interior decorating commission. It is not known how much Rudolph Stulik paid him for transforming the small first-floor dining room in the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, nor even if money ever changed hands. When William Roberts painted three large panels in another part of the restaurant he was paid lavishly in free meals for a year. Lewis may have worked under a similar arrangement, perhaps being paid in cash and in kind. Stulik had an especially soft spot for his neighbour at 4 Percy Street. ‘I vould do anyting for Mr Lewis’, the Viennese proprietor was fond of saying.
With Helen Saunders acting as his assistant, Lewis had finished the room by the end of the year. Invitation cards were printed, on production of which the Vorticist Room could be viewed daily, from 11 in the morning until 6, for the last three weeks of January. The correspondent for Colour described it in the April 1916 issue:
Gay Vorticist designs cover the walls, and call from the tablecloth. They are good in colour, and very decorative, although their meaning is not self-evident.
For years afterwards, the words ‘Vorticist Paintings’ set Stulik’s establishment apart from other restaurants listed in Baedeker’s handbook for London and its Environs. However, like the decorations in Lady Drogheda’s dining room, like those in Hueffer’s study at South Lodge – ‘very violent and explosive’ with accompanying red doors and skirting boards executed in November 1914 – and like the six panels designed for, but never installed in, Mary Borden Turner’s drawing room, the designs of ‘The Vorticist Room’ in the Tour Eiffel have long since been dispersed or destroyed.
*
The publishing destiny of Lewis’s Tarr was linked at this time with that of another first novel. Serialisation in The Egoist of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ended in September 1915 and in early October Ezra Pound was trying to find a publisher to bring it out in book form. Responding to a remark by Lewis that the novels would be in competition, Pound decided not to make two rival claims on a publisher’s attention at the same time and agreed to withhold Joyce’s manuscript from John Lane until after Tarr had been submitted. Lane received Lewis’s novel in late October or early November. His caution about publishing what he described as ‘sexual disagreeableness’ would have been redoubled by the criminal proceedings being brought against Methuen for D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. It was not surprising, then, that by late November he had rejected Tarr, on the advice of his reader, as being ‘too strong a book’. The decision incensed Pound: ‘God damn the fucking lot of ’em, readers, hog washers, etc.’
For most of December Lewis’s novel remained in the hands of another publisher: Werner Laurie.
Pound outlined contingency plans should Tarr receive the same treatment there as it had from Lane. ‘If Laurie rejects,’ he told Lewis, ‘you are to write to Miss H. S. Weaver . . . and make an appointment. I suggest that you call and read her the opening of the novel.’
Harriet Shaw Weaver, co-editor of The Egoist, meanwhile, was waiting to learn the fate of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. If no other publisher could be found for it, she intended publishing Joyce’s novel in book form under the imprint of the Egoist Press. If, however, it was placed elsewhere, Miss Weaver might consider publishing Tarr instead. And so a curious interdependence developed between the two novels, as Joyce’s followed Lewis’s from one publisher to another. If Tarr was rejected by Laurie, Joyce’s novel might be accepted, which might in turn mean Miss Weaver would accept Tarr. If, on the other hand, Laurie rejected A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it would be published by Miss Weaver and all Lewis could expect for his novel from that quarter was serialisation in The Egoist.
Werner Laurie rejected Tarr on 22 December. The reader’s report, as Lewis recounted to Pound, said that the book ‘dealt entirely with Germans, and English people who were not much better’. Whilst conceding it to be ‘extremely “clever” ’, the report ‘was a long and gloomy statement of antipathy’.
Following Pound’s advice, Lewis went to see Miss Weaver at 11 o’clock on the morning of 30 December. The following day he reported:
I read her the first 4 pages, and then left off, as I was sure she would not like it, and we were in an empty room under depressing conditions. I did not leave the MSS with her: I thought I must make some further move with it.
He concluded: ‘I am afraid I may have bungled the Weaver business.’
Even when she had at last been given the opportunity of reading Part I of the manuscript for herself, Miss Weaver did not like Lewis’s novel. ‘I should class it as of the same family as Mr Bernard Shaw’s plays’, she told him:
‘diabolically clever’, yes, and very interesting, but not a work of art. The characters appear to me mechanical automatons, wound up in order to spout forth opinions, instead of breathing with life.
Despite her reservations she wished to publish an abridged, serialised version in The Egoist. By this stage Lane had rejected Joyce’s novel and if Laurie followed suit, Miss Weaver was to publish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man herself. In the meantime she offered Lewis £50 for the serial rights, together with a promise that the type for the shortened Tarr would be kept set up ‘so that it would be easy . . . afterwards to have it printed as a book (with the deleted portions added).’
With the fate of Joyce’s novel still uncertain, Pound advised Lewis to accept Miss Weaver’s offer: ‘£50 now and . . . the chance of getting another wad . . . when you publish in a volume.’
*
At the end of 1915 Lewis confided his economic state to Pound. He owed £7.10s. in back rent. He owed £10 to the Harlesden printer, £4 to a furniture man, £1 to his frame-maker and had sundry other debts amounting to a further £10. He was also at least £25 in arrears with maintenance payments: ‘the upkeep of my son and heir etc.’ as he put it.
Set against this he was hoping to receive £50 for his book, £10 for a cover design and £30 from Quinn for four drawings. The £90 would allow him to pay his debts and leave ‘a little margin for [his] pocket’. Pound was also working to get more money from Quinn, advising him ‘that THIS IS the time to buy a big picture . . . by Mr W.L.’
* The offices of Bircham & Co., Solicitors managing the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust. The cache of papers stored there was withheld by the Trustees from the main collection of Lewis’s papers, sold to Cornell University in the 1960s and 1970s.
* The quotation is taken from a manuscript at Cornell and first published as ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Cantleman-Crowdmaster sections seven and eight’, edited by Robert Edward Murray, Enemy News 35, Winter 1992. Although the advice is attributed to a fictional character, ‘that old devil Samber’, Lewis told Geoffrey Grigson that it originally came from Sickert.
* He may also have written The Ideal Giant at this time – a play set in the Restaurant Gambetta, a thinly disguised Tour Eiffel complete with Austrian proprietor following his stomach about among the tables, ‘playing with it like a large ball’.
* According to Miss Lechmere, when she attempted to pursue the action in 1920, Lewis appeared in court, ‘pleaded poverty and added that he had just returned from fighting for his country’. As a result the court took his part and Lechmere’s suit failed.