‘You need sympathy, sympathy, sympathy’
On 22 May 1917 Lewis wrote to Pound from Cosham, near Southampton: ‘Our advance party sails this afternoon, and we are standing by. Two days should see us pushing forward on what the Daily Mail, Sphere, Morning Post and John Bull describe as the Great Adventure . . . Au revoir. A bientôt!’ They were not taking their guns. In the chaos of imminent embarkation no one seemed certain of what precisely they were being sent to do. Whether they were going as ‘reinforcement to sadly depleted Trench Mortars’, or to take over captured German guns, 2nd Lieutenant Lewis did not know. ‘This is of course unsatisfactory.’
The next day he told Quinn: ‘Going to war is a most complicated job for such an untidy man as myself. I am making a last frantic effort to adjust my affairs, and send a blast of military orderliness through my chaos of papers and interests.’ He had compiled an inventory of his writings, paintings and drawings. Some drawings were to be found at Pound’s flat and some at Helen Saunders’s. A number of paintings, including those belonging to Miss Turner and the Christopher Columbus that was ‘quite unfit for exhibition’ and to be painted out by Miss Saunders, were in his mother’s house at 43 Oxford Road, Ealing. In the event of a posthumous retrospective exhibition ‘in which it was desired to get together all [his] things’, there was a list of names including Quinn, Baker, Lechmere, Fry, John and Madame Strindberg, all of whom possessed paintings or drawings.
His literary legacy was to consist of five books: Tarr; a collection of already published essays and stories to be called Our Wild Body; his critical writings collected as Kill John Bull with Art; the play set in Stulik’s restaurant, plus short fiction produced since the outbreak of war, to be called Miss Godd and the Ideal Giant; and The Enemy of the Stars, which might include fragments of a play written 15 years before, together with sonnets from that period selected by Sturge Moore and Pound. In addition, there was a possible sixth book called The Bull Gun, comprising ‘sketches, stories etc. that I may find time to write at the Front’.
*
On 24 May the 330 Siege Battery, consisting of 6 officers and 154 other ranks, boarded the SS Viper at Southampton. The formal roll of officers noted in the Battery’s War Diary included the name of 2nd Lieutenant P. Wyndham Lewis. The following day they arrived at Le Havre and the congenial limbo of Number 2 Rest Camp. For the next week 330 Siege Battery led ‘a pleasant life in tents’ and waited. On 3 June they received orders to proceed up the line.
At 2 o’clock the following morning they entrained at the Gare Maritime and arrived in Rouen at 6. From there motor lorries took them to the headquarters of the 69th Heavy Artillery Garrison near La Clytte. Here the Battery was split up into five detachments and seconded to other units. Lewis and an unspecified number of other ranks went as reinforcements to the 224 Siege Battery.
By 6 June he was in the firing line for the first time. ‘Whizzing, banging, swishing and thudding completely surround me, and I almost jog up and down on my camp bed as though I were riding in a country wagon or a dilapidated taxi’, he told Pound. ‘I am, in short . . . in the midst of an unusually noisy battle.’ Most of the noise came from their own 6-inch 26 hundredweight guns; ‘the Germans are making a similar din a mile or so away!’ he explained. He was about four miles southwest of the smashed town of Ypres, opposite the village of Wytschaete. Censorship, however, prohibited him from giving Pound the whereabouts of ‘this unfortunate conflict’.
He wrote a reassuring letter to his mother:
Many more people are wounded than killed. One of the officers of the Battery the day before yesterday got seventeen wounds: but all of them together did not amount to a mortal wound, or a permanently serious one. – Anyway it is all pure chance.
He promised to send her a field postcard two or three times a week to show he was still alive. ‘If you do not hear for some days, however, do not be anxious. It will probably only mean that I have missed a post.’ He also told her that at this part of the line gas shells came over practically every night. ‘This necessitates sitting sometimes for two hours or more with gasmasks, and makes regular sleep out of the question.’
That same night he was slumbering soundly enough in his dugout when the shells came over. He told Pound that he was gassed in his sleep because the sentry had not realised he was there and omitted to wake him.
The morning of 7 June was a momentous one in the Ypres Salient. After two years of comparative calm there was to be a push forward by General Plumer’s 2nd Army. This was the start of a major campaign: the 3rd Battle of Ypres. At 3.10 a.m., 19 enormous mines were simultaneously exploded in tunnels under the German front line at Messines Ridge. It was, at the time, the largest man-made explosion in history. The shock wave was felt in London. Over 12 miles to the south, in Lille, a University Professor of Geology sprang from his bed, convinced that an earthquake was in progress. Lewis, however, made no mention of the cataclysmic event either in his letters or in his memoirs, and it must be assumed that he slept through it. The explosion, huge as it was, did not make an unusual amount of noise because of the muffling effect of depth on the subterranean charges. All the same he must have been profoundly asleep indeed not to have been woken up by the shock wave.
He cannot have inhaled more than a whiff of the gas, because by about 11 a.m. he was able to visit an Observation Post on the Wytschaete Ridge. From there he watched as New Zealand troops attacked the village of Messines: ‘an immense and smoky struggle . . . tanks advancing, cavalry . . . tanks hit, air fights – panorama of war, in fact’. He returned to his Battery and, in the late afternoon, set out in the 2nd Army’s wake with his Company Commander to reconnoitre their new front line, gained a few hours before. It was an opportunity to see at first hand the effects of high explosive. They passed ‘through the desolation of the Bosche concrete dugouts in a wilderness of charred spikes that was formerly a wood, everything . . . pits and gashes: dead Germans lying about like bloody waxworks.’ Lewis picked up a copy of the Vossische Zeitung from one smashed enemy trench. He was to spend that evening reading the newspaper with the aid of his German dictionary.
The 2nd Lieutenant and his Company Commander stopped their exploration at the crest of Messines Ridge. By the end of the day the British front line had advanced in certain places more than two miles. At the close of his second day in action Lewis had seen a lot of war. ‘I have been particularly lucky’, he told Pound, ‘in dropping into the midst of a very big attack.’
The attack had been successful and all was fairly peaceful on 8 June, ‘like a quiet day in the country; no row, fine sun . . . a half hour’s shooting, more calm.’ If Miss Saunders could send him the first eight pages of his story, ‘The Soldier of Humour’, destined for publication in The Little Review later in the year, he thought he would have time to make alterations.
Ten days or so later he contracted trench fever. His face, neck and testicles became swollen, the condition being not unlike mumps. Also his tongue turned green.
By 24 June he was in the Casualty Clearing Station eight miles behind the front line at Bailleul. On the 28th he was taken further west to the 46th Stationary Hospital at Étaples, just south of Boulogne.
The first day of July found him in good spirits; ‘the best of jolliest and jauntiest health and Humour’. He was considering a piece of writing for the theatre. Combative metaphors for the creative process and its effects upon an audience were drawn from his artillery experience. ‘My head is swarming with dramatic fragments’, he told Pound:
if they could be integrated into an 8. inch Play, they would make a fine black fountain of dung and smoke in the midst of the Unseen Canaille, detailed charts of whose positions I have long been provided with!
A week later his condition had improved. ‘My balls are smaller and less troublesome: I have less (or usually no) pain in my eyes. I am almost well.’ He was anxious to hear the results of Quinn’s negotiations with the New York publisher Knopf. Much depended upon a profitable US sale of Tarr. He felt that he had spoiled any chance of decent English sales by having it brought out piecemeal. ‘Any people who had read a chapter or two in the Egoist, and got sick of the serial nuisance, will never read it as a book.’
Meanwhile, his old Battery, the 330, had been sent north, from the Salient to the Belgian coast, where they were on temporary attachment to the Navy and engaged in mounting 7-inch Naval Siege Guns. Preparations were under way for a projected offensive against the port of Zeebrugge, where the German U-boat force, the main menace to British shipping, was based. Lewis’s servant wrote to him on 9 July with the news that there had been casualties. Gunner McMahon had been killed two days before and several others wounded. Gunner Coombe was severely wounded on the 10th and died on the 11th.
The day he received this letter, Lewis wrote again to Pound. He had now heard from Quinn and the negotiations with Knopf for Tarr were moving apace. Quinn expected that the war would continue for another three years and, evidently considering the possibility, if not likelihood, of Lewis being killed in action, urged him to appoint executors. The news of McMahon’s death, and the prospect of an imminent return to his hard-pressed and lethally shelled Battery, made Lewis take the lawyer’s advice seriously. Pound was the obvious candidate to execute his literary estate and he had already thought vaguely of asking Pound, Sturge Moore and Guy Baker ‘to execute for my children, and keep an eye on my boy occasionally’. He now felt that a more precise arrangement ought to be made. ‘I wonder if I should send you a legal document resembling a will’, he asked Pound. ‘I would rather execute your books than your children’, Pound replied.
The July issue of The Egoist had arrived at Étaples. Lewis was irritated to read, in the current instalment of Tarr, during the duel scene between Soltyk and Kreisler:
Soltyk, in rear of the others, struggled with his bile. He slipped into his mouth a sedative tablet, oxide of bromium and heroin.
It was a reminder of the speed with which certain parts of the novel had been written, and of the slapdash state of the typescript he had left with Pound. ‘Now, here we have another of my bloody dummies. That is to say I wanted to specify the sedative tablet taken, and for the time being put down the above extraordinary concoction . . . Obviously before appearing in book form these things must be dealt with.’ When Tarr was published in America the following year the sedative became ‘oxide of bromium and aniseed’. Other ‘dummies’, reproduced by the English printer, had been appearing throughout the serialisation. They were mostly approximations of abusive German epithets he had no doubt heard shouted at him by Ida Vendel but had never seen written down.
On 17 July he was issued with a Transport Order for ‘Un Officier, Armée Anglais’ from Étaples to No. 8 Michelham Convalescent Home, Dieppe, where he was admitted two days later, ‘convalescent, sick’. It was a large hotel converted into a nursing establishment. ‘The food is plentiful, good, Hotel like’, he told his mother.
He stayed for a month, his ‘disease . . . oozing out of [him] in the rays of the sun’, then, convalescence over, he returned to the front. It was a different front from the one he had left. ‘I have come to a tedious spot’, he told Pound:
It is really extremely bad. The parapet of one of our guns was smashed last night. We were shelled and gassed all night: I had my respirator on for two solid hours. There is only one bright side to the picture: a good concrete dugout.
He had rejoined the 330 Siege Battery on 13 August. Prohibited from giving Pound his exact location, he passed on the information in a form that no enemy spy who might intercept the letter would understand. ‘I am now not so far from the port where I did my Timon drawings one summer.’ Dunkerque. The Battery position was in fact some 15 miles away from the French port, at Oost-Duinkerke, in Belgium, on an extensive stretch of sand dunes just west of Nieuwpoort. The officers’ ‘dugout’ was the remains of a whitewashed cottage on the road that ran along the edge of the dunes. It had been earlier converted by the French into a virtually bomb-proof shelter. The thickness of the walls and roof had been more than trebled with a lining of concrete. This meant that it could withstand even a direct hit, and in the couple of weeks the officers of 330 Siege Battery had been in residence it had sustained several. Inside there was a dormitory, mess and kitchen.
It was the Battery cook who greeted Lewis when he arrived. ‘You’ve come to a nice place, sir! They never stop shelling that road. You’ve come to a hot place. It’s a little hell away from hell.’
Two days later on 15 August the concrete dugout sustained another direct hit while Lewis and his fellow officers were having lunch.
*
Back in London, Pound was preparing a publishable text of Tarr for dispatch to New York. His task was made difficult because parts of the original typescript, edited down for serialisation, had apparently gone astray at The Egoist’s printers in West Norwood. As a result he was forced to plug gaps with printed pages from the September 1916, February, April and June 1917 issues of The Egoist. By 17 August the textual collage was complete. ‘I have got Tarr together, all together at last and Miss S[aunders] is going over the foreign expressions’, he informed Lewis.
*
When you come to the end of a per - fect day,
And you sit a - lone with your thought,
While the chimes ring out with a car - ol gay,
For the joy the day has brought;
Do you think what the end of a per - fect day
Can mean to a ti - red heart,
When the sun goes down with a flam - ing ray,
And the dear friends have to part?
It was Sunday, 19 August and the voice of Alma Gluck sounded through the ‘pitch-dark, dank and chuck-full’ dugout on the Nieuwpoort road. Big shells howled over and exploded in the dunes beyond. Lewis had withdrawn as far from his brother officers and their music as the 12 by 8 foot mess would allow. ‘There is one awful shadow over my existence here: and that is the too frightful incompatibility of my companions.’ He was writing to Pound but the phonograph was an irritating distraction. The 20 or so recordings of popular songs ‘they’ had introduced into the cramped living quarters were the most recent horror of his wartime existence. A combination of Alma Gluck and continuous enemy bombardment was getting on his nerves.
He had been on duty from 4.30 until 8 a.m., and they had been hammered with 11-inch naval shells just before breakfast: ‘craters big enough to put a horse and cart in’. The shelling had gone on all day. ‘As you probably know,’ he told Pound, ‘a shell is most dangerous when it falls on top of your head. It is next most dangerous at from 200 to 400 or 500 yards – a big one that is. We get nothing but big ones.’ But he professed not to mind the constant danger of maiming or death by shrapnel. ‘In fact I am both glad and ashamed to say that I rather enjoy it.’ His major bugbear was the company he was forced to keep.
Someone put another record on the turntable and lowered the needle to the spinning shellac. A sugary duet in waltz time from The Firefly crackled out:
You need sym – pa - thy,
Sym – pa - thy, sym – pa - thy.
I’m just try - ing to be friend - ly and gen - tle
But not sen - ti - men - tal;
So if I should touch your hand,
Don’t mis - un - der - stand
Its mean – ing:
You must know
I’m but show - ing sym – pa – thy
Lewis poured his accumulated bile for his companions into the letter: ‘They’ve just put on “Sympathy”; may their next fart split up their backs, and asphyxiate them with the odour of their souls!’ Later that night his gun pit was hit by three shells in succession:
Well this is the end of a per - fect day.
Near the end of a jour - ney too;
But it leaves a thought that is big and strong,
With a wish that is kind and true;
For mem -’ry has paint - ed this per - fect day,
With col - ours that nev - er will fade,
And we find at the end of a per - fect day,
The soul of a friend we’ve made.
The following day he was at Battery Headquarters and he continued his letter:
As I left this morning from the distance I . . . had the satisfaction of seeing an 11˝ shell fall in the middle of our gun positions.
When he got back from Headquarters he learned that shrapnel from the explosion he had observed with such equanimity had wounded Staff Sergeant Scotland and Sergeants Smith and Nobles. Smith, Lewis’s Sergeant, died of his wounds the next day. Lewis had to write to his widow. He told her how popular her husband had been.
By the following Saturday, Pound had at last completed his assemblage of Tarr. Helen Saunders having finished correcting the ‘furrin languidges’, the parcel was dispatched to New York by registered post.
Meanwhile, Lewis’s sleeping bag, hanging in the doorway to air, had been ripped through by fragments of a shell that landed five yards away. Their dugout had sustained its fifth direct hit and was being repaired. It was five days after his Sergeant had died. There was ‘a little extra work’, he reported. ‘Otherwise humdrum.’
One of the coincidences of war brought an old rival as neighbour. Lewis discovered that T. E. Hulme was in the next battery. No visits or respects were paid. And it was there, in the dunes near Nieuwpoort, that the ‘heavy philosopher’ was blown to pieces:
I did not see him hit, but everything short of that, for we could see their earthworks, and there was nothing in between to intercept the view. I watched from ours, his battery being punched full of deep craters, with large naval shells: and from the black fountains of earth that spouted up, in breathless succession, occasional debris hurtled around us as we looked on. I remember a splintered baulk of wood sailing over and striking the dugout at my back.
Lewis’s account, written two decades later, was a fabrication. When Hulme was killed on 28 September 1917, Lewis was over 20 miles away, back in the Ypres Salient.
*
On 31 August the 330 Siege Battery moved south to billets at La Belle Vue near Wormhoudt. The following day they moved again to the Eecke area near to St Sylvestre Cappel. ‘Before going to our new position (a bad one, they say)’, Lewis wrote, ‘we are billeted for 4 days in a pleasant country.’
Unfortunately the phonograph had sustained the journey from Nieuwpoort in full working order:
I need sym – pa - thy,
Sym – pa - thy, sym – pa - thy.
Tho’ I’m try - ing to be prop - er and nice
I’m not made of ice;
And if my poor heart skips a beat
Each time we meet,
Don’t blame me
Tho’ I know
You’re but show – ing sym – pa – thy.
‘Should I ever in after life meet the man who composed that song,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler, ‘I shall – the mere thought of what I shall do makes my flesh creep.’
He had a new Commanding Officer. Captain F.J.C. Hindson was a native of Hull. Lewis railed to Pound about ‘the ways of the Army, in giving such unspeakable, foolish and dismal muck a Battery’. As he wrote, the CO was close by. He was stooped, balding and had a hanging crimson underlip.
There was nothing much to do that first week as they waited for their guns and stores to arrive from Calais, and when his request for leave of absence to get himself a restaurant meal was challenged for the third time, Lewis told Captain Hindson: ‘I am in your Battery, not in your Sunday School.’ The CO drummed his fingers for some minutes and blushed.
On 13 September their guns arrived and were installed on a stretch of road southwest of Ypres.
The Ordnance BL 6˝ Mk 19 on travelling carriage Mk 7A, its official nomenclature, was a monstrous piece of field artillery. It weighed just over ten tons and was 27 feet long from the mouth of its barrel to the end of the gun carriage. With the barrel raised to its maximum elevation of 38 degrees it could hurl a 100-lb shrapnel round a distance of ten miles.
On 15 September, the biggest artillery bombardment yet employed in the war began. A total of over 4 million rounds were fired from the 3,000 British guns.
Lewis’s Battery was a day late joining in. Sight gear for the 6-inch MK XIXs was received from base and fitted on the 15th. At noon the following day the four guns of 330 Siege Battery opened fire on the heavily fortified rubble of Zonnebeke.
There was still tension in the dugout. Surprisingly, following the retort about Sunday School, Captain Hindson was not unfavourably disposed to Lewis. But an argument with another officer had created an atmosphere of dogged attrition. ‘We sit dead opposite each other in the Mess,’ he reported, ‘and . . . do not exchange conversation, or extend to each other the usual courtesies.’ In order to get away from the battery for a while he was even prepared to volunteer for particularly dangerous jobs.
Consequently, he was Forward Observation Officer on top of a section of ridge 400 yards behind his own front line and some 600 yards from the Germans’. His position afforded him a vivid impression of the effect of artillery fire. ‘I . . . had the extreme gratification of seeing, in the midst of our barrage, a large Bosche fly into the air as it seemed a few feet below me . . . I looked down into the German front line,’ he told Pound, ‘as you might into Church Street.’
It had been a two-hour walk from his own Battery to this Observation Post. On the way he saw further grisly evidence of enemy shelling. One recent Scottish corpse evoked the bizarre recollection of a picture he had once seen in the Louvre*: ‘head blown off so that his neck, level with the collar of his tunic reminded you of sheep in butchers’ shops, or a French Salon painting of a Moroccan headsman.’
Communicating with his Battery from this Observation Post he registered a barrage of shrapnel on the church at Zonnebeke. ‘I was glad that it was a presumably empty ruin that I was guiding the bursts upon’, he confessed. ‘I am truly not sanguinary except when confronted by an imbecile; not, thank God, from lack of stomach. Too much sense. Alas, too much sense.’
Lewis’s position was itself a target for the enemy’s guns, and he and his party of signallers were shelled steadily for five hours before withdrawing.
At zero-hour, 5.40 a.m., on 20 September, the offensive for which the British bombardment had been devastating preparation was launched along a front of about 8 miles from Langemarck in the north to Hollebeke on the Ypres–Comines canal in the south. The guns of 330 Siege Battery fired for six hours in support of the 1st Anzac Corps’ attack and capture of the western part of Polygon Wood. On the 26th, at 5.50 a.m., the second stage of the offensive began: the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions in conjunction with British formations captured the rest of Polygon Wood, and Zonnebeke. The total number of casualties sustained by the seven attacking divisions was 15,375.
*
Three days later Lewis wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver. He thanked her for serialising his novel in The Egoist and supposed she had by then heard of its sale to Knopf. But he had been thinking: ‘is Tarr complete? Is there not a page missing somewhere? If there is, and you remember which and where it is, will you be so good as to send me the two numbers of The Egoist preceding, and the two succeeding this hiatus . . . I might then be able to remedy it. – I have a recollection that it has something to do with the character Butcher.’
*
Between 30 September and 2 October the four MK XIX guns of 330 Siege Battery were moved to a new position two miles to the east, following the advancing British Front Line. Map reference I16c 2.6 was five hundred yards from the great gigot-shaped body of water that was Zillebeke Lake and just behind a place known as the Moated Grange. It was equidistant from a Hellfire Corner to the north and a Hellblast Corner to the south. On the same day that the relocation was completed a German aeroplane bombed the new position, and the Battery Diary for 2 October recorded 11 men wounded. Casualties included all but two of Lewis’s detachment, including his Sergeant, the second in six weeks. ‘I have lost, I am sorry to say, many a pleasant companion by this – Old Bill amongst them . . . He dreamt the night before that the whole detachment had been wiped out.’ While fellow officers remained for the most part ‘poisonous refuse’, it was clear that Lewis’s contempt did not extend to the other ranks. He sent the customary platitudes back to wives and mothers of the dead. ‘They are perfectly easy to write, for the more crudely conventional the better. But it is a nasty official task.’
Whenever military duties allowed, he endeavoured to fill in the ‘missing parts’ of his novel. Miss Weaver had sent him the September 1916 and May 1917 issues of The Egoist, in which it seems the gaps had occurred. But it was a difficult task, ‘like trying to remember the shape of a cloud’.*
Ten days after the air attack, Lewis’s gun pit behind the Moated Grange was ‘a melancholy place’, the inadequately reinforced division ‘crawling about like a mutilated insect’. He was still volunteering for dangerous excursions to observation posts, and he supplied Pound with a thumbnail sketch of himself engaged in such activity: ‘a bulging figure covered with mud, with haversacks, field-glasses, etc. hanging round it, plodding through a spacious and sinister desert, at the head of a small party of signallers, loaded in their turn with coils of wire, lucas lamps, telephone-cases etc. – all suffused with mud.’
Around the middle of October he escaped these glutinous conditions for an evening, and had dinner in the town of Cassel, about 20 miles behind the lines. He recognised a familiar face at a neighbouring table. Below the face, a Major’s crown glistened on the shoulder. It was William Orpen: Slade Scholar, Associate of the Royal Academy and now an Official War Artist for the Department of Information. The year before he had been in the ranks, but a commission to paint pictures for his country brought him an officer’s commission as well.
Despite having been placed upon the proscribed list in Blast only two years before, the Major was glad to see his old Slade contemporary. He proffered whisky got from Haig’s mess, he said, that very morning. Lewis must have envied him his ‘cushy’ job, living in an excellent hotel miles from the mud and shrapnel, with occasional sketching trips into ‘Hell’. Years later, Lewis recalled their conversation and how the Irish painter pronounced the word as ‘Hail’:
‘It’s hell isn’t it? It must be hell!’
‘It’s Goya, it’s Delacroix – all scooped out and very El Greco,’ replied Lewis. ‘But not hell.’
‘Ah yes, it must be hell!’
‘Hell sometimes for the infantry. But it’s merely a stupid nightmare – it’s not real.’
‘Same thing!’, retorted Orpen.
‘Damn Orpen anyhow’, Pound wrote when Lewis told him of the encounter.
The prospect of turning his painting talents to the war effort did not immediately occur to Lewis. He did, however, feel the need for some sort of change. Writing to Pound from the 46th Stationary Hospital in July, he had mentioned a transfer to Intelligence:
I want to be in another Push or two. After that, there will be nothing to gain by remaining at the Front, practically nothing more to see or experience . . . Life . . . is only justifiable as a spectacle: the moment at which it becomes harrowing and stale, and no aesthetic purpose is any longer served, War would be better exchanged for Diplomacy, Intelligence!
He estimated this moment would arrive in about two and a half months time. ‘That’, he added, ‘is giving myself a good number of opportunities of ending my existence.’
When he encountered Orpen at dinner a little over three months later, the moment was overdue. He wrote to Pound the following day listing jobs his knowledge of French, German and even Spanish qualified him for:
Railway Transport Officer . . . District Purchasing Officer, Prison Camps, Deputy Assistant Provost Marshal, Intelligence jobs, and War Office jobs.
He did not mention the job of Official War Artist. And when he had dinner with Orpen again a little later and was introduced to a young man called De Trafford from Intelligence, it was on that branch of the Service that his sights seemed to be set.
*
In between Lewis’s two dinners in Cassel, on Thursday 18 October, some two thousand copies of the current issue of The Little Review were delivered as usual to the New York Post Office from Margaret C. Anderson’s headquarters at 24 West 16th Street, Manhattan.
Second-class postage had been paid and any second-class matter of a dubious nature delivered to the Post Office was brought to the attention of the Superintendent of second-class mail. So it was that Mr Frederick G. Mulker came to read a story about a soldier and a village girl, called ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’. He thought that parts of it contravened section 211 of the United States Criminal Code and accordingly referred it to Mr Thomas G. Patten, Postmaster of the City of New York. It was Patten’s assistant, Thomas F. Murphy, who wrote to the solicitor for the United States Post Office in Washington, the Honorable William H. Lamar, requesting a ruling. He enclosed a copy of the October Little Review and had marked the following lines in the story’s final paragraph:
At their third meeting he brought her a ring. Her melting gratitude was immediately ligotted with strong arms, full of the contradictory and offending fire of the spring. On the warm earth consent flowed up into her body from all the veins of the landscape. The nightingale sang ceaselessly in the small wood at the top of the field where they lay. He grinned up towards it, and once more turned to the devouring of his mate. He felt that he was raiding the bowels of Nature; not fecundating the Aspasias of our flimsy flesh, or assuaging, or competing with, the nightingale.
The first sentence of Section 211 of the United States Criminal Code comprised exactly 275 words. Even in the tide of ponderous legal documentation* that was shortly to flow across the bench of the Southern District Court of New York, section 211 was mercifully summarised as follows:
Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious, and every filthy book, pamphlet . . . writing . . . or other publication of an indecent character . . . is hereby declared to be non-mailable matter and shall not be conveyed in the mails or delivered from any post-office or by any letter carrier.
Lewis had been well aware of the ease with which contemporary writing could fall foul of such a statute: witness his ‘naif determination to have no “Words ending in -Uck, -Unt or -Ugger” ’ in the pages of Blast. He had even toned down that last paragraph of ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ earlier in the year, excising the lines:
That night he spat out, in gushes of thick delicious rage, all the lust that had gathered in his body . . . He bore down on her as though he wished to mix her body into the soil, and pour his seed into a more methodless matter, the brown phalanges of floury land. As their bodies shook and melted together . . .
While the New York Postmaster’s Office was awaiting Lamar’s ruling, Margaret Anderson had no idea that the October issue had been held up. It was only when she received complaints from her subscribers* that she went to the Post Office and was told that the matter could be taken up with Mr Lamar.
It was at this point that John Quinn entered the affair. Representing Miss Anderson he sent Lamar a four-page letter on 5 November, expressing his professional opinion that Lewis’s story did ‘not come within gunshot of violating the statute or any Federal statute’. He felt sure that, upon reading it, Lamar would agree that ‘there is nothing either lewd or lascivious or indecent in it or anything that is calculated to corrupt the morals of any of the readers of The Little Review.’
After due consideration, on 7 November, Lamar wrote to the New York Postmaster, T. G. Patten:
Referring to the October issue of The Little Review . . . I have to advise you that this issue of this publication is regarded as unmailable under Section 211 of the Criminal Code, Section 480 of the Postal laws and Regulations of 1913. You will please notify the publisher promptly of this ruling.
The following day Patten duly notified Miss Anderson. The two thousand copies of the ‘unmailable’ October issue could be withdrawn from the Pennsylvania Terminal Station by any representative presenting authority to receive them.
On 20 November Miss Anderson instituted an action against the Postmaster of the City of New York and a subpoena was served on Thomas G. Patten. He was ordered ‘to show cause why injunction should not be issued . . . enjoining and restraining defendant, his agents, servants and employees, from treating the October issue of The Little Review as non-mailable matter.’
Letters passed from Patten to the Postmaster General in Washington, Mr A. S. Burleson, and from Burleson to Thomas W. Gregory, the Attorney General. Gregory then instructed the New York District Attorney, Francis G. Caffey, ‘to protect the interests of the Government in this matter.’
The motion for injunction was argued before the Honorable Augustus Noble Hand on 26 November, John Quinn in support; Joseph A. Burdeau, Special Assistant US Attorney, in opposition.
Margaret Anderson stated in her affidavit that ‘“The Little Review” is not mailed to girls’ grammar schools and does not cater to girls’ seminaries, nor has it any day nurseries or children’s schools on its lists.’ It had, however, ‘more than fifty public libraries on its books, both in the United States and Canada, who are holding bound volumes . . . as a literary asset.’
On Tuesday, 4 December 1917, ‘at 10.30 o’clock in the forenoon of said day, at the office of the Clerk of the United States District Court, Southern District of New York’, the Honorable Augustus Noble Hand signed his pronouncement on the motion of complaint brought by Margaret C. Anderson against Thomas G. Patten: ‘it is ORDERED, ADJUDGED and DECREED that the said motion be and the same hereby is in all respects denied.’
The effective suppression of ‘Cantleman’s Spring Mate’ by the New York Post Office’s decision to regard it as unmailable cannot in all fairness be regarded as a notable martyrdom of the Modern Movement. It is of interest primarily as being the only occasion on which a work by Wyndham Lewis was judged to be obscene. Over the next 20 years three of his books would be suppressed and the prospects of a fourth damaged by a circulating library boycott, but his name would never again be connected, in a court of law, with the words ‘lewd’, ‘lascivious’, ‘filthy’ or ‘indecent’.
*
Lewis escaped from ‘Hell’ without a scratch. Late in October he received a telegram informing him that his mother was dangerously ill with pneumonia and he was granted compassionate leave.
Shortly before this he had a narrow escape. At 4.30 in the morning of 24 October a shrapnel burst in the dugout wounded 2nd Lieutenants Underhill and Dyne. Pound told Quinn: ‘his life was only saved because he was taking some extra duty and the officers whom he relieved were sleeping where he might have been.’
Ten days later, on 6 November, the village of Passchendaele was taken by Canadian troops. But by the time the four-month-long 3rd Battle of Ypres had ground to its bloody and mud-caked conclusion with the attainment of this final objective, Lewis was safely back in London. He had been relieved to find, on his arrival, that his mother was out of danger. He took a room at the Dean Hotel in Oxford Street and began to take full advantage of his period of leave.
* Exécution sans jugement . . . , ‘Summary Execution under the Moorish Kings of Granada’, by Henri Regnault (1843–71).
* Whatever these mysterious ‘missing parts’ contained, Lewis did not succeed in recreating them.
* Case File no. 49537 National Archives and Records Office, Washington DC.
* Even Lewis himself, writing from a map reference somewhere in the Ypres Salient, remarked to Pound: ‘No Little Review this month yet.’ (P/L 96).