‘Why not paint a picture instead?’
On Sunday night, 11 November 1917, as her train pulled out of Victoria Station, Sybil Hart-Davis was very happy, a little drunk, and experiencing increasing discomfort. ‘Three glasses of port beat hard on the bladder’, she wrote, ‘que faire?’
She was on her way back to Norton Priory, her sister’s house in Selsey near Chichester, and was already scribbling a note to Lewis, with whom she had spent the evening. ‘Darling. How happy we were – Roses, roses all the way . . . You were so perfect all the time.’
She wrote: ‘I think I rather love you’, and then crossed out ‘rather’.
Blonde and blue-eyed, she was a little over 30 when she was introduced to the handsome 2nd Lieutenant, newly returned from France. Her husband, a Captain in the Royal Fusiliers, was still out there. Since her disastrous, loveless marriage to Richard Hart-Davis, when she was 17, Sybil had had a great many affairs, and her two children, Rupert and Deirdre, were later to delight in speculating as to the identity of their respective fathers. Her two closest female friends were Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard. Lewis was to have affairs with them both in the early Twenties.
But as 1917 came to an end, it was Sybil who evidently fascinated him. Nancy would remember him in Venice during the late summer of 1922, talking about her every day:
There was no one like her, he said . . . I listened to much praise of Sybil – a most unusual thing to hear from Lewis. He told me he had been very much in love with her indeed.
In the early months of their relationship, Sybil talked to Nancy about him too. She asked her friend what she thought of his looks and Nancy, who hardly knew him at that time, said she thought he looked like a ‘bicycling plumber’. She was never quite sure why she thought this.
That Sunday night in November, 12 miles out of Victoria, the train stopped long enough for Sybil to void the port. ‘All is well’, she wrote. ‘Relieved at Sutton.’
One of the projected books inventoried by Lewis before he boarded the SS Viper was published that month. The Ideal Giant, ‘privately printed for the London office of the Little Review’, was sold at fashionable Christmas bazaars. That it also contained a story which the United States Post Office deemed ‘obscene, lewd, or lascivious’ must have encouraged sales, as well as the lionisation of the 2nd Lieutenant himself. ‘Lewis has been having a hell of a go socially’, Pound reported to Quinn. ‘No duchess without a copy of Cantelman [sic] and the Ideal Giant.’ He was also said to be ‘lunching with Asquith, Curzon and co., assisting inebriated viceroys, etc.’ This was at Claridge’s during a function given by Lady Cunard. He was the only guest in uniform, ‘the only one of military age, or not of cabinet or viceregal rank’.
He had met Mr Asquith before the war, at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s house in Bedford Square. On that occasion the conversation had been about modern painting, and the Prime Minister had appeared interested in the views espoused by the leader of the ‘Great London Vortex’. As if his thoughts were seldom far from international affairs, he had at one point enquired of Lewis ‘whether [he] was in touch with people of similar views in other countries’.
At Claridge’s, three and a half years later, Lewis sensed the former Prime Minister was at a loss how to continue the acquaintanceship:
‘The Artillery.’
‘Ah, yes, the Artillery . . .’
There was a pause.
‘Been at the Front, or are you perhaps . . . ?’
‘Yes, at the Front.’
‘Ah, at the Front.’
There was another pause.
‘Just back from the Front?’
‘Yes, just back.’
‘From the real Front . . .’
The conversation languished and Asquith changed the subject. Lewis was aware he had lost a particularly talented son to the war.
He remembered Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, sitting alone on a sofa, his face distorted by a ‘twisted grimace of painful, staring rumination’. Whether Curzon was one of the ‘inebriated viceroys’ Pound reported Lewis as assisting is not known.
Lewis claimed that it was Guy Baker who initiated his final escape from the front line. When his period of compassionate leave was over, Baker said to him: ‘Why return to your battery? Listen. It’s quite unnecessary. Why not paint a picture instead?’ As Lewis told the story, it was Baker who bundled him into a taxi and insisted he visit P. G. Konody, then engaged in recruiting artists for the Canadian War Memorials Fund.
The scheme had been set up late the previous year by the future Lord Beaverbrook, Sir Max Aitken, Officer in Charge of Canadian War Records. Its purpose was to provide ‘suitable Memorials in the form of Tablets, Oil Paintings etc., to the Canadian Heroes and Heroines in the war’. A Canadian War Memorial building was planned, but never built, to house the collection produced by over 40 commissioned painters. Among those eventually represented were several associates of Lewis: Roberts, Nevinson, Wadsworth, Bomberg, Gilman, Ginner and Augustus John.
Konody had been given a blessing in the 1914 issue of Blast, for his critical support in the pages of the Observer. If a third Blast had appeared after the war, the blessing would certainly have been repeated, if only for the enthusiastic welcome given to Lewis by the artistic adviser to the Canadian War Memorials Fund:
Konody received me, almost literally, with open arms. When I asked him if he had among his artists an artillery-artist, to paint howitzers, he shouted NO! When I said I knew all about howitzers – how would it be for me to paint one – he screamed OF COURSE!!!
An interview with Aitken in Clifford Street, off Bond Street, confirmed the appointment and the Canadian War Records Office made application to the War Office in Whitehall for Lewis’s secondment to the Canadian Army for the three-months duration of the commission. This process took considerable time.
Pound, ever mindful of his friend’s safety, wrote to Quinn: ‘I hope to God the thing goes through. His leave is up tomorrow, and it would be an excessive shame to have him blown up, during the interim between the application, and its being put into execution.’ According to Lewis, through the good offices of Lady Cunard, his leave was extended four times to bridge this limbo. As a result, for six weeks or more ‘I was in the society of Lady Cunard continuously’, he recalled, ‘and it was here that I had the opportunity of observing at first hand the less seamy side of the war.’
The salubrious interlude was interrupted briefly by one final, purely formal, risk to life and limb. He had to return to his Battery, somewhere in the muddy wastes around Ypres, report to his Commanding Officer, and be personally seconded by him to the Canadian Army. Captain Hindson duly signed the paper, Lewis saluted and went back to London.
At last he was instructed to return to France on Sunday, 30 December. He was to paint a picture of a Canadian Gun Pit on canvas twelve feet wide and of unspecified height, for which he would be paid, ‘on completion and acceptance by the committee’, the sum of £250.
On New Year’s Day he wrote to Konody from a chateau at Lievins, near Lens: ‘Arrived, installed and comfortable, incredibly comfortable. I have been shown the sights and put in touch with the requisite gunners . . . It is cold on this plateau . . . How I shall be able to hold a pencil, I don’t quite know.’ On his sightseeing tour he looked across fields to the town of Neuville St Vaast where Gaudier-Brzeska had been killed. He admitted to ‘a dismal and angry feeling’:
The ground was covered with snow, nobody about, and my god, it did look a cheerless place to die in.’
A day or two later Augustus John arrived, dressed in a Major’s uniform, and promptly slipped and fell in the snow outside the door to Canadian Corps Headquarters. Like Orpen he had been given lofty rank for the purposes of his Canadian War Memorials commission. Climatic conditions inspired his subject for the vast composition he had come to amass material for: Canadians opposite Lens – Winter.*
Lewis soon found ‘a dandy gun pit’ and began work. Following the heavy fighting of the previous April, the war had left Vimy Ridge behind. No guns fired on either side and when he informed Pound he was ‘contending . . . with unfavourable conditions’ he meant ‘chiefly bad weather and scarcity of cars’. He enjoyed his three weeks. ‘The Canadians display a great deal of hospitality’, he reported to Konody. ‘I like them very much.’ He had also caroused with John, and on one occasion took a staff car closer to the Front Line than either man felt comfortable with. He went to Paris on Canadian War Records business and found it packed with Americans and with ‘no signs of Art anywhere’.
By the end of January he was back in London, preparing to paint the biggest expanse of canvas he would ever attempt.
*
An article headed ‘WYNDHAM WHISKERS’ appeared in the weekly London Mail on 2 February. It referred to Lewis as one of ‘the long-haired whiskered men at the Café Royal’. The anonymous journalist’s sources combined accuracy and inaccuracy in about equal measure:
he has gone to America, and . . . written a short story which was instrumental in having the magazine in which it appeared suppressed.
A reference to his own magazine was predictably abusive:
He produces a ridiculous periodical at uncertain intervals over here called ‘Blast’. If you read it, you repeated its name if you were one of the unrighteous.
But it was the implication he had been sitting out the war in America that made the piece ‘unpleasant and even libellous’. Pound suggested Lewis, Wadsworth and Baker should proceed, in uniform, to the paper’s office without delay and demand an explanation of its editor. Wadsworth felt ‘truculence should be the keynote of the interview’ and that an apology for the piece ought to appear in the next issue. He also suggested ‘perhaps a punch on the jaw for the journalist who wrote it, the bleeder, the bugger, the sod’.
It is unlikely this plan was put into action, because neither retraction nor apology appeared in any subsequent issue of the London Mail.
*
Still in Northern France sketching soldiers and ruined masonry, Major John wrote to Miss Schepeler:
Have you seen anything of that tragic hero and consumer of tarts and mutton chops, Wyndham Lewis? He is, I think, in London, painting his gun-pit and striving to reduce his ‘Vorticism’ to the level of Canadian intelligibility – a hopeless task I fear.
Lewis had been initially seconded to the Canadian forces for three months, but covering a canvas 10 feet by 11 was a considerable task and the period he was ‘loaned’ for had to be extended by another four months. He was also, as John intimated, working under severe stylistic restrictions, although perhaps not so explicitly stated as those impressed on a Vorticist colleague when invited to participate in the scheme. ‘I would be glad to know whether, providing you are given the necessary facilities and leave’, Gunner William Roberts was asked:
you are prepared to paint the picture at your own risk, to be submitted for the approval of the committee. The reason for this request is that the Art Advisor informs us that he is not acquainted with your realistic work and Cubist work is inadmissible for the purpose.
In other words, if the painting was unsuitable the painter would not be paid.
Konody would have told Lewis what was required: a documentary record of his subject with few, if any, avant-garde flourishes. And Lewis worked ‘like a galley slave’ in a studio in Campden House Mews, to deliver what was expected of him.
Meanwhile, in April, he was approached by a second commissioning body, the organisation instrumental in sending William Orpen to visit and paint ‘Hell’: the Ministry of Information. Mr A. Yockney wrote to inform Lewis that, ‘in connection with a scheme for utilising the artistic resources of the country for record purposes’, it had been suggested that he ‘be invited to paint a picture or pictures relating to the war’. Yockney had been instructed by his Committee to enquire how 2nd Lieutenant Lewis was ‘situated in regard to [his] work and military obligations; and should the scheme mature, whether [he] would be disposed to enter into an arrangement with the Government’.
Lewis replied that he would be pleased to undertake the commission. He explained his commitments to the Canadian War Records Office but saw no reason why the ‘paintings for the Canadian and Imperial Governments should not overlap’.
Soon after, Yockney’s Committee met and agreed that Lewis was to paint a picture 125 inches long and 72 inches high. These were the dimensions of Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery. It was, thought one of the Committee’s artistic advisers, Robert Ross, ‘a very charming size’ for a war painting. Lewis was to be paid £300. This was £50 more than the sum he was being paid under the Canadian War Memorials Fund for painting a picture nearly twice as big.
*
In June, another volume of the literary legacy enumerated in Lewis’s 1917 inventory was published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York. John Quinn was unable to give the American publication of Tarr his undivided attention because of an operation in early February to remove a rectal ulcer. He was still in hospital when the proofs of the novel were delivered to him for correction. A meticulous and conscientious man, he would have amended a profusion of typographical errors and other anomalies that eventually appeared in the Knopf edition. Instead, feeling weak after the operation, he divided the proofs between two friends who did not appear to earn the $50 each he paid them for the job.
In a letter to Miss Schepeler Lewis referred to ‘the bad American Tarr’ and assured her he had ‘taken steps about that’. The ‘steps’ taken presumably ensured that the English edition, brought out by the Egoist Press three weeks after the American, was not riddled with errors as well.
Reviews of the novel were generally favourable, notably that by Rebecca West in The Nation, who, whilst conceding that the first impression was of ‘a cleverish pastiche of Dostoevsky’, went on to supply a puff that Lewis would quote in publicity material for the rest of his life:
a beautiful and serious work of art that reminds us of Dostoevsky only because it too is inquisitive about the soul, and because it contains one figure of vast moral significance which is worthy to stand beside Stavrogin.
Other critics also noted the influence of Dostoevsky. In her box at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 27 July, the last night of Sir Thomas Beecham’s Summer Season of Grand Opera in English, Lady Cunard struggled to make herself heard over the crashing chords of The Valkyrie. She was attempting to introduce Lewis to the General commanding the American troops in England:
the author of Tarr – a novel, General! Mr Lewis has been compared, General, to Dostoevsky! The Times says he has taken Dostoevsky for his model. Dostoevsky, General!
The American appeared impressed: ‘Dostoevsky – Dostoevsky!’ he said. ‘And a very good model too!’
*
He had told Sybil Hart-Davis his Canadian painting would be finished by 21 June. This proved over-optimistic. In July, after six months and with his period of secondment nearing an end, he was visited by Captain Watkins of Canadian War Records and Sir Bertram Lima, who wished to inspect their investment. This viewing of the picture revealed that it needed a great deal more work. Captain Watkins applied for, and was granted, an extension of Lewis’s secondment for a further four months, although expressing the hope to Yockney at Information that ‘he will probably have completed the picture . . . well within that time.’
Lewis’s affair with Sybil Hart-Davis foundered in suspicion and jealousy. At one point in the summer he wrote to tell her that their relationship was ‘doomed’ because of what he termed a ‘new sentimental interest’ that she was developing. She had no idea what he was referring to and called his letter ‘unkind gibberish’. He was, she told him, ‘a fiend . . . sent from Hell’s lower intestine to plague [her]’.
For her part, she often mentioned the affair she suspected him of having with another blonde, Helen Saunders, whom she called ‘the wild dandelion’. In the first months of their relationship she noted his absence from his hotel at an early hour of the morning and accused him of being ‘not quite truthful’.
Incidentally, if Lewis did indeed have an affair with Helen Saunders at this time, he would have cause to regret it two years later.
In the main Sybil chided him for not writing to her. ‘Is it wanton malice,’ she asked, ‘uncooked resentment or merely having nothing to say, that makes you refrain?’ And she wrote of his cruelty and her hurt feelings in vivid physical terms:
you can boast of having dealt out humiliation with a lavish hand. And you have possibly been of use to me – To be thrown, yet again, against the wall should bring a party to its senses. I feel wretched and quite unreasonably disappointed – But, believe me, even the shallowest of us suffer quite genuinely sometimes.
On more than one occasion the affair appeared to terminate, usually at Lewis’s instigation, and after one emotional parting she resolved to trouble him no further. ‘Remember the good chapters’, she urged, ‘for surely there were some.’ Then, a reconciliation initiated, she would write again to her ‘black angel’, signing herself ‘P’, for ‘Pet’.
Eventually they parted amicably. Sybil acquired a new lover but she and Lewis met socially from time to time. Writing to her son Rupert about one such encounter, she mentioned, in passing, the woman who had superseded her as the main emotional interest in Lewis’s life: ‘I dined with Lewis, a friend of his called Iris Barry who writes poetry and a married couple called Wadsworth (he camouflages ships).’ Herbert Read described a visit to Lewis’s flat in Great Tichfield Street – ‘lots of stairs to go up, but a view and fresh air at the top and the jolliest suite of rooms: 1 bedroom, 1 sitting room, 1 bathroom, 1 kitchen sort of place (very small). But all very jolly and dainty.’ He found the same dark-haired woman installed, apparently ‘to pour out the tea’. Read did not catch her name but learned she was ‘a young poetess who had not yet published’. He thought her ‘quite a nice girl’.
She was born Frieda Crump – a name which encourages imaginative alternatives in adult life. Although in the main styling herself Iris Barry, she sometimes adopted the pseudonym Frieda Bark.
Towards the end of August, Lewis was away from the Great Titchfield Street flat for over a week and his neighbours had no forwarding address for his letters. According to Sybil Hart-Davis, he was in the northwest of England, either Liverpool or Blackpool. It is likely that he was in the company of Iris Barry and that it was during this ‘Black or Liver poolian holiday’ that the conception of their first child took place.
*
Guy Baker, writing from the Grand Pump Room Hotel in Bath, sent ‘regards to Barry’, at the same time bringing reminder of an earlier liaison. ‘Be genial to Olive if you encounter her’, he urged Lewis. ‘She is terrify [sic] of you.’
The mother of Peter and Betty, both of whom were still being looked after in Norwood by Mrs Lewis and Mrs Prickett, worked in a hotel during the war, a prey to anxiety during Zeppelin raids and sustained by intermittent postal orders and surprisingly warm words from her former lover. Lewis had evidently forgiven her for the dose of ‘clap’ she had passed on to him in 1914, and a letter from Lydd in late 1916 or early 1917 addressed her by her pet name ‘Dunk’, concluding affectionately with ‘Many kisses, little Dunkie’. Later, from France, she received less personalised missives: field postcards sent to her in Chichester Road, Paddington, simply dated and signed to show he was still alive.
On the face of it, in late 1918, there was no clear reason for Olive to be terrified of him.
*
When Yockney, accompanied by Muirhead Bone, art adviser to the Ministry of Information, visited the Campden House Mews studio on 24 September to view the huge Canadian canvas, it was probably, with the exception of the lower right corner, to all intents and purposes finished. Lewis would have been able to explain the precisely delineated details of the sighting gear on the 8˝ howitzer under its canopy of camouflage netting, the ranks of high explosive shells, some with transit caps still fitted to their noses, others blue-tipped with the ‘graze’ fuses designed to detonate on glancing impact. The figures in the foreground, standing behind the shells or around the breech of the gun, seemed of secondary importance to the hardware. In the background was another canopied gun pit, ruins, and a clichéd column of soldiers wending, ‘Tipperary’ fashion, towards the blasted tree-spiked horizon.
Later he told Herbert Read:
On looking at my Canadian painting today I came to the conclusion that Konody had succeeded in making me paint one of the dullest good pictures on earth. I have just done another painting in an afternoon which is at least 17 times as alive. What a nightmare this wicked war has been.
To John Quinn he could not even concede it ‘good’, although it attracted favourable comment at the Royal Academy’s Exhibition of Canadian Pictures in January 1919: ‘My painting . . . is not good,’ he declared. ‘Lots of people like it. I can only see in it what I could have made, and frankly hate the sight of it.’ His contempt for Canadian Gun Pit was barely disguised by the final sentence of the description he wrote for the catalogue: ‘It is an experiment of the painter’s in a kind of painting not his own.’
Yockney and Bone, however, were impressed by what they had seen and, four days after the Armistice, a further extension of 2nd Lieutenant Lewis’s leave from the Royal Garrison Artillery was requested of the War Office, to enable him to paint ‘an important picture for the collection being formed by the Ministry of Information’.
*
By the end of the year Lewis had moved out of the Great Titchfield Street flat and, for the first half of 1919, had no settled address of his own in London. During this period he lived in Edward Wadsworth’s place at 1A Gloucester Walk, off Church Street, Kensington.
* John completed a cartoon 12 feet high and 40 feet long, but the painting was never produced.