‘I’m thirty-seven till I pass the word round!’
In February 1919 probate was granted upon the estate of the late Charles Edward Lewis. The estranged husband of Anne Lewis had died at 6 o’clock in the morning of Saturday 23 November 1918, at 1844 North Bouvier Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was 75 and the cause of death certified ‘dilatation of heart’. Given that Anne never granted him a divorce following their separation in 1893, and given his bigamous marriage to Lillian Natalie Phipps in 1912, he was survived by two widows.
Response to Anne’s enquiries showed that surviving members of her late husband’s family were probably as ignorant of the dubious domestic arrangements of his later life as she was. A niece wrote to her from Oakville:
you know I was quite a young girl, and he a travelling man whom we rarely saw, and while I never heard of any other marriage I would not swear to it.
In 1901, Charles had settled in Portland, Maine, with his companion Lillian Phipps, and Ethel Evelyn, aged about seven, whom he described as his daughter by his ‘second wife, now deceased’. He acquired two adjacent houses in North Street and a property on Preble Street. Lillian bore him a son, Alexander, in about 1905. When he made a will in December 1911, Charles passed Alexander off as the issue, with Ethel, of his ‘second wife, now deceased’. In the event of his death before the two children reached the age of 21, he appointed Lillian Phipps as guardian. Some time during the following six months he married Lillian and, in about 1915, moved with his family to the rented house in Philadelphia where he died.
He left personal property amounting to some $500 and real estate to the value of $12,000. To Ethel he bequeathed three violoncellos, two flutes, a large three-stone diamond ring and a smaller three-stone diamond ring. Alexander, 13 years old at his father’s death, received two ruby rings, a silver watch, a gold English lever watch, two revolvers, two shotguns and a Winchester rifle. The three properties in Portland, together with ‘household furniture, goods and effects’ were to be divided equally between Ethel and Alexander.
There was only one other beneficiary mentioned in the will and, despite a significant untruth in his designation, the legacy was substantial:
I give, devise and bequeath unto Percy W. Lewis, of London, England, my son born to me by my first wife from whom I was divorced many years ago, all the interest which I have in the house and grounds located at No. 23 Curzon Road, Southport, Lancashire, England . . . To have and to hold the same to him and his heirs and assigns forever.
Coincidentally, both Lewis and T. S. Eliot received word of their respective fathers’ deaths on the same day: 8 January. As a result Eliot absented himself from a small gathering at Ezra Pound’s triangular flat in Church Walk. Ben Hecht reported that Lewis attended, ‘apologising for his seeming callousness with the fact that he had not seen his parent for some twenty years’.
When the property in Curzon Street, Southport, was sold in May the following year, it realised just under half the estimated value of Charles Edward Lewis’s entire estate.
*
Lewis communicated a bustling sense of urgency in a letter to John Quinn:
first of all, I must dash in straight away and get active, now the war is over. I must have a show of war paintings and drawings, here in London, now, and in a gallery with a big clientele and machinery of advertisement. I have exhibited nowhere during the war: I must do nothing but exhibit, write, work, during this year, if my health allows.
Unspecified ill health had dogged him in the last months of 1918 and he blamed that, together with ‘war conditions generally’ and also ‘worry about [his] cursed Canadian canvas’, for the fact that, by the start of the new year, he had got ‘just enough completed, sound things for a show’.
In the wake of the Canadian War Memorials Exhibition at Burlington House, Lewis’s one-man show, ‘Guns’, opened at the Goupil Gallery on Saturday 1 February. The best paintings and drawings to be seen there, he claimed, were ‘about ten times as successful’ as his monumental Gun Pit. Following the opening he told John Quinn that the show had been ‘extremely well received by almost everybody’ and he hoped for ‘great things from this success in the coming year’. Before the private view Lewis put red spots alongside those he regarded as the ten best drawings, reserving them for the New York attorney. This proved presumptuous and, on seeing photographs of the ten, Quinn rejected all but three of Lewis’s recommendations, agreeing to buy four others instead. Other purchasers included Lord Rothermere and Lady Tredegar.
‘Every day fresh things are being sold’, Lewis declared. But by the time the show closed a total of only 21 out of well over 50 works had attracted buyers.
*
It is estimated that the influenza pandemic that reached its peak during the winter of 1918–19 wiped out some 27 million people worldwide: well over three times as many as were killed in the Great War. John Quinn wrote from New York that ‘one could not walk five blocks on the street without hearing the clanging of the ambulances taking people to hospital’ and that ‘there were too many funeral processions and hearses in evidence to make going around pleasant.’ For the first time on record the quarterly death rate in England and Wales exceeded the birth rate.
Symptoms were fever, low pulse, pains in the eyes, ears, head and back and a feeling of dizziness. Pneumonia often followed. Around the middle of February Lewis came down with it. Helen Saunders enlisted the help of her sister Ethel, who had worked with the Voluntary Aid Detachment during the war, and she arranged for him to be admitted to hospital. The VAD nurse recalled, in later life, how she and her sister assisted the weak and feverish patient to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital for Officers off the Euston Road, and that he was ‘very rude’ and never thanked them for their trouble.
The influenza followed its customary course and developed into double pneumonia. For some weeks he had a dangerously high temperature. Then in March he was flat on his back but no longer at risk. His doctor told him he had ‘staggered about a bit, but eventually rolled down the right side of the hill’.
Guy Baker, in another hospital, died of this postwar scourge.
*
Lewis stayed for another fortnight at the Endsleigh Palace Hospital, until about 20 March. From there he went to a convalescent home in Torquay. A month later he was still ‘not yet in proper trim’ and on his way ‘from one seaside place to another’: from Torquay to Aldeburgh in Suffolk. His route between these resorts took him to Birmingham, where Iris Barry, nearly eight months pregnant, was staying. Her mother lived in the suburb of Washwood Heath and Lewis wrote inviting her to visit them one afternoon. Presumably anxious to avoid establishing too frank and close a relationship with Mrs Crump, he adopted one of Iris’s pseudonyms for the occasion and signed the letter ‘Percy Bark’.
By the middle of May he had continued his journey and was staying at ‘The White Lion’, Aldeburgh-on-Sea. He sent Iris two nightdresses and £8, promising to send more in a day or two. For her part, probably some time towards the end of that month, Iris moved into a nursing home in Edgbaston where, on 3 June, she gave birth to a son.
It can be safely assumed that Lewis was not present for this event. The following day he was attending an Officer’s Dispersal Unit in London and having his Demobilisation Ration Book stamped. The address he entered on the Food Card issued him was the Coburg Court Hotel on Bayswater Road.
Iris called her son Robin. She registered the birth without divulging his father’s name and, accordingly, no entry appeared in that category on the child’s birth certificate.*
*
Later in June Yockney was pleased to hear Lewis had recovered sufficiently to make a start on his picture for the Ministry of Information, as he was keen to have the collection of commissioned paintings together by the autumn, in good time for an exhibition at Burlington House in the new year.
Lewis cannot have begun serious work on the picture until after 24 June, when he took over the tenancy of a flat and studio occupying the lower part of a house in Campden Hill Gardens, a cul-de-sac just south of Notting Hill Gate. It was a few minutes’ walk from the studio in Campden House Mews where he had painted his Canadian picture the previous year.
In September, unaware of Lewis’s current address, Yockney wrote to him at his former, temporary lodging at 1A Gloucester Walk, a house the Wadsworths had by that time vacated, leaving no one to forward the letter. In vain Lewis was informed that an illustrated catalogue for the Royal Academy exhibition was in preparation. ‘How far advanced is your picture?’ Yockney asked. ‘Will it be complete within the next few weeks so that it can be photographed?’ Receiving no reply, he sent a reminder in October to the same address.
Then, exasperated by Lewis’s continued silence, on 16 October Yockney took the precaution of registering his next letter and charged it with a threat:
unless your picture is finished and delivered here by the 31st instant, or a reasonable excuse given before that date, it will be considered that the commission has lapsed. As Trustee for the Ministry of Information scheme, I am compelled to bring the transaction to a close.
Despite also being dispatched to 1A Gloucester Walk, this ultimatum actually reached Lewis at Campden Hill Gardens three days later. His nonchalant explanation that the previous letters had been ‘marooned’ at the old address did not explain how the latest one had reached him so easily. He assured Yockney that his picture would be complete by 31 October. This deadline had to compete with other activities.
Blast was to be revived. In August he had told Herbert Read that a publisher had been found and that his own contribution would be ready within a week or so. Following his months of illness and convalescence, Lewis was belatedly keeping to his promise made at the beginning of the year to ‘dash in . . . and get active, now the war [was] over’.
One night, at Verrey’s Restaurant in Regent Street, following a meal with Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith Sitwell, Lewis made a pencilled calculation on a matchbox. Then, with a yellowing cigarette stub clamped in his mouth and his left eye partially closed against the smoke drifting across it, he said: ‘Remember! I’m thirty-seven till I pass the word round!’ There was still a month or so to go before his birthday and he meant to extend his 37th year indefinitely beyond that date. Like many men who had been plucked out of the natural course of their lives by the war, he felt the need to make up for the time lost. In 1915 he had declared ‘the War has stopped Art dead’, and he now regarded 1914–18 as ‘four years of the most vital period of his career . . . torn from his life’. It was not vanity that prompted him, from 1919 until his death, to deduct two, and as many as four, years from his age.
Edith Sitwell claimed to be so impressed by the seriousness of Lewis’s injunction to her and her brothers that for a long time after, if a doctor examined her chest and commanded her to say ‘Ninety-nine’, she instinctively blurted out ‘Thirty-seven’.
On the evening of Wednesday 22 October Lewis left off work on his Ministry of Information painting to give a public lecture at the Central Buildings in Westminster. It was one of a series organised by The Arts League of Service. Other speakers to the theme of ‘Modern Tendencies in Art’ were Eugene Goossens on ‘Music’, T. S. Eliot on ‘Poetry’, and Margaret Morris, who once performed barefoot at the ‘Cave of the Golden Calf’, on ‘Dancing’. At 8.45 p.m. Lewis addressed the audience in the conference hall on the subject of ‘Painting’. George Bernard Shaw was in the chair.
It was not a happy occasion. Lewis attempted to speak without notes and kept losing the thread of what he was saying. A report in The Athenaeum euphemistically referred to a ‘repeated sectional incompleteness . . . , which produced an effect of incoherence, . . . possibly due to an inability or a reluctance on the part of Mr Lewis to keep his brain chained to a main issue.’ Each time his discourse dried up he would mutter, ‘and so on and so forth’, while grasping for another thread to pursue. Years later, Lewis blamed the ‘amiable buffoon G.B.S.’ for playing to the audience and putting him off. Shaw’s behaviour must indeed have been distracting. Kate Lechmere watched mesmerised as he put on ‘four different pairs of spectacles in two hours’. During the discussion that followed the lecture, he kept referring to the speaker as ‘Mr Wyndfield Lewis’, and deplored ‘the regrettable conditions of democratic society which force an artist to spend his time talking about his art’.
Lewis determined never to extemporise a lecture again.
*
The revival of Vorticism, promised in 1915 for ‘the serious mission it [had] on the other side of World-War’, never materialised. Nor did the third issue of Blast. Instead, Lewis’s substantial contribution, The Caliph’s Design, was brought out as a slim volume by the Egoist Press in marbled blue and white paper boards. The subtitle gave away its pedigree: Architects! Where is your Vortex? It was published on 31 October, the day Lewis had promised Yockney his painting.
Lewis’s foreword to the catalogue of ‘Guns’ in February had begun:
The public, surprised at finding eyes and noses in this exhibition, will begin by the reflection that the artist has . . . abandoned those vexing diagrams by which he puzzled and annoyed.
The public might have been further refreshed and relieved to recognise the eyes and nose of a contemporary poet, in Lewis’s larger than life-size portrait of Ezra Pound Esq., exhibited at the Goupil Salon in November and praised to the skies by Frank Rutter in the Sunday Times as ‘a great work by a great artist’. And a representational element formed at least a part of the 10 foot by 6 foot canvas called A Battery Shelled which he at last presented to Yockney for exhibition at the Royal Academy the following January.
Casting the eye from the left edge of the canvas to the right, as across a printed page, three figures are encountered first, realistic in that they do indeed have ‘eyes and noses’, and the one with a moustache recognisable as a likeness of Edward Wadsworth. They are cut off by the bottom edge of the canvas, as if standing just inside the picture, at one remove from the viewer. One of the men looks down at his pipe, another stares, as it were, out of the picture and the third looks towards the action: the battery under shellfire. It is not immediately clear that the scene occupying the majority of the composition is one of violent devastation, contemplated with apparent equanimity by onlookers from a neighbouring battery. As the eye continues its movement to the right, two more figures are seen, also cut off by the bottom edge of the canvas but smaller than the first three and intended to be further away. They are more stylised, less recognisable as individuals. And so the further to the right the eye travels, the more the picture’s perspective increases. In the centre of the composition, the ploughed middle ground contains three figures, abstracted by distance, insect-like and mechanical. And as the eye moves further, on a rising diagonal toward the complex geometries of the background, men are barely distinguishable from the piles of shells and sheets of corrugated iron amongst which they struggle. Against the horizon explosions and plumes of smoke are strange, hard-edged, segmented structures like twisted pieces of metal or broken umbrellas.
A Battery Shelled would not have been accepted by the Canadian War Memorials Committee to whom ‘Cubist work’ was ‘inadmissible’. But because Lewis had been allowed more freedom of expression for his second picture, the Ministry of Information received, in return for its £300, a more complex meditation on war than the Canadian Gun Pit could ever offer. By using the contrast between realistic and abstract form he had made an observation about the artilleryman’s experience of fighting. Death and destruction occurred, for the most part, at long range and on map-referenced co-ordinates, and it was perhaps easy to forget that the distant spectacle involved any human tragedy at all.
* Robin was cared for by his maternal grandmother, Annie Symes Crump, until the age of three or four, then placed in a private children’s home at Woodford Green until the age of eleven. He was only made aware of the identity of his parents in adulthood.