On 7 February 1920, fifteen months after the passing of her husband, Anne Stuart Lewis died of lobar pneumonia at home in 99 Oaklands Road, Hanwell. She was 61. Her son was with her and he registered the death two days later. Her estate was valued by Probate at £1,718 13s. 7d. She left £100, some clothes and furniture to her aunt and companion Frances Mary Prickett. The rest she bequeathed to her son.
Frances Prickett, now aged 78, also inherited custody of Lewis’s two children by Olive Johnson: Peter, aged eight, and Betty, six.
*
At the end of March Lewis acknowledged himself a member of a group of painters for the last time in his life. ‘Group X’ exhibited only once, at the Mansard Gallery, 196 Tottenham Court Road. As spokesman of the group, Lewis wrote the catalogue foreword and a short piece in the Evening News. ‘Why X?’ he began rhetorically:
Why is this group branded in that way? The reason is an aesthetic one, like the markings on the face of a savage. It signifies nothing more didactic than that, X, as a sign, pleases the members of this group.
It was, perhaps, not necessary to mention that the members of ‘Group X’ were ten in number. Five were former Vorticist colleagues: Dismorr, Etchells, Hamilton, Roberts, and Wadsworth. The rest comprised the sculptor Frank Dobson, Charles Ginner, E. McKnight Kauffer, and ‘Jock’ Turnbull, veteran of the Omega Workshops, to whom Winifred Gill once confided witnessing Lewis’s unguarded posturings with a checked cap. Two facing pages of the catalogue were devoted to each of the ten, reproducing a drawing on the left and a self-portrait on the right, except for Lewis’s two pages, which featured neither drawing nor self-portrait, only a list of the works he exhibited: seven self-portraits.
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In June, probate of the late Mrs Lewis’s will was granted to her son as sole executor. But it was to be another eight months before he succeeded in selling the unprofitable laundry business, and ‘impossible’, he claimed, ‘to dispose of [it] at a reasonable price’. It is not known how much of the £1,718 13s. 7d. probate valuation of his mother’s estate actually came to Lewis. However, the legacy from his other parent, the property at 23 Curzon Road, Southport, was sold for the considerable sum of £1,200. Mrs Prickett did not receive the £100 promised in her niece’s will. Six years later, Lewis drew up a declaration and had her sign it:
This is to say that since your mother’s death you have supported me: and therefore the sum of money mentioned in your mother’s will to be paid me in the event of your not otherwise assisting me has long ago been cancelled.
*
A telegram handed in to the Leicester Square Post Office at 3.35 in the afternoon of 1 June was testimony to the domestic arrangements prevailing at 83 Lansdowne Road, Lewis’s current lodgings, just over three and a half miles away in Notting Hill:
PLEASE PREPARE CHOP EIGHT – LEWIS
On the back of the telegram Iris Barry itemised her shopping:
butter 1/4½d
potatoes 2/7½d
onions 4d
steak 2/9½d
She was doing her best to make him comfortable. And with some sacrifice. ‘I have led a singular kind of life all the last year to try and fit in with your life’, she told him two months later. ‘I have no friends and no acquaintances and nothing at all either hobby or career or what not to “live” for except to “get on” with you.’
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There was a notable absentee from the reunion of Vorticist colleagues at the Mansard Gallery under the brand of ‘Group X’. Helen Saunders, she whom Sybil Hart-Davis had called ‘the wild dandelion’, because of her golden hair, was exhibiting disturbing signs of amorous obsession. She took to dogging Lewis in the street, demanding his attention and exhorting him to work. Some time in January or February, while Lewis was still living at 20A Campden Hill Gardens, Helen’s mother came from Oxford to discuss the problem of her daughter with him. After that meeting Helen continued to pester him with visits, letters and telegrams. The habit of secrecy with which he surrounded every successive dwelling-place and bolthole over the next two decades may have been established, at least partly, by this campaign of emotional persecution he felt himself to be a victim of in the first six months of 1920. When his lease at Campden Hill Gardens expired in March, he rented another studio at 37 Redcliffe Road. For a short period he was left in peace. Then, in late April or May, Jessica Dismorr had a breakdown, and Helen used this crisis in the life of a mutual friend as an excuse to seek out Lewis’s new studio address and let him know. Thereafter she continued to write to him and pester him as before.
She begged to be allowed to live in his studio. She seems to have been, at one and the same time, pleading for release from his influence and lamenting the loss of it:
You don’t know what you are doing. You are killing me by mistake . . . If I have driven you away it is my death as a human soul because it is not possible for me to love any one else . . . I beg you not to drive me away from the discipline of your mind on my mind and body . . . What I begged release from was the awful sense that I was falling into involuntary bondage to some other mind . . . What I can’t make you understand is that if you would let me be alone for a month I should be all right – but not if this other bodily life is forced on me . . . I am not fit to be alive just now . . . If it hadn’t have been for my mother I should have killed myself last week . . . Please hear me this time – It is as if some one were beating me just over my heart.
What happened between Lewis and Helen Saunders to provoke these highly charged outpourings remains a mystery. But emerging from the tangle of her apparently contradictory desires is the suspicion that he had indeed seduced, and subsequently rejected, her:
You have not let me grow up yet – I was on the way but because you did not believe in my affection something went wrong in the very centre of my life.
Whatever happened, the experience plunged her into a desperate schizoid state apparently polarising mind and body:
I only want to be released from the idea of the other person . . . Don’t let me go into the mechanical body’s life which I call the other person . . . I don’t want the other life that is being forced on me – Don’t turn me into a machine.
For a time she bombarded him with telegrams and letters postmarked ‘Taynuilt’. It is not known what she was doing in this small village on the west coast of Scotland, but it must have been a comfort to Lewis that at least these irksome communications came from such a remote spot. But then she began travelling south. Lewis received another telegram, with a different postmark, announcing her arrival in London the following day and indicating her desire for a meeting. It was signed ‘S.O.S.’ At this point Lewis wrote to her mother:
I don’t want to distress you; and seeing that your daughter was for some time a very helpful and seemingly unselfish friend, I don’t wish to take any steps that would shock or distress her in her present state. On the other hand, I cannot undertake indefinitely to support the persecution to which she has thought good to subject me for a year or more. You will see yourself that to have her perpetually turning up and ringing my bell, perpetually telegraphing and writing to me, is not a bearable situation.
The problem was eventually resolved. Mr Saunders wrote from Oxford to tell Lewis that, following an interview with her mother, Helen had promised not to see him, or communicate in any way, in the future.
*
As she prepared Lewis’s steak and onions for 8 o’clock on the evening of 1 June 1920, Iris Barry was about six months into her second pregnancy. This time her condition seems to have been at Lewis’s suggestion. ‘I must remind you that last year you spoke of my having another child – yours – as a proof of good will and all that.’ It appears that he had harboured suspicions regarding the paternity of Robin, now being cared for by Mrs Crump in Washwood Heath, suspicions not entirely allayed by Iris herself. On this occasion, however, she could assure him: ‘I’m having another and most indubitably yours whatever stupidities you commit by conjuring up impossibilities to the contrary.’
By early August Iris was installed in the Nursing Institute at Mitcham in South London to await delivery. She spent the first part of her stay knitting Lewis brown woollen socks and sending meticulous timetable details. There were trains from Victoria at 3 and 4 o’clock, then 4.30, 5.22, 6.15 and 6.58. If catching the train from Clapham Junction, two or three minutes were to be added to these times and the journey took less than half an hour.
Lewis visited her when his hunt for a new studio allowed him time, but going six miles into the southern suburbs remained tiresome. ‘I am sorry I can’t come and see you more often’, he told her. ‘The distance is very great, and you are awkward to get at.’
*
Although the postwar revival of Blast had been abandoned, Lewis was having discussions with the wealthy novelist Sydney Schiff, who wrote under the name of Stephen Hudson and the influence of Marcel Proust, about the launch of another journal – The Tyro. The sale of his father’s house in Southport meant that Lewis was in a position to put £50 into the new enterprise, and Schiff offered the same. Harriet Shaw Weaver agreed to publish it but was unwilling to make any financial commitment.
Lewis’s new patron had sound advice, necessary to anyone setting up a small magazine, about getting people to work for nothing. ‘On the matter of paying contributors . . . we should adopt the principle that no one can receive payment until the new paper is in a position to pay them out of its own resources.’ Schiff’s connection with the paper was therefore to be kept secret. ‘I have come into this thing to support you’, he told Lewis, ‘but as soon as certain [people] get wind of it they . . . would imagine that as I was in it they ought to be paid handsomely.’
When the Schiffs invited Lewis down to their summer place in Eastbourne for the weekend, Iris wished him ‘best of luck with the powerful Semites’.
*
When his business affairs and studio search allowed him to make the journey out to Mitcham, Lewis’s visits sometimes seemed a mixed blessing to Iris. ‘We were both rather tired and wretched last night’, she wrote to him after one ill-tempered visit, ‘so it wasn’t very satisfactory, tho’ I was grateful enough to you for bothering to come, quite apart from being glad to see you.’
To spare her the stigma attached to an unmarried pregnancy, his letters would arrive at the Nursing Institute addressed to ‘Mrs Lewis’.
She had optimistic plans for their future life together. Lewis’s brown woollen socks had given her ideas for a thriving little business. ‘I should begin in a very unambitious way by employing only one or two cheap cripples or people like that and . . . lay in a stock of sample work for people to order from – specially for Christmas. I should . . . teach knitting; and try to arrange with some firm of manufacturers making woollen underwear to be an agent for them, selling women’s and children’s vests etc. on commission. As I got more orders I should employ more knitters, and aim eventually at doing nothing but sell.’ The business could be run from home, she went on, ‘if we had two furnished rooms near wherever you have your next studio.’ The enterprise was, she hastily assured him, dependent on one factor. ‘Naturally all this is supposing we continue to see each other – which I certainly wish.’
An exquisite drawing shows Iris in what must have been a characteristic pose at this time: sunk in an armchair, her sharply pencilled features in profile, staring down in concentration at a complex knot of fingers and knitting needles. Lewis’s views on the prospect of a cottage industry based upon knitted vests are not known.
She did not hear from him for some days and became preoccupied with how and where to dispose of the expected offspring. The cheapest place she had heard of was in Sudbury, near Harrow, describing itself as a ‘Home for the Infants and Children of Gentlepeople’. It would charge 27/- a week to take the child off their hands, she explained, ‘which is a lot but then you don’t have to buy a pram.’ She badly needed Lewis’s advice and support: ‘some place has to be found for it when I leave here, and I don’t suppose you want to try and find anywhere even if you had time. What shall I do?’
His intermittent visits, and now the prolonged absence of a ‘husband’ from her bedside, was becoming a depressing embarrassment. ‘Only do communicate with me,’ she pleaded, ‘I feel so very deserted when I don’t know where you are, and it is so beastly being unmarried and nosey old crabs of women will come and be rude and horrid to me, I do so dread all that.’
She was evidently unaware, as she wrote this letter, that Lewis had already left London for a fortnight’s holiday in France with T. S. Eliot.
*
Their first stop was Paris. Eliot had written to James Joyce before their departure, arranging to meet him on Sunday, 15 August. Ezra Pound had asked Eliot to deliver a package.
Those whom Lewis would later call the ‘Men of 1914’ – Eliot, Joyce, Pound and himself – were never, all four, in the same room at the same time. But that Sunday three of them were present in a red-curtained apartment at the Hôtel d’Elysée, staring at the brown paper parcel, mute representative of the fourth, lying on a gilt Second Empire table. Neither Lewis nor Eliot had any idea what Pound had entrusted them with. While Joyce struggled with the knots, Eliot sat impassive and Lewis adjusted his tie in a cracked mirror. Joyce had with him a 15-year-old youth over six foot tall, his son Giorgio, and they exchanged words in bad-tempered Italian. ‘Give me a penknife!’ snapped Joyce. ‘I don’t have a penknife!’ snapped his son. Eliot at length proffered a pair of nail-scissors. The string was cut and the brown paper rolled back. ‘Thereupon,’ as Lewis gleefully recalled 17 years later, ‘along with some nondescript garments for the trunk – there were no trousers I believe – a fairly presentable pair of old brown shoes stood revealed, in the centre of the bourgeois French table.’
An explanation of this embarrassing gift could be found in Joyce’s correspondence with Pound from Trieste two months earlier. He had, he said, no clothes other than his son’s cast-offs: a suit too narrow in the shoulders, boots two sizes too big. There was a postscript: ‘This is a very poetical epistle. Do not imagine that it is a subtly worded request for second-hand clothing.’ But Pound may subsequently have heard from Sylvia Beach about Joyce’s visit to the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop in July wearing a pair of grubby tennis shoes. He could not have known that by 15 August, and this first meeting with Eliot and Lewis, the author of Ulysses had replaced the tennis shoes with a pair of elegant patent leather pumps.
Eliot had invited Joyce to join them for dinner but the novelist, smarting under the humiliation of Pound’s misguided generosity, insisted upon taking them to a nearby restaurant and picking up all bills. Giorgio having been sent home with the old brown shoes, they were joined by the art critic of the Petit Parisien, the Belgian poet and novelist, Fritz Vanderpyl. Eliot commemorated the gathering, in a letter to Schiff, with a drawing of the four men under the puzzled gaze of a French waiter.
They left Paris the following day, intending to travel west to Vannes in Brittany. They reached Nantes by Wednesday 18 August and Lewis sent Iris a postcard and telegraphed that they would be in Vannes until the following Sunday.
The next day Iris wrote, poste restante, to Lewis in Vannes. She was now worried that the Home for the Infants and Children of Gentlefolk in Sudbury might find out that she was unmarried and refuse to accept the child. ‘Ought I to tell them before or what?’
An 83-mile train journey of between three and four hours took Eliot and Lewis the last leg of their journey from Nantes to Vannes. But by the time they reached their destination the weather had turned cold and, rather than face the bleakness of the Breton coast in such conditions, they retreated to Saumur, a town some 85 miles back along the Loire valley from Nantes. They stayed in the Hôtel Budan, first in Baedeker’s alphabetical list, ‘at the bridge, opposite the theatre’.
Iris’s letter requesting advice about the Home for the Infants and Children of Gentlefolk arrived in Vannes after their departure.
A few days in Saumur was a time to recuperate from the rigours of travel and to write something more than a brief postcard or telegram. On Saturday the 21st, Lewis sent Iris an heroic if impressionistic account of the holiday thus far. Not having received her last two letters, he made no reference to her anxieties about the baby:
I have been engaged in incessant Trek. I have risen at Six in the morning, have stood for 3 hours on end, 6 hours on one occasion, in corridors of crawling trains. I have crossed Gulfs, stopping at innumerable Islets, lain in the sun above beautiful Estuaries, driven in dusty carriages through the most divine villages.
Eliot took the opportunity to write to Sydney Schiff. ‘W.L. has been sketching here and I have been roaming about . . . I have enjoyed Lewis’s company very much, and have had a great many conversations with him – I do not know anyone more profitable to talk to.’
Their holiday idyll, however, was brought to a violent end when they hired bicycles for an excursion to Chinon, some 18 miles away.
It is possible that Lewis had not ridden a bicycle since July 1908, when his mother had cautioned him: ‘be careful not to be run down by a motor on the road, nor to coast down long hills and get smashed . . . and you don’t want to scorch on the bike as that is not good for your heart.’
They set off. After about 200 yards the chain flew off Lewis’s machine. They stopped to fix it and continued. After another two or three hundred yards, travelling at a brisk pace, the fork over the front wheel broke. Lewis was thrown onto the pavement, sustaining a ‘medium sized surface gash’ to knee and hand.
Eliot managed to help the injured man to a bench outside an inn where brandy was reluctantly provided. Leaving Lewis there, his broken cycle beside him, Eliot mounted his own machine and peddled back to secure the hire of an open barouche for friend and bicycle. Back in Saumur, Lewis confronted the cycle shop proprietor, accusing him of renting out dangerously faulty equipment, while the proprietor, equally enraged, insisted the Englishman pay compensation for the damage caused. ‘The dispute was terminated’, Eliot recalled, ‘in a hostile atmosphere, without any money changing hands.’
Leaving Eliot to explore the Gothic churches of Amboise, Loches and Tours, Lewis returned to Paris alone. ‘He believes that he has escaped lockjaw’, Eliot reported to Pound.
A week later in the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, he was daily anointing his wounds with ointment and complaining that he had lost ‘what would have been a most useful day’s work’ at Chinon as a result of the accident. He had, however, renewed his acquaintanceship with Joyce and produced three portrait drawings in Indian ink of the bespectacled novelist. Joyce seems to have got on better with Lewis than he did with the reserved American. ‘Your friend Mr Eliot’ was how the Irishman referred to him in conversation with Lewis.
By this time Iris’s letter had arrived in Paris, forwarded from Vannes:
I can’t decide whether to tell Nurse Thompson my position and get her to help but I think I shan’t, because it’s not the sort of thing people admire one for and I hate nastiness specially when I’m helpless!
Lewis told her not to confide in the nurse, that he would sort everything out when he returned. He did not know what day he would return, nor by which route, ‘but soon,’ he promised, ‘a few days.’ He seems to have been in no hurry to get back for the birth. ‘I don’t suppose you will void your foetus for several weeks yet.’ As to finding a place for the ‘foetus’, he instructed her to ‘make some temporary arrangements (in the neighbourhood)’. He would attend to permanent arrangements on his return.
He appeared to have second thoughts after posting the letter, because he accelerated his travel plans and dispatched a telegram the same day:
BACK TOMORROW DONT WORRY WILL ARRANGE IMMEDIATELY MUCH LOVE WRITTEN – LEWIS
A letter awaited his return:
This is just a note to greet you when you get back . . . I’m so sorry I’ve not gone to bed yet but I can’t help it . . . I shall surely take to my bed this coming week, and we will spring into an autumn offensive of Little Men, Art, and knitting.
She did not have much longer to wait. The baby was born on 1 September. If Iris had been expecting another son she was disappointed. ‘I want you to name the child’, she told Lewis:
she’s a nice little female and may possibly transmit a few traits of intelligence into a cow-like world so you could take a little interest. I know you don’t like females but this one is bound to ‘favour’ you more than a male, and she’ll like you better too: she won’t like me! Is AUDREY too Shakespearean a name? Invent one, then.
The birth certificate of ‘Maisie Wyndham’ included the names of both parents: Percy Wyndham Lewis, ‘journalist’, and Iris Crump, of ‘no occupation’.