The year 1922 began well. Lewis signed a contract with Constable & Co. for a novel provisionally titled The Life of a Tyro, and was given an advance on royalties of £100. True, the novel was never delivered and eight years later he was forced to return the money with interest and legal costs, but in the first months of 1922, while he began work as a portrait painter in Adam and Eve Mews, the money must have come in useful for the time being.
Sydney Schiff had spoken of having a portrait of his wife painted in November when Lewis had just moved into his studio. In January a price was agreed upon. Schiff was to pay £30 for a study of Violet and £100 for the full-scale canvas to be produced later. In February, with the study under way, Schiff agreed to supply him with an advance of £20 on the portrait proper. In March the study was delivered, in a plain black frame, but Schiff was not entirely satisfied with it. Lewis was at pains to point out that this was ‘not in any sense, [his] last word on the subject of Violet’, that the face was ‘sketched rather than painted’ and the left hand had ‘in any case at some time [to] be worked on and explained more’. And he went on:
If Violet herself is not displeased with this first attempt, I shall welcome the further opportunity that the larger painting will afford me, of presenting you with something that will in a sense be her. – Do not therefore, psychologically bring too much to bear on this sketch.
When The Tyro first appeared in April 1921, its front page had promised: ‘TO BE PRODUCED AT INTERVALS OF TWO OR THREE MONTHS’. On the second page there was a more cautious statement of intent:
A paper run entirely by painters and writers, the appearance of the ‘Tyro’ will be spasmodic: that is, it will come out when sufficient material has accumulated to make up a new number; or when something of urgent interest hastens it into renewed and pointed utterance.
The second issue appeared over a year later in early March 1922. ‘Between the first and second number’, the Editor conceded:
a longer time has elapsed than was intended; and no fixed date can be assigned, in any case, for its appearances. Roughly we aim at four numbers a year. But more, of a restricted size, may be produced; or the material may be made into a bulkier format, as in the present number, brought out less frequently.
Existing subscribers were told that the second issue was to be regarded as two numbers and that they could expect one further Tyro of whatever size for their 6/6d., inclusive of postage.
No further issues appeared.
*
Throughout April and May, Lewis was working on two major portraits in the corrugated-iron-bound studio beyond the high wall of Adam and Eve Mews. One sitter was the music critic Edwin Evans. The other was Edith Sitwell. The light was proving to be a problem, however, as he told Schiff: ‘the days are too short; and often light-dark, light-dark, like a lighthouse lamp’.
He had begun painting Miss Sitwell in the last month or so of 1921, and by her own account she sat nearly every afternoon until the following June. She sat in the same armchair that Iris Barry had occupied for Praxitella, turned this time almost side-on to the artist. She wore a loose, emerald green jacket and a yellow skirt. Her face, as it eventually came to be presented on the canvas, was a pale, egg-like oval. The eyes were so heavily lidded as to appear closed and the long slender nose seemed designed to look down.
Some ten years later, having been, as she thought, pilloried in Lewis’s gargantuan satire, The Apes of God, she wrote a memoir of her sittings. Its picture of Lewis’s squalid working environment was perhaps partly coloured by revenge:
The studio . . . was very large, and the floor was crowded with old newspapers, books, drawings, housemaids’ worries, pots, pans, kettles, a tea pot, tins of milk, and Mr. Lewis’s discarded undergarments.
At times he seemed to take delight in unsettling his exquisitely bred sitter. ‘D’you mind rats?’ he asked her. ‘Oh well, they’re here all right. Night and day! Night and day!’ Then, after a pause: ‘I’ll try to keep ’em off.’
Miss Sitwell never actually saw the rats but she heard ‘a great deal of animation taking place among Mr Lewis’s discarded shirts and drawings, which at times seemed to be absolutely whisking over the floor, in spite of all impediments.’
On one occasion she arrived to find him shaving.
‘D’you mind waiting whilst I shave?’ he asked her.
‘Not at all’, Miss Sitwell replied.
He sighed deeply.
‘And after I’ve shaved, I mean to wash my hands.’
He sighed again.
‘I suppose you do everything one after another, don’t you? I mean you . . .’
He paused.
‘. . . probably have a bath in the morning?’
Miss Sitwell said that she did.
‘And after that, you probably . . .’
During each pause, Miss Sitwell remembered, he built a small edifice in the air with his hands as if attempting to communicate more than mere words.
‘. . . brush your hair?’
Miss Sitwell agreed that she did.
‘But before that you – brush your teeth?’
‘Yes.’
He sighed again deeply.
‘It’s that damned Time! I seem to have so little Time for anything. Now sometimes I’ll . . .
. . . wash my hands in the morning . . .
. . . and shave in the afternoon. At other times I’ll . . .’
And in the middle of another pause he seemed to recollect his incomplete toilet:
‘Well, I suppose I’d better get on with what I’m doing.’
Laundry was also a problem, as the tangle of soiled shirts and underclothes testified. Miss Sitwell remembered arriving one afternoon to find him dressed in an immaculately starched shirt but without a collar.
‘D’you mind sitting to me in my evening shirt?’ he asked.
‘Not at all.’
‘It’s that damned laundress’.
If Miss Sitwell had heard rumours of his late mother’s occupation she might not have been averse to inventing this particular snippet of conversation to bate him with, should her memoir ever appear in print.*
In May Lewis pronounced the portrait ‘nearly finished: three more sittings should see it done as far as work from her is concerned’.
*
The stolid figure of Edwin Evans, dressed in a brown three-piece suit, sat bearded and extravagantly moustached in three-quarter profile. A Latin Quarter hat hung from a hefty walking stick propped between his knees. A group of composers, Arthur Bliss, Arnold Bax, Constant Lambert and Eugene Goossens, had commissioned the portrait in recognition of the Daily Telegraph critic’s services to British contemporary music. They wished to present it to him during a dinner to be held in his honour in late June. At the beginning of the month Lewis was working on it in oppressive weather conditions. ‘The most suffocating heat continues’, he told Violet Schiff, ‘my studio is an oven, the metal sides and roof cooking me every day.’
Work stopped, however, when it became apparent that Goossens and Bliss had not succeeded in raising the sum agreed on for the picture from subscribers. Years later Bliss could not remember how much Lewis had wanted, but a letter from Nancy Cunard, touching on his financial difficulties, linked the composer’s name with the question: ‘Whence £500?’
The presentation dinner was postponed for six months, from June until early in the New Year. This may have been because the painting was a long way from being finished, or it may have been to allow Goossens and Bliss more time to raise the shortfall in the painter’s fee. In the meantime the canvas remained in Lewis’s studio with the still unfinished portrait of Edith Sitwell.
*
Sydney Schiff had succeeded in interesting the Paris art dealer Léonce Rosenberg in Lewis’s work and there was talk of an exhibition at his Galerie L’Effort Moderne, in autumn. While fully sensible of ‘the importance of success in Paris . . . and the promises it [held] of greater freedom in work and development’, Lewis seemed cautious. He claimed he was unable to ‘set aside time to prepare a show for Paris’, while at the same time proposing to show Rosenberg half a dozen drawings which he might, ‘as an earnest of goodwill, a sort of instalment’, buy in advance, to ensure the show was financially beneficial to Lewis. Perhaps this caution might be better termed diffidence. Perhaps, offered the prospect of success in Paris, he was haunted by the possibility of not ‘setting the Seine on fire’ and of how damaging failure in Paris would be to his reputation.
Whatever reservations he had, Lewis mentioned his forthcoming Paris show to Charles Rutherston.* He also intended having another in London, simultaneously. But, lest nothing should come of these plans, he added darkly: ‘This between ourselves.’
*
Early in July, Schiff paid Lewis £20 for a pencil drawing of his wife. Again Schiff was dissatisfied with it, just as he had been with the painted ‘study’ of Violet delivered in March. Lewis’s defence of the drawing was almost identical with his defence of the study:
As regards what you say about the drawing, it by no means exhausts what I see and think about Violet. I think it is like her and has many points as a drawing and a drawing of her. But I shall be eager to attack her again as you suggest, as often as she is willing to sit.
Eventually he took the drawing back, promising to find it a better frame. Instead, he sold it again. This may have been an oversight on Lewis’s part, or else he reasoned that because Schiff had not been pleased with the pencilled rendition of his wife, he would not miss it. Either way, Schiff was later disconcerted to see the drawing hanging in the home of the critic O. R. Drey.
*
In August he was in Paris, probably with the intention of establishing personal contact with Léonce Rosenberg. Whether or not the autumn exhibition spoken of in April was still on offer, the art dealer’s words, as Lewis later remembered them, certainly boded well for the future:
Lewis, these things of yours are the only things being done in England today which would interest Paris. Give me some of these, as many as you like, and I will sell them for you.
In the meantime, however, he was staying at the Hôtel de Varenne, and so short of money he was forced to write and ask Schiff for a further advance of £20 on the portrait of Violet. Schiff sent him the money and urged him to call on Marcel Proust, even promising to write to the Frenchman, suggesting he sit for a portrait drawing. There is no evidence that Lewis took advantage of this opportunity to meet the ailing author, who died only three months later.
He did, however, record his first meeting with another, more robust man of letters, when he called at Ezra Pound’s apartment, 70 bis, rue Notre Dame des Champs:
I rang the bell. A good deal of noise was to be heard but no one answered: therefore I pushed the door, which opened practically into the studio. A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra’s. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back upon his settee. The young man was Hemingway.
Hemingway’s account of this first meeting with Lewis was far less flattering:
Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat . . . and was dressed like someone out of La Bohème. He had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog . . . and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra’s left leads or blocked them with an open right glove. I wanted us to stop but Lewis insisted we go on . . . and I could see that . . . he was hoping to see Ezra hurt. Nothing happened. I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me, sticking out his left hand and throwing a few right hands, and then said we were through . . . We had a drink of something . . . I watched Lewis carefully without appearing to look at him, as you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier looking man. Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty. Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of . . . I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.
*
Back in London, on 27 September, Schiff paid Lewis a further £30 in advance for his wife’s portrait. He also sent him an account, including precise dates and sums of money, of his outlay since the end of the previous year. There had been £25 on 8 December and another £25 a week later. There was £10 on 10 January, £20 on 23 February, £20 sent to Paris on 16 August. He pointed out that all this, together with the final payment of £30, completed the sum of £130 originally agreed for the portrait and study. As yet, work on the portrait had not even begun.
Lewis acknowledged receipt of the last cheque on a postcard hastily scratched with an almost empty fountain pen. ‘I will write you in morning more fully’, he promised. ‘I shall leave for Venice in a few days.’ He was going to Italy for the first and only time in his life on the invitation of a current object of amorous interest.
Nancy Cunard had rented one floor of a ‘rather exquisite’, quiet house on a stretch of the Grand Canal for a month. The Casa Mainilla had two small terraces for him to choose from as outdoor studios. He would have his own room and be welcome any time until 20 October. ‘Write to me there and arrive’, she had told him.
A week into October he was still in London, lingering ‘from day to day’ in the hope of having enough drawings ready to give Léonce Rosenberg on his way through Paris. Since no subsequent reference to the proprietor of the Galerie L’Effort Moderne occurred in Lewis’s correspondence, it may be assumed he did not succeed in his efforts and that further dealings, including the autumn exhibition and any possibility of ‘setting the Seine on fire’, came to nothing.*
*
He arrived in Venice on the morning of Friday 13 October 1922 wearing a ‘squalid-looking tweed hat on the back of his head. Very dirty and untidy.’ That was how he confronted Siegfried Sassoon on the same afternoon at Florian’s, in the Piazza San Marco. ‘Protruded his large unwholesome face at me with inquiring eyes (not quite certain whether it was me or not)’, the poet wrote in his diary. ‘As usual I felt quite ill at ease with him.’ Over a decade later the memory was so vivid that Sassoon was able to draw the face on the flyleaf of his copy of One Way Song. With staring eyes, a three-day growth of bristles and the incongruous tweed hat, Lewis looked like a farmer fallen on evil days.
Ivor Novello was acting in a film being shot in front of the Ducal Palace. Sassoon fantasised that the disreputable-looking Lewis would murder him. ‘I hope so’, he wrote.
The season was over. ‘Most of the heavy social stuff is no longer here’, Lewis wrote to Violet Schiff. Pleasantly lodged, as Nancy had promised, there was ‘every freedom, room to work and drinks’. The decadent atmosphere of Venice had a political charge to it now. Bologna had been taken over by the Fascists in May, Milan in early August, and Mussolini’s march on Rome was only 12 days away. ‘Autumn pederasts [were] everywhere, with a sprinkling of Fascisti.’ There was little interaction between the homosexual ‘Septembrists’, or off-season tourists, and the blackshirts, he told Violet ‘though I should have thought in many cases they were made for each other.’
He dined with the Sitwells, Osbert and Sacheverell, the first Sunday he was there and lunched with them on the Monday. Plagued by mosquitoes, he set to work drawing the two brothers before their departure for Rome the following Wednesday. He drew them seated together: Sacheverell, with legs crossed, took up the full height of the page, Osbert was further back, elbow resting on a round table, the suspicion of a plus-foured leg below. The pencil drawing was lightly gouached and squared off in preparation for a large double portrait oil he was never to produce.
On the following Saturday he was still hard at work producing drawings of Nancy and her friends. ‘Yesterday I got a good drawing of M[ondino]’s sister’, he reported, ‘also 2 good starts of Nancy. Today Ruby [Peto] is coming. Tomorrow I shall finish Nancy and tackle M[ondino]. Lady C[unard] can be dealt with following day (Monday).’
And it was amongst these leisured tourists that he made one potentially lucrative friend: Richard Wyndham. ‘Oh, he’s the boy who’s got Clouds,’ Hugo Rumbold told Lewis. The tall, dimple-chinned young man had just inherited the large country house from his uncle, George Wyndham. Richard’s wife, Violet, was the niece of Mrs Schiff, and it was their nine-month-old son who had been so terrified by Lewis’s Tyro self-portrait. ‘Dick’ Wyndham was also an aspiring painter and Lewis gave him some lessons in draughtsmanship. ‘I taught him how to sketch Venetian palaces,’ he recalled, ‘the fingers of one hand grasping the pencil and the fingers of the other grasping the nose’ against the stench of the canals.
*
When the holiday was over Nancy and Lewis left the Casa Mainilla for the railway station at the same time, although not together. Two gondolas were needed. She sat in the first with one of her friends and Lewis had to follow in the second with her maid and luggage. Years after Nancy recalled he was so angry that he did not speak to her until they were halfway to Paris.
Perhaps the reconciliation aboard the Paris train went somewhat beyond verbal communication. Certainly one railway journey would become a fond memory for her. ‘I wish I could see you more often,’ she wrote to him a few months later, ‘and as in Venice or rather as in the train that day.’
Her feelings for him were rather poetically stated in a letter she wrote on another train, to Scotland, in late December:
Dear, dear, Lewis. I get warmed when I am with you – you are a sort of black sun, dark earth, rich and full of new things, potential harvests, always dark, plein de seve, oil, blood, bread and comfort (among other things) I cannot get a nearer word than Rich. I love you very much.
Lewis once told Kate Lechmere that Nancy’s favourite mode of sexual congress with him was buggery. It was a practice he found distasteful and endeavoured to persuade her against.
It may have been sexual incompatibility that caused the break-up of their affair. It may have been her independence of spirit and way of life. It is difficult to imagine Nancy living a life ‘all in one groove deliberately’ for him as Iris Barry had done. Whatever his reasons, he eventually dragged himself away from her heady attractions:
I . . . am thinking as I write ‘I must see her tomorrow’ . . . but I must write in spite of that to say that I do not wish to be involved any more, just now, in your ZEX-LIFE.
*
While he was in Venice, Lewis wrote to Violet Schiff promising that he would start work on her portrait when he returned to London in November. Work began in December and sittings continued well into the New Year.
*
Pagani’s Restaurant in Great Portland Street was the venue for a dinner held on Sunday 21 January 1923. The company sat down to oysters, named after the facially hirsute guest of honour: ‘Huîtres Royales Evans (Bearded)’. Three instigators of the dinner were represented elsewhere on the menu: ‘Hors d’Oeuvre Bax’, ‘Petite Marmite Bliss’ and ‘Filets de Sole à la Goossens’.
Edwin Evans’s portrait had been liberated for the evening from the cluttered garden studio in Adam and Eve Mews. Bliss and Goossens had collected it by taxi that afternoon and it was safely stored in Pagani’s cloakroom until the moment of presentation. Apart from an item in the soup course, ‘Crème Divine Wyndham Lewis’, the painter himself was not in evidence.
The portrait was far from finished. The likeness of the critic, solidly enough modelled though it was, appeared to float against a thinly washed-in ground, the pencilled grid lines showing through. Only a patch of shadow under the chair served to anchor the figure to the canvas. Lewis had parted with it for the evening under protest, unwilling to have it judged in this unfinished state. Besides, he had still not been paid the balance of what was due to him, and insisted on the canvas being returned to his studio after the presentation for more work, pending further contributions from the subscribers.
For his part Evans was flattered by the gift and expressed himself very pleased with the portrait as it stood. Some time later, more money having been collected, but probably little extra paint applied, Lewis agreed to give Evans the canvas. Unfinished, it hung in his study until his death.
* It did not appear in his lifetime. A letter from the solicitors Child & Child, dated 27 July 1931, strongly advised against publication on the grounds that it would render her liable to an action for damages by Lewis. She eventually incorporated much of the material from her memoir in a newspaper article: ‘Hazards of Sitting for my Portrait’, Observer, 27 November 1960.
* Brother to William Rothenstein. Like his other brother, Albert, Charles anglicized his name during the Great War. He bequeathed his collection of Wyndham Lewis paintings and drawings to the Manchester Art Gallery.
* As did the ‘simultaneous’ show in London, about which he had sworn Rutherston to secrecy.