Some Sort of Genius

The Arthur Press’s quarter-million-word, 625-page, doorstop production, The Apes of God, was published on 3 June 1930 in an edition limited to 750 signed and numbered copies. The huge tome weighed three pounds and three ounces and, by a numerical coincidence, it retailed at three pounds and three shillings.

The action of this immense novel follows the six-foot-tall, black-haired and exquisitely handsome 19-year-old poet Daniel Boleyn – Lewis’s self-portrait of the artist as a young man – on a tour through London’s bourgeois bohemia under the tutelage of a charismatic albino by the name of Horace Zagreus. Zagreus is, himself, under the sway of another character, Pierpoint, who never appears but whose pronouncements are delivered in the form of written encyclical, or lengthily ‘broadcast’ speech. While the utterances and opinions of the god-like Pierpoint can be ascribed to the author, it was generally assumed that the model for Zagreus was the notorious practical joker Horace de Vere Cole. A more obscure model was the architect, Freemason and mystic William Stirling, who befriended the 19-year-old Lewis nearly 30 years before and who committed suicide in his Adelphi flat.

The eponymous ‘Apes’ – prosperous amateur daubers and scribblers who aped the ‘true’ artist’s vocation and, at the same time, made it impossible for him to earn a living by snapping up all the best studios for themselves at exorbitantly inflated rents – these were the targets of Lewis’s not entirely dispassionate satire. Many of the people he had known, borrowed money from and grown to despise during the previous decade figured there, under the guise of one object of ridicule or another.

Edward and Fanny Wadsworth appeared as a ‘rich mountebank marine painter’ and, ‘obese and smiling’, his ‘awful old bore of a wife’. In recognition of Wadsworth’s war experience in the Naval Reserve, ‘Richard and Jenny’ are described in elaborate nautical imagery. Sydney and Violet Schiff were ‘Lionel Kein’, the ‘pseudo-Proust’, and his wife ‘Isabel’, effortlessly orchestrating her dinner guests, her ‘brilliant handsome profile . . . like a large ornate knife at the head of the table’. Lewis’s former sketching pupil, Dick Wyndham, was subjected to particularly personal mockery. An overgrown schoolboy with corkscrewing trousers and uncoordinated blundering movements, Dick Wittingdon is the ‘Ape-Flagellant’ whose taste is for fast cars and whips. ‘Dick’ rents ten studios for himself to ‘prevent ten geniuses from having a roof over their genius, and . . . keep them in small ill-lit rooms while he [sits] on . . . valuable workshops in solitary egotistical state’.

Finally Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith Sitwell were caricatured respectively as Osmund, Phoebus and Harriet Finnian Shaw, the family group of preposterous baby-talking middle-aged infants. Georgia, Sacheverell’s Canadian wife, was a less easily recognisable model for Babs Kennson, the ‘New Zealand jewess’ eager to entrap Phoebus with ‘the magic of her Maori money-bags’ and holding ‘all the trumps in her neat kosher fist’.

Some time in July Lewis arrived unexpectedly at Marjorie Firminger’s maisonette and was shown in by the daily help. He was wearing a cloth cap, the peak of which he kept tweaking down over his eyes as he nervously glanced from side to side, uncomfortable that the cleaner was still in the flat. He appeared visibly to relax when he heard the front door slam behind her. He told Marjorie he was under attack from various quarters because of The Apes of God and he was having to prepare a manifesto to protect himself. Then he asked her ‘very tentatively – shyly almost’, if there were any possibility she might lend him £5 ‘to get a bit of typing done’. Delighted to be of service, she wrote him a cheque. She had never enjoyed writing a cheque more. There was a further embarrassed hiatus and then he asked her if it would be convenient for him to have cash instead.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘of course.’ Unfortunately, he would have to wait for cash as she had no ready money and the banks were closed by that time of the afternoon.

‘Never mind’, Lewis said and told her he would come back in a couple of days to collect it.

The South African poet Roy Campbell, who had made a cameo appearance in The Apes of God as the libidinous Zulu Blades, wrote a favourable notice of the novel for the New Statesman. The literary editor Ellis Roberts rejected the review as being too favourable. ‘I find you take a far more serious view of its merits than I can,’ he told Campbell, ‘and indeed take Mr Lewis altogether more seriously than I think is justifiable.’ Campbell tore up the letter, then, realising its potential value as propaganda, he numbered the pieces and sent them to Lewis with a copy of his rejected review. These two documents were to form part of Satire and Fiction, the last publication to appear under the imprint of The Arthur Press, and for the typing of which Marjorie Firminger had been asked to contribute £5.

To offset Ellis Roberts’s letter, printed in facsimile complete with jagged black horizontal tear marks, other letters, of enthusiastic endorsement, were included from Richard Aldington, Montgomery Belgion, J. D. Beresford, Meyrick Booth, Augustus John, H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats. A two-page ‘reader’s report for an American publisher’, written by Belgion, was presented as further evidence that the book should be taken seriously. Then there were eight pages containing extracts of reviews from The Referee, The Sphere, The Spectator, Time and Tide, Everyman, Daily Telegraph, Daily News, Daily Mail, Times Literary Supplement, Evening News, Evening Standard, Weekly Sketch, Weekly Dispatch, Sunday Express, Western Mail, Yorkshire Post, Glasgow Herald, Weekend Review and Saturday Review.

The generally favourable press reception of The Apes of God did not incline Chatto & Windus to undertake publishing another novel Lewis offered them of a similar character. The Roaring Quean* seemed like a substantial splinter of the bigger book, a catalogue of other ‘apes’ that he had not found room for even in that capacious volume. Judging it only on an incomplete manuscript, it was ‘one of the best things of its kind I have ever read’, Prentice told Lewis:

But the piece seems to us too risky for Chattos to do. Too many heads are cracked, and the result would be that the wounded would take it out of us . . . we don’t feel we could face up to the whole cohort of the implicated.

Those ‘implicated’ in this satire of the book racket were Arnold Bennett, Virginia Woolf, Nancy Cunard, Gerald Gould, literature critic for the Observer, and Brian Howard, poet and fiction reviewer for the New Statesman, model for the eponymous ‘Quean’, Donald Butterboy.

The troublesome little novel, attended by mixtures of commendation and regret similar to that expressed by Prentice, was to pass through the offices of a number of other publishers over the next six years.

It was later in the year that those implicated in The Apes of God began a campaign of petty irritation. A novelty postcard reached Lewis from Nuremberg, showing a chubby baby wearing goggles and a beret. The sender had inked in a brim to the beret, emphasised the black rims of the goggles, drawn a pipe in the infant’s hand and added a moustache. When the card was squeezed a mechanism inside emitted a whimpering cry. It was addressed to ‘Percy Lewis esq.’, and inscribed:

GREETINGS TO TARZAN FROM A GATHERING OF THE APES

Of all the victims of The Apes of God, Richard Wyndham was perhaps the most seriously offended by Lewis’s satirical treatment of him. When the two men chanced to meet in a restaurant shortly after publication, Lewis reported with disingenuous understatement that the other ‘did not seem friendly’. Only Richard Wyndham appended his real name to the Nuremberg novelty postcard. The other signatories were ‘Phoebus’, ‘Jenny’, ‘Richard’ and ‘Babs Kennson’.

Then, in The Times personal column of 2 September, sandwiched between the notice of a vacancy for a public school boy on a farm in Southern Rhodesia and an advertisement for an ex-cavalrymen’s association supplying messengers, clerks, semi-skilled and general labourers, the following offer appeared:

PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS. – Two PAINTINGS for SALE, 9ft. by 7ft. and 6ft. by 4ft., £20 and £15; inspection. – Captain Wyndham, 77, Bedford gardens.

It was taken up the following morning in the Daily Express, under the headline: ‘AN “AGONY” SURPRISE FOR CHELSEA’. The article pointed out that ‘detailed specification of size, contrasted with the price, invites one to work out a simple little sum to show that you can buy a square foot of Wyndham Lewis painting for the trifling expenditure of 6s. 8d. or 7s.’ The correspondent reported that he had visited the address given in the advertisement and been told that the pictures could be viewed ‘only after arrangement with Captain Wyndham, whose present address is unknown, because he is travelling in France’.

Comment was invited from Lewis himself, who explained that the advertisement was one of many reactions he had received from people who believed they had been represented in The Apes of God. ‘You would not believe’, he told the reporter, ‘the amount of abuse I have received by telephone and letter.’ He denied that there was ‘anything in the book in the least resembling Captain Richard Wyndham’.

This interesting development occurred too late to be reported in the body of Satire and Fiction, due for publication that month, but Lewis had the entire Express article printed as a flyer headed: ‘A STOP-PRESS EXPLOSION’.

ENRAGED ‘Ape of God,’ believing that he caught sight of his own features in the crowded mirror of The Apes of God, sends up a cry of AGONY!

It is not known whether Richard Wyndham seriously intended disposing of Kermesse and Plan of War for such ludicrously low prices, or whether he was doing, in 1930, what two years before he had pleaded innocence of doing: using those early works ‘as a weapon, for reprisals’ against Lewis.

If, on his return from France, he did sell them, even for £15 and £20, he would have made a profit on the £5 he told the Daily Sketch he paid for them in New York. Neither painting has been seen again.

In the autumn of 1930 Lewis was preparing, with mounting frustration, to paint his first portrait since that of Violet Schiff. Towards the beginning of May he had been commissioned by Lord Glenapp to paint his wife’s portrait for a fee of £300, to be paid on completion. Dress and pose were agreed upon: red lace, standing in three-quarter profile with left hand resting on hip, index and forefinger together pointing forward, ring and little finger curled back.

The Viscountess was initially enthusiastic, but her social commitments made it impossible for work to begin immediately. And in the ensuing months Lewis was unable to get her to stand still long enough for him to make a start. On 8 September she wrote from Scotland saying she did not know when she would be back in London. On 17 September she was still unable to let him know definitely when she could make herself available but hoped it would be the following week. Fortunately she had lent him her red lace dress, so he was able to carry out much of the work in her absence. Finally, on 1 October, his telegram intercepted her at the Piccadilly Hotel:

AM WORKING UPON DRESS TODAY CAN YOU SIT FOR HEAD TOMORROW MORNING TWELVE PLEASE TELEGRAPH DAYLIGHT ESSENTIAL

This two-hour sitting at last produced a portrait sketch.

On 9 October 1930 the marriage took place at Paddington Registry Office of Percy Lewis, bachelor aged 44 years, and Gladys Hoskins, spinster aged 30 years. The groom gave his profession as ‘architect’ and that of his deceased father as ‘captain in the Warwickshire regiment’. The witnesses were strangers. Wyndham Lewis later claimed that it was in an attempt to avoid press publicity that he omitted his distinctive middle name from the statement, pruned four years from his age and falsified both his own profession and his father’s military background.

No further sittings with Lady Glenapp could be arranged, and by the third week in October Lewis had completed the picture without her. Later she told her husband that she never sat for him ‘except for a few sketches’. This was portraiture without pain.

Lord and Lady Glenapp were in the final throes of a failed marriage which was to end in a swift Scottish divorce the following year. For the time being she was living at Cawston House near Rugby and he was occupying their London residence in Mayfair. There was little communication between husband and wife, and an air of vagueness prevailed when it came to viewing the portrait. Neither seemed to have the time. In November Lewis confessed to ‘the very slightest pique’ that the Viscountess had not yet been to see what he had done. Aware of his client’s delicate matrimonial position he tactfully explored with her the procedure for disposing of the finished work and, more importantly, the question of who was going to pay for it:

His Lordship paid promptly, but deferred viewing his acquisition because of a sore throat.

Lady Glenapp was a little over 30 when Lewis painted her. She was a chronic insomniac and consequently dependent upon narcotics. The nearly full-length portrait shows her against a dark background, her hair bobbed and sculpted. The exotically patterned bodice and sleeve of the red dress, with which the painter had spent more time than with the lady herself, are finely worked. Her eyes are deeply and darkly ringed.

Lewis was keen to capitalise upon this, his first ‘society portrait’ for some time, by submitting it to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition the following April.

On 16 November he went to Germany. It was then that both Lord and Lady Glenapp began demanding to view the portrait. Telegrams were forwarded to him in Berlin.

The ostensible purpose of the trip was business: to find a publisher for a German edition of The Apes of God. This was not to be. ‘The main reason’, he was told by his German agent, was that ‘the different characters of the book behind which English novelists and other well-known persons of the English Literature are hidden, might not be understood by the average German reader.’ But it was not a wasted excursion. He was able to observe at first hand the beginnings of a major political phenomenon.

The German people had voted two months before, sending 107 National Socialists to the Reichstag. Adolf Hitler’s crude appeal to the middle and working classes had attracted an increase in votes from 810,000 in 1928 to 6,409,600. His party had gained 17.5 per cent of the total vote, and was now second only to the Social Democratic Party’s 21.9 per cent. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party was no longer on the political fringe.

Lewis watched from a balcony of the Berlin Sportpalast, as Goebbels and Goering addressed a crowd of some twenty thousand people:

In this gigantic assembly . . . there was something like the pressure of one immense, indignant thought – it was impossible to be present and not to be amazed at the passion engendered in all these men and women, and the millions of others of whom these were only a fraction, by the message of these stormy platform voices . . . Goebbels . . . was a tiny nervous figure, whose voice rose constantly to a scream.

By day Lewis read the newspapers for reports of the previous night’s political street battles. After dark he toured Berlin’s underbelly with a puritan’s fascinated eye for the lush decadence of late Weimar democracy: ‘night-circuses, Negertanz palaces, nacktballeten, flagellation-bars, and sad wells of super-masculine loneliness’. He relied upon the German press for his political research. As for the transvestites of the ‘Eldorado’ in Motzstrasse he saw and felt for himself the chin-stubble, and the cloth-covered wire cups, painted with red rosettes to represent nipples, scooped for his examination from under a low-cut evening dress.

He was back in London by the beginning of December. During the rest of that month, despite an attack of gastric flu just before Christmas, he wrote the first book-length study in any language of Adolf Hitler and the phenomenon of National Socialism.

Despite her demands for a viewing of the portrait while he was away, Lady Glenapp was now in no particular hurry to fit it in to her hectic and erratic social schedule. But one Sunday in mid-December she arrived unexpectedly at Ossington Street with a friend, Mrs O’Donnell. She was shown the picture and appeared pleased. That evening the two ladies insisted on accompanying Lewis and Augustus John to the Tour Eiffel in Percy Street. John was drunk, Lewis uncomfortable, and the ladies seemingly oblivious to any social embarrassment. Later Lewis escorted them back to Lady Glenapp’s hotel in Weymouth Street, where she made a porter break open the drinks cupboard. She was evidently enjoying the estrangement from her husband and the Bohemian flirtation her acquaintance with Lewis offered. She commissioned a portrait drawing of herself as a birthday present for her lover, Captain Charles Douglas Beech. The following Thursday Lewis met her for lunch, which she insisted on paying for. ‘I’m not a gold digger’, she told him. Later that afternoon it proved too dark for the drawing to be done.

A year after she brought a rather drunk Heather Pilkington to visit Lewis, Marjorie Firminger’s first and only novel, Jam Today, was published in Paris. Donald Friede had told her that, contrary to Lewis’s advice, with the spicy details it could not be sold in the United States and without the details it would not sell. Its subject matter alone prohibited publication in London, earning it the invaluable selling point for the Paris market of being ‘banned in Britain’. The novel contained a thinly disguised lesbian character, and Heather Pilkington was enraged. ‘People are there to be used!’ Lewis had told Marjorie, and she was thrilled to have shown herself so worthy a pupil. During the furious reception of her own book she reported to her mentor that Richard Wyndham had comforted Miss Pilkington, telling her that ‘a much worse book’ had been written about him.

Perhaps Wyndham – mercilessly lampooned in The Apes of God as the ridiculous Dick Whittingdon – now understood the wider significance of Lewis’s chilling words, delivered across a café table in the South of France: ‘People are only friends in so much that they are of use to you.’

Marjorie was yet to learn that she was not immune to such usage herself.

By 12 January 1931, Charles Prentice had read and accepted the Hitler book for Chatto, although he could not offer as large an advance for it as Lewis felt its topicality demanded. A 40,000-word book, even with illustrations, commanded a retail price of only six shillings, Prentice explained. A retail price of 7/6, on the other hand, ‘would lay one open to the accusation of giving short weight, and would not help the book to gain a wide public.’ On that basis Chatto could offer an advance of no more than £100.

Before publication, extracts appeared as a series of five articles in Time and Tide called ‘Hitlerism – Man and Doctrine’. In the first, Lewis claimed to write as ‘an exponent – not as a critic nor yet as an advocate – of German National Socialism’. A preliminary editorial note accompanied each weekly instalment:

Whilst we do not find ourselves in agreement with Mr. Wyndham Lewis’s attitudes towards the German National-Socialist Party and the political situation generally, the vivid picture of present-day Germany which he gives in this series of articles seems to us of such unusual interest that we do not hesitate to publish them.

Following the first two instalments, reactions began appearing in Time and Tide’s correspondence pages. Frederick A. Voigt, a Manchester Guardian journalist living in Berlin, declared that Lewis had been taken in by the Nazi press. He was accused of regurgitating Der Angriff and Völkischer Beobachter for his accounts of Communists helping the police to beat up brownshirts, and of brownshirts, armed only with their fists, pitted against Communist gangs armed to the teeth. Cicely Hamilton disputed Lewis’s account of lurid decadence in the Wittenberg Platz. Claiming to have lived for several weeks just round the corner, she could not remember ‘anything startling in the way of wickedness and vice’. The following week, Lewis’s reply to his critics dismissed Voigt as a Communist partisan and Miss Hamilton as a kill-joy threatening to ruin Berlin’s tourist trade.

Both Voigt and Hamilton retaliated in subsequent weeks, and a correspondent calling himself ‘The Walrus’ joined the debate, applauding Time and Tide for its enterprise in printing Lewis’s views:

I for one would rather enjoy such interludes in this time of depression than read the studied accuracies and judicial views of grave and normal persons like Mr Voigt, whose only merit is that they know what they are talking about, while Mr Wyndham Lewis demonstrably does not (as if that mattered!).

Some criticism came from the extreme Right, but only in matters of detail. The Honorary Secretary of the Kensington Fascist Group took issue with Lewis’s assertion that Germany was a far greater nation than Italy. ‘Fascism and Hitlerism’, Mr W. J. Chambers protested:

are two expressions of the same ideal . . . Should the day come when we in this country throw off our present demo-liberal system of government and adopt a policy of national organisation similar to that advocated by Mussolini and Hitler we shall find that it will not be a slavish imitation of one or other of these systems, but a synthesis of the two, an expression in the sphere of politics of the Anglo-Saxon soul, as Fascism expresses the Latin and Hitlerism the Teutonic.

By the end of January the volatile Lady Glenapp decided that she did not care for Lewis’s representation of her after all. Her reasons are unclear. According to Lewis, she had expressed ‘nothing but satisfaction with the work’, had agreed to have it exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and consulted with him about a suitable frame. Then suddenly she began describing it as ‘an example of extreme modern art’ and proceeded ‘to cover the picture with abuse’. Perhaps the heavily lidded, dark-rimmed eyes in the pale face displayed her neurotic insomnia too accurately for comfort. For his part, Lewis expressed himself as ‘completely tired of the whole thing’ and unwilling to exhibit the portrait at the RA or anywhere else.

Lord Glenapp made excuses for his wife, ‘always a rather hasty tongued woman’, and explained that she was suffering from an affliction of the ear and was ‘a great deal in pain’. A frank allusion to her private affairs suggested there may have been other reasons for her erratic behaviour. ‘I shudder to think’, Glenapp told Lewis, ‘what will happen to her if she is being advised as to the conduct of her life by Captain Beech, and taking his advice.’

It may have been on Beech’s advice that, a few days later, Her Ladyship wrote to Lewis demanding the return of the £100 she had lent him in October 1929 to finance The Apes of God. If he was unable to repay it immediately she gave notice that she would require it in six months’ time with interest. Meanwhile he was to send her a cheque for the interest and compound interest to date, by return of post.

Summoned to Ossington Street by telephone for 9.30 on a Sunday evening in early February, Marjorie Firminger arrived in her black suit, white shirt and stiff bow tie. Her outfit had ‘a nice chap hint’, as Lewis had commented approvingly the last time they had met.

‘So you’re going in for pornography in a big way, are you?’ he asked as they settled themselves either side of the gas fire. Jam Today having been published just before Christmas in Paris, and duly banned in England, she had almost finished an even more daring book she thought of calling After Thirty. Lewis predicted that Europe would soon be flooded with ‘finely bound volumes’ of her work. He laughed at the euphemism and she was evidently expected to laugh as well. She felt a little put out at the way he talked about her work but let it pass. She did not regard the new book as pornographic but, since that was clearly the way Lewis liked to think of it, she did not attempt to persuade him otherwise. She even seemed to emphasise the racier elements when she gave him news of its development: ‘I have just been describing an amusing fuck this afternoon’, she told him on one occasion. She had no suspicion that such unguarded items of information were helping to develop the portrait of Valerie Ritter, whose ‘expressions were quite unprintable, except in de luxe editions privately printed in Paris’, that Lewis would unveil the following year.

He was in expansive mood that Sunday evening, his talk peppered with anecdotes about the Sitwells. At one point she laughed so much that she cried and could not find a handkerchief. Lewis went and fetched a piece of rag and she dabbed her eyes, ‘enchanted to be sitting there in the smoke and the clutter and the dust, wondering where he had got the rag from, if he had torn it off a larger piece he used for cleaning his brushes. Was there a sink somewhere outside on the landing? And did Mrs. Lewis really live upstairs?’ Having found him thus far so unguarded, she took the opportunity to ask about the story that he kept a wife up there who no one ever saw. Lewis’s eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his hat. The atmosphere changed.

‘Who said that?’

‘Constant Lambert. The composer.’

‘Lambert? LAMBERT? Yes, of course, Lambert!’ and he deflected one piece of gossip with a side-swiping piece of his own.

‘Lambert! Always pulling sheaves of invitations out of his pocket. By mistake, he says. But of course just to show how popular he is.’

She felt she had committed a faux pas as he got to his feet signalling that their interview was at an end. She stood also and they faced one another in silence. He was still looking at her suspiciously and she was beginning to flush when he suddenly asked if she would allow him to make a drawing of her. ‘We’ll call it jam to-day!’ he said, and added that it could go on the cover of her next ‘filthy book’. She was going to Paris to see a potential publisher for After Thirty, and if they could arrange a sitting soon she could have the drawing to take with her. She was of course delighted. Then he began to explain ‘in a rather ponderous way, and with elaborate gesture’ what he had in mind: ‘the drawing must match the book in “abandon” . . . some lying-on-the-sofa sketch, naked or nearly so.’

It was the first time she was ever to contradict him, and he seemed slightly taken aback by her response. Such a drawing would be out of the question, she told him, and it would set entirely the wrong tone in publicity for the new book: ‘The more “naked” my books the more prim should be my pictures.’ He retreated: ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘of course’, and tried to pass off the ‘abandoned’ pose as not having been an entirely serious suggestion. She continued firmly that he must draw her fully clothed or not at all. Even the very becoming satin breeches she sometimes wore, and that Lewis had admired, would not do. ‘Of course not,’ he assured her, ‘of course not.’

As usual he walked with her along Ossington Street to the Bayswater Road and, as they parted, promised to telephone and arrange the sitting.

Throughout Marjorie’s rather breathless memoir there is an undercurrent of something that might have been sexual tension between them. His suggestion that she pose for him nude may have been a move towards seducing her, albeit a clumsy and risibly obvious one. On the other hand, she may have overreacted to a nudge and wink too far in their self-consciously ‘liberated’ conversation.

Lewis thought the meeting that evening sufficiently relevant to record in a makeshift journal: ‘Saw M. Firminger for 2 hours at 9.30.’ The other part of the entry, however, was dismissive: ‘nothing of importance.’

He did not telephone to arrange the sitting and, despite a few letters attempting to lure him with promises of ‘chit’, she left for Paris without the drawing.

The period of time from first eyewitness impressions of the National Socialist movement in November 1930 to the appearance in the shops of Lewis’s book on the subject was a little over four months. Hitler was published on 26 March 1931. The Spectator critic was more perceptive than perhaps he realised: ‘The worst fault of the book is the inescapable feeling that Mr. Wyndham Lewis has thrown it all together in a few hectic afternoons of work. It is slapdash and often confused.’ He conceded, however, that ‘the slapdash and confused views . . . of an intelligent man are on the whole more preferable, in the case of a genuinely difficult subject such as the rise of the National Socialist Movement, to the most laborious and mature considerations of a dolt.’

Elsewhere, apart from unqualified praise from Hugh Gordon Porteus in The Twentieth Century and a favourable review in the Times Literary Supplement, critical response was lukewarm; at best the reviews gave Lewis credit for tackling a little-known subject in a racy and entertaining style. At worst it was dismissed by Clennell Wilkinson in Everyman:

what do we find? It would hardly be unfair to answer ‘Nothing.’ Here is a mere ‘write-up’ of the Nazi case, entirely uncritical, vague and unsubstantial. It was positively a feat to fill so many pages and give so little information.

It was criticised for being biased, sloppily written, badly researched and inaccurate. But nowhere was it condemned as morally tainted. Supporting Fascism or National Socialism did not carry with it the stigma in 1931 that it would carry two years later. It did, however, attract some interesting new acquaintances.

Not long after the book was published, Lewis was visited by a man he described as ‘the official representative of the Nazi party in London’. He was in fact the English correspondent for the National Socialist newspapers Völkischer Beobachter and Der Angriff. He was eventually expelled from England in November 1935 on the grounds that his activities were ‘unrelated to those of bona fide journalism’ – a Foreign Office euphemism for espionage. He was Dr Hans-Wilhelm Thost, ‘pronounced toast’, and he liked the book. ‘He said it was not at all bad for an Englishman.’ His only serious reservation concerned its analysis of the Judenfrage. Lewis did not take Hitler’s anti-Semitism seriously. Far from regarding it as one of the pillars of National Socialist policy, he described the ‘Jewish question’ as ‘a racial redherring’ and, in a passage brimming with painful irony for the hindsighted, he had reassured his Time and Tide readers:

Hitler himself . . . is, though not a man of compromise, yet not unreasonable, a violent or fanatical, man. I believe that, if he should come into power, he would discourage his followers from the reckless pursuit of any policy calculated to antagonise the rest of the European world. The Anglo-Saxon need not, I think, turn his back entirely upon Hitler because of this precious Judenfrage.

Lewis’s visitor assured him he was wrong. ‘If you do not understand the Judenfrage’, Dr Thost declared, ‘you have not understood Hitlerism. Without the Jewish question Hitlerism would not exist.’

The interview had its comic aspect. Dr Thost (or ‘Herr Thost’, as Lewis persisted in calling him) was preoccupied by a social dilemma. His father had been a friend of Lord Curzon, whose daughter was the first wife of Sir Oswald Mosley. Thost had a letter of introduction to Lady Cynthia but seemed embarrassed and reluctant to present it. ‘But why not, Herr Thost?’ Lewis pressed him for an explanation. It appeared that Lady Cynthia’s Jewish ancestry was the obstacle. Lord Curzon had married Mary Victoria, the only daughter of a Chicago industrialist: Levi Zeigler Leiter. ‘What a fearful obstacle-race life was’, Lewis mused, ‘for a member of the Nazi party, winding his way in and out of the family trees of his father’s oldest friends.’

Thost was not the only Nazi to have reservations about Lewis’s book. Reimer Hobbing Verlag, the Berlin firm who were preparing to publish a German translation, thought that the sales prospects would be much improved if one of the Party leaders were to write an introduction. But the translation appeared the following year without such an endorsement.

Articles in a weekly journal like Time and Tide are soon forgotten. But the same matter persists when expanded to over 200 pages in a book dustwrappered in swastikas. The threefold conjunction of Lewis’s name with that of the German dictator and his crooked emblem has made of that hastily executed dustwrapper an incriminating exhibit. Hitler has done more lasting harm to Lewis’s reputation than anything else he produced and, several decades after his death, that positive evaluation of National Socialism continues to be brandished against him. But an early damage assessment appears to have come from C. H. Brooks, his literary agent at A. M. Heath from 1931. ‘These are long vendettas’, Lewis wrote:

A peculiar people, neither forgivers nor forgetters.

All that I know is that my agents write

‘Your Hitler Book has harmed you’ – in a night,

Somewhat like Byron – only I waken thus

To find myself not famous but infamous.

Infamy did not come overnight. It came retrospectively as, two years later, the horrifying nature of the Nazi phenomenon began to be recognised in England.

* Eventually published in 1973, as The Roaring Queen, by Secker & Warburg.