‘A roaming wild oat come to roost’
When Lewis and his wife returned from Morocco in August 1931 they transferred their domestic hearth from Tavistock Road to the martial-sounding 27 Ordnance Road* in St John’s Wood. At about the same time their household was expanded by the addition of a small Sealyham terrier called ‘Tut’, ‘Tutsi’ or, latterly, ‘Jo-Jo’.
It was not until May 1932 that Lewis acquired another ‘office’ or studio equivalent to 53 Ossington Street. 31 Percy Street was owned by a firm of manufacturing jewellers on the ground floor. It was on the opposite side to Lewis’s wartime quarters at number 4, and nearer to Tottenham Court Road. The ‘first floor back’ of number 31 was sublet to him by a man called Love, whose congenial name remained on the bell throughout Lewis’s occupancy. John Rothenstein recalled being entertained there:
we . . . sat . . . in front of a red-hot iron stove, from whose angry rays we must have suffered painfully had we not been shielded by a yard-high range of cinders encircling the fearful source of heat.
Rupert Grayson described it as a ‘sealed, locked, padlocked, bolted, enchained hideout . . . equipped rather than furnished with two well-screwed-up packing cases (for the occasional use of guest or model), an easel and a sinister black steel-braced trunk pressed into a shadowy corner of the room and, for greater security, clamped to the floor.’ There was a second room but Grayson never saw inside. ‘Only one thing was certain: it contained a utensil of sorts, because when [Lewis] disappeared therein one could hear the tinkle-tinkle one associates with a male person peeing into a tin can.’ While engaged in this necessary activity he was able to keep a suspicious eye on his visitor through an ill-concealed spy-hole in the partition wall.
*
In April Lewis showed The Roaring Quean to Desmond, Lord Harmsworth of Egham, nephew to the press baron, Lord Rothermere. Desmond Harmsworth was, for two years in the early Thirties, trying his own hand at publishing, but by May he had decided not to publish The Roaring Quean. Unlike Charles Prentice two years earlier, Harmsworth did not seem worried about courting libel action. His main concern was the £200 advance Lewis was demanding for the novel.
Despite this setback Lewis’s publishing output in 1932 was remarkable. Including Doom of Youth from Chatto in June, his books appeared under four different British imprints. Harmsworth, although baulking at The Roaring Quean, produced an illustrated and revised edition of Enemy of the Stars in May and a portfolio of prints, Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait, in September. Rupert Grayson brought out Filibusters in Barbary in June and Cassell published the first in their three-book agreement, Snooty Baronet, in September.
At Chatto & Windus, Charles Prentice was enraged by this proliferation. His blustering letter of 21 June marked the beginning of a bitter dispute that continued into the following year:
We are amazed to hear . . . that Grayson & Grayson are publishing immediately a book by you on Morocco, and to see the announcement that Desmond Harmsworth is publishing almost at once your ‘Enemy of the Stars’ . . . I note, too, that . . . Harmsworth is under agreement to publish several other books by you, and we are also told that you have a contract with a third publisher for a novel.
What rankled was Lewis’s failure to deliver the second and third sections of The Childermass, contracted for in 1928. Adding insult to injury, Lewis was publishing with Grayson his account of the Moroccan trip which had been partly subsidised by Chatto in the belief that he was getting down to work on the overdue sequel in the ‘whitewashed cell’ in Agadir. Also, according to their 1928 contract, Lewis had agreed not to publish any other work elsewhere until The Childermass was completed, without giving Chatto the first option. Lewis was quick to remind Prentice of the recent options they had declined to take up:
was I to go on offering your firm for ever Roaring Queens and Apes of God – only to have them turned down on the score that they would be offensive to your Bloomsbury friends.
Ironically, the book that Chatto were about to publish would land them in just the sort of trouble Prentice had been guarding against when he turned down The Roaring Quean. Doom of Youth was the ninth Lewis title Chatto & Windus published. It was also, unsurprisingly, the last.
Chatto had initial qualms about Lewis’s treatment of the novelist Michael Arlen in the latter part of the book. ‘We speak with no precise knowledge of the working of the law of libel’, they told Lewis:
but we are inclined to think that the effect of calling him ‘this dismal asiatic caricature of a rastaqouère’* and ‘this tawdry gentleman who has filched the christian name of an archangel’ would be to send him hot-foot to his solicitor.
Lewis was persuaded to tone down these and other references, and minor changes were made in proof. ‘I am awfully sorry to bother you with these things’, said Prentice, ‘but clearly there is no point in putting one’s head into the noose.’ But when the book came out at the end of June, offence was taken in altogether different quarters.
*
For an intensive period of six weeks in June and July, Lewis was engaged in head-hunting for his portfolio Thirty Personalities and a Self-Portrait. Personalities from the publishing, literary and art world duly rang the bell marked ‘Love’ in Percy Street and sat for him in the Spartan ‘first floor back’. The portfolio’s publisher, Desmond Harmsworth, was one of these and he recalled Lewis’s working method:
The studio . . . was just a room (no skylight). For portraiture he had all shutters closed except one small square of light which shone painfully on the sitter facing it, Lewis having his back to the light.
When Harmsworth’s uncle, Lord Rothermere, pleaded weak eyes, Lewis reversed their positions and worked facing into the light himself. With Harmsworth’s wife he produced one of the most striking drawings of the set, his attention focused upon the complex arrangement of her clasped hands. He drew his other publisher, Desmond Flower, his wife Margaret, and his father. He added a brown wash to the drawing of Neuman Flower and was offended when the sitter protested: ‘You make me look like the Aga Khan!’
There were ‘personalities’ from other professional fields. Noel Coward’s head was a small slanting oval placed in the middle of the page, while Edith Evans posed with her right elbow raised, as if holding her hand behind her head. Wing Commander Orlebar wore a flying cap, and goggles pushed up on his forehead. The surgeon Ivor Back dressed in theatre gown and rubber gloves.
Augustus John made himself available only once and Lewis worked hastily against time on his ‘proud and mettlesome sitter’. He admitted to William Rothenstein that the portraits were ‘all . . . not equally good’.
*
Towards the end of July Lewis telephoned the novelist Stella Benson, another ‘personality’, in a state of panic to cancel her sitting. Miss Benson noted down what he said and transcribed it verbatim in her diary:
I can’t meet you to-day – I must get away – I must get right away at once . . . There is diphtheria in my house – I am quite sure I shall catch it if I stay. It is a fearful disease. Outrageous that I should be turned out of my house by a disease. Absolutely outrageous. But it is no use – if I stay in this house I shall catch it and die – I have had three libel cases on my hands this week – and it has been terrible – terrible – I am so nervously weakened that I shall certainly die if I catch diphtheria – and in this . . . state I am really almost certain to catch it.
It was an echo of his mother’s panic in Lamy’s Hotel, Amherst, Nova Scotia, on New Year’s Day 1883 when he was less than two months old. Anne Lewis’s concerns on that occasion were for her baby. Fifty years later, at 27 Ordnance Road, if Lewis had fears for anyone else’s well-being, his wife’s perhaps, he did not express them. It was ‘very odd’, Miss Benson thought, ‘in these days of understatement and indifference – to meet a man who is really so important to himself – and is not afraid to say so.’
One puzzling reference in Lewis’s terrified outburst over the telephone was to the ‘three libel cases’ he had on his hands that week. It is possible that Stella Benson misheard him. It is certainly possible that he was exaggerating. He was at this time dealing with only two actions for libel. Both were connected to Doom of Youth, published the previous month.
*
On 20 July a letter from the firm of Gisborne & Co., solicitors representing the actor and writer Godfrey Winn, was delivered by hand to Chatto & Windus:
Mr Winn’s publishers, his literary agents and a number of other persons have called Mr Winn’s attention to . . . the chapter . . . headed ‘Winn and Waugh’ . . . A number of the statements made in the chapter are . . . in the worst possible taste and are obviously meant to convey to the public that Mr Winn is a young gentleman who has little or no ability as an author and is not a serious artist but is merely commercialising his youth and is able to earn money by that method and not by reason of his ability as a writer.
The letter concluded with a demand that the book be immediately withdrawn from circulation and ‘a full and adequate apology’ published.
Two days later Chatto’s solicitors, Walker, Martineau & Co., agreed that references to Winn as a ‘hack’ and ‘a salaried revolutionary agent’ were indeed libellous. They proposed that Lewis amend the pages on which these insinuations had been made and that they be reprinted and pasted in to copies of the book withdrawn from sale and those still in the publisher’s warehouse. Winn’s solicitors replied that nothing less than the removal of the entire chapter would satisfy their client.
On 25 July Alec Waugh, just back from a fortnight in the South of France, called to see his agent. He was told that Godfrey Winn was anxious to meet him because they had both been libelled and he hoped that Waugh would join him in instituting proceedings.
Alec Waugh, whose best-selling account of his schooldays, The Loom of Youth, Lewis had parodied in his own title, claimed later that under normal circumstances he would not have taken action. He was, however, in belligerent mood:
My visit to the South of France had been an unofficial honeymoon with the lady, Joan Chirnside, whom I was to marry in October. [She] was an Australian, accustomed to rather tough horseback riding men. I fancied that she thought that I was rather flabby. I was anxious to prove to her that I was not.
Two days after Waugh’s visit to his agent, a letter from the firm of Rubenstein, Nash & Co. was delivered to Chatto & Windus by hand and marked ‘Important’:
We are instructed to call upon you unconditionally and immediately to withdraw the book from circulation . . . and to publish a full and unqualified apology to Mr Waugh in terms approved by us in the NEW STATESMAN and NATION, THE OBSERVER, THE SUNDAY TIMES and THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT.
Three days later Lewis ran into J. B. Priestley, a ‘personality’ who had already sat for his portrait in frowning double-chinned profile, and whose only connection with the case was that he shared the services of the same literary agent as Alec Waugh. Priestley told Lewis that Waugh’s action was being initiated because of an imputation that he was a homosexual. Lewis was appalled that he should hear such details of the case at third hand and immediately suspected Charles Prentice, and Chatto’s solicitors, of deliberately keeping him and his legal representatives in the dark for their own obscure reasons. Writing to complain to his own solicitors, he added in passing that Priestley disagreed that there was anything libellous in the book and that Lewis had merely described Waugh as suffering from ‘infantilism’. Waugh, however, newly engaged to his Antipodian fiancée, was particularly stung by what he interpreted as a systematic demolition of his masculinity. One passage in particular seemed designed to place him in an unsatisfactory light for a future wife accustomed to tough Australian men:
I should say that all the feminine, maternal attributes were excessively developed in him, and of course (Mr Waugh being a man) were thwarted. They relieve themselves . . . by means of . . . incessant literary compositions about small boys with sooty faces and bulging pockets . . . I do not wish to be offensive to Mr. Waugh, but I think . . . that there is something of an obsessional nature at work: and I do think that psycho-analysis would reveal the fact that motherhood in its most opulent form was what Mr Waugh had been destined for by nature, and that a cruel fate had in some way interfered, and so unhappily he became a man.
Over ten chapters further on, page 206 contained the words: ‘the homosexual is, of course, an imitation-woman’. This, taken in conjunction with what had gone before, was sufficient for Waugh’s solicitors to file a Statement of Claim:
The said words meant and/or were understood to mean that the Plaintiff was a contemptible man, and that as an author and novelist he was so lacking in versatility that he could not write on any topic save public school boys and/or that the Plaintiff was sexually perverted.
While the legal machinery attendant on both these cases slowly ground into action on behalf of the plaintiffs, Messrs Winn and Waugh, the defendants were engaged in the early stages of a litigious battle of their own. Chatto & Windus were attempting to extract from Lewis the £150 they had paid him in 1928 for the second and third sections of The Childermass. Legal action had not at this stage been formally begun but the two sides were communicating through their solicitors.
At the end of July Lewis’s legal representative from Barnes & Butler attended a conference to discuss a defence against Waugh’s action. Also present were Charles Prentice, his partner from Chatto, Harold Raymond, and their solicitors Walker, Martineau & Co. Mr Barnes saw an opportunity of at least gaining some leeway for his client ‘in connection with the Childermass matter’. He asked the publishers if Lewis could be given ‘say another year’, either to fulfil his contractual obligations or to pay back the money. ‘I am sorry to say’, Mr Barnes reported to Lewis, ‘while Mr Prentice and Mr Raymond were extremely nice, I completely failed.’ This smiling intransigence, coupled with Chatto’s apparent concealment from him of the grounds for Waugh’s action, made Lewis suspect a hostile cabal:
Can we entirely rule out the fact that Raymond and Prentice are members of the same club as Waugh, and know him?
It would seem that at this point Lewis imagined that his own publishers were conspiring to engineer a lawsuit against themselves in order to damage him.
*
Following the diphtheria scare at 27 Ordnance Road, Stella Benson sat for her portrait drawing in the ‘filthy back room (only by courtesy a studio) off the Tottenham Court Road’:
All the time he was drawing me he wore his hat and sat crouched over a swivelling easel; I had to keep my eyes fixed on a point just above his head, but I could see his teeth gleaming in his writhing mouth, as he talked of all his cruel experience of men and women . . . there really is something rather wistful in the look of this stout glowering snub-nosed man – sitting hunched on a too small camp stool, describing, without the slightest smile or irony, his position as the cynosure of all wickedness . . . He lives a curiously darkened life, continually assuring both others and himself that he is naturally a simple, gentle and pacific man, forced into the atmosphere of battle by other people. All his friends turn on him, he says – all business men try to cheat him . . . he is obsessed with the wickedness – active wickedness – of everyone except himself.
*
At 10.30 in the morning of Tuesday 16 August, in the Chambers of Mr Justice Goddard, a request by Waugh’s legal representatives for an interim injunction prohibiting further publication of the book was refused. His Lordship ruled that the remarks about homosexuals on page 206 ‘could not apply to the Plaintiff’.
Despite this initial victory, Chatto & Windus, on the advice of their lawyers, decided to withdraw the book. They had limited protection against liability for libel damages and their insurers had objected to further publication. They had also received letters from booksellers, informed by Waugh of the impending action, who did not feel inclined to sell any more copies until the matter had been disposed of. Anyone selling the book could be sued for ‘publication of a libel’ along with the publishers themselves.
Effective suppression of one book on ‘Youth-politics’ did not prevent Lewis from bringing out another. In the first paragraph of The Old Gang and the New Gang, published by Desmond Harmsworth, the following January, Lewis offered its 62 pages as the only extant work dealing with this field of criticism, until he had ‘succeeded in rescuing [the larger book] from occultation’.
*
In September the Lewises holidayed in South-East France, staying at the Hôtel Bonnard in Pont-en-Royans, near Grenoble. On the way they had visited Berlin. A translation, by Max Sylge, of Lewis’s Hitler book had been published earlier in the year as Hitler und sein Werk. Lewis visited the offices of its publisher, Reimer Hobbing, and was received by ‘a peculiarly uncivil cripple of the name of Schmidt’. Herr Schmidt told him that his book had been shown to Hitler and Goebbels and it had displeased them:
I displeased Herr Schmidt as well, that was obvious. The Nazis and the German people seemed to displease him even more. As I found Herr Schmidt exceedingly unattractive, that seemed to be okay all round.
*
On his return to London, Lewis was summoned to the offices of Cassell & Co. for an urgent conference. Neuman Flower informed him that their two best fiction-buying customers, the circulating libraries of Boots and Smiths, had judged Snooty Baronet to be ‘a coarse and unprincipled book’ and had ‘banned it in the most unpleasant and effective of all ways’ by taking only 25 copies each. Overall sales were thereby halved and the publisher could not even promote interest in the book elsewhere by advertising it as ‘banned’.
Flower went on to say that if Lewis was to be paid the generous advances on his next two books for Cassell as stipulated in their contract, ‘those books must be of such a character as to pass the Library censors of Messrs. Boot and Smith.’
Lewis argued that it had been the ‘outspoken’ qualities of his fiction that originally determined Flower and his son to take him on. Desmond Flower had even described him as ‘the writer destined to succeed D. H. Lawrence upon the English scene’ and, while Lewis did not exactly relish the parallel, he pointed out its potentially commercial value:
Half the popular success of D. H. Lawrence . . . was due to the constant banning of his books, and the exhilarating spectacle of his battle with the antiquated and unreal prejudices of the puritanic conscience and the prurient bellowing of the embattled Grundys.
Now he was concerned about the implications of the circulating library ban on his next two books for Cassell, and particularly worried that Neuman Flower was contemplating a reduction in his advances.
A few days after this unpleasant discussion, Lewis noticed that Cassell had stopped advertising his book ten days following its publication. ‘How strange it is’, he told Flower, ‘that I should have two books suppressed within the space of two months, and both by publishers! . . . you have as effectively killed Snooty Baronet as Chatto’s killed Doom of Youth.’ Then, in the complex fabric of the London book trade, he began to see conspiratorial patterns that might explain Cassell’s changed attitude:
As Mr Alec Waugh is one of your regular ‘authors’, a great personal friend of your son’s, I realised that if he persisted in his ridiculous action against me, it would make it awkward for me in my new capacity of a ‘Cassell author’. And I cannot help feeling very strongly, from all the signs, that you have been enlisted in this author’s quarrel upon the other side.
Pressure from Chatto for the return of their money increased and Lewis believed his ‘whole career [was] in some sort at stake.’ On 6 October Prentice wrote him a letter containing the threat of action which, if put into effect, Lewis’s lawyers assured him, might constitute a criminal libel:
We understand that it is open to us to inform your other publishers – and indeed all publishers, if we want to – of your contract with us to give us the first option of any other work of yours before you finish ‘The Childermass’; and that we can apply for an injunction restraining them from publishing any book, contracted for with you, that has not been offered to us first.
He was in imminent danger of an effective blacklist.
*
On the same day that Prentice dispatched his threat to destroy Lewis’s literary career, the Lefevre Gallery in King Street was opening Lewis’s first major showing of graphic work for over a decade. ‘Thirty Personalities’ was well received by critics, although the correspondent of The Times found fault with the relationship between paper and portrait: ‘the paper is artistically irrelevant as if the heads were intended to be cut out. They are firmly modelled in relief towards the spectator, but they have no implied backs to them.’
Desmond Harmsworth had published the series in good-quality reproduction in a shiny black portfolio, signed and limited to 200 copies, and priced at two guineas, before the exhibition opened.
*
The tangle of litigation already surrounding Lewis was made denser in early October by claims from the former Lady Glenapp’s solicitors to get back money she had put into the Arthur Press in 1929. When he borrowed the hundred pounds, Lewis suggested that ‘details could be arranged by lawyers’. Two years later the accumulation of interest and compound interest ensured that arrangements were still in the hands of lawyers. A couple of days after the Lefevre Gallery opening Barnes & Butler received a letter from Burton, Yeates & Hart to the effect that if they did not receive a remittance for the balance due by the middle of the following week they would ‘proceed by way of a Judgement Summons’.
Mr Barnes wrote to Lewis asking for ‘say £10’ and promising to gain ‘a further extension of time’.
Lewis had already repaid £100, and all that remained outstanding was the interest. Since her divorce in 1931 and her recent marriage to Captain Beech, the lady seemed determined to extract every last penny of the debt.
*
On Monday 24 October a postcard was delivered, addressed to ‘Percy Wyndham Lewis Esq., 31 Percy Street, Tottenham Court Rd’. Each ‘Percy’ was underlined. It had been sent from Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, by the 7 o’clock post the previous evening. There was no message in the space designated ‘Communication’. On the front was a photograph of two moustached men wearing ulsters and with their large floppy hats pulled down over their eyes. At the bottom were the words: ‘So there are two of you.’
Osbert Sitwell had found the photograph at Renishaw and, struck by the resemblance of the 1890s actors to Lewis, had had it made into postcards. ‘Every day that man gets one of these postcards’, Edith gloated to a friend, ‘either from London, or from the country in England, or from Paris.’ One of them was delivered smeared with blood. Edith had pricked her big toe and written ‘RACHE’, German for ‘vengeance’, across the picture.
Edith also sent telegrams, or had them sent from Calais, inspired by Lewis’s flirtation with German politics and intended to inflame his paranoia:
PERCY WYNDHAM LEWIS 31 PERCY STREET ACHTUNG NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN UNIFORMED COMMISSAR MAN DUE STOP BETTER WIRELESS HELP LAST NIGHT TOO LATE LOVE EIN FREUND SIGNED LEWIS WYNDHAM 21 PERCY STREET
This persecution provided bizarre accompaniment to the solicitor’s letters which were arriving with increasing regularity. Lewis’s position was further strained by demands from his own hard-working solicitors, Barnes & Butler, as their costs spiralled. On 7 November they asked him for £75.
With creditors on all sides, by mid-November Lewis was also about to be sued by Mr V. Tenney, His Majesty’s Inspector of Taxes.
*
On 16 November Walker, Martineau & Co. finally went into action on behalf of their clients, Chatto & Windus, and served Lewis with a portentous document:
GEORGE THE FIFTH by the Grace of God of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith . . . We command you, that within eight days after the service of this writ on you, inclusive of the day of such service, you do cause an appearance to be entered for you in an action at the suit of Chatto & Windus and take note that in default of your so doing, the plaintiff may proceed therein and judgement may be given in your absence . . . The Plaintiff’s claim is for damages for the Defendants’ breach of a contract in writing . . . Alternatively for the return of money paid for a consideration which has wholly failed.
When Lewis wrote to Barnes & Butler a few days later he was in belligerent good humour. ‘I hope that the forensic arms forged in your office will prevail against the inferior equipment, and the less just cause, of our opponents. The war chest I am busily engaged in filling.’
However, in the space of five days, on 25 November, Lewis had transferred his complicated business to the firm of Powell, Skues & Graham Smith. What caused the breakdown of confidence is unclear, but it may have been Mr Butler’s continued chafing as costs mounted and remained unpaid. When a messenger from his new solicitors arrived at their offices to collect Lewis’s documents, Barnes & Butler refused to surrender them until his cheque for £45, settling their charges to date, had cleared.
*
It was in late November, when pressure generated by the Waugh and Chatto actions was reaching critical pitch, when the Inland Revenue and the former Lady Glenapp’s solicitors were clamouring for settlement, that he became ill. The legal and pathological pressures were coincidental. ‘A bug walked from my intestine into my bladder’, he explained, ‘and then planted an ulcer in an old venereal scar.’
The bladder inflammation of cystitis was probably caused by stagnant and infected urine dammed behind a stricture or narrowing of the urethra. The scar tissue that exacerbated the obstruction dated back to his negligently treated gonorrhoea during the first months of the war. It was, as Symons put it, ‘a roaming wild oat come to roost’.
Just before Christmas another telegram arrived at 31 Percy Street:
ACHTUNG NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN THE BEAR DANCES
Lewis was not there to receive it. Early in December he had entered a private nursing home, the first of a series of such establishments that would count him as inmate over the next four years.
The Marchioness of Cholmondeley, whose features had been included among his Thirty Personalities, was a diligent visitor. On one occasion she brought him a sweater and on another, concerned that the institutional food might not be sufficiently nourishing, she instructed her cook to produce something for the invalid. The crème de volaille was not a success. Sight of the thick creamy soup with white lumps of chicken breast breaking its surface made him think of the organs of unborn cattle. Nauseated, he instructed Lady Cholmondeley to take it away with her.
Notwithstanding his rejection of such dietary supplements, the inflammation cleared up and by 3 January he was once more at large. His ‘bigwig’ specialist told him that he was over the worst and, provided he could take two or three weeks complete rest, no complications were to be expected. Docker sent £25 as an ‘economical barrage’ to carry him over this recuperative period. Lady Cholmondeley continued concerned. She would feel happier, she told him, if she were certain that the ‘bigwig’ specialist was really up-to-date. ‘These things have gone ahead so rapidly of late that one wants to get the opinion of a doctor who keeps au courant of all discoveries abroad and in England.’ She was convinced he would have to go to Paris for the best opinion.
Whether or not the ‘bigwig’ had been correct in his judgement that the patient was ‘over the worst’, Lady Cholmondeley’s anxieties were soon confirmed. Lewis had left the sterile environment of the first nursing home prematurely, and by mid-January he was admitted to a second. Influenza had caused a renewed flaring of cystitis and until 21 February his address would be the Porchester Square Nursing Home in Paddington.
* Now Ordnance Hill.
* The pejorative French epithet translates as ‘flashy wog’ (Collins-Robert).