On the same day that the surgeon, Mr Millin, was considering whether or not to open Lewis’s lower abdomen, the Professor of Physics at Middlesex Hospital wrote the artist an agitated letter. His wife’s mental state was causing concern. ‘Mrs Russ is threatened with delusional insanity and somehow or other we have got to save her.’ He wanted Lewis to send a letter, in his own handwriting or else she would not believe it, assuring her that he felt nothing for her. ‘It will be kind to be cruel’, he added, ‘it would be worse than useless to mince matters.’
Mary Russ was being cared for by the patient staff of the Tweedale Nursing Home, Tunbridge Wells. She made Lewis bookmarkers and wrote him letters late into the night:
It’s 4 o’clock and very quite; the only noise a sort of far off cawing – like ghost rooks . . . Every now and then a door opens or shuts and I can hear low talking; then quiet again.
She wrote him little poems – pieces of ‘sugar’ she called them – craving attention, begging for a response:
Send me some roses or – some mignonette
And all this bitterness will fade, forget
Where I have failed you: if I have I have:
Remember only all the love I gave.
Send me some roses or – some mignonette.
And when no response came she hallucinated one:
Such a queer thing happened here the other night – the rug in front of the french window was covered in roses! . . . every time I heard a noise in the night and I looked up some more came in! Somebody sending them in in shovelsful!
*
The note to Docker went undelivered. In March, Lewis was recuperating from the operation and writing to Richard Aldington about his surgical adventure:
[It] enabled the surgeon to look with the naked eye into my bladder . . . the first man ever to do that! – and at last I know what has been the matter with me for a year and 4 months. It is not a malignant growth, I am glad to be able to tell you, or anything cancerous or tubercular; but internal varicose veins . . . – not at all pleasant, as you may guess, and the cauterising and cutting of them is going to be no joke.
An interval would have to elapse to allow him to recover from the blood loss before ‘cauterising and cutting’ could proceed. In the meantime, fearful that his creditors might get wind he was incapacitated and lay siege to his sick bed, he implored Aldington to maintain the usual secrecy:
Please keep this address very dark – I am rather helpless at the moment and can only afford to let friends know my whereabouts – above all no duns!
Midway through March he was operated on again and the ‘varicose veins’ were cut and cauterised. Three days later, Professor Russ, still eager to gain Lewis’s assistance in dealing with his wife, wrote heartily: ‘They tell me you are doing well. Good.’
The patient replied: ‘I cannot guess what reports you received . . . but all I do know is that I feel exceedingly ill.’
Lewis later became convinced he had been wilfully neglected by the surgeon who carried out this second operation. The neglect came as a result, he alleged, of an unpaid bill. Although Millin conducted the first exploratory operation in February the major remedial surgery in March was performed by a house surgeon. When Lewis received the bill he discovered that he was expected to pay for the work of more than one pair of hands. Even Russ was surprised. ‘The pathologist yes’, he agreed, ‘but the idea of the house surgeon and the secretary getting a fee is quite new to me.’ Since Lewis had originally contracted with Millin for his services, Russ told him, the surgeon had no right to employ someone else. His advice was to ignore the bill.
*
On Friday 30 March 1934 Ernest Hemingway and his wife called at Sylvia Beach’s bookshop at 12 rue de l’Odéon. While the two women chatted, Hemingway sat down to read the latest issue of Life and Letters. It contained a 13-page article by Wyndham Lewis called ‘The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway’. Despite the seemingly insulting title, the article began favourably enough with the statement: ‘Ernest Hemingway is a considerable artist in prose fiction.’
The first signal Miss Beach received that Lewis’s assessment displeased Hemingway was a loud snort. His face swelled and became purple. He threw Life and Letters on the floor, clenched his fists and looked for something to hit. A large bunch of red tulips stood in a vase on a table used to display modern fiction. The flowers had been a birthday present to Miss Beach, and Hemingway now started punching them. When he had decapitated the blooms he swiped at the vase, which overturned, flooded the table and smashed to the floor. Among the books lying in a puddle of water was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The two women mopped up while Hemingway sat down and silently wrote out a cheque for 1,500F before departing with his sodden purchases. The actual flood damage cost 1,000F and Miss Beach refunded the balance a couple of days later.
It was probably at the fifth page of ‘The Dumb Ox’ that Hemingway interrupted his reading to demolish the tulips. Lewis here embarked on an analysis of the American’s prose style:
He has suffered an overmastering influence, which cuts his work off from any other, except that of his mistress (for his master has been a mistress!). So much is this the case that their destinies (his and that of the person who so hypnotised him with her repeating habits and her faux-naif prattle) are for ever interlocked . . . But there it is: if you ask yourself how you would be able to tell a page of Hemingway, if it were unexpectedly placed before you, you would be compelled to answer, Because it would be like Miss Stein! And if you were asked how you would know it was not by Miss Stein, you would say, Because it would probably be about prizefighting, war, or the bull-ring, and Miss Stein does not write about war, boxing or bullfighting!
‘The Dumb Ox’ formed the first chapter of Lewis’s tenth book of the 1930s. Men Without Art was published in October 1934, its title a parody of Hemingway’s book of stories about soldiers, pugilists and toreadors: Men Without Women.
*
Lewis left the York Place Nursing Home in the third week of April. By the beginning of May he was suggesting to Grigson, himself recently convalescent, that they lunch together at Frascati’s:
to celebrate on your side a recovery from alcoholic excesses but three weeks old; on my side, a recovery from excesses of a different order and of much longer ago than that!
But celebration was premature, recovery far from complete. Russ took advice from W. L. Webb-Johnson, ‘no trifler’, Lewis was assured, and ‘not a man to beat about the bush’. The diagnosis, based upon the information Russ gave him, was not heartening. Although unable to give a definitive judgement without examining the patient, the consultant feared that unless he submitted to a further operation, the problems inherited from those long-ago excesses would inevitably recur. If Lewis had taken Russ’s advice and allowed himself to be examined by Webb-Johnson, the shortcomings of his second operation might have been identified and a further two years of physical misery avoided. His response to the prospect of a third ‘ordeal-by-the-knife’, however, was to leave well alone.
*
The rent on a workroom must have proved too great a burden during his illness and he was forced to abandon number 5 Scarsdale Studios before he had even settled in. Until September his only work space would be the small back bedroom at Chilworth Street. He wrote on a pad on his knee, with his papers and books laid out on the bed and his inkpot by his side on a stool.
*
Early in June, Lady Cholmondely suggested an evening’s entertainment to brighten up his convalescence. She had secured him a ticket for Oswald Mosley’s ‘circus’ on the 7th. Her brother and a friend were going and they proposed having a light supper of ‘zakuskis’ at Her Ladyship’s home around 7.15, leaving for Olympia at 7.40.
It is unlikely that Lewis took advantage of his ticket to the British Union of Fascists rally. Had he done so, then reference to this infamous event would certainly have been made in one or other of the books he published in the latter half of the 1930s. As it was, he would have had to rely upon accounts at second hand, such as that of Naomi Mitchison, a left-wing observer, who found herself surrounded by Mosleyite sympathisers. They bayed and hooted as blackshirted stewards beat up hecklers and threw them down flights of steps. Women protesters were grabbed and bundled out of the hall with their arms knotted behind their backs. Mrs Mitchison rather courageously entered into debate with one of the Mosleyites:
‘You call yourself a gentleman . . . do you like this sort of thing?’
He turned round. ‘Yes, I do, I am enjoying myself ! Do you want some of it yourself ? Blackshirts! Here is another of them, turn her out!’
‘How can you enjoy seeing people being hurt? I was a nurse during the war.’
‘Yes, and I was an officer!’
She noticed that the stewards could be divided into two distinct classes: ‘toughs’, possessed of the nearest she had ever seen to the ‘criminal face’, and ‘nice, blond, romantic-looking boys, not much over twenty . . . able to worship a leader.’ Fortunately for her, the two blackshirts summoned by the ex-officer turned out to be of the latter sort and she was left unmolested.
She found political arguments with Lewis rather trying too. She apologised on one occasion for becoming upset when he responded to her experience at Olympia by badgering her with counter-evidence of Communist brutality. ‘If you want to talk about who interrupted who’s meetings’, she told him:
you must give me notice so that I can produce figures! . . . One knows there are bloody people on both sides, and whether there are a few hundred more or less in London . . . in one kind of shirt or another, doesn’t matter an awful lot.
There was another female acquaintance of Lewis’s who almost certainly did not attend the rally in Earl’s Court that night, despite the fact that she had, like the ‘romantic-looking boys’, fallen under Sir Oswald Mosley’s spell. Discharged from the Tweedale Nursing Home in Tunbridge Wells, Mary Russ was in Coniston throughout June, but a single-page fragment of a letter shows that she had become a member of the British Union of Fascists:
it’s big enough to take in everything. I do hope I’m not following an illusion – it seems now to be the one thing that I have wanted to be in all my life. Something that’s not material, something to aim at and somebody really worth following and admiration.
She complained that her sister in Leeds had disapproved of her ‘silly little WAW’ and that now she had joined the BUF, ‘Dodo’ had ‘not said one word or taken the tiniest bit of interest.’ Extremist politics, so much more glamorous than Women Against War, was clearly filling a gap in her life:
‘Dodo . . . knows how hard I’ve tried . . . but O Lewis I am so lonely.
*
Lewis had met Mosley for the first time the previous year – Mrs Mitchison having arranged an appointment – and thought him ‘a good fellow’. During 1934 their association was an excuse for cloak-and-dagger theatricals. ‘Wyndham Lewis used to come to see me in most conspiratorial fashion’, Sir Oswald recalled, ‘at dead of night with his coat collar turned up. He suggested that he was in fear of assassination, but the unkind said he was avoiding his creditors.’ Lewis produced an ink portrait drawing of Mosley in blackshirt uniform, beetle-browed and prognathous. About the same time he made a companion drawing of Sir Stafford Cripps, Labour Member of Parliament, Communist sympathiser and co-founder of the Socialist League, wearing steel-rimmed spectacles and a frosty curl to the lip. ‘The Governess and the Gorilla’, Mosley commented when he saw the two portraits. Lewis seemed displeased. ‘I found him agreeable but touchy’, the Fascist leader remembered.
The drawings were published, facing one another across a two-page spread of the London Mercury, in October 1934. ‘Two Dictators’ was the caption.
*
Six months after leaving the York Place Nursing Home, Lewis was still being pressed for settlement of his outstanding bill. Eventually Russ helped out. ‘I hate to think of you labouring to meet the fee of any surgeon. I am venturing to enclose a small contribution.’
But Russ’s ‘small contribution’ was not, after all, used to pay the house surgeon who, Lewis believed, deliberately neglected his defaulting patient. ‘I have suffered in the most awful way for that neglect’, he wrote two years later. ‘A few weeks of intensive treatment at the right moment . . . and I . . . should not have wasted a year of my life and endured every kind of anxiety and physical misery.’
In his letter thanking Russ for the cheque, he added ‘please come round and see me some evening in my new flat (of which I am rather proud) . . . We shall be alone and can have a good talk.’ The new address was 121 Gloucester Terrace, just around the corner from Chilworth Street, where his wife still kept house and where he ate and slept. For the first time since having to abandon 5 Scarsdale Studios he had a small workroom. It measured 13½ feet by 10½ and cost one hundred pounds a year.
*
Mary Russ was still writing to him. Sometimes her letters rambled over a dozen pages. Lacking both salutation and signature they were sections of a seamless monologue interrupted only by postage. Sometimes, desperate and agonised by some imagined slight, they were short:
Cruel devil. It wasn’t even clever to mesmerise even for a few years a thing so moth eaten and already hurt. Anyone could have done it if they had tried as hard as you did. Cruel devil.
She seemed under no illusions about the value he placed upon her outpourings. ‘I’m sending you . . . all this rubbish. After all it’s your own fault and you must suffer it – you can burn it easily enough unread if you’d rather.’ But he kept everything, sometimes typing out the shorter notes as if preserving evidence:
Coming to see you tomorrow I can’t bear it any longer. Don’t let the door be locked. Its thousands and thousands of years since then. I shall be there soon after 5 . . . If you are busy at that minute I can wait. Only don’t let the door be locked.
The envelope was postmarked ‘Leeds 13 August’ and ‘London 14 August’ and delivered to the long-abandoned studio in Percy Street. It was forwarded to Lewis’s solicitors in Essex Street and from thence to the Pall Mall Safe Deposit with a final postmark of 20 September.
If she did come to visit him in Percy Street that Tuesday afternoon in mid-August, following her train journey from Leeds, she would have got no response from the bell marked ‘Love’. The door would, after all, have been locked. It might have been then, in that London street off Tottenham Court Road, that she saw the bird scarers.
Since first meeting Lewis she had experienced the pleasures and pains of hopeless infatuation. ‘I thought my body was dead,’ she once wrote to him:
it ought to be I suppose and yet just last night . . . I woke. The window places were light grey though the room dark; the moon behind the clouds I suppose; hidden anyway. A light cool breeze came in on my face and before I realised anything clearly, you were with me. O Lewis yes. I thought all that was part of life – to be endured – but last night, last night.
But the paranoiac suspicion that he was mocking her, having locked the door to 31 Percy Street against her, ‘turned heaven into hell’ and everyday reality became a nightmare:
Every pane of glass in that hateful street had a thing like they hang in gardens to frighten birds away: a tin cat’s face with glass eyes and grinning and every single one of them was you or so like you I couldn’t tell the difference.
*
The idea of a collaborative book was first discussed by Lewis and Naomi Mitchison in May. ‘If we did do it’, she told him, ‘I should think the best thing would be for you to do the pictures and me to write the fairy story around them.’ Some time later she suggested a title and theme:
Au dela de cette Limite, or Beyond this Limit, like in the metros – tickets, you remember, aren’t [valid], and there might be a story in the place beyond where one’s ideas don’t hold.
They worked at the book throughout the autumn. It was an amicable collaboration despite ideological polarity. At one point her writing stalled:
I find the next bit difficult, mostly because it should, in the scheme I have in mind, be political, but it obviously can’t be in this collaboration, because you and I have definitely opposed ideas. This can’t be helped, and you are a sufficiently great man to be what you please, but it’s no good pretending that we can touch on all subjects so I have to get round it somehow.
She recalled that they worked with the enthusiasm of children. ‘It was the greatest fun . . . I think it was my idea to start with but it developed jointly. I did the writing and he did the pictures but he came more and more into the story as we went on.’ Sometimes the pictures followed the writing, sometimes the writing the pictures. The story evolved as a metaphor of their collaboration:
There were two main characters, Phoebe who is me, is usually drawn in a wide-skirted, unfashionable, not to say highbrow dress which I used to wear at the time with a handkerchief knotted over my head . . . The ticket collector, who is also Hermes the guide of souls becomes increasingly clearly a self-portrait.
At the end, the narrative complete and the ticket collector bidding her farewell, Phoebe grasps him by the lapels: ‘No! . . . We’ve worked together . . . You can’t leave me like this! I won’t let you go.’
There was a difference of opinion at this point, as to how the book should finish. Mitchison held out for her favoured ending: the peaceful, seemingly endless descent by lift to the Kingdom of the Dead. Lewis, on the other hand, had favoured an explosive climax with the lift and everyone in it being inexplicably blasted to pieces.
*
In November, while completing the series of thirty Indian ink illustrations to Beyond This Limit, Lewis was asked to collaborate on another fairy story:
Once upon a time there was a poor though very gifted juggler. Now he used to go just where he willed, generally with laughter in his heart, but frequently with scorn upon his lips, and gave his exhibitions of skill for he had his daily bread to earn. One day a Princess happened to pass when he was in the middle of one of his juggling acts and she felt fascinated for this was something the Princess had never seen before, though she had often read about such performances . . . Now the Princess was married, though her husband was not in fact a prince at all, but spent his time over things which she wasn’t very much interested in, though he seemed very much wrapt up in them. And one day her husband looked up from his work expecting to find the Princess in the garden where she much delighted to be. But to his surprise and concern she could not be found . . . As a matter of fact she was looking on at the juggler once more, still more fascinated than before and in fact she could not get the glitter out of her eyes, so light and bright were the gems which he tossed into the air. And now the juggler himself noticed the Princess among his audience. Previously he had not seen her, for good jugglers have no eyes for their audience only an ear for their applause. But something shining about the Princess brought her into the ambit of the juggler’s vision . . . And on that day when he had finished a particularly brilliant act of juggling . . . he sought her and spoke certain words to her and an even lovelier light shone in her eyes than had ever shone there before. And on that same day her husband found her in the garden transplanting some lilies that had long wanted just that bit of attention from her and the children when they saw her wondered where she had been but like children they soon gave up wondering and were quite content to listen to her ghost stories as of yore.
Professor Russ arrived at Chilworth Street with a family friend on the evening of 13 November. Hester Gorst was a QC’s wife, a dilettante painter and writer. After chatting for a while about pictures and books Russ blurted out the purpose of their mission. A ‘psychological experiment’ was proposed, ‘to be clothed in symbolic language’, in an attempt to bring Mrs Russ to her senses. If the object of Mary’s obsession would consent to, as it were, enter the romantic world of that obsession and send her the Professor’s concocted fable of Princess and Juggler as if it were his own, the estranged wife might be persuaded to return to her family. Mrs Gorst thought that the situation should be handled ‘as if one were dealing with a child’.
Lewis felt he had been trapped into an acutely embarrassing position, being already financially obligated to Russ. He also bridled at the figure he cut in the Professor’s fairy story. ‘Of course I am poor’, he told him, ‘although as little a music hall comedian as you are the Prince of Wales – and after two years of illness, culminating in a major operation, very poor, instead of just poor.’ But it was the suspicion that Russ was calling in favours for his generosity that particularly distressed and humiliated him. ‘Had I realised that what I took to be your disinterested help was in some way a bribe for services of the nature you have divulged tonight, I should never, however hard up, have accepted them.’ He was also mistrustful about the efficacy of the ‘psychological experiment’ itself:
You say that your wife should be treated as a child, under the circumstances: well, if you show weakness where a child is concerned, and invariably fall in with its whims, is it not likely to ask more and more for what is so easily obtained? Is there ever any end to the demands of a spoilt child – and those who are suffering from delusions of any sort are notoriously apt to plot to contrive that things shall conform to their delusions. If, however, you are persuaded that everything, even psychoanalysis, should be tried, would it not be better to consult some not-too-bogus practitioner of that science, rather than resort to amateur intervention?
With or without Lewis’s ‘amateur intervention’, about two weeks later a tentative reconciliation was effected between the Professor and his wife. This did not mark the end of Mary’s obsessive interest in Lewis, however. As late as July of the following year she was still pestering him with letters.
Later she haunted his sleep and the dream was recorded on canvas. In 1936 he began work on a painting which now exists only in ghostly photographic monochrome. A robed figure stands with three smaller figures to either side and behind. In the background, in the top left corner of the canvas, a jumble of spherical and ovoid forms that might be other figures spill from a shadowy opening. The upper right corner looks as if it has been ripped away like part of a painted backdrop, leaving a jagged tear line and revealing beyond a single-masted sailboat tossed between turbulent sea and sky. Through this jagged hole, as if from one world to another, a bird flies away. One of the small foreground figures turns its head to look after the bird and holds another bird cradled between hands and forearms. Across the lower third of the picture shreds of mist pass in front of the figures. The three attendants possess the familiar ball heads of other compositions of the period, but the leftward-tilted face of the central figure, revealed by a hand drawing aside its cowl, and gazing directly out of the picture, is something more than a cipher.
The canvas was exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in December 1937 and Lewis explained, in the catalogue foreword, how it came to be painted:
the Departure of a Princess from Chaos is the outcome of a dream. I dreamed that a Princess, whose particularly graceful person is often present in the pages of our newspapers, was moving through a misty scene, apparently about to depart from it, and with her were three figures, one of which was releasing a pigeon. This dream, with differences, was repeated, and it was so vivid that, having it in my mind’s eye as plainly as if it were present to me, I painted it. As to the resemblance of the figure in the canvas to the princess in question . . . the likeness is not material, and I have seen nothing but press pictures of my dream ‘model’.
The ‘graceful person’ referred to was the Greek-born Princess Marina, who had married Prince George, becoming Duchess of Kent in September 1934.
It is entirely credible that a dream was the genesis of the painting; it is equally possible that at one level at least of Lewis’s unconscious mind, the ubiquitous Duchess of Kent was his ‘dream model’. But a photograph of Mary Russ, with her baby daughter on the beach at Walberswick in the early 1920s, a little over a decade before Lewis met her, bears an astonishing resemblance to the ‘Princess’ in the painting. Faces do not change fundamentally in ten years and the line of cheek, chin and jaw is unmistakable. Sidney Russ’s ‘Princess’ emerging from the chaos of her ‘delusional insanity’, surrounded perhaps by her children, inspired both recurring dream and subsequent canvas. Some time after it was exhibited, Lewis painted out the picture.
Another painting, The Room that Mary lives in,* shows an interior cluttered with the strange abstract forms commonly found in Lewis’s imaginative compositions of the 1930s. In the middle ground sits a female figure dressed in a turquoise gown decorated with black wedges. The style is similar to a figure he drew for Beyond This Limit. The featureless head inclines to the left at an angle echoing the heads of two ball-jointed lay figures sitting side by side in the background as if keeping the central figure under surveillance. On her left, in the centre of a small round table, stands a bowl of red and white flowers, ‘some roses or some mignonettes’. Among the abstract shapes that loom from the dark recesses of the interior, a glowing spot of the same bright red as the flowers forms the boss of a round medieval shield. The autumnal tones of the background range from dark umber through brick red to brilliant yellow ochre; this last slashed through by a vertical, silvery wedge of the palest blue and white which exactly bisects the upper third of the composition: an opening to the light beyond the room. Continuing the analogy of shield and fairy-tale princess, this might be a tall lancet castle window. Or, perhaps, an escape route similar to the ‘tear’ in the Departure of a Princess from Chaos. At the feet of the female figure is a pool of light, a sketchily painted chaotic swirl of letters and crumpled paper.
Even without knowledge of Mary Russ’s breakdown, her haunted existence, loneliness and compulsive letter-writing, Naomi Mitchison thought the picture terrifying: ‘at least to me; I have plenty of nightmares of my own.’
*
His ‘Princess’ returned, Professor Russ’s domestic life approached normality. There were still rows: once she called him a ‘rhinoceros headed idiot’, and on another occasion actually thumped him. But life went on much as before, with the healthy difference that she now shouted ‘rhinoceros headed idiot’ at him instead of only thinking it, which did not keep the peace, her husband observed philosophically, but at least it cleared the air.
Lewis kept a large sheaf of Mary’s letters but eventually surrendered, at her husband’s request, a package of papers, including two exercise books, that she had sent him from the Lake District. Professor Russ received the ‘Coniston papers’ in late February 1935. It is not known what the two exercise books contained, and Russ took measures to ensure that it never would be known. ‘Thank you for your letter and separate packet’, he wrote to Lewis, ‘the latter has been consigned to the flames already.’
The rest of Mary’s letters remained in Lewis’s possession until his death. They were not among the first collection of manuscripts that his widow sold to Cornell University in 1960. Nor were they included in the final batch of papers gathered together by Omar S. Pound on behalf of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust and dispatched to Cornell when Mrs Lewis was admitted to a nursing home in 1977, a year and a half before her death. In the shambles of her Torquay flat, Mr Pound glanced briefly at the often unsigned, inadequately paginated ramblings that remained as evidence of Mary Russ’s pathetic infatuation. He decided that, whether or not these outpourings were of the remotest interest to the future generations of scholars who would trawl that archive in upstate New York for insights into Wyndham Lewis’s contribution to 20th-century art and literature, for the time being at least they were ‘nobody else’s damned business’. He placed them among the small pile of sensitive, potentially embarrassing or otherwise unclassifiable material to which public access would be denied for the foreseeable future. That cache of papers was then placed in the care of the Trust’s solicitors where, in the battered black metal deeds box, they remain to this day.
*
On 13 December 1934, Professor Russ paid Lewis £26.5.0 for the 30 original ink drawings illustrating Naomi Mitchison’s modern fairy story Beyond This Limit, published by Jonathan Cape in the spring of the following year.
* Completed and dated 1949, exhibited at the Redfern Gallery that year but almost certainly begun much earlier. The Room that Mary Lives in (30˝ × 20˝) was until 5 June 1992 in the possession of the Vermilion County Museum Society, Illinois. It was auctioned at Christie’s but failed to fetch its reserve.