1935 began well. In January it seemed as if Lewis’s five-year-old manuscript of The Roaring Quean was finally to be published. Unaccountably retitled Foul Play’s a Jewel, it was accepted by Wren Howard of Jonathan Cape on terms considerably less extravagant than the £200 Lewis had demanded of Desmond Harmsworth in 1932 for this problematic little satire on the book trade. It had already been rejected by several publishers:
in the nature of things the small publisher would be afraid of publishing it for fear of offending his big colleagues, and . . . the big publisher would hardly feel very genial about it. [Jonathan Cape] on the other hand, were one of the 2 or 3 publishers in London who still stuck to a high standard of publishing, and so might do it . . . Such a book, going to the ‘fiction-critic’ for review, could not be expected to meet with a very cordial reception; the popular libraries could not be expected to coo over it; so its publishers could not be expected to pay anything to speak of for it.
It was on the basis of such reasoning that Lewis accepted Cape’s offer: a modest advance of £30, to be paid on the day of publication.
The manuscript was still unfinished and Wren Howard suggested that an extra 10,000 words would add ‘a little more substance’.
Lewis was also struggling with his third book for Cassell: False Bottoms. He had recommenced writing the novel the previous October, having settled in to his workroom in Gloucester Terrace. ‘I had not had a day’s holiday since my operation’, he told Desmond Flower:
so was not perhaps as fresh as I might be, but full time work began. It was my hope that I should be able to take up and complete, in intervals of the drudgery of articles, the novel for you. But that has been far more difficult than I had supposed.
Flower was magnanimous. ‘I will not trouble you unduly in the matter of the novel, but know that we can rely upon you to let us have it as soon as it is possible for you to do so.’
On the other hand, by March Wren Howard was becoming mildly restive about the Cape novel, which had now reverted to its original title. He wanted to know an exact date for delivery of the complete manuscript of The Roaring Quean before making plans for its publication.
By the end of April, work on False Bottoms was going well. Selected friends were favoured with bulletins and occasional readings. The book’s progress was enthusiastically charted by Russ:
it is nothing less than splendid news that you are glorying in a burst of work with people not bothering you – you already whet the appetite about what is going to be in the pot.
At ten o’clock on the night of 30 April, Lewis’s clipped nasal voice was broadcast on the BBC’s National Programme. The talk was the fifth in a series of thirteen called Freedom. ‘You were very good,’ Professor Russ told him:
But why so short? I don’t think you took more than 18 minutes. I expected 30. However, that’s over and you will have the freedom to turn to what interests you more, because after all you can’t be very creative on the wireless.
Previous speakers had been Sir Ernest Benn, J. L. Garvin, The Right Honourable Herbert Morrison and J. A. Spender. The 13 talks, ‘which were considered too valuable to be allowed to fade away on the ether’, were published in a single volume by George Allen & Unwin the following year.
Work continued on False Bottoms. ‘I can only say that I have been very glad to see your star brighten week after week’, Russ enthused. ‘And when you say you are at work I can hear an anvil ringing.’
On 21 June he was on the wireless again, this time in a series called Among the British Islanders. Eminent speakers were asked to give an account of some aspect of British life from the perspective of a visitor from Mars. ‘Art and Literature: A Martian reviews our books’ was the penultimate lecture of seven. Under the comic pseudonym G. R. Schjelderup, Lewis gently satirised George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce:
I bought his latest masterpiece the other day . . . it was completely incomprehensible. I showed it to the waiter at my hotel. He assured me that he could not understand a single line of it. I asked him if it was English, and he said no . . . I asked him if he thought it might be Irish: and he said that he did not know any Irish, but that it might be that.
‘Your stuff was really very good on the wireless tonight’, Russ congratulated him. ‘Hitting the nail on the head every time.’
*
July was suffocatingly humid and the Lewises’ living quarters in Chilworth Street were far from satisfactory ‘When it rains the water pours into the top floor of this accursed maisonette’, he complained. Perhaps as a result of these swampy conditions, he fell ill again. ‘I am . . . laid on my back by a chill which has taken the form of a mild cystitis’ he told an Inland Revenue official in explanation for his failure to submit tax returns for 1932. ‘In a few days . . . I shall be in full working order again.’
His prognosis was optimistic however. This recurrence of urethral infection was to put him out of action for the best part of three months.
Professor Russ introduced him to a new medical man: Dr Ian McPherson, ‘a sound fellow’, and assured him he was in ‘competent and scrupulous hands’. He urged him ‘to quell that spirit of damn-it-all-ness, get into and out of the hands of reliable medicos as soon as possible and then a holiday.’ Russ even promised him financial assistance towards a recuperative trip to Germany when he felt better. When ready for such assistance Lewis was to wire a coded message which would appear to concern hospital business:
REQUEST FOR RADON SUSTAINED MIDDLESEX
The Professor’s wife was still apt to intercept any undisguised communication from Lewis.
*
On the afternoon of Wednesday 28 August he entered St Peter’s Hospital for Stone and other Urinary Diseases, in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. It was ‘a first class nuisance’ but there was ‘no help for it.’ He was assured there would no question of his having to undergo an operation and that his stay in St Peter’s was for the greater convenience of the treatment:
As I have the infection, the treatment has to be gone about more cautiously, and I have to be where I can receive more constant professional attention than would otherwise be the case. Alas, it is of critical importance that I should have the curative process – made necessary by long neglect – speeded up.
Mr Andrews, his surgeon, estimated the treatment would take about a week. Lewis wrote to Russ the day he was admitted, asking him to visit. ‘I am a little nervous about being in a hospital, I confess.’
Russ sent him roses and promised to visit the following week. But by the time he rang the hospital on Sunday to see how he was, ‘the bird had flown.’ Lewis had discharged himself.
*
By mid-September he seemed fully recovered. There was no sign of the infection and, following a further visit to his surgeon, he anticipated the remainder of the treatment would be of a fairly routine nature. Russ, after paying his children’s school fees and consulting his accounts, found he had a small balance which he was willing to share: he sent Lewis a cheque for £25. ‘I hope you won’t think this an excess of meanness on my part, but I do also get hard up sometimes.’ He was also able, the following month, to put a minor portrait commission Lewis’s way. ‘It might not interest you frightfully’, he told him, ‘but it would certainly mean a few guineas.’
His sister-in-law, Dr Priestley, wished to present portrait drawings of two former headmistresses as a gift to Leeds Girls High School. One was a woman of 73 with ‘a live, mobile face’, the other was 60, ‘good featured, infinitely more difficult to catch’.
It would still be necessary to conduct the transaction in absolute secrecy to avoid pursuit by Mrs Russ. ‘Madame might get news from her sister as to where the sitters were going to’, Russ cautioned:
in fact if she were very keen on finding out she might go to the sitters themselves – but there are ways of circumventing. You could meet sitters at their London hotel and take them to [the] studio and [she] would not know where they were – all sorts of ways will suggest themselves to you I expect.
Whatever methods finally suggested themselves for smuggling the two elderly ladies into Lewis’s presence – at an ‘address to be kept in the strictest confidence’, they had been told – portrait drawings of Miss Helena Powell and Miss Low were completed by the end of the year.
Lewis was probably not told about the aftermath: how ‘Dodo’ and Mrs Kirk, the then head mistress, presented the drawings at a meeting of the school governors and how the governors carped and criticised and eventually sent for Miss Harwood the art mistress to give an opinion. Professor Russ’s daughter, who remembers the story, has no idea why Miss Harwood advised them not to accept Dr Priestley’s gift, ‘but that was her advice and they took it.’*
*
That year the nation celebrated King George V’s quarter-century on the throne. In a letter to Lewis in December, referring to the artist’s three months of poor health, Professor Russ commented ruefully: ‘Well, 1935 has been anything but a Jubilee year for you, and so I wish you better luck in 1936.’ The year to come, however, was to be considerably less of a Jubilee even than the last.
*
Desmond Flower had received the manuscript of False Bottoms in November. Following the loss of profits occasioned by the circulating library embargo on Snooty Baronet three years before, Cassell & Co. were anxious to avoid giving costly offence to Smiths and Boots again. Accordingly Lewis’s typescript was subjected to an in-house vetting and he was asked to alter anything that might cause problems. To begin with, the overly suggestive title False Bottoms was dispensed with and it became instead The Revenge for Love. When completely confident that the novel would not offend, Flower submitted it to Mr Richardson, the reader from Boots.
*
By the middle of April Lewis had finished a political book for Jonathan Cape. Called Bourgeois-Bolshevism and World War at this stage, it would be published in June as Left Wings Over Europe. The typescript of The Roaring Quean was also finished for Cape.
Meanwhile Cassell & Co. were holding up production of The Revenge for Love until the Boots representative had passed it as suitable for the circulating library readership. Desmond Flower was anxiously awaiting Mr Richardson’s report. ‘The . . . avoidance of any difficulty with Boots’, he told Lewis, ‘has always been . . . regarded as one of our first cares.’ But when the report arrived it was ‘extremely unfavourable’ and unless further changes were made the book would be condemned to the same fate as Snooty Baronet, its sales effectively halved. Without telling the author about the reader’s report, Flower passed the typescript to the man who had originally introduced Lewis to the firm of Cassell, in the hope that he might be able to suggest changes.
So on the morning of 6 May Lewis was startled to receive a note from A.J.A. Symons congratulating him upon the novel, which he had just finished reading. ‘It was with mixed feelings that I received your . . . letter’, Lewis replied, ‘great satisfaction to learn that you should have approved of my Mss., but less satisfaction to find that its journey to the printing-works was apparently as far off as ever.’ He was dismayed at the hint, contained in Symons’s second paragraph, that further alterations were to be demanded of him. There were ‘one or two points’ that Symons would like to talk over, and could he ‘spare the time to come in for a glass of Sherry and half an hour’s discussion?’
Lewis was particularly stung that he had been kept in the dark about Richardson’s report and refused to discuss changes with Cassell’s intermediary. The relationship with his publisher, embarked on with such optimism five years before, was rapidly souring. Everyone concerned was dissatisfied. Lewis claimed to have had ‘nothing but disappointment and difficulties’ from the firm, Desmond Flower felt that the association had ‘been attended by nothing but disagreement’, while his father seemed anxious to be rid of the new novel altogether. ‘I think it is the whole note of the book which is wrong for Cassell’s’, he told Lewis, with evident embarrassment:
Put plainly, I do not think it is any good to you or to Cassell’s for the book to come out from this House, because I do not think it is a book Cassell’s would do well with. As you know, certain publishers do well with certain types of books, and not with others.
*
At the end of May Lewis sold his Edith Sitwell portrait to the Leicester Galleries for £50. It had been abandoned in 1923 with the head complete, the coat largely finished and the legs in position. He had taken it up again some time in 1935, providing its background of formalised books, and pale blue and dark to light shaded grey panels. The coat was completed and the brightly coloured sleeves covering the forearms painted. In what might have been a vindictive slight upon an old enemy, the sitter’s delicate and highly prized hands, the only part of her anatomy of which she was truly proud, were noticeably absent from the composition.
At 121 Gloucester Terrace he painted in a room, not a studio, with the canvas propped up on a chair. He was preparing as best he could for the long overdue Leicester Galleries show. But by early July he was working in increasing physical discomfort.
The cause of the problem was once again related to the diverticulum in the urethral wall inflicted three years before by a clumsily applied catheter. As urine seeped in and stagnated behind the stricture, this diverticulum had become the site of periodic infections ever since. The last, treated at St Peter’s Hospital, under Mr Andrews, had been 12 months before. But now the condition had become exacerbated and Mr Millin prepared him for an exploratory operation, at All Saints Hospital in Lambeth, involving ‘the necessary dilatation of the stricture and enlarging of the opening of the diverticulum . . . combining this with the X-ray’. The urinary tract, with all its natural and unnatural crevices and detours, was to be flooded with dye for the X-ray. It required two or three days in hospital at the most and Millin booked him a room from 7 July.
What showed on the X-ray would have been a roughly Y-shaped line of dye marking the track of the urethra itself and the blind branch of the diverticulum leading off it. The neck of the diverticulum had narrowed with scar tissue to such a degree that the morbid growth of necrotic tissue, produced by the infection, and its expanding reservoir of pus, had become sealed in the cul-de-sac. Denied a passage back into the urethra, it would follow the line of least resistance: burrowing down through the fatty tissue to the perineum, emerging, if unchecked, just behind the scrotum.
Lewis had been sitting upon an abscess Millin described as ‘the size of a duck’s egg’. He was advised that, if it were to burst, it would certainly kill him.
*
In June, Jonathan Cape had published Left Wings Over Europe, having ‘pulled every available string’ to get it favourably reviewed. With a pre-publication subscription of 500 copies, the book promised to do reasonably well. Included in a list of the author’s books printed opposite the title page was: ‘THE ROARING QUEAN (in preparation)’.
On 22 July Neuman Flower saw an opportunity to rid Cassell of the troublesome Revenge for Love. ‘I see that you have published a book with Jonathan Cape’, he wrote to Lewis:
I am wondering, therefore, whether you feel you could agree to Cape taking over the novel we have . . . This is only a suggestion on my part with a view to a friendly solution which shall be as satisfactory to yourself as ourselves.
*
Draining the abscess was a simple operation but as Lewis could not, on this occasion, afford a private room he was forced to endure the democracy of a crowded general ward and the grim nocturnal eavesdroppings upon other diseased lives and deaths. ‘I still can hear the soft thudding rush of the night nurses,’ he wrote in 1950:
when certain signs appraised them of the approaching end. For some reason it was preferred that death should occur in another ward, reserved for the purpose. The patient would be hurriedly wheeled out to die. Though I saw death often enough as a soldier, that was the only occasion on which I heard the authentic death-rattle.
The name and location of the institution is not known. ‘Somewhere in hospital land’, he wrote at the top of a letter to Eliot on Friday 31 July. The previous Monday he had again submitted to the knife. ‘Operated on . . . satisfactorily I think’, the bulletin continued. ‘My diverticulum is no more. I feel very fine indeed, but am of course in rather low water for the present.’ The surgeon told Mrs Lewis that it was remarkable her husband had survived the physical strains of the last three years. ‘He must be very strong’, he told her.
Removal of the abscess left a fistula 3 millimetres in diameter in the perineal region between anus and scrotum. It would be referred to in the pathologist’s post-mortem report twenty years later.* ‘The scrotum’, Lewis wrote to Grigson when once more at large again:
and the surrounding areas is a part of the body to which my attention has been repeatedly called of late. Hang on to your balls . . . whatever happens! Even if not in constant use, they are essential to the equipment of any self-respecting freebooter.
*
In the middle of August Rupert Hart-Davis, the son of Sybil Hart-Davis, and Wren Howard’s fellow director at Jonathan Cape, sent Lewis proofs of The Roaring Queen. He was puzzled by the change of spelling:
When we first had the beginning of the MS you spelt it Quean, but I see that you have now changed it to Queen. I can’t help preferring the former, but if you think the latter is better we will, of course, leave it at that.
But towards the end of the month, as he read his own set of proofs, Hart-Davis was beginning to have more serious doubts than about the variant spelling of a slang term for effeminate homosexual. One particular sentence raised concerns that the conjunction of the Russian secret police with a similar-sounding name to Victor Gollancz would be too easily recognised as representing the left-wing publisher whose professional connection with Gerald Gould, chief novel-critic on the Observer, was equally well known. The sentence ran:
There is Geoffrey Bell who is reader for Hector Gollywog and Ogpu, who in his capacity of novel-critic of the Sunday Messenger writes the most glowing accounts of the books that reach him as critic from the firm to which he belongs, as reader.
It was, thought Hart-Davis, ‘highly amusing’ but ‘a bit too near the real thing’. He asked Lewis to modify the sentence to something ‘no less amusing, but less libellous’. The author’s reputation for attracting writs was clearly causing alarm bells to ring in the house of Jonathan Cape.
*
On 30 September Lewis finally confronted Neuman Flower’s proposal of offering The Revenge for Love to his other publisher. He pointed out that, having already drawn attention to the book by announcing it in their spring list and then having it vetted by Boots, Cassell had made it a less than attractive prospect for any other publisher, ‘the entire book-trade having been frightened in advance’. He was determined to hold them to their side of the contract. ‘And I have no intention of allowing you to suppress my book by indefinitely delaying its publication’, he told Flower. ‘I contracted to write the book and you contracted to publish it.’
Early in October The Revenge for Love was at last on its way to the printers. Among the 60 or so textual alterations Lewis had been forced to make by Cassell and the straitlaced Mr Richardson were: ‘breasts’ to ‘bosom’, ‘bastard’ to ‘devil’, ‘bugger off!’ to ‘Go to Hell!’, ‘naked’ to ‘unclothed’, ‘come-to-bed eyes’ to ‘eyes’, ‘sex’ to ‘lust’, ‘bloody neck’ to ‘neck’ and ‘passing the maid’s flurried bottom’ to ‘passing the simpering maid’.
By early October, Left Wings Over Europe had slowly but steadily sold 1,531 copies, leaving Lewis a credit balance with Jonathan Cape of £9.6.8. The book had been reprinted in late August and the list of the author’s works printed opposite the title page altered in one respect: ‘THE ROARING QUEEN (in preparation)’. Then, on 19 October, a bombshell arrived from Wren Howard:
we submitted a set of proofs . . . to our solicitor and asked him to advise us in the matter of possible libels. After reading it he sent us a report which we have since consulted him about verbally and in great detail. I am exceedingly sorry to have to report that the final conclusion come to by our solicitor is that he must advise us not to publish the book.
It was not a case in which judicious cuts and alterations would be of any avail: ‘the possible libels . . . were so far-reaching as to make it impossible for them to be removed without completely destroying the book.’
Lewis’s protestations that his novel dealt with ‘the “Bloomsbury” principle’ and that there was ‘no caricature of any individual “Bloomsbury” ’, his assertions that the directors of Jonathan Cape had known the nature of the book when they accepted it, and his demands for precise clarification of the nature of the alleged libels, went on throughout November.
At the beginning of December, Wren Howard attempted to draw the matter to a close:
I am afraid that it will not help matters to continue this correspondence.
* Dr Priestley and Mrs Kirk kept one each. The portrait of Miss Helena Powell now belongs to Leeds City Art Gallery. That of Miss Low is still privately owned by the Russ family.
* Also noted there was the fact that his prostate gland had been removed, probably at the same time as the abscess.