In Left Wings Over Europe, Lewis offered a parable of the state of Europe midway through the fourth decade of the 20th century:
The political landscape, if we were to look down upon it from a passing airship, would appear somewhat as follows. Our bird’s-eye view would show us a very considerable plain, on which ninety per cent of mankind passed their lives in a highly unpolitical manner . . . Situated at either extremity of this very extensive plain we should remark two little ranges of rugged hills, in which two . . . races of hillmen dwell, both bursting with political consciousness . . . We should learn, if we inquired, that the ‘black’ mountaineers on our right were called fascists, and the ‘red’ mountaineers on our left were called communists. Both . . . had established . . . a very reprehensible form of government . . . and the popularly-elected mayors of the various important townships of the lowlands feared and disliked both heartily. But of the two they disliked the ‘black’ highlanders much more than they did the ‘red’: because, whereas the reds announced it as their intention quite simply to abolish the governments of the plain altogether as soon as they got the chance (which the governments in question regarded as absurd and impossible), the other lot expressed themselves as determined to put an end to the corruption of these happy-go-lucky regimes, and to rule on similar (though better) lines in their stead. This appeared to the plainsmen’s political leaders as a much more ungentlemanly point of view. From our coign of vantage . . . we should notice signs of considerable excitement everywhere beneath us, both on the plain and in the hills above . . . From what we heard we should gather . . . that a decisive struggle had started between the red principle and the black principle for the mastery of the plain. And it would . . . appear . . . that the rulers of the plain were compacting with the reds . . . against their so-called ‘totalitarian’ adversaries. – But the anti-red mountaineers, on their side . . . were hastily arming themselves too . . . determined to save the plain, from what they described as ‘the Red Menace’. A great and universal conflict was well under way: that would be as far as we should be able, from such an altitude, and in the face of issues so obscure, to unravel the matter.
In the same year that he composed this fable to show why the Conservative democracy of England favoured Soviet Russia against Nazi Germany, he propped a two foot by four canvas on a chair in his workroom at 121 Gloucester Terrace and painted a picture which he called Red and Black Principle. The two gladiatorially garbed figures, standing amicably shoulder to shoulder and both painted in shades of red, appear to contradict the opposing elements of the title. Black shapes loom behind the figures. By the side of one can be seen the bundled rods of the fasces, by the side of the other, a sickle. If the figures are representative of polarised political ideals, there seems confusingly little to differentiate them.
However, the dustwrapper design of another political book by Lewis, of April 1937, showed the two identical figures locked in conflict with daggers raised, emblems of hammer and sickle and swastika discernible amongst the struggling feet. The book was called Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! Concerned largely with the Spanish Civil War, it favoured General Franco as ‘an ordinary, old-fashioned anti-monarchical Spanish liberal’:
no more a Fascist than you are, but a Catholic soldier who didn’t like seeing priests and nuns killed . . . didn’t want to see all his friends murdered for no better reason than that they all went to mass and to the more expensive cafés and usually were able to scrape enough money together to have a haircut and a shave.
Against the propaganda of the Left Lewis pitted the propaganda of the Right. He saw the Spanish conflict as a rehearsal for a far greater upheaval and the book was subtitled ‘A New War in the Making?’ The previous year’s Left Wings Over Europe had been subtitled: ‘How to Make a War about Nothing.’
If Lewis came down on the side of the Black Principle as opposed to the Red, it was in the belief that his country’s squaring up to Germany and tacit support for Russia, with the complicity of a left-wing intellectual orthodoxy, was hastening on another major European conflict. It was to avoid war that he mounted his campaign of hastily written political pot-boilers. The anti-war books were, by his own admission, ‘futile performances – ill-judged, redundant, harmful of course to [him] personally, and of no value to anybody else’. A question mark at the end of this dismissive list raised a momentary prospect of qualified defence, but he concluded: ‘Certainly they were in the main just that.’
The admission was made over a decade later when the war he recognised ‘in the making’ had run its course and a volume of autobiography, subtitled ‘narrative of my career up-to-date’, called for an explanation of his 1930s political stance.
In January 1937, the cover of The British Union Quarterly, formerly the Fascist Quarterly, carried Lewis’s name alongside those of Ezra Pound, Roy Campbell, and the leader of the Norwegian National Socialist Party, Vidkun Quisling. Lewis’s article made no claim to balance. In fact the author declared at the outset that he would not avail himself of the Quarterly’s editorial offer, to criticise, if he felt disposed, ‘the Fascist Principle’. Balance, in the climate of opinion in which he was writing, was already so firmly weighted in favour of the Red Principle that he concluded with a paean of praise for the Black. It revealed a more deep-rooted sympathy for the Right, based upon economics, than that which he later acknowledged:
a word to the Fascist at large. You stand to-day where Socialism stood yesterday – for the Poor against the Rich. You do not stand against Property; you are reproached for that, but you should in fact be congratulated upon it . . . You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state, for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.
*
In February 1937, in a letter to Oliver Brown at the Leicester Galleries, Lewis reviewed his achievement, during the previous year, as a painter:
I am encouraged to think that the time spent in painting was well spent. Very various paintings – the ‘Cubist Museum’, the ‘Siege of Barcelona’, and a good many more – represent a considerable output . . . I think it compares very favourably with what most English artists I know of get through in the year. I cannot conjure up enough modesty to feel that, in quality, it ranks below the productions of my ½ dozen most eminent fellow painters.
What concerned him most was a lack of official recognition:
In the many institutions for the encouragement of art in this country – such as the Contemporary Art Society, the numerous public galleries in London and the provinces – I am unrepresented.
The CAS, of course, had lost the large gouache of three grinning studies of Kate Lechmere when the Tate Gallery cellars flooded in 1928. The only works in a public collection, he claimed, were the drawings left to Manchester by Charles Rutherston. He had either forgotten about the drawings left to the Victoria and Albert Museum by Captain Guy Baker, or else he felt it would spoil his thesis of neglect if he were to mention them:
Many little known and relatively undistinguished artists find a lucrative haven for their pictures in public galleries. It is that I am completely unrepresented, that is the point I am labouring. It is against that zero that I lift up my not inconsiderable voice.
And it was the word ‘lucrative’ that touched on the nub of his complaint: while the Manchester Art Gallery and the Victoria and Albert had been bequeathed examples of his work, no public collection to date had actually gone so far as to buy anything from him.
The Leicester Galleries had already half a show of Wyndham Lewis in their cellars: ‘12 paintings and masses of drawings’. Lewis’s problem was to get the other half painted in time for an exhibition at the end of the year. ‘I should like a portrait or two’, he told William Rothenstein, ‘I can do them awfully well. Quite traditional – no square jaws and green eyes!’*
*
In March, Lovat Dickson Limited submitted the proofs of Lewis’s latest political book to their solicitors to be read for libel. By coincidence, they took advice from the same legal firm as did Jonathan Cape. Accordingly it was Mr Rubenstein, of Rubenstein, Nash & Co., the solicitor who had advised Wren Howard against publishing The Roaring Queen, who was now asked to pronounce upon Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! On page 345 Mr Rubenstein noticed a passage about debts incurred from the Great War:
Then the Jews were awfully good to us, and Lloyd George says we promised them to clear Palestine of the Arabs for them as a reward for their financial accommodation.
Although not of a libellous nature, it was somewhat dubious and Mr Rubenstein took the liberty, in his report, of saying so:
The statement attributed to Lloyd George is presumably another invention of the author’s, but I expect he is used to this.
When he read the report Lewis was furious. Not content with single-handedly wrecking the publication prospects of his last book, it seemed that Rubenstein was attempting to undermine his future prospects by questioning his integrity as a writer. ‘I can see no excuse’, he thundered to Lovat Dickson:
for the gratuitous offensiveness in which he has thought proper to indulge, . . . this sort of thing, if allowed to continue with impunity must affect my reputation and livelihood . . . On Monday I am seeing my lawyer. Protect myself I must.
And, on the same day, as if reminded to take up the cudgels again upon the other matter, already six months old, of The Roaring Queen, he wrote to Wren Howard: ‘Oblige me by telling me what exactly it is in my book that Rubenstein objected to?’*
Perhaps wisely, Lewis took no further action against a firm of solicitors skilled in the laws of libel. Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! was published at the end of April, with the reference to Lloyd George intact. And following hard on the heels of one book about Spain came another: Cassell brought out The Revenge for Love in May.
Although appearing at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the novel had been written during the period of political turmoil preceding it, and completed and delivered to the publishers a full six months before Franco’s rebellion against the Republican government sparked off the conflict. Set against a background of gunrunning over the Spanish border, of Communist agents and art forgery, it was, in particular, a withering satire on Bloomsbury ‘parlour pinks’. Because of the timing of its publication, and the polarised climate of political opinion in which it was at last appearing, Lewis was afraid that his anti-Communist satire would attract harsh criticism. He was even concerned that Cassell, out of spite perhaps at the trouble it had already caused them, would not do their best in marketing it. He appealed to Desmond Flower not to visit his displeasure upon the book and ‘to forget its politics’ if he found them displeasing. His novel was being published ‘under auspices of the most black and disheartening kind’, he claimed:
And yet as I was reading my proofs I realised that the book that is thus about to be contemptuously flung upon the market is probably the best complete work of fiction I have written; and . . . that it will be considered one of the best books in English to appear during the current 12 months.
In July 1937 Lewis and his wife moved into temporary quarters at 10, Sussex Gardens, and thence, in October, to an address they would occupy off and on for the rest of their life together. It could be difficult for visitors to find. From the Olde Swan public house at the top of Church Street it was about ten yards to the right along Notting Hill Gate that an archway at number 29 penetrated the frontage between Timothy Whites hardware shop and the Primrose Tea Rooms. The discreet name-plate divulged Kensington Gardens Studios. Lewis told one prospective visitor that there was a bell at street level, with his name on it, that the bell did not work and that he was perfectly content with this arrangement. A narrow covered passage, white-tiled like the entrance to a public lavatory, led to the rear of the block, emerging into the open air close to the junction of two sidestreets: West Mall and Rabbit Row. To the left, draughty stone steps zigzagged up the outside to the top of the building. Landing succeeded landing, draped in pegged-out washing and with scuffed chalk hopscotch grids underfoot. At the second storey another dark, narrow passage plunged back into the fabric of the building and after some twists and turns the door to Studio A was reached. The tenant’s name appeared on a piece of card to one side, typed downwards, one visitor noticed, ‘as if to be more difficult’. The bell provoked a shuffling response, the door opened and the hatted and piped figure appeared very large in the cramped entrance. A short flight of stairs rose sharply left just inside, and this made opening the door in the confined space rather awkward. To greet his visitor Lewis had to swivel round suddenly into view from behind the opening door like a theatrically contrived piece of clockwork.
Entrance to the Lewises’ living quarters lay directly opposite the front door, but guests would not be invited there until some years later. Instead they were ushered up the short flight of stairs to the studio with a huge, north-facing skylight running its entire length. It was a spacious room, scrupulously tidy, and inadequately heated by a gas fire installed by the previous tenant ‘without the expert assistance of the gas company’. At one end, beyond a partition, was a small kitchen with a window overlooking Notting Hill Gate. Here, a guest remembered, Lewis would set a kettle on the stove for tea. The kettle, ‘by a device novel at the time, would put forth a vigorous whistle when ready.’ The tea would be served at a low square table. There must have been a kitchen downstairs in the living quarters as well, because Julian Symons recalled Lewis thumping on the floor with a stick, and, following an answering thump from below, collecting a tray of tea and bread and butter from the bottom of the studio stairs.
Between their removal to Sussex Gardens and their occupation of 29A Notting Hill Gate, Lewis and his wife toured three European capitals: Warsaw, Berlin and Paris.
They arrived in Poland on 31 July. Lewis’s reasons for wishing to visit this country are mysterious. Mrs Lewis recalled that, when they were in Warsaw, she had wanted to see the Black Madonna of Krakow, but her husband was content ‘just sitting around cafés’ and so they did not go. Apart from a memorable descriptive passage in a book published a year and a half later, nothing is known of the visit. On the last day of their stay they went sightseeing. ‘I felt I had seen very little of the outlying parts of the city,’ Lewis wrote:
so I engaged a droshky. We made a tour of churches and palaces, or drew up in front of them, looked and passed on. Then at length the driver, speaking over his shoulder, announced: ‘Maintenant, messieurs et m’dames, nous nous approchons du Ghetto.’ In this ex-czarist barouche, its seat a long way above the street-level, we charged into the Ghetto, the driver cracking his whip. Its crack had a strangely knout-like inflection. Aged crones, spitting out curses, scuttled to one side: old kaftaned cripples hobbled out of the path of this rattling Gentile juggernaut. The driver relished this part of the sightseeing more than I did. He pointed his whip and proffered obscure information. He slowed up to inform us of the proportion of Jews to Gentiles in Poland. I gathered it was ten Jews to one Pole. If anyone is desirous of forming an opinion upon the Jewish Problem they should visit the Ghetto in Warsaw. This inferno continued for miles upon miles: or so it seemed . . . The percentage of diseased, deformed, and generally infirm persons is what strikes one most: that and the inexpressible squalor.
They crossed the border into Germany on 12 August. On this visit, by his own account, Lewis declined a very momentous meeting indeed:
When . . . I informed an English admirer of Herr Hitler that I was going to Germany he wrote me to say that it had been arranged that I should see the Führer. That, however, I had no desire to do, and I told him so. I passed through Germany en touriste, as I have always done.
He did not divulge the name of this ‘English admirer of Herr Hitler’, and the letter offering an audience with the German Führer has not survived. One possible candidate for the shadowy intermediary was a man who once sat down to eat with Lewis, Lovat Dickson and Sir Oswald Mosley. The lunch took place at Mosley’s flat in Ebury Street, and Dickson recalled the fourth member of the party: a small man with a long scar curving back from the right corner of his mouth.
William Joyce is said to have received his disfigurement at the hands of Communists in Lambeth during the 1924 by-election campaign. A razor was put into his mouth and a flick of the wrist opened his cheek to the earlobe. He was to become an infamous figure during the ensuing war, broadcasting from Berlin, giving ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy, and popularly known, and reviled, as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. Dickson claimed that Lewis introduced him to Mosley and Joyce, who were keen for him to publish their work. The meal was served by heel-clicking blackshirts who raised their arms in 45-degree salute on entering or leaving the room. Lovat Dickson died in 1987 and his story cannot be verified. His is the only testimony to establish a dangerous link between a man who flirted with National Socialism and one who was hanged for his activities on its behalf. Joyce destroyed all his papers before he was arrested, and any evidence of friendship between himself and Lewis would have been destroyed along with them. No letters from William Joyce to Lewis have survived either, but the trial of Lord Haw-Haw and his execution for High Treason in January 1946 would have led anyone acquainted with him to judiciously weed out potentially incriminating correspondence from their private papers.
In Berlin Mr and Mrs Lewis stayed in a hotel off the Kurfürstendamm. They noticed the miserably run-down Jewish-owned shops, the window of one in particular, beneath the name ‘ISRAEL’, displaying ‘deplorably outmoded’ women’s dresses, ‘crumpled, and one or two actually hung upside down’. In November 1938, such already demoralised establishments would be put out of business permanently in a State-condoned orgy of looting and splintered glass: Kristallnacht.
Lewis had last visited Berlin in January 1934, only six months after Hitler assumed absolute power in Germany. Three and a half years later he was able to cast an eye over the trappings of the Third Reich fully fledged:
I watched . . . a party of Black Guards falling in, and marching off down the Wilhelmstrasse. I noted the ascetic, the monkish appearance of their pale faces under the black casques, and the clock-like solemnity of their movements, with the violent kick of the goose-step that leads off the quick march!
It was not a happy visit. ‘We left . . . very quickly’, Mrs Lewis remembered, ‘because we found it very uncomfortable, or Wyndham did at least.’ And a letter from his literary agent at A. M. Heath, shortly after they returned to London, commiserated: ‘I am so sorry you had such a trying time in Germany.’
Publication of Lewis’s latest book in October was attended by bitter dealings with one of the directors of Eyre & Spottiswoode, Douglas Jerrold. In response to Jerrold’s objection that too much space had been devoted to James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in his autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis wrote to him as follows:
in all arts and sciences there are a few men, a very few, whose views on each other’s work are of substantial and enduring importance . . . which will not be allowed to vanish, which will be quoted and reprinted for the sake of a percipience that is rare. Conversely, there is a large number of others who play a humble though not necessarily dishonourable part in dissemination, and whose views are of only commercial importance. If you are not able to grasp this distinction . . . you would be better employed in the grocery trade.
Not for the first time he developed the suspicion that a publisher was deliberately sabotaging his work by not bothering to market it enthusiastically. This arose from Jerrold’s fatalistic remarks, doubtless intended to comfort the author, about the disappointing sales of his own autobiography, Georgian Adventure, published by Collins earlier the same year. According to Lewis, the director of Eyre & Spottiswoode was ‘an embittered “author” turned publisher, who had invented for his own consolation the dogma that “no good book can sell”, and had pursued his calling with so much languor that in effect his dogma could be guaranteed to justify itself.’
*
It was partly to mark the forthcoming exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, that A.J.A. Symons’ younger brother Julian published a special Wyndham Lewis number of the small magazine he edited, Twentieth Century Verse. The project had had Lewis’s blessing and all contributions had been submitted to him for approval before being included. With the single exception of an outright attack on Lewis by the American critic Kenneth Burke, all the material submitted was used.
The November/December double issue of Twentieth Century Verse included a review of the Leicester Galleries exhibition by T. W. Earp, an evaluation of Lewis ‘The Novelist’ and ‘A Note on One Way Song’ by A.J.A. and Julian Symons respectively, a review of Blasting and Bombardiering by Constant Lambert and an article by Eliot on The Lion and the Fox. Other contributors were: G.W. Stonier, Gilbert Armitage, E.W.F. Tomlin, Ruthven Todd, D. S. Savage, Keidrych Rhys, Glyn Jones, Rex Warner, Gavin Ewart, John Beevers and H. B. Mallalieu.
The collection was prefaced by a letter to the Editor from Lewis himself:
What a quantity of friends ‘The Enemy’ has nowadays! I am a little abashed. No company, this, for a public enemy. I am very much afraid that you have compromised me!
Privately he told Symons: ‘the Double Number . . . will remain for me one of the milestones in my life as an artist.’
Another friend was unimpressed. ‘What a curiously anti-feminist publication . . . this is’, Naomi Mitchison complained to him:
Presenting a picture of Wyndham Lewis walking over the prostrate bodies of Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein – It would have looked better to have one woman contributor anyhow, and if they hadn’t been a set of adolescents they would have seen that . . . One gets so sick of all these young men. It obviously isn’t your fault, but fuck and bugger the bastards who make you look to me and other women what I’m quite sure you aren’t.
*
So recent was some of the work that one large canvas had to be hung when the paint was still wet. A 16-page catalogue, with a foreword by Lewis, accompanied the show:
It is . . . the function of the artist to translate experience, pleasant and unpleasant, into formal terms. In the latter case, as what we experience in life is not all pleasant, and the most terrible experience, even, is often the most compelling, the result is a tragic picture, as often as not . . . And many of these pictures belong to the tragic art.
The 24 canvases had all been completed during the five years of intermittent illness since December 1932 and the titles of three pictures explicitly reflected that context: The Invalid, The Mud Clinic and The Tank in the Clinic.
A schematised figure, The Invalid, was painted in warm shades of yellow and zigzagged diagonally across the earth-toned geometries and dazzling white of the background, its face framed in a dark trapezium. A companion figure, partially concealed behind the patient, slightly inclined its oval head.
Elsewhere, the specifics of sickroom and the hospital experience had undergone more radical transmutation. In the compartmentalised abstraction of The Mud Clinic sat billiard-ball headed mannequins. Others lay prone or supine, each with a vacuous, full-lipped grin. All but the blindfolded patient at the bottom stared with round, vacant eyes.
A sinister form of treatment seemed to occupy the upper half of The Tank in the Clinic; featureless brown and beige bodies crammed passively down into an ultramarine precipitate. Below the tank, to the right, a fork-legged stretcher-case protruded from a storage drawer. Occupying the centre foreground, three figures studied something bulbous on a tall pedestal. In another context they might be art critics examining a piece of modern sculpture: a cubist rendering of a mandolin perhaps. But in this clinical nightmare the object raised to such grail-like significance was the humble receptacle of a sick man’s urine, a bottle designed to rest on its side in the bed without spilling. To the left a couple of women were partnered in a Totentanz by tall, bony wraiths. On the extreme left of the phantasmagoric scene stood a smaller figure, in dark glasses, wearing a red dressing gown, the lapels trimmed with brown, and with a blue cord round the waist: a portrait of the artist as inmate of the clinic. The painting was otherwise unsigned.
Elsewhere, images of a post-mortem existence recalled the infernal world described in The Childermass a decade earlier. Figures waited in limbo for obscure judgement: Group of Suppliants, Group of Three Veiled Figures, Queue of the Dead and One of the Stations of the Dead.
Forming a spectacular centrepiece was the five-foot-high figurative epic that was still wet when hung: Inferno. Lewis described it in his catalogue foreword:
In this composition (an inverted T, a vertical red panel, and a horizontal grey panel), a world of shapes locked in eternal conflict is superimposed upon a world of shapes, prone in the relaxations of an uneasy sensuality which is also eternal.
Blazing red figures gushed through a white open door, flung back against a background of hospital green. Below, a tangle of emaciated mannequins, the familiar round heads grinning with crescents of bared teeth. In the centre, the back of a flesh-toned figure with curly blond hair relieved the bald, ashen monotony of the mass grave.
In contrast to these horrors, another ‘recent painting’ was a tender portrait of a woman, in pale blues, her hands clasped and looking wistfully to the left in three-quarter profile. Portrait of the Artist’s Wife was Lewis’s first public acknowledgement of Gladys’s existence.
After the private view Lewis was taken by A.J.A. Symons and his brother to Wheeler’s seafood restaurant in Old Compton Street. The founder of the Gourmet Club was noticeably pained to see his guest vigorously salting and peppering his oysters. Lewis was delighted at the gourmet’s dismay ‘and thumped his thigh with pleasure’, Julian Symons recalled.
*
The morning after the private view, a report in The Times listed an impressive couple of dozen titled notables as having been in attendance. It may have been this publicity and the imagined prosperity conferred upon the artist by his obviously well-heeled guests that attracted attention to him from an unwelcome quarter. The day after The Times report was published, a short note from an address in Wimbledon was posted care of the Leicester Galleries:
Dear Mr Lewis, I would like to have a word with you, at your convenience, on a matter which I consider concerns you vitally.
It was signed ‘Anne Cumiskey’, a lady acting as intermediary for a third party. A fortnight later, when Lewis had not responded to the first advance, a second came direct to his home address. This time the intermediary had been dispensed with and the message was couched in the style of blackmail:
Would you please write me by return of post and arrange a suitable time for meeting me – I suggest Saturday morning about 11.00 am or Friday. If I do not hear by Friday morning I will come to the Leicester Galleries and make myself known – not as in the past, using discretion for your benefit. Yours sincerely Peter.
Lewis’s son by Olive Johnson had just turned 26 years old. A good six feet tall, and with the dark good looks inherited from his father, he would not have gone unnoticed in the Leicester Galleries. It is not clear what substance lay in his veiled threat, but it cannot be denied that a young man from south of the river visiting a West End gallery and claiming to be the painter’s illegitimate son would have caused, at the very least, some measure of embarrassment.
Lewis instructed his solicitors to deal with the matter and drafted the letter they were to send. It would appear that this was not Peter’s first approach, and that Lewis had paid him off on at least one former occasion:
Our client . . . has asked us to write to you (in reply to your letter threatening to make trouble for him in some way at the Leicester Galleries) to remind you of your promise [some time ago] not to interfere with him any more if he found the money you then needed. He hopes that you will abandon the idea of extracting money from him indefinitely, and understand that you have no claim on him of any sort.
*
Peter would have been sadly mistaken in the belief that the Leicester Galleries show had made his father a profitable target for extortion. Notwithstanding the Lords, Ladies and Knights of the Realm assembled at the private view, by the end of the first week only a single painting had sold, One of the Stations of the Dead – and that to a friend, Naomi Mitchison, for £105. With only a fortnight left for the exhibition to run, Stephen Spender asked Lewis’s permission to organise a letter to the press. Permission was granted and the following statement appeared in The Times on 16 December 1937:
Many years have passed since the strange mind of Wyndham Lewis began to invigorate English painting and letters. Mr Lewis is now holding his first exhibition since 1921, and it seems to us an appropriate time to suggest that Lewis’s deep and original art should be publicly recognised. Social change has made it inevitable that in these days the place and duties of the private patron should be handed over in a large degree to the public galleries; and those rarer artists whose vision and energy are too great to be confined in small or decorative pieces must depend more and more on the wide discernment of the galleries. We believe Wyndham Lewis to be such an artist, . . . and we hope that the opportunity of acquiring a representative work by him for the national collection will not be overlooked.
Twenty names appeared underneath: Henry Moore, Eric Gill, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Edmund Dulac, Edward Wadsworth, P. H. Jowett, Randolph Schwabe, John Piper, Serge Chermayeff, Raymond McGrath, Arthur Bliss, Michael Sadler, W. H. Auden, Herbert Read, Lady Rhondda, Rebecca West, Naomi Mitchison, Stephen Spender and Geoffrey Grigson. It was Grigson who had written the letter and collected the names.
Wadsworth’s support suggests that their acrimonious dealings of the early 1920s had been forgiven, if not forgotten. The only person approached who refused to append his signature was Walter Sickert.
The signatories’ hopes were fulfilled. It may even have been as a result of this timely intervention that the Tate Gallery purchased item number 50 in the catalogue, Red Scene, for £84.
*
When the Leicester Galleries exhibition closed on 24 December, only six drawings and five canvases had been sold, for a total of £423 3s. The Gallery’s 33⅓ per cent commission was subtracted, leaving £282 2s. Framing costs of £60 8s. reduced it further, and the £221 13s. 3d. that remained was swallowed up in a labyrinthine debt of £418 to the Leicester Galleries that had accumulated, in the form of occasional advances on the exhibition, since 1933. A balance of £196 6s. 9d. on this debt was still outstanding. So the Gallery retained seven canvases with a catalogue value of £365 8s., for half price, as they were entitled to do. These included Siege of Barcelona, The Inca (with birds) and Tank in the Clinic. Brown and Philips also exchanged the portrait of Ann Lyon, which they had already purchased for £40, for Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, at half price, £52 10s. The balance of £12 10s. from that exchange finally settled the debt.
Although the exhibition was far from being a financial success for Lewis, it may not have given this impression to creditors and other parties eager to extract money from him. Apart from Peter, at least one other old score soon emerged from the past for settlement.
Rupert Grayson, Lewis’s co-defendant against Major MacFie back in 1934, began an action for libel on his own account in January 1938. The letter from Gordon, Dadds & Co. referred to matters defamatory to their client in Lewis’s novel Snooty Baronet.* Because the book had been published five years before Grayson allegedly discovered himself to be libelled, the belatedness of the claim required explanation:
For some time past various friends and acquaintances of our Client have been informing him that he is referred to in the book in question, but it was not until recently that he was told of the serious imputations which have been made.
It is difficult to believe that Grayson would have neglected to read for himself a novel in which he had been told he figured. It is also difficult to believe he would have neglected reading it for five years. It is much easier to believe, however, that he took action when he judged that the supposed proceeds of a prestigious exhibition had made Lewis worth suing.
Whatever his motives, or his sense of timing, Grayson did not pursue his claim beyond this exploratory sally.
* By the end of the year when the Leicester Galleries show opened, he had managed to get ‘the other half’ painted. 24 canvases were exhibited. There were two oil portraits: one of the artist’s wife and the other of Anne Bowes Lyon.
* ‘I am sorry the position is unclear to you’, Wren Howard replied. ‘The advice we received was to the effect that the restricted range of the motif coupled with the essentially allusive treatment of the subject matter of your book rendered it inherently dangerous from the point of view of libel.’
* Grayson believed, quite rightly, that he had been the model for the absurd, large-chinned ‘Humph’.