‘Attendance upon the great ones of this bloody earth!’
Canada appeared to offer everything New York had withheld, and by December Lewis had several irons in the fire. A trip to Ottawa yielded the promise of three wireless broadcasts, albeit badly paid at $30 apiece. H. O. McCurry, the Director of the National Gallery of Canada, invited him to lecture on ‘The Importance of the Visual Arts’, and also suggested he produce ‘five portrait drawings of prominent army and navy personalities’ that the Gallery would purchase for $125 each. He was in a position to make about $700 that side of Christmas from Ottawa alone.
In Toronto he hoped to sell ‘a pamphlet’ to Lorne Pierce at the Ryerson Press for an advance of about $50. And there were prospects of more substantial rewards from another source. He and Gladys were to have dinner with ‘one of Toronto’s bigwigs’. Canada seemed, he told Stone, a land of opportunity. He was shrewd enough to realise, however, that as well as being ready to seize opportunities, it was often just as important to remain calm and patient ‘while this or that opportunity is pruned down and secured to one’. To be able to exercise this degree of sangfroid he needed a little working capital to ensure he did not give an impression of financial desperation to his future patrons:
It is fearfully important that during the next two weeks I should not appear hard-up or have to ask for advances . . . I feel that what happens between now and Christmas will decide the whole of my life for some time – for the duration of the war.
Inevitably, at the heart of the two-page letter to Stone was a request for money. Long communications from Lewis, outlining his glowing prospects, were often assurances that not only past debts, but those advanced to meet pressing present needs, would be swiftly repaid.
*
At a quarter to eight on the evening of Thursday 12 December, ‘Wyndham Lewis – novelist, painter, journalist and lecturer’ spoke from Toronto on the national network of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The announcer accurately introduced the speaker as ‘Canadian born’ but, perhaps relying too literally on the title of his 1937 autobiography, added that he ‘served in the last war as bombardier’. Recent purchases by the Tate Gallery in London, as well as his Canadian Gun Pit in the National Gallery at Ottawa, were enlisted to establish Lewis’s credentials as a painter whose works were ‘sought after by collectors’. The subject of his 15-minute talk was ‘Can Democracy be Defined?’:
Good evening! In speaking for the first time to a Canadian radio-audience, I feel just as the first pioneers must have done in the presence of the virgin forest – except that all the indians are ‘good indians’ – all are white; all miraculously speak my own native tongue; all have names beginning with Mac!*
Most of the ensuing discourse on the superiority of Anglo-Saxon democracy over Prussian totalitarianism found its way into the ‘pamphlet’ the Ryerson Press were to publish at the end of June: Anglosaxony: A League that Works.
*
The local ‘bigwig’ he mentioned to Geoffrey Stone was one of those Canadians with a Scottish prefix to their name: J. Stanley McLean. The date of the dinner was 15 December. The following day Lewis was able to acknowledge an airmailed cheque from Stone in Bethlehem, Connecticut, with the news that he had just clinched a $500 portrait commission without having to ask for an advance.
Work ‘on the portrait of a rich young lady’ began immediately in the little studio he rented for $12 a month at 22 Grenville Street, a short walk from the Tudor Hotel, and Lewis developed a routine of rising at 7 o’clock in the morning. McLean’s daughter Mary was much preoccupied with preparations to become Mrs Douglas Stewart, and the earliness of the sittings suggests that they had to be fitted in to her already busy schedule. The painting was intended by her father as a wedding present.
This was the first of three commissions to come Lewis’s way from the head of Canada Packers. One was a portrait of McLean himself, which his grateful employees were to pay for by subscription. He also wanted a portrait of Lisa, the wife of his friend Robert James Sainsbury, head of the great grocery chain back in London.
The elegant Mrs Sainsbury fared better under Lewis’s brush than did Mary McLean.
*
‘I work like a helot and march up and down to my studio in blizzards’, he told Stone in early January. 1941 was opening with great prospects of success. But eleven months later, at the beginning of December, he had just seven cents in his pocket. He had enough money for a stamp or enough for a telephone call but not enough for both.
Lewis failed in Toronto against what initially seemed very favourable odds.
In spite of the early morning regime of sittings, McLean’s wedding present to his daughter remained unfinished when Mary and her new husband departed for Vancouver. Thereafter work proceeded from a photograph. He was aware of how important this portrait was to his future prospects. ‘If it is liked’, he told Stone, ‘it must lead to other work.’ It is surprising, then, that he turned out something almost guaranteed not to satisfy. It was unflattering and ineptly drawn to the point of clumsy caricature. The enormous limpid eyes might have found favour with a sentimentally inclined sitter, despite the vacuous quality they gave the oval face, but the nose between them was an affront: long, sharply ridged and flaring out at the nostrils like a toy trumpet. Beneath the plain neckline of the plain mauve dress the square, frumpy expanse of mannish chest was framed by pipelike forearms and sketchily modelled crossed hands. Below the waist the pose was awkward and unconvincing, the left knee bent at far too acute an angle, the lower leg tucked up and disappearing underneath her.
Mary admitted to disliking Lewis and thought he disliked her. A. Y. Jackson believed that the portrait reflected their mutual animosity.
Perhaps anticipating an unfavourable reaction to his work, Lewis appeared unwilling for it to be seen, and it had still not been surrendered when his second commission was formally unveiled at noon on Saturday 19 April. The portrait of Mary’s father was shown off to family, friends and the employees of Canada Packers in the convention room of the firm’s Welfare Building in West Toronto. The occasion was reported, and the picture described, in the Toronto Star:
The portrait is a harmony in blue, green and brown, and is a subtle study in strong shades cleverly balanced. Dressed in a blue business suit, the industrialist sits in front of a palebluish-green background.
In the upper right of the composition was a section of Mining Town, a painting of Cobalt, Ontario, by A. Y. Jackson. This, said the Star correspondent, symbolised Mr McLean’s interest in art, while the books at his right elbow ‘stand for the sitter’s wide reading’. The artist gave a short speech:
In my portrait I have said – more concisely and precisely – than it is possible to say in words – what I think of the very distinguished man who is President of this company. It has been a great privilege to have been selected to record, in this way, the personality of a great business leader, who appears destined to play an increasingly important part in the life of this young and vigorous nation. As an artist, I can say that I regard myself as extremely fortunate to have had so interesting a subject to paint, and also a man like Mr McLean, has found time, in the midst of a strenuous business career, to give his attention to cultural matters, and especially to the particular arts that I practice. – All in all, the painting of this portrait has been for me a great and pleasurable experience.
That evening Mary and Douglas Stewart drove him to the studio he was now using in Severn Street, to view her father’s belated wedding gift. But by the time the car drew up in front of the studio building, Lewis seems to have changed his mind about allowing the picture to be seen. Probably making a show of searching his pockets, he said that he was sorry, but unfortunately he had forgotten to bring his keys. The Stewarts had the distinct impression that he was lying.
Later, following considerable pressure from the family, he delivered the portrait to the McLean estate. Mrs McLean thought it made her daughter look like a horse and refused to give it houseroom. Lewis took it away with him. Mary herself would not see it until the late 1950s, after the painter’s death.
The portrait of Mary’s father did not find favour with the employees of Canada Packers who had commissioned it. It was eventually taken off its stretcher, rolled up and stayed in storage until an exhibition of Lewis’s Canadian pictures brought it back into the light in 1992.
*
Lewis’s few days ‘among the civil servants and statesmen’ of the Canadian capital in November 1940 had yielded more opportunities than he could at that time take advantage of, and he realised he would have to return. ‘You have to keep on seeing these people’, he told Stone. ‘The machine set up there, for running Canada, contains a number of quite agreeable persons and is the ideal place for a portraitist.’ He believed he had, with the support of H. O. McCurry at the National Gallery of Canada, a great deal of business to conduct in Ottawa. He had heard that accommodation was scarce and proposed establishing a base two hours away by train, making weekly visits to the capital to paint portraits. Accordingly, in mid-May, Lewis and his wife left the Tudor Hotel for the time being and, Ottawa being ‘inconveniently full’, took a very small two-room apartment in Montreal at 430 Prince Arthur Street West.
During his first weekly trip he stayed at the Chateau Laurier Hotel, Ottawa, and wrote to Gladys about his round of social engagements:
All this tiresome business has to be done. Probably at lunch I shall have no opportunity of talking about portraits: so have to do that at six o’clock drinks. Doing business is always long-winded . . . people give you a job or do you a good business turn because they like you ‘round’ – like talking to you and so on: not because they like your work. – Wastes a lot of time, but can’t be helped!
That first expedition proved futile, as did subsequent forays. In fact, Lewis’s projected portraiture campaign ‘among the civil servants and statesmen’ appears to have failed entirely. Nothing even came of the ‘five portrait drawings of prominent army and navy personalities’ which McCurry had promised to arrange for him.
The rental on the Montreal apartment was due to expire on 15 July, but by the end of June Lewis and his wife were back in Toronto at the Tudor Hotel.
*
‘I think they’re really afraid of you.’
The young poet Douglas LePan blurted out these words one September afternoon while he sat in a room at 86A Isabella Street, the little place Lewis was by then renting as a studio. LePan remembered it as being surprisingly unlike a traditional artist’s studio: ‘it was a bed-sitting room . . . in a boarding-house or apartment hotel; and it was suitably, and oh! so tastefully, fitted out with crocheted doilies on the tables, and crocheted anti-macassars on the chairs, and potted plants by the windows overlooking the street.’ Lewis wore a flat-crowned, flat-brimmed black felt hat throughout the sittings. They would have tea and Lewis would get to work on the portrait drawing.
He had been asking LePan about the University of Toronto, where he had been an undergraduate and his father the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. Lewis had been speculating about the reasons why he had not been offered work at the University and why the academic establishment had apparently not recognised his presence in Toronto over the past year. The young man’s words came in response to such ruminations: ‘I think they’re really afraid of you.’
In June, writing from Montreal with suggestions as to where unprejudiced reviews of Anglosaxony: A League that Works might be courted, and warnings against allowing it to fall into the hands of unsympathetic University professors, Lewis confided to Lorne Pierce at the Ryerson Press:
I did not exactly hit it off with the intellectuals of Toronto . . . Actually some people were very rude to myself and wife while I was there, so I regard it . . . as a rather alarming place.
However, some time during the first half of the year an attempt had been made to introduce Lewis and his wife to the City’s academic community. With possibilities of lucrative portrait commissions and other forms of employment, acceptance here would have made a great difference to their quality of life over the next two and a half years. Barker Fairley, painter, and Professor of German, one of that small group who had dined in his honour on St Andrew’s Night 1939, invited Lewis to dinner to meet some of his University colleagues. This preliminary encounter seems to have been satisfactory. Shortly afterwards it was arranged that Mrs Lewis should accompany him to Professor E. J. Pratt’s house so that ‘the various womenfolk would be able to make each other’s acquaintance’. This was a larger gathering to which the Lewises were driven in the writer Morley Callaghan’s car.
Two years later the party still loomed so large in Lewis’s memory as to form the main bone of contention in a two-page letter to the Professor of German, by then saluted icily as ‘Mr Fairley’.
Details of what happened chez Pratt are sketchy. At some point in the evening Lewis became aware that ‘something was amiss’. His wife was being troubled by a woman who insisted on ‘regaling her with obscene stories and limericks’. Callaghan’s wife had made several attempts to rescue her but was unsuccessful. Eventually the aid of Professor Bower’s wife was enlisted and the woman was driven off. Both Mrs Lewis and Mrs Callaghan were upset by the incident and it dominated conversation in the car going home.
This deeply felt but factually skeletal version is the only record of the occasion that exists, but it is difficult to resist the suspicion that there was more to the embarrassments of the evening than the unwelcome attentions of a dirty-minded bore. That in itself would not explain why, following the Pratt party, no faculty member or wife made further contact with the Lewises. As the whole point of the gathering had been to make them better acquainted with University staff and their families, the neglect could only by interpreted by the indignant Lewis as ‘pointed rudeness’.
Some details missing from his version of events might have accounted for the ostracisation. He did not, for instance, identify the ‘female ruffian’, nor her standing, influential or otherwise, in the community. And he did not mention how he and his wife behaved after the alleged insult.
Whatever else happened that night, barriers subsequently shot up between the two residents of the Tudor Hotel and the University of Toronto. Professor Fairley claimed that, when he next encountered Lewis, he was ‘deliberately and without provocation . . . boorishly insulted’.
*
‘I think they’re really afraid of you.’
LePan regretted the opinion as soon as it was uttered:
My remark gave him too much satisfaction. I could see him rolling it over on his tongue with relish behind his prominent, ravaged teeth, and his eyes glinting with unholy joy as he thought of it and savoured it.
The academic community might indeed have been nervous about Lewis. After all, his talents as a satirist had already found a target in one of their number: the well-respected warden of Hart House, Burgon Bickersteth.
But there were other reasons Lewis might have found himself shunned. Like the lady who could not take the hint that her limericks and stories were causing offence, Lewis himself seemed, on occasion, unskilled at gauging the sympathies of his audience.
An unwholesome picture of him in this insensitive mode, rampaging in Toronto society, comes, undulled by 40 intervening years, from LePan’s memoirs. It was a hot July evening following his return from Montreal, during a dinner party at the house of Mrs R. J. Sainsbury. Lewis, resplendent in a bright scarlet silk cummerbund, dominated the conversation:
I remember in particular a long malicious account he gave of a well-known Toronto figure, of which the unmistakable implication throughout was that he was homosexual. The whole recital was as replete as it could be with bad faith. Not only was the main point made by innuendo and implication rather than by anything said directly; but there was also the further implication that . . . the locals, poor clods – would be shocked to the core while the narrator with all his cosmopolitan sophistication would be quite unaffected. The truth was, however, that all those in the company knew very well what were the sexual inclinations of the figure in question – I doubt whether they were often acted out – and accepted them, so that the effect intended . . . fell noticeably flat. It was all rather meretricious, and sad . . . I looked down at my plate demurely like all the others and dutifully helped to turn the conversation in a different direction when the time came . . . But the question did cross my mind, I remember: Who among us is really being the most provincial tonight?
The ‘well-known Toronto figure’ was Douglas Duncan, another one of the St Andrew’s Night dinner companions, proprietor of the Picture Loan Society, and a man who was a willing source of handouts to Lewis throughout this, his ‘Tudor period’.
*
It was probably soon after Professor Pratt’s party that Lewis began harbouring serious suspicions about John Reid. The rudeness visited upon him and his wife, so the reasoning went, resulted from somebody maligning them. Reid was the only person in Toronto to have known the Lewises, however briefly, in London before the war. It was assumed therefore that any stories spread about them, from that other world and time, must have originated with him.
Relations with the young Canadian had been distant since Christmas. ‘Don’t think that I’m trying to avoid you’, Lewis told him when they ran into one another on the street. Reid had suspected no such thing until it was mentioned. He was as sensitive to real or imagined slights as his mentor. That Lewis was indeed avoiding him became increasingly apparent. Phoned several times, he was too busy to arrange a meeting. Sometimes he would answer the telephone briskly and then affect a ‘sleepy’ voice, when he heard who was on the line, in order to cut the conversation as short as possible.
Eventually, in February, the young disciple called unannounced at the Tudor Hotel and found Mrs Lewis cutting out material for a black dress. He had brought cakes and she told him he could wait for her husband, who was expected shortly. Lewis arrived complaining about the cold and immediately suggested a walk to the Grenville Street studio. Outside, however, he turned north instead of south and on the windswept corner of Church and Bloor, confronted Reid:
‘Frankly, we don’t think you’re trustworthy.’
Reid did not immediately understand.
‘We think you go around telling harmful stories about us.’
Lewis also accused him of using and exploiting his friends.
‘You can’t be loyal to your friends; you don’t know how to be friends.’
Reid was too shocked to reply. Later he became physically ill as a result of the incident. He vomited. He was able to quote to Lewis, five months later, the prescription number, 116950, of the ‘nerve medicine’ he got from MacMillan’s pharmacy while recovering from that confrontation.
At the end of the month Lewis phoned as if nothing had happened and asked Reid to sell him his copy of The Lion and the Fox. Reid agreed to let him have it at the price he had paid and Lewis took the book, promising payment in a few days. Reid was short of money and pawned his typewriter while he waited. He phoned Lewis and was told he would get in touch in 48 hours. Reid pawned his watch. Three weeks later, on 22 March, Reid phoned again and Lewis arranged to meet him, again on the corner of Church and Bloor, in a quarter of an hour. He also wanted to buy the young man’s copy of Hugh Gordon Porteus’s Discursive Exposition and to borrow the dust jacket of The Apes of God.
Reid did not have the bus fare but made the one-and-a-half-mile walk to the rendezvous in 20 minutes. Lewis kept him waiting in the wind for another 20 minutes. When he arrived he gave Reid the money he owed to date and thrust a receipt into his hands to sign:
Received from Wyndham Lewis the sum of four dollars and eighty five cents in payment for one copy of The Lion and the Fox.
It was another hurtful sign for Reid, if one were needed, that he was not trusted.
*
Late in August Lewis cabled a Harley Street ophthalmologist. The unpunctuated staccato prose style of such communications gave the 57-word message a tone of rising panic:
GLASSES YOU PRESCRIBED MISLAID IN PACKING VISITED TORONTO DOCTOR HE INFORMS ME NERVE LEFT EYE ATROPHIED RIGHT EYE TEN PER CENT UNDER NORMAL SUSPECTS GLAUCOMA GIVES ME SIX MONTHS TO LOSE SIGHT UNLESS USE DROPS CALLED PILOCARPINE WHAT FROM KNOWLEDGE CASE DO YOU ADVISE IS PILOCARPINE SOUND YOU WILL REMEMBER YOU SUSPECTED LEFT EYE HAD SUSTAINED INJURY
The Toronto doctor, ‘one of the most highly esteemed specialists’, had, it was true, hazarded glaucoma as a tentative diagnosis only. In order to be sure he needed to apply a pressure test to the eyeball which would require anaesthetic. Lewis declined the test on the grounds that he had work to do the following day, but partly, perhaps, from fear of a final, irrefutable proven diagnosis. He pushed away the unthinkable:
I do not believe that I have glaucoma . . . if my eyes go I go too. Loathsome as the world is, I do like to see it. That sort of blackout I could not live in.
He visited another Toronto doctor, ‘to check up on the first.’ The second opinion was more reassuring. He did not have glaucoma. The condition of his eyes could instead be directly traceable to the decayed ruins that were Lewis’s teeth.
Affleck Greeves, the Harley Street ophthalmologist, sent a cable on 29 August stating that he had detected no signs of glaucoma when examining Lewis’s eyes two years before. On the other hand he could not rule out an onset of the condition during the interval and advised him to follow the Toronto doctor’s advice. But this, along with the second doctor’s categorical assurance that he did not have glaucoma, was enough to incline Lewis, ‘not entirely on account of ostrich-like optimism’, towards the hypothesis that his teeth, ‘a septic centre of the first order’, were in all probability the cause of his failing left eye.
These considerations were, as he told Iris Barry, largely academic in his present financial position:
it has almost ruined me seeing these eye-doctors and getting the glasses they prescribed. As to having my teeth attended to, that is, as things stand, a complete impossibility . . . I can never make money enough to have a margin for expenditure on doctor or dentist. It is all I can do to buy tooth-paste.
Writing to Stone early in September he did not confide the frightening condition of his eyes. He nevertheless produced a bleak picture:
Things have come to an awful pass here: if I don’t do something to break out of the net, I shall end my days in a Toronto flophouse.
*
One way out of the net lay some 900 miles northeast of Toronto, in Bathurst, New Brunswick. It was here that the President of Algoma Steel, Sir James Dunn, was convalescing from a coronary thrombosis under the watchful eye of his secretary, soon to be wife, Miss Marcia Christoforides.
Back in May, Sir James had seen and admired Lewis’s portrait of J. S. McLean and had written, holding out a tentative promise:
If I can see my way to afford (in these days when taxes take everything) having a portrait painted I will ask you to do it.
Lewis assured the millionaire he could offer a bargain:
I am satisfied with much more modest sums than an artist is accustomed to expect in England. I am not so well known on this side of the water as the other. To be specific, I will paint a portrait for anything from 700 to 1000 dollars.
But before Dunn could take advantage of these knockdown rates he fell ill and was henceforth in the care of his secretary.
Lewis renewed the campaign in early August, and Miss Christoforides told him that Sir James was considering employing him, not only as a portrait painter, but also to execute a poster design for Algoma Steel. If Dunn had been in any doubt about Lewis’s financial plight following the offer of a portrait for $700–1000, such doubts would have been dispelled by his next letter:
There is a wolf at the door, which has to be kept away. If very soon I don’t shoo it away, it will devour me. I do not have to tell you how, even in his home town, an artist is always apt to have a wolf on his doorstep. But we are in Canada – in the midst of an economic blizzard.
He may have been aware that Sir James had kept the wolf from Sickert’s door during the Thirties by giving him the much-needed commission for a series of 12 portraits of friends.
Miss Christoforides suggested Lewis visit the ailing magnate at Camp Dunn, his sprawling country place outside Bathurst, New Brunswick. And he was given the tantalising impression that a number of other portraits would be required. There would be one of Dunn himself if he was well enough to sit. There would be one of the Managing Director of Algoma Steel, a Mr Thomas Rahilly, who was expected at Camp Dunn while Lewis was to be there. Another high-ranking but as yet unspecified executive was to be tackled, as was, finally, no less a personage than the Premier of Ontario, the Honourable Mitchell Frederick Hepburn. This last portrait would be a gift to the province. Hepburn had been very useful to Sir James in the past. He had oiled the wheels of the controversial bid to take over Algoma Steel in 1934, and in 1939 had provided the firm with a government subsidy.
By 10 September Lewis was awaiting the green light. ‘Whenever I receive telegram I shall begin getting ready’, he told Miss Christoforides. ‘Within 48 hours I could start.’ She had warned him about the inclement weather in New Brunswick and he assured her that he was prepared:
though I am no pioneer, and if polar storms bear down, I shall keep pretty near the hot water pipes!
If all went according to plan, the trip promised a profitable end to the ‘economic blizzard’ howling around his ears in Toronto.
By 21 September Lewis was back from Bathurst with his canvas untouched. The Managing Director of Algoma Steel, Mr Rahilly, had not, after all, arrived at Camp Dunn. Sir James himself was there, but with a doctor in attendance and under the solicitous eye of Miss Christoforides. There was some discussion about Lewis painting her in a winged collar and with her hair in a pigtail tied with ribbon, but this project did not get further than discussion.
The woods had been peaceful and there was a small lake nearby where he strolled, waiting to see if Dunn would be found strong enough to sit. After a day or so the doctor decided he was not. ‘He is trying to run before he can walk’, Miss Christoforides reported. Sir James would not be fit enough for another month. But in the meantime the Honourable Mitchell Hepburn was in Toronto and could be painted immediately. In a month’s time Lewis was to return to Bathurst to tackle Sir James and, no doubt, Miss Christoforides. ‘Of course I greatly regretted being snatched away from the delightful task of transferring to canvas your image’, he told her. ‘Still we can take that up at a more propitious moment.’
When he got back to Toronto he was optimistic about what still seemed an upturn in his fortunes. ‘My next portrait is of a very big shot. If I am not assassinated by the local portrait-painters’, he told Stone, ‘it should put me on the map.’
Conscious that he needed to pin his ‘big shot’ down as quickly as possible before the political concerns of Ontario carried him away, Lewis telephoned Hepburn the weekend he got back. He left a message but his call was not returned. On the Monday he delivered a letter by hand:
Here I am, and shall hold myself in readiness to start work. May I add that I regard it as a great honour that I should have been chosen to do your portrait, and am greatly looking forward to the experience.
Unfortunately, although Miss Christoforides had told Lewis he was to paint the Prime Minister, she appears to have neglected to inform the Prime Minister himself. A rather frosty response reached the Tudor Hotel from Hepburn’s office:
I am directed by the Prime Minister to acknowledge your letter of recent date. Mr Hepburn left yesterday for New York and on his return at the end of the week will have to go to Ottawa for conferences with the Federal Government. I do not know just when any arrangements could be made along the lines you suggest.
Shortly after his return from Bathurst, as it became clear that painting a Prime Minister’s portrait would not be as straightforward as he had at first thought and as he realised that the campaign to get commissions might have to start again from scratch, he went to see Lorne Pierce in his office at the Ryerson Press. He told Pierce he wanted to do a drawing of him. It would not, he explained, cost anything but might be used to get other commissions. Pierce was a busy man and unable to spare the time to pose formally. However Lewis was welcome to try to capture a likeness while he worked at his desk. Lewis produced a large sheet of paper, pinned it to a board and began to draw. After a while he suddenly tore the paper from the board, crumpled and dropped it into the waste-paper basket. Then he left the office without a word, slamming the door behind him. A couple of days after this he returned, walked into the office without knocking, settled himself in a chair near to Pierce and began again. A day or so later he came back and completed the drawing. He finally delivered the delicate pastel, signed and dated on blue paper, to Pierce on 8 October with meticulous instructions as to its preservation:
These drawings in pastel chalks require extremely careful handling . . . Consequently, I am leaving you the drawing pinned to a drawing board and suggest you do not allow the drawing to leave the board until it is framed or mounted. If you are not having it framed at once, but only mounted, then I advise very strongly that you have a cellophane face fixed on it . . . It is my experience that the frameworker is none too careful – he is quite apt to leave the drawing face up on a work-bench; other things may be placed on top of it, and so it gets rubbed. So I have blocked out a warning notice and pinned it to the top of the drawing-board . . . All this may sound fussy, but there is a bloom to these pastel-surfaces which it is easy to lose.
Nothing meanwhile had come, or was to come, of the commissions discussed at Camp Dunn. Lewis did not paint the Honourable Mitchell Hepburn. Neither did he paint Sir James Dunn and his Managing Director Mr Rahilly. And, finally, he never painted the beautiful, wing-collared and pigtailed features of Miss Marcia Christoforides, who had stage-managed the entire futile exercise and who was to marry her employer the following year.
The pursuit of these potentially lucrative commissions had not been a waste, merely, of his time. It had actually cost him money. Apart from canvas, paints and travelling expenses, ‘I have spent a hell of a lot . . . on making myself respectable’, he complained to Stone, ‘a new suit, and all other requisites of attire for personal attendance upon the great ones of this bloody earth!’
*
When he was in New York 18 months before, he had talked of the prospect of portrait commissions to Mrs Florence Lamont. She had been pessimistic, telling him that war was on everyone’s mind, to the exclusion of all other considerations. She had been right, he now told her. ‘The portraitist must lay aside his brush.’
A fortnight after he had arrived at this conclusion there was a brief, tantalising addendum to his dealings with the Canadian powerful. It was as inconclusive as anything that had gone before.
On Thursday 9 October he received a telephone call from a Miss Pritchett at the Parliament Building. She introduced herself as secretary to the Speaker and asked Lewis if she and Mr Hepburn’s secretary might visit his studio and look at his pictures. He explained that he had no studio at present and only possessed photographs of his pictures. Nevertheless the two women still wanted to meet him. He wondered whether he might visit them at the Parliament Building instead, and Miss Pritchett agreed, suggesting the following Wednesday at noon. Lewis was a little uncertain as to the wider purpose of the meeting and asked if it was to have anything to do with arrangements to paint Mr Hepburn. Miss Pritchett replied: ‘Yes, or somebody else.’ He got the impression that this ‘somebody else’ might turn out to be the Speaker. She told him, on the other hand, that Mr Hepburn was difficult to fix in one place for very long and Lewis agreed that in such a time of pressing national emergency it would be difficult for him to sit for his portrait. Miss Pritchett said that all the same he ought to be painted, however busy he was, and then his portrait could hang in the Parliament Building along with the other Prime Ministers. Lewis said he would telephone her on Wednesday to confirm their noon appointment, and replaced the receiver believing, once more, that there was light at the end of the tunnel.
For all the benefit that came to him from these arrangements, they might just as well have been part of an elaborate hoax. And the most malicious hoaxer could not have raised more radiant expectations than Miss Pritchett innocently did with her telephone call that Thursday. ‘She implied there would be other portraits,’ Lewis wrote excitedly to Pierce half an hour later, ‘she wasn’t specific.’
He immediately set about preparing for the meeting. He gathered photographs of his recent portrait work: J. S. McLean, Chancellor Capen and perhaps T. S. Eliot. He also needed to borrow the portrait drawings he had produced of LePan and get back the drawing of Pierce he had delivered with such detailed instructions for its welfare only the day before. And he had to borrow $30 from Pierce, no doubt to supply him with requisites for further attendance upon ‘the great ones of this bloody earth’.
There is, however, no more evidence of meetings with Parliament Building staff, relating to plans for painting Speaker, Prime Minister or indeed anybody else, high or low, in Toronto society. And no explanation offered or offers itself as to why such bright prospects came to nothing.
* Another radio talk, ‘Address to French Canada’, was delivered in French. It called on the English- and French-speaking peoples of Canada to unite, as those in Europe were doing, against a common enemy. The subject of Lewis’s third CBC talk, and whether it was even broadcast, is not known.