‘We consider the artist not a very responsible person’
He reached Ottawa, alone, during the second week in March. He was entertained by Malcolm MacDonald and his sister and introduced to Mr Rielle Thomson of the Department of Munitions and Supply, with whom he discussed potential subjects for his painting commission.
Thomson thought it might be possible to gain him access to International Nickel, over two hundred miles north of Toronto, in Sudbury. There was also an Aluminium Company at Arvida, six hundred miles to the northeast, in Quebec, with a gigantic hydro-electric plant close by that he would find interesting. Copper-mining at Noranda and a company producing metallic magnesium at Renfrew were also suggested. Through Thomson, Lewis was put in touch with the publicity manager of Canadian Industries Limited of Montreal. The nondescript name disguised a sinister network of death-dealing factories. In the explosives plant at Nobel, Ontario, for instance, Lewis could witness the nitration of wood pulp into gun-cotton and cordite. Twenty-five miles outside Toronto, near Oshawa, was the shell-filling plant at Pickering. Here publicity manager C.P.C. Downman promised scenes of interest, ‘perhaps in the actual pouring of TNT into shells as well as the monorail equipment for carrying loaded shells through to the paint spray booths’.
Sir Kenneth Clark had written, on the day of the Tudor fire, agreeing to pay Lewis £150 at the beginning of the commission and the remaining £150 when it was completed. On 5 April he received his reply by telegram:
PLEASE HAVE ADVANCE CABLED IMMEDIATELY – LEWIS
The Committee’s decision to pay half the money in advance had not been referred to the Finance Department of the Ministry of Information, and Mr Trenaman, the Ministry’s accountant, was not happy about it. He referred the matter to his colleague Mr Dowden, who in turn referred it to the head of the Finance Department, Mr Parker.
Mr Parker thought that the arrangement committing the Ministry of Information to advance payment of money was ‘unsatisfactory’. In his memorandum to Mr Dowden, Mr Parker expressed the underlying fear of all concerned:
I do not know whether Wyndham Lewis is reliable or not, but some would not be, and we are committed to paying money belonging to the Country for something which the Country may not get.
Nevertheless, the Ministry of Information paid £150 to the Canadian High Commissioner’s office in London and requested him to arrange with the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa for transferral of credit in Canadian currency to Lewis.
As early as 13 April, Malcolm MacDonald had assured Lewis that arrangements to send him the initial £150 of his money were ‘in train’.
However, due to ‘an unfortunate mechanical delay in the transmission of . . . funds’ the cheque for Canadian dollars did not reach the Office of the High Commissioner for the United Kingdom until 15 June. This was precisely two months after Lewis’s telegram to Clark.
By the time the ‘advance’ arrived, Lewis claimed to have nearly finished the commission. He had been unable to carry out an ambitious series of drawings covering the wide-ranging activities of Canada’s war effort because ‘it was economically impossible, owing to the delays, to embark on a program of travel.’ He laid the blame for his thwarted creative endeavours on the grinding slowness of bureaucracy and the ‘cryptic taciturnity . . . and . . . phenomenal and pointed unalacrity’ of Sir Kenneth Clark. But the late arrival of his advance had little or no material effect on his ability to carry out his drawing programme. Between 15 April and 27 May, on Malcolm MacDonald’s instructions, Lewis was able to tap the High Commissioner’s Office for payments of $200, $150, and two more of $100 each. A further payment of $114.50 on 9 June brought the total to $644.50, the precise equivalent, converted at $4.43 to the pound, of the delayed £150 advance from London. These payments began only ten days after Lewis sent his cable.
In fact he visited a number of factories in late March, Mr Thomson’s letters of introduction smoothing his path wherever he went. He was made welcome. One factory manager took him to lunch ‘at a sort of country club’ and offered him ‘a most delicious dry sherry and an imported Chateau Margaux’. The factories themselves disclosed other wonders – ‘wildly interesting’, he told MacDonald. He visited a glass factory and described ‘a great tank like monster they have christened “Winnie” which bears down upon the furnace, puts a great claw inside, and draws out in its clutch the white hot jar of molten glass.’ But even the influential Mr Thomson could not gain him access to the nickel mines at Sudbury. The management was averse to visitors because of recent accidents to sightseers.
Finally, he settled on the Anaconda American Brass Foundry, not far outside Toronto, as the focus of his attention. Having made a preliminary visit in January, it was not until early April that he began serious work there, producing drawings for his commissioned composition. ‘I believe I can put my hands on the money to buy the canvas’, he told Kennington at the end of March:
and I can get free transport to the factory. Wish me luck! – it is a lulu as they say here: a most rugged subject, full of the apparatus of industry, which by screeching and roaring stages becomes in due course the apparatus of war.
In the casting shop he was confronted by ‘a busy scene in a factory, with all the contraptions that pertain to such a scene . . . the casts into which the molten metal is run, for instance, or the hoods which are swung over the furnaces to catch as much of the smoke and fumes as possible and pass them up into the shoots.’ Much of what he saw was indistinct – ‘there was a great deal of smoke and steam, and not a great deal of light.’ As if to compensate for the poor visibility, he focused upon details:
I discovered (from the superintendent) the meaning of a certain cleft shape in the hoods. It turned out to be an extra bit they had added on, because the original hood was not large enough.
When one shift came to an end and before the next started, he managed to get close enough to the hood to make a detailed drawing just in case he should need to use that particular feature.
He claimed to have sketched in that ‘demonic casting shop’ for six weeks, out of the allotted hundred days for which his maintenance was supposed to last, and to have produced somewhere in the region of a hundred preparatory drawings, ‘quite unsaleable since they [were] in the first place very dirty and . . . nothing but notes of how . . . things work, their relative proportions and positions’. He got on well with Edward J. Beatie and his colleague J. S. Vanderploeg in the managerial quarters, while on the shop floor he was regarded with some scepticism:
The men thought I had been sent there to think up safety-devices, and believed that my account of myself, as an artist engaged on an oil-painting, was baloney.
Lewis and Gladys made preparations to leave Toronto for Windsor. By 24 April a house had been found for July and August at a rent of $50 a month. Mrs Hettie Hagarty was a school teacher and would be away for the summer. Lewis told her that he and his wife would move into 424 Tecumseh Road between 25 and 28 June.
At the end of May, responding to threatening letters from London, Lewis was still attempting to placate Swain & Company and persuade them against disposing of his goods at 29A Notting Hill Gate to clear his rent arrears:
Have patience and don’t put them up for auction. – Many things you’d only get a few shillings for but replacing would cost lots of money. The books are tools of my trade, collected over a period of years and as to the things pertaining to my other trade in the studio upstairs, they would fetch very little.
He was, he explained, stranded in Canada and could not return to London while hostilities continued even if he could afford the fare:
I have my wife here and have not wished to take cattle boat back; nor for that matter will the captains of slow and vulnerable ships accept women . . . as passengers.
*
On 16 June Lewis wrote to MacDonald with the news that his picture for the Ministry of Information would be finished by Monday the 21st at the latest, leaving him the five days until Friday the 25th to prepare to take up his teaching post in Windsor:
My picture is 45˝ by 33˝ showing the furnaces of a strip mill or casting shop. The faces of the work men are as black as those of Commando personnel, and if I have succeeded in conveying a tenth part of the drama of the scene, then my picture should not be an inconsiderable contribution to the collection of War Records.
He was however unwilling to surrender the picture immediately, wanting to take it with him to Windsor, and, perhaps, do some further work on it.
*
‘There is nothing pretentious about it’, Mrs Hagarty had told him. ‘It is just our home.’ The school where she taught did not close until 29 June, and this meant that she would not be vacating the house for some days after the Lewises’ arrival. She also had a friend staying until the 29th. ‘However your bedroom will be all ready and we can just share the rest of the house until I move’, she told Lewis. ‘If you provide yourself with linens everything else will be to hand.’
But shortly after their arrival in Windsor alternative accommodation had to be found. It is not clear what went wrong at 424 Tecumseh Road, but the Lewises evidently found it impossible to cohabit with Mrs Hagarty and her friend even for the short period they were to overlap. ‘The Tecumseh place was hopeless,’ Lewis declared, ‘and after a few days there, crouching in a small bedroom, we fled to a hotel. I believe the woman was demented.’
*
On 26 June Mr Pugh from the Dominions Office telephoned Mr Trenaman at the Finance Department of the Ministry of Information to say that a cable had arrived from His Majesty’s High Commission in Canada to the effect that Lewis had finished his painting and was now applying for the £150 balance of his fee. Trenaman wrote to his colleague, Mr Dowden, suggesting that it was now for the War Artists Advisory Committee to say whether they recommended payment of the balance without seeing the picture. Trenaman displayed the deep mistrust of any conscientious official asked to dispense large sums of money in circumstances for which there was no readily discernible precedent. Dowden discussed the matter with Sir Kenneth Clark, who was quite prepared for the payment to proceed before delivery of the picture. ‘He points out’, Dowden told Trenaman, ‘that the Committee could not very well reject it!’
On 17 July Lewis received the cheque for $664 and 50 cents from the High Commissioner’s Office in Ottawa.
He was by this time heavily involved in lecturing on ‘The Philosophical Roots of Modern Art and Literature’. For 50 minutes a day, five days a week, he held forth on a range of books from War and Peace to Of Mice and Men. The reading and preparation for this series took up far more time than he had expected. Lectures on Tolstoy, on Hegel, on democracy and the effects of modern technology and modern communication, left him no time to work on his Anaconda painting.
By mid-July the Lewises were installed in a basement on Ellis Street East. They had been lucky to find it so soon after their flight from Mrs Hagarty. Lewis claimed ‘he had simply stood on a street corner, asking passers-by the possible whereabouts of a space for himself and his wife until he found this apartment.’ 2 Royal Apartments was sublet to them by Mrs Delores Sills until 1 October at a rental of $30 a month.
Towards the end of his lecture series, Lewis received a letter from a young Canadian lecturer at St Louis University. Alerted to Lewis’s presence in Windsor by his mother, who had attended the Vanity Theatre lecture, Herbert Marshall McLuhan – future communications theorist and guru – requested an audience:
If you are not too busy or too exhausted by our heat, there is nothing I should more enjoy than a chat with you.
McLuhan arrived at the Royal Apartments in the company of an Italian American colleague from St Louis, Felix Giovanelli. Father Murphy was present in the Lewises’ apartment that evening. Lewis was extremely happy to be holding court, and the two young academics hung on his every word. Father Murphy remembered one incident:
Lewis, in the middle of a long explanation, left the room for a moment to Giovanelli, McLuhan and myself. When he returned, he hesitated to recapture the train of thought. We were all interested. Dr Giovanelli beckoned, respectfully: ‘Please continue your paragraph!’
*
In response to a letter from Lewis expressing anxiety about his books and manuscripts in the abandoned Notting Hill Gate flat, Swain & Company wrote on 27 August with grave news:
We have recently effected an entrance . . . in order to deal with some water leakage to find that the carpets and rugs have been largely disintegrated, apparently by mice.
The books Lewis was concerned about, however, seemed intact. Swain & Company were surprised he should have displayed such disquiet at this time because, for the previous year or two, his possessions had been of apparently little interest to him. Once again they returned to the issue of what was owed them:
We think we should have some definite understanding that the arrears of rent will be paid.
During a brief period of respite from teaching and lecture preparation, Lewis rented ‘an excellent small studio’ at 938 Ouellette Avenue and resumed work on his painting. Mr Vanderploeg, from the Anaconda Foundry, was planning to visit Windsor and Lewis had to make excuses for not allowing him a sight of it. ‘Alas . . . the picture must remain incognito for at least two weeks’, he told him:
There are times when the outside world must not see a picture, just as there are stages of a woman’s toilet when it is fatal for her to be seen. But . . . in September, I shall be going with it to Ottawa, and my promise stands that yours shall be the first eye to see it.
In fact the picture was giving him trouble and instead of comparing it to a delicate stage in a woman’s toilet, the analogy of wholesale cosmetic surgery would have been closer to the truth.
Meanwhile, nearly five hundred miles southwest, preparations were under way to bring him to St Louis, Missouri. McLuhan and Giovanelli visited Charles Nagel, acting director of the City Art Museum at Forest Park, with the suggestion that Lewis be invited to lecture there in February of the following year. The engagement would coincide with an exhibition of contemporary American painting and carry with it a fee of $150. McLuhan was confident that another lecture could be lined up, ‘probably a big affair sponsored by the Junior League which should bring . . . at least $500.’ He and Giovanelli were also planning to line up portrait commissions. St Louis, it seemed, was a town of bargain hunters, ‘but if one person with a reputation for shrewdness can be persuaded to sit, then the rest will flock along.’ Vladimir Golschmann, conductor of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra, was a possibility. Also, Mayor Becker had recently been killed in a plane crash and McLuhan and Giovanelli had begun negotiations with the dead man’s friend, ‘a hard-headed, ignorant Irish lawyer’ by the name of Leaky, for Lewis to paint a portrait from photographs for the City Hall. The press had been alerted and were lined up ready to give Lewis’s visit ‘real attention’.
*
In mid-September, during a lull between the end of Summer School and the 12 Heywood Broun Memorial lectures that would occupy him from early November until the week before Christmas, Lewis managed to do more work in his studio. ‘I have turned to my Anaconda painting again’, he told MacDonald, ‘and I think greatly improved it. I have wanted it to be one of the best of my things, and that it has become, if I am not mistaken.’
When the Department of Information’s Finance Division authorised payment of the balance of Lewis’s money in July, before the War Artists Advisory Committee had seen the Anaconda picture, they did so against their customary procedures. This ‘departure from regularity’ would be a weight upon the mind of one particular member of the Finance Division for the next year and a half.
Mr Trenaman wrote to Mr Gregory, the secretary of the Committee, on 22 September: ‘Has Mr Wyndham Lewis’s picture been received yet please?’ The following day Mr Gregory replied:
I have got into touch with Mr Pugh of the Dominions office who is seeing what can be done to expedite the receipt of the picture.
Mr Pugh then wrote to Mr Costley-White at the Office of the High Commissioner in Ottawa asking him to contact Lewis, to take delivery of the painting or drawings, have them safely packed and sent through the diplomatic bag to Mr Gregory at the National Gallery in London:
The War Artists people do not know whether in fact Mr. Lewis has produced one painting or several drawings. In any case, however, his work should not be bulky since even if it is a painting it can be dismantled and rolled into a metal tube.
*
In October, their lease on Mrs Sills’ basement having expired, Lewis and Gladys moved into a first-floor apartment. Sandwich Street West runs along the Windsor waterfront and the apartment at 1805 had a large window opening on the west, offering a view of the skyscrapers of Detroit and of the Ambassador Bridge connecting the two cities. The move, however, ‘was accompanied by difficulties with the other tenants, wasting a great deal of time.’
In the close-knit apartment block community they did not like strangers, and there was gossip about Lewis being a Nazi spy. The local butcher was once heard to mutter: ‘Father Murphy has brought some pretty suspicious persons to Assumption College.’
The real or imagined slanderous campaign originated with insinuations made by Mr Kibble, the janitor of 1805 Sandwich Street West, Mr Kibble’s wife and a family called McCarthy. It is not clear what was said but it may have been to the effect that the thick-set Englishman and the wife he sometimes called ‘Frau Anna’ had sympathies for a country with whom Great Britain and its Dominions were at war. Certainly Father Murphy suggested a degree of ‘war psychosis’. Whatever was said, Lewis took the matter seriously enough to pay a visit to the local Police Chief and was told his best course would be to engage a lawyer. A King’s Council by the name of Kenning was engaged and he immediately set down a barrage of letters to the other tenants warning them against making further slanderous allegations.
The janitor’s son, Sidney Kibble, leapt to his parents’ defence and instructed his own lawyer to write to Lewis’s:
I am instructed by Mr Kibble that he has no knowledge whatsoever of any slanderous statements made about Mr Lewis or Mrs Lewis and would appreciate very much your clients giving him the source of their information.
The second part of the letter hinted at other intriguing background details to the dispute:
[Mr Kibble] states further that the conduct of Mrs Lewis on at least one occasion in the past has been very objectionable. In fact, I am instructed that Mrs Lewis assaulted Mr Kibble’s mother without any provocation whatsoever.
The English intruders were warned against making further trouble and put firmly in their place:
This letter is to state that if there is any recurrence of this conduct on the part of Mr Lewis or his wife and unless Mr and Mrs Lewis in future keep to such part of the building in which they reside as is necessary for the proper enjoyment by them of such rights as they may have in the building, or if there is any recurrence of objectionable conduct, appropriate action will be taken.
A copy was sent, at Mr Kibble’s instruction, to the Lewises. The lawyer’s covering note contained the sentence, made more peremptory by its lack of a concluding question mark: ‘Would you kindly be governed accordingly.’
They retreated with as much dignity as they could muster. ‘I have followed the advice you gave me,’ Lewis told Mr Kenning:
to ‘drop’ the matter, at least temporarily. If I decide to take it up and bring it home to these people (and ordinary human justice seems to demand that such persons should not be suffered to gang up in this way with impunity against a stranger simply because he is a stranger and pays more rent than they do) I should go about the matter quite differently.
The injunction to keep to their own part of the building was easily complied with:
The topography of the house is such . . . that we luckily do not in the ordinary way see the Kibble and McCarthy faction at all. We have our private door. The slum is upstairs, where all the housewives gossip at their doors.
*
At the end of November he gave a lecture at the Detroit Institute of Arts: ‘The Cultural Melting Pot’. He expressed the belief that:
the day of closed systems, of watertight group-consciousness, are at an end. With television tomorrow causing us to be physically present (in our living room, with one of its walls a screen for long distance projections) at contemporaneous happenings all over the earth: with the vast development in the immediate future of airtravel, which will abolish distance, and strangeness: with the cultural standardisation which has already resulted, and must in the future increasingly result, from this – with all these and many other technological devices expanding our horizons and making a nonsense of the old-fashioned partitions and locked doors of our earthly habitat . . . national or nationalist . . . cultures must disappear.
Lewis told McLuhan that he got tight in the restaurant before the lecture and ‘it really was delivered.’
The big $500 lecture in St Louis, on the other hand, had not materialised and nothing more was to be heard of it. Instead, Lewis was invited to speak at the Wednesday Club – ‘a snooty affair’ – for $100. It was reasoned that his interests would be well served, and the chances of portrait commissions increased, by his appearance at this affluent women’s club. McLuhan had done such a good promotional job that Mrs Knight, the club’s President, had taken the time and trouble to look Lewis up in the Public Library and decided he was ‘really stuff’ and ‘undiscovered’ as well. ‘Personalities in the world of modern art and letters’ was the title provisionally agreed upon for the lecture. McLuhan told him:
frankly they want anecdotes about ‘Long-haired people I have known.’ You can please them completely, simply by making it a chat about familiar names – Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Augustus John, T. E. Lawrence etc. Let it embrace more than one field. A musician wouldn’t be amiss. The more your own life is seen to be merged in all theirs the more thrilled they will be.
At one point Mrs Knight asked about the speaker: ‘What sort of personal appearance does he make?’ ‘Oh, a duke at least’, McLuhan replied. ‘That really settled it’, he reported to Lewis. ‘You can’t be too Bond Streetish for these people.’ The speaker accordingly went out and got himself fitted for a new suit. The material was dark blue with a submerged stripe. ‘I think it will be a lulu’, he told McLuhan, using his currently favoured Americanism.
*
In mid-November the War Artists Advisory Committee had heard nothing of Lewis’s picture for nearly two months and, at Mr Gregory’s prompting, Mr Pugh sent a reminder to Mr Costley-White in Ottawa:
The . . . Committee is growing a little troubled at not having received Lewis’s work, for which they have now paid. Could you do anything to persuade him to deliver the goods or failing that let us know what has happened to him?
The reply, in Costley-White’s absence, came from O. L. Williams, who informed Pugh that the artist had at last contacted the High Commissioner’s Office. He had been seeking expert advice, but thought it unwise to roll a thickly painted canvas for transportation in a metal tube as Mr Pugh had suggested. Lewis had assumed that delivery of the picture could wait:
What I was hoping was that since the end of the war cannot be so very far distant, the delivery of my picture in London would not be expected until then. Indeed I took this for granted.
Mr Gregory consulted Sir Kenneth Clark and the chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee told him delivery could not wait until hostilities had ceased. Mr Gregory then wrote to Mr Pugh, who wrote to Mr Williams with the following suggestion regarding the picture: ‘If it can’t be rolled then it had better be sent in a crate.’
Meanwhile, Lewis had again written to Williams, who reported to Pugh:
He maintains his objection in principle to shipping the picture to the United Kingdom before the end of the war. On the one hand he states that all expert advice points to the impossibility of rolling up the painting into a small space for transmission by air and, on the other hand, he takes the view that the risk of loss by enemy action ought to preclude its being sent by sea.
On the last day of 1943, Mr Trenaman expressed his disquiet in a memorandum to Mr Gregory: ‘Finance Division is not a little concerned at the non-delivery of the picture.’ He pointed out that full payment had been made six months before. As for Lewis’s expressed concern about the threat to his work posed by the U-boat fleet, ‘consideration of any risks in connection with its transport is a matter for the Ministry and not for Mr Wyndham Lewis.’
At Trenaman’s urging, Mr Gregory again wrote to Mr Pugh at the Dominions Office, calling for renewed rigour:
I do think that we ought to take a really firm attitude . . . My Committee feel that as the picture has been paid for the picture is now our property and it is for us to decide whether it ought to be sent over during the war or not.
And Mr Gregory, secretary of the War Artists Advisory Committee, added the following:
For your private information I may say, and this is confidential, we consider the artist not a very responsible person in his negotiations . . . and I feel there is grave risk if we do not get the picture sent over now the future would be too uncertain.