Some Sort of Genius

‘I fear that we have simply been swindled’

The temptation to accept your incredibly generous offer . . . is very great . . . I don’t know what to say about it. I feel we shouldn’t, or rather I know we shouldn’t.

The Giovanellis had offered to vacate their apartment, leaving Lewis and his wife the run of it for the duration of their stay in St Louis. And now Lewis expressed a hitherto unacknowledged, if only half serious, tendency towards vegetarianism as he playfully wrestled with his conscience:

I know I shouldn’t eat a mutton chop, since it involves the murder of a helpless and rather charming, if foolish, animal, and as to pheasants and partridges! I do all these things, never making up my mind to take the great step, and confine my depredations to the vegetable kingdom. So now I cannot make up my mind. My wife who is far more brutal than I am (though sharing my compunctions regarding ‘livestock’ and game) is delighted at the idea of turning you out. – I don’t know what to do.

Such tender feeling towards dumb creatures and their suffering must have been sharpened over the Christmas holiday with the invasion of Mrs Lewis’s beloved dog by a malign abdominal growth. In another letter to Giovanelli, a fortnight later, Lewis paid Jo-Jo a moving tribute. And he could not resist coupling this miniature domestic tragedy with the last four wretched years he felt he had suffered at the hands of faceless enemies:

We are on the grim side just now. The death of our hirsute gremlin has left an ugly gap. You will understand that people never forgive you for possessing more of anything than themselves – more reputation is a sore offence: and if you put yourself in their power they can make you tolerably uncomfortable. By coming to Canada – in the middle of a worldwar – I did that. And my wife has had to pay as well as myself. So this small creature, which stood for all that was benevolent in the universe, sweetened the bitter medicine for her. Like the spirit of a simpler and saner time, this fragment of primitive life confided his destiny to her, and went through all the black days beside us. She feels she has been wanting in some care – for why should this growth in his side, almost as big as his head, have gone undetected? – Such are the reflections that beset her. Whereas I am just another human being – by no means a well of primitive joie-de-vivre: so not much comfort!

With the New Year, McLuhan recruited a powerful ally to his campaign promoting Lewis’s visit. Edna Gellhorn was not a wealthy woman, but her influence was formidable. She was ‘the public lady number one of St Louis’. She was also Ernest Hemingway’s current mother-in-law. Lewis was to produce a chalk drawing of her for the risibly token fee of $40, on the understanding that word would spread that she had commissioned it for a larger but undisclosed sum. This was expected to result in a flood of wealthy friends prepared to pay $200–500 for something similar. McLuhan reasoned that, because Mrs Gellhorn knew she was getting a bargain, she would be all the more eager to enhance it by ensuring others paid the full price.

Almost as influential, and another prime target for this unashamedly cynical publicity machine, was the conductor of the St Louis Symphony Orchestra, Vladimir Golschmann, ‘recognised connoisseur and picture bargain-hunter’. McLuhan suggested he be charged a knockdown $150 for a drawing in order that photographs of him sitting for it might appear in the press.

And there were still hopes of securing a commission to paint the late Mayor Becker. If Lewis were to produce a study of the deceased from photographs before leaving Windsor, it would benefit the cause immensely. McLuhan’s breathless enthusiasm then spun off into hyperbole:

to have your Becker sketch with you when you arrive would be like riding into St. Louis on a charger . . . It would become a case of the Emperor’s new clothes among the public here. Nobody would dare to expose himself by raising a sceptical note when such a signal compliment had been paid their king by a world-famous painter . . . It would become a matter of local pride to boost the drawing. It would be talked of as much here as the Eliot was in London, and would probably be reproduced in many other cities.

Meanwhile, in Windsor, Lewis was writing Malcolm MacDonald a three-page progress report on the Ministry of Information commission and endeavouring to explain why it was still unfinished. From the beginning, he had been aware that there were two ways of approaching so complicated a scene as the Anaconda casting shop:

One could be described as the ‘impressionistic’ approach. That would entail no great accuracy of detail. Even the purposes of the various objects need not be studied . . . I started with the ‘impressionistic’ approach in mind . . . and . . . my aim was to paint an impression rather than what Cézanne called ‘quelque chose de solide et durable comme l’art des musées.’

It was this ‘impression’ that Lewis had almost completed after three months of work around the middle of June 1943, just before he left Toronto for Windsor.

At that time there did not seem to be a great deal of pressure on him. So far as he knew, the Ministry of Information were in no particular hurry for their picture, so he decided to keep it by him in case ‘some supplementary work on it might suggest itself after a lapse of a few weeks’.

When, in mid-September, he had an opportunity to work on the picture again, he began to make use of the sketches he had produced in the casting shop. The technique thereby shifted from an ‘impressionistic’ approach to a ‘more solid and detailed one . . . more in harmony with [his] own tastes and manner of work’. What followed inevitably pulled the painting back from a state in which it could be delivered to his employers. As one detail of the composition was picked out from smoke-blurred impressionism, another needed to be brought out to match it: ‘one part after another took body and bristled with factual stuff. So that at last it all [had] to be brought in to a far more solid pattern.’

The result of this tinkering was that, by January 1944, the picture was further from completion than it had been the previous June. He now promised MacDonald that the picture would be finished in six months’ time. ‘All this additional work’, he pointed out, ‘is a gift I make, in time and labour, to the august purchaser; and it is time I am obliged to steal from other things.’

He did not tell the High Commissioner that he was shortly to leave Windsor to pursue portrait commissions in the United States.

A letter had just arrived from McLuhan concerning preparations for his lecture to the ladies of the Wednesday Club. ‘Personalities in the World of Modern Art and Letters’ had been the original title, but now the President, concerned that her members might think the subject matter a little too highbrow, wanted to make it clear that the talk would be as gossipy as possible. She stopped short of ‘Long-haired people I have known’, but McLuhan’s irony had not been entirely wide of the mark. ‘Latest title suggested by Mrs Knight’, he told Lewis, ‘ “Famous people I have put in my books and on canvas”, God help us!’

In February the implacable Trenaman wrote to Gregory enquiring what was the current position with regard to the picture and asking him to make another approach to the Dominions Office. Mr Gregory wearily renewed his correspondence with Mr Pugh:

My Finance Division is worrying me about the Wyndham Lewis painting again . . . Perhaps you would be good enough to make another effort to obtain the picture.

And Pugh wrote to Williams, his style rendered terse by repetition: ‘My letter of 20th January about Wyndham Lewis’ painting. Is there any more news?’

Excitement mounted in St Louis. According to Giovanelli, Mrs Gellhorn had browbeaten three of her smart friends into commissioning drawings:

everything is snowballing, the machine is in motion, the ‘right’ people are talking and thinking about you, the publicity set up is all mounted and Mac’s seeming Quixotic optimism is justified, my pessimism discredited.

But on 1 February, even the irrepressible McLuhan felt nervous:

Will this Bergsonian flux gell when you arrive? Will all these eggs I’ve been sitting on these past weeks hatch the moment you appear in the papers?

That morning he had had an irritating telephone conversation with a Mrs Sayman, who told him she had deferred making a decision about commissioning a portrait until she had consulted her English son-in-law, an assistant naval attaché in Washington DC, Lieutenant P. Otway-Smithers RNVR. What Otway-Smithers had to say about the painter was to have decided the matter. But since Otway-Smithers had never heard of Wyndham Lewis, Mrs Sayman concluded he must be a nobody. McLuhan was annoyed that ‘a little snot of that type should travel so far to spoil good work here’.

But if Mrs Sayman’s son-in-law had damaged Lewis’s prospects, the views of Edna Gellhorn’s son-in-law did him nothing but good.

Mrs Gellhorn carried weight on a committee which was planning to commission a portrait of the Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the Washington University Medical School, Dr Joseph Erlanger. His work on the differentiated functions and electrical potential of single nerve fibres would win him a share of the Nobel Prize for Medicine later in the year. If Mrs Gellhorn had any doubts about putting Lewis’s name forward for the job, they were dispelled when she sought the advice of her daughter’s husband. Ernest Hemingway gave Lewis a glowing endorsement and urged her to do everything she could for him. The Life and Letters article, ‘The Dumb Ox’, which provoked Hemingway’s tulip-thrashing tantrum in Sylvia Beach’s Paris book store a decade earlier, had apparently left no hard feelings.

As the time of the Lewises’ arrival got closer, Giovanelli was having doubts about the suitability of his apartment. He and McLuhan were now convinced that if Lewis was to get portrait commissions from the ‘right’ people, then nothing less than a suite at the Park Plaza Hotel would do. Everyone they spoke to agreed – ‘If he wants to make any impression here he must put on a front.’ A deal had been struck with Mr Jones, the assistant manager of the Park Plaza, that Lewis be given $10 a night accommodation for $5. And in terms more appropriate to the hiring of an exclusive call-girl’s services than a portrait painter’s, McLuhan suggested that the assistant manager ‘might discreetly inform his millionaire clients that he had an “in” with Mr W. Lewis and might be able to get a job done for them. Not much hope of course. But just a chance that Lewis might relent for $5000.’ Mr Jones, needless to say, was promised 10 per cent of whatever his discreet solicitations netted.

With all of McLuhan’s and Giovanelli’s meticulous arrangements in place, deals made and Mrs Gellhorn’s handling of the people prepared to put out big money for paintings, Lewis and his wife arrived in St Louis on 15 February.

Greatly against his will, Lewis claimed later, they stayed for the first week at ‘that palatial and fantastically expensive home of the local plutocracy’, the Park Plaza Hotel.

Mrs Gellhorn’s reception on the early evening of 16 February was necessarily exclusive, her house being of modest scale. But it was a lavish affair. She spent $100 entertaining about 15 guests who could ‘well afford to be painted’. In St Louis it was understood that anyone attending such a party was a prospective client. ‘There is no hypocrisy in the air at all’, Lewis was assured.

Vladimir Golschmann was there, and Lewis spoke to him in French, haltingly at first, Margaret Giovanelli remembered, but then fluently. It was as if, in conversation with the conductor, he became a European once more. But in spite of this cosmopolitan exchange of pleasantries, Golschmann declined to commission a portrait.

However, John Brett Robey, British Vice-Consul of St Louis, commissioned a portrait of his wife, Betty. When Mrs Gellhorn introduced him to her guest of honour, Robey said he was aware that there were two Wyndham Lewises, made it clear he realised which one he was speaking to and, in passing, made a slanderous comment about the painter’s namesake D. B. Wyndham Lewis. John Brett Robey’s inconsequential remarks on this occasion would be recalled seven months later when Lewis’s dignity was nettled by a carelessly addressed envelope.

If there was a correlation between attendance at Mrs Gellhorn’s reception and subsequent commissions, then other guests that evening would have included: Erma Stix, wife of the President of Rice-Stix Dry Goods Company, Importers, Manufacturers and Wholesale Distributors; Isidor Loeb, Emeritus Dean of the School of Business and Public Administration, Washington University; Mrs Evarets Graham with her son and daughter-in-law, the psychologist Frances Graham; Edgar Curtis Taylor, headmaster of the Taylor School on North Central Avenue; and Carl and Gerty Cori, distinguished biochemists and future Nobel Prize winners.

Dr Carl F. Cori was chairman of the committee at Washington University School of Medicine charged with commissioning the portrait of Joseph Erlanger.

The day after the reception, McLuhan told his mother that everybody of note had been there. ‘There is nothing that can be done for Lewis that hasn’t been done. Something is going to click soon. Something big for him. A little time is needed.’

On Friday 18 February at 8.15 he addressed The Wednesday Club of St Louis on the subject ‘Famous People I have put on Canvas and in Books’.

McLuhan gave him an introduction and then Lewis rose to speak. Beginning with a short digression about his accent, he told the audience that he had also been invited to speak at a local school. A production of a George Bernard Shaw play was in rehearsal and those taking part were anxious to hear a genuine English accent. Owing to the briefness of his stay a visit to the school could not be scheduled, but he understood that a number of the young performers had been encouraged to come and listen to his lectures:

Under these circumstances I must be careful to stick to purely English locutions. The American idiom is catching. The other day I caught myself saying golly, for instance. I must be careful not to talk like that!

He paused for laughter.

Enlarging on his theme, he recounted the experience of recording excerpts from One Way Song at Harvard in 1940. ‘When they played it back to me’, he declared, ‘I was astonished to find how English it sounded.’ He had also listened to recordings of Auden and MacNeice and they sounded the same. E.E. Cummings, on the other hand, sounded much better. ‘He sang more.’ From this he concluded that the staccato English accent was entirely suitable for everyday usage – asking somebody to ‘pass the salt’, for instance, or for ordering mashed potato and spinach. But for literature ‘the singing accents are the best.’ And he suggested that the students might be better advised to perform their Shaw play with an Irish accent.

This led him smoothly to the first ‘famous’ name to be dropped in front of the Wednesday Club ladies and their guests: William Butler Yeats. And he gave a spirited impression of the legendary poet reciting ‘The Wanderings of Usheen’:

Arl the words that I utter

And arl the songs that I wroite,

Must spread out their wings untoiring

And never rest in their floight.

Here he paused again, perhaps for applause, before turning to his present assignment:

What my young friend Marshall McLuhan (not to be confused with Marshal STALIN) meant by the words ‘people that Mr Lewis has put into his books’ I do not know.

He had indeed, he said, ‘written about certain people’. He dropped a hail of names for his audience to be going on with: Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, the Sitwells, Gertrude Stein, and so on. And he whetted the Wednesday Club ladies’ appetites for the gossipy morsels to come:

Now most of the amusing things I could tell you about these famous people are of course UNPRINTABLE – UNMENTIONABLE . . . If here and there – ever so cautiously – I say too much, it is in the interests of my very human audience.

How many ‘unprintable’ or ‘unmentionable’ things he imparted is not known. According to his surviving notes the lecture drew heavily upon anecdotal material already published in Blasting and Bombardiering.

Three days later, Monday 21 February, he fulfilled his only other speaking engagement in St Louis, at the City Art Museum. It was ostensibly the same lecture he had given at the Detroit Institute of Arts in November, ‘The Cultural Melting Pot’. And it is possible that the state of alcoholic intoxication that he claimed had enhanced his delivery on that occasion was even more pronounced the second time. Charles Nagel remembered the performance as a clumsy shambles:

the lecture was held in one of the largest galleries. It was . . . hot and the acoustics far from ideal. Nevertheless, and giving Mr Lewis every allowance, my recollection is, I’m sorry to say, of nothing he said but of the nightmare way he said it: starting, interrupting himself, reading parts of his typed talk to himself, then balling them up and throwing them aside – it was just something to be endured until it ground to a halt finally!

Nagel concealed his disappointment with a single sentence of faint praise when he sent Lewis the Museum’s cheque for $150 a few days later: ‘I enjoyed particularly your analysis of the relation of nature to art and your remarks on the inevitable limitations of abstract painting.’ Nagel’s comment suggests that gin might not have been the only factor responsible for the mumbled incoherence of Lewis’s discourse. He seems to have attempted, unsuccessfully, to combine two lectures: ‘The Cultural Melting Pot’ and ‘Nature and the Abstract: a discussion of abstract art and the superior potency of Nature’.

But if his performance on the lecture platform had been less than inspirational, he had evidently succeeded in making a good impression on Carl F. Cori at Edna Gellhorn’s reception, because by the end of February the chairman of the Medical School portrait committee had offered him $1,000 to paint Dr Joseph Erlanger.

‘I was lured down here by the promise of big money’, he told Malcolm MacDonald some months later. ‘The latter has not been forthcoming.’ While he admitted that enough portrait work had come his way to keep him going, it is true that the fees he commanded in St Louis fell far short of the figures of $200–500 for a drawing and $5,000 for an oil that McLuhan had mentioned during the previous months.

Lewis and his wife maintained the expensive front of the Park Plaza only long enough to impress prospective patrons. After a week they moved to less luxurious, and at $25 a week, less expensive quarters at the Park View Hotel.

Declaring himself to be the ‘banker’ of Lewis’s ‘camp’, Felix Giovanelli supplied him with $100 to settle the Park Plaza bill. Three months later Lewis claimed to have had no idea whence ‘these “fighting funds” and necessary expenses came.’ The discovery that he was expected to pay the money back and was personally liable to Giovanelli for the debt soured their relationship for a time.

In March they moved from the Park View to The Coronado, where they stayed for three weeks.

The Lewises’ continued residence in the United States necessitated a monthly return to Canadian soil and renewal of their visitors’ visas. On the first of these round-trips to Windsor Lewis took with him a letter of application from Marshall McLuhan to Father Murphy.

Although a Canadian citizen, McLuhan was subject to the American draft and could be called up to serve his adopted country at any time. If he waited to be drafted in the United States, he could only return to Canada on condition he join the Canadian Forces. If, on the other hand, he took a job in Canada before the US Draft Board turned its attentions to him, he hoped to avoid serving in either army.

Lewis was delighted to endorse his application to teach at Assumption College. However, some time after the post was secured and the McLuhan family settled in Windsor later in the year, relations changed. ‘He accused me of vile intrigues against him in Windsor’, McLuhan recalled. ‘I had inveigled him down to St Louis and then shot up here to steal his job.’

Back in St Louis by mid-March, Lewis rented a second floor, northwest-facing studio above Hildebrand’s Artistic Framing at 4967 Maryland Avenue. Here he began his portrait work.

The recently married Frances Graham sat for a $100 chalk drawing. The large room was freezing cold, so she lent Lewis an electric fire for the duration of the sittings. The fact that Mrs Graham was a psychologist impressed him and he plied her with questions, trying to get her talking about case histories. She believed he intentionally prolonged the sittings, sometimes laying down his chalks and talking for three-quarters of an hour at a stretch. Another chalk drawing, of Dean Isidor Loeb, brought him $150.

Towards the end of March Lewis accepted the Giovanellis’ offer to give up their home. He and Gladys moved out of the Coronado Hotel and into 312 Convent Garden Apartments on Taylor Street, while Giovanelli and his wife ‘took a room and began eating out’. McLuhan was present when the handover was effected:

How well I remember Lewis seated in that apartment the first day, dramatically announcing to Gio and myself that wherever he went he split up old friendships.

That same day Lewis noticed Hitler on the bookshelf. It was McLuhan’s copy, recently lent to Giovanelli. He became agitated about possible misinterpretation, anxiously asking whether Giovanelli’s wife Margaret had read it and what she had thought of it. ‘There is a passage or two which has rather upset her, because read out of context,’ Giovanelli told him, ‘but I assure you that she is over that, and finds what she has read of it of great interest and as prophetic as I have found it.’ Lewis was not comforted by this. ‘I must explain the whole matter to her’, he replied. To spare him further anxiety, Giovanelli hid the 15-year-old embarrassment behind a row of books on the top shelf. Some time later, when Giovanelli moved back into the apartment, he looked for the volume and found that Lewis had taken it away with him.

Through April and May 1944 Lewis worked on two oil portraits concurrently: one a 70-year-old Professor of Physiology, the other a teenage chorister.

Joseph Erlanger sits to one side of a cathode-ray oscillograph and the tangled workings of apparatus designed to analyse the twitching of a bullfrog’s sciatic nerve. A number of laboratory visits were scheduled so that Lewis could sketch the equipment so closely associated with the work for which the Nobel Prize was to be awarded in December. Erlanger holds in his hands a sequence of five photographs showing the spiky configurations recorded by the amplified action of electrically stimulated nerve fibres upon a horizontal electron beam across the oscillograph’s fluorescent screen.

Young Jimmie Taylor, the headmaster’s son, stands three-quarters on in a short white surplice, apparently singing from a bound anthem. In the background are the altar rail and Caen stone reredos of Christ Church Cathedral, St Louis. A ‘choir boy with the whole of Winchester Cathedral behind him’ was how Lewis described the portrait, and this was close to being true: the Christ Church reredos was a copy of the altar screen at Winchester with the slight variation of a carving of the Nativity substituted for the row of saints immediately above the altar. Lewis went by taxi to sketch in the Cathedral during the last week of April and the first week of May, and the carved stone thatch of the Nativity stable, proof of this diligent pursuit of accuracy, is visible just above the top edge of the anthem cover that Jimmie Taylor is holding.

The Lewises stayed in the Giovanelli apartment for only a fortnight. Their departure was acrimonious, the reasons unclear. McLuhan was reminded of Lewis’s remark about splitting up old friendships when he became the confidant of whispered complaints – ‘Gio had begun making nasty remarks about wanting back his apartment. Gio had insulted Mrs Lewis’s cooking and ridiculed Lewis’s toothless or worse than toothless condition.’ When McLuhan tried to reassure him as to Giovanelli’s continued good will, Lewis snapped back: ‘So, you like him more than you like me?’

Lewis and his wife lived temporarily at his studio above Hildebrand’s Artistic Framing, before moving into the $20-a-week Fairmount Hotel, further down Maryland Avenue at number 4907.

Spring had arrived and they might have been seen at the St Louis Zoo. Lewis described to Pauline Bondy, a friend in Windsor, the ‘scratching, bellowing, growling and whistling to mark the advent of the exciting season’. They still felt the cold, however. ‘We prowl about in our thick Canadian overcoats like a pair of exotics’, he said. ‘Only the bears understand us!’ And he wrote to Mrs Graham asking if he might keep her electric fire in his studio for a week or two longer.

Two months had passed since Mr Trenaman’s last memorandum to Mr Gregory, but on 12 April he returned to the worrisome bone of contention:

we do not appear to be any nearer to obtaining possession of the picture . . . than when we first started on this quest.

Clark seemed an unwilling participant in this extended wrangle, and when Gregory prodded him with a reminder of his promise to contact Vincent Massey there was an exasperated reply: ‘Yes, but what am I to say?’ And in view of the fact that the war was expected to be over before long, he questioned the worth of ‘taking a great deal of trouble to get the picture a few months sooner’.

Meanwhile, from Ottawa, Malcolm MacDonald was gently attempting to gauge from Lewis the rate of progress. ‘As the War Artists Advisory Committee . . . have been asking about your picture, I am wondering whether there is anything further which you could tell me?’

Lewis explained that the ‘big money’ he had been lured to the United States for had not materialised. There was a possibility, how good he could not say, that more portrait commissions might be offered him in St Louis. In that case he could devote the two hot months of summer to his own work and complete the picture. If the commissions were not forthcoming he would teach another Summer School course at Assumption College. This work, although poorly paid, would allow him the spare time to finish the painting.

In either eventuality the picture would not be ready before the end of August. He was ‘extremely distressed at not being able to send . . . a more satisfactory reply’. It was ‘a case of force majeure’.

MacDonald dictated a reply on 20 April. Having to respond to repeated enquiries from the War Artists Advisory Committee, he explained that he was sending it copies of their recent correspondence. He concluded in genial fashion that he was sorry Lewis had been having a difficult time and hoped circumstances would improve. He was soon to realise what a diplomatic minefield corresponding with Lewis could be. When his secretary typed the letter she began with the salutation ‘Dear Mr Wyndham Lewis’. MacDonald signed it and either failed to notice, or failed to appreciate, the offence that the prefix ‘Mr’ might cause. Back came the reply:

Dear Mr MacDonald. Your letter informing me of the despatch of correspondence to London duly reached me. The formal mode of address and forbidding tone is of course a reproof. I am sorry you adopted it for I have done nothing to deserve it.

And his self-righteous offence extended further, to the Chairman of the War Artists Advisory Committee himself:

I have perhaps the right to demand a modicum of understanding, or at least not to be additionally harassed on account of what I have done to further the arts in England. To badger and attack me through the Dominions Office, as Clark is doing, will not I believe in retrospect look attractive.

At the end of May the Lewises moved from the Fairmount Hotel into a rooming house on Washington Boulevard. At $13 a week it was the cheapest rented accommodation they had occupied in St Louis so far. ‘The . . . place is averse to visitors,’ Giovanelli was told, ‘and not suitable for same anyway.’

Two months after moving out of the Convent Garden apartment, Lewis’s relations with Giovanelli were still frosty. Realisation that the $100 used to settle the Park Plaza bill in February was not a gift but a loan, and that he was personally in Giovanelli’s debt, did not improve matters. With McLuhan about to take up his new teaching post in Windsor, Lewis felt he was being abandoned to confront alone that fearsome creature, the importunate creditor.

For his part Giovanelli was willing to cancel the debt, and succeeded in allaying Lewis’s mistrust by disarming and continued generosity:

Feel free to make such modest calls on my financial help as may be necessary. I get no particular satisfaction out of yielding up money, even to you, but there is something in me – I suppose it to be an amalgam of ineradicable affection, high respect for your achievements, and, of all things, a feeling of responsibility for your physical welfare – which impels me to want to be a source of financial availability to you. I can never help you in any big undertakings, but, unless you are foolishly suspicious of my motives, I can help you against economic pin-pricks. You can make what you want of this letter. Permit me to advise you, however, to take it as literally as possible; there are no catches, no booby traps, no hidden meanings.

Pressed once more by Finance Division for a resolution to the deadlock of Wyndham Lewis and his painting, Mr Gregory sent a memorandum to Mr Trenaman:

In view of . . . the signs of the war soon terminating, had not this matter better be left till after the war?

But Mr Trenaman proved, as ever, dogged in his pursuit of what had been paid for:

I fear that it is not within the competence of Finance Division to agree to waive delivery of the picture until after the war as you propose, and unless the Advisory Committee wish to take any further action in order to induce Mr Wyndham Lewis to hand it over I shall be obliged to refer the matter to higher authority in the Ministry.

Lewis had been warned that the summer heat in St Louis would be ferocious. There was no need for Mrs Graham’s electric fire now, as his studio was immediately under the baking roof and there were ‘two large sun-smitten windows’ making the atmosphere inside almost intolerable. In addition, by the middle of June he was having difficulty with Jimmie Taylor. ‘One hour’s sitting’, he told the chorister’s father:

or even a half hour during which my sitter is relatively still would be more valuable than three hours spent with a sitter constantly in motion – and you know enough about boys of thirteen to realise that they cannot be relied on . . . to accommodate themselves to the task of sitting still on a summers day.

He wondered if the boy might be accompanied, for two one-hour sittings, by someone who could ensure complete immobility.

There was also a financial consideration. The Taylor family was shortly to leave for their summer holiday. ‘I do not relish being obliged to stress this’, he told Jimmy’s father, ‘but the war conditions make it imperative for me to receive the final payment of three hundred dollars before you go.’

Lewis and his wife were also preparing to leave for Windsor. But before their departure, Lewis secured another portrait commission that would ensure his return in the fall. Mrs Stix wanted a portrait of herself for which she was prepared to pay $500 in advance and a further $500 on completion.

Also awaiting his attention in September was an unfinished portrait of the British Vice Consul’s wife, Mrs Robey, and the portrait of Jimmie Taylor, for which the balance, despite Lewis’s urgent request, was still to be paid.

Lewis drew up his accounts. During the five months in St Louis, he had made $250 from lectures and $2,750 from portrait commissions, a round total of $3,000. But with money still to be paid him by Mrs Stix and the Taylor family, the total he had actually received amounted to $2,100. He had spent $696 on accommodation in St Louis, $300 in train fares, $170 on artists’ materials and $100 on incidental expenses. With $200 in rent for the apartment in Windsor, total expenditure came to $1,466.

When expenditure was subtracted from income, Lewis calculated that profits amounted to approximately $30 a week for two people to eat, drink and smoke. ‘So the position is as it has been all along during this ghastly period of my life: no surplus, unremitting anxiety.’

The Lewises caught the train for Detroit on Monday 17 July, arriving at Wabash Station at 10.30 that night. They were met by a car from Assumption College and driven to the Sandwich Street West apartment, which their friend Pauline Bondy had looked after in their absence. Despite Miss Bondy’s care, all of their mail, not forwarded to St Louis, had been lost.

At noon, the day after his return, Lewis gave the first in a series of six classes at Assumption College: ‘The A.B.C. of the Visual Arts’. He envisaged a ‘measure of practical demonstration’ and instructed students to provide themselves with ‘an inexpensive drawing-pad and a couple of pencils’. How far practice was balanced or overwhelmed by theory is not known, but Father Murphy, who, with McLuhan, sat in on most of the classes, recalled a heated debate between Lewis and one of the lay professors, which had evidently developed into abstruse realms. McLuhan leaned over to Murphy and whispered: ‘They’re both on the same side.’ And weeks later, the lay professor said to Murphy: ‘I am sorry that I did not understand him at the time; he was perfectly right.’

After three weeks, his teaching commitments over, he painted furiously for a further five. His Anaconda picture, however, remained untouched.

The commission to produce portraits of former Assumption College Presidents had been mooted by Father Murphy in March. At that time the figure of 14 paintings of Basilian Fathers Superior was mentioned, but subsequently a round dozen was agreed upon.* There had been resistance to the project from the current President. Father Guinan, according to Murphy, would have been content to entrust the memorialising of his predecessors to ‘some “ham-and-egger” of an artist in Toronto or Detroit to do such a job for around $400–$500 and make the paintings look like photographs.’ In the face of such ‘ham-and-egg’ competition, Lewis offered Assumption College his rock-bottom rate:

I am prepared to do a painting a week for 45 dollars . . . Therefore if I work for 12 weeks and got 540 dollars for what I did it would be approximately what you would pay the Detroit or Toronto artist.

Although four of his subjects were still alive, he worked from small monochrome photographs, most of them taken from the College’s Diamond Jubilee Yearbook: The Basilides.

His original estimate of being able to execute a picture a week had been made on the understanding that he would have three months to do the job: the whole of May and June; then, following his Summer School course, a further five weeks until the fall. But, having delayed his return to Windsor until the last possible moment before the start of classes, and as he was planning to return to St Louis in September, his work schedule had to be drastically telescoped. He painted in the apartment at the rate of two Basilian Fathers a week. At times the commission must have seemed like a cottage industry, with Mrs Lewis recruited to share the work.

At the end of the third week of August he was ahead of schedule. ‘The little job . . . proceeds apace’, he told A. Swinton Paterson, the British Consul in St Louis. ‘I have 8 out of 10 phizzes on canvas. It is not entirely an unamusing occupation.’

Following Trenaman’s threat to refer the matter of the Anaconda picture to a higher authority in the Ministry, Sir Kenneth Clark wrote to Malcolm MacDonald. The High Commissioner had after all established something of a personal rapport with the man causing such a bureaucratic tangle in the Ministry of Information. MacDonald was asked to bring his influence to bear. Mr Gregory expressed an optimism he probably did not feel: ‘I hope this will fetch the picture’, he told Trenaman.

Towards the end of August Lewis’s attention was distracted briefly from the drudgery of his work on the Basilian Fathers by a dispute with a local laundry. Of a parcel of washing collected three weeks before, only bedclothes, towels, tablecloth and napkins, what was called the ‘flat wash’, had been returned. The Puritan Laundry, ‘name of evil association’, had lost two summer dresses in grey cotton and leaf print, a pair of woman’s pyjamas, two white slips, ten handkerchiefs, two of Lewis’s white shirts and four pairs of his underpants: two in white cotton, one in blue cotton and one ‘aertex’. According to the carefully itemised inventory Lewis left among his papers to be eagerly seized upon by future biographers, the replacement value of the loss amounted to $39.50. He asked advice of Father Murphy, incidentally mentioning a loss of $50:

If you know a lawyer personally who would do something about it, for a modest fee, we might recover something. Otherwise it seems we just have to submit to this thievishness and go about our business. Our pardonable anger is extreme.

They were planning to leave for St Louis on 7 September, but delayed their departure to receive a visitor. The Honourable Paul Martin, Parliamentary Assistant to the Minister of Labour and soon to be Secretary of State for Canada, wished to discuss the possibility of Lewis painting his wife Eleanor. Other painters to whom he had proposed the commission had, he said, demanded nothing less than a thousand dollars. If Lewis was prepared to do the job ‘for some unspecified sum short of one thousand’, Martin promised to line up several people in Windsor who had money and could afford to pay more. Lewis was of course familiar with the economics of such an arrangement. It was not unlike the deal McLuhan had struck with Edna Gellhorn at the beginning of the year: a chalk portrait at a token $40 in exchange for the brow-beating of her wealthy friends in St Louis. And not surprisingly, the same agency was responsible for the Eleanor Martin portrait commission. It was McLuhan who ‘got the job for Lewis’, urging the future Secretary of State to catch the painter before his departure for St Louis and suggesting he might get the portrait at a bargain price if he was prepared to recruit more sitters.

This piece of business concluded, and the promise of work lined up to bring him back to Windsor before the end of the year, Lewis and his wife gave up their apartment.

He was still working on the tenth Basilian ‘phizz’, that of Father William G. Rogers, an hour before the priests arrived in the Assumption College car to drive him and his wife to the station. He scarcely had time to paint in the buttons on Father Rogers’s jacket.

In St Louis they moved back into their less than salubrious $13 a week accommodation on Washington Boulevard. There was no telephone but anyone wishing to make contact could phone Hildebrand’s Artistic Framing on Maryland and leave a message, or Lee Hildebrand would call Lewis down from his studio on the second floor. 4967 Maryland was also used as a tolerably secure postal address, as Lewis was concerned about the safety of his mail at the rooming house.

He had expected to start work immediately on Mrs Stix’s portrait, but she was in Cape Cod. In need of a further advance from her, Lewis had to write instead to McLuhan. ‘A pox on Stix’, came the reply from Windsor, and shortly thereafter the arrangement of a $40 loan.

McLuhan had to get the money from his mother in Battle Creek, and to save time she sent the $40 directly to Lewis with a note presenting it as ‘a loan for two weeks as requested by my son’. Knowing how quick Lewis was to take offence, McLuhan wrote, hastily excusing his mother’s ‘distressing’ way of putting the matter and urging him to overlook ‘the “two week” phrase’ as being ‘quite irrelevant and unfortunate’. Lewis showed himself magnanimous. ‘The phrase you refer to is unobjectionable’, he replied. ‘Please do not chide Battle Creek for that.’

Awaiting Mrs Stix’s return, he busied himself with the portrait of young Jimmie Taylor against the pseudo-Winchester backdrop. He expected to have this finished by 30 September, when the balance of $300 from the boy’s father would be due.

And it was on the last day of September that John Brett Robey, British Vice Consul in St Louis, wrote suggesting Lewis finish the portrait of his wife Betty, begun in the summer. Lewis was furious when he caught sight of the envelope:

Your method of addressing me – namely ‘Mr D. B. Wyndham Lewis’ – I find gratuitously offensive. I might attribute this to ignorance . . . were it not for one thing. I refer to your words of greeting, upon being introduced to Dr McLuhan and myself at Mrs Gellhorn’s reception – the party given to welcome me to St Louis. In announcing on that occasion your consciousness of the existence of two Wyndham Lewises, you indulged in a definition which I think describes my namesake as little as myself. As to the official propriety of that I wish to say nothing at this time. This note concerns merely a small matter of studied discourtesy – though, may I suggest it is not with impunity that you can indulge in the libel to which, in passing, I referred.

This was the letter he drafted to Mr Robey. Then, perhaps because he had not yet been paid for the portrait, he judiciously muted his indignation:

Dear Mr Robey. I am not, as you are aware, Mr Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis; I shall work a little more upon your wife’s portrait as you suggest.

Two months after Sir Kenneth Clark wrote to Malcolm MacDonald enlisting support in the delivery of Lewis’s painting, no reply had been received from the High Commissioner’s office. Trenaman brought this fact to Mr Gregory’s attention on 10 October and told him that the Finance Division would ‘draw the file in another month’s time’.

Following Mrs Stix’s return from Cape Cod, the task of getting her image onto ten square feet of canvas proceeded very slowly. The portrait gave him ‘untold trouble’. The precise nature of the trouble was not specified, but by late October the portrait was far from finished and, to make matters worse, Mrs Stix was bored. The 60-year-old wife of the dry-goods tycoon was finding the process of portraiture tiresome, as sitting succeeded sitting and she was not even allowed to see the work in progress. Lewis was dismayed by this development, clearly envisaging the $500 still due to him being snatched away on the impatient whim of a capricious ‘bored’ woman. ‘If you are “bored” with your portrait, as you express it, I am not’, he told her:

However it is discouraging and even alarming . . . if every time you see your patron she declares she is bored with what she has commissioned you to do . . . Now I want you to tell me with frankness what you want; for were you to inform me that you did not wish me to continue with my work it would be extremely unjust, but if you allowed me to go ahead and complete the picture, and then anything went wrong, it would be for me a catastrophe.

A month later on 22 November he had precisely six dollars and fifty cents in his pocket. The Thanksgiving weekend loomed and he borrowed $35 from Gerty Cori, tiding him over until Mrs Stix’s portrait was handed over on the Monday in exchange for his $500. The portrait was ‘really a good one’, he told Dr Cori:

and I am anxious not to spoil the effect by showing it prematurely . . . Poor woman, she has no idea what kind of an image I am making of her, so it is I suppose natural she should be nervous. She will I believe be pleasantly surprised.

After Mrs Stix’s portrait had been delivered and her curiosity and anxiety allayed, he was to ‘have a breathless week painting against the clock a boy of seven’, in the once again refrigerated conditions of his studio, before he and his wife could leave St Louis for Windsor. The seven-year-old was Carl and Gerty Cori’s son Tom.

When Trenaman drew out the file of correspondence relating to Wyndham Lewis and the War Artists Advisory Committee’s picture on 7 November, he had few hopes of further development. A memorandum was sent to Gregory: ‘I assume that no reply has been received to Sir Kenneth Clark’s letter.’ When this assumption was confirmed by Gregory two days later, Trenaman referred the matter to the ‘higher authority in the Ministry’ he had mentioned four months before. Accompanied by extracts from War Artists Advisory Committee minutes from June 1942 to May 1944 and copies of the related correspondence, Mr Trenaman’s report to Mr W. G. Crossley began: ‘This is an unfortunate case.’ Three paragraphs dealt with the history of the affair: the commissioning of work, the initial payment of £150 in advance, payment of the balance when the picture had allegedly been completed and the subsequent deadlock over delivery. Trenaman was concerned that if the matter was left as it stood there was a ‘risk of the picture being overlooked altogether after the war’. He concluded that there was little hope of resolution to the problem from further application to either the Dominions Office or the High Commissioner:

and if we write to the artist direct . . . he will probably not reply to our letter at all or deliver another lecture on art.

Between Trenaman’s report and Crossley’s response, Mr Gregory received dispiriting but hardly unexpected news from Sir Kenneth Clark. Malcolm MacDonald had written to Lewis about the painting in August but, aware of how ‘very temperamental’ he was, had ‘thought it wise to allow things to ride for a while rather than appear to hustle him.’ He had written again in October, again without response. Now, in late November, MacDonald told Clark:

I am afraid . . . that despite friendly words from my side he now regards me as being in the enemy camp. What a difficult fellow!

Passing this letter on to the Secretary of the War Artists Advisory Committee, Clark wrote at the top of it: ‘Mr Gregory, I fear that we have simply been swindled.’

Four days before he and his wife left St Louis for Windsor, Lewis wrote to Malcolm MacDonald. He was concerned to correct a misapprehension on the part of Sir Kenneth Clark and the rest of the War Artists Advisory Committee. Although he had initially experienced misgivings about his painting of the Anaconda casting shop braving the U-boat-infested waters of the Atlantic, this was not his present reason for withholding the picture:

I literally have not had time to work on it. Certainly moving of large canvases across oceans during a world war is an idea that does not recommend itself to me, but that is not at this moment what we have to talk about.

MacDonald sent Clark a copy of Lewis’s letter and concluded: ‘the War Artists Advisory Committee will have to wait for Wyndham Lewis to send them his picture in his own good time.’

Mr Gregory passed the correspondence to Mr Trenaman on 29 December with the comment: ‘I am afraid it is a sad story’. Mr Trenaman passed it on to Mr Crossley, who was inclined to agree. Crossley noted Clark’s fears that they had been swindled. ‘It certainly is beginning to look like that’, he told Trenaman:

but I do not see that either the War Artists Advisory Committee or the Ministry [of Information] can take any further measures which would be likely to remedy the position, and I should be sorry to waste much more of the time of important people on a matter of this sort.

Mr Trenaman’s superior in the Finance Division then absolved him of bureaucratic responsibility and outlined a procedure that would allow him to wash his hands of the whole sorry business:

I should like you to ask Mr Gregory to arrange, as a matter of record, for the inclusion in the minutes of an early meeting of the Committee of a statement to the effect that the Ministry regards the position with dissatisfaction, which it understands the Committee to share;

Reading through the typed memorandum, prior to having it dispatched, Mr Crossley took up his fountain pen and inserted the word ‘much’ between the words ‘with’ and ‘dissatisfaction’. The memorandum continued:

subject to any suggestion which the Committee may be able to make, the Ministry feels that there would be little or no advantage in taking further measures at the moment; and that the Ministry would propose to let the matter stand for six months and then to ask the Committee to make a further effort, through such channels as may then seem most likely to be effective, to obtain possession of the picture. Should this further attempt fail, then the Ministry would find it necessary to report the matter fully to the Treasury.

This portion of Crossley’s memorandum was marked by Trenaman and sent to Mr Gregory for inclusion in the minutes of the next meeting of the War Artists Advisory Committee. This meeting was held on 17 January. The following day Mr Gregory informed Mr Trenaman that ‘a paragraph on the lines laid down by Mr Crossley’ had been duly minuted. Mr Trenaman then wrote his final words on the matter:

Mr Gregory, noted. Thank you! Trenaman, Finance, 19.1.45.

With that, responsibility for the unfinished painting of the Anaconda casting shop passed from Mr Trenaman’s shoulders for ever. It was not to become the concern of Finance Division again until the war was over.

* Only ten were produced.