‘Although people in St Louis wished me to stop there,’ Lewis told Paul Martin, ‘I risked it and came back . . . to Windsor.’ Arriving on 16 December 1944, he and Gladys stayed first at the Hotel Norton-Palmer and then in room 612 of the Prince Edward at $5 a night. The principal reason for their return was the commission to paint Mrs Martin for a still unspecified fee, and her husband’s promise of more lucrative commissions once the portrait was in a sufficiently advanced state to show prospective patrons.
Lewis began work as soon as he arrived. A preliminary sketch shows ‘Nelly’ Martin sitting in the corner of a sofa, ‘intimate, domesticated’, her body upright, legs stretched along the seat to the left. For this she wore a beige suit. The right-angled composition of the pose gave the drawing its title: 3 o’clock. But something closer to 6 o’clock was eventually decided on. The painting shows her to be so frontally posed, her legs completely concealed by a deep blue ball gown, that at first glance she seems to be standing. Only the bundle of interlaced fingers resting on the promontory of dark dress material enveloping a crossed knee shows her to be seated. Otherwise she does not appear to make contact with the yellow upholstered armchair behind her.
At Mrs Martin’s suggestion, they had tried out the same pose with her wearing the beige suit, but Lewis was not satisfied. ‘It does not seem to me that you pass over from intimacy into formality with the beige suit’, he explained. The choice, between ‘intimacy and formality’, between 3 o’clock and 6 o’clock, was left to her husband. Lewis pointed out that since she had such ‘a beautifully shaped head’, he himself favoured the more exacting frontal pose, ‘the head erect instead of in a relaxed position’.
‘Smile up to your ears!’ Lewis told her. The red cupid’s bow lips tilted slightly at the corners, the blue eyes widened and stared straight ahead, the interlaced fingers probably tightened. She hated the sittings and had the feeling that Lewis was trying to shock her delicate, 25-year-old sensibilities. She remembered him telling her that Lady Cunard’s daughter had a black man for a lover. As he talked, her attention was involuntarily drawn to his long yellow equine teeth.
When Paul Martin left Windsor for Ottawa en route for England, he had done nothing about getting Lewis further commissions. It was better to wait, he said, until Nelly’s portrait was sufficiently advanced to show. Lewis was disconcerted when he discovered Martin was going away. Admittedly the portrait was not yet ready to be shown, but it very soon would be. In the meantime, his failure to find an apartment made unavoidable an expensive stay at the King Edward Hotel. The fee for the commission had been ‘left fluid’, and the ill-defined financial arrangements created inevitable misunderstanding. If Martin was under the impression that a cheque for $150, dispatched on 8 January during the hour before the Ottawa train departed, covered ‘the balance owing’, and so settled the matter, he was to be convinced otherwise over the following month and a half.
That Monday, Lewis was expecting a visit from his patron, and waited in his King Edward Hotel room for him all day. Phoning Martin’s office, he discovered the MP was actually in the same building. The implication was clear:
I was very upset when on the last day you avoided me – for your secretary told me you were in the hotel ‘with the Minister’, and you could I take it have spared ten minutes to see me, seeing I was only a few yards away.
In fact Martin had been fully occupied, ‘the Minister of Labour being on hand, and . . . having to superintend, as it were, his visit’. Added to which, he explained, ‘there was the necessity, precious to me, . . . of wanting to spend some time alone with my wife.’
The Parliamentary Assistant’s meeting with his Minister was a final briefing for the 94th Session of the International Labour Office’s Governing Body to be held from 25 to 31 January at the Ministry of Labour and National Service in London. Paul Martin was attending as his government’s representative and as Chairman of the Committee on Constitutional Questions dealing with relations between the ILO and the system of world security proposed in the final months of the war to preserve the forthcoming peace, the United Nations Organisation.
Such statesmanlike activity would prove an inevitable distraction and prevent him from fulfilling the promises he had made to find subjects for Lewis’s brush in Windsor.
Martin had originally mentioned three such possible portrait commissions. A painting from photographs of his secretary’s brother, an airman recently killed in action, came to nothing. This left a ‘Dodge millionairess’ and a ‘Windsor businessman’.
As his patron’s absence abroad lengthened and as Mrs Martin’s portrait had long since reached a point at which it could be shown, Lewis became restive. He sounded out Mrs Martin, mentioning the prospective portrait of the ‘Dodge millionairess’ in passing. Mrs Martin appeared uncomfortable. Lewis persisted:
Whenever I referred to that she seemed very reserved, seeming anything but sanguine. At last she definitely was so discouraging that I wrote that off.
This left ‘the Windsor businessman’ as the sole remaining prospect, ‘the third of the original trio, and never as much in the foreground as the other two’.
*
In the meantime Daphne Hein, secretary of the Windsor Art Association, had invited him to speak at a members’ tea in the Willistead Manor Gallery, held to coincide with an exhibition of three contemporary women painters from Montreal: Prudence Heward, Anne Savage and Ethel Seath. The event was to take place on Sunday afternoon, 4 February, and Lewis was to be paid a fee. Details of the exhibition and of the tea were reported the week before in the Windsor Star, where the speaker was referred to as ‘D. B. Wyndham Lewis, distinguished English artist and writer’. The day before the members’ tea a longer article, including a photograph, attempted to correct the mistake. He was, the Windsor Star assured its readers, ‘completely different from D. B. Wyndham Lewis, the humorous essayist, who is not related to him’. There were other mistakes. He was ‘born in England in 1886’. He edited Blast ‘for years after the war’. Finally, ‘in 1932, his portrait of Augustus John was rejected by the Royal Academy.’ It was not, however, the harmless mangling of a press release that gave rise to trouble and led to the members of the Windsor Art Association waiting in vain for their speaker the following day. Instead, it was a section of the article in which the local reporter had got his facts more or less correct that embarrassed Lewis and caused him to cancel the engagement. In the second paragraph he was described as ‘editor of the Blast, a magazine publishing the works of many well-known writers, including Ezra Pound.’
Since his indictment for treason by a Federal Grand Jury in Washington DC on 26 July 1943, the author of The Cantos had become a potentially dangerous man to be associated with. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war against the Axis Powers, he had continued broadcasting on Rome Radio, thereby ‘adhering’ to his country’s enemies and ‘giving them Aid and Comfort’. There was a strong likelihood that, when the war was over and the time came for such scores to be settled, Ezra Pound would hang.
Lewis was horrified at a 40-year-old association with an indicted traitor being publicised in a small community naturally mistrustful of strangers and in wartime positively xenophobic. He and his wife had already been the target of gossip and insinuations whispered from door to door by the Kibble and McCarthy families on the upper landing of the Sandwich Street West apartment building the previous winter.
Lewis set about tracing the source of the press release. The most likely candidate for blame was a man who had been a cause of irritation and veiled resentment for some time. Whether or not he was responsible, it nevertheless served as an excuse for Lewis to rid himself of an irksome acquaintance.
Marshall McLuhan claimed never to have known the reason for the letter Lewis sent him on 4 February. It began ‘Dear Mr McLuhan’, a formal salutation announcing the young Canadian’s consignment to the ranks of ‘enemy’ for the next eight years. ‘In a small community,’ he went on, ‘where everybody knows everybody else, and one is an outsider, intrigues of the most moronic kind are bound to blow up.’ Here the shades of Kibble and McCarthy reared in the memory. ‘You’, he accused McLuhan, ‘appear to have been at the centre of this one.’ That was the only point in the letter offering a hint as to the nature of the offence with which he was charging his erstwhile friend. Thereafter it was concerned with generalities and long-festered grudges:
I neither care much for you nor for the way you behave towards those you are the ‘friend’ of and ‘admire’. I am ashamed to say you inveigled me down to St. Louis. You came up here to avoid the draft. We changed places. But I returned 2 months ago to this city . . . and do not want or intend to be interfered with . . . I send you this as a preliminary warning off, and I hope you will take it to heart.
This was the letter McLuhan received. There was another, longer version written the same day but not sent, detailing past slights: McLuhan leaving his wife in the car when he came to visit; McLuhan holding a drinks party on the same evening as Lewis’s and poaching his guests; McLuhan making a fool of him in front of a visiting academic. Only in the first line of this draft was reference made to the current crisis:
You have made it impossible for me to give my lecture.
Paul Martin had given his assurance that he ‘would and indeed must be back’ from London by 30 January at the latest. Since the International Labour Office Conference began on the 25th and ended on the 31st, this schedule proved unrealistic, and it was not until the second week of February that his arrival in Montreal was reported by the Windsor press. Lewis phoned his office and was told that the MP would be home on the 16th or 17th. By this time the portrait of his wife was close to completion. In a peevish letter greeting Martin on his return, Lewis mentioned the ‘difficult conditions’ under which the work had been done, confessed himself ‘surprised’ he had received no word of explanation or reassurance at the prolonged absence of one he had relied upon to secure him further commissions and, finally, implored him to get in touch as soon as possible. The ‘difficult conditions’ referred to were presumably Lewis’s lack of a studio and the necessity of living and painting in room 612 of the Prince Edward Hotel. Martin seems to have lost little time in coming to see the portrait. The day after he got back to town, he and his wife stood with Lewis in front of the five-foot-high canvas. The meeting, that Sunday afternoon, was tense. Lewis got the impression that Martin resented his still being in Windsor. While Mrs Martin ‘impulsively expressed her delight’ when she saw what Lewis had done, her husband ‘did not utter a word during a half hour examination of the picture.’
The interview must have started amicably enough, with the two men arranging to meet the following day to visit a Detroit framemaker. However, their subsequent conversation led to Lewis sending a terse note the same evening cancelling the excursion. Probably, later in the afternoon, Lewis had demanded more money: money in addition to the $150 Martin had paid him as ‘the balance owing’ in January; money in addition to the undisclosed sums Mrs Martin recalled giving him while her husband was away.
Lewis’s rationale appears to have been simple. He had agreed to paint Mrs Martin at a reduced fee in order to gain other commissions which her husband had promised to secure for him. However, since Martin’s absence had prevented him from fulfilling his side of the bargain, the original fee for his wife’s portrait was to be increased as compensation to the painter for loss of earnings:
under these circumstances the least I can agree to is 750 dollars. With that I shall be out of pocket.
*
On Monday 12 March he was in Chatham, about 25 miles east of Windsor, to speak at the Ranklin Hotel on ‘The Problem of Beauty’. The invitation had come from one of his former students at Assumption College, Dan Taylor, who now ran a bookshop in town and sponsored the series of ‘Chatham Lectures’ of which Lewis’s was to be the first.
Dan Taylor recalls that, when he was studying at Assumption, a bootlegger’s son paid fellow students $5 a month for the use of their ration books. Taylor himself, although he could have used the money, passed his liquor coupons to Lewis, who exchanged them for gin. It may have been in recognition of these past favours that Lewis agreed to lecture for a fee of only $35 and his return railway fare. About 125 people paid to attend and the event appears to have been a great success. Taylor himself recalled nothing of the talk, having been in a state of considerable anxiety all afternoon about his speaker. Lewis started drinking gin at 2 o’clock and kept at it steadily until it was time for him to speak at 8.30:
His method of drinking was to break a hole in an orange, and squeeze two drops of juice into a tumbler of gin which he then drank slowly.
It did not appear to affect his performance, Taylor recalled:
it was not one of his worst lectures. I had heard him give worse, as well as better, at Windsor.
*
Three days later, on 16 March, he crossed the river from Windsor to lunch with a Detroit collector, Charles E. Feinberg. Lewis had phoned him, mentioning Augustus John’s name, and they arranged to meet in the Book-Cadillac Hotel. Mr Feinberg brought along one of John’s etchings of the youthful Lewis, intending to have it inscribed over lunch. But he retained unpleasant memories of the encounter:
At first he spoke of England and pleasantries. He was looking for commissions for portrait drawings. I agreed to help him. I don’t remember the turn of the conversation or what turned him on the Jews, but his remarks angered me. I told him that as a Jew, I considered his remarks offensive. He started to splutter, but I quickly got up from the table, paid the cheque for the lunch, excused myself and left . . . That was my only contact with him. Years later, I mentioned the incident to Augustus John and his only remark was, ‘He was a bloody fool’.
When he left the restaurant Feinberg had not shown the John etching to Lewis nor had it inscribed.
*
With the portrait of Mrs Martin finished, but acrimoniously delivered unsigned in view of the shortfall in his fee, there was nothing to keep Lewis in Windsor apart from a smattering of minor commissions.
He produced a portrait drawing of William R. Valentiner, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts – ‘very successful’ in the sitter’s estimation – and another, ‘which . . . did not come out very well’, of the Assistant Director, Edgar Richardson. There were also two chalk studies of John Stoughton Newberry, Honorary Curator of the Department of Prints and Drawings.
In late April or early May, Valentiner was responsible for getting Lewis his last sitter in the Detroit area. The 28-year-old Henry Ford II commissioned a drawing of his wife Anne. Lewis undertook it in the familiar but fading hope that an example set by the future Ford Motor Company President would encourage others and generate more work. When the coloured chalk portrait was finished the Fords invited Lewis and his wife to a small gathering of friends assembled to view it. But any hopes that the rendering of Anne Ford would lead to further commissions, clinched over cocktails, were disappointed.
What happened at the viewing remains a mystery, but Lewis’s patience seems to have snapped at this point. ‘It was a complete failure’, he told Richardson the next morning. ‘Nothing could be more so. There is nothing to do but get out – go somewhere.’ The war in Europe was over and if he and his wife could get to the State Capital, the British High Commissioner would look after them until sufficient funds were raised to get them back to England. Richardson agreed to help. ‘I had a hard time finding enough money to pay the Lewises’ train fare to Ottawa’, he recalled. ‘I know Lewis thought I should have found more but I had to put in all I could afford myself to make up what I gave him.’
Their move from Windsor to Ottawa more than halved the distance to Quebec and embarkation home but offered little in the way of paid employment. Lewis estimated that they needed about $725 or £182 to get them, with their ‘long baggage train of crates and boxes’, to London. But there was still no means ‘to make anything over and above that needed to pay hotel bill . . . and satisfy hunger and very moderate thirst.’
Malcolm MacDonald helped out with a loan of $150 and engineered the few meagre commissions that allowed the Lewises to survive those last two months in Canada. But something more was needed to raise the boat fare. At the end of June MacDonald approached Sir Kenneth Clark with a proposition. It was a proposition which, given the recent history of Lewis’s relations with Clark and the Committee he chaired, was surely doomed to failure. The approach was made through Sir Eric Machtig at the Dominions Office, who was asked to pass to Clark the following message:
Wyndham Lewis . . . would like to get back to England, and wonders whether you and your colleagues on [the] War Artists Committee would be willing to commission him to do some pastel or oil portraits for war records. If you are, I suggest that the best arrangement would be for you to authorise me to pay to Lewis the dollars required for passage money and expenses . . . It would be deducted from the amount that you eventually paid him for the portraits. It would allow him and his wife to leave for Britain by an early boat.
As intermediary in Lewis’s evasive dealings with the Ministry of Information over the previous two years, MacDonald must have known this was a hopeless cause. His message ended with a vain inducement: ‘Lewis would bring with him the picture about which we have had earlier correspondence.’
For his part, Clark must have felt surprised that there was, after all, a picture to be delivered, having entertained suspicions for some time that Lewis had not even begun work on it. But not surprisingly Clark declined MacDonald’s proposition: ‘I do not think I can go to the Finance Division for more money to be paid to Lewis in advance.’
MacDonald now realised that, if Lewis and his wife were ever to get back to England, he himself would have to lend them the passage money.
On 7 August he cabled Sir Eric Machtig another message to be passed to Clark:
WYNDHAM LEWIS HAS SAILED FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM ON S.S. STRATHEDEN
Owing to luggage restrictions he did not take the Anaconda painting with him. MacDonald agreed to have it shipped to him at the expense of His Majesty’s Government, whose property it now was.
The SS Stratheden sailed from Quebec on 2 August and eight days later docked in Liverpool. It was 10 August. Atomic bombs had devastated two Japanese cities during the Atlantic crossing and the world was at peace.
*
Lewis and his wife knew of the creeping dilapidation of their home, through water damage from a burst pipe in 1942 and, by 1943, the devouring of rugs and carpets by mice. On their arrival they discovered the property had also suffered from enemy action during the Blitz. The greatest havoc was upstairs in the studio: ‘the glass roof . . . had been shattered . . . Although the glass had been replaced, everything was in indescribable confusion. Someone had emptied on the floor cases in which Mss etc. had been stored and a mass of stuff of all kinds had been rained on. The bodies of birds attested to the length of time [the] studio had only half a roof.’
They had been away for nearly six years. Lewis was a couple of months short of his 63rd birthday. Downstairs in the flat he picked up the dusty telephone receiver from its cradle on the window sill and found that the line was dead.
*
In August 1943 Lewis had vowed to John Rothenstein: ‘I will not ever return to my hand-to-mouth existence in London. I have a great horror of it.’ However, he came back to a city where ‘only millionaires can breathe . . . with freedom’, where nearly everyone was hard up and where rationing was to keep life at a near wartime level of austerity for the next nine years. But on the whole he preferred being hard up in London to being hard up in Toronto. Even the routine swindling seemed congenial by comparison. As one who had not used English currency for six years, Lewis fell particular prey to this:
The number of times I have given shop assistants half a crown and got change for a two shilling piece: they seem to know I’m green, but my God they might be Canadians!
Under rationing they did not go hungry, although he found that he missed the American T-bone steaks. What seemed a more serious problem was the shortage of alcohol. Eliot was invited to dinner:
All I can offer is hot soup and cold fowl and alas beer – unless you can tell me where I can get some gin.
But cheerless came the Possum’s reply:
Hot soup and cold fowl would be very acceptable, but I am not allowed beer or wine and my means of getting gin are limited to about a bottle every six weeks or so.
With the end of war, the political climate of Great Britain had abruptly and, so far as the former Prime Minister Winston Churchill was concerned, ungratefully changed. Following the July General Election, Lewis was ‘devoutly thankful to learn the Tories had not got in’. This at least was what he told Naomi Mitchison, whose husband had taken his seat on the government benches as Labour MP for Kettering:
In orderly progression let us hope all necessary measures of nationalisation will be carried through, and exploitation of the people (us and the rest) be made impossible. Capitalism is rampant as never before . . . And my landlord – or his agent – is the ugliest capitalist of the lot. It is difficult to see why the Government does not go for my landlord.
In the months that followed the bleak homecoming to 29A Notting Hill Gate, debts, accumulated over the war years, clamoured for settlement.
When Lewis and his wife left London in September 1939 the rent was about £33 per quarter, with ‘all Rates, Taxes and Assessments in respect of the premises’ paid by Lord Francis Manners, his landlord. When that tenancy agreement expired on 28 September 1942, rent arrears stood at around £390. But thereafter, without a tenancy agreement and with the premises still occupied by his possessions, Lewis became liable both for rent and for the annual Council Rate of around £75 per annum. By the end of September 1945, therefore, arrears of rent amounted to £780 and Kensington Borough Council were demanding £228 6s. 3d. worth of Rates for the past three years.
Lewis was suspicious that the Rating Authority seemed so accurately informed of the expiry date of his tenancy agreement. This intelligence could only have been gleaned from his landlord’s agents, Swain and Company, whose Mr Saunders was coincidentally a Kensington Borough Councillor. Lewis drew his own conclusions:
I am tightly held in the jaws of the Rating Authorities and my obscene landlord . . . They are evidently cutting up my body between them.
He protested that he had written to Swains ‘on two occasions’ from Canada, instructing them to store his belongings and rent the property to someone else. Instead, everything was left where it was and the studio remained unlet. Swains may have considered that, with so great a proportion of its roof consisting of plate glass, it would have been difficult to find anyone foolhardy enough to rent the place while London was undergoing the nightly hazards of a German blitzkrieg.
Either Swains agreed that their claim for the three years’ rent following 28 September 1942 was unjustified or they took Lewis at his word that he was quite incapable of finding that amount of money ‘or anything like it’. They agreed to halve their claim. Then, following a further exchange of views during which Mr Saunders apparently lost patience, ‘was extremely uncivil’, and refused to discuss the matter further, Lewis, discouraged from any more dealings with his landlord’s agents, wrote instead directly to Lord Francis Manners himself. He wondered if His Lordship would be prepared to accept ‘a cash down payment of one hundred pounds, against the £400 odd owing’.
He agreed to settle his debt to the Rating Authority with monthly payments of £15, although on occasion even this arrangement proved unmanageable and they were asked to content themselves with £10 for the time being.
Meanwhile, he was annoyed to learn that before his telephone could be reconnected the Post Office were demanding a £36 rental for the six years their instrument had been ‘sitting quietly, half buried in dust’ on the window sill.
*
In October, the painter Allan Gwynne-Jones was making final preparations for an exhibition of portraits he was organising for the Arts Council at Wildenstein’s Gallery in New Bond Street. The show was in two sections: 82 large photographs illustrated aspects of the art of portraiture in Europe from Graeco-Roman painting up to Whistler’s Miss Alexander and English portraiture of the Twentieth Century, represented by works borrowed from public and private collections or from the artists themselves. ‘When disappointed in obtaining a picture I wished for,’ Gwynne-Jones wrote in the catalogue foreword, ‘I . . . tried to fill the gap with another painting by the same artist.’ He mentioned Lewis’s portrait of Edith Sitwell, acquired by the Tate Gallery in 1943, and currently touring the provinces with an exhibition of wartime acquisitions, as one of the pictures he was unable to borrow.
His alternative choice had been promised by the Tate Trustees late the previous year. It was delivered to the Wildenstein Gallery in time for the opening in early November 1945. However, it was Lewis himself who raised an objection to this picture being exhibited. ‘As to the portrait of Ezra Pound,’ he told Gwynne Jones in late October:
I can see how attractive this might prove from the macabre point of view: a kind of Madame Tussaud exhibit. It is not mine, but as far as I am concerned, I should not choose this particular moment to show it . . . Pound will at any moment now be tried for his life. Far be it from me to suppose that a man who broadcasts from an enemy capital at a time of war can expect anything else. But I have known Pound for a very long time and I do not like the idea of helping to put him on show.
A concern for his own interests may not have been entirely absent from his thoughts as he expressed this unwillingness to have the portrait shown. As in Windsor the previous February, Lewis may have believed that association with an indicted traitor could do him harm, and even compromise his chances of re-establishing himself in the London art world. Any relationship with Pound, even that of artist to sitter, might have recalled his own ill-advised defence of an infamous political system and the damaged reputation he hoped had been left behind on the other side of World War.
Another event which may have brought such matters to the forefront of his mind was the trial of William Joyce, once a fellow guest at Sir Oswald Mosley’s dinner table in the 1930s, for doing in Berlin what Pound was accused of doing in Rome. Sentence of death on the man known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, handed down in Courtroom no. 1 of the Old Bailey only a month before Lewis’s letter to Gwynne-Jones, was an eloquent expression of the postwar mood of the country.
Since the portrait was the Tate Gallery’s property and the Trustees had agreed to lend it to the Arts Council, Lewis’s veto need not have been taken into account. Gwynne-Jones, however, respected his wishes and the picture was returned to Millbank. Lewis invited him to his studio to choose a substitute and it was the long-legged portrait of John McLeod that went into the exhibition for sale at £250, so late an addition that it was not listed in the catalogue.*
*
On 9 November Miss W. M. Dodd, Senior Executive Officer in the Finance Division of the Ministry of Information, wrote to Mr Gregory of the War Artists Advisory Committee ‘regarding Mr Wyndham Lewis and his picture on which £300 from official funds has been expended although the picture has not been forthcoming.’ It was a matter she had inherited from her predecessor Mr Trenaman, now promoted to Chief Accountant of the Division. ‘We trust we may be able to avoid suing Mr Wyndham Lewis,’ she told Gregory, ‘but unless the picture is produced or the money advanced for it is returned to H.M. Government this course may be necessary.’
The unfinished Anaconda picture had been crated and shipped to Lewis, care of the London Depot of the Canadian National Express, at the end of August. On 28 November, at the 195th meeting of the WAAC, it was agreed that Mr Gregory and Mr Jowett visit Lewis at his studio to see the picture.
*
Long after grudging settlement of the disputed £36 rental, Lewis’s telephone had still not been reconnected due, the Post Office informed him, to a ‘shortage of labour’. The arrangement of business and social engagements necessitated his tramping down several flights of stone steps to the street. At 12.40 in the afternoon of 29 November, an image of the changed face of postwar London might have been seen in Notting Hill Gate – Wyndham Lewis, his large frame muffled against the cold and surmounted by a broad-brimmed black hat, squeezed into a red public telephone box attempting to make contact with Augustus John, besieged the while by a truculent queue of impatient housewives at his back.
His friend’s telephone rang unanswered and Lewis doggedly mounted the stairs home again to write him a letter: ‘To telephone is not easy’, he told John.
With the onset of winter a combination of coal shortages and industrial action by the Gas, Light and Coke Company workers brought such a reduction in gas pressure that the fire in Lewis’s studio was no sooner lit than it popped out. Unable to paint in these arctic conditions, he sat downstairs in the flat keeping his left foot warm against the feeble gas vouchsafed him and keeping his right foot warm with an electric heater. Over hot soup and cold fowl, Eliot told him he was forced to use a similar combination of inadequate heat sources in his own furnished flat nearby.
*
Mr Gregory and Mr Jowett ‘with much trembling’ readied themselves for their visit to view the Anaconda painting at 3.30 in the afternoon of 7 December, only to have their expedition to Notting Hill forestalled by a telegram on the 6th:
SORRY MUST BE NEXT WEEK ANY AFTERNOON AFTER TUESDAY – WYNDHAM LEWIS
Further arrangements were made and notice given that the deputation would visit the following Thursday at 3.45, but on this occasion the two men were told by Mrs Lewis that her husband was not at home. They went away promising to return the following day at 3.30. Apologies were profuse, Lewis claiming he had mistaken the day and blaming himself for allowing Mr Gregory and his companion ‘to make a journey for nothing’. As for their visit the following day, he told Gregory by note that evening: ‘You may depend upon my being here.’
*
On Saturday 29 December 1945, his seventh wedding anniversary, Peter Lewis died of lymphatic cancer in Westminster Hospital. He was 34 and left a widow, Vera, and a five-year-old daughter.
Official documentation of the last decade of his life charted a varied career. ‘Fruit salesman’ at the time of his marriage, he was a ‘commercial traveller’ in 1940 when Margot Angela was born and the occupation listed on his death certificate was ‘aircraft manufacturer’.
Peter’s mother, Olive Elstow, née Johnson, survived him and attended Vera’s second wedding, to an RAF flying officer, at All Saints, Kingston-on-Thames two years later. A photograph shows Olive on this occasion, striding towards the church, ribboned limousine reflected in a shop window. The strong broad face of ‘Mamie’, drawn by her lover in pencil and wash 36 years earlier, was still recognisable, the hairstyle unchanged.
There is no evidence that Lewis was informed of Peter’s death. A little over 11 years later he expired in the same hospital as his son.
*
With the New Year, concern and responsibility for Lewis’s Anaconda painting passed from the War Artists Advisory Committee at the National Gallery to a former Bedlam on Lambeth Road: The Imperial War Museum. All the works paid for by the Ministry of Information were stored here before being dispersed to other London and provincial galleries. On 30 January, the Art Sub-Committee agreed that a letter be sent to Lewis asking him to bring his painting to the Museum. This, presumably, was intended to establish if indeed a painting actually existed, for despite Lewis’s assurances to Gregory and Jowett that he would be at home to receive them on 14 December, neither man had thus far succeeded in seeing it.
* Leaving aside his scruples regarding the Pound portrait, the substitution of John McLeod, being Lewis’s property, meant that he would benefit in the event of its being sold.