‘In the absence of proof of malice’
1948 began, as 1947 had begun, with another quarter’s rent due and another appeal for money. Lewis was, he told Docker, still paying off rates arrears to the London County Council, had parted with 10 guineas thence a couple of days before, and now needed £38 for his landlord. He deeply regretted having to ask his friend for the sum. ‘I am appalled at my situation.’ It was 4 January and only the day before, John Rothenstein had let fall a piece of information that gave rise to bitter thoughts as Lewis composed his begging letter to Docker:
Mr Beddington Behrens has refunded the Tate Gallery the £350 they paid him for my Sitwell portrait – saying that as he only paid me £50 for that picture he thinks he ought not to keep the money!
He wondered why Behrens had not thought fit to pay the money to him instead.*
A little over a week later, Docker received a further desperate appeal. Lewis’s landlord had given him until the following Saturday, four days, to find his quarter’s rent, due 25 December:
I have not the money. Were it Saturday week I should have the money; not this Saturday . . . I am terrified.
That same day he lunched again with Alan Pryce-Jones amidst the splendours of the Travellers’ Club. Looking around at the careless prosperity of those about him he had to keep shaking himself to remember he was in an inflationary country, that his rent money had gone in the purchase of goods, overpriced and weighted down with taxes, and also that the suit he was wearing, making him look, to Anthony Powell, like an American senator or businessman, was in all probability the last he would ever be able to afford.
Letters to friends in the United States were a constant litany of the sordid details of postwar austerity:
We now get no eggs at all, or at most one apiece every month . . . The ingredients of the bread is said by medical men to be actually injurious to health and is so dry and gritty as to be disagreeable to eat . . . The water is now so heavily chlorinated it is almost undrinkable. When the taste of the chlorine wears off, you taste the sewage, which is worse . . . sometimes for a short while the water tastes quite normal again . . . garbage has ceased momentarily to flow into it, or they have run out of chlorine.
While Lewis sat in his studio writing this to Geoffrey Stone on 15 January, a ten-day upheaval was about to interrupt both domestic life and letter. The carpenter and his men had finished their activities in the flat below and now announced their intention of carrying the rot-eradication campaign upstairs. ‘Everything had thereupon to be moved down. Everything got lost . . . in a whirlpool of furniture and food and blowlamps and typewriters.’ Things became relatively calm again on 25 January and Lewis was able to resume his catalogue of complaint, now on behalf of Gladys:
as is the case with all women . . . here, except Princess Elizabeth,* she has to think from morning to night of food, coupons, coal, chars, ‘purchase tax’ and such things. We both hate the ‘purchase tax’ more than we have ever hated anything. Next to that we loathe an expression which our conquerors never cease to employ. It is this: ‘Too much money chasing too few goods’.
Geoffrey Stone responded by sending lipstick and six packets of Pillsbury’s Roll Mix. This last immediately produced ‘a dazzlingly white loaf of bread’, Lewis told the man in Bethlehem, ‘about the finest present I can imagine, being a great bread-eater: that and the butter to put on it, of which we happily possess as much as we need at present.’
It was soon to become illegal for persons in the United Kingdom to purchase from overseas parcels containing rationed foods. Unsolicited gifts, however, might still be received with only the warmest gratitude tendered in exchange.
*
In February, preparations were under way for ‘40 Years of Modern Art’ in the basement of the Academy Hall Cinema at 163 Oxford Street. The exhibition was to be the first project of the Institute of Contemporary Art and intended to raise funds for that fledgling organisation, ‘co-ordinating’, as Herbert Read put it, ‘the emulative efforts of a thousand other centres’, whereby ‘a wholly new aspect would be given to our life and civilisation.’ Selected mainly from private collections, the works on view were largely unfamiliar to the general public. There were paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Rouault, Braque, Chagall, Derain, Dufy, Juan Gris, Modigliani, Bonnard and Vuillard. The large British section included pictures by Sickert, John, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Paul Nash, Matthew Smith, Sutherland, Pasmore and Lewis.
One morning, a week before the show opened, Lewis called at the Academy Hall. Herbert Read had already written to ask where the Committee might find examples of his work from before the First World War, the earliest of the four decades under review in the exhibition. Lewis had made it clear that he did not look with favour on the overexposure of his youthful experimentation and the comparative neglect of his more recent work:
To speak frankly, I have come to object a great deal at seeing myself consistently mis-represented in mixed exhibitions, by people who affect not to know what I have done for the past thirty years or so.
And it was with some urgency that he asked Read to keep him informed. ‘If you have obtained anything of mine . . . please be so good as to tell me what.’ But before Read could reply, Lewis lost patience and went to Oxford Street to see for himself.
Read was not at the Academy Hall that morning but someone else was on hand to show Lewis the painting the Committee had selected for their show. It was not, after all, from the period before the First World War. To his ‘infinite disgust’ he found that his contribution to the art of painting in the first half of the 20th century was to be represented by the angular, grimacing caricature with bilious background that had so terrified Dick Wyndham’s nine-month-old baby in 1921: Portrait of Mr W.L. as a Tyro. It was a piece of work he now dismissed as ‘posterish’.
He sensed conspiracy and blamed the Committee. Neither Roland Penrose, the chairman, nor Watson were ‘great fans’ of his, and E. L. T. Mesens was ‘in the employ of one of them’. Of the remaining two members Herbert Read, who might have been predisposed in Lewis’s favour, was ‘never at committee meetings’. It followed that a hostile majority had determined he should be represented by an inferior painting.
Lewis left the Academy Hall and walked to Zwemmer’s Gallery in Charing Cross Road, the nearest place he knew where an alternative to the ‘posterish tyro’ might be found. He walked out of Zwemmer’s with ‘an excellent painting’ under his arm, the 1937 Red Portrait of his wife, and this he loaded into a taxi and delivered to the Academy Hall. After lunch he sent a telegram to the ICA Committee:
INDIGNANTLY PROTEST AT PROPOSED EXHIBIT AS REPRESENTING MY CONTRIBUTION TO CONTEMPORARY ART HAVE SUPPLIED WHAT I SUGGEST AS SUBSTITUTE
The following day he wrote to Read:
Should [the Committee] think the ‘red portrait’ . . . is too good and would advertise me too much, there is this alternative. Still abolishing the posterish ‘tyro’ (which is essential) one can substitute a drawing, also at Zwemmers (which I would if necessary fetch and deliver). It is ‘modernist’ – I am sure you would like it. You will observe the trouble I am taking. Over a small matter, do you say? No, because this is one of a number of small matters. And it is one too many.
In fact there was one ‘small matter’ more.
Five days after taking action against what he perceived to be a malicious interpretation of his contribution to contemporary painting, he took up cudgels in another quarter to defend his prose style against editorial mangling.
Alan Pryce-Jones had sent him galley proofs for his TLS review of the Slochower book on 3 February, but it was not until the evening of the 9th that Lewis found the time to read them, along with Pryce-Jones’s covering note: ‘I hope you will not be too much shocked by the changes I have made here and there. They have only one object in view – to make your article fit easily into our normal scheme of anonymity.’ Lewis’s original had contained a number of first-person singular references that would be rendered meaningless in an unsigned review.
Lewis’s response, thought Anthony Powell, was ‘expressed in scarcely sane terms’. First he threatened immediate legal action against the TLS if Pryce-Jones’s ‘spiteful joke’ was pushed so far as to print what he had ‘fooled about with’ of Lewis’s text. He had stopped reading on the second page of the galley proofs ‘when it became clearer at almost every line’, that the editor’s intention was to be ‘very offensive’. He then went on to delineate three of Pryce-Jones’s ‘transformations’ with a withering, homophobic sarcasm:
I had, however, read enough to admire . . . the femininely placed very, ‘on the very title page’ . . .: to note how infinitely more elegant the word ‘comprise’ is than the word ‘is’ . . .: and to mark your really radical improvement of one of my unworthy sentences, from which emerged your masterly ‘emphatically an archipelago’. This fills me with awe: obviously those two words were brought into the world to coalesce – ‘emphatically an archipelago’ – but they awaited your fairy wand to effect the graceful conjunction.
Powell, who heard only Pryce-Jones’s side of the argument, drew his own conclusions. ‘The impression . . . that all was not well with the balance of Lewis’s mind could not be avoided.’
The article, with or without Pryce-Jones’s ‘transformations’, was not published.
As for the painting hanging in the basement of the Academy Hall Cinema and representing Lewis’s contribution to ‘40 Years of Modern Art’, it is not known whether the ‘posterish tyro’ was removed and replaced by something more to his liking. The despised Tyro certainly remained listed, however, below a Fernand Léger, in the alphabetically arranged catalogue:
48. Lewis, Wyndham. Born: England 1884. Lives: London. Self Portrait, c.1920 Oil lent by Mrs Violet Schiff.
*
Between his intervention at the Academy Hall Cinema and his outburst to Pryce-Jones, Lewis received news from his solicitor of a small but significant legal victory. Responsibility had at last been accepted for the two-year delay in the publication of America and Cosmic Man. Something in the region of £150 damages and legal costs had been wrung from the firm of Nicholson & Watson. ‘It is a triumph’, Lewis wrote to his solicitor Mr Mitchell. ‘I am tremendously grateful.’ Thereafter, in all his dealings with the firm, Lewis acted with his ‘big lawyer’ at his elbow. Three months later he was able to boast that Mr Roberts, the managing director of Nicholson & Watson, ‘always keeps appointments and seems terrified of me’.
In mid-June the publication of America and Cosmic Man was announced in the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. Lewis told Mr Mitchell it would be out on the 21st and he promised to inscribe his legal champion’s copy with a glowing endorsement:
in my dedication I shall speak only of your powers . . . to make publishers perform like circus horses, and eat out of the author’s hand.
But, due to an error on one of the pages, the book remained stalled at the printers. When his three author’s copies were finally delivered on 1 July the book seemed to Lewis an abomination of austerity publishing. It was, he raged to Roberts, ‘an all time low in book production . . . The paper is cheaper than the poorest paper used in “mystery story” books or cheap novels.’
He had been warned that limitations on the choice of paper size necessitated a somewhat smaller format than was ideal for such a book: something below demy octavo and above crown octavo, resulting in an untrimmed page of between 8¾˝ and 7½˝ from top to bottom. ‘In the event it turns out to be a crown – 7½˝ by 5˝ – the size of the smallest popular book, or of a reprint.’ The type, however, had been set to fit a demy octavo page:
Consequently there is hardly any margin, and at the bottom of the page the last line is very nearly on top of the paper edge. At the beginning of the book the ink is pale and wan. Later on it gets quite strong and black. You must among other things be economising on ink. Shall I speak of the hideous green cloth cover with red lettering on the spine? No. It was the cheapest line they had and you said okay.
His only positive words were for the ‘quite good jacket’, and then only because it ‘decently’ concealed the atrocious binding. But even this faintest of praise was muted by an observation that the jacket had been ‘chopped down and mutilated’. The jacket, like the typesetting, had been designed to fit a larger format.
Lewis’s mood cannot have been improved by a raging toothache. ‘Left side of my face is in uproar’, he complained to Giovanelli. ‘I am in pain.’
*
It may have been that year, on 23 August, that Constant Lambert dragged the artist and writer Michael Ayrton to the ‘rather dispiriting public bar of Notting Hill Gate Underground Railway Station’ to catch a glimpse of Lewis. It was Lambert’s birthday and he told Ayrton that on a previous 23 August he had had the rare privilege at that location of hearing Lewis sing a mournful popular ballad:
I’m a broken-hearted Milkman, in grief I’m array’d.
Through keeping of the company of a young servant maid:
Who lived on board wages, the house to keep clean,
In a gentleman’s fam’ly near Paddington Green.
Oh! she was as beautiful as a Butterfly, and as proud as a Queen,
Was pretty little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.
Lambert did not mention whether all seven verses of the song had been rendered.
Late that night, Lambert and Ayrton arrived at the ‘grim and forbidding edifice’ and found it empty but for two figures standing at either end of the long bar. One was an orchestral conductor who had deserted from the army during the war and was still technically on the run. The other figure was Lewis, with customary large black hat pulled down over his eyes:
No one spoke and the only sound was that of trains groaning and roaring beneath our feet. Without seeing us and without singing a note, Lewis turned and strode out into the night.
Derek Stanford went to the same establishment in search of Lewis and discovered him sitting on a stool at the bar and wearing a black patch over one eye. ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis, I believe.’ Lewis swung round and told Stanford he was mistaken, identifying himself instead as ‘Captain Brown’.
*
By 10 September Doubleday, Doran & Co. of New York were expressing keen interest in publishing a US edition of America and Cosmic Man. Felix Giovanelli, now teaching Romance Languages at New York University, was brokering the deal, fanned by Lewis’s ‘enraptured’ gratitude.
Meanwhile in London, with the exception of one column-inch, albeit of praise, by John Betjeman in the Daily Herald, the book had been critically ignored. ‘It is a watertight boycott’, Lewis told a friend. He claimed that Nicholson & Watson had delayed distribution for six weeks, bringing the book out finally in August, during the summer ‘holiday-blackout’, when it would be most likely to go unnoticed.
Before America and Cosmic Man was finally released to the reading public and to what Lewis regarded as a less than sympathetic critical cabal, he had written the following for a book that would be published four years later:
that cross, smart, shallow, excitable animal . . . is still with us everywhere, entrenched in broadcasting, art-racketeering, the literary reviews, and even the most stately of the daily and weekly press. Which is just too bad for those upon his black list (a list at least twenty years old). May the Lord have mercy upon those books of mine which fall into his hands.
When The Writer and the Absolute appeared in mid-1952, these lines carried a footnote. It meant little or nothing to his readers but was indicative of how firmly he believed that the eventual publication date of America and Cosmic Man, the Friday of the August Bank Holiday weekend, was far from coincidental:
It will interest the literary historian of the future to know that these lines were written at least six months before a significant date in publishing history – and in the annals of conspiracy and boycott: namely July 30, 1948.
In New York the sale of the book to Doubleday was settled and awaited only signing of the contract. The $750 advance, $250 less than the ‘regulation “thousand berries” ’ he told Giovanelli had been customary eight years before, was of less importance than the prospects for further books. John Sargent of Doubleday reported enthusiastic preliminary responses from bookshops, and this augured well for commercial success and better terms in future.
Then on 30 September Lewis received word from Giovanelli that his English publisher had entered into communication with Doubleday informing them that US rights to America and Cosmic Man belonged to Nicholson & Watson.
Lewis flew into a rage. Nicholson & Watson did not own the American rights, he told Giovanelli. In fact they barely merited the definition ‘publishers’. As for the managing director, Mr Roberts – ‘remember his name’, Lewis enjoined, as if marking him out as target for special retribution in the future – he was nothing more than ‘an ex-shopsteward of a very large printing works’. Inventive epithets for Mr Roberts followed, ranging from ‘double-crossing little rat’ to ‘unspeakable lying homunculus’ and back to ‘bubble-headed rat’.
This crisis coincided with the arrival of a food parcel from America containing bread mix and luxury. He tore it open ‘in a nightmare’. The bread was baked and ‘devoured . . . in a feverish dream’. He poured maple syrup over a compote of pears, muttering how delicious it was and racking his brains the while for a means of tackling his ‘tiny enemy’.
He telephoned Nicholson & Watson, but succeeded only in speaking to Roberts’s secretary. That unfortunate woman told him the managing director was flying to New York on 10 October and would be speaking to Doubleday while he was there. She was roundly cursed for this information and ordered to tell her master ‘he would find himself in a court of law before very long.’ Roberts returned his call the same day and protested innocence. Doubleday had written informing him of their desire to publish America and Cosmic Man. Roberts had replied: ‘That’s fine’, and sent over a copy of the book. ‘No, of course the rights are yours’, he assured Lewis. ‘I was not muscling in!’ And he promised to cable Doubleday early the following day to make that absolutely clear.
The same morning that Roberts cabled to this effect, 1 October, the ‘watertight boycott’ of America and Cosmic Man was breached by a three-and-a-half-column notice in The Times Literary Supplement. It was not of the sort that would encourage sales. The anonymous reviewer pointed out half a dozen inaccuracies or dubious points of interpretation and declared: ‘Mr Wyndham Lewis very clearly does not know enough American history to justify him in the generalisations of which he is fond.’ Even grammar and prose style were criticised.
Lewis believed that sheltering under the anonymity which the TLS gave its reviewers was no less a figure than Alan Pryce-Jones himself. Still smarting from the treatment his own review received under Pryce-Jones’s editorial pencil, a passage such as that beginning, ‘We do not wish to be too particular or pedantic’, must have touched a raw nerve indeed:
it is really necessary to make a protest against the English in which this book is written. It must be a long time since a single volume contained so many sentences that are innocent of verbs. Nor are the objections to the author’s sentences merely grammatical. They are peppered with obscure conversational asides and qualifications which make it extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible to follow his meaning.
‘I cannot write, it appears’, Lewis protested to Giovanelli. ‘Well, I cannot certainly do that if the boneless pansy fluency of Mr P-J is to be our canon.’
*
Meanwhile, despite Mr Roberts’s assurance that Nicholson & Watson had no intention of ‘muscling in’ on arrangements with Doubleday to publish America and Cosmic Man, Lewis still believed he was being ‘doublecrossed’. On the eve of Roberts’s departure for New York, he was prepared for the worst and already laying plans for legal action. ‘Now, if the deal falls through’, he told Giovanelli:
and clearly it will be the result of Mr Roberts intervention if it does – . . . do your damnedest to get hold of text of . . . letters and cables to Doubledays and . . . carefully note . . . anything Sargent transmits orally. This will be valuable. Indeed without it I have no evidence.
He confided paranoiac suspicions of a wider conspiracy, hatched perhaps by a Sitwell, a Clark, or some other shadowy enemy intent on sabotaging his livelihood:
There is one thing that must not be lost sight of, fantastic as it may seem. Mr Roberts may be acting for a third party. I have realised all along that there might well be a Mr X., or a Sir X.X., in the background.
*
In fact the Sitwells, Osbert and Edith, were occupying his thoughts at this time as a rather unlikely source of profit. They had recently arrived in the United States at the start of a lecture tour and Giovanelli was being encouraged to shadow them:
If Osbert performs in New York, try and be present. If he libels me I can get from the English courts a fat slice out of his fat annual income.
Since his friend could not realistically be expected to eavesdrop on every public and private function the Sitwells attended, Lewis instructed him to engage the services of a press-clipping agency and order cuttings for the name ‘Wyndham Lewis’. This he hoped would secure him the text of any defamatory statements made by either Sitwell during the course of their stay, and ‘shake money out of them if they are careless’.
*
On 13 October anxieties about the managing director of Nicholson & Watson ‘muscling in’ on the US publication of America and Cosmic Man were finally allayed by the arrival of a four-word cable from Giovanelli:
CONTRACT CONCLUDED ROBERTS EXCLUDED.
Lewis soon discovered that the author of the hostile TLS review was not Pryce-Jones after all, but Raymond Mortimer. ‘That Bloomsbury gentleman’, he recalled, ‘wrote 10 or 12 years ago somewhere that Mr Lewis should not paint. Now he writes that Mr Lewis cannot write.’ Members of the ‘little high tory group’ frequenting the Travellers’ Club, Mortimer and Pryce-Jones were friends. They were therefore, Mortimer as writer, Pryce-Jones as publisher, interchangeable as enemies and equally responsible for the attack on Lewis’s reputation and livelihood.
A fortnight after the review appeared, his retaliation occupied a substantial section of ‘Letters to the Editor’. With ponderous mockery he suggested the reviewer ‘give himself a little longer in the [British] Museum Reading Room’. Point by point he defended the ‘inaccuracies’ in his book with supporting quotations from higher authorities. It was another three weeks before Lewis’s letter was brought to the reviewer’s attention and received a response. Anonymously, Mortimer defended his criticisms, point by point, and concluded:
Mr Wyndham Lewis is in fact wrong in all his contentions. Even if he had been right in all of them it would not have affected my general verdict on his book.
These were to be the last words the TLS published on the subject.
When Lewis submitted a reply, criticising the paper for not sending his book for review to an authority in the field and serving up instead the ‘fake-“scholarly”, and the pseudoexpert’, Pryce-Jones informed him it could not be printed as the correspondence page of the next issue was already set up in type. Lewis threatened litigation if this arena remained closed to him. ‘Obviously I cannot afford to allow you to attack me with impunity’, he told Pryce-Jones:
If you do not print my letter in your next issue I shall put the whole business in the hands of my lawyer.
The letter was not printed in the next, nor in subsequent issues. A month later, in belated response to the original article and with his jaw swollen by a large abscess ‘playing ugly tunes on [his] nervous system’, Lewis attended a conference at the Lincoln’s Inn chambers of King’s Council Mr G. Gardiner, accompanied by his solicitor and solicitor’s clerk. He returned to Notting Hill Gate having been given a useful, if discouraging and rather expensive, lesson in the workings of the law of libel.
His solicitors presented their bill for professional charges. For attendance on their client and ‘advising as to proceedings being taken in respect of the defamatory matter contained in the . . . article’, for ‘perusing and considering papers’, for ‘preparing lengthy Case to Counsel to advise and instructing Counsel to advise in conference’ and for attending with their client at conference with Counsel, Clifford-Turner & Co. claimed ten guineas. The fee of Mr G. Gardiner KC for his advice, ‘that in the absence of proof of malice, no proceedings should be commenced’, came to a further £21 15s.
‘It appears I can be attacked with impunity and with obvious malice, provided I am not personally maligned’, he told David Kahma.
*
At the same time the Sitwells were costing him dear. Services of the American press-clipping agency Giovanelli had engaged were far more expensive than Lewis had expected, and neither Osbert nor his sister had as yet made any public pronouncement for which he could sue them. ‘If that great fat bum doesn’t utter a good hot libel’, he railed, ‘I will never pay any attention to him again.’
Evelyn Waugh was in New York at the same time. ‘The Sitwells were rampaging about . . . cutting a terrific splash’, he wrote home. ‘Every magazine has six pages of photographs of them headed “The Fabulous Sitwells” . . . Goodness how they are enjoying it.’ Giovanelli sent Lewis press clippings of their triumphant progress. A photograph in Life magazine showed a party given in their honour at the Gotham Book Mart. Lewis described them:
surrounded by all the dolly vardens – pansies or whatever you call them . . . The British pansy-poet, Auden, was there, perched on a ladder . . . [Charles] Henri Ford squatted on the floor, Osbert (his hair permanently waved) with a sullen frowning, frustrate uneasy smirk. Edith is the only dignified girl there.
It is difficult to believe that a degree of envy was not mixed with the scorn. The Sitwells’ lionisation in New York, a city in which he had experienced such miserable and impecunious defeat nine years before, must have been especially galling. At the same time, their success encouraged his own plans for an American lecture tour in the new year.
In September he told Giovanelli he would be reaching New York ‘shortly after Christmas’ and at the beginning of November he was planning to arrive ‘late January or February’. Giovanelli visited the Colston Leigh Lecture Bureau in New York and was told that a tour needed to be planned from eight to twelve months in advance, but in December, undeterred, Lewis still intended to make the trip if he had ‘2 or 3 odd lectures . . . in or near New York’, to be arranged, if possible, for March. The further setting back of his departure was occasioned by plans for a retrospective exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street. A fortnight later he told Giovanelli the show was to open on 30 March. This of course would further delay his arrival in America.
* The story is more complicated. Lewis was paid £50 for the picture in May 1936, by Messrs Phillips and Brown, directors of the Leicester Galleries. Two months later they sold it to Behrens for £350. In 1943 Rothenstein persuaded Behrens to sell the picture to the Tate Gallery and Behrens offered it at the price he had paid seven years before. But on being told the Tate Trustees had ‘fearfully little money’, he let them have it for £250. Then in July 1947 Behrens wrote to Rothenstein explaining he had always felt uncomfortable at the Tate having had to buy the picture when most other works from his collection had either been given on loan or donated. With the letter he enclosed a cheque for £350. It had evidently slipped his mind that the Trustees had only paid him £250 in the first place. It must also have slipped the collective mind of the Trustees, because they warmly accepted Behrens’s generosity and relabelled the portrait as a gift. It was a further two years before the overpayment was noticed and the Deputy Keeper, Norman Reid, was asked to send Behrens a cheque for £100. The last item of correspondence on the subject is a note from Behrens thanking Reid for his letter, but politely pointing out that he had neglected to enclose the cheque.
* Voted £40,000 per annum by Parliament the previous December.