Some Sort of Genius

In December, Lewis had been promised by Methuen that the proofs of his novel, once called Chateau Rex, then later The Victory of Albert Temple, and now sporting the unwieldy title Are you perhaps a Fool, my son!, would be ready for him to correct ‘just before Christmas’.

When they failed to materialise he tried, throughout January, to reach Alan White by telephone. He left messages but received no response. Eventually, and the effect on Lewis’s prickly sensibilities was like ‘a slap in the face’, a telephonist relayed his name to the Managing Director and returned with the message: ‘Mr White says he is busy, and cannot speak to you.’

In February he was told that White had gone to Australia, but that proofs of the novel would arrive ‘in two or three weeks time’. They did not. By the end of March, White had returned from his travels but either did not receive, or chose to ignore, Lewis’s messages. Then in April, Lewis sent him a note requesting a meeting as he had ‘several things’ he wished to talk about. On a separate matter he enclosed a cutting from the Daily Mirror for 27 March. ‘I think something ought to be done’, he wrote and asked White to let him have the cutting back.

No more than a mile away, to the northwest of Kensington Gardens Studios, the first corpses had come to light three days before that issue of the Mirror. Scantily clad women, strangled and probably worse, had been stuffed into a kitchen alcove behind a flimsy partition, wallpapered over for disguise. The newspaper-buying public was already agog at the grisly revelations of what journalists were now referring to as ‘The House of Murder’ at the blind end of a cul-de-sac called Rillington Place.

Lionel Crane was covering the sociological background to the case for the Mirror. Notting Hill had a reputation for violent death, he declared, going back to the 1930s and, beyond that, to a time when highwaymen, vagabonds and murderers infested the area. As John Reginald Halliday Christie’s sinister activities were exposed, Crane conjured up a seedy underworld of cafés, popular music, tea and teddy boys:

It was a big night last night in the Juke Box Cafe in London’s Notting Hill district. Frankie Laine and Johnnie Ray bellowed at the top of their voices. Teenage boys in American-type drape suits lolled against the tea and sandwich counter. The balls in the pin table in the corner clicked busily.

He described the crime-ridden area as lying ‘only a cosh throw from some of Kensington’s most elegant streets’. He heard of a local shop being wrecked by a gang of youths, the shopkeeper’s wife pelted with bottles. He saw the leader of such a gang, barely out of short trousers but carrying a car’s starting handle as a weapon. ‘Police now regard it as Black Spot Number One and locally they have given it a change of name to Rotting Hill.’

The headline of the article was a mock-up of a street sign:

The Royal Borough of Kensington

ROTTING HILL, W.11.

This was the cutting that Lewis sent to his publisher with the vague injunction that ‘something ought to be done’.

There was a more pressing concern for Lewis at this time than a minor infringement of copyright. He was urgently in need of fresh funds.

He had, by now, written, ‘at least in the rough’, the two books intended to complete The Childermass. They were to be called Monstre Gai – ‘this combination of words’, he helpfully volunteered to I. A. Richards, ‘from Voltaire’ – and Malign Fiesta. Respectively of 300 and 250 published pages each, they were written in little more than a year but would require ‘months of polishing’. When he managed to reach White by telephone in April, he asked for a further £100 to enable him to finish this work, for which Methuen had already paid him an advance of £300. Before White agreed to this, Lewis made a second appeal a few days later. He had, he said, given a far too optimistic account, during their phone conversation, of what he should need to properly finish the two books. ‘When we wrote the agreement’, he went on:

I was so overjoyed that the ‘Childermass’ was at last to be finished, that I did not sit down and soberly work out how much money I should require to complete this difficult piece of writing.

At first he had thought that the £1,000 advanced him by the BBC would enable him, not only to produce what was necessary for Bridson to convert into radio drama, but also to fulfil ‘the much more exacting task’ of finishing the writing for publication by Methuen. ‘But I did not know at that time that I should be writing two full length books . . . The three hundred advance, to cover everything, would have been all right – I would even have accepted no advance at all,’ he rather implausibly confided, ‘if the B.B.C. money had proved adequate.’ Under the circumstances, and ‘dreadfully sorry’, he was obliged to ask for a further £300 in advance. Of this, the £100 already requested was a matter of some urgency and he trusted White would get it to him as quickly as possible.

He was greatly dismayed by White’s reply. The publisher was ‘extremely sorry’ but, having ‘earnestly considered the problem’, could advance no more on Part II of The Childermass than the £300 already received. In his defence, and to show that Methuen & Co. had, to date, ‘not been backward in making advances’, he drew the author’s attention to unearned balances on the books published so far and to the advances on books as yet undelivered or, like the new novel, not yet published. This formed a total of £1,300.*

Lewis was particularly stung by mention, in terms he interpreted as reproachful, of the alarming grand total of outstanding advances. ‘If a publisher is taking on a number of books of a writer like myself,’ he argued, ‘it is obvious that now and then, such a momentary collision of advances must occur, especially where books are commissioned and the publication considerably delayed.’ And he returned to the vexed subject of his ‘long novel’, implying it was not his fault the largest outstanding advance was on a typescript White had by this time been in possession of for a year and which appeared no closer to being published.

In conclusion, and no doubt realising that White was immovable on the £300, he demanded £100: ‘nothing to do with “Childermass”, just a general advance’.

White wrote to say that, while ‘a general advance’ was not practicable, he was prepared to add a further £100 to the £300 already advanced so that the total of £400 be considered as the advance in respect of Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, and Lewis was to drop him a line if this was acceptable. Lewis would have telephoned but his telephone was out of order and it was, besides, of little importance to him if the money was described as a ‘general advance’ or as an advance on something specific so long as it was advanced him immediately:

Of course let it be that, if you prefer it that way.

His impatience for the money was apparent in the terse communication that, to save time, he had ‘someone’, probably Gladys, deliver to the Methuen office on 1 May:

Would you be so kind as to send it as quickly as possible: it is, as I wrote you, urgent.

In a diary entry of 3 July, Dorothy Richards recorded her impressions of Lewis and his wife at a restaurant in Charlotte Street. Dorothy and her husband were in England on their regular summer visit from Harvard and, as they were to do in subsequent years, had arranged to dine with the Lewises. Between that early July in 1953 and the summer of 1956, she provided her diary with a brief annual bulletin, sympathetic but unsentimental, born as it was of no great personal liking, of his conversation, behaviour and deteriorating physical appearance.

When Mr and Mrs Richards got to the Restaurant de l’Etoile they found Lewis and Gladys waiting for them. This was not unusual as they were often early for engagements. Joyce Bridson recalled them arriving at her flat for dinner half an hour before they were expected and finding her still in her underwear. At the Etoile Mrs Lewis was sipping a gin. Dorothy found her ‘pleasant’ and thought she ‘must have been very pretty’ once. Lewis was ‘very frail and faint’. Unaware she was describing characteristics of the hormonal changes brought about by his pituitary tumour, she remarked on ‘that queer white skin, unlined face and hands’. The hands, she noticed, were ‘beautifully manicured’. At dinner she found his expensive tastes irritating, especially as her husband would be picking up the bill. Demanding a half-bottle of 1935 or 1936 champagne for himself, she noted, he left the ‘best part of a glass’ untouched. Her general impression was that he had ‘lost his vigour of phrase’ and was a ‘very pathetic shadow’ and that the occasion ‘all felt hollow’. There was, presumably, from Richards and perhaps from Mrs Lewis, a ‘vein of flattery going on all the time’. Lewis made ‘sly remarks about everybody’ and Dorothy found this particularly distasteful when such remarks were aimed at Eliot, ‘whom one knows has done a lot of nice things for him’. He told them more about the ‘Tudor period’ in Toronto, spoke warmly about his time at Assumption College and talked a lot about young Henry Ford in Detroit, ‘whom’, he assured them mysteriously, ‘one could see a good deal of’. On matters of more immediate concern, he complained about Alan White at Methuen, who kept insulting him, and gave a progress report on Part II of The Childermass: he had ‘got something written’ of the two volumes and thought there might be another one to follow, but none were in a publishable state as yet.

At the end of the meal, and issuing from the restaurant, his vulnerability and lack of co-ordination became apparent. He was ‘strangely unable to put his hat on or get into [the] taxi – a kind of complete loss of balance. Like an old frog the feeling he leaves you with.’ Dorothy Richards’s 1953 summer bulletin concluded: ‘He seems to be completely lacking in the milk of human kindness.’

Later that month Gladys had a ‘beastly accident’ and dislocated her left arm. It was the second injury she had sustained within two and a half years, the first requiring a course of ten physiotherapy sessions in early 1951. X-rays were now taken of the stricken limb and it had to remain immobilised for some time. As a result of this catastrophe she was unable to type, and Lewis was still excusing lapses in his correspondence three months later: ‘My wife received an injury to her arm’, he told Hugh Kenner in October. ‘This is rather as if I had my own right arm in a sling.’ The injury was serious enough to warrant three guineas worth of treatment from Philip Newman, a Harley Street orthopaedic surgeon, and was still giving enough cause for concern at the beginning of December for her referral as a private patient to Professor Brian Wellingham Windeyer, Director of the Meyerstein Institute of Radiotherapy at the Middlesex Hospital.

In August, Lewis offered Methuen ‘a short book on Extremism in the Visual Arts’. The matter was urgent. Having just heard White was going on holiday in two days’ time, and ‘owing to the economic difficulty’ in which he found himself, it was imperative that Lewis ‘immediately market’ the work. ‘Rapid publication’, he added, ‘would be essential for the success of the book.’ This was a rather pointed reference to Methuen’s far from ‘rapid publication’ of his novel, for which he was still awaiting proofs.

Two days later White took delivery of what perhaps proved to be his holiday reading: the typescript for a 30,000-word book concerned with a crisis in modern painting. This crisis was being brought about, Lewis believed, by contemporary artists pushing the limits of abstraction to a point beyond which art logically ceased to exist; ‘driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero’. Methuen published The Demon of Progress in the Arts fifteen months later.

Three months after Alan White left for his holiday with the typescript of this diatribe against modernism, Lewis wrote to tell McLuhan that he had just received, ‘one year after submitting the Ms’, page-proofs of his novel. ‘One year’ was in fact a charitable estimate. It was closer to two. Then, in late December, there was a flurry of unaccustomed urgency from Methuen. White telephoned to say that the Book Society was prepared to ‘recommend’ the novel if publication could be in April. The opportunity of printing ‘Recommended by the Book Society’ somewhere on the dust wrapper was sufficient incentive to have it rushed to press without further delay. Not content with a telephone call, White expressed a letter to Lewis on 28 December to ensure it reached him the following morning. If the April deadline was to be met it was imperative the corrected proofs be returned during the following few days. The letter also contained first mention of the title which author and publisher had by now agreed on: not Chateau Rex; nor The Victory of Albert Temple; nor yet You are perhaps a Fool, my son!; nor even A Man Cannot Kill Himself Twice. Instead, it was to be called Self Condemned.

‘The Hotel, first and last, is the central feature of the book,’ Lewis told Michael Ayrton a month later, ‘and the death of the Hotel gives you flames and ice, smoke, and ruin.’ The Tudor Hotel had become the ‘Hotel Blundell’. The fantastic conjunction of fire and ice which the Lewises witnessed on the morning of 15 February 1943, and which had effectively brought to an end their ‘Tudor Period’, now formed the climax of the middle section of the novel. Ayrton had been commissioned to design the dust wrapper and Lewis was sure it would be ‘superb’. He hoped that White was ‘not being too tiresome’, and told his young friend that if the design required a particular colour that the publisher’s budget would not run to, ‘let me know, and I will see what I can do with him.’

But if Ayrton was constrained by printing costs, he made good use of the colour blocks available to him. The dust wrapper showed the ‘central feature’ of Lewis’s book, the hotel, with one side sheathed in icicles, grey and black against white, the other side spouting a swirl of yellow flame and picked out with hot patches of red. A preliminary design had the towering building viewed from a conventional angle somewhere around street level. The finished version presented an aerial view, the vertiginous perspective enlarging a pair of upper windows to form the hollow eye sockets of a face.

Lewis pronounced himself satisfied, although Ayrton was never sure how the blind man acquired a sufficiently accurate impression to be satisfied or otherwise. He assumed that Mrs Lewis described the design in detail and Lewis, ‘using his previous knowledge’, constructed the image from her description.

Lewis need not have worried about White making difficulties for his protégé. There would be greater problems over the design for a reprint of The Apes of God.

Late the previous year Bernard Hanison, of Arco Publishers Limited, had noticed that 1955 would be the 25th anniversary of Lewis’s gigantic satire. He approached Methuen in December and, having ascertained that White had no plans to publish the title, proposed to Lewis that Arco produce an edition limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies. The author was to write an introduction and Ayrton to design the wrapper. Ayrton recalled that Hanison considered Lewis’s original jacket design to be ‘out of date’, a judgement which drew from Lewis a grim laugh. Apart from the two innovations of introduction and ‘up-to-date’ jacket, Arco’s would be a photographic facsimile of the 1930 Arthur Press edition. Even the retail price of the tome, after 25 years, was to remain unchanged at three guineas.

The contract, vetted by Lewis’s solicitor, was signed in mid-March. He was given an advance of £175. But Ayrton’s part in the enterprise got off to a bad start. Offered 15 guineas to execute the wrapper design, he demanded more, only to be told 15 guineas was all that was on offer for the job.

In March, Lewis received a letter from 10 Downing Street informing him that, on the Prime Minister’s recommendation, the Queen had been pleased to award him a supplementary Civil List Pension of £150, with effect from 1 April, in addition to the £250 per annum he was already receiving. Again, he was asked to acknowledge the communication and to say whether the arrangement met with his approval. Lewis replied that he was grateful to the Prime Minister for recommending the increase. He added that ‘to be receiving it from the hands of so personally great a man gives this public attribution an especial value’.

It is difficult to reconcile this glowing description of Sir Winston Churchill with the man he once slightingly described as an ‘ex-Minister of State’ and who, during a Royal Academy banquet 15 years before, delivered his ‘passionate advocacy of platitude’ at the expense of Lewis’s rejected portrait of T. S. Eliot.

In the Times Literary Supplement of 16 April, Methuen was able to announce ‘Two Book Society Recommendations’ forthcoming from 36 Essex Street. One was Karl von Frisch’s popular account of his discoveries in apian behaviour, The Dancing Bees. The other, Self Condemned, was published the following week in an edition of 3,000 copies, to largely favourable, often enthusiastic reviews. It was generally felt that the book’s faults were far outweighed by its brilliance. L.A.G. Strong in The Spectator called it a ‘vast novel, at its best magnificent, at its worst stupefying’ and saw in it ‘many signs that suggest further possibilities in the growth of an artist who, unequal though his work may always be, has lit his age with an occasional irritated lightning flash of genius.’ John Biggs-Davison in The Tablet called it ‘powerful, witty and withering’. The anonymous reviewer of the TLS said it lacked a satisfactory structure and that its digressions were ‘tiresome’ and impeded continuity. Nevertheless, he concluded, it was ‘a brilliant, disorganised book, yet one which carries a compulsion to read it to the bitter end’.

L. P. Hartley welcomed it in the most glowing terms for Time and Tide, suggesting that, far from weakening the book, as other commentators suggested, by presenting the reader with so unlikeable a main protagonist as René Harding, Lewis had actually strengthened it:

The fact that [Harding] can command our sympathy, as ultimately he does, by sheer integrity and without any appeal ad misericordiam, any soft spots for pity to light on, is a proof of the unswerving consistency with which Mr Wyndham Lewis has drawn his portrait.

Alan Pryce-Jones, writing for the London Magazine, and drawing upon acquaintance and conversation with Lewis in the late Forties to trace the novel’s autobiographical roots, suggested that:

things became too abominable . . . to be borne. The war itself, an exile not less disturbing than [his protagonist’s], the Welfare State, the general collapse of good sense in international affairs, the rise of upstarts everywhere: Mr Lewis is not alone in finding all this a sore trial.

But he concluded that raw hatred was not conducive to the creation of a true work of art and that ‘a point of repose’ was needed, ‘from which the excesses of the twentieth century can be seen with a calm satiric eye’. Lacking such a viewpoint the novel ultimately failed. Pryce-Jones nevertheless applauded its vigour, its lack of pretension and its refreshing break with the genteel tradition of the modern novel. Unable to control his instincts for tinkering with other men’s prose, the literary editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who six years before had enraged Lewis by altering a book review and drawn down on his head sundry pages of blistering invective and threats of legal action, could not resist suggesting the insertion of a hyphen: ‘Self Condemned (does he not mean Self-Condemned?)’.

Patricia Hodgart also expressed mixed reactions in the Manchester Guardian. She found the first part ‘tiresome and repetitive . . . sometimes like D. H. Lawrence at his very worst’. The middle section, however, contained some of the author’s ‘most astonishing and imaginative writing’. She concluded that: ‘It is painful to read, but some unnecessary pain could be avoided if Mr Lewis were more critical of his prose style.’

Walter Allen, in the New Statesman and Nation, said it was one of Lewis’s most powerful pieces of writing, ‘at once terrifying and comic, comparable in its total effect to Kafka’s America’. He ended by castigating others who reviewed it with anything less than admiration:

It is, of course, superbly written, for of one kind of English prose, that which we associate first of all with Thomas Nashe, Mr Lewis is the modern master. This, it must be admitted, is not what one would gather from some reviewers of Mr Lewis’s new novel, reading whom one can only echo Shaw’s ‘Really the English do not deserve to have great men.’

The Book Society’s recommendation had encouraged brisk trade and substantial headway was being made in sales to the lending libraries. A second printing of 2,000 copies was published in June and a further 2,000 the following February. Curiously, nowhere on Ayrton’s strikingly designed dust wrapper did the seductive words ‘Recommended by the Book Society’ appear.

In May, McLuhan wrote to say that he had not only read the novel himself but had been so busy thereafter evangelising the book and pressing it upon his friends that he had been unable to retrieve it for a second reading. He believed it to be a ‘very important piece of work . . . The first time that anything Canadian has been given serious treatment.’ It was still not available in Canadian bookshops, however. ‘Toronto waits humped in silence’, he reported, ‘for the book to hit the stalls.’

Self Condemned received a belated response in Toronto from the novelist Robertson Davies in October 1955. Writing for Saturday Night, he criticised ‘the boring quality of the writing, the flat-footedness of the prose, the lack of climax in the construction’. Using an imaginative but scarcely coherent metaphor, he described it reading ‘as though it had been written in lemon juice, with a rusty nail, on a piece of tin’. Davies denied disliking the book because it was critical of his country. Indeed:

A good sousing satire on Canada would be a fine thing; but the Momaco of Mr Lewis’s atrabilious description is not like anything in Canada, or perhaps in the world. It exists only in the bleak waste land of his imagination.

Curiously, Davies was under the impression that Lewis had had a comfortable time in Canada during the war, ‘painting portraits and sniffing the incense which was liberally burned by the nobility and gentry at his shrine.’ But if his experience was really anything like that delineated in his book, Davies felt heartily sorry for him.

The 1,000 limitation sheets for the Arco edition of The Apes of God were delivered to Lewis in May and he set about signing them with his blue ‘Biro’. Bernard Hanison was present at the Notting Hill flat for part of this operation and remembered Mrs Lewis guiding her husband’s hand to the correct place on each sheet.

Michael Ayrton completed the dust-wrapper design in the same month. A great mandrill baboon crouched on the front cover, eating a piece of manuscript with its right hand, grasping a hunting crop in its left and clutching a palette and brushes in the toes of its left foot. The lash of the hunting crop, intended as reference to Part VI of the novel, ‘Ape Flagellant’, curled along the lower edge of the design and around the words ‘by WYNDHAM LEWIS’.

For some reason Bernard Hanison found fault and returned it to Ayrton with instructions for emendation. Lewis, according to Hanison, was mortified when he heard that his protégé’s work had been slighted and insisted the design remain as Ayrton originally conceived it, even paying his friend’s fee out of his own pocket. If Hanison’s story is to be believed, Ayrton may not have known whence his fee finally came. Certainly, in the account he gave of the affair the following year, he made no mention of the money. ‘The publishers’, he said, ‘were not pleased until Mr Lewis instructed them to be so.’

In July I. A. Richards and his wife were in London again for their summer vacation from Harvard. They came for dinner on the 21st, Dorothy divulging no details of the meal in her diary apart from the observation that Mrs Lewis was a ‘striking cook’. As in the previous year’s entry, mention was made of how beautiful she must once have been. Also, that she was ‘a heavy drinker’ and ‘non stop smoker’. A tour of the abandoned studio upstairs was granted by their host. Dorothy called it ‘his strange messy attic’. She found Lewis himself ‘quite a different man at home’ and that evening ‘he was at his nicest’, she thought. It was an impression much improved on that of the previous July at the Etoile, despite the scurrilous baiting of her oldest friend’s husband, Robert McAlmon, as ‘a homo’ and suggestions that other mutual friends were probably ‘homos’ too.

She observed that he did not seem to ‘move with any security in his own room’. She noted how pasty he looked, as if he didn’t get enough fresh air, and the suspicion was confirmed by his wife. ‘She said they never went out.’ As Lewis talked about the two further parts of The Childermass all but complete, and of The Demon of Progress in the Arts, Dorothy’s attention was drawn to his ‘beautiful pale mobile hands’.

Another visitor that year remembered his hands ‘swollen by illness but still beautiful’. Patricia Hutchins had come to ask him questions about Joyce and Pound. She remembered climbing the concrete stairs and negotiating the long, uncared-for passageway to his front door. Beside the door, ‘typed downways, as if to be more difficult’, there was a faded notice:

Mrs Lewis showed her into a dark sitting room full of books and pictures. ‘Soon a large, slow-moving man entered and was helped, or rather refused help, to settle in an armchair with rugs round his knees.’ He had an invalid’s fretfulness about draughts and asked if all the doors were shut. Miss Hutchins spoke from the sofa, where she sat next to a pile of reference books and dictionaries and a large pad of foolscap covered with wavering lines of thick pencilled notes. Misunderstanding his query about the doors she tried to reassure him. ‘I’m all right here’, she said. And Lewis remembered his customary courtesy to female visitors. ‘I thought I’d be in a draught’, he said. ‘I should have asked if you were comfortable.’ Mrs Lewis sat on a stool, forming, with armchair and sofa, a triangle. ‘My husband, you know, is blind’, she gently told their guest.

He wore a green eyeshade and she saw, below it, that his pupils were green-grey ‘muffed like a dimmed bulb’. She noted also the skin of his face, ‘curiously unmarked by the inner life’. And it was when she showed Mrs Lewis her book, James Joyce’s Dublin, and this was given her husband to hold, that Miss Hutchins noticed his swollen but still beautiful hands. His fingers moved lightly over the binding and pages. ‘Well made’, he said. ‘I can feel it.’

The interview began a little awkwardly, Miss Hutchins suspecting he was afraid she would stay too long. Then she got him talking about the time in 1920 when he and Eliot delivered Pound’s second-hand shoes to Joyce and he relaxed into genial reminiscence of old friends: one 14 years dead, one a Nobel laureate and the other an indicted traitor or madman. ‘In Paris that time’, he told her, ‘we behaved like schoolboys, and didn’t mention serious subjects.’ She told him she had heard it said that the character of Pullman in The Childermass was based on Joyce, and he seemed surprised. ‘Oh I don’t know about that’, he demurred. He told her about Pound sitting for his portrait in the studio above, stretched out because he needed his rest and had not the energy he liked to make out that he had. And he recalled the poet’s green eyes wide open for a instant, the only time he ever really saw them.

‘Come and see me again’, he told her as she left.

But the next time she entered that room she came uninvited, into a cold, windy, gutted shell. The pictures, the books, even the shelves had gone and the rain-soaked, frozen floorboards were littered with broken glass and plaster, fallen laths and old press clippings.

* This did not include an extra £90 paid to Chatto & Windus, when rights were transferred to Methuen, in respect of unearned royalty balances on Tarr, The Wild Body and Part I of The Childermass.