Late in 1954, Michael Ayrton began work on a series of illustrations for Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, to be published in a single volume by Methuen after the BBC had finished broadcasting them in October 1955. Each part was to contain three illustrations. The Childermass, when it was published in a uniform edition in 1956, contained another three. Ayrton himself wanted to produce at least six for each book and Methuen were perfectly amenable to the increase. Lewis, however, was insistent that there should be no more than three. Moreover each illustration, through Mrs Lewis’s detailed description, was, as it were, run past his mind’s eye for final approval. And he was ‘explicit’, Ayrton recalled, ‘in his requests for alterations and new versions.’
The collective title for the three books was to be The Human Age; derived from the idea, advanced by the character of Sammael in Malign Fiesta, of combining the Human and the Angelic in a quasi-divine hybrid. Lewis had, for a time, contemplated calling the series The Human Dream but abandoned this on the grounds that it might have been thought he was referring to Christianity as a mere dream.
*
Writing shortly after The Demon of Progress in the Arts was published, and incidentally questioning whether painters were really so easily led by art critics as he made out in that book, Naomi Mitchison told Lewis of a recent dream of her own:
in full colour as many of my dreams are – of an enormous exhibition of your pictures, which were in a very strange variety of styles – more pictures than anyone could paint in a life-time. In fact, I thought some of them looked suspiciously like Matisse, but I didn’t like to say so because there was a catalogue. I’m not sure what you make of that.
A month or so later Lewis received a letter from Sir John Rothenstein which gave Mitchison’s dream the quality of prescience. The Trustees of the Tate Gallery were hoping to honour him with a retrospective exhibition. It would cover ‘the whole range of [his] work as a painter and a draughtsman, together with a pendant illustrative of the Vorticist movement which [he] led, including the work of Wadsworth, Roberts, Hamilton, and others’. The Trustees appreciated that the exhibition would not be possible without his own ‘goodwill and assistance’ and Rothenstein was writing to ascertain whether they could count on this. He added ‘that, as an almost lifelong admirer’ of Lewis’s art and thought, he ‘should be very proud to be associated with such an exhibition’.
Lewis replied that the thought of an exhibition at the Tate was ‘most stirring’ and that Rothenstein might rely on any assistance he could give. The Vorticist ‘pendant’ was, however, to prove an initial source of discontent. Lewis felt it unfair that, while other recent retrospective exhibitions, such as those of Jacob Epstein, Ben Nicholson and Stanley Spencer, spread themselves through three galleries, his own would occupy only two, the third being devoted to a class of artist to be called ‘other Vorticists’. He was eventually persuaded by Rothenstein to accept the arrangement, albeit ‘with a grace that did not disguise his disappointment’.
When the exhibition opened the following year, the objections of one ‘other Vorticist’ to this arrangement were not so easily dealt with and continued long after Lewis’s death.
*
In February, Lewis addressed ‘the question of obscenity’ in The Human Age and told White that he had modified ‘offensive passages’ and removed ‘objectionable words’. The abusive exchanges between angel and devil in Monstre Gai he preferred to leave untouched and the anatomically robust descriptions of the goat-men in the same chapter did not, he felt, need ‘watering down’. He did, however, express a willingness to be guided by White in these matters.
As late as April, he was still making excisions. He informed White that on page 51 of the galley proofs the words ‘Only had you allowed my hand to wander a little, the nature of your sex would have been revealed’ might be deleted. The sentence followed Sentoryen’s placing of Pullman’s hand on his bare midriff and the question ‘had you not known I was a man, but thought I was a girl, would you have had the same sensations as if you had been caressing a woman?’ The proposition remained. But Pullman’s reply, with its indirect allusion to hand and genital contact, had to come out.
*
Sir John Rothenstein had not met Lewis since interviewing him in 1951 as part of the groundwork for the second volume of Modern English Painters: Lewis to Moore. During their long conversation on that occasion, ‘Lewis was very pale . . . his features were puffy’, Rothenstein recalled, and ‘he looked seriously ill.’ But his energy, if only fuelled by bile, seemed unimpaired, as he raked over past quarrels and current slights. Four years later when the Tate director visited the Notting Hill flat to discuss the forthcoming exhibition, Lewis’s condition had deteriorated greatly:
I was shocked to find him aged and ill . . . utterly reduced, his features white and without form, his energy ebbed away. Apprehending how changed I found him he spoke with envy of Augustus John’s health and in sudden irrelevant disparagement of Matthew Smith’s painting as ‘the taste of the stupid.’
Smith had been honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 1953. With this in mind, Lewis’s disparagement might not have been entirely irrelevant. If he was enviously comparing the tribute accorded Smith with that being prepared for himself, it cannot have escaped him that, in 1953, the 81 canvases representing that painter’s contribution to British art, ‘noble and unique’ according to Bryan Robertson in The Listener, had occupied all three of the Tate’s customary exhibition galleries, instead of only two.
*
A month after Rothenstein’s visit, the BBC’s dramatisation of The Human Age received its first complete performance. The Childermass was broadcast in a new production on Tuesday, 24 May. As in the first version, four years before, it lasted one and a half hours. Two days later came Monstre Gai, at a gruelling three and a half hours the longest play in the series, and, finally, the following Monday evening, Malign Fiesta went out from 6 o’clock until 8.
A party was held at Broadcasting House to celebrate completion of the seven-hour drama. Walter Allen found the author sitting alone on a sofa, ‘a blind titan’. Lewis remarked that V. S. Pritchett had just been talking to him. ‘Pritchett says he thinks my books are very funny.’ He repeated the epithet: ‘Funny!’ Allen remembered ‘a wealth of derision in his enunciation of that word “funny” ’.
The same could not, unreservedly, be said of The Human Age. Dorothy Richards heard that their friends the Jack Sweeneys had been sickened, listening to the infernal torture sequences in Malign Fiesta, and Mrs Lewis herself confessed to being ‘upset by the cruelty of it all’. While it could hardly have been laid entirely at Lewis’s door, the Richardses heard that audiences for the BBC’s Third Programme were not on the increase. They received a similar report from P. H. Newby of the BBC Talks Department, who told them that, while the plays had caused ‘a lot of discussion’ and were ‘worthwhile’, he could not say they were a success.
All three plays were repeated in July and again in October. By contractual agreement this last sequence was completed immediately prior to the publication of Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta in a single volume by Methuen.
Dorothy Richards and her husband visited London late in the summer of that year. Their annual dinner appointment with the Lewises was in September, at the recently refurbished Café Royal. The place had just celebrated its ninetieth anniversary but was empty, the food bad and expensive, and Lewis, ‘very old, shrunk and collapsed’, his face ‘gone very limp and slack’. As Dorothy recorded the strained and depressing evening in her diary, Mrs Lewis, as if to compensate for her husband, was ‘very vivacious’:
she played to his hand all evening – very gallantly. He unable to take part in the conversation. We all threw the ball at him as hard as we could but he couldn’t see it. He slumped over the table and . . . went to sleep from quite early on. Horribly pathetic . . . It’s an awful desert for the old.
Mrs Richards felt just a flicker of irritation, as two years before, at the expense incurred by geriatric caprice as Lewis ordered Moët et Chandon at £1 18s. the half-bottle and ‘which he didn’t finish’. She was more understanding of his lack of appetite for the ‘very dull’ food.
There were ‘flashes’ when he seemed to wake up. He spoke of the Childermass broadcast and called it ‘a hubbub in the desert’ but there was nothing the others could take up. Then, following the struggle of a visit to the lavatory, he appeared to revive and Dorothy felt he would have sat up half the night. The Richardses made an excuse of the friend they were lodging with in Hampstead and preparations were made to leave at 11 o’clock.
As they helped him into a taxi in Regent Street, Lewis clung to them both as though he thought he would not see them again. Mrs Lewis kissed her hand to them as the taxi drew away. ‘One feels so sad’, Dorothy wrote in her diary and she remembered something Mrs Lewis had told them earlier in the evening, beyond her husband’s hearing. ‘He’s had a very vague day. It’s the pressure on his brain – which has caused his blindness.’ Then she added brightly: ‘But he can do his novel and isn’t vague about the details of that.’
The novel Mrs Lewis referred to was to be the last published in her husband’s lifetime. Late in 1953, Lewis offered a synopsis to White, introducing it as ‘an extremely topical’ and ‘a deeply interesting subject matter’. He did not feel the need to enumerate to his publisher ‘the many facets, religious and political’, which the narrative provided and imposed. White received the synopsis on a Thursday and Lewis expected him to give it his personal attention over the weekend in order to be able to give an account of his reactions the following week. ‘I would like to stress’, he concluded, ‘that it is my intention to make this book extremely easy to be read by everybody.’
The potentially popular novel concerned the downfall of a charismatic High Anglican vicar with left-wing views, dubbed by the popular press ‘The Red Priest’. The Reverend Augustine Card, a boxing Blue at Oxford, is an immensely powerful athlete. A fight with his curate, a smaller man with a heart condition, results in Father Card serving a three-year prison sentence for manslaughter. On his release, Card leaves his wife and child and seeks redemption as a missionary among the Eskimos of British Columbia. There, history repeats itself: he kills an Eskimo and is gruesomely butchered by other Eskimos in revenge.
The topicality of the story rested not so much on the melodramatic events, but on the identification of High Anglicanism with Communism, notable in such figures as Conrad Noel, the ‘Red Vicar’ of Thaxted, his equally ‘Red’ successor, the Reverend Jack Putterill, and the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson. In 1947 the Archbishop had publicly distanced himself from his Dean’s political utterances and in 1951, as a friend of the Soviet Union, Father Johnson was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.
By October 1955, only a month after the ‘horribly pathetic’ Café Royal dinner, Lewis had finished The Red Priest. White read the typescript over a weekend ‘with all the pleasure and admiration’ he expected to feel.
*
Immediately following the last complete broadcast of The Human Age on the 11th, 19th and 25th of October, Methuen published the 566-page volume containing Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta.
Despite its size and weight, Patricia Hutchins carried it around with her ‘in bus, train, underground and restaurant’ because, she told Lewis, it had ‘got a hold’ of her. She was, however, disappointed not to find a few estate agents in his inferno. Looking for a new flat at the time, Miss Hutchins felt that members of this profession ‘would have interests there!’ And Naomi Mitchison wrote:
What a terrifying book. It’s like a congealed nightmare and I can’t think how you could bear writing it except that I suppose it was better to get it out than have it inside . . . I must say, you do succeed in making one’s hair stand on end.
A significant change had been made in the published ending from that which had been dramatised. In the climax of the broadcast, whilst admiring Satterthwaite’s Japanese peony, Pullman was accidentally trodden on by an angel’s foot ‘the size of a German farm-cart’. There was a shrieking crescendo of music, which merged into the shrieking of Satterthwaite, and the last words, before the crash of closing music, were spoken by James McKechnie as the Narrator:
Satters stared down where the foot had been. Upon the ground was his peony as flat as those flowers which we crush between the leaves of a book: souvenirs of a picnic. And there was what had been a head, stamped as flat as a sheet of paper into a shape which was in another dimension to the shapes of the living. He could see teeth mangled into something like a mosaic representing a fish. It was a patchwork pancake, mostly blood. Underneath came a larger unit. It was an enormous cowpat where the body and legs had been and one real boot at the bottom of that, a boot in which was a foot and a bloody section of bone.
In the published version, the giant angel’s sandal crushes only the peony, while Pullman is captured and carried off by a pair of God’s soldiers. His survival admitted the possibility of a sequel. The Human Age was not intended to remain in only three parts after all. Opposite the title page published on 27 October the complete tetralogy was listed. The dust-wrapper blurb promised that Book One, The Childermass, long out of print in the Chatto & Windus edition, would ‘in due course be published in the same format as the present volume’ containing Books Two and Three. Book Four, listed there as if already in existence, was The Trial of Man.
Following on from the ‘Limbo’ of The Childermass, the ‘Purgatory’ of Monstre Gai and the ‘Hell’ of Malign Fiesta, this was to be Lewis’s ‘Paradise’. In it, he told Hugh Kenner, Pullman finds himself ‘in the Celestial Camp . . . in Divine Society’. Naomi Mitchison foresaw the obvious difficulty:
But are you going to be able to describe good as efficiently as you do evil?
It was a question about which Lewis himself was uncertain. ‘God is a big problem’, he told Bridson.
In a surviving fragment, the Supreme Being enters, to a rather unimaginative accompaniment of tinkling little bells. He has grey eyes, blue-grey hair and is dressed in the closest shade of pale bluish-purple to pure white. His voice is deep and gentle and he does not smoke tobacco. Predictably, the Devil has all the best lines:
I saw the shadow of the Beast of Heaven! He was there! I smelt him . . . I smelled the lump of butter which would not melt in his dirty mouth. I smelled the fug of the Goodness – of Someone who is too disgustingly inhuman to live – even in Heaven. Who calls himself All Father, but has not the guts to pup a single son. Whose Son had to be born of a Virgin! I smelled that great absence of guts – that big Nothing we call God!
During the last complete year of his life, Lewis divided his time between the resolution of that ‘big problem’, and the writing of a new novel about an artist.
Twentieth Century Palette was complete but unpolished at the time of his death. It survives as a 253-page typescript divided into 34 chapters tracing a painter’s life from public school just after the First World War, through art school and Montparnasse, commercial success in London, marriage, divorce and remarriage, the loss of an arm at El Alamein, the establishment of his own art school in postwar London to death from natural causes in a private clinic.
Although the chronology of Evelyn Parke’s life was shunted forward some 20 years from Lewis’s own, certain key stages of their early careers can be noted in common. Like Lewis, Evelyn is 16 when sent to an art school on the advice of his house-master. A similar bohemian apprenticeship is enjoyed in Montparnasse. Then, reflecting Lewis’s relationship with Sturge Moore, Evelyn’s education is completed under the informal tutelage of an elder mentor in Holland Park.
However, it is the dissimilarities between the real and fictional lives that are significant. Evelyn is brought up by one parent, a father, and Lewis effectively lost his father at the age of ten. Evelyn has the advantage of a relatively prosperous family and a talent for painting that is immediately recognised by the art world. He is never short of money and is a commercial success from the start. The same could not be said of Lewis. ‘In one way and another’, he wrote, perhaps ruefully, of his protagonist:
he was ideally placed as an artist, and encountered none of the difficulties that handicapped many of those around him.
Both of Evelyn’s marriages produce offspring, two from the second being killed in a car crash along with his second wife. The only child of his first marriage suddenly confronts him, aged 20, as a student in his own art school. Whilst this encounter superficially recalls the reappearance in the 1930s of Lewis’s illegitimate son Peter, Nicholas Parke emerges, not as a juvenile delinquent and unsuccessful burglar, but as a brilliant painter and, eventually, his father’s loving, dutiful and favoured son, his professional colleague and his heir. When Evelyn dies he is mourned by the art world and by the entire student body of the ‘Parke Academy’. He is eulogised in The Times and accompanied to his grave by the strains of the funeral march from Götterdämmerung which gives the final chapter its name. Lewis might have been rehearsing an ideal end to his own career.
*
The previous April he had been agitated to learn that another exhibition, scheduled by the Tate Gallery for the summer of 1956, might overshadow his own. Rothenstein was at pains to reassure him that no date had at that time been fixed for ‘One Hundred Years of German Painting (1850–1950)’ but that the Gallery had no intention of allowing the two exhibitions to overlap. As it happened, the German show immediately preceded Lewis’s and so conflict was avoided. But, with only a month to go before ‘Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism’ opened, Rothenstein foresaw a problem when the Tate was offered an exhibition of Cubist paintings at short notice. ‘Autour du Cubisme’, a miscellaneous group of about thirty pictures, was made available to London because the Muśee d’Art Moderne in Paris had recently been forced to close due to the building’s extreme dilapidation. The proposed dates for the showing of ‘Autour du Cubisme’ were from 27 July to 8 September, and Rothenstein was quick to forestall any objections Lewis might have had:
You will notice that it is not suggested that it should open until yours has had a run of three weeks entirely to itself. The effect of the addition of a small but distinguished group of paintings with a quite definite relation to your own early work, would be to enhance your own exhibition and stimulate further public interest in it. I ought to explain that these Cubist works are not available at any other time and that in my view it would be to the advantage of your exhibition and to the interest of the public generally.
He must have been relieved when Lewis raised no objections, replying with perhaps only the faintest trace of irony:
The overlap you refer to will leave plenty of time for the public to concentrate their attention on my work, I think.
To reach the private view on 5 July, so feeble he was unable to negotiate the flight of steps to the main entrance from Millbank, Lewis had to be taken up in a service lift from the rear. He told Elizabeth Rothenstein how pleased he was with the exhibition and gratified by the consideration with which the Tate had treated him. He added that he was deeply touched by everything her husband had done on his behalf. A photograph shows him strangely isolated in the middle of a row of chairs. Eliot sits on his right, reading the catalogue, and on his left, Ayrton grins into the camera. Both men seem too far removed for conversation from the deaf old man sitting between them. On the other side of Eliot sits Elizabeth Rothenstein talking to the painter Ceri Richards, who leans attentively above her. Sir John Rothenstein stands. At that moment only one member of the group looks at the slumped, white-headed ghost in their midst. Mrs Lewis, at the extreme edge of the picture, closer to the camera than Ayrton, turns to direct a watchful, protective eye at her husband.
‘The private view was a remarkable assembly of Lewis’s old friends’, Rothenstein recalled, ‘T. S. Eliot, the Sitwells, Kate Lechmere . . . Mrs Nevinson, and many others.’ In conversation with Eliot, Rothenstein referred to his oft-quoted appraisal of Lewis in the September 1918 issue of The Egoist: ‘the most fascinating personality of our time’. Rothenstein was convinced that Eliot’s response was not intended to imply the least denigration of the man they were all honouring that night. ‘But that was so many years ago’, the poet said vaguely. It was as if ‘at that particular moment he himself was also occupied with thought of happenings of “many years ago”.’
The last time Rothenstein ever saw Lewis was at the end of the evening, ‘so exhausted by the ordeal that it was only with difficulty that Mrs Lewis, Elizabeth and I could get him into a taxi – exhausted, but touchingly happy.’ In another account, Rothenstein noted tears in the blind man’s eyes.*
The following week I. A. Richards and his wife came to dinner at Kensington Gardens Studios. Dorothy thought Lewis looked better than the last time she saw him on that ghastly night the year before at the Café Royal. She was still slightly repelled by his behaviour. He was ‘irritatingly helpless’ and he complained about his food, particularly the taste of the peaches. At one point he snapped at his wife, wanting to know what she was doing with his plate. It was ‘not amiably said’, Dorothy thought. His deafness made conversation difficult and he did not speak much, except at the beginning of the evening. Then it was to complain that Valerie Fletcher, secretary and soon to be wife of T. S. Eliot, was interfering with his telephone calls to her employer. The Richardses were also shocked, and somewhat incredulous, at a piece of 40-year-old scandal he regaled them with concerning their friend’s first marriage. He claimed that a week after the wedding, Vivien Eliot had an affair with Bertrand Russell ‘which upset Eliot very much’. It may have been the cruel way he told the story, perhaps chuckling about how indignant Eliot had been, and Mrs Lewis’s sense of their guests’ embarrassment, that made her spit the words at him: ‘You would have been indignant!’
Apart from this and complaints about his food, the only other subject of Lewis’s conversation recorded by Dorothy Richards in her diary was that he was ‘pleased with the reception of his show at the Tate’. He showed them the ‘excellent’ Spectator review in which Basil Taylor declared him to be ‘among our greatest portrait painters’ and, furthermore, ‘among the finest draughtsmen in the history of English art, as he is one of our undoubted masters of prose’. Admittedly Taylor’s praise was slightly qualified by the suggestion that, in both prose and drawing, the ‘precision, . . . lucidity, . . . sharpness of observation and imagery’ were sometimes mixed with ‘cliché and formal slackness’.
But, overall, Lewis was entitled to be pleased with the critical reception. The Times reported that ‘in the best of the portraits, an underlying humanity warms the steely strength of the line, and turns a relentless technical precision to the service of some of the most distinguished original creations in modern British art.’ In Time and Tide, Eric Newton devoted two glowing reviews to the exhibition, one week dealing with Lewis as a creator of images, the following week as a painter of portraits. T. W. Earp lauded him in the Daily Telegraph, just as he had reviewed the Redfern Gallery show in 1949 and so impressed Lewis’s Viennese dentist. Even David Sylvester, writing in Encounter, who recognised borrowings in Lewis’s work from both Augustus John and Gauguin, and who thought a comparison with the French paintings of ‘Autour du Cubisme’ was ‘discouraging to chauvinism’, conceded that the large Vorticist canvas, Revolution,* the portraits of the painter’s wife and the semi-abstract drawings of 1925–27 were ‘among the best things done by British painters in our time’.
Rothenstein remembered Lewis telephoning ‘to express his annoyance’ about Myfanwy Piper’s review in the Sunday Times. However, it is difficult to see what he found objectionable in that favourable, if rather sycophantic piece, unless it was that she devoted a considerable part of it to slavishly quoting his own pronouncements from the 1920s back at him.
Michael Ayrton’s review, ‘The Stone Guest’, appearing in the New Statesman and Nation, was also vigorously partisan. But it may have served to trigger the only truly hostile response the exhibition was to provoke. It certainly inflamed an already smouldering resentment, and fuelled a spate of pamphleteering worthy of Lewis himself in his prime.
*
William Roberts had been suspicious about the exhibition from the beginning. Early in February he received an invitation to participate in the ‘Other Vorticists’ section, signed, not by the Director of the Tate, but by Miss Chamot, an assistant keeper. The letter went unanswered. His suspicions regarding the status to be accorded the ‘Other Vorticists’ were not allayed when he learned that a collector had offered to lend the organisers a Roberts painting measuring 4 ft by 5ft which had been refused ‘because it was too big’. The largest of his pictures eventually displayed was The Cinema, borrowed from Violet Schiff, which measured 2ft 8ins by a little over 3 ft.
When the exhibition opened, Roberts acquired a copy of the catalogue and read Lewis’s introduction. The fifth paragraph of this document began with a heavily punctuated declaration:
Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period.
When, a fortnight later, Ayrton repeated that claim in the New Statesman and Nation and added that ‘the other Vorticists collected at the Tate look rather like a lot of sprats a whale has caught’, Roberts fired off letters to The Times, The Listener and, of course, the New Statesman and Nation, in protest. None of these letters was printed. He than had recourse to a small printing firm at 152 Kensington Church Street. The Favil Press Ltd was just around the corner, and barely a minute’s walk from the home of the man whose self-proclaimed position as sole begetter of Vorticism Roberts intended to challenge.
With only two days of the exhibition left to run at the Tate, Mary Chamot sent Lewis two small pamphlets she thought might interest him. The first consisted of two leaves stapled in a yellow paper cover. On the front were the words:
THE
RESURRECTION
OF
VORTICISM
AND THE
APOTHEOSIS
OF
WYNDHAM LEWIS
AT THE
TATE
The message on the back cover was more succinct:
BLAST
VORTICISM
Inside, Roberts gave an account of his grievances through the letters refused publication in The Listener, The Times and New Statesman. A cartoon made heavy-handed reference to Michael Ayrton’s observation in ‘The Stone Guest’, and to John Huston’s epic film, the American release of which had been reported, coincidentally, in the adjacent column of The Times to a review of ‘Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism’. The cartoon showed Moby Dick, standing erect on his fluke in front of an easel, holding a paint brush in one flipper and a palette in the other. It was labelled: THE VORTICIST WHALE.
The second pamphlet was a little more substantial. It consisted of four leaves in a paper cover – an identical shade of pink to the first issue of Blast:
COMETISM
AND
VORTICISM
A
TATE
GALLERY
CATALOGUE
REVISED
On the back cover was an abstract design. At first sight it appeared as a jumble of irregular black shapes, ellipses, and thin cylindrical forms. Closer inspection showed it to be the storm cone emblem from Blast, turned upside down and smashed to bits.
‘I cannot understand how he got it printed’, Lewis told Ayrton:
In the main it is abuse of me. He believes that the Tate show was organised by me, that I am very proud of Vorticism, wish to make use of him, chose the pictures insisting on his own being very few, etc. etc. etc. He regards you as a bad man too . . . If you have seen this wretched little squib give me your views.
Lewis himself took the ‘wretched little squib’ seriously enough to contemplate legal action, and the firm of Field, Roscoe & Co. was alerted to hold itself in readiness.
*
Meanwhile, he had other preoccupations. The functioning of his bladder was causing him discomfort and, probably, embarrassment. Dr McPherson could find no trace of infection and so ruled out cystitis. However, due to the large quantity of vegetables and fruit in his patient’s diet, there was a lower than average degree of acidity in his urine and this in turn was leading to weakness in the muscles of the bladder. The doctor explained that an acid condition of urine helped to stimulate the muscle and maintain its tone. In order to rectify the balance he prescribed a mixture of strychnine and dilute phosphoric acid to be taken before food and ephedrine hydrochloride tablets to be taken after. In addition, McPherson was making enquiries about the availability of absorbent pads, but thought that these might be rendered unnecessary if the medication proved effective.
The Lewises were also being threatened with eviction. The London County Council intended pulling down all the buildings on the south side of Notting Hill Gate in order to widen the road. This scheme was intended to remedy the notorious bottleneck Lewis himself had been the victim of some years before when hit by a motorcycle in the congested traffic.
He was interviewed in the Daily Mail under the headline:
The blind outsider battles on at 72
The correspondent, Richard Evans, finding a rather incongruously keen-eyed, avian simile for a blind man, described him ‘crouched sharp and silvery as a heron in the clutter of his Notting Hill studio’. Lewis clearly enjoyed being seen as an individual under siege and standing up to the faceless authority of local government:
The L.C.C. demolition squads are closing in on me with their picks and hammers to knock this excellent solid room down about my head if I am not out by Christmas. All Notting Hill will be rubble.
Posing as an embattled survivor from a more chivalrous age, he continued indignantly:
Why even the little flower shop guy who makes me a posy of orchids if I am visited by a beautiful lady is being kicked out.
It was the height of the Suez Crisis, and Lewis jokingly called upon the current bogey man of the British and French governments to intervene. ‘Nasser should deal with the L.C.C.’, he told the Mail.
The interview was happily timed to publicise his latest novel, and this was given duly bold prominence: ‘The Red Priest (Methuen 15s.), just published’. Lewis gave Evans a demonstration of his laborious writing method and told him he could produce ‘thousands of words a week’ and was currently ‘slogging away’ finishing another novel. The interviewer asked if he would be writing many more books. Lewis replied: ‘You insult me! I am still alive. I work up to midnight if I feel like it.’ The article finished on a decidedly optimistic note, with Lewis saying: ‘Life is still as rich and fascinating.’ Referring to the fate he had imagined for himself in ‘The Sea-Mists of the Winter’, five years before, he went on: ‘I am not locked up in a dark room. The mind has many chambers.’
*
The Red Priest did not receive unanimous acclaim from the press. Many were agreed that it displayed a falling off from the standards of his other recent work. The Scotsman felt that, after Self Condemned and The Human Age, the new novel came as an anticlimax and that it ‘will not add much to Mr Lewis’s deservedly great reputation’. Maurice Richardson, in the New Statesman and Nation, drew attention, in rather a pot and kettle fashion, to the novelist’s style: ‘Mr Lewis savages his farce like a werewolf decimating a stolen thigh. The style creaks and groans as if someone were wrestling with a straitjacket.’ The Bulletin and Scots Pictorial called it ‘a powerful creation, but serious reading with a lot of religious argument and some disturbingly stilted speech’. In the Sunday Times, John Metcalf thought that The Red Priest ’isn’t a total failure . . . but three fourths of this arrogantly careless book are.’
Despite the imminent prospect of losing the roof over his head, Lewis was still preoccupied with Roberts’s pamphlet campaign well into September. A letter to the press was drafted, defending himself against the ‘venomous misunderstandings . . . scattered abroad’ by the ‘little Mr X’:
I found myself given a huge exhibition . . . at the Tate. This was the work of Sir John Rothenstein and his youthful assistants . . . Anyone resenting this outburst of my work should blame them, not me. I was not responsible for Mr X being insufficiently represented . . . I cannot see to read a book or write a letter, and was quite unable to see my own pictures, and certainly am not interested enough to vote for or against Mr X’s canvases. Lastly, Vorticism. . . . What does this word mean? I do not know . . . but let me say that I did not ask for this meaningless word to be revived . . . We live in a world of Art Historians: they do funny things.
But, finally, it must all have seemed too much trouble. The letter to the press was not sent. A telegram was dispatched to his solicitor, Kenneth Ewart, at Field, Roscoe & Co.:
PLEASE DO NOT WRITE MR ROBERTS WILL WRITE TO YOU – LEWIS
And Mr Ewart replied that he would do nothing until instructed further. No further instructions were received.
When ‘Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism’ ended its run at the Tate, the Arts Council of Great Britain arranged for a selection of the exhibition to tour. Seventeen of the 41 paintings and 37 of the 114 drawings travelled first to Manchester, then on to Glasgow, down to Bristol and back up to Leeds. Where necessary, owners were asked to extend the loan of their pictures until the end of the tour in mid-December. Mrs Lewis agreed to allow the sketch of her beloved Sealyham terrier, who had died in Windsor, Ontario, to travel. The drawing, called Tutsi, was the hit of the show so far as the Manchester Evening Chronicle correspondent was concerned. ‘Don’t miss Tutsi’, he urged his readers, ‘the impudent pup . . . is an oasis in a stormy sea.’
On the other hand, Lewis refused to extend the loan of his Portrait of John McLeod, explaining that it was required elsewhere.
An exhibition of British portraiture from the 16th century to the present was to open at the Royal Academy on 24 November and Gallery number one, together with the Small South Room, were to be devoted to the achievements of modern painters. The irony of a picture by Wyndham Lewis being solicited by the Royal Academy cannot have escaped Humphrey Brooke, who wrote to thank him for the loan of the ‘fine portrait of John McLeod’. Because the Tate exhibition was still on tour, opening in Leeds on the same day that their own exhibition opened in Burlington House, the Royal Academy Council was unable to obtain the portrait by Lewis that they most wanted. Nevertheless, Brooke wished him to know that their first choice had been the 1938 Portrait of T. S. Eliot. All was forgiven.
* Introduction to Jane Farrington’s catalogue to the City of Manchester Art Galleries exhibition, 1980.
* Shown at Second London Group Exhibition, March 1915, as ‘The Crowd’.