This is a review of Geoffrey Wagner’s Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1957). It appeared in The Hudson Review 10, no. 4 (Winter 1957–58): 592–8. Reprinted by permission of Victoria University.
Mr. Wagner’s book is an excellent study of one of the “men of 1914,” as Wyndham Lewis styled the group of Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and himself. The approach is critical rather than biographical, although one important biographical detail does emerge: Lewis was born in the same year as Joyce, a fact which he seems to have concealed, but which must have been known to Joyce when he made Lewis the basis of his Shaun figure. Much has still to be done on Lewis’s biography: Mr. Wagner could not have done it without writing a different kind of book, but he clearly feels that the key to the contradictions in Lewis’s character and thought is biographical rather than critical. The book is divided into four parts. The first, “Politics,” obviously put first in order to get that out of the way, deals with such things as the Hitler book and its recantation; the second, “Art,” with Lewis’s critical journalism; the third, “Time,” with his larger cultural reflections; and the fourth, with his work as a satirist. Lewis is studied throughout as a literary figure, and it is his opinions about art rather than his practice as a painter that Mr. Wagner stresses.
The disadvantage of such an approach is that it deprives Mr. Wagner of a centre of gravity. Lewis’s painting usually makes sense; much of his writing does not, partly because writing with Lewis was a hobby, as painting was with D.H. Lawrence, though a hobby which he cultivated with such energy that it came to overshadow the main art. Many features of his writing are those of the amateur. He never mastered—never tried to master—the art of expository prose, and the insincerity in his journalism is mainly due to the fact that he does not have the technical equipment to be sincere. He cannot make words express a precise meaning: he showers his reader with a verbal offensive, with what the accurate schoolboy phrase calls shooting a line. A passage quoted by Mr. Wagner reminds us how much of Lewis’s prose is couched in the huff-snuff rhetoric which is a non-occult form of automatic writing:
Ours has been in the West a generation of hypocrites … a generation that has shown less care for men in the mass than any for a great many centuries, combining this demonstrable indifference to the welfare of the generality with never-ceasing hosannas to the Common Man: a generation of power-addicts who put on a red tie with a smirk, climb upon the back of the Working Class and propose to ride it to a new type of double-faced dominion .… [Rude 142]
In reading even the best of expository works, one feels in contact with an acute, witty, and erudite mind, yet these books are unusually difficult to finish. There are two reasons, I think, for this. One is their inconclusiveness: they never seem to make a memorable or rounded point except when they are attacking some other writer. The other is their lack of rhythm: one bores one’s way along a deafening, unaccented clatter of words until one can stand the noise no longer.
Such a style, though largely useless for exposition, has its points as a style for satire, founded as it is on invective and parody, and Lewis’s theory of writing is chiefly a rationalization of his satiric style. The theory is that his approach is external and spatialized, in contrast to that of Joyce (whom he considers only as a stream-of-consciousness writer) and, more particularly, Gertrude Stein, who writes “like a confused, stammering, rather ‘soft’ (bloated, acromegalic, squinting, and spectacled, one can figure it as) child” [Enemy, 71], and who is “just the german musical soul leering at itself in a mirror, and sticking out at itself a stuttering welt of swollen tongue” [Time, 194]. The difference in kind from his own style implied by such remarks does not, of course, exist: his is simply another highly mannered rhetoric, and it would be easy to think up similar epithets for it. Lewis maintains that his own approach is consistently concerned with the outsides of people, paying attention only to the visible “ossatures,” in contrast to the emotional and temporal fumblings for a dark and soft interior. His definitions of his own aims, however, in the flat, antithetical form in which they are presented in Men Without Art, are sheer idiocies: space is better than time; the outside is better than the inside; painting is better than music, and so on, and so on. Besides, the human body not being crustacean, its ossature is inside anyway.
Even Lewis, however, can hardly be unaware of the badness of his metaphors: he adopts them because they give a general idea of his tradition. This is the line of intellectual satire represented by Petronius (one of the nearest to him technically), Rabelais, certain aspects of Dickens, and the Flaubert of Bouvard et Pecuchet, which he imitates to some extent in The Human Age. Satire is based on a moral attitude—there is a half-hearted effort in Men Without Art to argue that satire need not be moral, but it soon breaks down—and the basis of this attitude is frequently an assumed contrast between a moral norm that is pragmatically free and flexible, and behaviour that appears grotesque because it is obsessed, or bound to a single repeated pattern of action, like Jonson’s “humour.” The obvious metaphor for the latter is the machine or puppet, and Lewis’s characterization deliberately reduces his characters to mechanisms. Mr. Wagner has an interesting table of the number of mechanical and crustacean images Lewis uses for his characters: there are certainly more than enough to make the point. In the light of this, the image of the external ossature makes more sense: a machine does have such a thing, and, in studying a machine, only its external behaviour need be examined; it has no inner essence or soul stuff. Lewis, in contrast to Lawrence, associates mechanical behaviour with the primitive, the “wild body” which cannot attain the disciplined freedom of civilized man.
When we compare Lewis with other satirists in his tradition we notice that his metaphor has in one respect led him astray. One element in writing is the rhythm of narrative, the inner pulsation and continuity in the style that keeps one turning the pages. Lewis’s theory would doubtless oblige him to condemn this as an internal or temporal quality in writing, but unfortunately for the theory, structural rhythm is the real skeleton or inner ossature of writing. His neglect of it brings the defects of his expository style into his satires. If we look at The Apes of God, we see a use of catalogues and set repetitive passages, like the split-man’s litany, that remind us of similar things in Rabelais. But in Rabelais there is a sweeping rhythmical power that carries them off, and Lewis has no power of rhythm. Words merely cover and congeal one scene after another; his writing is the opposite of his painting, a kind of literary pointillism. For this reason, even his best satires seem to me books more likely to be admired than read. Anybody can see that they are remarkable, even astonishing books; but they give a not wholly unjustified impression of being themselves the kind of clever mechanical imitation that they present as grotesque. The exuberance of Rabelais (and Swift and Joyce) results from a rigorous discipline which is also a professional competence in their art. Lewis has this discipline as a painter, but writing he has approached externally; and when his theory extends from a technique of satiric presentation to a technique of writing satire, caricature becomes self-caricature, and the book as a whole resembles a Cartesian ghost caught in its own machine, trying to break out of a closed circle of parody. Lewis speaks of D.H. Lawrence’s painting as incompetent Gauguin: partisans of Lawrence might retort that much of Lewis’s writing reads like delirious Dickens. For one is often reminded of the way in which Dickens allows his facility in caricature to take over the style of writing and produce the prodigies of unplausible melodrama that mark his lapses.
The same contradiction exists in Lewis’s personal publicity. Lewis appears to think of the role of the artist in terms of an anti-Communist redefinition of a proletariat, anti-Communism being one of the few attitudes that Lewis has consistently maintained. The genuinely declassed person, for Lewis, is the detached or withdrawn observer. Such an observer has a continuity in his attitude that most people, stampeded as they are by the pressures of news and propaganda, lack; he is more radical than the crowd, yet he is deeply conservative too, for the crowd, being plunged into the time-spirit, is restless for constant change, this being what Lewis calls the attitude of the “revolutionary simpleton” in the arts. The crowd wants the kind of art that reflects itself: art which glorifies the primitive, the child, or the ordinary or inarticulate common man, as in the Chaplin films and in Hemingway’s “dumb ox” characters; art which follows the endless associative burble of the inner consciousness, as in the interior monologues of Joyce and Stein; art which tends to approximate, in one way or another, the communal dance, the art which encourages a sense of participation by the untrained, or of what Lewis calls the “dithyrambic spectator.” All this is in contrast to the detached contemplation necessary for the Egyptian and Chinese art that Lewis (like Gauguin) prefers to the modern West, where we realize that art is not self-expression but the expression of something disinterested, a “not-self.” Such views are common to an antiromantic or “neoclassical” group of artists, both English and French, whose precepts and personnel Mr. Wagner ably outlines. The true artist thus becomes the “enemy” of society, for he must either declare war on it or be crushed by its hostility.
We seem to be close here, Mr. Wagner suggests, to a theory of a creative elite. Lewis says he holds no such view, and Mr. Wagner has got to the point of feeling that this is fairly good evidence that he does. Still, Lewis’s denial points to some uncertainty in his mind. The real meaning of elite is “people like me,” and nearly everyone believes in an elite, in the sense that nearly everyone with any social function at all will tend to think of that function ideally, as something on which society as a whole depends. For artists, the conception of an elite normally begins in the establishing of schools and trends and manifestoes aimed at waking society up to the importance of their art. But with the artist, the conception of “people like me” changes, as he becomes less fond of rival artists and more attached to the people who buy and appreciate his work, into the political question of what kind of public would make his art elite. The change for Lewis is accelerated by his insistence that most people have no right to participate in the arts and by his increasing jealousy of almost every widely acclaimed contemporary. Finally, the conception “people like me” modulates into “people who like me,” a society recreated in one’s own image, which at least has the advantage of permitting a more authentic form of creative life.
All three phases are clearly marked in Lewis. The first phase is the period of “vorticism” and the Blast manifestoes. Lewis was clearly fascinated by Marinetti’s use of the new techniques of advertising and publicity stunts in an art movement. He sent a copy of Blast to a friend, with a letter, quoted by Mr. Wagner, apologizing for its noise but asserting that the artist cannot exist at all without such things—a statement one may beg leave to doubt. The second phase compels Mr. Wagner to deal with the shoddy story of the flirtation with fascism by British and French intellectuals. The “neoclassical” group favoured a type of relatively unpopular art, and such art could win its place only through some kind of established authority, hence their speculations were largely concerned with what kind of authoritarian government would be most useful to them. The result was a series of self-contradictions (matched, of course, by similar ones in the Communist camp) unparalleled in the history of the arts, and Lewis’s writings afford an excellent area for observing them.
In Lewis, as in others of the neoclassical group, antiromanticism seems to be a late romanticism fouling its own nest. The romantic decadence glanced at in Lewis’s Diabolical Principle seems merely to expand into a more political form of experimenting in sadomasochism. The genuine statements in neoclassical theory are mainly of romantic origin. Mr. Wagner shows that Lewis’s theory of satire is lifted almost bodily from Bergson’s Le Rire—an excellent place to go for a theory of satire, except that Bergson is one of the two philosophers most violently attacked in Time and Western Man. In any case, the contrast between organism and mechanism is a romantic commonplace, going back to Goethe and Coleridge. The other target of Time and Western Man is Spengler, and the framework of Lewis’s pronouncements on contemporary culture comes straight out of Spengler. Lewis’s polemical writings are in a relatively modern genre—Spengler calls it the diatribe—which was largely created by Victorian romanticism, though Milton and Swift had practised the form earlier. It was romanticism that brought in Lewis’s notion of a special type of creative man, superior to others not simply in his particular expertise, but in general, in his whole attitude to life. This conception of the superior person is expounded particularly in Carlyle, whose Teufelsdröckh is a professor of things in general.
Our own age has inherited from this the conception of the “intellectual,” who produces, in the line of duty, the “calling-for” book, the pseudopolitical treatise that “calls for” various shifts of attitude in society and is the modern form of Spengler’s diatribe. It is based on the romantic assumption that if one’s expertise is in, say, poetry or fiction, one’s reaction to the morning paper will show an infinitely more searching insight than the reaction of one whose expertise is in greasing cars or curling women’s hair. I imagine that this assumption has still to be substantiated: in any case, Lewis’s political writings provide little evidence in its favour. Of the four men of 1914, Joyce, after his adolescence, remained almost entirely aloof from this kind of intellectualized journalism; Pound fell for it hard, which is one reason why he reads so like a late Victorian. Eliot has also yielded to the temptation to write the odd diatribe, but has had the literary tact to keep the musings of After Strange Gods and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture at least overtly out of his poetry and drama. But even in this addled century, there are few phenomena more strange than Lewis’s fanatic addiction to the diatribe.
Mr. Wagner speaks of the influence on Lewis of Benda’s Trahison des Clercs, yet his diatribes are a flagrant example of what Benda means, an artist deliberately vulgarizing critical and philosophical ideas, deliberately deserting the field of his expert knowledge for a field where nobody knows anything because there are no facts. Lewis condemns the “dithyrambic spectator” in art only to become one himself in society. Lewis thinks of art as aloof, unpopular, exact, and difficult: his diatribes are slovenly, cliché-ridden, confused, and embarrassingly personal. Lewis is anti-Communist, yet if we ask what is wrong with Communism, one of the most decisive answers is that it adopts Lewis’s technique of communication. Lewis speaks of continuity as the feature that makes for dignity in life: his polemics shift ground so often that it becomes almost uncharitable to remember what he said last Tuesday. The assumption in most of the political writings is that the one form of society which makes such writing possible—a tolerant bourgeois democracy—is the most contemptible of all social structures. But when we find Lewis urging in 1936 that Germany be allowed to rearm (and urging the opposite in 1942, Mr. Wagner notes), we feel less grateful for the tolerance that allows him to write than for the indifference that makes him relatively harmless.
Again, as a satirist, one would expect Lewis to lampoon the popular ideals of the English, their devotion to sport and fair play, their pride in having a sense of humour, and so on. The villain of The Human Age is a cliché expert known as the Bailiff, whose appearance, recorded on Michael Ayrton’s jacket design, recalls Punch. Yet this attitude exists beside another which is its direct opposite, apparently motivated by some feeling of guilt at being declassed by art, and which at every stage has followed a Colonel Blimp line.1 Tarr reflects the popular anti-Germanism of the First World War; in the twenties Lewis is explaining that Stein, Joyce, and transition are really “shams,” that there are too many homosexuals in modern art, and that cubism is largely humbug; as the political situation darkens, he becomes pro-fascist and ridicules the colour cult which is part of the reaction against white supremacy; in 1939 he abruptly takes a democratic line on Nazis and Jews; in 1941 he completes the circle by writing Anglosaxony: A League that Works. Even in religion, on which he says little, we still find him sucking his own blood, like the Ancient Mariner. He believes in Something Upstairs, rejects Catholicism with some respect, and treats Protestantism with great contempt, as was usual in diatribes of his generation. But the dead end of Protestantism is not capitalistic exploitation or bourgeois prudery or any of the things that intellectuals’ lay sermons say it is; the dead end of Protestantism is the intellectual’s lay sermon.
If these diatribes formed, as Lewis is not unwilling to suggest, a deliberate masquerade, behind which the serious writing of the “Not-Self” takes place, or if the diatribes could in any other way be separated from the serious writing, their inconsistencies would not matter. They cannot—The Childermass, in particular, is a diatribe in fictional form—and the inconsistencies of the one become a kind of split creative personality in the other. The masquerade theory ascribes an impossible degree of subtlety, in any case, to a most unsubtle writer. Lewis ridicules the archetypal approach to fiction, yet his most memorable characters are culture-myths, some of them, like Kreisler in Tarr, largely of newspaper origin. He nags at homosexuals, yet shows a curious distaste for the normal relation, and his women resemble Asiatic mother-goddesses as they might have been described by the prophet Elijah. One would expect his “external” approach to have some affinity with realism, as in Flaubert; but anything like a setting in a Lewis satire becomes a fantasy of Grand Guignol proportions. The Parisian left bank in Tarr, the Bloomsbury-Chelsea London of The Apes of God, the Toronto of Self Condemned (if the reader will accept the opinion of a reviewer who lives there) are all as far out of this world as the limbo of The Human Age.
What is one to make of a writer who hates everything, with the unvarying querulousness of a neurotic, that his own writing represents? The easy way out is to decide that Lewis must be some kind of phony. Even Mr. Wagner has twinges of wondering whether his subject has really been worth his pains, and speaks of Lewis’s “constant, almost paranoid, lust for destruction.” Certainly one cannot study Lewis in detail without exasperation, but that is true of many writers, and though he has uniformly substituted cleverness for wisdom, still no one can read The Human Age carefully and feel that its author has no real place in literature. The better solution is to take all Lewis’s theories as projections, realizing that he is an almost solipsistic writer, whose hatreds are a part of him because he understands nothing of what goes on outside his own mind. As Stephen Spender pointed out in a hostile but shrewd critique of Lewis, that is what his external approach really amounts to. No one better manifests Yeats’s dictum that we make rhetoric out of the quarrel with others, poetry (read satire) out of the quarrel with ourselves [Per Amica, 29]. Lewis’s temporary admiration for Hitler thus becomes intelligible: here was someone else lost in a dream, yet with a medium’s power of animating and imposing his dream. We come back to our figure of the Cartesian ghost caught in its own machine, which I have partly borrowed from Mr. Wagner. Lewis is the satirist of an age whose drama is a flickering optical illusion in a darkened room, whose politics is an attempt to make clichés into axioms of automatic conduct, whose spiritual discipline is a subjective exploring of the infantile and the perverted. Such books as The Apes of God or The Human Age can hardly be written without a personal descent into the hell they portray, and Lewis has made that descent, and taken the consequences of making it, with a perverse but unflinching courage.