2 July

Blast deafens philistine opposition, until the blasts of war destroy it

1914 The announcement of an anarcho-Vorticist manifesto magazine, entitled Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis, published by John Lane (original publisher of the 1890s Yellow Book), was announced in April 1914. With its eye-catching pink cover, the first issue appeared on 2 July, at half a crown. Lewis and Lane hosted a launch dinner party at the Cave of the Golden Calf, a cabaret club for London’s bohemians.

The first issue of Blast announced, in a fighting foreword (‘Long Live the English Vortex’), its intention to ‘deny politeness … We will convert the King if possible … A VORTICIST KING! WHY NOT?’ No response was forthcoming from the palace. More hopefully, the magazine aimed its shot against the despised Italian futurist Marinetti. Blast was, if not loyal to the crown, firmly chauvinist. It would forge an English modernism.

The first issue (although the production never paid for itself, or its expensively unorthodox printing) was well enough received to warrant a grand dinner, on 15 July, at the Dieudonné Restaurant in Ryder Street to celebrate ‘the great MAGENTA cover’d opusculus’ (Ezra Pound’s description).

A second Blast was published in July 1915, including among its contributors Ezra Pound (who had actually invented the term ‘vorticist’), T.S. Eliot, and the artist Gaudier Brzeska. It already represented a nucleus of home-based modernism, despite the internationalism of its contributors.

Had world history not intervened, the ‘men of Blast’ (i.e. those featured in its pages, and promoted by the magazine) – Wyndham Lewis, Pound, T.E. Hulme, Eliot, and Joyce – would probably have cohered into something culturally dominant. The Great War extinguished the movement, with its louder blasts. Lewis himself enrolled (appropriately) in the artillery (his experience of these years is commemorated in the autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering). Hulme and Gaudier were casualties. Modernism, in Britain at least, lost its way. The country still awaits its Vorticist monarch.