I am sitting for myself at present—in fact it is a permanent job … 1
Wyndham Lewis
After almost a decade spent on the Continent since leaving the Slade School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture in 1901, Wyndham Lewis returned to England with a new sense of purpose and urgency concerning his life as a painter and writer. Back in London in 1909, his long, unproductive European period, spent mainly in Paris, with periods in Brittany, Holland, Munich, and Madrid, was essentially over. Lewis, at twenty-seven, had just had his first success in art or literature: the appearance of his short stories of Breton life in the English Review. Ford Madox Hueffer had published “The Pole” by “P. Wyndham Lewis”—still in the process of shedding his first name, Percy—in the May 1909 issue, which also carried Conrad’s reminiscences. “Some Innkeepers and Bestre” and “Les Saltimbanques” followed later that year. Despite this literary encouragement, Lewis, who oscillated between painting and writing all his life, decided soon afterwards to apply himself, with renewed dedication, to art.
Around 1911, Lewis drew three self-portraits as if taking possession of his talent: a trio of angular visions of himself, in which traces of his youthful wistfulness are overcome by resolution. All three drawings showed an affinity with Picasso’s work influenced by African art. In Paris, Lewis had not met Picasso; but he probably heard about him through the bohemian elder painter Augustus John, who visited Picasso’s studio and was a mentor to Lewis in France. In his three self-portraits, Lewis invented his own idea of Cubism, and of himself, as he divided his own face into geometric shapes, breaking up and abstracting his features: tight and brooding, mask-like and vacated; alien, cold, and inhuman. Lewis had been depicted by John several years earlier, in an etching of 1903, and an oil painting of 1905; his expression in both portraits, beneath his luxuriantly dark hair, allowing flickers of his naivety and dreaminess to hover, as if hopefully, around his hard, exclusive, self-focused determination. But in the 1911 self-portraits he is all angles and edges.
Self-portraiture would become a recurring aspect of Lewis’s work as an artist, and he produced numerous drawings and paintings of himself, in contradictory guises. Having been classically schooled at the Slade in the Life Room, Lewis used his self-portraits to experiment with identities, to cast himself in roles. “Why try and give the impression of a consistent and indivisible personality?,”2 he wrote in 1915. He made reinvention sound like an artistic, even moral, obligation. “You must catch the clearness and logic in the midst of contradictions: not settle down and snooze on an acquired, easily possessed and mastered, satisfying shape.”3 In his “Code of a Herdsman,” Lewis aired the same theme: “Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”4 “Leave your front door one day as B.: the next march down the street as E.” “A variety of clothes, hats especially, are of help in this wider dramatisation of yourself.”5
The essence of self-portraiture, for Lewis, was multiplicity. The secret of the self was an illusion, a painting; and it was also through painting that one could remake oneself. In Lewis’s first published novel Tarr (1918) the young English painter Frederick Tarr imagines the self as “a Chinese puzzle of boxes within boxes, or of insects’ discarded envelopes.”6 For Bertha, his lover, at the center of these boxes was “an astral baby”; for himself, though, there was no “live core, but a painting like the rest. —His kernel was a painting, in fact: that was as it should be!”7 Yet for all his multiplicity, Lewis was always reserved and secretive. Perhaps part of the attraction of showing many faces was that one could, fundamentally, protect oneself.
Lewis produced his most conflicting self-images in the years just after the First World War. For the Group X show at the Mansard Gallery in London in March 1920, he contributed at least four self-portraits, one an oil painting—and nothing else. His pen-and-ink self-portraits of that year, with their black shading looking like woodcuts, saw him improvising with accoutrements and props: pipe, hat, coat, and tie.8 His face is generally softer and more oval than in the earlier self-portraits. The shading makes a mask of his expression, mournful and slightly anonymous, a face that could disappear in the crowd. A lost painting from this period, Self-Portrait with Chair and Table, turns Lewis into a smooth, black, externalized, almost sculptural figure, as if he were painting his shell.9
For his one-man show Tyros and Portraits at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1921, Lewis exhibited two contrasting self-portraits in oil. In Portrait of the Artist as the Painter Raphael, he depicted himself in the act of painting, with the canvas tilting towards him on the left-hand side of the frame, wearing a brown hat and jacket, his eyes direct but strangely flat. He appears calm, studious, and confident, accomplished in his art but also, the title suggests, keen to realign himself with tradition. In Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro the background is violent yellow, the hat sharp and black, and the sneering, cartoon-like face hardly recognizable: sour green, eyebrow raised to a point, mouth set in a fixed, toothy grin.10 Traumatized and empty, the implicit reference of this satirical and harsh self-portrait is to the psychological damage of the war. In 1921, Lewis launched a journal called The Tyro, and he made other drawings and paintings of Tyros: manipulated puppets of post-war society, mechanical and childlike, “worked with deft fingers, with a screaming voice underneath.”11
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, Lewis continued to make drawings of himself in pencil, pen-and-ink on paper, often as an author portrait to accompany his writings, to which he turned with vigor, neglecting art for several years, from around 1923. In two self-portraits from 1927,12 and his Self-Portrait with Hat from 1930,13 Lewis looks more earnest and bookish. He now sometimes wears spectacles, as in the sober self-image from his 1932 exhibition Thirty Personalities and a Self Portrait.14 In his 1931 Self Caricature,15 later inscribed as Self-Portrait, the spectacles are an aspect of his cold, impersonal persona, recalling the sharp, hard lines of his self-drawings from twenty years earlier.
By this time Lewis was “The Enemy.” Antagonistic, like a theatrical villain, “The Enemy” was an exaggerated, parodic alias. He enters and exits Lewis’s poem One-Way Song (1933) “cloaked, masked and booted,” spitting green flames, “an ‘outcast’ and a man ‘maudit’.”16 A solitary, shadowy artistic force against contemporary society, unafraid to speak his mind, “The Enemy” was active from 1927, when Lewis launched his journal of that name. Yet after playing at casting himself in the role of villain, Lewis struggled to shake the mask off. In his last recorded self-portrait, a pencil drawing in 1938 for the London Mercury, he moved beyond this self-dramatization, yet his depiction still has a slight air of insouciance, with his Peterson pipe, spectacles, and sombrero.17 In all his self-portraits, Lewis moved between the temptation to portray and construct a tough, aggressive exterior, and another impulse which conveyed his sensitivity. The problem was that the hostile persona was so much more memorable.
Lewis also made portraits of others throughout his life. Even as the self-styled pioneer of Vorticism before the First World War, he often used models to create his abstract paintings, or reverted to naturalism. In 1911, he drew his lover Olive Johnson, the year she had her first child with him, in Mamie and Girl Asleep.18 Around the same time he drew another lover, Kate Lechmere, grimacing like the later Tyros, in Smiling Woman Ascending a Stair and The Laughing Woman. Of the latter’s distortions, Lewis declared that “although the forms of the figure and head perhaps look rather unlikely […] It was done from life.”19 The title of the Vorticist Portrait of an Englishwoman (1913), meanwhile, is nothing less than a challenge, or affront, daring the viewer to reconcile its stack of rectangles and diagonals with a flesh-and-blood sitter.
In the years after the war, Lewis threw himself into portraiture. Moving away from Vorticism, he came much closer to representation, though retaining abstract elements, “burying Euclid deep in the living flesh.”20 as he put it. Wishing to improve his technique, he concentrated on the human figure, working on nudes as well as drawings and paintings of friends, acquaintances, and lovers. His new muse, Iris Barry, was depicted contrastingly, sitting while pregnant with another of his children in Woman Knitting (1920); and mutated into an inhuman brooding mass in the oil Praxitella (1920–1). Yet in his portraits Lewis was concerned not so much with multiplicity, as with capturing the presence of his subjects, through an intense—and often uncomfortable, for the sitters—focus on appearances. Through portraiture, externality became his artistic philosophy. “Dogmatically, I am for the Great Without, for the method of external approach—for the wisdom of the eye,”21 Lewis wrote in Men Without Art (1934). “It is the shell of the animal that the plastically-minded artist will prefer.”22 To William Rothenstein, Lewis declared, “I go primarily for the pattern of the structure of the head and insinuate, rather than stress, the ‘psyche’.”23
This external method could be transcendent in its power, Lewis thought, making some portraits, in their extreme likeness, exist outside time. “The reality that is reflected in some portraits,” Lewis wrote, referring to Renaissance portraits in particular, “is so fresh and delicate […] that it is, while you gaze at these reflections, like living yourself, in a peculiar immortality.”24 Portraits took on a life of their own when achieved at this level of mastery. Of a portrait of Violet Schiff, Lewis said he wanted to create “something that will in a sense be her.”25 With such ideals, sitting for Lewis was arduous. Even his wife Gladys, a favorite model who married him in 1930 and sat for scores of images, found his scrutiny severe. Some sitters recalled the stream of negative talk issuing from Lewis as he worked; others evoked the silence as he portrayed them. Edith Sitwell, who said she sat for Lewis “every day excepting Sundays, for ten months” from late 1921, wrote that “when one sat to him […] mice emerged from their holes, and lolled against the furniture.”26 The detail is leveled disparagingly at Lewis, who satirized Sitwell in The Apes of God (1930), but it also suggests the devoted absorption of his method of working on portraits.
Sometimes sitters would fall asleep, as happened when Ezra Pound—depicted by Lewis many times in his career after they first met through Ford—sat for one of his portraits. The shrewder T. S. Eliot, also depicted many times by Lewis, was less at his ease. He described Lewis at work on one portrait of himself, “wearing a look of slightly quizzical inscrutability” while he painted, making one “feel that it would be undesirable, though not actually dangerous, to fall asleep in one’s chair.”27
The danger of displeasing the sitter was an intrinsic element of portraiture for Lewis. “Sitters,” Lewis wrote in his autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), “are apt to be very nice right up to the final sitting,”28 when they were disappointed on viewing the finished product. Lewis always associated portraits with money. Whenever he was hard up, he returned to portraits for support. But the terrain was treacherous. A good portrait of a sitter was not always one that made the sitter look good. Sitters whose vanity was wounded were apt to leave without the portrait, and without paying for it. For this reason, many of Lewis’s portraits were drawings rather than oil paintings. He could invest his time more cautiously with “portrait-heads in pencil or aquarelle,” which “only occupied two or three afternoons,”29 he wrote in Blasting, rather than oils which took far longer. Extracting payment from sitters became one of Lewis’s many miseries. Squabbling over a portrait drawing of O. R. Drey, Lewis wrote to his sitter:
You say, let the original arrangement stand: but where’s the cheque, old boy? […] instead of saying let the arrangement stand, do something; sit down at your desk, draw out your cheque-book, write me a nice polite little note saying you are sorry there has been any trouble, close your eyes, hold your breath, and write six—and there you will be straight with me.30
Wrangles with offended sitters bedevilled Lewis’s life as a painter. Related problems also surrounded his writing. Lewis was more fiercely satirical as a writer than in his art, and his books often included, recognizably, friends, acquaintances, and other real-life figures. As a writer, Lewis remained faithful to external appearances, however unflattering. Satire, Lewis felt, was truth-telling, a mode between comedy and tragedy: “a grinning tragedy.”31
Pledged as a writer to the external, Lewis scorned the internalized techniques of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Lewis’s friend James Joyce. (Lewis never let friendship get in the way of satire or critique.) Stein came under heavy fire, parodied as Satterthwaite in The Childermass (1928) and in Time and Western Man (1927), which ridicules Stein and the “stuttering,” childlike inflections of her “prose song”: “a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along […] It is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate material.”32 Lewis thought such verbal representations of the inner life lacked any firm definition. Joyce’s Ulysses, Lewis wrote, “imposes a softness, flabbiness, and vagueness everywhere in its bergsonian fluidity.”33 Yet Henry James, never an acquaintance, receives a milder treatment. James “had an excellent eye in his head,” Lewis wrote in Men Without Art.34 But James went wrong, Lewis thought, in that “his activities were all turned inwards rather than outwards.”35
Vagueness was seldom a feature of Lewis’s own novels, often drawn daringly sharply and closely from life, sometimes causing reprisals. Some of those satirized in The Apes of God set up counter-attacks on Lewis, including the painter Richard Wyndham, who took out a personal advertisement offering two of Lewis’s paintings at bargain prices in The Times. Lewis denied that there was any character based on Wyndham; and he produced a flyer, headed “A STOP PRESS EXPLOSION”: “ENRAGED Ape of God, believing that he had caught sight of his own features in the crowded mirror of The Apes of God, sends up a cry of AGONY!”36
Like H. G. Wells—who wrote to Lewis about The Childermass, with Lewis replying in turn, complimenting the older writer on The World of William Clissold and his articles about war37—Lewis made repeated disavowals about the “originals” of his characters. Around the time of The Apes of God, he had lunch with Wells and they discussed this very topic. As Lewis recalled in his second autobiography, Rude Assignment (1950), Wells found it hard to believe that people could be wounded by such portrayals: “he had some interesting things to say on the subject of the rage that people may affect to feel, and their motives.”38 Yet contemporaries were wounded by Lewis’s unforgiving take-downs. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, in October 1934, about Men Without Art: “I know by reason and instinct that this is an attack; that I am publicly demolished.”39 Being at the receiving end of Lewis’s barbs was more painful than Wells would acknowledge. But his satire, Lewis thought, was “not portraiture”—“a new world is created out of the shoddy material of everyday, and nothing does, or could, go over into that as it appeared in nature.”40 To publishers, Lewis offered many explanations of this point. In 1926, to Chatto & Windus, Lewis made this self-defense:
As to your believing that you detect a likeness in some of my personages to people in real life, in that you are mistaken. I have here and there used things, it is true that might suggest some connection. But the cases you choose are not ones I could, I am afraid, remove from my picture. If the bodies I describe fit the morning suits of real people and they […] lay claim to them, however much the clothes fitted I should not countenance the wearing of such mis-fits by any of my characters, to all of whom I supply suits to measure from my own store.41
Libel actions from people who saw themselves in his pages became a pressing snag for Lewis in the 1930s, in the years just before he wrote his autobiography in 1937. Doom of Youth in 1932 brought two libel actions, as Chatto had foreseen. Switching publishers with Snooty Baronet the same year, there was further trouble, with Cassell warning Lewis that his next books must “pass the Library censors.”42 Filibusters in Barbary, also in 1932, brought another libel claim; The Roaring Queen, submitted by Cape to a solicitor, was withdrawn. Faced with this barrage of writs, Lewis was paranoid, believing there was a conspiracy against him.
These legal vendettas added strain to Lewis’s financial woes at this time. Since 1926, he had sustained an outpouring of writing, often publishing several books each year. But he had little money. Medical bills deepened his debts when he became seriously ill in 1932 from grisly complications resulting from the gonorrhea he had when he was younger. Lewis had four major operations in the 1930s, nearly dying during one of them, becoming a long-suffering denizen of what he called, in a letter to Eliot, “hospital land.”43 The experience of illness and dependency fed into paintings such as The Convalescent (1933), broaching a new warmth and humanism. Lewis also produced otherworldly and metaphysical imaginary scenes, likewise haunted by hospital, around this time. His novel The Revenge for Love (1937) also revealed an interest in creating rounded, emotionally alive, characters, blessed with an interior, rather than purely exterior, life. It was a complete departure in this way from the hard impersonality of his earlier literary work.
At the same time, Lewis had been moving into dangerous territory with his political writing: especially since his articles on Hitler and National Socialism, published as a book in 1931. Lewis’s polemical volumes in the 1930s took contradictory positions on Communism and Fascism. They were all, above all, against another war, but they did at times show sympathy for Fascism. In several tracts, including Left Wings Over Europe (1936) and Count Your Dead—They Are Alive! (1937), Lewis’s suspicion of left-wing intellectuals and desire for appeasement made him, in W. H. Auden’s phrase, a “lonely old volcano of the Right.”44
What Lewis called his “anti-war” political books were often shifting and ambiguous. By 1938 he reversed his opinions, especially on Hitler and Germany, and after the war, in Rude Assignment, he called most of these political books “futile performances—ill-judged, redundant, harmful of course to me personally, and of no value to anybody else.”45 Fear of the insecurity of another war lay behind their frenzied postures. But no amount of retraction could undo the damage they did to his reputation, as Lewis himself slowly came to realize.
*
Lewis was fifty-four when he published Blasting and Bombardiering in October 1937. Despite his recent illnesses, Count Your Dead had appeared in April, and The Revenge for Love in May. Much of the autobiography was written that spring and summer, being finished in the autumn,46 although Lewis had the idea of writing it earlier, probably in the autumn of 1936,47 in the hope of gaining a larger audience, and paying off some of his medical debts. Lewis always distinguished between his “formal” books—his novels—and his “informal” non-fiction, written much faster, “just as one talks, and nearly as fast as talking.”48 A page of The Revenge for Love, Lewis wrote in a letter of 1937, “takes me as long to write as twenty pages of Blasting and Bombardiering.”49 The autobiography was written at great speed; its tone was also deliberately colloquial.
That year, Lewis was moving house, as he constantly was during the 1920s and 30s, sometimes secretively. His flats since the war had frequently been around Paddington and Bayswater, and he had an unusual habit of renting several different, often tiny, separate spaces for living and work, then shifting between them. In 1937, before his fourth and final major operation, he and Gladys relocated, and that summer he cleared out of 121 Gloucester Terrace,50 where he had had a workroom since 1934.51 From July, his London base was nearby at 10 Sussex Gardens before the Lewises arrived in October at 29A Kensington Gardens Studios, Notting Hill Gate, a large third-floor studio with a skylight and kitchen, the living quarters—a living-room, bedroom, and another kitchen—on the floor below.52
In several unrealized projects, Lewis had come close to depicting his own life before, as well as in his autobiographical fiction. In 1922, he had planned a novel entitled The Life of a Tyro, never written.53 Then there was a character called “Cantelman,” who surfaced in some stories published during the First World War,54 drawing from Lewis’s experiences. In 1930, Pound wrote to Lewis about Cantelman,55 and Lewis mentioned some “rough war-stories and sketches” used for a “war-book which I started two years ago, have not gone on with, but hope to soon,”56 possibly referring to the unfinished “Cantelman-Crowd Master” manuscript,57 parts of which he used in Blasting.58 Perhaps Pound also recalled a letter he received from Lewis in 1916, where Lewis, about to fight in France, announced: “I am writing a book called ‘The Bombardier’: only in my head, of course […]”59
Blasting and Bombardiering would be another war book itself, indeed another anti-war book, its depiction of the First World War freshly topical in the late 1930s with another conflict looming. Early on, Lewis highlighted the time of the writing, “with a little sketch of how things are shaping—in 1937,”60 “because it is after all myself in 1937 who is writing about myself as ‘blaster’ and as bombardier.”61 Lewis promised that there would be no politics in the autobiography, “a private history”62 free of propaganda. He was clear, too, about what period the autobiography would cover, making ambitious claims about the omission of his life until his thirties:
This book is about myself. It’s the first autobiography to take only a section of a life and leave the rest. Ten years about is the time covered. This is better than starting with the bib and the bottle. How many novels are tolerable that begin with the hero in his cradle? And a good biography is of course a sort of novel […] This book is about what happened to me in the Great War, and then afterwards in the equally great Peace […] the war, with a bit of pre-war and post-war sticking to it, fore and aft.63
Lewis promised that the autobiography would not venture past 1926, because it was still too near to be seen with clarity. “One only writes ‘biographies’ about things that are past and over. The present period is by no means over. One couldn’t sit down and write a biography about that.”64 Blasting moves from Lewis’s momentary celebrity in the first six months of 1914, to the First World War in London and France, before depicting the early 1920s—its structure “Art-War-Art, in three panels.”65 It is hardly “the first autobiography to take a section of a life and leave the rest,” yet its total omission of childhood is radical. Any areas of Lewis’s life not concerning his status as a writer and artist, or the war, are left completely out of sight. Lewis pictured the structure of the book in strikingly visual terms—and perhaps his lifelong practice of self-portraiture and portraiture made autobiography easier for him—as being “about a little group of people crossing a bridge […] the bridge, you see, is the war.”66
Alongside himself, Lewis wanted to portray a number of friends in the autobiography. “As well as being about myself, this book is about a number of people in all walks of life,”67 he wrote. In fact, Blasting was initially envisaged as a kind of group biography called “The Men of 1914,” before Lewis shifted the focus onto himself during the writing.68 The people finally included were mainly writers and artists. Many figures also appeared in the reproductions of Lewis’s portrait drawings in Blasting, including Rebecca West and “The Men of 1914” themselves: Joyce, Pound, and Eliot, all of whom Lewis drew in multiple portraits with sharp, incisive strokes, and whom he characterizes as a group both heroically and nostalgically as “the first men of a Future that has not materialized,” belonging to “a ‘great age’ that has not ‘come off’.”69
Lewis noted that he was bound by the “vexatious” laws of libel: “there are limits to the truthfulness in which I may indulge.”70 In a rejected early preface, “A Preliminary Aside to the Reader; Regarding Gossip, and its Pitfalls,” Lewis voiced his qualms about biography, as he declared: “I am about to gossip. I am going to be exceedingly ‘personal’ about certain persons.” He blamed the reader: “it is because of you that I descend to these picturesque details.”71 As an autobiographer, he was conscious of the irony of depicting impersonal writers such as Eliot—who asserted that “the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”72—through their lives rather than their work. Part of his motivation, Lewis claimed in Blasting, was to give a more truthful account than he thought these people would receive from future biographers. “I must rescue a few people I respect […] from the obloquy and misrepresentation which must be their unenviable lot.”73 Blasting also makes a side-swipe at the “New Biography” practiced by the “Bloomsberries”:
With what assurance people compose accounts of the demeanour and most private thoughts of the departed great! What novelists a bon marché those biographists become! Every “great man” to-day knows that he is living potentially a life of fiction. Sooner or later he will find himself the centre of a romance [ … ] Now for a decade or two those of the Strachey kidney have made a corner in the eminent dead […] But I, for a change, will stake out a modest claim in the living.74
In Blasting, Lewis organized his life-story with the firm lines of his drawings and novels. Autobiography, he argued, allowed him to assert control. “Don’t you often feel about some phase of your existence that it requires going over with a fine comb and putting in order?”75 In this spirit, he offered views of himself, in different phases and poses. As an autobiographer, Lewis wanted no flapping loose ends; above all, he wanted his life to be neat, as though self-portraiture were akin to a visit to the hairdresser—blessed in a whole page of Blast, as Lewis also reminds us in Blasting.76
The first “panel” of Blasting recounts Lewis’s breakthrough in 1914, as the leader of the Rebel Art Centre, figurehead of Vorticism and editor of Blast. Writing from the pre-war-shadowed present of 1937, Lewis recreated the pre-war-shadowed months of 1914 as a period when art was full of military maneuvers, playing at war, as Marinetti and the Futurists clashed with the Vorticists. In one slapstick sequence which, in its exaggeration and caricature recalls Ford’s memoirs of the Pre-Raphaelites in Ancient Lights, Lewis intervenes in a dispute between Henri Gaudier and David Bomberg, after Gaudier “threatened at Ford’s to sock Bomberg on the jaw”77—before Lewis admits that he once seized T. E. Hulme by the throat. “He transfixed me upon the railings of Soho Square,”78 Lewis writes. All the “putsches” of these rival groups are portrayed as essentially comic, as is Vorticism, which “was replete with humour, of course.”79
So was Blast, the “Review of the Great English Vortex,” whose first issue appeared on July 1, 1914,80 and which Lewis gives such prominence in his autobiography. In pages of typographically eccentric headlines between putrid covers variously described as puce, pink, and purple, and whimsical cursings and blessings, Blast challenged an entire generation of writers and artists, in a string of manifestos, poems, plays, “vortices and notes,” and other oddments, with literary contributors including Pound, Lewis, Ford, and Rebecca West; and illustrations from numerous Vorticists. Despite the inclusion of Ford, Impressionism was one of many targets of the Vorticists: “Our Vortex rushes out like an angry dog at your Impressionistic fuss.”81 But the contributors were certainly far from aligned in their aims. Rebecca West, for example, wondered privately, “Am I a Vorticist? I’m sure it can’t be good for Anthony if I am.”82 In Blasting, Lewis reproduced—without the typographical quirks of the original or “the scale of the 12 in. high Blast page”83—some of the Blast manifestos, which as he explains, reveled in contradiction:
Then only a few pages later:
BLESS ENGLISH HUMOUR […]
The wild MOUNTAIN RAILWAY from IDEA
to IDEA, in the ancient Fair of LIFE.85
As Lewis tells it, a shower of invitations reached him as a result of “that comic earthquake, Blast,”86 helping him make his entrée into “society.” He was a “lion,” enjoying an unprecedented—and he implies, largely unearned—celebrity. At Lady Ottoline Morrell’s house, Lewis even met the Prime Minister. On the weekend before the outbreak of war in July, Lewis went up to Berwickshire, to the country-house party hosted by Mary Borden Turner where Ford and Violet Hunt were also present. Lewis had no idea, he writes, of the war on the horizon, and depicts himself as a political naïf. At the party, he belatedly became aware, noting the other guests’ concentration on the newspapers, that something momentous was occurring. In a pivotal scene from Blasting, at breakfast, Mary Turner and Ford discussed whether England would go to war.
Ford thrust his mouth out, fish-fashion, as if about to gasp for breath. He goggled his eyes and waggled one eyelid about. He just moved his lips a little and we heard him say, in a breathless sotto voce—
“England will.”
“England will! But Ford,” said Mrs. Turner, “England has a Liberal Government. A Liberal Government cannot declare war.”
“Of course it can’t,” I said, frowning at Ford. “Liberal governments can’t go to war. That would not be liberal. That would be conservative.”
Ford sneered very faintly and inoffensively […] “I don’t agree,” Ford answered, in his faintest voice, with consummate indifference, “because it has always been the Liberals who have gone to war.”87
This ending of the first “panel” of Blasting was a political awakening for Lewis, still only in his early thirties. Lewis also wrote about this moment in his earlier, fictional “Cantelman-Crowd Master” manuscript, where the portrait of Ford (fictionalized as “Leo Makepiece Leo”) is more unpleasantly explicit about the older man’s habit of associating himself with other great writers, and about Ford’s physical appearance and size. Although Ford in Blasting is hardly portrayed kindly in external terms—with his thrust-out mouth, goggling eyes, and breathlessness—he is given a certain grudging admiration and respect for his knowledge of the ways of the world, compared to the more innocent Lewis.
In the second “panel” of Blasting, the “Cantelman” manuscript reemerges more strongly—as Lewis hands over entirely to “Cantleman” [sic] for several chapters. He tells us that Cantleman is a mask for himself,88 and notes that he has used parts of Blast 2: War Number from 1915, written “on the spot.”89 And this is where “Cantleman” material first surfaced.90 Reassembling texts written over twenty years before, Lewis acts as an impresario of his earlier fictional selves, also saying he has toned down the original, included as its closeness to the events gives it authenticity. He worried that the Blast 2 material might be too “highbrow” for the autobiography.91 The switch into the third-person, into fiction, and into a different tone, is novel and jarring. But the dislocation also reflects the momentous confusion as England prepared for war.
Cantleman leaves the house-party abruptly, departing on the night train. He sees scenes of mobilization everywhere as the train lurches south through the small hours. Conversations are woven into a tapestry of reportage and stream-of-consciousness, as Cantleman gives word portraits of people on the train, reaching King’s Cross in the morning. Cantleman joins the thronging war-crowds in London, wandering through them like a flâneur to Trafalgar Square, conducting “crowd-experiments.”92 He dissolves into the moods of the crowd, and makes notes on them. “The war was like a great new fashion,”93 he observes.
*
Lewis, having only just established himself as an artist and writer, was completely unprepared for the war. As he stresses in Blasting, it took him by surprise. His first reaction to the tumult was, he writes in the autobiography, to try and continue as usual. For a while he lived at 4 Percy Street, off the Tottenham Court Road, recovering from an “infection”94—the gonorrhea which proved debilitating years later—mentioned in the autobiography in fairly cryptic terms. Knowing he would sign up once he was fit, Lewis worked on Tarr, and continued with art. In November 1914, he completed a Vorticist panel at South Lodge for Ford and Violet Hunt, and the following year designed the cover for Ford’s poem Antwerp. In March 1915 he appeared in the Second London Group Show, and in June held the first, only, Vorticist Exhibition. Also that summer, after Gaudier died in France on June 5, and probably before Ford enlisted in July 1915, Lewis recorded another conversation in Blasting with Ford, again granted a gift for prophecy, contrasted with Lewis’s naivety.
I was talking to Ford Madox Hueffer about Gaudier’s death […] It was absurd, Ford agreed. But there it was, he seemed to think. He seemed to think fate was absurd […]
“When this War’s over,” he said, “nobody is going to worry, six months afterwards, what you did or didn’t do in the course of it. One month after it’s ended, it will be forgotten. Everybody will want to forget it—it will be bad form to mention it. Within a year disbanded ‘heroes’ will be selling matches in the gutter. No one likes the ex-soldier—if you’ve lost a leg, more fool you!”
“Do you think that?” I said […]
“Of course,” he answered. “It’s always been the same. After all wars that’s what’s happened.”
This worldly forecast was verified to the letter.95
In Blasting, Lewis makes clear he wanted to finish Tarr before enlisting,96 intending to leave at least some kind of literary legacy behind him before he went to France. Harriet Weaver accepted Tarr for The Egoist in January 1916; Lewis volunteered in March. He bequeathed his possessions to his mother, Anne, who was also looking after his two children with Olive Johnson, the second born in 1913.97 Lewis spent the rest of 1916 in artillery camps on the south coast of England, initially training as a gunner, then as a bombardier. Through Pound in August 1916, he heard about Ford’s shell-shock. Pound had met Ford’s brother-in-law. “He said a shell had burst near our friend and that he had had a nervous breakdown,”98 Pound wrote Lewis. Through Violet Hunt, Lewis was also applying for a commission. He left for France in May 1917, and he was soon at the front and under heavy fire.
Lewis’s letters describe the vivid turmoil of the war with immediacy and extraordinary bravado. On June 6, 1917, Lewis was writing to his mother, telling her not to worry: “I am now in the firing line […] I am writing you this note in my dugout, surrounded by a continuous din from all quarters. Guns of all description blaze away day and night.”99 To Pound, the same day: “Whizzing, banging, swishing and thudding completely surround me.”100 Two days later, to Pound again, Lewis said he had been gassed in his sleep, and missed shells—“coming over every few seconds”101—by twenty yards, twice.
Lewis also gave a very thorough account of his war in Blasting, again steeped in bravado. While Ford avoided the war in his autobiographies, Lewis gave it pride of place. He was especially concerned to demystify war, to strip it of its “romance.” He was keen to write against the “subtle anguish”102 of the accounts of the late 1920s. He wanted to depict the conflict as a “squalid serio-comedy.”103 Yet the detail of the autobiography, for all its gruffness and imperturbability, amasses a certain gravity. And while its grim humor and anti-romanticism mask Lewis’s feelings about the war, its centrality in his account of his life shows his awareness nonetheless that, more than anything else he experienced, it had marked him irrevocably. He was not prepared for the war; nor did he ever really get over it. In Blasting, keen to demystify war, Lewis tried to make light of his time as a gunner and battery officer, stressing that his experience was not “fighting” like the infantry, and depicting the long periods of inactivity. Lewis says he hardly ever saw the enemy, while dispatching endless shells towards them. But he was also under continual bombardment, sometimes for days and nights on end.
At the end of June 1917, he came down with “trench fever,” as he writes in Blasting: his neck and face were swollen, along with his tongue. He was taken to a Casualty Clearing Station near Boulogne, then a convalescent hotel in Dieppe. Despite the stiff comedy of the autobiography, in his letters he was dwelling on his possible death, writing to Pound that if anyone had to write a memoir of him, he would like Pound to do it.104 In mid-August, he returned to his battery near Nieuwpoort in Belgium. In Nieuwpoort, for almost two months, he was in a battery position under intense shelling day and night. An anecdote in Blasting from this time is particularly chilling. One afternoon, Lewis went to Headquarters, and on return saw his position had been hit: his sergeant killed, half a dozen men wounded. Lewis’s unemotional tone modulates into solemn, stunned resentment. “As this is written, so it happened. But that is obviously not how men’s lives should be taken away from them, for nothing at all.”105
From the end of September, he was in the Salient, in the Third Battle of Ypres, a semi-aquatic, boggy nightmare, portrayed in Blasting in both comic and tragic terms—a “grinning tragedy,” indeed—as “an epic of mud.” Going to his observation post before dawn, in an empty dugout just off the road, a shell “exploded two feet from my head,”106 Lewis writes in Blasting. Soon afterwards, he saw two dead Scottish soldiers, one without a head.107
In November, Lewis was granted compassionate leave to return to London, as his mother was ill with pneumonia. Lewis extended his leave in London, he notes in Blasting, and heard about the Canadian Government’s scheme for war artists. Returning to the front at the end of 1917, he had a new role as a “painter-soldier.”108 As a war artist, he was living in a château along with his old friend Augustus John. He was back in London early in 1918, to complete his war paintings. He was physically unharmed, miraculously; but he must have been psychologically scarred by his experience of being shelled for months on end. Lewis makes his role as a war artist sound relatively frivolous, but he excelled in his paintings of the conflict.
Bitterness only seeps into Blasting as the conflict nears its end. Lewis pinpoints how the war was an education for him politically. Under bombardment, Lewis had read Stendhal, Proudhon, and Marx. And now, thinking politically about the war, he gags himself and his rising anger, not unlike Ford’s ex-army character “Gringoire” in No Enemy, who also has to stop himself saying too much.
In the third and final “panel” of Blasting, Lewis gives a sketchy account of his post-war period, in London. His father, Charles, who left Lewis’s mother in 1893, and whom Lewis had barely seen for twenty years, died in November 1918, before Lewis’s mother died in 1920. Lewis himself was a victim of the post-war flu epidemic, with influenza followed by double pneumonia. He recovered, but only after losing nearly all his hair. Lewis’s resumé in Blasting of what he had achieved by this point in his life is scathing: “I had accomplished nothing.”109 He had to start anew as a writer and artist, at thirty-six, having lost several crucial years in the war.
As Lewis began painting regular portraits in the early 1920s, the pages of Blasting offer a series of anecdotes about his sitters, these short verbal sketches forming a natural counterpart to the narrative of Lewis’s new life as a portrait painter in his garden studio in Adam and Eve Mews in Kensington. The last “compartment” of the autobiography gives distilled word portraits of first meeting Joyce, Pound, and Eliot—the device of depicting these figures through brief “meetings” also allowing for concision and pithiness. Lewis met Joyce in Paris with Eliot in the summer of 1920, as he relates. His first meeting with Pound was probably in 1910, in the Vienna Café in New Oxford Street, where Lewis also remembered noticing Wells (before they met) several times: Wells “springing about in a suit too tight for him, as he inducted ladies into chairs.”110 With Eliot, Lewis can’t exactly place when he first met him—for he “slid” into his consciousness—but it was “in the narrow triangle of Ezra’s flat” in Kensington.111
Blasting ends with a brief account of 1937; and it is in the third and final “panel” that the omissions and evasions of the autobiography—the most glaring being of Lewis’s sexual relationships—make themselves most felt. Even at the outset of Blasting, Lewis noted that “1918–26 is a period marked ‘strictly private’.”112 His many relationships with women are off limits in Blasting, and as in Ford’s autobiographies, Lewis’s lovers are completely omitted, along with their offspring.
Lewis’s two children with Olive Johnson are not even glimpsed in these pages, nor are his two children after the war with Iris Barry, born in 1919 and 1920 respectively, or his child with his first serious girlfriend Ida Vendel, born in 1908. These omissions do however reflect one truth. Lewis hardly saw any of these children. Apart from attempting to provide upkeep, he abandoned them just as he had been abandoned by his father, and he abandoned the women who bore them. He seems to have found any conception of family life completely unimaginable; to have regarded emotion with suspicion or scorn. Women who had affairs with Lewis, meanwhile, did appear, innocuously, in his autobiography, including Sybil Hart-Davis, Mary Borden Turner, and Nancy Cunard. His wife, Gladys Anne, or “Froanna,” would have no children, and was also invisible in Blasting.
And yet Lewis drew and painted nearly all his women repeatedly, obsessively. It was in his images, not his words or deeds, that his feelings for them emerged. Between 1936 and 1938, for example, as Paul Edwards writes, Lewis produced seven paintings of “Froanna,” and many more works on paper.113 She was highly visible in the Red Portrait and Portrait of the Artist’s Wife in Lewis’s show at the Leicester Galleries in December 1937, “Infernos.” The couple traveled to Warsaw and Berlin together before the opening, with this trip revealing to Lewis his misjudgment of the German situation. Over the next two years, Lewis returned with vigor to portraiture, remaining in Kensington Gardens Studios, and painting portraits of Pound and Eliot—the latter being painted in March 1938, with sittings in the evenings between 8.30 and midnight, and Lewis continuing with the painting alone during the day.114 The Eliot portrait was rejected by the Royal Academy, sending Lewis back into the public fray in his preferred role as artistic antagonist.
Much as he liked to satirize society and live in secrecy, “underground,” Lewis thrived on company, even if only as something against which to rebel. Despite his seeming misanthropy, he found it hard to live in total isolation, and his satire fed on other people, just as his portraiture literally depended on them too. This was something he would realize over the next few years, as he and Gladys left England for America and Canada on the eve of the Second World War, with Lewis planning to escape the “economic inferno”115 of war-time Britain, where the encroaching atmosphere of war was making it harder than ever to survive as an artist. In America, Lewis thought, portraits would be easier to come by.
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Lewis and Froanna left Southampton, sailing for Quebec, on September 2, 1939, the day before Britain declared war on Germany, arriving in Canada on September 8. After a week in Toronto they made their way to New York, where they were based for most of the next year, before being forced to return to Toronto in November 1940 when their American visas expired. They spent the next two-and-a-half years in an apartment suite, 11A, in the Tudor Hotel in Toronto, while Lewis attempted—steadily becoming poorer and poorer—to keep them afloat on portrait commissions. A trip Lewis had imagined would last several months eventually lasted six years, as the war continued, and as Lewis and Froanna’s finances dwindled, making the return boat fare out of reach.
As during the First World War, Lewis became a prolific letter-writer during this time. His growing desperation can be traced in numerous accounts to correspondents throughout his residence in America and Canada. Where Gertrude Stein a few years earlier toured America in triumph, disconcerted mainly by her celebrity, Lewis faced not just indifference on his arrival, but even, he thought in his more paranoid moments, hostility. He was utterly dependent on portraits to survive, yet to obtain commissions he had to dress expensively, he thought, and give no outward sign that he and Gladys were hard up. After nearly a year in the Tudor Hotel, in October 1941, he summed things up relatively optimistically to Archibald MacLeish: “Although I have succeeded in making a living of sorts here in Canada—mostly by portrait-painting—it is very gruesome work struggling with people about the shapes of their noses and the size of their feet.”116 But by April 1942, still stuck in the Tudor, he was writing to James Johnson Sweeney:
Already my life here is unbelievably difficult and my wife nearly crazed with worry. All along I have recognised that millions of people everywhere are suffering in the most terrible way—that my misfortune is merely typical of a universal misery. For my wife’s sake even more than for my own (for I feel responsible for what is happening to her) I have incessantly exerted myself to find some solution. I am still doing so. There is no stone that has not been turned over. But all I can say is that […] I can see no prospect of relief. If I did not have a hotel which providentially does not seem to mind about the payment of rent we should be on the streets.117
As ever, Lewis was able to extract humor from the desperation, wryly adding: “I refer to this as my ‘Tudor Period’.”118 But the situation was obviously dire, exacerbated by exile, worry, and loneliness. New York, Lewis told one correspondent in summer 1942, “was the worst year of my life—years of illness excepted […] Today however I am screwed down as firmly as it is possible to be […] What is going to happen to us in the end I do not know.”119 At one point, he and Gladys were so short of funds, as Paul O’Keeffe relates, that Gladys “was unable to leave the apartment because she had no serviceable shoes.”120 She applied for work in a tarpaulin-sewing factory, but her application was rejected, as were Lewis’s applications for teaching positions. The begging letters from Lewis continued; at one particularly low moment he even made veiled threats to his ex-lover Iris Barry, now married and working at MoMA in New York, and also trying to find a publisher for Lewis’s novel The Vulgar Streak (1941). “Remember, I will show up your bad behaviour,”121 Lewis wrote to Barry ominously. She sent money.
Lewis wrote about his time in America and Canada in two highly autobiographical books, which together suggest how his initial optimism became privation as the war continued. America, I Presume (1940) was written swiftly in the first year abroad, narrated by a bluff Anglo-Indian, Archibald Corcoran, who like Lewis has left England on the eve of the Second World War. Corcoran, with his wife Agatha Morgan—a crime novelist whose latest mystery is called The Clue of the Silver Snuff-Box, and who, we are later told, has ghostwritten much of the manuscript—is “booked for a coast-to-coast lecture tour”122 of the United States. Like Lewis and Gladys, “Corkers” and Agatha arrive in Canada at Quebec and visit Toronto, before New York. Lewis uses America, I Presume to offer, through Corcoran’s conservative viewpoint, his jaundiced observations as he travels in America. Stephen Spender recalled being shown a copy containing a “key” to the real identities of its characters123—and the novel is a transparent roman à clef, close to a travel book or even a polemic, as Lewis uses his slapdash, “political”-pamphlet-style loquacity to flesh out an essentially plotless narrative. For all its aimlessness and digression, and the jarring effect of the prejudiced, unreliable narrator, the mood of America, I Presume is generally blithe and upbeat.
But in Self Condemned (1954), mainly written after the ordeal was over, Lewis fictionalized, in gruelling detail, the long confinement in the Tudor Hotel, through his portrayal of the two main characters: René Harding, a professor of history who gives up his career and emigrates to Canada, and his wife, Hester. As René tells each member of his family in turn before departure, he has abandoned history as a discipline. His exile to Canada, unlike Lewis’s initial vision of America, is envisaged as hopeless: “an empty interlude, an apprenticeship to death,” or “a breathing-space, a period of readjustment.”124
Self Condemned conveys René’s self-reproach in microscopic detail, as he and Hester take up residence in Canada in “the Room,” in the Hotel Blundell, “twenty-five feet by twelve about,” where they remain for “three years and three months.”125 Stuck in a “senseless captivity,”126 they are “economic exiles—exiles by accident, frozen in their tracks, as it were, by the magic of total war.”127 The months turn into years. England recedes—“until it was, at times, hardly real.”128 The Room becomes like an extension of René and Hester themselves, and René resents anyone entering it and seeing their unhappiness. The plight of the exiles is too “small” to be truly tragic, as they know their suffering is eclipsed by the war. Yet it inspires pity. Shame and self-recrimination haunt them, as well as pettiness and futility. Time expands as the war goes on:
That there was no intention of ending this war, until it had become a total catastrophe for everybody was now obvious to him. He did not communicate to Hester his views as to the probable length of the war. He just sat before the radio, and listened to the unfolding of new moves promising, as he interpreted it, the most stupendous evils—sat there, night after night, too shocked to speak at times: at others simply stifling the human instinct to communicate.129
The bleakness of Self Condemned is lightened by the love which, in their confinement, binds Hester and René together, in a tender and unexpectedly affecting way. Lewis depicts this newly dawning affection, rooted in mutual dependence and shared suffering, with the force of an emotion experienced for the first time. The drawings of Gladys that Lewis made during their time in the Tudor Hotel are also integral to Self Condemned. Illustrating the role of Hester, they again make Gladys touchingly visible. In Self Condemned, as also happened in the Tudor Hotel in February 1943, there is an immense fire in the hotel, and René’s situation eventually changes, as he is offered a column in the local newspaper, and a post as a professor in Canada. René knows he cannot return to London, while Hester longs to do so. Towards the close of the novel, Hester commits suicide, leaving René stunned, a “glacial shell.”130 In an alternative discarded ending of Self Condemned, René and Hester return together to London and penury.
But things improved professionally for Lewis later in 1943, when he found a teaching position at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario, entering a less desperate phase in his sojourn in North America. Lewis and Gladys moved to Windsor in June 1943. In 1944 they spent nearly eight months in St Louis, where Lewis hoped for some large portrait commissions, before returning to Windsor. By May the next year, the Lewises were in Ottawa. They sailed from Quebec to England in August 1945, having borrowed the money for their fares.
Lewis was sixty-two when he and Gladys came back to post-war London. As they returned to Kensington Gardens Studios, vacant throughout the war, the landlord immediately tried to claim six years’ back-payment of rent. The top floor studio’s glass roof had been smashed during the war from bombing, and although new glass had been installed, the contents of the room had been rained on during a considerable interim period.131 Meanwhile, dry rot apparently originating in the Christian Science Reading Room below the flat was spreading through the building. Rationing was still in force, and London seemed like a giant ruin. “This is the capital of a dying empire,” Lewis wrote to Geoffrey Stone, “—not crashing down in flames and smoke but expiring in a peculiar muffled way.”132 Lewis however was clearly glad to be back among his old haunts and acquaintances.
In 1946 he turned his thoughts to writing another autobiography. In July, Lewis signed a contract with Hutchinson for Story of a Career, which he submitted in March or April 1947, under the title Ascent of Parnassus.133 The book, after a long delay, was published in 1950 as Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date. At the time of writing, it had been almost a decade since Blasting, whose selective slice of Lewis’s life left plenty of scope for further treatment. Like Blasting, Lewis conceived Rude Assignment as having three parts. But war played much less of a role. In part one, “Three Fatalities,” Lewis outlines the three “handicaps” he faced—namely, being an intellectual, a satirist, and a political pamphleteer. “Part Two is autobiography,” he declared, while the last part is “a biography, and in some cases a restatement in different terms, of a number of my books.”134 The only autobiography in Rude Assignment, really, is the careful portion sandwiched in the middle.
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Autobiography is a form of revision in which parts of one’s life can be reordered and reshaped, while offering the illusory satisfaction to the autobiographer of setting the final record “straight.” Often, for novelists and artists, the urge to undertake this revision is stirred by a desire to explain elements of their work which might otherwise fall prey to, or be ignored by, uncomprehending critics. Autobiography allows writers to offer their own self-criticism, and to respond to assessments of their work. But the possibility of writing multiple autobiographies also attests to the way that any autobiography, while often aiming to have the “last word,” is only another version of, and another slant on, the various aspects of any life and its work. Autobiography seduces with the lure of finality and completeness, while always remaining partial, a portrait. In Rude Assignment, Lewis was particularly motivated by an urge to counter distorted portraits of himself that might find themselves in circulation, as he wrote in a passage which curiously recalls Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891).
In the course of controversy, in order to discredit an opponent […] many disobliging fictions gain currency. A picture of a man is in this way handed down which is a very bad likeness, one that corresponds only slightly with the original. After his death, the painting goes on […] if only the spurious portrait of oneself gets painted in public […] if it is brought out into the open to be painted there, then all is well […] And so long as the living man is still there he can annihilate the phantom: whereas when a phantom himself it would be too late.135
This is a haunting meditation on biography and reputation, also echoing the ghostly reverberations of Henry James’s thoughts about biography and what the artist could do in self-defense. Where James opted for destruction of documents, Lewis puts his faith in setting forth his own account. Rude Assignment, he writes, has been composed in order “to spoil the sport of the irresponsible detractor, to improve my chances of some day not being too much lied about, to clear the path immediately ahead—a simple domestic operation, but long overdue.”136 But it is not his conduct as a man that Lewis defends, or even describes in Rude Assignment, so much as the controversial positions in his work. As with Blasting, Lewis’s personal relationships make no appearance. Once again, as an autobiographer, Lewis is extremely controlled, separating the panels of his text very neatly. At times, the tone of the volume feels like Lewis giving his own defense at an imaginary trial, as he outlines how “the nature of my thinking […] has resulted in my life being so difficult a one to live.”137
The first part of Rude Assignment is essentially an essay, divided into three sections, on the role of the intellectual, satirist, and political writer, as Lewis gives a “catalogue of my personal handicaps.”138 While Blasting had been written for a popular audience, Lewis wished to concede less of his usual “highbrow” stance in Rude Assignment; and the fissure between the “two publics” was his very subject in the opening section on being an intellectual. Explaining his role as a satirist, meanwhile, Lewis invokes a host of earlier writers, and discusses the cartoons of David Low and “Vicki.” Portrait painting in the twentieth century, he writes, has become unable to deal with reality, as people desire an “improved” version of themselves. This kind of self-deception nonetheless—despite Lewis’s ability to stare closely at his own frailties and mistakes—also underlies the project of Rude Assignment, particularly in Lewis’s account of his politics, as he attempted to readjust his own portrait for posterity.
When “more intimate autobiography”139 appears in part two, Lewis offers, for the first time as an autobiographer, an account of his youth. Casting his mind back half a century, he recounts making his first “books” at eight; transforming his study at school in Rugby into an “artist’s studio”;140 spending weeks each year with his mother in Paris, visiting the Louvre; attending the life-class under Professor Tonks at the Slade, before entering “heaven” with a long sojourn in Paris “in its late sunset.”141 In Paris, Lewis rid himself of his English education and “became a European.”142 Looking back, he dwells on his inactivity throughout his years on the Continent, and how he was supported financially by his mother, during “long vague periods of an indolence now charged with some creative purpose.”143 In one unusual passage, he notes his inability to communicate with other people:
I remained, beyond the usual period, congealed in a kind of cryptic immaturity. In my social relations the contacts remained, for long, primitive. I recognised dimly this obstruction: was conscious of gaucherie, of wooden responses […] But I am gazing back into what is a very dark cavern indeed. An ungregarious childhood may have counted for something.144
Augustus John noticed this too during his time with Lewis in France. “You never have—it seems to me—given the [idea] of friendship a chance,”145 John wrote to Lewis in 1907. In his early years, by his own account, Lewis’s dealings with others were marked by secrecy, privacy, and a certain truculence. Writing here as if about someone else, in the sometimes awkward language of this second autobiography, admitting that he has no explanation, Lewis tentatively connects his “gaucherie” with his childhood. Later in Rude Assignment one also senses him wondering about his later self-ostracism after the war, as he reflects on The Tyro and The Enemy, and the “note of solitary defiance”146 he often struck.
But he did become more social returning to London in 1909. In Rude Assignment, Lewis recounts going to the office of the English Review in Holland Park—and portrays himself through Ford’s portrait of him: “Hueffer has described […] ‘the moujik’ who unexpectedly mounted the stairs, [and] silently left a bundle of manuscript.”147 Ford, Lewis writes, led him to Pound, Eliot, Gaudier Brzeska, and others; and what Lewis calls Ford’s “somnolent but systematic sociability” expanded further when he married Violet Hunt. At dinner at “Mrs. Hueffer’s,” Lewis remembered first meeting Rebecca West: “a dark young maenad then, who burst through the dining-room door (for she was late) like a thunderbolt.”148 Lewis’s 1932 pencil drawing of West—nervy, graceful, and melancholy—already in Blasting, reappears in Rude Assignment, where Lewis continues his word portrait of Ford at some length, satirizing Ford’s physical appearance and pretensions, but extolling his virtues as an editor.
Hueffer was a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the Zoo inviting buns—especially when ladies were present. Over the gaping mouth damply depended the ragged ends of a pale lemon moustache. This ex-collaborator with Joseph Conrad was himself […] a typical figure out of a Conrad book—a caterer, or corn-factor, coming on board—blowing like a porpoise with the exertion—at some Eastern port […] He possessed a vivid and theatrical imagination: he jacked himself up, character as he was in a nautical story, from one of the white business gents in the small tropic port into—I am not quite sure it was not into a Maugham story […] But […] Hueffer was probably as good an editor as could be found for an English literary review.149
In his autobiographies, Lewis grasped how Ford’s reminiscences opened the door to verbal flourishes in return. Rude Assignment, which offers less of a group portrait than Blasting, despite sketches and asides on Augustus John, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound, still made space for Ford. In this portrait, Lewis mocks Ford’s manner, while paying him a homage he would have appreciated, describing him as a fictional character in Conrad, someone from the pages of a book. Lewis saw the self-delusion in Ford that irritated Wells; he also saw how, as an editor, Ford offered himself to others, abandoning his “vanity.”150 Ford helped Lewis form his persona: in his literary portrayals of Lewis, Ford described him as a conspirator, an exotic European. And Lewis accepted this Fordian mask in Rude Assignment. “I was for some years spiritually a Russian,” Lewis writes, “—a character in some Russian novel. As such I made my bow in London—to the deeply astonished Ford Madox Hueffer.”151
As it moves past the English Review, Rude Assignment leads towards the same period as Blasting, saying more about Lewis’s involvement with Roger Fry and the Omega Workshops in 1913, while being uncharacteristically diplomatic about their falling-out.152 Lewis also writes of his work decorating the short-lived “Cave of the Golden Calf” nightclub on Heddon Street, off Regent Street, for Madame Strindberg, and the high ideals—worth fighting for—of the immediate pre-war period:
It was, after all, a new civilisation that I—and a few other people—was making the blueprints for: these things never being more than that. A rough design for a way of seeing for men who as yet were not there […] I, like all the other people in Europe so engaged, felt it to be an important task. It was more than just picture-making: one was manufacturing fresh eyes for people, and fresh souls to go with the eyes. That was the feeling.153
This feeling altered after the war. In the short account of the conflict in Rude Assignment, Lewis remarks how the war made him move away in art from abstraction, towards figuration. Writing Tarr also dragged him away from abstraction, as novels were necessarily less abstract than art. After the war, “the geometrics which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling.”154
The central reminiscential section of Rude Assignment comes, as Blasting also did, to an invisible block in the mid-1920s, offering a different reason for it. In the first autobiography, Lewis wrote that the period after this was still too near to be seen clearly; in Rude Assignment, he writes that after 1925, writing took up nearly all his existence.155 Lewis tells us that he had been intending to go up to the Second World War in this second autobiography. But after the mid-1920s, “my personal life has no further relevance. Thenceforth my history is strictly that of my books.”156 In this way, Lewis justifies the final section of Rude Assignment, which offers a life through these books, and a reassessment of his oeuvre.
In concept, this final part offered Lewis a chance to compose a very fitting text for an impersonal writer and artist such as himself: a purely “intellectual autobiography” in which only the work is reassessed rather than the life. Autobiography and biography are well-suited to depicting the genesis and evolution of works of literature and art, also fitting them together into the larger pattern of an oeuvre. This is precisely what Lewis aims to give in this last section, “The Books—a Pattern of Thinking,” taking us up to the time of writing.
An ambitious attempt at self-criticism and realignment, the final part of Rude Assignment founders partly because of Lewis’s very productivity. A long, involved discussion of The Art of Being Ruled (1926) sets a level of detail Lewis does not sustain; and where he is expansive on some areas of his oeuvre he is cursory about others. The main thread of his interest in his “pattern of thinking” is, he asserts, in focusing on his most controversial books. While Lewis does make important retractions and revisions, above all of his “anti-war” books of the 1930s which he here almost completely disowns, the focus on controversy skews the account, dwelling on some of his least accomplished books, and ignoring his work as an artist. Reproductions of Lewis’s art towards the end of Rude Assignment—including a delicate pencil sketch of the artist’s wife from 1936—only remind us how much is being missed.
Even Lewis himself fairly early on, as he arrives at certain monuments of his career to defend them in Rude Assignment, seems to be tiring of his self-appointed task. The autobiographer, looking back at his earlier ideas, alternates between pride, wariness, apology, and bafflement. “Arriving as I do now at Time and Western Man,” Lewis writes, “I feel that I am standing before a substantial fortress, once full of vigorous defenders, but now silent, probably a place where bats hang upside down and jackals find a musty bedchamber. To be frank, I have no desire to re-enter it.”157 As he reapproaches his political works of the 1930s, the work of salvage becomes a great deal harder, as Lewis acknowledges, writing of his poverty and sickness, seemingly as the only way he can find to explain or excuse the manifold wrong-turns and rash judgments he now finds in some of these volumes. The autobiography ends with an “Envoi,” reminiscent of the ending of Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography in its over-tidiness, as Lewis recomposes his ruffled ego.
I have gone back to the past in order to defend ideas of twenty years ago with a changed outlook. This, however, turned out to be less troublesome than might have been expected. Certainly in many particulars I judge the issues in question differently today. In other cases I discovered there was remarkably little change […] It is character and motives rather than anything else which one has to protect and put out of reach of smearers. No one cares about the intellect—I don’t have to worry about that, but what the domestic requires in applying for a job—a good character.158
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While Lewis was writing Rude Assignment in Kensington Gardens Studios in 1946, and was approaching its initially scheduled deadline of November, he had a bout of flu which kept him inside for several days. Emerging from his illness, he went to buy a newspaper, and was hit by a motorcycle. He continued with the autobiography in a state of semi-immobility, in a “recumbent position”159 as his leg healed throughout the winter.
For quite some time, Lewis had been aware of a far more serious problem with his health. In Toronto in 1941, he saw an eye specialist who warned him, as he told one correspondent at the time, that “one of my eyes […] was practically extinct. My other eye would be the same in six months’ time—if I had what he thought I had: namely glaucoma.”160 Having formed his artistic philosophy around the eye, and relying for his livelihood in Canada on his ability to paint portraits, Lewis was terrified of losing his sight. He wrote elsewhere in his letters that he first noticed something wrong with his left eye “about two years before the war,”161 and had been “practically blind”162 in that eye for years.
While working on another portrait painting of Eliot, in March and April 1949, Lewis noticed he had to come right up to the sitter to see. He began a portrait of Stella Newton a few months later, and needed “to draw still closer and even then I could not quite see.”163 In December 1949 he had his eyes examined again. His teeth, initially thought to be the source of the problem, were removed early in 1950. The large tumor pressing on his optic nerves, the actual cause of the loss of vision, was diagnosed shortly afterwards. Throughout 1950, Lewis’s sight rapidly deteriorated, as he wrote in an article, “The Sea-Mists of the Winter,” announcing his necessary resignation as art critic of The Listener, in May 1951:
I found that I could no longer read the names of streets, see the numbers on houses, or see what stations I was passing through on the railway. About that time everything but banner headlines was invisible: then I found I could no longer read the letters inside the finger-holes of a telephone-dial. At present, if I wish to dial a number, I count the holes with my fingertips until I reach the opening where I know the letter I have to locate is situated […] When visited by friends […] I see them after a fashion, but fragmentarily, obliquely, and spasmodically. I can see no one immediately in front of me […] But an awareness of the bodily presence is always there, and as one turns one’s head hither and thither, glimpses constantly recur.164
Lewis was advised to have the tumor removed, but he preferred to live with the encroaching darkness, well aware that “the failure of sight which is already so advanced, will of course become worse from week to week.”165 He had had the tumor for years already, possibly since the 1930s. What he called his “unseemly autobiographical outburst”166 in The Listener was strangely calm and humorous, announcing his intentions to continue as a writer, with a Dictaphone, even while abandoning art criticism, “for I can no longer see a picture.”167
The lifelong dilemma over whether to pursue writing or painting was one thing, at least, resolved by blindness. In the 1950s, he continued to work, evolving a method of writing blind not with a Dictaphone but using sheets of paper with wire stretched across them to guide his script, often managing about six lines per page, before the pages were sorted, typed up, and read back to him. Among other books, he wrote Self Condemned in this way, Monstre Gai (1955), Malign Fiesta (1955), and The Red Priest (1956). In 1956, the blind painter was honored by an exhibition at the Tate, Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism. After the private view, Lewis was helped into a taxi with Gladys. As John Rothenstein recalled, “there were tears in his eyes”:168 a surprise to anyone who knows how well Lewis held his feelings at bay.
In 1957, the year he died, he had completed the typescript of another novel, Twentieth Century Palette. The hero of this unpublished text, as Paul O’Keeffe writes, is a painter, Evelyn Parke, born twenty years later than Lewis and spared the First World War, although he loses an arm in the Second.169 Lewis wrote to Hugh Kenner about this novel that it was “not about a man who did anything very much, except sleep with his models, and squeeze pigment out of fat tubes. I like his smell, but would not marry him to my favourite girl.”170 Evelyn has things Lewis never did: a father who brought him up (on his own), a prosperous background, and success from the start. “He was ideally placed as an artist,” Lewis writes, and “encountered none of the difficulties that handicapped many of those around him.”171 Thus Lewis, blind, at seventy-four, at the end of what he portrayed in Rude Assignment as a long life full of handicaps, sought a sustaining vision.