Three cities can claim Wyndham Lewis in this, his centenary year: Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the basis of his birth off Amherst in 1882; London, England, where he spent the bulk of his life; and Toronto. where he spent miserable years during the Second World War. Toronto is keeping very quiet; Lewis’s Self Condemned of 1954, his anatomy of those years, put the town on the map, but only so that thinking persons might be aware of its location on the planet, and successfully avoid it.
Halifax has been a little more positive. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia ran for a month a “Centennial Salute”, a small exhibition of Lewis’s paintings and drawings, mainly from the years of his Canadian residence. The tone of the exhibition programme, though, is mildly apologetic, and the Assistant Curator’s article, entitled Wyndham Lewis, Artist: from Nova Scotia or Mars?, seems almost as ready to disclaim him as to take credit for his genius. Might not Lewis’s legacy after all turn out to be a mass of embarrassing debts?
Perhaps it is as well that Lewis never revisited Nova Scotia, although (according to his widow) this was the main original purpose of his journey to Canada. If he had reached his native province, he would most likely have converted (with his usual mysterious metabolism) any latent local good-will into the most passionate resentment, and forfeited even a modest centennial exhibition.
London has produced a definite spasm of celebration. A radio programme has been devoted to Lewis, and the Tate Gallery has found space to display its collection of two dozen Lewis pictures. The Tate also played host, on November 27, to the fourth Symposium of the Wyndham Lewis Society, for a day of talks and discussions.
The Wyndham Lewis Society is also responsible for the admirable Enemy News (formerly Lewisletter), a magazine now in its ninth year: there is a passionate pleasure to be found in the championing of a neglected figure. In its Summer issue Enemy News published an article by a Dr Alistair Davies suggesting that the cosmology of Lewis’s 1928 novel The Childermass was derived more or less directly from the antisemitic teachings of a German secret society of the 1920s called the Thule Gesellschaft; the Autumn number duly carries a pair of refutations. That a periodical must print in one issue the heresies it will denounce in the next is proof enough that the arena of Lewis studies, though the sand is adequately blood-soaked, is a small one: but the more extreme the reversals that Enemy News embodies the closer it will approximate to the tantalizing infuriating mind of its hero.
Most of those who attended the Symposium at the Tate could be seen the same evening at a performance of Lewis’s two plays, The Ideal Giant and Enemy of the Stars, at the Bloomsbury Theatre; the choice of venue could hardly be more ironically appropriate, since Lewis’s 1913 quarrel with Roger Fry, and subsequent rejection of and by Bloomsbury, cut him off from the major reputation-making apparatus of the day. The plays themselves have not been performed before this year, which is hardly surprising given their mixture of philosophical speculation, expressionist slapstick and bulky poetry, aggressive spectators and passive men of action. A theatre group called the Buick of Sighs delivered the difficult text with considerable verve and enterprise, though towards the end of Enemy of the Stars they seemed to he losing Lewis to a blizzard of gimmicks: smoke machines, wind machines, hand-held lighting and yearning Wagner.
As regards publishing,the centennial has in this country produced two reissues: of Lewis’s first novel Tarr, in Penguin Modern Classics, and of Jeffrey Meyers’s useful 1980 biography The Enemy as a paperback. The 1980s Penguin Tarr offers no advance over the 1960s Jupiter edition, except presumably in terms of distribution. Tarr is a complex work, and like all Lewis’s early productions was extensively rewritten. The 1928 version represents several layers of development, which could best be distinguished by means of a critical edition: but the Penguin Tarr provides no context for the novel beyond a suggestion on the back cover that the character Kreisler is “a Hitler-like figure”. This is a bold speculation on the blurb-writer’s part, since the novel was probably started in 1909. (The Enemy goes a long way towards establishing the biographical context of Lewis’s work. Meyers is uneven as a critic; he seriously underrates some important fiction – The Apes of God, Snooty Baronet – but is consistently good on the effects of constant poverty and recurrent illness on a difficult temperament.) The centennial’s real treasures, though, are the collection of essays in Italian, French and English on Lewis’s writing and painting published by Sellerio in Palermo, and Bernard Lafourcade’s edition of The Complete Wild Body, from the Black Sparrow Press in Santa Barbara.
Giovanni Cianci’s bias as editor of Letteratura/Pittura, and author of its longest essay, is an insistence on the importance to the early Lewis of Italian Futurism. The links are clear enough, and were never denied by Lewis, but he claimed to admire Marinetti’s talents as a showman and self-publicist rather than a theorist. Cianci’s essay is entitled Un futurismo in panni neoclassici (“Futurism in Neoclassical Dress”), and maintains for example that Marinetti’s Words at Liberty and Wireless Imagination was an important source for Lewis’s style. For Cianci, Futurism is synonymous with spontaneity and exuberance, Vorticism with calculation and the intellect. Therefore the “libertine conclusion” of Tarr, in which the hero’s sexual life after the events of the book is presented in a few dismissively comic sentences, must indicate a persistent strain of Futurism.
There is something to be said for this thesis. But somehow it is easy to envisage Lewis treating women cavalierly, in fiction and out of it, even without the Futurist endorsement of “amplessi fuggevoli” (fugitive embraces). In any case, Lewis’s processes of reaction were too complex to allow of a simple return to a previous idea of his own, let alone someone else’s. By turns he rejected the status quo, and the influences which led him to attack it.
He never attempted a synthesis. preferring rather to establish an entrenched and contradictory opposition: in his fiction, he strengthens both sides of every conflict, until both are destroyed. The alienated intellectual Arghol, for example, in Enemy of the Stars, suddenly attacks and injures the lumpish Hanp: we have assumed throughout that Arghol is physically feeble, but now we are told he is twice Hanp’s size. Reassuringly, Hanp later kills Arghol, and then himself.
Alan Windsor’s essay (on the “Blast and Bless” lists in Blast I) follows Cianci in emphasizing the influence of Apollinaire’s L’Antitradition Futuriste: once again, this is well-trodden ground, which has the great advantage that it is unlikely to drop from beneath you. He does, however, backslide a little when it comes to examining the inclusion of C. B. Fry (cricketer) on the “Blast” list, where Roger Fry (critic) might have been expected. His speculative explanation ignores Jeffrey Meyers’s authoritative account of the Lewis/Fry rift, after which Fry’s “blandly impervious Quakerism” looks much more like a sustained dishonesty.
Ian Duncan, in his valuable essay “Towards a Modernist Poetic: Wyndham Lewis’s Early Fiction”, takes a different tack, arguing that Lewis was already beginning to establish an essentially “modern” poetic before he had contact of any sort with a European avant-garde. Duncan plays with fire when he quotes Lewis’s late assessment of the characters in The Wild Body (“primitive creatures, immersed in life, as much as birds, or big, obsessed, sun-drunk insects”) and then attributes it to “neo-romantic revisionism, closer to Lawrence than what Lewis actually wrote”; Duncan’s own thesis has a revisionist streak, since like Hugh Kenner’s pioneering study of 1954 it stresses Lewis’s mysterious self-invention rather than his mysterious openness to a continental diversity of influences.
The fact remains that Lewis was a revisionist; that his ideas changed constantly, and that he incorporated all his modifications into his texts, even when they clashed with elements already in place. Whereas Joyce in his revisions filled in a pattern with innumerable additional touches, Lewis wrestled continuously with the issues raised by his own work.
Later in his career, Lewis sometimes found it necessary for financial reasons (since publishers traditionally pay an advance in thirds on signature, delivery and publication of a manuscript) to write a book in a hurry, and rewrite it extensively in proof: but with Tarr and The Wild Body he had plenty of time to work his transformations. Tarr, after all, if the preface to the 1918 edition (which refers to starting the book “eight years ago”) can be assigned to 1915, dates in origin from 1907, while some of the stories in The Wild Body appeared in magazines five years before Dubliners; the collection was published five years after Ulysses.
The 1928 Tarr adds a certain fluency to the novel, at the expense of its Vorticist asperities; the development of The Wild Body is much less simple. It is in fact only with the publication of Bernard Lafourcade’s edition that Lewis’s early stories can properly he read: it is a pleasure to salute a scholarly edition of exemplary beauty and clarity. It includes thirty-five of Lewis’s designs, which admirably complement the progress of the book, and contains maps of the areas of Brittany and Spain referred to in the stories.
Only in the Freudian bias of his Afterword does Lafourcade render Lewis less than magnificent service. Lewis after all denounced Freud so rarely that it is safe to deduce a rather minor influence; at the same time, Lewis’s work is well protected against Freudian analysis by its paradoxical strategy of insisting on its misogyny and homophobia, keeping its secrets on the surface. When Lafourcade suggests that Lewis’s painting and writing were a single attempt to reunite his separated parents (his mother painted, his father wrote) we have only to remember Lewis’s letters to his mother. It seems clear that he didn’t want her reunited with anyone.
The Complete Wild Body contains both the raw and the cooked, both diary entries and finished stories; all the stages are visible, though none the less mysterious for that. From 1901 until 1907 Lewis lived in Madrid, Paris, Haarlem, Hamburg and Munich; in 1908 he visited Brittany with his mother. “Gradually the bad effects of English education wore off, or were deliberately discarded”, he wrote in Rude Assignment. “Being with ‘foreigners’ all the time who never ‘played the game’, I rapidly came to see there was, in fact, no game at all.”
But he also wrote of this period: “During those days, I began to get a philosophy: but not a very good one, I am afraid. Like all philosophies, it was built up around the will – as primitive houses are built against a hill, or propped up upon a bog. As a timely expression of personal impulses it took the form of a reaction against civilised values. It was militantly vitalist.”
Typically, Lewis was learning and unlearning, absorbing and rejecting, all at equally immense rates; and by the time he had finished with his successive elaborations and condensations of the material gathered in Spain and Brittany, it was both Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian, vitalist and anti-vitalist.
The earliest piece included in The Complete Wild Body is “A Breton Journal”, written on two successive evenings during the 1908 holiday. The style of the journal is oddly elevated and incantatory, combining romantic locutions (“out-strip’d”, “robed … in the garment of strangeness”) with the occasional hint of Lewis’s preoccupations: “after a day’s companionship with a man he will succeed in hiding his real self from you for ever.” In the latest piece, the essay “The Meaning of the Wild Body” which Lewis wrote for the 1927 collection, he has altogether abstracted the anecdotal material into a theory of the comic (“the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person”), which he opposes to Bergson’s.
How many books of stories contain an essay (let alone two essays) explaining the theories behind them? And would Dubliners be more or less popular if Joyce had included one? But Lewis was sufficiently perverse to import into his fiction many of the characteristics of non-fiction, and vice versa; inevitably he also incorporated abstract areas into his portraits, and representational elements into his abstracts.
The Complete Wild Body contains sociology as well as philosophy rhetoric as well as analysis. Sometimes Lewis seems genial, English, sedentary, Chestertonian: “Walking and talking are the two finest exercises in the world, and for the requirements of health no man needs any other.” But then he is also alien, steely, dogmatic, theoretical: “These studies of rather primitive people are studies in a savage worship and attraction.”
Lewis’s range, from the grossly physical to the thoroughly abstract, is represented by every paragraph. All his energy goes into the creation of a style in which livid alignments of words upstage the sentence rather than subserve it. The model for this early style is the telegram; inessential or merely neutral words are jettisoned. The dominant strategy is reification, the presentation even of abstract events in strictly material terms:
Back in her rooms, she examined, over her lunch, with stupefaction the things she had been doing…as she might have sat down before some distinctly expensive, troubling purchase that she had not dreamt of making an hour before.
On the rare occasions when Lewis uses the opposite device of animism, it is always at the expense of human will that the inorganic is endowed with life:
An intricate arrangement of chairs and tables, like an extensive mantrap, lay outside the hotel, extending a little distance into the square. From time to time one or more clumsy peasant would appear to become stuck or somehow involved in these iron contrivances. They would then, with becoming fatalism, sit down and call for a drink.
Lewis never exactly topples grammar, but the words’ claims to individual attention impede its workings. The reading eye is forced to choose between the dynamic of movement, created by the sentence form, and the demands of comprehension, imposed by the oblique immediacy of the words.
Sometimes, particularly in The Childermass, whose fantastical setting attenuates the normal physicality of the writing, Lewis overbalances into malapropism (“surrounded by this trooping of obsequious gazebos”, “he suppurates the old days”) or worse; but most of the time, the style contrives to combine dynamism and arrest without the sentences falling apart or the words losing their force.
So how does a vitalist who has turned against vitalism dramatize his encounters with Breton tramps and vagabonds? In Lewis’s case, by refusing them an interiority; by eliminating their consciousness from his story, and treating them as dynamic husks. By doing so he drains their actions of meaning, and his stories of conventional plots. All that is left, as Lafourcade puts it, is “a gang of active paralytics prone to mock aggressions”, observed by an ambiguous narrator.
There is left also a massive quantum of laughter, which Lewis feels able to hail as an “emotion” without any of his usual qualms. Lewis’s two most characteristic ideas, of the world as a mechanism and of the artist as an explosive force, have in common only the avoidance of emotion. In most other respects a world of meticulously rendered externals (which excludes emotion) and a life of aggressive mental endeavour (which subordinates emotion) are incompatible notions.
Lewis’s solution, of course, is to reinforce both sides in this conflict, and to pit his most characteristic forces against each other. It is largely this that makes even the most dazzling passages in the early work seem like a succession of own goals.
Clearly it would resolve Lewis’s dilemma if art could be established, not as a form of self-consciousness, let alone a sophisticated system of feeling, but as a basic drive, exactly as human (and non-human) as sex. Then he could write books about an unfree world, without having to confront the issue of his own freedom to write about it. This in fact is what he attempts in Tarr – to prove that the artist is older than the fish. The reader of Tarr, though, could easily mistake the hook’s hero for a laughably compromised hypocrite; it is only authorial fiat that exempts him from the rules of the fictional world, and it took Lewis many years before he could create a philosophically consistent universe.
Black Sparrow Press have quietly been masterminding an explosion of Lewis. An edition of The Apes of God has already appeared, as have facsimile reprints of Blast (both issues): a collection of Lewis’s writing on Morocco, Journey into Barbary, has been promised. As it is we must be grateful for The Complete Wild Body and even for the Penguin Tarr. These books reek not only of Richmond Gem cigarettes (of the medium strength in the pale green packet) and of London before the Clean Air Act; they bring with them the authentic brimstone whiff of ignored innovation.
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