Wyndham Lewis

The sudden revival of interest in the iconic art of Wyndham Lewis has been brought about mainly through the influence of television. Like those of Seurat and Paul Klee and others, Lewis’ art and writing anticipated the rear-projection and the strong bounding lines of the iconoscope form of the TV image.

According to Lewis, “The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person who lives in the present.” And in his own writing Lewis foresaw many of the problems of today. Thus in his last work, The Human Age, he portrayed the dehumanizing forces of what he called the Magnetic City. He started with the telegraph press and its power to generate cosmic political disturbances as a means of selling advertising copy, and he concluded with TV and its power to alter the images of self-identity on a worldwide scale. Lewis was truly a giant in Lilliput.

I first met Wyndham Lewis in 1944. My mother wrote to me from Detroit in February of that year telling me that she had attended a lecture by the English painter. The lecture, one in the Christian Culture series sponsored by Father Stan Murphy at the Book Cadillac, was entitled “Rouault, Painter of Original Sin.” I could scarcely believe that the great Wyndham Lewis was living in Windsor, Ontario, and I took occasion to tell Felix Giovanelli, who taught modern languages at the University of St. Louis, where I was teaching too. We had no difficulty in contacting Lewis through Father Stan Murphy and visited him in an apartment in downtown Windsor, where he was living with Mrs. Lewis. Father Stan Murphy had, as it were, rescued Lewis from Toronto, where he had been living a rather obscure and inadequate existence celebrated later in Self Condemned.

We visited him at the Royal Apartments in Windsor. He had had great difficulty in finding a place to stay in those war years, and he told us that he had simply stood on a street corner, asking passersby the possible whereabouts of a space for himself and his wife until he found this apartment. Lewis was a large man, fairly bald, with very prominent round eyes and an impressive portly figure with a rather stately stride. He and Mrs. Lewis were extremely hospitable to Felix Giovanelli and myself, and we quickly formed the idea on returning to St. Louis of finding some sitters worthy of his talents and also of providing him with a more adequate income.

Assumption College, now called Windsor University, was very cordial to Lewis and had him on the staff of the English department, where he lectured on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and on a wide range of modern fiction. His classroom manner was greatly appreciated by the students. He was extremely informal and would occasionally strip off his turtleneck sweater in the class when he found it too warm. When somebody sneezed he would manifest considerable alarm, rush to open windows, explaining that the room was rapidly filling up with germs and they would soon all be down with terrible colds.

Giovanelli and I described American education and university life to him. He was tremendously interested, and we, of course, were eager to discuss his own work with him and especially his more controversial “pamphlets” like The Doom of Youth, and Time and Western Man, and The Art of Being Ruled. Giovanelli had a very keen political mind and used to rib Lewis a good deal about his supposed fascism.

it wasn’t long after getting back to St. Louis that Gio (Lewis always referred to him as Gio, usually linking the name with some resonating allusion to Giovanezza, Italian youth politics) and I persuaded various people to take an interest in Lewis. I approached Mrs. Gellhorn, mother of Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife. She was the head of the League of Women Voters, a very influential woman, and happened to live across the street from the place where I stayed. Mrs. Gellhorn mentioned that there was a committee looking for some means of honoring Dr. Joseph Erlanger, professor of physics at Washington University in St. Louis and a recent winner of the Nobel Prize. She contacted her son-in-law, Ernest Hemingway, to check the credentials of Wyndham Lewis and received instant approval of the suggestion that Lewis should do a portrait of Erlanger. He urged her to do anything she could for Lewis, speaking of him in the highest terms.

It is to the credit of Hemingway that he should have kept his esteem for Lewis since it was only in 1934 that Hemingway had been in a rage against Lewis. Lewis told me the story as he had it from Sylvia Beach. Hemingway had come into her shop to browse and had picked up the current issue of Life and Letters, in which appeared Lewis’ famous essay “The Dumb Ox: A Study of Ernest Hemingway.” Lewis had credited Hemingway with being the inventor of a new approach to fiction which he dubbed “the dumb-ox school.” The allusion is to the presumed gesture of the doomed ox as it reaches to lick the hand of the butcher with his upraised ax. Lewis pointed to the characteristic of Hemingway’s fiction: “He is interested in the sports of death, in the sad things that happen to those engaged in the sports of love—in sand-sharks and in Wilson-spoons—in war, but nut in the things that cause war, or in the people who profit by it, or in the ultimate human destinies involved in it. He lives, or affects to live, submerged. He is in the multitudinous ranks of those to whom things happen— terrible things of course, and of course stoically borne.” The annoyance of the essay was enhanced by linking Hemingway the aficionado, Hemingway the sporting fisherman, with the world of the meek and the mute. When Hemingway had scanned the essay in the shop he seized a large inkwell and threw it across the room. He then seized the edge of the big central table and flipped it over and proceeded to run amok among the bookshelves.

Lewis loved to recount anecdotes of all the literary figures of his world. He has recorded many of these in Blasting and Bombardiering— his first meeting with Eliot in “the narrow triangle” of Ezra Pound’s flat in Kensington; the “famous tale of the old pair of shoes” sent by the “misguided Ezra” to Joyce and delivered in a brown-paper parcel by Lewis and Eliot; the story of Roy Campbell’s wedding “in the Old ‘Harlequin’ night-cafée in Beak Street.” Each story was so vivid that it never occurred to me that I would ever need a memo to recall it. He once asked me whether I had met Eliot while I was in England. I assured him that the mere thought was intimidating. Lewis laughed and said, “Eliot is the one who would have been intimidated.”

Mrs. Gellhorn had her own portrait done by Lewis and managed to obtain various sitters. He undertook to do the Erlanger job, which was accomplished to the satisfaction of all and for which, I think, he received $1500, which was quite a comfortable sum in 1944.

When he was invited to lecture at women’s clubs at that time, he was asked to speak about famous people he had known. It never entered the heads of his hostesses in St. Louis to ask him to discuss his own work. They had never heard of him before. Lewis, after all, was one of the highest of the highbrow’s, a category which he himself dismissed as “a clownish American term”—"half abuse, half derision,” and he was utterly beyond the reach of the ordinary political, social, artistic interests of the day. In fact, it is only since the disappearance of the vast bulk of his contemporaries from the scene that his image has assumed its true dimensions in the history of art and letters.

We had Lewis many times to dine. On one occasion he casually called an hour or so in advance and asked what we were having for dinner. We said we were having ham, and he asked, “What sort of wine are you having?” I mentioned some popular table wine. He said, “Well, I’ll come another night.”

From the third floor where we lived we would occasionally have the opportunity to see him and Mrs. Lewis approaching. Lewis, a tall striding figure, usually preceded Mrs. Lewis by twenty or thirty feet. She somewhat stoically hurried along some distance behind, her big blue cape billowing.

Once when he was about to get into a cab outside our apartment 1 remember his saying with great solemnity to the cabdriver, “It must require a great deal of sadistic aggression to drive a cab, wouldn’t you say?” It was this that led me to notice how very much his own profile resembled the curved surface of a tomahawk, and when 1 pointed this out to him one time jocularly he seemed quite upset, although Mrs. Lewis recalls that when I noted during one of his lectures that his head in profile was that of a Mohawk Indian he was actually rather pleased, just as he was pleased to quote Eliot’s observation in The Egoist (September, 1918) that “in the work of Mr. Lewis we recognize the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave man.”

At dinner he was a great raconteur. He told us on one occasion the origin of the name Froanna. While they were living in Germany they had a landlady who used to call Mrs. Lewis, whose first name was Anne, “Frau Anna.” The sound “Froanna” appealed to Lewis, who was fond of German, and from then on it became his familiar name for her.

He enjoyed recalling his rugby days (the flanneled fool at the wicket/the muddied oaf at the goal) and was very proud of being the only rugby man until his time who had ever been given the “sixth licking”—six full-scale lashings by a prefect in one day. When he had achieved his fifth licking, and having no wish to forgo tlie distinction of the sixth, he at once proceeded to the prefect’s door, with tennis racket and ball, and began to bounce the ball vigorously against the prefect’s door.

Lewis’ relations with Canada began with his birth in Canadian territorial waters on his father’s yacht, which had docked near Amherst, Nova Scotia. His paternal grandmother was a FrenchCanadian Roman Catholic named Romain. All his life Lewis carried a Canadian passport. In the First World War he was associated with the Artists’ Rifles, the Beaverbrook Unit, formed to employ artists and to save them from some of the more tedious assignments in the trench warfare of those days. During the Second War, he became involved in the vast project of painting an image of the war effort in the Anaconda Brass Works near Toronto, this time for the British War Artists’ Advisory Committee.

Lewis flowed with good spirits most of the time. He used to entertain his sitters with operatic arias and enjoyed singing along with other people. Margaret Giovanelli used to delight him with her sprightly soprano as she rattled away at the piano in the living room. Gio was a very lively and irreverent character and never ceased to spoof Lewis for his somewhat sober and heavy mannerisms. Lewis had very prominent teeth, and when he laughed, his teeth were much in evidence. Gio could be counted on to remark ominously, “Mrs. Roosevelt’s teeth aren’t getting any shorter either.”

On the same third floor of our St. Loins apartment house was a rugged Italian, Dr. Joseph Privitera, also of the modern language department at St. Louis University. In the hot St. Louis weather he sat in his study with bevies of pencils and pens securely filed in the plentiful hair of his chest. “Mack,” he would say, “if you think this is hair you should see Betty’s brother [Betty was his wife]. He has as much hair on the inside of his wrists as I have on the outside of my chest.” The ebullient Joe was fascinated by Wyndham Lewis, this exotic and unclassifiable character from another planet. Lewis reciprocated Joe’s wonder with a kind of uneasiness that manifested itself in a ritual greeting. Every time he opened our front door he would say, rolling his eyes somewhat wildly toward the Privitera quarters, “How’s Joe?" and usually Eric, our infant son, would echo, “How’s Joe?”

One time we had Lewis read One Way Song into our little Motorola recorder, and when we played back his reading, he simply went into fits of laughter. He had imagined all his life that he had a rugged American voice. He used to think of himself as a kind of American caveman of the twenties, and when he heard this very pukka sahib voice coming out of the recording, he was simply bowled over.

Knowing that Felix and I had been good friends for some time, Lewis took occasion to remind us that he had always seemed to come between good friends. This didn’t happen in the case of Felix and myself. Lewis hail a somewhat exclusive and possessive temperament, and when Mrs. Lewis ventured forth into the park to sketch in St. Louis, he took a rather dim view of this, and those little excursions shortly ceased. He seemed to be fearful of any regular activity that might alienate any member of his group, and when my wife began to take Mrs. Lewis on regular walks, often in the afternoon, with the stroller and our Eric, he demurred.

Lewis was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, student ever admitted to the Slade School in London. He entered when he was fifteen or sixteen under the regime of Tonks. He was full of stories about Tonks, for whom he had no respect whatever. He mentioned that he vacated the studios as much as possible, spending his time down in the boiler room on the pretext of drying his canvases. Tonks eventually realized that this was a sort of bluff, and there was a great falling out. Lewis was certainly nobody to put up witli bureaucrats in any sphere of life. His writings sift them thoroughly. He saw the journalists and literati of London and Bloomsbury as a vast literary bureaucracy. These “apes,” as he called them, were people who were really mocking the true and literary function of inventing new kinds of perception. His Apes of God is a Rabelaisian satire of their goings-on. One has only to dip into sections like “Lord Osmond’s Lenten Party” or to visit the arboretum of the higher Lesbian Apes to get an immediate sense of his gigantic masquerade.

While at Assumption College he did numerous portraits of the heads of the Basilian Order. He worked from old photographs and portraits since these men were long deceased. This unique collection of Lewis’ paintings is locked up in a room at the University of Windsor today.

It was at Lewis’ suggestion that I applied for a position aL Assumption College. He suggested that if I were to come to Windsor with him, we could start up again his magazine The Enemy, which had been published twice in 1927 and once in 1929. Although an appeal had been made in the first number for “some sort of conscious-cooperation” and contributions were made by T. S. Eliot, Henry John, and Roy Campbell, this “review of art and literature” was largely the work of Lewis himself. “The nearest big revolutionary settlement lies some distance behind me,” he wrote in the first issue. “I have moved outside. I found it impossible to come to terms with the canons observed in it. Outside I am freer.” I was accepted into the English department at Assumption, but this was toward the very end of the war, so that Lewis sailed back to England before we had any opportunity to proceed with the magazine project. However, it was that job in Windsor that led to my transfer to the Basilian College of St. Michael’s in Toronto, where I have continued to teach. So it was a decisive event in my life.

Lewis used to discuss the possibility of doing “Thirty Personalities of America” in the striking sculptural line style, with its resonating visual puns of the portraits in his great portfolio Thirty Personalities [of the British world] and a Self Portrait, which had been published by Harmsworth in 1932. But these drawings were never done.

He was tirelessly alert to all sorts of contemporary developments in the popular media which I have ever since found a world of delight. My little effort called Counterblast was intended merely as an echo for the Canadian scene of his own Blast of 1914 and 1915. The theme of the London Blast was that London was not a provincial town, and the theme of Counterblast is that there is no part of the world which need any longer be provincial or even parochial since we have equal and instant access now from all parts of the globe to all other parts. Jet City is a planetary city of circulating inhabitants. Counterblast, in other words, was not intended as an attack or as a retort to his, but as a development and a reverberation. The word “blast,” of course, means “germ” or “embryo” or “blastoderm.” The Rossettis, who were also both painters and writers, for whom Lewis had a considerable regard, had published a magazine called The Germ.

Lewis once told us of the great difficulty he had in getting Blast printed in very large newsprint type. He said no printer would do it this way. He finally found a skid-row character who had been a typographer, and he supplied him, he said, with all the gin necessary, and the chap did the job for him in thanks for the gin. Lewis himself was very fond of gin. It was his favorite drink. I used frequently to bring him a bottle and hand it to him with the remark, “Here’s the tiger’s milk.”

He once related his strategy for dealing with importunate painters. When they insisted on his coming to examine their work, he said his method was to stalk into their studio and to stand in front of their canvases with his feet well apart. After a minute or two of silent inspection, he would turn and leave the studio without comment. If captured again by the same painter and made to return for a second look, he would once more stand, feet apart, and after a bit, draw his breath in sharply to make a low whistle, then turn and leave once more. He recommended this procedure to all those pestered by painters and said that it was recognized professional protocol for the serious critic. A nonverbal art required a nonverbal comment.

Lewis was fond of telling the story of Yeats and T. E. Lawrence. He said Yeats once told him how Lawrence of Arabia had summarized his life: “Oi was an Oirish nobody. Oi did a great thing. Oi came to nothing, and Oi became an Oirish nobody again.” In fact, Lewis pointed out, Lawrence was a very casual and colloquial person who would have said simply: “I was an Irish nobody. My work came to nothing, so I became an Irish nobody again.” This story Lewis also recalled in Blasting and Bombar diering.

He was an ecological observer and analyst. He was never caught in the booby trap of the “Peter Principle.” He never stopped needling those who had attained the level of their own incompetence in the vast bureaucracies, political and professional, that surrounded him. In The Caliph’s Design he revealed the total incompetence of the architects and town planners of his day. In The Apes of God he pilloried the literary mandarins of Bloomsbury. In The Art of Being Ruled he revealed the vast new Lumpenproletariat of the affluent who have since become so painfully obvious as the successors to the Marxist proletariat. In The Doom of Youth, he explained the idiocy of the child cult long before the Dr. Spocks undertook to sponsor permissiveness. Even in the twenties, as Sheila Watson expresses it, he observed the intrusion of the mechanical foot into the electric desert. Is it any wonder that his analysis of the political, domestic, and social effects of the new technological environments had a great deal to do with directing my attention to these events? □