19. Jacques Lacan, "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" , and "The Mirror Stage," in E, 16, 4.
20. Wyndham Lewis, Tarr (London: Penguin, 1982), 312.
21. F. T. Marinetti, Selected Writings, ed. R. W. Flint (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1972), 41; hereafter abbreviated M. Of course, aggressivity is also very pronounced in Lewis--prose and art, protagonists and personae.
22. Obviously it functioned in other ways for them as well--for example, as a model of social organization. But that use is not specific to them, or indeed to fascism.
23. See Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1914; New York: Random House, 1959), esp. 65-96.
24. See Sigmund Freud, "On Transformation of Instincts as Exemplified in Anal Erotism" , in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977); hereafter abbreviated OS. For Marinetti, old Italy, especially Venice, is cloacal in another way. In a sense, he evokes such historical stages, individual and national, in order to break with them, to allow a Futurist identity to emerge from them. In "Against Past-Loving Venice," a leaflet dropped from the Clock Tower in Venice on 8 July 1910, Marinetti writes: "We renounce the old Venice . . . cloaca maxima of passéism. We want to cure and heal this putrefying city, magnificent sore from the past. . . . We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice. . . . Let us hasten to fill in its little reeking canals" (M, 55).
25. For an egregious example, see Le Corbusier, L'art décoratif d'aujourd'hui (Paris, 1925), esp. ch. 8, where the machine is regarded as a "negro god." On such primitivist fantasies in general, see my "'Primitive' Scenes," Critical Inquiry (winter 1993), the companion piece to the present essay.
26. Sigmund Freud, "On the Sexual Theories of Children" , in OS, 197.
27. As in this fantasy-memory of a factory beach in "Tactilism" : "I was naked in a sea of flexible steel that breathed with a virile, fecund breath. I was drinking from a sea-chalice brimming with genius as far as the rim. With its long searing flames, the sun was vulcanizing my body" (M, 110). It is as if Marinetti secretly identified with Vulcan as a crippled (castrated) god who imaginatively forges perfect (phallic) bodies. This "vulcanizing" is also evocative of the Freudian "baking" of the epidermis into the "protective shield" (more on this below). It is a persistent trope in fascistic visions of the subject (see, for example, Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima).
28. This is how Constance Penley describes the operation in science fiction in "Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia," in her The Future of an Illusion: Feminism, Film, Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). Both Marinetti and Lewis might be read in terms of science fiction.
29. Thus in "Against Amore and Parliamentarianism": "I confess that before so intoxicating a spectacle [the take-off of a Blériot plane] we strong Futurists have felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have suddenly become too earthly, or, to express it better, have become a symbol of the earth that we ought to abandon" (M, 75). Marinetti oscillates between identification with the machine and desire for it, which confuses the sexual positioning of these two lovers throughout his work (more on this below).
30. This fantasy follows that in note 27. Marinetti has other avatars of this creation outside the female body: for example, Mafarka, the hero of his novel Mafarka le Futuriste , or "the multiplied man" proposed in War, the World's Only Hygiene (1911-15). On Mafarka, see Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 78-92. On autogenetic tropes in modern aesthetics generally, see Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthesia: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (fall 1992): 3-41.
31. This crossing of the natural and the technological has its own logic, as Andreas Huyssen suggests: "The most complete technologization of nature appears as a re-naturalization, as a progress back to nature. Man is at long last alone and at one with himself" (Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide [Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986], 71).
32. For a good discussion of misogyny in Lewis, see Lisa Tickner, "Men's Work? Masculinity and Modernism," differences 4 (fall 1992). For a good discussion of misogyny in Marinetti, especially in its homosocial dimension, see Barbara Spackman, "Mafarka and Son: Marinetti's Homophobic Economics," 1 (September 1994): 89-107.
33. Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 84.
34. "If the penis were the phallus," Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni writes in the wittiest gloss on the notorious difference between penis and phallus, "it would have no need of feathers or ties or medals"--no need, that is, of the "primitive" body (feathers), the business suit (ties), or the military uniform (medals); certainly no need of the vulcanized body desired by Marinetti or the armored hide proposed by Lewis. See Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, La Robe: Essai psychanalytique sur le vêtement (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 34.
35. For an incisive discussion of the "Technical Manifesto," see Jeffrey Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," 1 (September 1994): 153-78. In the "Work of Art" essay Benjamin also poses a relation between shock and tactility--but obviously with very different expectations for the new subject of technology.
36. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 18-27; hereafter abbreviated BPP. Important here is the fantasmatic resonance of this hypothesis, not its scientific validity. On the influence on Freud of Lamarck as well as Haeckel (from whom Freud adopted "the biogenetic law" whereby ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny), see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 155-64, and Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 259-64. A certain Lamarckianism is also evident in discourse on shock at the turn of the century, as here in the famous text of Georg Simmel on "The Metropolis and Mental Life" : "The metropolitan type of man . . . develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment"--the organ of "intellectuality" (The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt H. Wolff [New York: MacMillan, 1950], 410).
37. Twenty-five years later Jünger also wrote of the evolution of "artificial organs of perception" in which "seeing [becomes] an act of aggression," and "consciousness" "an object . . . outside the sphere of pain" (Jünger, "Über den Schmerz," 200). For some contemporary manifestations of this technobiological addiction, see my "On the Origin of the 'Imaging Machine' in Schizophrenia," in Culture Lab 1, ed. Brian Boigon (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).
38. Here Marinetti turns into a triumph the "consolation" offered the hero stiffened by terror before the castrative Medusa: the good news is that "he is still in possession of a penis"; the bad is that he is turned to stone (Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head" [1922], in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff [New York: MacMillan, 1963], 212-13). For a provocative argument concerning the corollary of the position presented here--that "self-preservation, in its capitalist form, manifests the death drive"--see John Brenkman, Culture and Domination (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 166-73.
39. This is how I understand his "most violent Futurist symbol" in War, the World's Only Hygiene:
In Japan they carry on the strangest of trades: the sale of coal made from human bones. All their powderworks are engaged in producing a new explosive substance, more lethal than any yet known. This terrible new mixture has as its principal element coal made from human bones with the property of violently absorbing gases and liquids. For this reason countless Japanese merchants are thoroughly exploring the corpse-stuffed Manchurian battlefields. . . . Glory to the indomitable ashes of men, that come to life in cannons! My friends, let us applaud this noble example of synthetic violence [M, 82].
40. Relevant here is the example that Freud offers of the support belt, a kind of prosthesis that renders ambiguous whether its wearer--in this case a man--is castrated. See "Fetishism" , in OS, 351-57.
41. See Catherine Millot, Horsexe, trans. Kenneth Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990). In her Lacanian account "the [male] transsexual aims to incarnate The Woman," that is, to be the phallus . So contemptuous of castration is this transsexual that (s)he undergoes it to be free of it, only "through surgery to realize that castration is an evil without remedy," that (s)he has "confuse[d] the organ with the signifier" .
42. As Millot writes of the male transsexual, "Self-castration comes to signify incest and thus absolute, unlimited jouissance, outside the law, but also outside sex" (Millot, Horsexe, 99).
43. Sandor Ferenzci, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1923; London: Karnac Books, 1989), 16. In Understanding Media McLuhan approaches the notion of autotomy when he thinks extensions of the body as "auto-amputations" of particular organs under technological strain. Theweleit also mentions autotomy in passing in Male Fantasies.
Like the Freudian notion of a protective shield, the Ferenzcian idea of a "Thalassal regression" to an oceanic womb may have more to say about male fantasy than biological science. And it is not incommensurate with technological motifs, as suggested here by the interwar German philosopher Adrien Turel: "This technical prosthetic system, which is a typically masculine achievement, can only be compared with the prenatal, complete enclosure in the body of the mother" (Adrian Turel, Technokratie, Autarkie, Genetokratie [1934], quoted in Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, 459).
44. In a line that looks past Jünger to Virilio, the Gulf War, and our next video inferno, Marinetti writes, "The projectile's very personal path is a thousand times more interesting to us than human psychology" (M, 98).
45. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 38-39.
46. Ibid., 70. For another brilliant account, here concerning modern art and Assyrian sculpture (which also interested Lewis), see Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), in which the tension between an impulse to stasis and an impulse to movement is crucial.
47. Or is this notion of prophylaxis too readily turned into a justification for any such representation of violence? As we will see, Vorticism seeks this stoppage in order to preserve the ego from such disruption, and in so doing may risk the greater violence. On the other hand, Lewis is also concerned with "blasting," and his satire may function as bombast does in Marinetti--as a partial release.
48. This echoes the cultural program announced eleven years before in the first manifesto: "We establish Futurism because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni, and antiquarians. . . . Why poison ourselves? Why rot?" (M, 42).
49. Andrew Hewitt argues that this corporal politics "strains between an ideal of discipline and an ideal of liberation" (Andrew Hewitt, "Fascist Modernism, Futurism, and 'Post-Modernity,'" in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan [Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992], 49). See also idem, Fascist Modernism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1993).
50. See Jeffrey Schnapp, "Heads of State," Art Issues (fall 1992): 24; as well as his "18 BL: Fascist Mass Spectacle," Representations 43 (summer 1993).
51. Yet here again is a rub: with his "square crashing jaws" and "scornful jutting lips" (M, 158), Mussolini projects the other, castrative aspect of the fetish as well. ("Paradoxical as it may seem, the Fascist phallus is, like Freud's Medusa, at once hyperphallic and castrating" [Schnapp, "Heads of State," 27].) Productive of fear, anxiety, resentment, was this castrative aspect "castrated" in turn in the mutilated body of the hanged Mussolini?
Mussolini dropped Marinetti when he was no longer useful, but his imaging of Mussolini remained important. Today it might be explored along the lines of the body politics examined by Claude Lefort in L'Invention democratique (Paris: Fayard, 1981; English translation in The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John B. Thompson [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986]; hereafter abbreviated PF). For Lefort there are three paradigmatic stages of the libidinal relation of subjects to leaders in the modern West. The first is the king of the ancien régime held to possess a double body, at once mortal and immortal, patterned after the double body of Christ (here Lefort draws on the classic study by Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies [1957]). The kingdom is also conceived as a body that the king both images (in the familiar synecdoche "I am France") and directs as its head. Thus when the democratic revolution decapitates the king, it also decapitates its own body politic, and its imaginary coherence begins to fall apart. "Power appears as an empty place," Lefort writes. "Unity cannot now efface social division" (PF, 303). For Lefort totalitarianism emerges as a belated "attempt to resolve [the] paradoxes" of this empty place of power. The metaphorics of the double body is resurrected by the re of "the egocrat," who guarantees "the representation of the People-as-One." But the representation depends on two things: "the integrity of the body" and "the incessant production of enemies" (PF, 298-99).
How different is the "Futurist fascism" red by Marinetti? It, too, reinstates the double body of leader and nation in an imaginary coherence of the two. It, too, sees democracy as an empty place of power, and it, too, requires enemies of the state within and without. And in both regimes the machine is used as an image of social organization. And yet there are also crucial differences. For example, in "Futurist fascism" the machine is not productivist and proletarian (a distinction must be drawn, as Schnapp suggests in "18 BL," between mechanization as a re of the subject in functional mesh with the social factory, and metallization as a re of the subject in imaginary identification with the military nation), and the fascist leader is not an egocrat to identify with but a "phallocrat" to bind with. (In this regard a further contrast can be made between the body politics of Mussolini and Hitler.) For more recent meditations on the despot body and the mass subject, see Kenneth Dean and Brian Massumi, First and Last Emperors (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), and Michael Warner, "The Mass Public and the Mass Subject," in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
52. Lacan, "Some Reflections on the Ego," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 : 17.
53. Ibid.
54. This association of the crowd and the unconscious as "feminine" threats runs throughout Lewis, as it does in crowd discourse from Le Bon through Freud. Lewis is more ambivalent about the crowd, for it can serve as a site of "mobilization." In Blasting and Bombardiering he recalls the wartime crowds: "So periodically we shed our individual skin, or are apt to, and are purged in big being. An empty throb. . . . Does not the Crowd in life spell death? . . . The Crowd is an immense anaesthetic towards death, such is its immemorial function" (BB, 79-80). This "death" that is an "anaesthetic towards death" is fundamental to Lewis on art and subjectivity.
55. Note the suggestion of pollution here, and the operation of abjection. If in Marinetti the new ego is a man-machine that emerges from feminine waters, in Lewis it is a "hysterical wall" set up against the same. Both draw on the unconscious symbolism of the masculinist ego noted by Lacan in the "Mirror Stage": "the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium--its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders" (E, 5). This symbolism suggests a fairytale of patriarchy, an almost phylogenetic feudalism inscribed in the structure of Western masculinity.
56. Wyndham Lewis, quoted in Douglas Goldring, South Lodge (London: Constable and Co., 1943), 65. For the Vorticists, Futurism was just close enough to this point to miss it entirely. Ezra Pound: "Futurism is the disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it, dispersal" (B, 153). Art history also tends to miss the difference between the movements on this point.
57. Fredric Jameson deploys a revised version of the Lyotardian notion of "the libidinal apparatus" (le dispositif pulsionnel) in Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
58. Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled , reprinted in Wyndham Lewis: An Anthology of His Prose, ed. E. W. F. Tomlin (London: Methuen, 1969), 210; hereafter abbreviated WLA. This is actually a citation of Julien Benda. For similar reasons Lewis attacks the modernist cults of the child and "the primitive" too.
59. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953), 13; hereafter abbreviated AE. This text is often discussed in relation to expressionism, but Vorticism answered to the Worringerian will to abstraction more radically (expressionism is empathic in comparison). This also points to another difference between Vorticism and Futurism. The notion of empathy may have passed into Futurism through Benedetto Croce (who discusses Lipps in his Aesthetics [1909]); in any case an "empathic" eclipse of distance between subject and object is fundamental to Futurism. This is one reason why Lewis refers Futurism to impressionism and dismisses both as realisms.
60. For Worringer the "intermediate stage" between the two poles, which resolves them in an ideal form, is the "Northern artistic volition," especially as manifest in German Gothic, which resonated at the time with German expressionism. This art history according to "race psychology" (see note 62) brought Worringer close to Nazism.
61. See Thomas Ernest Hulme, Speculations (1924; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 75-109; hereafter abbreviated S. Its epigraph is pure Worringer: "The fright of the mind before the unknown created not only the first gods, but also the first art."
A crucial medium of ideas for Vorticist circles, Hulme was first influenced by Bergson; he then translated Sorel (Reflections on Violence); and upon meeting Worringer in Berlin he embraced his philosophy of art. Like several Vorticists and Futurists, Hulme died in the war he had welcomed. In Blasting and Bombardiering Lewis recounts a tempestuous relationship complicated by the fact that Hulme preferred the work of Jacob Epstein.
62. The Worringerian model is informed by a developmental logic that ranks cultures according to a racialist hierarchy. Residual in the discipline of art history as developed in the late nineteenth century, this racialism was pronounced in Lewis. But it did not contradict his primitivism. However opposed to the modernist cult of "the primitive," he insisted that "the Art-instinct is permanently primitive" (B, 33).
63. Lewis strove to combine these two res in his own protoganists and personae. "We are Primitive Mercenaries in the modern world," he wrote in Blast 1 (B, 30). And T. S. Eliot once commented that in Lewis "we recognize the thought of the modern man and the energy of the cave-man" (T. S. Eliot, review of Tarr, by Wyndham Lewis, Egoist [September 1918]: 106).
64. The cubist imbrication of re and ground, to which the Vorticist version is often related, does not register in this psychic way at all. Jameson locates "the inner logic of [Lewis's] stylistic practice" in a related tension between the sheer energy of his sentences and the violent closure of his narratives (Jameson, Fables of Aggression, 30).
65. This effect corresponds to the reading of the play by Pound: "the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by circumjacent stupidity" (Ezra Pound, "Vorticism," Fortnightly Review [1 September 1914]: 470). And this reading in turn suggests that "the spatial" can serve as an abstraction for "the social," as it sometimes does in Lewis.
66. In a short play of the same title in Blast, Lewis writes apropos of "personality": "It is the one piece of property all communities have agreed it is illegal to possess. . . . When mankind cannot overcome a personality, it has an immemorial way out of the difficulty. It becomes it. It imitates and assimilates that Ego until it is no longer one. . . . This is success" (B, 66).
67. This becoming-inorganic is paralleled in the early work of Max Ernst, who seems to respond to a similar drive in a different way. Like other dadaists and surrealists, Ernst played with another form of hardening also developed in Lewis--a becoming-insect of the body. But he did so in a way that inverts its use there: first to mock the becoming-machine of man, and second to explore the imbrication of death in sexuality (thus the significance of the surrealist motif of the praying mantis, the female of which kills the male in mating). The classic texts in the surrealist milieu are by Roger Callois: "La Mante religieuse," Minotaure 5 (February 1934), and "Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire," Minotaure 7 (June 1935). The convulsive possession of the subject by space theorized by Caillois is precisely what Lewis feared.
Lewis was fascinated by insects (his library contained an annotated copy of Ants, Bees, and Wasps by John Lubbock), which he often used, like machines, to re his ideal of aggressive armoring. In "The Artist Older Than the Fish," he glosses an account by J. H. Fabre, a French entomologist for whom all action was driven by instinct:
Fabre describes the creative capabilities of certain beetles, realizable on their own bodies; beasts with a record capacity for turning their form and colour impulses into living flesh. These beetles can convert their faces into hideously carved and detestable masks, can grow out of their bodies menacing spikes, and throw up on top of their heads sinister headdresses, overnight. Such changes in their personal appearance, conceived to work on the psychology of their adversaries, is possibly not a very profound or useful invention, but it is surely a considerable feat. Any art worth the name is, at the least, a feast of this decription. The New Guinea barred and whitewashed masks are an obvious parallel [note this last association with "primitive" abstraction] [Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph's Design , ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 66; hereafter abbreviated CD].
68. Among other commonalities, Worringer and Freud shared a psychophysiological model of development, and both were driven by an epistemological mandate to correlate new discourses--here art history and psychoanalysis--with the principles of biology and/or physics. (In this regard the primary reference for Freud was Fechner; for Worringer it was Lotze.)
69. In the same period Lewis writes of his fiction similarly: "Upwards from the surface of existence a lurid and dramatic scum oozes and accumulates into the characters we see" (Wyndham Lewis, "Inferior Religions" [1917-27], in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade [Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982], 152; hereafter abbreviated WB). As "expressions of the conservative nature of living substance," Freud notes the return of certain fish to spawn, the migration of certain birds, and the recapitulation inscribed in embryology (BPP, 30-31).
70. Lewis, Tarr, 312.
71. Lewis defines the Tyro as "an elementary person; an elemental, in short" (Wyndham Lewis, Tyros and Portraits [Leicester Galleries, April 1921]; reprinted in WB, 353). "These immense novices," he adds, "brandish their appetites in their faces" (WB, 354).
72. In a private note Hulme all but images the eye as the point at which the death drive is driven home: "The eyes, the beauty of the world, have been organised out of faeces. Man returns to dust. So does the face of the world to primeval cinders" (S, 227). What irony is there that Lewis went blind?
73. Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art , ed. Seamus Cooney (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 99; hereafter abbreviated MWA.
74. See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), ch. 7, as well as his 1928 essay on humor.
75. In "On the Essence of Laughter" , Baudelaire called this convulsive aspect "the satanic" in laughter, an old guise that Lewis often affected (Charles Baudelaire, "On the Essence of Laughter," in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne [London: Phaidon Press, 1964], 147-65).
76. His pictorial ambition to "bury Euclid deep in the living flesh" is explicit enough (Wyndham Lewis on Art, ed. Michel and Fox, 40). Compare this note of Walter Benjamin: "Exposure of the mechanistic aspects of the organism is a persistent tendency of the sadist. One can say that the sadist sets out to substitute for the human organism the image of machinery" (Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982], 465-66).
77. As for the first transvaluation: "[Vorticism] was not an asylum from the brutality of mechanical life. On the contrary it identified itself with the brutality, in a stoical embrace" (Wyndham Lewis, Wyndham Lewis the Artist from "Blast" to Burlington House [London: Laidlaw and Laidlaw, 1939], 78). As for the second:
When on joue sa vie, it is not so much the grandeur of the spectacle of destruction, or the chivalrous splendour of the appointments, as the agitation in the mental field within, of the organism marked down to be destroyed, that is impressive. It is that that produces "the light that never was on land or sea," which we describe as "romance." Anything upon which that coloration falls is at once transred. And the source of light is within your own belly [BB, 115].
78. This "narrow escape" is one definition of the sublime. For his part Marinetti seeks not to sublimate shock into the sublime but to arrest it there. Thus in a letter to Severini from the front (20 November 1914): "I believe . . . that the greatest war, lived with intensity by Futurist painters, can produce real convulsions in their sensibility and spur them towards a brutal simplification of very clear lines such as to strike and incite the reader in the same way that battles strike and incite" (quoted in Raffaele Carrieri, Futurism, trans. Leslie van Renssalaer White [Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1963], 158).
79. Wyndham Lewis, The Tyro: A Review of the Arts of Painting, Sculpture and Design 2 (London: The Egoist Press, 1922): 27.
80. See note 5.
.
I first climbed the steps from the street near Notting Hill Gate in mid-November 1956. Every evening thereafter until I left London about a week later I would climb it again; Wyndham Lewis was especially glad of an evening visitor, after his day of writing.
Writing? Not painting, because he'd been blind for five years. "Milton had his daughters," he'd announced back then; "I have my dictaphone." But it was literally writing that he'd soon returned to. In the blue armchair from which he dominated the flat's major room, on a huge pad of paper, pen in hand, he wrote. His technique was to clutch the top of the pad's left side with his left hand, then, starting three fingers' width down, to write until his ballpoint bumped off the right edge. Back to the left, come down three fingers, and repeat. That way he got perhaps five lines on a page, so widely spaced that, waver though they might, they were unlikely to intersect. The page completed, he tore it off and dropped it face down on the floor to his left. His wife Froanna (from "Frau Anna"; she'd been christened Anne) would gather up the day's work for typing. That was how seven books got produced. (Some odd repetitions have been noticed in The Human Age. They survived because reading the entire final typescript back to the author took much longer than it would have taken him to read it by himself. Inevitably, he now and then forgot he'd "already said that.")
On my second or third visit, November 18th, a Sunday, his seventy-fourth birthday was celebrated by the three of us. Life being "too short to travel first class," there was champagne and pheasant, rather for us two than for him. Offered more champagne, he shouted "NO!!!" so sharply Froanna felt moved to venture, "You mustn't mind Wyndham shouting. It's just . . . High Spirits!" Actually it was blindness, by which, late in life, he'd been deprived of something most of us don't realize we depend on vision for: a knowledge of how far away are the people we're talking to. Geoffrey Bridson, of the BBC, told me of a lunch in a mid-London oyster house, where the blind Lewis imparted confidences in a voice audible "as far as Piccadilly Circus."
His own work seemed to him thin and remote. He chanced to mention Time and Western Man: "That's a book of mine." Mainly, I'd give him things to respond to. I'd flown from America. "Were the hostesses pretty?" I described the dilemma of a young British poet I'd recently met, wondering if he should visit America. "Tell him by all means to go to America." (I did, and he did; it was sound advice.) I'd lunched with Eliot, who'd given me the address of a tailor on Albemarle Street. "That's an expensive street." His most memorable riposte followed my recital of Eliot's performance before a succession of cheeses: a native American's parody of British connoisseurship, done for an overseas visitor whom he'd typecast as Huck Finn. I've described it in The Pound Era; here I'll just repeat Lewis's response: "Oh, never mind him. He's like that with everybody. But he doesn't come in here disguised as Westminster Abbey."
"In here" was the terrain the blind man commanded, a flat doomed for razing any day, to make room for a deluxe tube station. Lewis claimed to have staved that off during his lifetime by adroitly planted newspaper interviews. Four months after our last talk he was dead. His last words are said to have been "Mind your own business," in response to a nurse's query about his bowels.
All through the doomed flat, bell pushes had been disconnected. Wires hung loose above nameplates that threatened to fall. On my last day, I removed one that hung aslant from a single screw. It says simply, "Wyndham Lewis. Studio A." Better with me, I thought, in the land of America and Cosmic Man, than in some London rubbish-bin. I'm sure Lewis would have agreed.
Hugh Kenner, who wrote Wyndham Lewis , didn't meet Lewis until late in 1956. By then he was obeying an injunction from Ezra Pound: "You have an obligation to visit the great men of your own time." Pound was in fact reviving the Grand Tour, unaware that he was setting up The Pound Era .
.
18 November 1882: Born on a yacht off the Nova Scotia coast to an English mother and an American father.
18981901: Attends the Slade School of Art.
19011909: Travels in Europe, living in Paris, Holland, Munich, and Madrid.
May 1909: First short story published, "The 'Pole,'" in The English Review.
1912: Contributes decorations for Frieda Strindberg's London night club, the Cabaret Theatre Club. Exhibits Kermesse at the Allied Artists' Association show.
1913: Joins the Omega Workshops, but breaks with the director, Roger Fry, in October.
1914: Founds the Rebel Art Centre. Friendly with Ezra Pound and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Edits and publishes Blast, which heralds the first English avant-garde movement, Vorticism.
1915: Vorticist exhibition at the Doré Gallery. Publishes Blast 2.
1916: Joins Royal Artillery as a bombardier.
1917: Vorticist exhibit opens at the Penguin Club, New York, on 10 January, sponsored by John Quinn. Active service in France from May to November.
1918: Publishes his first novel, Tarr, set in the artistic bohemia of Paris.
1919: Guns by Wyndham Lewis exhibit at the Goupil Gallery.
1920: Travels with T. S. Eliot in France; meets James Joyce.
March 1926: The Art of Being Ruled is published, which Hugh Kenner later calls "the germ of all the polemics."
1927: Time and Western Man, a combination of literary criticism and philosophy, is published.
1930: Visits Berlin, and on his return publishes articles on Hitler in Time and Tide.
May 1931: Visits Morocco; his account of the trip becomes Filibusters in Barbary.
1932: Thirty Personalities, an exhibit of portraits by Lewis, opens at the Lefevre Galleries in October.
May 1937: Publishes The Revenge for Love, a novel set in preCivil War Spain and London.
1938: Portrait of T. S. Eliot rejected by the Royal Academy.
March 1939: The Jews: Are They Human?, which attacks anti-Semitism and advocates admission of Jewish refugees into the British Empire, is published.
September 1939: Sails to Canada and remains in North America until the end of World War II.
1945: Returns to England.
1951: Vision begins to deteriorate, eventually resulting in blindness. He produces seven books after this.
7 March 1957: Dies in London.
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The text is taken from a four-page carbon typescript at Cornell. It is annotated at the opening by Lewis: "IMPORTANT NOTE" and "for explanation | Tyro." This suggests that the piece was composed in the early 1920s and belongs to the group of essays concerned with the aesthetics of visual art that Lewis published during this period. The mention of The Tyro relates it to the "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in Our Time" published in issue number two . This was an unfinished essay, and both "The Anonymity of Perfection" and some more fragmentary notes at Cornell entitled "A Theory of Divine Imperfection" may have been intended as developments of its argument. In the "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in Our Time," Lewis discusses the imperfection of men of genius in comparison with an absolute standard. A synthesis of several geniuses (Calderrf, Voltaire, Plotinus) might seem to approach this standard more closely, but would lack identity and be a "pale shadow of their separate selves. Perfection, therefore, from this standpoint, appears as a Platonic ideal, and is a thing with which we have not very much to do. . . . " 1 But, despite its title, "The Anonymity of Perfection" as it stands does not develop this line of thought (perhaps because the typescript may only be the first section of a longer or unfinished essay, since it is numbered as section "I"). What we have of the essay is more closely related, first, to a section of the "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in Our Time" called "The Sense of the Future" advocating detachment from the functionalism of everyday life (and criticizing Futurism for its attachment to the machine of the present); and, second, the essay, "The Meaning of the Wild Body," published in The Wild Body in 1927, but probably extracted from "Man of the World" typescripts composed in the early 1920s. That essay shows a similar preoccupation with dualism and the fundamental absurdity or uncanniness of animal life.
This essay and the two that follow are published in "reading" versions. Minor errors of spelling, typing, and punctuation have been silently corrected, but the texts have not been brought into close conformity with modern style. Significant alterations and doubtful readings are recorded in the editorial notes to each essay.
That we are eternal miners, lashed in the clumsy process of learning by the retribution that awaits our mistakes, and dreaming, steeped in transcendental values that transform the mechanical basis of our life into a fairyland, is the first truth that we must accept. "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me," Sir Isaac Newton wrote.
So Newton felt that he had been "only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting himself"!
He at least was not taken in by the scale of the immense machine of the universe that he had constructed. He was a great mechanic. But he knew that this machine was only in reality a toy, just as a motor-car or a flying machine is a toy, invented by an eager and ingenious child. The only difference was that his toy was a very big one though not much more complicated than many machines invented by man. It would rather be some grand aesthetic or emotional twist of temperament that would lead this great mechanic to make railways or world-ways for stars rather than more homely contrivances on the face of the earth for our domestic uses.
Where we say a "child" and a "toy," again, or "work" or "play," it is necessary not to leave it at that.
The analogy is this. The little boy makes a wooden sword. It is an actor's property, really: it only resembles the weapons of the real world. Or the little girl has a bevy of dolls. They are only simulacra of life, worked, when their eyes are constructed to close in sleep, by an interior mechanism.
What ultimately is the difference between a "toy" and a "machine" (for we do not call a machine that serves as a toy or plaything a machine)? The difference is that the toy is a make-believe only, a small and incomplete model of a larger mature thing of the same stamp. The real thing (fire-engine, for instance, or six-inch gun) extinguishes real life-size fires, or kills people, whereas the child's imitation fire-engine or gun, however elaborate an imitation, is not adapted to play a part in LIFE, but only in the imitative life of the child's fancy.
But what is the nature of the "reality" of the real fire-engine and guns? Are people really killed, in the full naïf acceptance of the simple unspeculative mind, and does so much depend on the spectacular galloping of the fire-engine? Is not the thrill, as the hoof-beats echo in our brain, an aesthetic one; horror and ecstasy, and the contents of the Chamber of Horrors of the mind, a representation, and not a reality? Would men be so ready, would they be able even, to indulge in huge butcheries, like a modern war, would they be able to go about their rash, ordinary existence so calmly, if they were not intimately convinced of the superficiality or "nonentity," of the events in which they were called on to "play their part" as they say?
In maturity a sense of the same unreality haunts the child, transformed by some to him strange enchantment into a large full-sized "mammal," as he finds he is labelled.
Or when puberty arrives for the girl-child, and she finds a mate, the anonymous array of her cells, working certainly under her conscious orders, but obeying some "instinct" that is in a sense foreign to her, produces a living doll, which she nurses and cherishes. This new doll, however, is not made of wax but of protoplasm, and is part of the arch mystery of quickening matter that surrounds her. It develops into a being like herself, but in its turn becomes strange as it grows. It grows away from her, leaving her behind. It is not, she perceives, herself, but some separate enigma, which she cannot possess as she could direct and own a wax doll. She has become part of the exterior world in a sense; and as this new being grows, she fades and takes the road to extinction. To some extent she sees her personality, in the form of the child, becoming eaten up by the great life exterior to her, or being adulterated with other foreign elements, of matter and destiny, under her eyes.
She is confronted, in most cases very obscurely, with one of the academic riddles of philosophy: namely HOW CAN ONE THING CHANGE OR GROW OUT OF ANOTHER THING? 2
When again she has said "this is me," and "that is not me," she has included in a sense those cells of which "she" is composed, and which in their unconscious fury of creation are obsessed by some despotic order the motives of which she is ignorant, and from which a portion of "her" appears to be detached. This, then, is the self that is an irreducible factor of personal consciousness, like the ultimate atom of Democritus?
The average mother, if we can imagine her getting as far as this by some confused emotional road, will be prepared to call a halt at this stage in the process of perplexity.
But, if she reflected on it, she would on the one hand feel that these active and arbitrary cells (her cells, all said and done, more than any other individual's) which had been the motive of all the pleasant, half-pleasant, and disagreeable accidents of her life, were implicated with her personality. That if they, and all the rest of the evidently mechanical history of her life were withdrawn, there would be very little left of HER! And on the other hand it could be shown her how her personality, that she had traced, we have imagined, to a hard and irreducible particle like a Democritan atom, must share the fate of other irreducible atoms, and that the ineffable SHE must fade out, evaporate, escape to at least a human extinction that way as well.
At this point (by which time she would no doubt be a little hysterical), you could probably persuade her of the truth of Samuel Butler's remark: that we were all actually only offshoots of the OVUM: that our arms, legs, head and the rest of us, sprouted up like a plant, merely, from this anonymous root, and all our complex activities referred to it. 3
But men and women think that it is in the interest of this real or imaginary SELF that they are following the behests of their mechanism, whether as it happens pleasant or the reverse. Just as a man who slaves in some machine-like daily task identifies the interest of his dear SELF with the machine he finds himself in, but never entirely surrenders it. His dearest possession is still his latent "independence."
This ideal PERSONALITY, this EINZIGE, is the mind and ally of the OVUM and with it the master-fact of our world. 4 It might be regarded as the master-stroke of the illusionistic mechanism, the bait and prize, whereby the entire concern is driven.
But in any case it is by virtue of this PERSONALITY that we are children. The more Personality we possess, the more child-like we are: that is to say also more removed from the besetting reality, less implicated in its queer anonymous proceedings. Life is a sleep, and a rest from God. But the nightmares and reflections of his energy disturb and terrorize that sleep. --We are "children" with a very anxious, troubled childhood indeed. 5
So we do not share in the "work" of the world, or at least we do not know that we participate in its results and benefits: we only invent Heavens and Utopias for ourselves to cheer us at our drudgery, and pretend that it is really all for us that this is happening, or that we are in a sense partners and not slaves. The songs the workman sings at his work, when he does, are about frivolous matters or in any case not about the subject of his employment. In the same way our best speculations and finest art is not about "reality" or our mechanical job, but abstractions that remove us from it.
Paul Edwards, Research Fellow at Bath College of Higher Education, is the editor of the Wyndham Lewis Annual and has produced critical editions of several of Wyndham Lewis's books for Black Sparrow Press, the latest being Time and Western Man . Most recently he has edited Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis's Painting and Writing and is now writing a monograph on Lewis's painting and writing for Yale University Press.
This essay and the two that follow are published courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
1. Wyndham Lewis, "Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art in Our Time," in Wyndham Lewis on Art, ed. C. J. Fox and Walter Michel (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 208.
2. Typescript gives "comforted," not "confronted."
3. "Drop out my father's and mother's lives between the dates of their being impregnate ova and the moment when I became an impregnate ovum. See the ova only and consider the second ovum as the first two ova's means not of reproducing themselves but of continuing themselves--repeating themselves--the intermediate lives being nothing but, as it were, a long potato shoot from one eye to the place where it will grow its next tuber" (The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, ed. Henry Festing Jones [London: Fifield, 1912], 54).
4. The typescript gives "EINIGE," not "EINZIGE." "Der Einzige" means "the unique one"; Lewis is referring to Max Stirner's Der Einzige und Sein Eigentum (The Ego and its own). Lewis misspelled this word in referring to Stirner in both the 1914 and 1932 editions of his play, Enemy of the Stars.
5. The final two sentences of this paragraph are Lewis's handwritten addition to the typescript. For a further consideration of our separation from God, see Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1993), 372.
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Two copies of this article exist: a typescript of five leaves with a cover leaf inscribed by Lewis, "The Machine. | typescript for article. | Wyndham Lewis," and a carbon of the same typescript. The first is at Buffalo, the second at Cornell. The typing is poor and inaccurate, and both copies have occasional marks (probably by Mrs. Lewis) separating words that the typist has run together. The carbon has one spelling correction, but neither copy has been properly corrected. The essay was probably written in 1934 or 1935, when Lewis published a series of articles on industrial art and the machine. The subject was topical in literature, design, and architecture. Its political side is brought out most clearly in "Shropshire Lads or Robots Again" and "Power-feeling and Machine-Age Art." 1 Lewis associates enthusiasm for machinery in the arts with political enthusiasm for the industrialisation of the Soviet Union and its accompanying feats of social engineering--enthusiasm in which he did not share. Lewis's theories of the necessity for human imperfection conflicted with his modernist utopian ambitions (expressed in the 1919 pamphlet, The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex?). 2 Mechanical perfection dissolves human identity. "The Machine" bears traces of Lewis's admiration of the architecture of the Berbers of North Africa, whose romantic (and "European") barbarism he praises in Kasbahs and Soukhs, an unfinished book of the early 1930s, sections of which are included in Journey into Barbary: Morocco Writings and Drawings. 3
If we confine ourselves to things of which we have ocular evidence--excluding all modes of life or art that might come about, or that should come about, or that might have been, or should have been--then no argument is possible, I think, when those two modes are contrasted--the human mode and the non-human mode. The human modes are the better and brighter.
If by the fiat of a despot a city could be built (such as I imagined in The Caliph's Design or Architects, Where is Your Vortex) and if the despot could be so trained and so endowed--his state so rich in resources, possessing such transcendent workmen, politically so firmly established etc. etc. etc.--as to ensure a maximum result, in speed, effort and intelligence, then, of course, the city that would be built would be second to none in history, it would be far better than any city ever built.
But that is a city of Ifs and Ans [sic], for a rather vulgar streak somewhere in the mind of the despot, for instance, would be enough to spoil the city. 4 Meanwhile the human seems to have the advantage of the non-human, or the superhuman. Where men have physically been able to act the giant, and chop through nature, instead of crawling over it, in the manner of Lilliput, and override an accident, instead of accommodating themselves to it, they have not been able to supply the appropriate mind for the super-body, that is the trouble.
There are no rules for cities of course: Venice is built upon the most disadvantageous basis imaginable, a stork of a city: Manhattan on the other hand depends for its existence upon the rock-mass beneath it. You might cite Venice as an example of Man imposing his will upon the waters. But in fact the charm of Venice is the waters, of course. The obstacle (technically) turns out to be prime factor, aesthetically. With Manhattan the rock underneath is of no importance except as a socket and platform. And after all the Earth itself must always play that role in anything we undertake upon its surface.
Taking Venice and Manhattan together--the first as a specimen of human art (typifying a human submission to the natural beauty of the waters), the second a specimen of the non-human--then, I think, in its heyday of course, Venice could be the better place, as the Venetian is the better man.
So we have to admit it seems to me that at a period when man has not been powerful enough to transform the accidental dispositions of nature--with no dynamite to blast, or rock-drills, say--and is compelled to build the streets of his cities in and out and up and down, inventing, as he goes along, untried architectural devices, delightful deformities and structural freaks, then (it is but too plain) the result is more satisfactory. By following the vast, non-human, lines of nature, our human arts score their best successes. Projecting his tortuous, not yet oppressive, geometry, out upon the chaotic superstructures, being methodic where he can, in the teeth of natural disorder, man is seen at his best. He then produces something of intellectual as well as emotional value, which the unadulterated stark geometry of the Machine-Age precludes.
It pains me to say this. And I wish I could assert with a propagandist emphasis that someday the Machine would be put in its place and man rule over Machine and nature alike. But I believe that the problem of scale is at the centre of these particular problems of art. It is easier to put the soul of a god in the body of a man than vice versa apparently. All the Machine so far has done is to enlarge, as you enlarge a small photograph. Will it ever be allowed to enlarge, or to multiply, anything good? The Machine is able to bloat to a hundred times the size something trivial, or repeat in innumerable exemplars something foolish. This is what usually it does. When it reproduces the Mona Lisa, or Van Gogh's Postman ten thousand times it is doubtful if that is an improvement. Should it enlarge it the same number of times it would of course be meaningless. The Machine imitates, it enlarges, it multiplies, or Man through it. But so far there has been a watering down, only, or vulgarising of pre-Machine-Age effort. And this of course has coincided with the notion of the supersession of the Individual by the Mass. Perhaps the destiny of the Machine is involved with the destiny of the Mass?
Ten thousand dull chair-legs (of Windsor Chair pattern) enlarged a hundred-fold, and placed in two rows upon Salisbury Plain, would knock Stonehenge into a cocked hat no doubt. But no question of art would be involved, any more than in the impact of a giant comet, or, if you like, in the size of a nebula.
The Machine has been courted and denounced: but even more important than the question of the Machine, is the natural fashion in which all human societies grow and flower and perish. Can a conscious or mechanical canon be imposed upon them? I have always held that ideally it would be more satisfactory if this limitation of natural growth--the waxing and flourishing plant-status--could give place with us to something more deliberate. 5
There has to be not only the power, in short (which is conferred upon society by the development of mechanical technique) but also the will to invention, to beauty, significance and so forth. China and Japan are today a terrible object-lesson in how with the Machine comes in Barbarity.
Just as the old art (which I have called human art) has derived its significance from the accidental character of the surface of nature (without attempting to flatten it out or tidy it up), may not the will to invent depend also on the brutal accidents of the surface of a given society, and the accidents, again, of a secluded situation, or a local and temporary prosperity? Or we can put this in another way. It may be parasitic upon nature only. Once the social landscape, as it were, has been humanly flattened out, tidied up, or even has been very much interfered with, and lost its "primitive"--its human--character, this parasite may die off, or forget its cunning.
In the midst of all these speculations, the only thing that is quite certain is that the various graphic and plastic arts are upon all hands in a state of decay. In spots, the building art alone is not quite dead. The Cinema, in its capacity of Kinetic Plastic--or "Moving Statue," or of moving monochrome picture, or Tableau Vivant--is very active, certainly, very proselytising and perfervid. But the Cinema (the only Cinema that counts) is a social doctrine as well as an art I think. It is far too handy a vehicle for all that is second-rate--as a mode of expression for people who would be doomed to second-rateness, and that is failure, in other directions--not to be suspect.
So what we come back to here is the problem again of the Machine: for the conquest of the Redskin by the European colonist was not the conquest of a lower type by a higher necessarily. It was the triumph of the rifle. Ultimately, it was the triumph of the inventor of the rifle--not certainly of the people who manufacture or use it. --May not the Machine play a similar role, destructive of all value and human significance, in the field of art that it has in the field of politics?
Paul Edwards, Research Fellow at Bath College of Higher Education, is the editor of the Wyndham Lewis Annual and has produced critical editions of several of Wyndham Lewis's books for Black Sparrow Press, the latest being Time and Western Man . Most recently he has edited Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis's Painting and Writing and is now writing a monograph on Lewis's painting and writing for Yale University Press.
1. Wyndham Lewis, "Shropshire Lads or Robots Again" , and "Power-Feeling and Machine-Age Art" , in his Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society, 1913-1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 190-94, 236-40.
2. See Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? , ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1986).
3. See Wyndham Lewis, Journey into Barbary: Morocco Writings and Drawings, ed. C. J. Fox (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1983).
4. The protagonist of Lewis's 1941 novel, The Vulgar Streak, was intended as an embodiment, and hence critique, of a Napoleonist dynamic principle (which, by then, Lewis also associated with Hitler) in European culture.
5. Especially in Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled , ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989).
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"Berlin Revisited" exists as a fifteen-page autograph manuscript in the Lewis archive at Cornell. The first page is inscribed (not in Lewis's hand) "Blasting & Bombardiering," but in fact Lewis and his wife visited Germany and Poland in October 1937, immediately after the publication of that autobiography. (See Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis; the 1935 visit mentioned in the first sentence of the article is not recorded by Meyers.) 1 During the mid-1930s, Lewis's promotion of an understanding with the new Nazi regime in Germany brought him close to being an unofficial apologist for it. His fear of a repetition of World War I, in which he had served as an artillery officer, was an inextricable part of his attitude. Count Your Dead: They are Alive!, published in April 1937, is the climax of his campaign. After the 1937 visit, Lewis made no more attempts to persuade the British public of the beneficence of the Nazis, and, as his biographer notes, decisively distanced himself from anti-Semitism. "Berlin Revisited," then, records a visit that seems to have coincided with the turning point in Lewis's attitude to Hitler's Germany. It does not itself record the change of attitude, however. An "extremely vulnerable" Germany is still seen as a potential victim of aggression. But Lewis is clearly disappointed by the lack of a heroic temper in Berlin's well-dressed bourgeoisie (which indicates that he had expected the Nazis to induce one). The shoppers and café-loungers of Third City in the 1955 Monstre Gai (sometimes taken as a reflection of Lewis's attitude to the Welfare State in postwar Britain) clearly owe something to his memories of the Kurfürstendamm in 1937. 2 In Count Your Dead, Lewis had half insinuated the existence of a conspiracy by Jewish financiers to undermine European society by war, just as Russia had been subverted by communism. He was shocked by his visit to the Warsaw Ghetto, but there was evidently not yet sufficient change in his worldview for him to do more than record without comment the heroic or desperate Herr Israel's absurdist defiance of persecution.
A week or so ago I dropped into Berlin, which I had not visited for two years. This time I stayed in a small hotel off the Kurfürstendamm. The Kurfürstendamm is a big boulevard, thick with cafés. It is a sort of little Paris consisting of a single great boulevard, created under the Brüning and earlier régimes, in stark contrast with the old imperial city.
The "terraces" of these cafés which lie thick along the Kurfürstendamm are for the most part sumptuous marquees. Within these spacious tents, infested with palms, the elegant ladies and gentlemen of the new Berlin discuss coffee and cakes. These great Konditoreien are somewhat oppressively respectable, and incidentally extremely expensive.
It takes you a few days to sort out the essentials of this swarming tent-life, of Berlin's fashionable boulevard. The first thing you remark is the admirable taste displayed in all the clothes, hats, and shoes worn. There is a great surface effect of luxury. But these are only Konditoreien, or cake-and-coffee palaces, after all. If you go into the equivalent of these places in the matter of restaurants--the Weinrestaurant--you will find that more than half the customers are not eating, or not more than one dish. They have the wine but not the food of the wine-restaurant, many of them, whereas in London or Paris they would all be eating a four-course dinner.
After this, and a few similar discoveries, seeing the extreme smartness, notwithstanding, of these half-eaters, or mere drinkers, you will be disposed to say to yourself that these Germans put all their available cash on their backs.
But that would not be entirely correct. There is an explanation for this paradoxal smartness. It is probably true to say that they put too much of their money on their backs, and think too much of sitting for an hour or two in the palmy tent of a Konditorei, over a cup of coffee, trying to look as much as possible like a very rich and idle sportsman or sportswoman, reposing after a strenuous day on the tennis-court. But there is another factor which has to be taken into account.
If, after leaving the masses of sunburnt elegants toying with a cake and exhibiting themselves to the passers-by, or entertaining each other in the seclusion of an enormous marquee, you walk along the boulevard, you will find yourself passing shop after shop of the extremest luxury. That delicious mackintosh, with steel clasps in place of buttons, those multi-coloured half-sandals, those attractive flounced jackets you have just seen upon the bodies of the coffee-drinkers, you now see in the shop-windows. 3 Approaching the shop-window, you find to your astonishment that they cost very little. The shoes that impressed you so much are only twelve marks and a half; the dresses which create such a voguish effect range from fifteen to fifty marks; there is a very smart straw helmet for ten pence!
It is not quite true, therefore, that these people put all their money on their backs. For two or three pounds they can dress up like their favourite film-heroine or hero, and cut a dash as a coffee drinker. And for two or three marks they can exhibit themselves--they seldom talk much, they are too busy looking and being looked at--sipping a Moka and nibbling a cake.
The Germans have their fair share of the lady-and-gentleman complex, as it might be called, of the modern democracy. Every nation has its own variety of this absurdity. Where the Germans differ is that, with their matchless efficiency, they have a far more thorough way of indulging it and of showing it off. These big marquees and open tents in the Kurfürstendamm are colossal tableau-vivants of genteelness.
What Hitler, with his dreams of a "classless society," must think of all this I cannot imagine. But I suppose he doesn't think about it at all, he has too much to attend to, building up the armoured shell for his extremely vulnerable country.
The Kurfürstendamm is still run by the Jews, or rather most of the big shops still seem to be jewish--only they are diabolically cheap. Have these keen traders been left there on the understanding that they smarten up the Berliners at cost price? As a sort of defiance over one shop I noticed, in large capitals, the name ISRAEL. Approaching it, I found it was a dress shop. But the dresses were all most deplorably outmoded, even crumpled, and one or two actually hung upside down. Imagine this happening in the middle of Bond Street. A large shop, the window full of a provincial stock, displayed with a deliberate, as it were insolent, carelessness.
What Herr Israel may mean by this I cannot guess. With his coreligionists all round it is a case of "business-as-usual." Only the implacable Israel refuses to play, it would seem! With all his flags at half-mast he breasts the storm. 4
After having observed at my leisure the fashionable world of the Kurfürstendamm, I thought I would see what these people read. For what books would go with this sort of outlook I felt I should like to know. Entering one of the best of the Kurfürstendamm bookshops, I bought a Dolphin--or a Penguin--and put to the gentleman who served me my difficulty.
I had been much impressed, I told him, by the crowds I had seen outside, and I wished to know what they read. Six or seven years ago, I informed him, I had been greatly distressed to see nothing but detective stories in the windows of German shops. This great intellectual nation had abased itself before Edgar Wallace. 5 Today there were none. Did this signify that today the German taste was better?
No, he answered, their taste was not better. Was it then worse? I asked. No, he said. He volunteered the information that they had much more money to spend today than a few years ago. Ah: but then their taste must be better, said I. For they read better books.
He smiled. He said that did not follow. He said it was not because their taste was better but because they could not get them, that they did not read detective stories.
The German writers were all so ambitious and conceited, they refused to write detective stories, it seemed. This I gathered was one of the results of the new régime. He frankly regretted this ambitious temper or this "author-complex," as we should call it in England.
Besides, he informed me, intelligent people all liked detective stories. I raised my eyebrows in astonishment. Noticing my surprise, he smiled again. He assured me that that was the case.
I ventured the opinion that for a very intelligent man it might be an excellent thing to read a crime story, but for the multitude crime stories and nothing else was not the most suitable fare. That was a point of view that was worth considering, he thought.
This was a bookseller of considerable pretensions. When I asked him what anglo saxon books he sold most of he answered immediately Santayana. Santayana is surely the softest and silkiest of all philosophers. But my question had not contemplated the possibility of philosophical nibblings. I had meant fiction. And for a great philosophical race to indulge in Santayana was not very creditable, anyway. It suggested a considerable weakening of the teeth.
I brought him back to earth, however, by saying I had had fiction in mind. Morgan's Fountain seemed the next, after Santayana. 6 I held up my finger peremptorily and said--
"You have forgotten!" He looked startled.
"Forgotten?" he asked.
"Yes," said I. "There is another name that should have come before that of Morgan. Think again!"
He looked confused.
"Galsworthy!" I thundered.
For a fraction of a second he looked still more confused. Then he assumed, as best he could, an expression of imperious indifference, although palpably shaken.
"Galsworthy--yes," he exclaimed. "A year ago, perhaps. Not today. That is over."
The meaning of all this is as follows. Galsworthy has for a long time been the bible of the Germans. Middleclass Germany has absorbed the Forsyte Saga to the exclusion of almost any other English author--excepting, of course, Morgan's Fountain, from which cheaply platonic spring they still refresh themselves in prodigious gulps.
The full nectar of the kindred respectability of Anglosaxony was somehow to be found in Galsworthy more than in any other British importation. A young German, for instance, told me that his sister, a typical German girl, had read the Forsyte Saga ten times. He said that when he would arrive home late at night--however late--he would see a light in her room. Looking into it he would see her asleep, with the Forsyte Saga still in her hand.
When this young German paid a visit to London he naturally bought picture-postcards of Pall Mall, the Horseguards, and of the Houses of Parliament. These he sent to his sister in Berlin. On his return, he found that his sister had stuck these postcards into her copy of the Forsyte Saga, opposite the pages where the story speaks of these historic scenes.
All this I knew: I knew that to speak of the German Reading Public and not to mention Galsworthy would be a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark.
After this visit to the Buchhandlung of the Kurfürstendamm I made it my business to visit many other bookshops. The three bestsellers among English books were, in every case, Galsworthy, Col. Lawrence, and Morgan's Fountain. 7 Those were always the first names that came to their lips. Of American books, Wolfe, the author of Look Homeward Angel, was the big noise. They had prospectuses from the Rowohltverlag of all his books, with the fine jewish head of the author on the cover. Hemingway is forbidden--Hemingway who is the incarnation of the spirit of physical adventure, the "tough guy" par excellence, and of all American authors the one you would think with most appeal for the Nazi Youth--the most unexceptionably "virile" reading.
For the rest, there is a spate of fashionable amateurs from England--such as Mr Richard Wyndham and Mr Harold Nicholson. 8 The latter gentleman refuses categorically to put his foot upon German soil, so great is his loathing for the Dritte Reich: but his books embellish all the shop-windows.
When one considers that the publication of books in Germany is rigidly censored, these are eccentricities, to say the least. But these books are not bestsellers. That is a curiosity of the censorship Abteilung [department], and is no indication of German taste. For you may bring a horse to the water, but you cannot, necessarily, make him drink. What the German bookbuyer--that is to say the middle class--drinks down in great draughts is Galsworthy. The lady-and-gentleman complex, as I have called it, is satisfied by that better than by anything else. It is deep calling to deep--the deep British respectability of Galsworthy is answered by the deep respectability of the Kurfürstendamm.
Politics are far from my mind. The Nazi revolution is now an accomplished fact.  But one thing we may surely deduce from this scrutiny of the bookshops: namely that a kindred respectability, almost as tenacious as that of England, has survived, intact, into the new era.
"Tell me what a man eats, and I will tell you what he is!" Well, for anybody who is able to augur from a book as well as some can from a gastronomic dossier, the words "Forsyte" and "Fountain" are eloquent.
A delusion of the Englishman--one among many--with respect to his German cousin, is that the German is invariably crude and rough. We have in England a disease called "refaynment"--something that causes the poor fellow afflicted with it to say "nayce" instead of "nice."
But the German can be just as "refayned" if not more so. Do not run away with the idea that every German gives utterance to a trenchant "Nein!" when desiring to express negation. No. There are just as many Germans who say "Nayn," or "fayn," for "nein" or "fein," as there are Englishmen who say "nayce" for "nice."
Another illusion of the Englishman's is that the Germans are an "intellectual" nation. That is of course absurd. The middleclass that was dispossessed by the collapse of the valuta [exchange rate] just after the war (to which, ultimately, the Nazi revolution must be traced) yearn with an almost pathological intensity for respectability. And, as a passion, respectability is at the opposite pole to the passions of the intellect, if one may so express oneself.
I received, while I was in Germany, as great an impression as ever of massive physical energy. Passing from Germany into Poland, the contrast, in this respect, is very great. I should, quite dispassionately, advise any country to think twice before it started dropping bombs on the Germans. But in all those matters where sensibility and artistic intelligence are concerned, it is another story. I must confess to having experienced a certain shock, upon realizing the ineradicable "nayceness" of the modern German mind. You know what it is--when you find that the gladiator reads Little Lord Fauntleroy in his spare time, it is sort of disillusioning. It should have been Aeschylus!
Paul Edwards, Research Fellow at Bath College of Higher Education, is the editor of the Wyndham Lewis Annual and has produced critical editions of several of Wyndham Lewis's books for Black Sparrow Press, the latest being Time and Western Man . Most recently he has edited Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis's Painting and Writing and is now writing a monograph on Lewis's painting and writing for Yale University Press.
1. Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 242-43, 338.
2. Wyndham Lewis, Monstre Gai (London: Jupiter Books, 1955), 39-46.
3. Uncertain reading of "flounced"; possibly "flowered."
4. People classified as Jews had been deprived of full citizenship and forbidden to marry "Aryans" in 1935, but the full force of prewar state anti-Semitism was not felt until the Reichskristallnacht of November 1938, when shops, synagogues, and schools were looted and destroyed. Jews were subsequently deprived of all basic civil rights.
5. Universal taste for Edgar Wallace and detective fiction in the liberal-capitalist democracies had frequently been deplored by Lewis; for example, in The Art of Being Ruled , ed. Reedway Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 180, and The Apes of God (1930; Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 402-4.
6. Charles Morgan, The Fountain . Morgan's books were always more highly esteemed on the continent, especially France, than in English-speaking countries.
7. Presumably T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom , of which Lewis had written in Blasting and Bombardiering, saying that it was "not a great work of literary art" (Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering [London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937], 245).
8. A friend and patron of Lewis's in the 1920s, the wealthy painter and writer Richard Wyndham (1896-1948) was satirized as Dick Whittingdon in The Apes of God. Harold Nicholson (1886-1968), associated with the Bloomsbury Group through marriage to Virginia Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West, wrote a number of biographies during the 1930s. Initially a supporter of Oswald Mosley's New Party, he became a National Labour Member of Parliament in 1935, and was vigorous in his opposition to dictatorship.
.
On 7 June 1936 Wyndham Lewis wrote to Geoffrey Grigson that the next day he would be handing in a "large book" to his publisher. That book was probably the novel The Revenge for Love, which appeared in May 1937. 1 Completing it left Lewis free to work on other things, which came to include his autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, finished in the summer of 1937 and published on 29 October 1937. 2 Despite bad health, since early 1935 Lewis had been working on several writing projects, paintings, and books. One of them may have been the autobiography, but no mention of it appears in his letters and manuscripts until February 1937, when Lewis signed a contract with William Morrow for an American edition of the book. 3
When did Lewis begin Blasting and Bombardiering? It seems not to have been on his mind in April 1936, when in a letter he mentions working on his "large novel" (The Revenge for Love), "a large political book" (Left Wings Over Europe), and a "short novel The Roaring Queen." 4 In August of that year Lewis was in serious financial trouble; he owed money to his doctor for one of several operations to correct complications from gonorrhea. 5 By 16 October, his lack of money had grown urgent. Lewis told Oliver Brown, the dealer for his paintings, to arrange for a sitter: "One relatively well-paid portrait--or two ill-paid ones--would . . . settle all my illness-debts." 6 Lewis was eager to compromise his artistic principles for ready cash. He wrote Brown, "To hell with these experimental 'difficult' contraptions, which only the Young and impecunious in England, like [sic] and which are hard to sell--I will do no more for six months, or until I am solvent. I will really do dreams of beauty, which will sell themselves, as I am bringing them down to the Gallery. This I mean, in sober earnest." 7 Just three days later, the London Times ran an article previewing the newspaper's publication of letters by Prime Minister Gladstone. 8 In a preface, ultimately rejected, for the book that became Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis refers to having seen this article "the other day" . When he wrote this preface in late October or early November 1936, he had probably not written much, if anything, of the autobiography, for the book he introduces to his readers is not the book he eventually published. The preface adumbrates a book of gossip about his fellow highbrow artists; in the autobiography, however, that material is relegated to the last section, part 5; the first four parts concern Lewis's war experiences as a soldier and an artist. Lewis's title for the preface to the book he then thought of as "The Men of 1914" was "Preliminary Aside to the Reader; regarding Gossip, and its pitfalls." 9
It is likely, then, that the idea of writing an autobiography came to Lewis in the fall of 1936 as another way to relieve his extreme financial pressures. The rejected preface reveals Lewis's anxieties about making his autobiography appeal to a public receptive to the novels of J. B. Priestley and war memoirs like Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That . It also shows Lewis struggling awkwardly to accommodate himself to middle-class readers who buy books at railway-station bookstalls.
Lewis continued to think of the book as a memoir of his relations with other writers and artists at least until February 1937, when he signed the contract for a book titled Blasting and Bombardiering with William Morrow. Lewis must have described the autobiography to his editor at Morrow, Charles Halliwell Duell, as a book of reminiscences primarily about other artists, for in the late summer when Duell received the first six chapters treating Lewis's own experience of the onset of war, he balked, refusing to publish the book. Duell wrote Lewis, "I cherished the notion that your book would have enough to say about enough well-known res and would so thoroughly express your own personality that it would appeal widely to American readers." 10 Duell had received six chapters of a very different book than he had contracted for, despite the fact that, coming from the former editor of Blast, the book's title might have suggested to him a balance between Lewis's life as an artist and as a soldier.
The major change in Lewis's conception of the book seems to have occurred in the spring of 1937, after the contract with Morrow was signed. Despite his disappointment with the book's first six chapters, Duell had been expecting some material on Lewis's experiences in the war, for in May he was under the impression that Lewis was "re-work[ing] the war scenes." 11 The manuscripts and galleys show, however, that in four of the book's five parts, Lewis was concentrating on his own experiences as a soldier and artist; only part 5 preserved the promised focus on his fellow artists. Some material now in part 5, in which Lewis theorizes on the place of art in modern society, seems to have been written very early on under the title "The Men of 1914" and may have been the first section Lewis drafted. 12 Later on in the process of composition, that material as well as the chapters on Joyce, Pound, and Eliot became part 2 (perhaps of two parts in all). In the reworking in the spring of 1937, all of it became part 5, following four other parts devoted mainly to Lewis's war; portions of the draft chapter on Joyce were moved into the introduction. 13 As Blasting and Bombardiering took its final shape, Lewis would have realized that the early preface about the troubles of a writer gossiping about other writers was a completely unsuitable introduction to the autobiographical account of his life from 1914 through 1926 that the book had become.
The significance of the rejected preface is that it helps document the reasons for the opening up of Lewis's work in the mid-1930s to simple human realities and emotions. In accounts of Lewis's career, The Revenge for Love and Blasting and Bombardiering have served as markers of a relaxation in Lewis's hard-edged public role as "The Enemy." 14 The rejected preface reveals that one motivation for Lewis to become slightly more tolerant of human vulnerability was his own need to find a way to appeal to the tastes of the middle-class book-buying public. This was a challenge for an artist whose career, since the days of Blast, had moved forward while he ignored, dismissed, analyzed, or flouted just such tastes. In the rejected preface, we see Lewis struggling to come to grips with the new opportunities and dangers of finding common ground with readers to whom he felt he had very little of real interest to offer, except gossip.
Original capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and underlining are preserved. Typographical errors that Lewis corrected have been corrected silently here; typos that Lewis left standing are reproduced. Complete words that Lewis changed while typing remain and are cancelled with a solid line. 15
I am about to gossip. I am going to be exceedingly "personal" about certain persons. But this is not at all because I wish to be. It is because of you that I descend to these picturesque details. Quite at the start it is far better that I should lay the blame where it is due - namely at your door - for anything that is of too familiar a nature that may be uttered in these pages.
When the Times the other day was announcing the appearance in its columns of extracts from letters exchanged by Mr Gladstone and Mrs Gladstone, "The Thunderer" purred:
"We may see Mr. Gladstone winning 8d at cards from the Prince of Wales, and tearing his court suit while he dresses in a hurry; Princess Beatrice being chased and caught by Jenner to have a loose tooth out; the Gladstone children kissed by the Queen. Mr. Gladstone drying his wet socks out of the railway carriage window, deep in "The Woman in White" etc.' 16
If such blandishments are necessary on the part of "the Thunderer", how much more are they not required of me, who have no eagles at my beck?
I have no caries of the teeth of Mr. T. S. Eliot to tempt you with, I fear, but I have a particularly disagreable affliction of the eyes in the matter of Mr. James Joyce: I can show the author of the Waste Land engrossed in a "Crime Club" thriller - but on the other hand his socks will be on his feet. I have no clothesline at a railway carriage window, unfortunately,with which to catch your eye - the best I can do as regards underclothes is to borrow Mr. George Moore's pants from Mr Yeats for the occasion. 17 Still, I have pleanty of shots in my locker: I can tell you to one ounce how much alcohol two of the most outstanding highbrows can carry, and as to kissing children, the worthy Ezra kisses any children he can lay his hands on and even pats a quantity of quite big boys on the head.
Have I "that terrible gift, familiarity?" Or am I too unfamiliar? Time
alone will tell. show.
No. Much more concerned with ideas that I am with people, I
have, all right, a familiar vein. And I do recognize, with
very great cleverness clearness, that straight "ideas" is
not at all what the Publics cup of tea.
Ideas the Public does not relish. Or at least it likes its ideas to be incarnated, to take on flesh and blood. It abhors the vacuum, as it feels it to be, of a disembodied notion. The breath and bustle of life are all in all to it; and the laws by which that bustle is goverened - the "ideas I speak of - it will describe as "over its head". And with things "over its head" it will have no truck. If it is desirious of acquiring ideas, it prefers to come by them without tears. It finds it more agreable to extract them, in small quantities, out of a mass of inorganic and drifting gossip.
All this being so, I become a gossip, in the present instance. Also, my Public is the Anglosaxon. I have no choice in the matter. The instinct to analyse and to disembody, and to translate the things we call persons back again into their platonic archetypes - that instinct must be sternly repressed. Even I must not allow these souls of things to peep out too much, as I proceed with my lighthearted tale of a family of lions at play. As I report the activities set in motion upon the plane of gossip by these dynamic abstractions - these ideas or idealogies that govern us - I must keep the latter carefully out of sight.
Under these circumstances let me confess and then have done with it, that this is, all the same, a history of ideas. It records the birth of the system of ideas which is now in the ascendant. But it would be a thoroughly repulsive proposition to undertake a "history of ideas." No one would stand for it, from the publisher to Smith's Station bookstall. And it is my ambition to lie upon Smiths station book-stall side by side with Mr. Priestley - the lamb lying down with the lion. How should I ever do that without showing the same careful regard for the Public that is shown by the author of "Good Companions"?
Yes, I have decided to be a "good companion". I will show what stuff I am made of, and make a hearty picaresque affair full of jolly incidents, of all this highbrow business. As Father O'Flynn with great spirit protested: "Cannot the clergy be Irishmen too?" I will show that they can be - I mean that the biggest highbrows of the lot are jolly good sports, as merry as grigs 18 and if Mr. Priestley has not coined money out of them yet, and put them on the map, it is only because it has never, luckily, occurred to him to do so.
This is the explanation of how I have come to adopt the approach indirect: to dilate upon Mr. Pound's plush jacket. and Mr. Joyce's patent-leather shoes. 19 I am out to popularise Pound, to jack up Joyce' stocks, and make my own alarming name a little less horrific.
But if I am going to gossip, I am, like all gossips, confronted with a rather puzzling little problem. Especially the gossip who is committing himself to paper is exposed to this difficulty (were he merely gossiping away in a club or in a pub he would be as safe as houses). He must not, in a word, lay himself open to the charge of being a "poison pen". That is the snag, in setting out to please.
At all costs I must avoid appearing "malicious" or "savage". The Anglosaxon will not tolerate that. But on the other hand how on earth am I going to be even passably entertaining about these eminent persons without offending against the canon of kindness and even decorum - for some of the habits of Lions are distinctly free and easy? Above all, how am I ever going to pass myself off as a Good Companion, and lie side by side upon the bookstalls in the railway stations with Mr. Priestley, if I betray a suspicious indifference to the great unwritten law of It isn't done? - For (between ourselves) I mean to do it. I am determined to be jolly good company, an uproariously good sort and damn the consequences. My only fear is that I might find that I had been too good a fellow! That is the danger with me - I have to guard against my tendancy never to do things by halves. For then I might after all not find myself lying cosily side by side with Mr. Priestley or Miss Baum 20 upon the railway bookstall, but squatting cheek by jowl with some embezzler in one of His Majesty's jails.
These celebrated highbrow cronies of mine about whom I am writing
about are in fact of the same flesh and blood with yourself,
however: greatness is a superstition of the little, and apart from the
fact that they are not terribly fond of golf and bridge, and a few minor
difficulties of that order, they are no more alarming that a Slate Club
or Territorial Mess. To a man they are 'fond of a drop' (though you will
never have to take this on trust, as the laws of this country do
not allow me to a show a living character consuming a highball or a pint
of beer).
My subjects are the vessels of those disagreable ideas I was speaking about just now: and those are in fact my quarry, I have admitted. But you must remember that in consequence of this more esoteric purpose I am handicapped. Mr. Priestley would have me beat - he would sell three books to my one - if I did not prove myself a better companion than he was. It is not enough to be as good. And the trouble is how to overstep that decorous limit without appearing a little disreputable.
Or take Mr. Robert Graves - I have to be prepared to lie on the station bookstall between Mr. Priestley and Goodbye to all that! now a classic bestseller.
Thomas R. Smith has published on the autobiographies of Henry Adams, Roland Barthes, Joseph Conrad, and William Butler Yeats. He is currently editing a special issue of A/B: Autobiography Studies on autobiography and neuroscience. He teaches at Penn State Abington, near Philadelphia.
I would like to thank Robert J. Bertholf and Michael Basinski of the Poetry/Rare Books Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Jody Armstrong and Lucy B. Burgess of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Kroch Library at Cornell for their generous help in locating manuscripts and letters. I am grateful to Penn State's Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies for a Faculty Fellowship supporting this research. A Travel to Collections grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities made research at Cornell possible, for which I am also grateful. Omar Pound, executor of the Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust, was very helpful in securing permission from the Trust. Thanks are due also to Michael Beacom at William Morrow. For suggesting work on the preface, I am indebted to Paul Edwards. This essay is published with the permission of The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo.
1. Wyndham Lewis to Geoffrey Grigson, 7 June 1936, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University. The Revenge for Love was more substantial than other books he published in 1936 or 1937 and thus more likely to be considered by Lewis a major work. The satire The Roaring Queen, which was printed but not published in 1936 for fear of libel, had been all but finished since at least 1932, when Desmond Harmsworth turned it down under the title The Roaring Quean (Omar S. Pound and Philip Grover, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography [Folkestone, Kent: Wm. Dawson and Sons, 1978], 38). The political essays Left Wings Over Europe and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! appeared in 1936 and 1937, respectively; the autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering appeared in 1937.
2. Pound and Grover, Wyndham Lewis, 43. According to Lewis's agent, A. Heath, the publisher Eyre and Spottiswoode was setting type for the autobiography by 31 August 1937 (A. Heath to Lewis, 31 August 1937, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University).
3. See Wyndham Lewis to Desmond Flower, 22 February 1935 and 25 July 1935; Lewis to Geoffrey Grigson, 30 November 1935; and the contract between William Morrow and Lewis for Blasting and Bombardiering, 6 February 1937, all of which are in the Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University.
4. Wyndham Lewis to the Rev. M. C. D'Arcy, S. J., 14 April 1936, The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, ed. W. K. Rose (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), 237; hereafter abbreviated L.
5. Wyndham Lewis to Sir Nicholas Waterhouse, 10 August 1936, in L, 237-38. For a discussion of Lewis's medical problems in the 1930s, see Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 220-23; hereafter abbreviated E.
6. Wyndham Lewis to Oliver Brown, 16 October 1936, in L, 239.
7. Ibid.
8. "Gladstone Letters, A Selection in 'The Times,'" Times (London), 19 October 1936, 14.
9. Five other draft introductions to the book exist among the Blasting and Bombardiering manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, and page proofs in the Wyndham Lewis Collection at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In one of the draft introductions, Lewis refers to "The Men of 1914" as the book's title (box 3, folder 1, Buffalo); in another he calls it the subtitle (box 4, folder 3.1, Buffalo). Yet another draft introduction projects an autobiography covering about ten years of Lewis's life, a decision he stuck by (box 4, folder 3.2, Buffalo). Reading these drafts, one sees Lewis not only working toward his final conception of the autobiography, but also piecing together the published introduction.
In a note on the title page of the manuscript of the rejected preface, Lewis describes it as a "rejected Preface for 'Blasting + Bombardiering': a [illegible] explaining author's approach to autobiography in question" (box 4, folder 2, Buffalo). This note may have been written when Lewis was preparing his manuscripts for sale. A little over a year after Blasting and Bombardiering was published, Lewis organized some of his papers, perhaps with an eye to selling them, for in the Lewis Collection at Buffalo is a list of sixty separate books, sets of page proofs, and manuscripts labeled "Items. Literary dossier (assembled Nov. 1938)."
The preface's title page bears two identifications in brackets--"The Men of 1914" and "Blasting + Bombardiering"--which seem to have been written at different times. The handwriting of "The Men of 1914" resembles that of the preface's title, whereas the handwriting of "Blasting + Bombardiering" resembles that of the note, suggesting that the titles for both the preface and manuscript were written at the same time, while the note and the title for the published book were added later. This physical evidence supports the idea that Lewis wrote the preface for a book titled "The Men of 1914" that would showcase his associations with his fellow avant-garde writers and artists.
10. Charles Duell to Wyndham Lewis, 10 September 1937, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University.
11. Charles Duell to Wyndham Lewis, 20 May 1937, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University. A month later, Duell wrote as if the reworking had been completed and assumed the manuscript had been completely retyped (Duell to Lewis, 29 June 1937, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Cornell University).
12. Box 3, folder 5, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Buffalo.
13. Box 4, folders 7 and 8, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Buffalo.
14. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press), 145-48, 176-77; Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), 123-37; Meyers, The Enemy, 223; William H. Pritchard, Wyndham Lewis (New York: Twayne, 1968), 106-30.
15. The typescript of the rejected preface is fairly free of corrections and additions. The paper is cream-colored and appears to be the same paper as most other manuscript and typescript pages for the autobiography in the Buffalo collection. The same typewriter seems to have been used for the preface as for the other Blasting and Bombardiering drafts.
16. These sentences are quoted from the commentary on Gladstone's letters published in the London Times on 19 October 1936. The anonymous writer previewed selections of letters from the forthcoming Gladstone to his Wife, edited by A. Tilney Bassett, that the Times published on 21 and 22 October 1936.
17. This alludes to an anecdote about George Moore that Yeats had included in his recently published autobiographical book, Dramatis Personae . While bicycling with a friend in the country, Moore went behind a bush, took off his trousers, and exchanged them for a glass of milk because the trousers wouldn't stay up (William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats [New York: Collier Books, 1965], 271).
18.  Also in phrase 'as merry (or lively) as a grig.'"
19. In Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis recounts a visit he made to Paris with T. S. Eliot to deliver a pair of shoes that Ezra Pound wanted Joyce to have (Lewis, "First Meeting with James Joyce," in Blasting and Bombardiering [1937; London: Calder and Boyars Ltd., 1967], 267-70). Pound's plush jacket does not appear.
20. Lewis probably refers to Vicki Baum (1888-1960), a prolific popular novelist who began publishing in the 1930s. Her most well-known work is Grand Hotel .
.
There is certainly a new type of energy arrayed against [the Germans] which they, with their eyes fixed on the past, had not suspected the growth of.
--Wyndham Lewis, September 1914
That the Vorticist movement should have survived a year such as that we have just passed through argues a grimness and tenacity of purpose such as must needs reflect itself in the works of these contributors.
--Ford Madox Ford, July 1915
A story is often told about World War I and the politics of Anglo-American modernism. Following the lead of writers like Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, it res the war's impact on the Vorticist movement, which Lewis and Pound led, as a (if not the) critical factor in shaping the modernists' postwar politics. The war's senseless destruction, it explains, intensified the Vorticists' critique of Britain's liberal, parliamentary government, and encouraged them to support the radical right-wing parties that arose across Europe between the wars. Given the ubiquity of the tale, one expects to find numerous studies of Blast: War Number, the second issue of the Vorticist periodical, published almost a year into the conflict (July 1915). Even a cursory reading reveals the journal's active and complex engagement with the war and home-front life, especially politics and popular culture: it provides a wealth of valuable evidence of the war's influence on the Vorticist movement, evidence that illuminates the trajectory of modernist art and politics. So it comes as something of a surprise that we find comparatively little critical interest in Blast 2, particularly in its political art and polemics.
The scant discussion Blast 2 has provoked suggests another, related story about Vorticism and the Great War. In this narrative, the War Number is a rather tragic document of artistic (and political) concession in the face of war; its less radical, less innovative artworks and polemics demonstrate not just a decline from Blast 1's more genuinely oppositional and progressive standards, or even the lamentable death of Vorticism (or the avant-garde), but perhaps, and most disturbingly, a tendency to anticipate modernism's later retrograde politics. At best the War Number is a casualty of war, at worst an ur-text of fascist modernism. 1
There is truth in both of these accounts. Still, I concur with Samuel Hynes that Blast 2 is more productively examined in light of British public discourse and popular culture during the first year of the Great War. 2 When read in this way, the document tells a different story about the transformations of modernist art and politics during the conflict, a story that raises its own interesting questions about the other two, more common tales. Insisting on the importance of its wartime context in Blast 2's opening editorial, Lewis described his magazine and movement as "surrounded by a multitude of other Blasts." 3 This essay recovers some of those other "blasts" and articulates some of their consequences for our understanding of Vorticism and the development of modernist politics. Reading Blast 2 as a failure--of aesthetic will or progressive politics--is to misunderstand its proclaimed doctrine, artistic practice, and the ways they dovetailed with the realities of British life during the war's first year. Because the Vorticists had from the start placed at the center of their doctrine the allegedly incompatible aims of avant-garde critique and nationalist politics, Blast 2 turns out to have been well suited to the circumstances of the early war: the conflict created a cultural and political environment that validated more powerfully than at any time before the war the Vorticists' program of dissenting patriotism in art and politics.
The Vorticists responded polemically to a wartime context in which the British government was expanding control of public discourse, clamping down on dissent, and promoting an antimodernist cultural policy, by reorienting the principal foreign target of their opposition from Italian Futurism to German (or Prussian) imperialism. The accusations of passéism, sentimentality, and effeminacy that the Vorticists had aimed at the Futurists in Blast 1 were now turned on Germany, which became in Blast 2 the international locus of the cult of the past and romance, an account used to buttress the new argument that Vorticism was allied with Britain against Germany.
Not only did this opportunistic assertion of alliance affirm that modern English art and artists were participating in life for the highest stakes--the Vorticists, Blast 2 repeatedly implies, are willing to t for modernism to the death--but the new realities of wartime life also validated the Vorticists' aims in a new and more potent way. The government-sponsored war against modernism gave them a clear and implacable home-front enemy, ensuring that their art would never become too fashionable (as, in their eyes, Futurism had) and thereby demonstrating more clearly than ever the integrity of their opposition. The war against Germany gave the Vorticists a new means of affirming their patriotism: in their willingness to die for the nation's cause--also the cause of modernism--they could prove, beyond any doubt, the integrity of their support for empire. And when the movement's resident sculptor, the Frenchman (and hence ally of the British) Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in action, the Vorticists' paradoxical program received its ultimate confirmation: the death of the modern soldier-artist in the two-front war against Germany and passéism.
Like most intellectuals who remained in England during the war's first year, the Vorticists participated actively in the period's public controversies. The conration of their participation articulates the confluence of Vorticist doctrine and home-front life. This company of rebellious artists and writers took up arms in three competing polemical wars raging on the home front: the government-sponsored propaganda war against Germany and German Kultur directed by the Edwardian literary establishment, in which the Vorticists endeavored to stand alongside their elders as spokesmen for their generation in the battle against Germany; the avant-gardist war against established social, political, and artistic institutions, in which they tried to maintain their prewar effort to revolutionize English art and life; and, finally, the polemical war against modernism, also led by older artists and writers, in which Blast's contributors strove to defend modern art and literature against accusations of irrelevance, decadence, even "Junkerism," the worldview of Prussia's landed gentry. To affirm their dissenting patriotism while defending modernism, the Vorticists argued in Blast 2 that their war against artistic and political passéism was an extension of the war against Germany; they were ting against the German forces of reaction for the future of Britain and modern art.
The Department of Information's propaganda war against Germany was directed by the well-known writer and Liberal M. P., Charles Masterman. 4 Within a month of the declaration of hostilities, he held a meeting of "well-known men of letters" for the "organisation of public statements of the strength of the British case . . . in the war." 5 Two weeks later, the Times published a "Declaration by Authors" on "Britain's Destiny and Duty" in which fifty-two leading writers publicly proclaimed their support for "the cause of the Allies . . . with a full conviction of its righteousness," declaring Germany an outlaw nation driven to aggression by the "iron military bureaucracy of Prussia." 6 Among the worthies who affixed their names were H. Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, Robert Bridges, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Pinero, May Sinclair, and H. G. Wells, a veritable who's who of Edwardian culture.
True to their word, they took up their pens to support the cause. In a letter to the Times, Poet Laureate Robert Bridges defined the moral stakes of the conflict, pronouncing it "a holy war . . . between Christ and the Devil," leaving little doubt as to the proper response: "The infernal machine which has been . . . preparing for the last 25 years is now on its wild career like one of Mr. Wells's inventions, . . . [I]t is the plain duty of all civilized nations to unite to drive it back into its home and exterminate it there." 7 Bridges's comparison between Germany's war machine and "Mr. Wells's inventions" would not have offended the author of The War of the Worlds. From the declaration of war, Wells too had adopted the persona of patriotic journalist, churning out in less than a month eleven propaganda pieces, one of which summed up the official case against "Prussian Imperialism":
Ever since the crushing of the French in 1871 the evil thing has grown and cast its spreading shadow over Europe. Germany has preached a propaganda of ruthless force and . . . materialism to the whole uneasy world. "Blood and iron," she boasted, was the cement of her unity, and almost as openly the little, mean, aggressive statesmen and professors who have guided her destinies to this present conflict have professed . . . an utter disregard of any ends but nationally selfish ends, as though it were religion. 8
This diagnosis of German evil was reiterated, in one form or another, in nearly every patriotic article, poem, and poster produced during the first year of war.
Not surprisingly, the Vorticists joined the t, contending that their avant-gardist war against passéist art and life was not only compatible with the war against Germany but an extension of it. The cover of Blast 2 articulated the argument visually with a Vorticist vision of the Allied defense by Lewis; its title, Before Antwerp, identified the modernist soldiers as defenders of the Belgian city against German assault ( 1). 9 Before Antwerp was Lewis's pictorial rejoinder to a celebrated work by the nation's best-known painter, Walter Sickert, entitled The Soldiers of King Albert the Ready ( 2). 10 Sickert's impressionistic tableau of Belgians poised for battle against German invaders appeared in a December 1914 exhibition at the New English Art Club and won praise as a major work of war art. 11 Lewis's visual counterattack expressed commitment to the war against Germany and the war for modernism: his angular military men appear at once as Allied soldiers braced against German assault and as artistic soldiers braced against established art, especially the impressionistic realism that dominated prewar art and lingered in works like Sickert's Soldiers.
The War Number's opening editorial continued the strategy, going so far as to suggest that because "romance" had inspired Germany's aggression, Blast, with its long-standing antagonism to all things romantic, was an essential weapon in the Great War: "Germany has stood for the old Poetry, for Romance, more steadfastly and profoundly than any other people in Europe. . . . This paper wishes to stand rigidly opposed, from start to finish, to every form that the Poetry of a former condition of life, no longer existing, has foisted upon us" (B, 5). Lewis had begun developing this argument in a neglected polemic entitled "A Later Arm than Barbarity," published in the Outlook of September 1914. "Germany is sleep-walking in a bombastic dream of another time," he had argued there; "German romance . . . is the goddess whose deity is just now at stake." 12 Pursuing this logic, he reasoned that the "nations allied against Germany are in reality opposing the interference of the past," but stopped short of following this analysis to its implied conclusion by never explicitly identifying the avant-garde as one of the "later arms" arrayed against German barbarity. 13 What Lewis only implied in September 1914, Blast 2 declared in July 1915: Germans t for the past; the Allies and the forces of advanced art t for the future.
The argument failed to convince most British journalists and intellectuals. Older writers generally attacked modernism, casting it as a decadent distraction from the pressing realities of war, a symptom of the national malaise that had contributed to Britain's international decline and Germany's attendant rise, or a product of the same alien Kultur menacing Europe (AWI, 58-67). Predictably, England's popular humor magazine, Punch, took up arms in this war. An October 1914 issue, for example, included an antimodernist cartoon, entitled "How the Cubist, By a Mere Alteration of Titles, Achieved a Ready Sale of Unmarketable Pictures" ( 3). 14 It portrays a nearsighted, scrawny, slope-shouldered "Cubist" who succeeds in selling his abstract paintings (which in fact look more Futurist than Cubist) to an overweight, hook-nosed, richly dressed--that is, stereotypically Jewish--art collector by retitling them "Ruin of Window of Rheims Cathedral," "Louvain 1914," and "In the Wake of the Huns." Not only does the cartoon ridicule modernism, charging modern artists with taking advantage of the war to advance their careers, but it exploits visual stereotypes to accuse them of degeneracy and their patrons of stupidity and Semitic origin. The "Cubist's" poor physique, weak chin, and receding forehead were conventional indicators in prewar poster art of the dissipated lunatic, while the collector's big nose, bald head, and facial hair were markers of the Jew. 15 This use of anti-Semitism to assail modernism suggests that the modernists had no monopoly on this prejudice.
Antimodernists fired polemical salvoes at the Vorticists in particular in a Times review of a March 1915 art exhibition in which Lewis and his comrades Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, and Edward Wadsworth had shown works. Under the telling title, "Junkerism in Art," the anonymous reviewer pronounced the wartime case against the Vorticists, terming their "rigid" pictures "Prussian in . . . spirit": "These painters seem to execute a kind of goose-step. . . . [I]f the Junkers could be induced to take to art, instead of disturbing the peace of Europe, they would paint so and enjoy it." 16 Lewis responded directly to this attack in Blast 2: "if [the Junker] . . . painted, [he] would do florid and disreputable canvasses of nymphs and dryads, or very sentimental 'portraits of the Junker's mother.' . . . As to goose-steps . . . as an antidote to the slop of Cambridge Post Aestheticism . . . may not such 'rigidity' be welcomed?" (B, 78-79). Lewis repudiated accusations of Junkerism by reiterating the standard Vorticist line: the movement's sternly antisentimental art opposed the spirit animating both passéist art and the German war effort.
The Vorticists' stance led them at times to deploy the government's arsenal of propaganda tactics to defend modernism and assert their alliance with the national cause. In another polemic, Lewis attempted to channel popular repulsion at alleged German "atrocities" into support for modernism. Early in the war, examples of a potent new genre of propaganda began appearing, which lent the authority of fact to the popular picture of Germans as brutal barbarians--the Kaiser's Huns (AWI, 52-56). 17 These works purported to supply documentary evidence of crimes the German army committed against innocent civilians and cultural treasures. By adducing additional "facts" of German barbarism, Lewis adapted the tactic to justify support for modern art:
A fact not generally known in England is that the Kaiser, long before he entered into the war . . . had declared merciless war on Cubism and Expressionism. . . . I expect among his orders to his troops is one to "spare no Cubist prisoners, wounded or otherwise."--I am not implying that this should be a bond of sympathy between the British Nation and Cubists or Vorticists. I only mention it as an interesting fact. [B, 9]
Yet the war against modernism led the Vorticists elsewhere in Blast to protest the very strategy pursued here. Because Blast 2 insisted that the Vorticists t with the nation against Germany, its polemics assailed in particular those attacks on modernism that exploited anti-German feeling.
By protesting such opportunism, Lewis slammed both "patriotic" antagonists of new art and intellectuals who sacrificed creative independence at the government's behest. But as we've seen, he too "exploited blood," using evidence of German atrocities to promote modernism. That such contradictory negotiations recur repeatedly in Blast 2 demonstrates not just opportunism or hypocrisy, however, but also design: they map the dynamics of Vorticism's two-front war against Germany and passéism. Accordingly, Blast 2 featured polemics deploying propaganda tactics alongside others animated by dissent. We can assess that dissension through Blast's responses to two questions especially pressing for British intellectuals priding themselves on their political commitment and cultural scope: how to justify war against Germany, and how to evaluate German culture in light of war. The answers indicate that the Vorticists believed it possible to support the national cause while resisting the official explanation. In their view, indeed, this paradoxical strategy was the necessary means to realize the Vorticists' project.
Despite its popularity, the British government's Manichean account of the conflict was disputed by a small number of dissenting writers of varying political persuasions. The most controversial such polemic of the early war was George Bernard Shaw's "Common Sense About the War," a supplement to the New Statesman of 14 November 1914. In keeping with his reputation as socialist gadfly, Shaw rejected the official line that a Good England was morally obligated to defeat an Evil Germany, arguing that both nations were ruled by Junkers and militarists bent on exploiting the poor. Still, he defended the socialist cause in terms as ethically polar as those of the war propagandists:
Will you now at last believe, O stupid British, German, and French patriots what the Socialists have been telling you for so many years: that your Union Jacks and tricolors and Imperial Eagles . . . are only toys to keep you amused, and that there are only two real flags in the world henceforth: the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism, or the flag of God and the flag of Mammon? 18
Recognizing, nonetheless, that war against Germany had effectively suspended the war for socialism, Shaw concluded that the former conflict would have to be resolved before the latter could be resumed: his rejection of the government's justification as "hypocrisy and cant" had as its goal not the defeat of the international cartel of capitalist Junkers and Militarists, as we might expect, but the efficient destruction of German power: "[W]e in England are ting to shew the Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors . . . and that if they are fools enough to make ting efficiency the test for civilization, we can play that game as destructively as they. That is simple, and the truth, and by far the jolliest and most inspiring ground to recruit on." 19 Not all dissident intellectuals embraced Shaw's skeptical militarism, however; dissenting members of the Cambridge and Bloomsbury circles preferred militant pacifism (AWI, 81-87). Among Bloomsbury pacifists, Clive Bell, for example, published the pamphlet Peace at Once, which argued that no recourse to international law or power politics could justify the conflict. Bell turned against the government its tale of holy war: in his account, peace becomes the necessary weapon to defeat the real evil menacing Europe; not Germany: war itself. 20 In the opening editorial of Blast 2, Lewis too presented himself as a dissident, but one unique among leading dissenters. He concurred with his radical counterparts in certain respects. Like Shaw, he argued that German defeat was a military necessity; like Bell, he contended that war could not be justified on moral grounds.
What distinguished Lewis's analysis, however, was its antagonism to conventional morality: for him, the conflict's devastation proved not the senselessness or immorality of war as such, but the human race's "fundamental" urge to murder and destroy (B, 16). When Lewis adopted the voice of the dissident, he did so not to evaluate the war's moral status but to acknowledge its existential reality. He discovered in it dark and exhilarating truths about human aggression that confirmed the Vorticists' prewar celebration of vitalizing violence and discredited the categories of morality on which most arguments about the war, both for and against, depended. Blast 2 also departed from the official line on German culture. Whereas support for the war led many to totalizing dismissals of Kultur, the War Number defended Germany's artistic achievements even as those expressing similar views grew silent over time. The war posed a problem for cosmopolitan commentators, who before the declaration of hostilities had defended German art and literature, pitting their former devotion to cultural internationalism against a newfound patriotism. To reconcile these competing loyalties, such writers often bifurcated German history, distinguishing an older, better type of "German culture" from a more recent, more dangerous "Prussian Kultur."
One of the Vorticists' closest allies in the intelligentsia, Ford Madox Ford, had employed the tactic in his anti-German polemic When Blood Is Their Argument (March 1915), praising "the old-fashioned German virtues of sentimentality, idealism, and romanticism," while excoriating the "Prussian State" for spreading "a religion of materialism and of egotism." 21 Written at Masterman's request, Ford's tract was a rejoinder to Shaw's "Common Sense" pamphlet. Predictably, Masterman viewed Shaw's polemic the way it came to be pictured popularly, as an unpatriotic, even treasonous document. He asked the Anglo-German Ford (then Hueffer) to respond to Shaw because of the former's intimate knowledge of Germany. No doubt Ford's background put him under particular pressure to verify his patriotism by obliging Masterman. At a time of increasing public suspicion of "alien enemies"--Germans in England--he could demonstrate his national loyalty by answering the government's call to action. But that decision would require maligning the nation of his father's birth, a nation he had defended until the eve of war. 22 In the end, Ford would choose England over Germany: his particular contribution to the propaganda war was a detailed assault on German culture, especially those "little, mean, aggressive . . . professors" officially deemed the architects of German aggression. 23
Showing loyalty to Ford and the national cause, the War Number praises When Blood is Their Argument as a "Blast" against Germany (B, 7). Yet while Blast 2 implies support for Ford's negative reckoning with Kultur, it does not exactly reiterate the official denunciation. To be sure, it criticizes Germany, even divides German cultural history. But Blast 2 splits Germany along somewhat unconventional lines, insisting that the official account unjustly ignores Germany's significant contributions to modern art and literature. The opening editorial differentiates between "official Germany [that] stands for . . . Traditional Poetry and the Romantic Spirit" and "unofficial Germany" (B, 5). Though the citizens of this "unofficial" nation are never clearly identified, the editorial contends that it had "done more for the movement" that Blast was "founded to propagate, and for all branches of contemporary activity in Science and Art, than any other country" (B, 5). This kind of defense was originally formulated by a few dissident intellectuals in the war's opening months, 24 but by the time Blast 2 appeared in mid-1915, with battle bogging down and the government clamping down on dissent, such praise for German culture ran more strongly against English opinion than had earlier defenses.
That a journal so devoted to defending modernism against allegations of cultural treason would begin with a polemic that invites just those indictments confirms both the Vorticists' commitment to political and artistic independence and conviction that such dissent was compatible with the war against Germany. And as I hope to show, they were more correct in that contention than has been previously acknowledged. Because the government enlisted the aid of the intelligentsia in promoting its official account of the conflict, it helped create a cultural environment that, insofar as it forbade political and artistic dissent, authorized expressions of opposition. So by using their talents to resist Britain's official antimodernist wartime culture, even as they supported the Allied cause, the Vorticists and their allies managed to produce a body of literary and artistic works that were at once propagandistic and experimental, imperialistic and avant-garde, Edwardian and modernist, and thus further evidence of Vorticism's fulfillment.
Lewis's principal literary contribution to Blast 2 was the ambitious but incomplete war fiction, "The Crowd Master," an experimental-realist hybrid that modernistically portrayed British mobilization on the home front. Like much of the art and literature featured in the War Number, "The Crowd Master" engaged wartime life and supported the war cause, but it dissented in its literary and political approach. Previous accounts have tended to simplify and totalize this ambivalent, discontinuous, and incomplete text, treating it as univocally elitist in order to support a reading of the fragment as protoreactionary. 25 It is better understood as a work that elucidates the conflicted responses of Lewis and his comrades to the huge crowds that rallied to support the British cause in late July and early August 1914, and the attendant claims of wartime patriotism: fictionalizing Vorticism's initial response to the stirrings of war, the story stages a stylistic and thematic competition between mass patriotism and avant-garde critique, corporate action and intellectual elitism, conformity to state narratives and formal experiment. "The Crowd Master" deploys experimental literary techniques to affirm and interrogate the competing claims of Vorticist doctrine in wartime.
 Drawing on period discussions of "crowd-psychology" like Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd , the text examines the role of mass behavior in the rush of popular support that attended war's approach. As historians like Modris Eksteins and Eric Hobsbawm have shown, the tumultuous days of late July 1914, with their flurry of ultimatums and mobilization orders, provoked massive public demonstrations across Europe. These spontaneous displays surprised many European governments, which had expected greater popular resistance, and thus played a crucial role in encouraging the declarations of war that soon followed. 26 Anxieties about such resistance were especially pronounced in England due to an all-volunteer military policy, an overdependence on foreign imports, and a prewar public mood of unprecedented dissent and agitation.
Because politicians and members of the press were worried about public support, even when confronted with overwhelming evidence of it, they persisted in efforts to rally patriotism. Thus the Times's description of the London crowds that gathered in anticipation of war (on 5 August 1914), emphasizes above all the need for national unity:
Towards midnight Trafalgar square, Whitehall, Parliament street, and Parliament square were filled with a solid mass of people. The cheering and singing which had marked the earlier hours of the evening died away as the hour approached at which the British demand must be answered by Germany. A profound silence fell upon the crowd just before midnight. Then as the first strokes rang out from the Clock Tower, a vast cheer burst out and echoed and re-echoed for nearly 20 minutes. The national anthem was then sung with an emotion and solemnity which manifested the gravity and sense of responsibility with which the people regard the great issues before them. 27
This report encourages the same patriotic "gravity and sense of responsibility" it describes. Recruitment propaganda disguised as objective reportage, the piece summons readers to join the mobilized crowd.
In comparison, Lewis's treatment of these public demonstrations is stylistically experimental and analytically penetrating. Evoking the image of the mobilized crowd in the clipped declarative style of Blast 1's manifestos, Lewis's text moves beyond encouraging national unity to explain the patriotic willingness to die for one's country:
THE CROWD
THE CROWD is the first mobilisation of a country.
THE CROWD now is formed in London. It is established with all its vague profound organs au grand complet.
It serpentines every night, in thick well-nourished coils, all over the town, in tropic degustation of news and "stimmung."
THE INDIVIDUAL and THE CROWD: PEACE and WAR
Man's solitude and Peace; Man's Community and Row. . . .
We all shed our small skin periodically or are apt to sometime, and are purged in big being: an empty throb. [B, 94]
As Paul Edwards notes, this mini-manifesto on crowd psychology conforms to period analyses. 28 Following late-nineteenth-century social psychologists like Le Bon, Lewis's text defines participation in a crowd as a surrender of individuality to an unconscious corporate organism. Describing the formation of a "psychological crowd," Le Bon had written that "an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes. A collective mind is formed." 29 Drawing on theories like Le Bon's, "The Crowd Master" attends in particular to the role of crowd psychology in mass patriotism, arguing that the surrender of individuality entailed by participation in a crowd is an "anesthetizing" of self that can inspire persons willingly to die for country: "the Crowd in Life spells death too, very often. The Crowd is an immense anaesthetic towards death. Duty flings the selfish will into this relaxed vortex. . . . Wars begin with this huge indefinite Interment in the cities" (B, 94). While these words reveal an elitist disdain for the unconscious masses and anticipates what recent theorists have deemed the fascist unconscious, 30 they also initiate a rather prophetic analysis of the war's causes. Viewed in light of the government's rapid conquest of the public sphere during the war's opening months, and the attendant spread of propaganda and suppression of dissent, Lewis's effort to analyze rather than exploit crowd psychology seems an expression less of retrograde politics than of suspicion at expanding government control. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that the key finding of Lewis's analysis--that wars begin with the gathering of crowds--anticipates the account of the Great War provided by today's historians.
"The Crowd Master" is noteworthy not just because it analyzes rather than exploits mass patriotism; through its rendering of Blenner, the soldier-turned-bohemian-egoist, it also portrays the effects of such patriotism on an oppositional Englishman like Lewis, divided between loyalty to nation and individual ego. This "retired 1st Lieutenant," who now "writes a little, abusively as regards the army," learns of war, like his creator, while vacationing in northern Britain (B, 95). 31 But upon reading the Daily Mail headline that "Germany Declares War on Russia," the skeptical Blenner cannot avoid feelings of dread and excitement:
With the words came a dark rush of hot humanity in his mind. An immense human gesture swept across him like a smoky cloud. "Germany Declares War on Russia," seemed a roar of guns. He saw active Mephistophelian specks in Chancelleries. He saw a rush of papers, a frowning race. "Ça y est," thought Blenner, with innate military exultation. The ground seemed swaying a little. He limped away from the paper-shop, gulping this big morsel down with delighted stony dignity. [B, 95]
As Blenner assimilates the earthshaking information with the reserve of a military professional, feeling exultation and delight at the prospect of national mobilization. Lewis's fragment responds similarly: fascinated by the swirl of patriotic activity of Britons being mobilized, it still wants to maintain critical distance.