"The Crowd Master" shows this analytical fascination in its treatment of the type of the dutiful, good-humored, self-effacing British soldier portrayed in popular war literature. While the "Tommy Atkins" re was originally idealized by Kipling and others before the century's turn, younger combatant writers like Herman Cyril McNeile and Ian Hay Beith venerated the type in their efforts to portray the facts of the Great War realistically. Their works naturalistically rendered war's trenches, mud, bullets, death, and the young men who confronted them. 32 But Lewis's approach to the "Tommy Atkins" re thematized the complications of his position as a civilian who had not yet joined the ting troops, and as a modern artist trying to maintain commitment to artistic and political independence. Blenner's responses to the mobilized Scottish coal miners he encounters on the train to London epitomize the competition the text enacts between patriotic engagement and avant-garde critique. On one hand, Lewis's protagonist sees the "pitmen" as embodying Britain's best qualities: "Here were fellows to whom he could point to back up his chauvinistic enthusiasm for the country, and not doubt their shining and showing handsomely beside any man alive" (B, 97). On the other, Blenner admires the Scottish reservists because they incarnate the resistant individual immune to the claim of crowds: "These Crowd-proof sailors were the first break in the continuity of the Crowd-spirit that Blenner had met since war began blowing up seriously" (B, 97).
Confronted with the tumultuous realities of war's opening, Lewis was pulled, like his ambivalent protagonist, by the competing claims of self and nation, dissent and patriotism, nonconformity and collectivism. "The Crowd Master" is an illuminating document of the early war and the emergence of modernist politics precisely because Lewis did not, as some maintain, resolve that competition in an unambiguous embrace of the elite ego. The contention between these claims, thrown into particular relief by mobilization, fascinated Lewis. He used "The Crowd Master" to portray and probe it, and by doing so he expressed his vision of Vorticist doctrine in literary form. Like Blast 2 as a whole, "The Crowd Master" strove to demonstrate that avant-garde critique was compatible with patriotic collaboration. As we'll see, by embracing that ideal as an editorial policy, Lewis also managed to assemble a series of patriotic pictorial and literary works that, while by no means great, did depart aesthetically and politically from the pictures and poems sanctioned by the government, and to that extent appeared (to the Vorticists at least) to demonstrate Blast's doctrine of patriotic dissent in art and politics.
The majority of visual works featured in Blast 2 are formally comparable to those in Blast 1--dense angular fields of form, combining modes of abstraction and representation. Most do not engage the war (many were completed before it began): of the twenty-five illustrations, only five refer to the war at all, while just three portray war subjects. This imbalance demonstrates in part Lewis's claim that war posed no threat to modernism's prewar innovations: modern art "will be exactly the same after the war as before it," since "[a]ll art that matters is already so far ahead that it is beyond the sphere of these disturbances" (B, 13). Yet the inclusion of war art in Blast 2 also manifests Lewis's editorial commitment to demonstrate the Vorticists' wartime conviction that modern art could and should engage the conflict using modernist visual techniques.
To appreciate Blast 2's war art, we need first to recover the popular war art it opposed, the "weak and sentimentalized reactive" works assailed in its commentaries (B, 24). Generally speaking, four types of war art were produced during the conflict's first year: heroic renderings of traditional military subjects, often drawn from past wars England had won; allegorical representations of combatant nations or the ideals at stake; comic caricatures of unsavory German types; and dramatic renderings of heroic Allied soldiers and victims of German aggression. 33 The first exhibition of war art, Some Modern War Pictures (New English Art Club, October 1914) was aimed at stirring up patriotism and helping to recruit volunteers (Britain's military depended on volunteers until full conscription was mandated in May 1916). 34 The most common sort of war pictures were allegorical cartoons featured in popular journals like Punch. These typically portrayed Germany as the diabolical Kaiser being brutal and Britain either as the chubby and defiant John Bull or as the British soldier displaying loyalty and pluck ( 4).
Some allegorical artworks sought to discourage class difference and encourage working-class volunteers, depicting conversations between the Soldier and the Worker in which the former appealed to the latter's sense of national duty. Popular journals like Punch also featured the period's comic pictures, which caricatured the enemy as rigid militarists, filled with hate and adorned with various accoutrements of stereotypical Germanness: dachshunds, spiked helmets, beer steins, and sausages ( 5). Lastly, the period's most serious (and sentimental) posters aimed to recruit volunteers and solicit material support for the British military and for Belgian and French refugees by portraying innocent women and children displaced by German aggression or gallant Allied soldiers resisting it ( 6). The most renowned producer of this type of poster was the Academy painter Frank Brangwyn, who created scores of propaganda posters, including one of the first, Britain's Call To Arms, which portrayed a soldier standing beside Belgian refugees pointing dramatically toward ruins from which, amidst the innocent dead, war victims flee. 35
In his commentaries on art in Blast 2, Lewis assails all these modes of war art, calling posters and popular art too representational (B, 47) and modern caricature too literary and naturalistic (B, 79). He blasts art that is "the ornament and current commentary of every day life," suggesting that "politically souled" artists who create naturalistic propaganda pictures at the government's behest reduce art's function to reflecting the status quo. Arguing against such a diminution, Lewis calls for an "abstract and universal" art that refuses "plastic compromise" (B, 72). Accordingly, Blast 2 condemns especially strongly three leading war artists: R. Caton-Woodville, whose history paintings it terms inane and formulaic (B, 24); Bernard Partridge, whose Punch illustrations are assailed for their "endless tiresomeness and art school neutrality" (B, 79); and Brangwyn, whose name is first on the list of those blasted (B, 92).
But Blast 2 doesn't just attack popular war art. It also features artworks that pursue the double war against Germany and passéism by using techniques of pictorial modernism to render soldiers in scenes of war: Lewis's Before Antwerp, Christopher Nevinson's On the Way to the Trenches ( 7), and Jacob Kramer's Types of the Russian Army ( 8). Though formally dissimilar, these works share the common goal of presenting a modernist war art: Nevinson's Trenches, like Lewis's Antwerp, presents itself as a modern war poster, while Kramer's Types appears a modern war caricature.
In "Modern Caricature and Impressionism" Lewis describes how modern war caricatures ought to look. The essay begins by criticizing English caricature art as overly beholden to Impressionism and naturalism and goes on to echo Vorticism's prewar polemics by arguing that the "naturalistic method, with its atmospheric slop and verisimilitude, makes a drab academic study of the best notion" (B, 79). The piece deems Punch, England's major venue for war cartoons, a "national disgrace, from the point of view of drawing" and praises the late-nineteenth-century caricatures of Aubrey Beardsley--the only "important re . . . England has produced in the matter of imaginative drawing in the last generation"--for avoiding naturalism: "Beardsley's several versions of John Bull would be a good model to set against the endless tiresomeness and art school neutrality of some Albion or Lord Kitchener by Bernard Partridge" (B, 79).
In this light, Kramer's Types appears a modern caricature that avoids naturalist failings. It rejects "the method employed by the degenerate Punch cartoonist" of finding a model, dressing up and posing him, and "carefully cop[ying] the required attitude," instead portraying three Russian soldiers as freakish, unnatural grotesques: in the foreground, a large-headed, pigeon-toed midget; in the midground, a square-headed, hairy-faced cavalry man atop a tiny-legged horse; in the background, a rail-thin giant wearing a sword. Unlike much popular war art, Kramer's caricature is not an image to inspire much faith in Britain's Russian allies or a willingness to die for the fatherland; in this it shares with the Vorticists a resistance to making art into government propaganda. Yet at the same time, Kramer's cartoon departs from Vorticist visual practice and certain political views announced in the War Number. Though the caricature inhabits a pictorial landscape occupied almost exclusively by abstract works, it is, as others have noted, neither particularly abstract nor Vorticist in pictorial technique (V, 286). And the disjunction of Kramer's image does not end with its visual style; its anti-Russian politics too are inconsistent with Lewis's proclaimed support for Russia (B, 11). By rendering Russians freakishly, Kramer questions the official government line aesthetically and politically, departing from the naturalistic conventions of popular war pictures as well as the pro-Russian policy of the government and established press. The presence of Kramer's work in Blast 2 confirms a willingness to feature dissident works even if they departed from the Vorticists' announced political views or aesthetic practice.
By including Kramer's Types of the Russian Army, Nevinson's On the Way to the Trenches, and his own Before Antwerp, Lewis placed engaged and fairly representational pictures into a body of artworks primarily abstract and aestheticist, inserted non-Vorticist works into the propaganda organ of Vorticism, and assembled artworks that voiced contrasting political views at a time when only one political narrative, the government's account of the war, dominated public discourse. While these aesthetic and political inconsistencies have been cited as evidence of Vorticism's wartime decline, Lewis and his cohorts would have taken them as indicators of aesthetic and political integrity: in their view, such diversity measures the intensity of their modernist resistance to conformity at a time of rigid (artistic) consensus.
Reading Blast 2's war poems in the context of popular war poetry suggests that the Vorticists understood them too as demonstrating the movement's twin aims of patriotic political participation and modern aesthetic experiment. While a few of the War Number's nonpolitical poems have been studied and praised, its war poetry is generally downplayed or dismissed. 36 Admittedly, when compared to prewar Imagism and the poetic masterpieces of high modernism, these sometimes blunt and polemical poems seem less aesthetically innovative and historically significant. But when the war poems are compared to the occasional poetry produced during the conflict's first year, we can begin to understand them as the Vorticists would have: as poems engaged in the serious work of demonstrating poetically Vorticism's competing commitments to art and politics, collaboration and dissent, patriotism and innovation at a time of political and poetic conformity.
Among the most celebrated patriotic poems of the early war are the "War Sonnets" of Rupert Brooke, the promising young Georgian poet whose death in April on a boat to Gallipoli nearly coincided with the poems' publication, thus enhancing both Brooke's stature as English patriot and the sonnets' stature as major war poetry. We will have reason to return to Brooke's death and its implications for wartime patriotism and subsequent readings of Vorticism; for now, the "War Sonnets" will serve to demonstrate the best that popular English poetry had to offer in response to the start of war. "The Soldier," for instance, so successfully re-presents Romanticism's pastoral-nationalist tropes of soil and spirit and so delicately expresses complicity with the government's agendas of justifying support for war and encouraging volunteerism that it largely avoids the artlessness of most propagandistic poetry of the period. Here is sentimental patriotism at its most expressive:
If I should die, think only this of me,
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed,
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the Eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given,
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 37
Despite the comparative aesthetic effectiveness of the "War Sonnets," however, they demonstrate almost total compliance with government aims: Brooke may not have signed Masterman's "Declaration of Authors," but the publication of the "Sonnets" confirmed a comparable willingness to put his talents at the service of official propaganda.
The vast majority of popular early war poetry lacks the aesthetic dimension Brooke imparted to defending the English cause: most is little more than government propaganda in rhyme that exhorts the public to join the t either at home or on the front lines by bluntly celebrating England and the Allied cause, or demonizing Germany, the Kaiser, and the conduct of the German troops (AWI, 28-33). Typical is the humorist Barry Pain's "The Kaiser and God," 38 which uses the Kaiser's public assertion that "God supported" the German army as an occasion to catalogue, in strutting heroic couplets, Germany's diabolical crimes:
Broken pledges, treaties torn,
Your first page of war adorn; . . .
Villages burned down to dust,
Torture, murder, bestial lust, . . .
Strange the offerings that you press
On the God of Righteousness! 39
In the context of poems like this, the poets of Blast 2 rejected archaic language, heroic couplets, and ballad stanzas. Ford Madox Ford, for instance, chose free verse and the doctrine of literary "Impressionism." He had recently described the method in print as "a frank expression of personality," in which "[t]he Impressionist gives you his own views, expecting you to draw deductions, since presumably you know the sort of chap he is." 40 If successful, the Impressionist would transmit "the sort of odd vibration that scenes in real life really have; . . . giv[ing the] reader the impression that he was witnessing something real." 41
Ford's Blast 2 poem, "The Old Houses of Flanders," works to fulfill the Impressionist credo by personifying the demise of the old Belgian houses. It renders war's destruction, if not more "real," then at least more affecting than any list of atrocities in tetrameter:
The old houses of Flanders,
They watch by the high cathedrals;
They have eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic, for the ways of men,
In the high, white, tiled gables.
The rain and the night have settled down on Flanders;
It is all wetness and darkness; you can see nothing.
Then those old eyes, mournful, tolerant and sardonic,
Look at great, sudden, red lights,
Look upon the shades of the cathedral
And the golden rods of the illuminated rain,
For a second . . . .
And those old eyes,
Very old eyes that have watched the ways of men for generations,
Close for ever.
The high white shoulders of the gables
Slouch together for a consultation,
Slant drunkenly over in the lea of the flaming cathedrals.
They are no more, the old houses of Flanders.[B, 37]
Because it portrays the poet's feelings of personal regret rather than caricatures of German soldiers, descriptions of war crimes, or accusations of war guilt, Ford's elegy for Belgian culture distinguishes itself from much British war poetry in form and content. And when read in light of his own damning analysis of German culture in When Blood is Their Argument, the poem suggests that, more than many other journalistic venues, Blast 2 provided its contributors with a forum to express heterodox responses to the war.
It is not so surprising, then, that Lewis chose to include one of the most unsettled and unsettling dissident poems of the early war: Helen Saunders's "A Vision of Mud," a discordant, hallucinatory meditation on mud and poetry in wartime. 42 Saunders's particular poetic contribution is a restless reverie on the urge to bridge the chasm between home and the front in verse, and on the ultimate impossibility of doing so. Consistent with Blast 2's attack on the sentimental realist techniques of war propaganda, Saunders's poem uses tropes of poetic naturalism to incite and then deny the empathy that propaganda art and poetry is supposed to provide.
The poem proffers a disorienting series of images evoking facts of war: recruiting bands, beating drums, struggle, sickness, mud, bodies, blood, death. It opens somewhat as the conflict did, on a note of exhilaration. Mud is presented as a medium of "mighty life": "There is mud all round / This is favourable to the eclosion of mighty life: thank God for small mercies!" (B, 73) But the mud turns dangerous, overwhelming, as aggressors try to drown the speaker:
I lie quite still: hands are spreading mud everywhere: they plaster it on what should be a body. They fill my mouth with it. I am sick. They shovel it all back again.  [B, 73]
The poem presses us to read its images as representations of front life: here, a soldier suffocated in trench-mud by the enemy. The gambit recurs in the poem's first half. A whirl of images invite but never declare war; one moment a soldier struggles in mud, the next, we hear sounds of mobilization: "It seems to be a recruiting band, / The drums thud and the fifes pipe on tip-toe" (B, 73). For the poem's original audience, it would be difficult not to read such lines as referring to the war.
Months after the war began, the German government launched a series of zeppelin attacks on Britain. April and May of 1915 witnessed eight air raids; bombs rained down on Tyneside, East Anglia, Southend, Leigh, Westcliff, Ramsgate, and London. 43 These often terrifying raids captured English imaginations; so, when a "giant cloud like a black bladder with holes in it hovers overhead," pouring mud with "a little red" onto the narrator, remaining doubts about the poem's representational and rhetorical aims disappear (B, 73). Few Britons could read such lines without recalling the deadly airships.
Yet as the narrator contemplates this rising "black mud" of war, the poem swerves:
This mud has curious properties.
It makes you dream. It is like poisoned arrows.
(Such mud, naturally, is medicinal: that is why they
have set up this vulgar "Hydro" here.
It is a health-resort.)[B, 73]
By matter-of-factly identifying the poem's mud as that of the "health-resort," Saunders trips her readers, rebuking those who read her verse as providing access to the trenches, calling into question the basic assumptions of such an understanding: that reading about mud is in any way like being in it, that a mention of mud refers to the mud of the battlefield, that reading poetry is a political act, a form of participation in a distant and incomprehensible conflict. As most English poetry worked insistently to support or render the conflict, "A Vision of Mud" questions the possibility of that project in a journal aimed to demonstrate it not only possible but, for modern writers and artists, necessary. The presence of Saunders's poem in Blast 2, like that of Kramer's caricature of Russian soldiers, confirms Lewis's editorial willingness to feature creative works that deviate from the Vorticist party line.
As Ford uses verse to lament war's cultural cost, and as Saunders makes it question the project of writing war poetry, Pound turns it to protesting the war against modernism. "Et Faim Sallir Le Loup Des Boys" (B, 22) offers poetry as a tool for rebutting attacks like those of the radical socialist writer and editor, Alfred Orage. Before the war, Orage's New Age had been a leading organ for the promotion and analysis of modernism, publishing and praising works by numerous radical writers and artists, including Pound and Lewis. Yet Orage's wartime attacks on Imagism and Vorticism confirm that the conflict led him to take up arms against modernism. He began the assault in early September 1914, pronouncing Vorticism "dead": "It was, at best, only a big name for a little thing, that in the simmering of the pre-war period suddenly became a bubble, and is now burst." 44 Orage then reiterated the standard line that modernism was irrelevant in wartime: "Compared with the war, [Vorticism] is incomparably feeble." 45 The polemic reached its greatest intensity in an October assault on Imagism, where Orage went so far as to hope that the Imagists might all "perish in the war," a wish more theatrically extreme than most found in the period's numerous antimodernist polemics. 46
"Et Faim Sallir Le Loup Des Boys" responds by refusing poetically to abandon the modernist cause. Assailing in particular antimodernist editors, Pound's narrator defends his closest allies by name, scorning dreams of dead Imagists:
Cowardly editors threaten: "If I dare" Say this or that, or speak my open mind, Say that I hate my hates, Say that I love my friends, Say I believe in Lewis, spit out the later Rodin, Say that Epstein can carve in stone, That Brzeska can use the chisel, Or Wadsworth paint; Then they will have my guts; They will cut down my wage, force me to sing their cant, Uphold the press, and be before all a model of literary decorum. Merde! [B, 22]
This defense resembles popular war poems in its use of poetry as a medium for polemic and antimodernist polemic in its tendency to demonize antagonists. But the poem also distinguishes itself from the generalizations of both genres by asserting its emergence from a nexus of personal relationships. In its closing tercet, as the narrator faces war's costs with defiance, the poem turns the besieged (but noncombatant) modern poet into modernist war hero: "Cowardly editors threaten / Friends fall off at the pinch, the loveliest die. / That is the path of life, this is my forest" (B, 22). Acknowledging such costs is not the same as arresting them, however. Despite the speaker's determined embrace of artistic exile as the title's starving wolf in the woods, this poetic defense finally serves to emphasize the dynamic it seeks to resist: by admitting death into the poem, Pound articulates more powerfully than most antimodernist polemics the limits of modern poetry in the face of war. Nonetheless, because Ford, Saunders, and Pound responded to the call to creative arms by resisting the conventions of popular war poetry, exploring instead their personal reactions to war's tumult, they upheld a modernist commitment to dissenting aesthetics at a time of militant political and aesthetic consensus. They managed thereby to produce war verse that, while by no means great, did express poetically the Vorticists' commitment to engaged dissent.
The broad dynamic this essay has been tracing, in which Vorticist doctrine dovetailed with wartime circumstances in such a manner as to authorize newly that doctrine, achieves its most intense and revealing expression in "Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska," the central polemical contribution of the talented young French sculptor whose death in June 1915 cast a chastening pall over Blast 2. Rather than disputing the scholarly consensus that Gaudier-Brzeska's death, announced at the end of the polemic, anticipates and even symbolizes Vorticism's decline or demise during the Great War, I want to point out that his death wasn't understood by the Vorticists as merely a confirmation of one or another kind of failure or loss. On the contrary, "Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska" is the War Number's culminating document: it extends Vorticism's program to its theoretical telos, recording and enacting the glorification of Gaudier-Brzeska, who by sacrificing his life in the Vorticists' two-front war against Germany and passéism, provides the ultimate authorization of Vorticist collaboration and resistance.
"Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska" recreates in Vorticism's paradoxical image what George Mosse terms the "myth of the war experience"; it appropriates the myth's cult of the fallen young soldier, but makes its heroic soldier a modern artist. 47 Robert Wohl has traced the development of the myth in Britain through the case of Brooke, who made the perfect war hero despite the fact that the cause of his death was less than heroic (blood poisoning attending the clap). 48 For as the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, explained in his eulogy, Brooke embodied all the best English qualities required for victory: he was "joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, . . . all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered." 49 In death, Brooke became a symbol for the generation of young Britons that he himself had praised for jumping into battle "as swimmers into cleanness leaping." 50 Wohl shows how Brooke's death validated the national cause, transforming him into "a patriotic monument of marble," "an icon in which an entire class could recognize itself and by means of which it could justify the sacrifice of its sons." 51 Similarly, by celebrating destruction even while insisting on his own--and by extension Vorticism's--invincibility, Gaudier-Brzeska's Vortex lays the groundwork for the myth his death would fulfill: "WITH ALL THE DESTRUCTION that works around us NOTHING IS CHANGED, EVEN SUPERFICIALLY.  The demise of this defiant soldier-artist recuperates Vorticism's contradictory doctrine: his destruction is the final validation of his cause, transforming him into the heroic and monumental soldier-artist celebrated on the War Number's cover, who dies in the t for modern art and life against Germany and passéism, and in whom the Vorticists could recognize themselves.
The Vortex's celebration of annihilation as the fullest proof of manly life anticipates, perhaps more than any other evidence one could cite from the early writings of Lewis and his comrades, what has come to be called fascist modernism. Klaus Theweleit and others have argued that the German Freikorps texts of the 1920s similarly fetishize the moment of manly self-sacrifice in the national cause as the ultimate proof of personal and national vitality. 52 In our context, however, this striking resemblance bolsters the argument that during the early months of the Great War, England's leading modernist art movement positioned itself as an eager but critical collaborator with the British government. The crucial difference in their respective doctrines, as we've seen, was the role assigned to modern art and letters in the war for a British future. For the government, modernism plays a minor role, useful only insofar as its denigration validates official art and the official attack on Germany. For the Vorticists, in contrast, it plays an essential role; they t for a future in which Britannia rules not only waves, markets, and industry, but culture as well. As Blast 2 repeatedly insists, only the Vorticists, with their recognition that modernity required a culture as advanced as it was patriotic, can lead the world's greatest empire against the forces of reaction.
Such policy differences notwithstanding, however, the war revealed a deeper affinity. Gaudier-Brzeska's sacrificial death, like those of Brooke and other fallen soldiers across Europe, instantiates the paradoxical terminus of the prewar cult of masculine vitality that undergirds not only Vorticism's project of avant-garde imperialism, but the general ideological edifice of the prewar nation-state system: the ultimate destruction of vitality as its ultimate affirmation. 53 This relation calls into further question the still influential account of the avant-garde as a progressive--and only somewhat successful--antagonist of the nineteenth-century international system of bourgeois capitalism. 54 Not only does it extend the point Renato Poggioli first made over thirty years ago, that the avant-garde was always also a parasitic collaborator with that regime, 55 it also suggests that the avant-gardists' neglected investments in the imperial politics and nationalistic psychology of the prewar may have played as important a role in facilitating their postwar turn Right as the optical aesthetics, (latent) anti-Semitism, or elitism cited elsewhere.
Having recovered these lines of collaboration and resistance between Vorticism and British imperial doctrine during the Great War, and suggested their significance for our understanding of modernist politics, we are still left with the question of why these issues tend to get overlooked or downplayed. Tales of artistic concession and ideological conversion that dominate accounts of the War Number, I'd suggest, say as much about us, our politics, and the ways we construe the history of modernism and its politics, as they do about what Lewis and his comrades originally said and did. My effort to retrieve Vorticism's conflicting wartime ambitions and articulate their entanglement with the aims of British imperialism thus seeks not only to complicate the familiar tale of the Great War's impact on Vorticism and the rise of reactionary modernism. I also hope to provoke some critical reflection on the cultural and political investments we late-twentieth-century academics bring to the study of modernists whose politics we don't much like, and the ways those investments have, over the years, conditioned our evaluations.
Paul Peppis is an assistant professor of English literature and culture at the University of Oregon. He is completing a book entitled The Fictions of National Character: Nation, Empire, and the English Avant-Garde, from which this essay is taken. He is at work on another book-length project, tentatively titled The Sciences of Modernism: Racialism, Sexology, Eugenics.
1. Studies that contribute in one way or another to this account include William Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 197, 202-6; Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age, vol. 1 (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976), 281-96, hereafter abbreviated V; David Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (New York: Macmillan, 1992), 61-62; and Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror up to Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80-83.
2. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 65-67; hereafter abbreviated AWI. As should be clear, my work here depends on and is meant to complement Hynes's.
3. Wyndham Lewis, Blast 2: War Number (July 1915; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981), 5; hereafter abbreviated B.
4. Masterman epitomized the uncertain and apprehensive Liberalism of the Edwardian period, writing a series of nonfiction works on England's social situation in the years before the war that display the ambivalence and limitations of the prewar Liberal movement. His best-known work is The Condition of England (London: Methuen, 1909). For a discussion of Masterman's literary career, see Samuel Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968; London: Pimlico, 1991), 54-72.
5. The quotation is from the journal of Thomas Hardy, who attended the meeting, as quoted in Florence Emily Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928 (London: Macmillan, 1930), 136, quoted in AWI, 26.
6. "Britain's Destiny and Duty: Declaration by Authors, A Righteous War," Times (London), 18 September 1914, 3. For a discussion of Masterman's Department of Information and the early role of the arts in supporting the war effort, see AWI, 25-56.
7. Robert Bridges, "A Holy War," letter to the editor, Times (London), 2 September 1914, 10.
8. H. G. Wells, "Why Britain Went to War," The War That Will End War (New York: Duffield, 1914), 11.
9. Germany began the siege of Antwerp on 26 September 1914; the city fell on 9 October (The Chronology of the Great War, ed. Edward Gleichen [1918-20; London: Greenhill Books, 1988], 57).
10. Richard Cork, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press), also notes the relation of Lewis's cover to Sickert's painting .
11. Soldiers was admired, for example, in "New English Art Club: Three Remarkable Works," Morning Post, 2 December 1914, where the reviewer speculated that Sickert "might well become the first great military painter" (quoted in AWI, 35).
12. Wyndham Lewis, "A Later Arm than Barbarity," Outlook: A Weekly Review of Politics, Art, Literature, and Finance 34 (5 September 1914): 298.
13. Ibid.
14. Punch, Or The London Charivari 147 (14 October 1914): 325. The cartoon is reprinted in Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Art and War (London: Lund Humphries, 1992), 28, who suggests that Morrow's "Cubist" is actually based on a contemporaneous caricature of Lewis by E. X. Kapp, which is reproduced in V, 160.
15. For a discussion of the role of visual types in the propaganda posters used by and against the Suffragette movement, see Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-14 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 167-226; for an example of the common typological representation of the lunatic, see a pro-Suffrage poster titled Convicts and Lunatics by Emily Harding (ca. 1908), plate 4 in Tickner; for an example of the typological representation of the Jew, see a pro-Suffrage postcard titled "This is Allowed to Vote" by Edwyn Llewellyn , which, as Tickner explains, "contrasts the political status of the educated, middle-class white woman with that of immigrants [including Jews] . . . and the newly enfranchised American Negro" . For discussions of period representations of Jews, see Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
16. "Junkerism in Art: The London Group at the Goupil Gallery," Times (London), 10 March 1915, 8.
17. The first of these texts was German Atrocities: A Record of Shameless Deeds (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 1914), a short pamphlet compiled by the well-known patriot and author of adventure tales, William Le Queux. It gathered together newspaper reports, quotations from government officials, and interviews with soldiers and civilians in order to substantiate Le Queux's assertion that popular accounts of German brutality, no matter how outrageous, were in fact true. "This fearful and disgraceful record of a Nation's shame and of an Emperor's complicity in atrocious crimes against God and man is no work of fiction," Le Queux's preface begins, "but a plain and unvarnished statement of the grim and terrible work of the Kaiser's Huns of Attila" .
18. George Bernard Shaw, "Common Sense About the War," in What I Really Wrote About the War, vol. 21, The Collected Works of Bernard Shaw (New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1931), 90.
19. Ibid., 102.
20. Clive Bell, Peace at Once (Manchester: National Labour Press, [1915]), 38-39.
21. Ford Madox Ford, When Blood is Their Argument: An Analysis of Prussian Culture (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), 206, 270. For a discussion of Ford's tract in the context of the home-front war against culture, see AWI, 71-72.
22. In the Ford archive at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, there are letters to Masterman that show Ford's ambivalence as he was writing the tract, as declarations of national loyalty offset efforts to place responsibility for the work on Masterman's shoulders (21 October 1914; 15 January 1915).
23. Masterman rewarded Ford's loyalty by publicly praising his polemic; in a book review, Masterman, writing under his initials "C. F. G. M.," explained that Ford had "brilliantly accomplished" his "bitter and, at times, passionate indictment of Prussian 'Kultur'" (Nation, 27 March 1915, 838-39).
24. See, for example, Arthur Kitson, "The War and the Prophets" [letter], New Age 15 (3 September 1914): 429; and T. W. Rolleston, "Literature and Politics in Modern Germany," Hibbert Journal 13 (October 1914): 83.
25. See, for example, Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist, 80-83; Ayers, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man, 61-62; cf. Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 28-29.
26. See Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (New York: Random House, 1987), 324-26; and Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 55-56.
27. "London and the Coming of War: Impressive Midnight Scene," Times (London), 5 August 1914, 9.
28. Edwards writes that "like most theorists of 'crowd-psychology,' Lewis considered that to become part of a crowd is to merge one's individual will to life and survival within a larger collective" (Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 28).
29. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895; Atlanta: Cherokee, 1982), 2.
30. See, for example, Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Erica Carter, Chris Turner, and Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), passim; cf. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), 44-64.
31. For Lewis's retrospective account of his time in north Britain and the declaration of war, see his Blasting and Bombardiering (1937; New York: Riverrun, 1982), 56-59.
32. See, for example, Sapper [Herman Cyril McNeile], Sergeant Michael Cassidy RE (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915), and Ian Hay [Beith], The First Hundred Thousand: Being the Unofficial Chronicle of a Unit of "K " (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, [1915]). For an account of British novels of the early war, see AWI, 49-52.
33. For examples and discussion of war art, see Martin Hardie and Arthur K. Sabin, War Posters Issued by Belligerent and Neutral Nations, 1914-1919 (London: A. and C. Black, 1920); Joseph Darracott, The First World War in Posters: From the Imperial War Museum, London (New York: Dover, 1974).
34. John Turner, "British Politics and the Great War," in Britain and the First World War, ed. Turner (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 121-24. In December 1915, Prime Minister Asquith, bowing to pressure from conservatives and Lloyd George, allowed a limited Military Service act calling up only single men to be passed. Pressure continued to build for full conscription until it became law in May 1916.
35. The poster is reproduced in Hardie and Sabin, War Posters, plate 5. On Brangwyn, see Darracott, The First World War in Posters, xvii; and Cork, A Bitter Truth, 291-93.
36. The conventional wisdom concerning the poetry of Blast 2 is that only Pound's "Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess" and Eliot's two early pieces, "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and "Preludes," are worthy of much attention. Pound's piece is usually noted as the period's only self-consciously Vorticist poem, while Eliot's are cast as formative texts in the great modernist's career. See, for example, Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde, 205; and V, 292-94.
37. Rupert Brooke, "The Soldier," The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1915; New York: John Lane, 1918), 111. Brooke's "War Sonnets" originally appeared in Harriet Monroe's magazine Poetry (April 1915).
38. Harold Monro, Georgian poet and editor of Poetry and Drama, lamented the poor quality of most war poetry as "rhymed leading articles" and regretfully noted that "Barry Pain's jingle 'The Kaiser and God'" had become "generally popular" ("Varia," Poetry and Drama 2 [September 1914]: 250, 251).
39. Barry Pain, "The Kaiser and God," Times (London), 28 August 1914, 9.
40. Ford, "On Impressionism," Poetry and Drama 2 (June 1914): 169, 168.
41. Ibid., 175.
42. My understanding of Saunders's poem has benefited from discussions with David Thompson.
43. Chronology of the Great War, ed. Gleichen, 211.
44. R. H. C. [Orage], "Readers and Writers," New Age 15 (10 September 1914): 449.
45. Ibid.
46. R. H. C. [Orage], "Readers and Writers," New Age 15 (8 October 1914): 549.
47. George L. Mosse, "Two World Wars and the Myth of the War Experience," Journal of Contemporary History 21 : 491-513; cf. idem, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
48. Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 83-92.
49. Winston Churchill, valediction for Brooke, quoted in Christopher Hassall, Rupert Brooke: A Biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 515.
50. Brooke, "Peace," The Collected Poems, 107.
51. Wohl, The Generation of 1914, 91.
52. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, passim.
53. Julian Symons comments astutely but only briefly that "Lewis was ready for the War, . . . it expressed the meaning of Vorticism" ("Friends of the Enemy: Reassessing the Uncomfortable Art of Wyndham Lewis," Times Literary Suppplement, 10 July 1992, 16).
54. Such accounts follow that of Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (1974; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
55. Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (1962; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 94-101.
.
Bloomsbérry is merry,
the Sitwells sip sherry.
Wyndham Lewis is dead.
--Omar S. Pound
I used to visit my grandmother, Olivia Shakespear, in London often when I was a child, while my parents were living in Rapallo, and I suspect the first time I heard the name of Wyndham Lewis was when I was nine or ten years old--it meant nothing to me, but I think I understood that he was the fellow who painted three strange large vertical panels in bright colors on the wall in her dining room. One seemed to have the driver's cab as seen from upstairs on a London double-decker bus at the top, and the same cab upside down at the bottom ( 1); the second one (M618) I ignored; the last one (M619) was a bird with only one wing. 1 They took up the entire wall behind my grandmother's chair in the dining room. The only other Lewis I remember was an ink drawing, "D." Sub-section Relief, over the sideboard (M274) facing my chair at the table, of men in flat tin hats climbing up a hillside with large lumps in the background. I didn't pay much attention to it, and I don't think I knew it was a war painting. I never even noticed Lewis's drawing of my grandmother (M591) in another corner over a small desk. I was much more interested in a large brass barometer, a bowl of ceramic artificial fruit (in particular the shiny apple and large black grapes), and a flower holder in the shape of a tortoise, nicknamed "Kuraima" by the Swami, Yeats's friend and collaborator, who told me that was the "Indian" word for a tortoise. I remember the Swami well; he always came to my birthday party at the flat. He was tall, with a large pink turban and flowing robes, and walking down Kensington High Street with him enchanted me. I remember counting the eight lumps of sugar he put in his tea whenever he visited. By this time I was used to exotically dressed friends and incomprehensible decorative panels.
My first meeting in 1948 with the real WL was entirely different. I had just begun studying Persian and Islamic history at the London School of Oriental and African Studies (S.O.A.S.). I often saw WL at Agnes Bedford's cottage near Sloane Square. He would be sitting hunched up in an armchair in her living room, always wrapped up heavily in rugs and wearing an eye shade. He was by then almost totally blind and complained constantly of the cold despite the stifling heat from the gas stove in Miss Bedford's tiny room and objected to any strong lighting from any direction, fearing it might hurt his eyes. She would either read to him or he would dictate to her. They were always working on his next book--I never knew which. Mrs. Lewis ("Froanna") would bring him over to the cottage in a taxi from Notting Hill Gate, then leave Agnes to work with him, often through most of the afternoon. If I arrived too early I would wait in the equally small dining room, the walls covered with drawings and paintings by WL, Etchells, and others, until they had finished, and then Agnes would prepare tea. Often we would return to the sitting-room to find WL snoring--work fatigued him, requiring great concentration, but when he came to he always had a beatific smile and was full of wit and linguistic humor.
I also visited him on occasion at his Notting Hill Gate flat, which one reached along a dark narrow passage leading to the front door, which opened directly into his crowded sitting-room. He had a large armchair right next to the gas fire, still with a scarf, a thick rug on his lap, and wearing his large eyeshade. Behind his chair was his drawing of their dog, "Tut" (M730). The room was crammed with books, and where there was space he had a couple of colored reprints of Rowlandson cartoons on the walls.
He frequently asked me about my courses at S.O.A.S. and why I was taking them. I told him I wanted to write a history of Persia; he asked me, "Why?" I gave some sort of answer, which he capped with another "Why?" I vaguely recall at least five or six "Whys?" This was perhaps his most valuable gift to me--asking, "Why?" so persistently, but never antagonistically. He really wanted to know.
On one occasion when I visited him there we got into a discussion of what kinds of candies they had on the moon--"Moonies, of course," said WL. This sort of frivolity was common with him, and on occasion he would ask me to sing a well-known music-hall song or ballad, which seemed to tickle him. He wanted the words--but obviously already knew the ballads and just wanted to hear them again.
From time to time WL became very restless in his old flat and had to move. One of these moves was to a temporary room nearby in Notting Hill Gate, which he used for work. It was a small room with minimal furniture but packed with bookshelves. My job was to help him sort and shelve his books, so he could remember where they were. We had quite involved discussions as to which authors would like to be next to each other. I recall quite a lot of books were on religion and philosophy. On another occasion he moved to a fairly spacious flat on Victoria Street, near the station, again taking many of his books with him.
In 1951 WL wanted to go to Ireland to join Froanna, who was staying with old friends outside Cork. Agnes suggested that I get leave from my classes at S.O.A.S., which I did, from my elderly professor of Persian, Darab Khan, who approved of me accompanying a blind man. WL and I travelled by train to Fishguard in Wales to catch the overnight boat to Cork.  I can't remember who won--almost certainly neither!
WL loathed being helped in any way, and getting him up and across the gangplank and on board was extremely difficult. The nurse attached to the ship's company and I had considerable trouble navigating--especially since he insisted on hooking his stick around the handle of his suitcase to prevent it being stolen. Once on board I remember being embarrassed because he kept saying to the nurse, "I suppose you want a tip for helping me"--still hooking his walking-stick around the handle of his suitcase.
When moving anywhere, especially through doorways, WL always ducked his head and almost doubled up each time, which made accompanying him through doors and along low narrow passageways difficult. Eventually we got him into his small but adequate cabin--considerable juggling needed--having to explain our every move--where the door handle was, and how to find the toilet. I was in a cabin nearby.
I joined him again the following morning for breakfast where he insisted, in his very clear voice, that I describe everyone around me--asking such questions as "Is she pretty?" of a woman sitting nearby, wanting me to describe her hat in detail--most embarrassing for me at that age.
Froanna and a friend met us and somehow we got WL into a car and went to the old house Froanna was staying in. It was large, reputedly either the origin of Dickens's Bleak House or where he wrote it--I never knew which.
Now, with others to care for him, I was given my freedom--I borrowed a bicycle, cycled into Cork and along the coast, enjoying the change from London.
One day WL suggested that I go to Dublin to visit Georgie Yeats--so off I went by train, not knowing then that Georgie had been one of my mother's oldest and closest friends. I think the address was 46 Palmerston Road.  At the time I didn't know anything of her long connection with Olivia, my parents, or that at one point during the war Georgie had suggested that I be sent to Ireland to escape the bombings in London.
When back in Cork, WL suggested I buy myself an overcoat--clothing still being rationed in England--so I bought an Irish tweed coat.
The return trip with WL and Froanna was equally trying, but at least I no longer had the major responsibility of steering him on and off the ship and train. When we got to customs in Fishguard there was some confusion because WL refused to go into the customs shed. I think the ceiling seemed too low to him and he was afraid of banging his head. This was resolved and we returned to London.
I enjoyed WL's company despite the embarrassing moments and his constant asperity--his humor, directness, and imagination always appealed to me.
On finishing my year at the S.O.A.S. I went off to the University of Tehran on an Iranian government scholarship--and my only news of him was via letters from Agnes and my parents in Washington, D.C.
Our next meeting was in the summer of 1955 when Elizabeth and I went to England on our honeymoon. On one occasion Froanna and WL invited us to an enormous, superbly cooked dinner in the flat with champagne, a necessity for WL. Froanna was an exceptional cook--cordon bleu in caliber.
On another occasion I took some of WL's books that I had picked up secondhand and asked him to sign them for both of us, which he did. I remember Froanna instructing him exactly where to sign them, saying, "Sign there, that will make them more valuable." I felt uncomfortable, having never asked anyone to sign anything for me before. All in all I think Elizabeth and I visited them three or four times--the last times I saw WL.
At the end of 1956, when I was still at McGill University, we arranged with Fortnum and Mason, the best food store in London, to send WL and Froanna a small box of marrons glacés, one of WL's favorite delicacies, for Christmas. For some reason Fortnum couldn't find his flat so the box was not delivered for Christmas--and when it finally arrived in January, Lewis was dead.
A few weeks later I wrote a memorial ditty for WL, which I sent to Agnes; it was not poetry, but what I felt at the time. 2
Wyndham Lewis is dead, hurrah!
Now he knows, or never will,
Why his metaphysics were (and are?)
And if the Gods drink swill.
Living, he outlived the whim
That hordes rate high,
Who live (and sometimes love)
For no end in particular--
Save to die.
Himself half-freed from Christian pride
And savagery, he lived when learned men,
Engrossed in courting power,
Incited youth to war
Then popped them in the fire;
Spitting out their grateful nation's epitaph:
"This was their finest hour."
Lewis is dead, hurrah!

Give merry Gods to Wyndham,
For company and fun,
While waiting for a chance return
Of everything he meant and knew
When man is free again--
To laugh, and scoff, and learn.
18 December 1996
Omar S. Pound is a translator of Arabic and Persian poetry, as well as an editor and bibliographer of the writings of Wyndham Lewis.
1. "M" numbers refer to catalog numbers in Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).--Ed.
2. Delta, the Canadian literary journal, edited by Louis Dudek, published "Give My Regards To Wyndham!" in October 1958.
.
In the first paragraph of "The Meaning of the Wild Body" , Wyndham Lewis sets out the major premise for his mature theory of comedy. This entails an axiomatic, apparently inarguable separation between the object of comedy and its laughing observer, between the Wild Body and its percipient:
First, to assume the dichotomy of mind and body is necessary here, without arguing it; for it is upon that essential separation that the theory of laughter here proposed is based. The essential us, that is, the laugher, is as distinct from the Wild Body as in the Upanisadic [sic] account of the souls returned from the paradise of the Moon, which, entering into plants, are yet distinct from them. Or to take the symbolic vedic re of the two birds, the one watching and passive, the other enjoying its activity, we similarly have to posit two creatures, one that never enters into life, but that travels about in a vessel to whose destiny it is momentarily attached. That is, of course, the laughing observer, and the other is the Wild Body. 1
This uncompromising dichotomy appears at odds, however, with Lewis's attitudes in a contemporary treatise, "Inferior Religions." 2 Here the "Wild Body" is "regarded as a brain" and
laughter [as] the brain-body's snort of exultation. It expresses its wild sensation of power and speed; it is all that remains physical in the flash of thought, its friction; or it may be a defiance flung at the hurrying fates.
The Wild Body is this supreme survival that is us, the stark apparatus with its set of mysterious spasms: the most profound of which is laughter. [WB, 152]
No superior or derisive sneer, laughter here wells up from the very source and matrix of the laughable. Although Lewis seems equally to root his laughter in the Wild Body and laugh his way out of that vibrating corpus, he stands as no credible witness at a comic marriage of brain and blood. For he scores his doubts too deeply into these essays--into their conceptual fabric, into the very rhetorical textures of these passages: the re of the souls returning to the plants in the Upanishadic account, for example, is poised with suspicious ambivalence between entry and abeyance.
The contrary positions Lewis assumes in these essays may reflect a generic or typical division in modern ideas of the comic, which have focused variously on the internal or psychological dimensions of laughter and its external, mechanical occasions. His preoccupation with the nature and character of the laugher resonates with Sigmund Freud's interest, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in the laugh as an unleashing of forbidden energies. And his fixation on the comic object of the Wild Body matches Henri Bergson's focus, in Le Rire (Laughter), on the risible automaton, the primary scene of comedy. These several interests may testify to the comprehensive scope of Lewis's engagement with the comic, but their differing interests do not explain away the inconsistency here: the uneasy shift in positional relation between the target of humor and the laugher's vantage. There is an uncertainty about the proper comic response that we may understand as a vacillation between an experience of the ludicrous and a sense of the ridiculous: between a spirit of play, in which homo ludens happily joins with the wild body of the laughable, and a spirit of ridicule, where the observer distances and chastises the mechanical object of laughter but does not redeem or reclaim it. 3
This double measure of ludic participation and satirical rebuke has only been obscured by the re of the Enemy, the professional antagonist, which Lewis projected so strenuously as his public persona in his middle years and put forward as his literary identity in Satire and Fiction . There is indeed a richness of texture in his comic texts that is informed by a self-division that the Enemy could not admit. Now, these rival attitudes might be assimilated to some standard critical counter like "generative tension" or "creative opposition," but they are understood better, more usefully and substantively, as a residue of contrary stages in his development. His movement from reciprocity with the comic object to judgment of it turns on a moment of political recognition that gives the difference between early and later Lewis its fullness of intellectual implication. This moment stands as a watershed in his literary-intellectual career, and I wish to define and recover its importance here. I center it in the second of the three sections that follow, where I show the profound reorientation it represents by searching more deeply into the samples and model of early comedy that I set out in the first section. The difference this political perception makes will then be seen, in the third section, in the revision the older Lewis makes of his earlier work.
The variable in Lewis's comic theory and practice lies in the positional character of the laugher, not in the nature and behavior of the comic object, and so it seems best to begin with that constant: to redraw Lewis's image of the Wild Body and note its comic properties and precedents. The most influential model is surely Bergson's. After all, Lewis attended the lectures Bergson offered at the Collège de France in 1903, 4 and the recent publication of Le Rire had established its idea of the comic as a prevailing convention. It was this idea that Lewis carried with him through Brittany and Spain--in travels that would provide material for his first attempts at literary fiction, the stories he drafted and published in England in 1909 and 1910.
Bergson sees the classic incidence of comedy as involving a collision between the mechanical and the organic, the habitual and the variable. Thus the absent-minded man, who has reduced his walking to involuntary routine, slips risibly on the unseen banana peel. The changing demands of life reveal a habitual pattern for what it is, and the mirth is earned at its expense. The laughter entails more than perverse delight in such contretemps, however; it exercises a high Aristotelian function, Bergson suggests, for it identifies the fool, rebukes the automaton, and purges the nonperson, the thing, from proper society. 5 Yes, humans may revert to the lower level of mechanical life, but Bergson's comic philosophy clearly regards such descents as mere dramatic opportunities, as incidents to trigger and set in motion a whole economy of redemptive laughter, which returns the audience to the true norm of the flexible, thinking response. That is a profoundly humanist norm, after all, for it measures and celebrates a human superiority to the lower, animal-mechanical character.
It is remarkable that the tradition of critical inquiry into Lewis's appropriation of Bergson has failed uniformly to note this defining difference--all the more remarkable in view of the fact that Lewis sets the anti-Bergsonian temper of his early stories in the clear theoretical frame of his later treatises, which he published with the revised version of those stories in 1927. 6 Here Lewis reverses the value and strategy of the Bergsonian formula: "The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person" (WB, 158); the mechanical thing defines the essence of Lewis's character, not simply a provisional, farcical identity. This comedy laughs at the pretence to humanity, the imitation of personhood by its inveterate inferiors; the very humanist vantage assumed by Bergson is here the butt of laughter. Lewis's comic characters are not some subnormal exception; they comprise a usual humankind, whose strenuous but vacuous attempt to supersede their animal-mechanical nature affords the constant opportunity for comedy. Lewis expresses the antihumanist philosophy that generates this perception as the passage about "the root of the comic" continues, elaborating its basic premise in typical mise-en-scènes:
But from that point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons. . . .
If you saw (to give another example of intelligence or movement in the "dead") a sack of potatoes suddenly get up and trundle off down the street (unless you were so sceptical to think that it was some one who had got inside the sack), you would laugh. . . .
The other day in the underground, as the train was moving out of the station, I and those around me saw a fat but active man run along. . . . [H]is running, neat, deliberate, but clumsy embarkation, combined with the coolness of his eye, had a ludicrous effect, to which several of us responded. His eye I decided was the key to the absurdity of the effect. It was its detachment that was responsible for this. It seemed to say, as he propelled his sack of potatoes--that is himself--along the platform, and as he successfully landed the sack in the carriage: ". . . When you run a sack of potatoes like ME, you get the knack of them: but they take a bit of moving."
It was the detachment, in any case, that gave the episode a comic quality, that his otherwise very usual appearance would not have possessed. [WB, 158-60]
To say, as Geoffrey Wagner does, that Lewis's "comic type is the human being lacking in awareness, guilty of Bergsonian 'distraction,' and approximating to the animal machine," 7 is to miss the whole point of this radical rewriting. For Bergson's comic percipient takes an Aristotelian high ground, noting the anomaly of the mechanical person and restoring the proper human value by laughing at the mistake; the pretence of such human superiority becomes the target of Lewis's comic disdain--the animal's humorous impersonation of free and thinking humanity.
There is an anatomy of folly in Lewis's oeuvre, a tendency to see certain sensory aspects of the human creature as particularly susceptible to the mechanisms of comedy. His inclination points to backgrounds in French intellectual history that may be usefully rehearsed here. This is the post-Revolutionary tradition of idéologiecritique. 8 This quasi- or semiscientific method takes the body as primary locus for adducing truths about the human creature and uses these axioms as bases for the formulation of political principle. This discourse was being carried on at Lewis's own moment in France by Remy de Gourmont, whose analyses, compounded shortly afterward by Julien Benda, routinely identified the senses of sound (speech as well as hearing) and sight as demonstrations of opposite human possibilities and political values. In this description the eye relies on distance and separation from the object in view, while the ensuing clarity of focus induces a mental condition favoring clear conceptual definition and detached understanding; instrument and emblem of intellectual superiority, the eye validates the whole notion of social hierarchy. Hearing, by contrast, requires contact between the auditor and the physical stimulus; incapable of detached intellectual activity, the ear processes the content it has received merely by repeating it, verbatim, through the mouth: the auditory type becomes one with the sound. The fusion or empathy enabled by this process defines its political valence: the less discriminating members of the body politic are open to this lower channel of sensory communication--an audience bound first to sound and then to each other in a spurious but formidable unity, a demotic solidarity. 9 The political import of this construction may await our consideration in the second section, but it is already easy to see how this understanding of sound may cast the primary character of comedy. The re of an acoustic fool, blithely and mechanically repeating the sounds dubbed into him, is the automaton set up for a comic fall.
The fall shows its peculiarly Lewisian spin right from the start, in his first published story, "The 'Pole'" . Here the tale-teller Isobletsky has listened to himself recite his account and is now locked into the several speaking mannerisms to which he has reduced it; his own character in the adventure has become an aural impression to be duplicated. A tissue of impersonations, an overlay of echoes, he depicts the habitual, rote repetition to which aural reception inclines. By the time the narrator meets him, he shows
the strangest habit of imitating his own imitations. In telling a story in which he red (his stories were all designed to prove his independence) he had a conventional type of imitation for the voice and manner of his interlocutor, and a gruff, half-blustering tone to imitate his own voice in these dramatic moments. And gradually these two tones, mixed into each other, had become his ordinary tone in conversation. [WB, 213; emphasis added]
Isobletsky's claim to "independence" as a protagonist in these tales comes into sharp and revealing contrast with the mechanical character of his utterance: the irony here tracks Lewis's own classic comic incident, where the target of laughter lies in the assumption of human superiority over such automatic life. Thus Lewis mounts his challenge to the humanist philosophy of Bergson from a distinctively Gourmontian ground; the heavy mechanisms of aural habit exert a force like gravity here, acting as counterweight to the auditor's unsuccessful but laughably strenuous efforts at transcendence.
The comic agon in "A Breton Innkeeper" develops similarly. Roland, the concierge-dictator, inveighs thus against the boy-auditor, his assistant:
He rages often, cries nom de Dieu, stamps and fumes when the aforementioned youth does something that displeases him. And doubtless there is some nuance in this that touches the brass-buttoned boy--doubtless there is in that youth's exquisite instinct for Roland many a shade in the rough voice imperceptible to a stranger--some inflection that makes him scamper more hastily about his business. But outwardly it is the same heavy and desperate geniality. [WB, 269]
The youth is driven by aural signals as compelling but uncomprehended as a dog-whistle; such reflex response and mechanical behavior enact the truth of de Gourmont's own aperçu: the ear is unfree, incapable of detachment from its own network of rote, determinate response. Nor is the speaker Roland a straight man to this comic mechanism: his character-in-voice is no less manic and inalterable than the boy's, for Lewis prefaces the account of his speaking style with this generic identification: "I have never seen him forsake his farcical manner with anyone" (WB, 269). There may be some pronominal confusion between the speaker and auditor in the last sentence here--whose "heavy and desperate geniality" is it?--but this uncertainty resolves itself into a single debility, into the one comic opportunity of ear and mouth. Whether it is the boy or Roland, the automaton pretends an independence more risible than his ostensible slavery. He reaches toward a higher level of human polity and social decorum, but lurchingly, comically, as the phrasing suggests: his "heavy and desperate geniality" speeds up the very mill of driven behavior he is seeking to outrun.
This paradox of mechanical vitality shows its somber gusto in the visual language of the 1912 Courtship ( 1). Here the male and female res are curvilinear, lithe, thus idealizing the elementary energy of their own instinctive ritual; true to the ironic pattern, their thighs and upper torsoes bulge to a muscle-bound puppetry, and so depict their owners as chthonic automatons, dancing in grim compliance with the determinate laws of life. Bergson's élan vital runs down into self-mocking robotics, and Lewis adds his comic touch in allowing one of these res to pretend some superiority over her mechanical condition: the head angled demurely to the side affects a human shyness, a self-consciousness out of keeping with the machine, with behavior compelled by instinct. But not entirely so. Such courtship is a ritual, after all, and the head display is really no free play at all, for it is working in a fashion as grim and driven as the rest of her bodily bulk. The image of superior freedom it affects is really the focus and butt of humor here.
But it is the circuit of aural-oral compulsion that provides Lewis's main comic occasion. Thus the narrator-farçeur of "Le Père François" fiddles with his victim's throat:
After having been shown his throat, and having vainly attempted to seize between my thumb and forefinger an imaginary vessel that he insisted, with considerable violence, that I should find, our relations nearly came to an abrupt termination on my failing, and having, indeed, pursued song athwart his anatomy to its darkest and most lugubrious sources, I said irrelevantly that his hair was very long. He slowed down abruptly in his speech, but some sentences still followed. Then, after a silence, taking suddenly the most profoundly serious expression, he said, with a conviction of tone that admitted of no argument and paralysed all doubt, "I will tell you! It's too long! My hair is too long!" [WB, 278]
The mystery organ in the depths of this "florid aperture" of the mouth is the source and center of acoustic vitalism, an energy running according to those laws of élan mécanique so richly evidenced in the other early stories. Having had the vitalist innards of his throat tickled and stimulated, Francis duly produces the sort of rote, determinate reaction that vocal energy typically runs to: the Franciscan merely repeats the phrases imprinted into him by the narrator-protagonist. When he claims these words as his own--"I will tell you"--he is of course reversing the real current of influence; thus he takes the wheel of farce one turn further, and completes the scene with Lewis's own distinctive flourish: the ultimate moment of comedy is a character's attempt to pretend superiority over his own determinate nature--the paces of aural habit through which this vibrant songbird has just been put.
"The higher the slavery, the more exquisite the buffoonery": 10 the truth of Shaftesbury's elegant conceit is borne out by the deftness of Lewis's lampoons, for this farçeur also reveals an intoxication with the object of laughter. At moments in his early work, one finds the signs of an infatuation with the musical and vocal culture of the same Breton speakers he otherwise burlesques. Such attraction instances a prime type of acoustic empathy. To its considerable appeals Lewis produces a mixed response, modifying his enchantment with an emergent recognition--and resistance. He is coming to regard this musical sympathy as an experience replete with the psychological and political meanings so richly detailed in the contemporary European analysis of the subject. (There is simply no evidence that Lewis knew de Gourmont's work before beginning to write the stories; the very progressive and dialectical character of the recognition I am about to outline, indeed, suggests persuasively that he had no prior knowledge. The work of the contemporary idéologues comprises an awareness into which he moves, at least initially, on his own.) 11 While Lewis's struggle clarifies the terms of that continental discourse, and claims its relevance to his own nascent model of comedy, his divided attitudes will be most interesting when they end, as an ambivalence overcome. Once he recognizes the social manifestations of aural empathy, that is, the idea of musical fellow-feeling generates a distaste that annuls all ambiguity. His angle of relation to his comic object shifts, accordingly, from a more playful and reciprocating one, grounded in a strong sense of the ludicrous, to an attitude of detached ridicule and a concomitant vision of the ridiculous.
A travel diary fragment written at Quimperlé in 1908 (preserved at the Cornell archive) records Lewis's elementary fascination with the Breton tongue. His sympathy is as articulate as it is discriminating. Sifting through an interlingual hubbub on the quays, he concentrates on the local dialect, which sounds out its own version of the Burkean sublime. It creates a beauty as severe as fear--a mingled and compelling chime:
Several groups of Sweedish [sic] sailors from the boats and breton dock hands were working on the quay, and the harsh celtic tongue, passionate and abrupt, was mixed with the wearisome drawl of the scandinavians. Certain languages,--Russian, swedish, breton,--apart from the distinct sound of them, are spoken with a distinct tone of voice.
. . . Breton is a solemn, rude, patriarchal, monotonous tongue, with long and sudden bursts of wild, impetuous speech, with sentences coming to a dead halt, which is not a breaking off as it seems, but the excited pitch of the voice is kept up till the last syllable and so there is no drop of the voice at the end of the phrase; there seems to be a ring of joy--not benevolent,--and recklessness, hysterical, timbre drawn out, and then sudden harsh and trenchant tones, and grating emphasis. [WB, 197]
Acoustic sensation at this pitch of intensity is felt along the pulse of a fundamental life-force, various European commentators were suggesting, and thus joins its auditor in empathy with an élan vital. The same vitalist currents drew Lewis into the thrall of Bretonic aural culture, he would reveal four decades later, when its vibrancy seems inseparable from the stupefaction it induced in him:
The Atlantic air, the raw rich visual food of the barbaric environment, the squealing of the pipes, the crashing of the ocean, induced a creative torpor. Mine was now a drowsy sun-baked ferment, watching with delight the great comic energies which erupted beneath my rather saturnine but astonished gaze: Brotcotnaz, Bestre, and the rest.
During those days, I began to get a philosophy: but not a very good one, I am afraid. . . .  The characters I chose to celebrate--Bestre, the Cornac and his wife, Brotcotnaz, le père François--were all primitive creatures, immersed in life, as much as birds, or big, obsessed, sun-drunk insects. 12
The passage offers its mixed attitudes like the palimpsest of a forty-year career, yet it also provides a remarkably accurate replica of an original complexity. Its peculiar combination of attraction and censure, both glorifying and objecting to the vitalism with which Lewis had moved in elementary sympathy, describes a counterrhythm already strong in the early fiction, where it emerges less discursively, more dramatically, as the function of an open-ended, dialectical inquiry.
This counterrhythm of resistance and reciprocity with Bretonic vocal culture moves at first as a function of Lewis's response to its sublime aspect. Its severe economy of beauty and terror discovers a locus classicus in "The Death of the Ankou" (probably the first of Lewis's attempts to fictionalize his experience in Brittany), where the English narrator recounts and responds to a primitive death fetish. Whereas Lewis would later attribute this story to sources of vitalist energy in Brittany, to the "sun, a Breton rather than a British" sun, 13 the death fetish emerges narratively and dramatically out of the vitalist sounds of the place--a vocal hubbub drenched in the sharp life-blood of the locale, an acoustic milieu as stark and compelling as the object it generates:
Whenever I grew attentive to my surroundings, the passionate movement of whirling and striking arms was visible at the tables where the play was in progress, or a furious black body would dash itself from one chair to another. The "celtic screech" meantime growing harsher and harsher, sharpening itself on caustic snarling words, would soar to a paroxysm of energy. "Garce"! [Bitch!] was the most frequent sound. All the voices would clamour for a moment together. It was a shattering noise in this dusky tunnel.--I had stopped reading, as I have said, and I lifted my eyes. It was then that I saw the Ankou.
With revulsed and misty eyes almost in front of me, an imperious re, apparently armed with a club, was forcing its way insolently forward towards the door, its head up, an eloquently moving mouth hung in the air, as it seemed, for its possessor . . .
The blinded re had burst into my daydream . . . [WB, 109-10].
The Ankou embodies not only the vocal culture of the place but the double measure of its acoustic sublime, moving not by eyesight but an "eloquently moving mouth" and in that sound combining the lure of acoustic beauty with its own lore of terror, its death-mission and aim.
Behind this curtain of terrible splendor, rather like the Wizard of Oz's, stands a pair of all too human feet, a local beggar's, and the little joke of this reversal goes to the larger sense of comedy that Lewis inscribes in the tramp's name: Ludo. The sense of play in this environment--"the play was in progress," after all, when the Ankou appeared--captures an ethical value within its theatrical meaning. In this primitive culture, the drama of death (and life) is a game, a sport no less severe than boisterous but at all points a collective engagement, a playing tout ensemble: Ludo emerges from voices in "clamour . . . together." And Lewis signs this re of play into a type and model of comedy as he assigns Ludo an exact double and counterpart in the farçeur, through this fisherman's anecdote:
"Quel type!" [What a character!] he said. "When we were in Penang, no it was at Bankok, at the time of my service with the fleet, I saw just such another. He was a blind sailor, an Englishman. He had lost his sight in a shipwreck--He would not beg from the black people."

"He liked the heat. He was a farçeur. He was such another as this one." [WB, 112]
The English farçeur's blindness may be taken to typify Lewis's openness to the sounds of the warm vitalist cultus of his own experience, in Brittany. In such reciprocity, moreover, we find the unexpected values and emphases in his earliest model of comedy: a playful synergy with the very characters of acoustic vitalism that provide his farcical types.
Such reciprocity is the theme in Lewis's recreation of the comic economy in "Les Saltimbanques" . Here the performing troupe provides a paradigm of the comic occasion and a definition of the author's relation to his comic object (and audience), the wild body of the public:
They looked upon the public as a vast beast, with a very simple but perverse character, differing from any separate man's, the important trait of which was an insatiable longing for their performances. . . . Whenever they met one of these monsters ["the many-headed beast"]--which was on an average twice a day--their only means of escape was by charming it with their pipes, which never failed to render it harmless and satisfied. They then would hurry on, until they met another, when they would again play to it and flee away.
The reflection that all these people parted with their sous for so little would be the only bright spot in the gloomy Adrien Brower of their minds. They felt that they were getting the better of them in some way. That the public was paying for an idea, for something that it gave itself, did not occur to them, but that it was paying for the performance as seen and appreciated by them, the performers. For it is most difficult to realise the charm of something we possess. [WB, 237-38]
Once again a pronominal confusion--here in the last several sentences--serves Lewis's theme perfectly: an exchange of roles, in which the audience plays music to the performers. Sounding the audience's response back to itself, Lewis's performers seal the network of acoustic empathy that binds all together. The author's own incipient resistance to such exchanges leads him to give the upper hand here to his players, who can pretend that, even while they are being paid for performing, they are the ones enjoying the show.
Yet the performers' complicity with the crowd reflects the inexorable laws of physical attraction and bonding between sound and listener and, as expressed, signals Lewis's own fascinated discovery of these rules. For his narrative modulates into semidiscursive rhythms, inscribing sympathy through sound--speech no less than music--as the constant, necessary principle of such performances:
it is the public . . . towards whom the discomfited "swell" in evening dress turns as towards his peers, for sympathy and understanding, when "scored off" anew, in, as the simile would affirm, this low-bred and unanswerable fashion. They are appealed to as though it were their mind that was being represented in the dialogue, and constantly discomfited, and he were merely their mouthpiece.
Without doubt this re originally stood for the public. [WB, 240]
To hear these exchanges between performer and audience as a protopolitical event is to exercise a Bendian hermeneutic that Lewis's language and imagery here amply invite. Thus Demos, a "low-bred" creature, is reached at the lowest sensory level through sound; musical empathy underlies and directs the very collective behavior that constitutes "the Crowd," "the public." While these scenes hint consistently at such a political insight, however, their social content is most interesting in remaining implicit, unformulated. It is as though the narrative consciousness, struck by the perplexity of its own fascinated revulsion at the music of local speech, is evolving this social analysis to sort out that paradox. For this political reading, which occurs to Lewis only as a suggestion, emerges obliquely, tentatively, as a function of his own divided response to the Bretonic vocalese. While the insight lingers on one side of the narrative consciousness, he does not look at it directly.
Lewis sees it steady and whole a year later, in the last of his continental stories, "Le Père François":
Music was his theme. In making use of certain expressions in the course of his rambling declamation, such as andante and contralto, he would add with sudden politeness "that is a term in music." . . . To look at him one would have said that the only emotion he had ever experienced was that provoked by the topical and sentimental songs of his country. He had become a very disreputable embodiment of them. His was the face of a man who had wedded, and been mastered by, the vague and neurasthenic heroine of the popular lyrical fancy; from constant intercourse with this shade he had grown as nearly as he could make himself her ideal.  [H]is discourse [was] full of what I supposed to be musicians' slang, confounded with thieves' slang and Breton slang; the hiccups that engulfed so many of his phrases and often ruined a whole train of thought . . . were only a few of the disappointments to be met . . . [WB, 277].
Here the empathy proper to the musical response reveals the same psychic and social mechanism that Benda would describe nearly a decade later. Thus Francis's fanciful marriage with the heroine of the song, following his "constant intercourse with this shade," consummates the laws of physical sympathy fundamental to acoustic experience. Presenting that response as the femme fatale's "popular draw," moreover, Lewis draws a specifically political situation. Such empathy through sound is the populist way of feeling; it also binds the membership of Demos into an acoustic amalgam and, like the national hymns heard by Benda, generates collective feeling as a function of its own musical effect. Thus the singer Francis, exuding the same "lusty" mood that compels his imaginative marriage with the ballad bride, rides his "patriotic song" into radical union with his conationals--and it is a lower order of nation, after all, that includes "thieves' slang" in its national speech.
Reversing this current of empathic projection but preserving its social meaning, Francis invites the same populist aggregate to abide within him: he has "become a giant. . . . [N]ow that he is isolated everything has come to inhabit him, and he feels constantly in his spirit the throbbing of multitudes" (WB, 279-80). Thus the modern political phenomenon of demotic gigantism whirls around an empty center; this vacant intraindividual space craves such bogus relationships and expansions as musical empathy makes all too easy and available.
Remarkable for the new virulence of its depiction of the aural, "Le Père François" moderates its invective only to serve the needs of exposition, which links this musical character to the methods and emblems of demotic solidarity. Once Lewis has recognized the social meanings of aural empathy, moreover, he exhibits a categorical antipathy to it. Thus lyrical fellow-feeling provokes a distaste that annuls all of Lewis's earlier ambiguities about the acoustic experience. Indeed, the political content of this aesthetic event decisively turns the course of his development, for "François" anticipates the substance of the author's mature social critique. 14
The difference this political perception makes in the typical mise-en-scène of Lewisian comedy may be found in a particular passage in "François," one that recasts the incident of an earlier story in view of the political import newly found in the comic action. (The unitary character of these stories was reinforced by their appearance in but two magazines: the first three [1909] in Ford Madox Hueffer's The English Review; the next three [1910] in The Tramp.) Thus "François" includes a pointed reference to "A Breton Innkeeper," the piece published immediately before it. Here Lewis compares the musical antics of the Franciscan, cryptically but knowingly, with those of the concierge. Invoking Roland as Francis's "like," the author gestures at a particular scene in which the innkeeper, seen in the company of street boys--like Francis in the matching passage--matches the "ceaseless dramatic effervescence" (WB, 279) of the priest. A juxtaposition of the two texts shows Lewis angling his later reference to point up the specifically political nature of Roland's musical antics:
Roland is like one of those "eccentric musicians," as they are called, that tear about in front of a row of different sized bottles, playing "Rule Britannia" with inconceivable agility. His perpetual verbosity and ubiquity are appalling. Rather than relapse into anything approaching calm, he will talk to his own wife, or to a little ragged boy that has stopped in the street to stare at the boy in buttons. He is capable of banging on the back of a saucepan or rattling the dishes to "keep things going." [WB, 271]
The Père François and his like spend their lives in a ceaseless dramatic effervescence. Their furious gestures, their dark sayings and invectives, are as harmless as the vacant menace of lonely and excited little boys, who occasionally take some notice of one in the streets. The only difference is that the children are conventional and romantic, whereas his impersonations are often of the most blood-curdling realism. You will find a beggar ranting in some Paris street, and with fiery exclamations he will be exciting an imaginary and sanguinary mob to revolution; or he will lash the watching people with his scorn like some misunderstood and outraged leader, and, rushing off, will constantly turn and shout his threats and reproaches at them from afar, as though he were leaving some doomed city. At the next street corner a fresh crowd will gather at his eccentric mutterings. [WB, 279]
In a nationalist lyric like "Rule Britannia," the collectivizing effects of music are channeled to their predictable political ends, but this theme holds no conceptual focus for Lewis yet. An unclaimed inference, it is passed over, lost to the very headlong fancy of the simile that generates it. Two months later, this gay charade has darkened into an augury of the political truths Lewis has lately and grimly grasped. He exploits it accordingly. As Francis's "like," then, the formerly innocuous bottle-player moves as one with this ignorant but sinister mountebank, and into the arena of real political theater, where the demagogue's vocal music consolidates the crowd and magnetizes its members to himself. And that is no laughing--or ludic--matter. The earlier sense of the ludicrous--a boisterous laughing with the wild body of comedy, a participatory fun with the comic automaton playing his harmless bottle music--dissolves into a repugnance at the dangerous political prepotence of such performance and sympathetic participation: Francis prompts only disdain; ridicule is the sign and mode of our response.
The treatises on comedy that Lewis composed later in his career, then, show the palimpsest-like character of his developed thinking on the subject: a layering of varied--and conflicting--emphases on vitalist empathy and satirical distance. It is thus especially interesting to recover a first tract, a piece written just slightly ahead of the moment of political perception that would complicate the primary model. This is an essay published in the New Age in May 1910: "Our Wild Body." My emphasis here points to its signal difference from "The Wild Body," where the definite article carries that later strain toward objectivity and distanced regard. For in May 1910 Lewis still views the Wild Body as a collective possession and the experience of comedy that it centers and generates as a game played in common, a sport of the social corpus. Indeed, this 1910 essay is so borne along by the spirit of corporate fun that it scarcely steps aside to characterize as humor the experience it valorizes, but the nature and behavior of the energy he extols here clearly belong to the genre of comedy.
The essay seeks to recover and legitimate a sense of bodily vitality by contrasting the healthy attitudes of Continentals, mainly the French, to the defensive inhibitions of the English. The bodily behavior of the French is not idealized beyond the bounds of the comic--their energy resembles Roland's, a type of the laughable automaton--but the playfulness and easy communion Lewis finds between the actors here announces the ludic, empathic character of the fun. The genteel buffoonery of these French bodies is mellowed, moreover, through its fellowship with the French mind, which ingratiates them to each other and to us:
[The French bourgeois] will . . . establish a playful and more intimate relation between your respective persons--to glory in their warmth and fitness, to slap you on the shoulders, to take your arm in his hand. . . . This will not in the least detract from the severe and dignified attitude of your two minds, and their sentimental intercourses. The Frenchman regards our bodies as children, and when the minds, like the two fathers, have become friendly, it seems natural to him that the bodies also should become better acquainted and have their little sport. [WB, 251-52]
The comic marriage of blood and brain that Lewis intimates here is consummated in the summary praise of the French as one of "those vivacious and thoughtful races, for whom life is game" (emphasis added), and for whom
such a monstrous growth as this universal life of sport [the English mind's denial of corpus ludens in the discipline of body-building] . . . would be impossible and above all unnecessary. This division weakens both life and play. But it is in our case meant as a blow at life, to divide life's forces. Art is only worth anything when the artist is as vulnerable in it as in his body. [WB, 254]
Annulling the opposition he will later drive between the laughing observer and the laughable object, Lewis declares an essential reciprocity between himself as author of comedy and its wild body, presumably his own--a synergy once again empowered through the (French) sense of play. And with the same value in mind he rewrites the typical scene of Bergsonian comedy here, deploying the orange peel for the comic automaton to slip on but falling together with the victim: "Often walking beside some man, nervous and exasperated, and silently imputing to him the whole gamut of stupidity and meanness, have you not felt that . . . should you slip by chance on a piece of orange peel, catch at him instinctively, drag him down with you on the ground, and roll about a bit with him, all would be well?" (WB, 252) Ludicrousness, in the full sense of that word, shapes Lewis's early understanding of comedy, and the admission of openness and vulnerability that attend it stand in sharp contrast to the ridicule later professed, through the persona of the Enemy, in his brandishing of the satirist's armored hide.
The revisions Lewis performed on the stories he republished in 1927 are informed centrally and crucially by the political lesson first adduced in "Le Père François," in 1910. Even at that early date, this lesson provided him the vantage, as we have seen, for significant revision of previous stories, by enabling him to read the political character of the demagogic Franciscan back into the apparently innocuous capers of Roland. His later adjustments essentially repeat that procedure. He extends the recognition first limned in "François," applies it retroactively, and continues to shift the essential tenor of comedy from the ludicrous to the ridiculous. To place his later work on a developmental continuum with the earlier, moreover, is to subjoin its apparent mastery to those difficult beginnings. The ambiguities revolving around musical and vitalist empathy with the Wild Body beget fresh complexities, but he moves these toward resolution in the harsh solvent of the political convictions first expressed in "François."
Rewriting "Le Père François" as "Franciscan Adventures," Lewis simply takes the earlier political intuitions up a discursive level, fixing generic tags on the populist musician, whose experience now typifies the values of post-Revolutionary, populist, "Republican France" (WB, 121): he is a "sickly re of early republican romance" (WB, 129). The pre-"François" stories must undergo more extensive revision, however, because these sustain ambiguities about acoustic empathy that are simply intolerable now. Thus Lewis seeks to write equivocation out of these stories, to this purpose showing a striking singlemindedness. His target in "Les Saltimbanques" is the players' musical complicity with their audience. These exchanges, contested but necessary in 1909, showed Lewis conceding his own part in the verbal and acoustic milieu; his later revision, however, takes back that concession. Thus the musical soothing of the public beast no longer provides the show in the retitled piece, "The Cornac and His Wife," where the action seems to revert to the acrobatics suggested by the original heading, "Les Saltimbanques":
Whenever one of these monsters was met with, which on an average was twice a day, the only means of escape for the unfortunate family was to charm it. Conduct involving that never failed to render the monster harmless and satisfied. Then they would hurry on, until they met another. Then they would repeat just the same thing over again, and once more hasten away, boiling with resentment. [WB, 92]
This silencing of a formerly musical relationship coincides with a newly virulent antipathy to the public, asserted by the author through his players. The urgent need to distance themselves from the audience signals a repressed but unforgotten connection, a linkage primarily acoustic; it is most forcibly recalled when most strenuously repressed: "Had you suggested to the Showman that the Public paid for an idea, something it drew out of itself, that would have been a particularly repugnant thought." (WB, 93; emphasis added) "Particularly repugnant" to the Showman (the author's provisional double) in 1927 is a thought Lewis presented with eloquence and imaginative penetration in 1909, when he heard the rhythms and movements of the public's own inner vitalism--something it drew out of itself--echoing back through the sounds made by the players: a perfect paradigm of acoustic empathy. Now infected with political meanings, this formerly musical union survives only as an uneasy memory, a residual irritant--a sore point for the author no less than his Showman.
Behind the circuit of acoustic connection that Lewis esteemed earlier lay the residual pull of the harsh music of Breton speech, and so it seems appropriate, in conclusion, to revisit that scene of primary edification and chart the evolution of attitudes toward its appeals. In the early account of Bretonic speech in "Les Saltimbanques" , Lewis's narrator echoes the bracing appreciation made in the 1908 diary fragment, repeating its conceit. This vocal music appears to be alternately excited and imperturbable; it displays the odd but exciting combination of spontaneous vitalism and controlled mechanism. He expands that paradox, too, as he hears the speakers grasping vibrant life at its most intense--that is, at its most predetermined, automatic, fatalistic:
Their hysterical and monotonous voices are always pitched in a strain of fierce raillery and abuse. . . .
They are accustomed to look upon all conditions of life as inevitable. They can never conceive of a man being anything else but what he is. They have this primitive wisdom. [WB, 245-46]
In the 1927 revision, however, Lewis's Showman stands "before a congregation of Hodges, who could not even express themselves in the metropolitan tongue, but gibbered in breton, day in, day out" (WB, 92).
In "Franciscan Adventures," similarly, the author revokes his early fascination with a passion more exacting than his earlier appreciation. Here he alters his former excitements both in letter and spirit, casting the very terms of his first infatuation (emphasized here)--the paradoxical but pleasing medley of vitalism and mechanism--into labels of evident "scorn" for the Breton priest: "I examined this old song-bird with scorn. Monotonous passion, stereotyped into a frenzied machine, he irritated me like an aimlessly howling wind. . . . What emotions had this automaton experienced before he accepted outcast life?" (WB, 121; emphases added) Accordingly, Francis acts out a clarifying parody of his own provincial speech, both defining and mocking the halt-and-rush rhythms that, at least in the mouths of other speakers, have held Lewis in their thrall: "He would stop, and with an indrawn wheeze or a quick gasp, fetch it back as it was escaping. Then he would burst out violently again into a heaving flux of song" (WB, 120). This dramatic invective goes back to 1910 and the decisive moment of "Le Père François," where Lewis first recognized the political meanings of acoustic empathy. It is there that the sweet severity of Bretonic speech first goes sour. In "Franciscan Adventures" the enlivening abruptions of the Breton dialect produce a sad caricature in Francis, who turns its angular frisson into this blithering staccato, staggering through his own comic prosody of discontinuity:
These sayings occurred to him quite fortuitously, and he would quote them à propos of something with which they had no connection. Instead of adroitly leading the conversation round in such a way that the bon mot might be introduced, as a less sincere or enthusiastic man would do, he boldly uttered it, taking it as a text for a new discourse, until another one turned up to bring what was often its most astounding career to an abrupt end. [WB, 282]
From the start the harsh music of that coastal dialect provided Lewis a type and model of vitalist laughter; its severe percussiveness was at one with the stabbing gestures of its mirth. Thus the narrator in "Les Saltimbanques" actually roots the patterns of local speech in the raucous laughter of the place:
One sees in the Breton peasant a constant tendency to sarcasm. Their hysterical and monotonous voices are always pitched in a strain of fierce raillery and abuse. But this does not infect their mirth. Their laughter is forced and meant to be wounding, and with their grins and quips they are like armed men who never meet without clashing their swords together.
They dance, work and amuse themselves fatalistically. [WB, 245-46]
In 1927, however, that savage panoply of armored mirth is stained with a diminutive regard; its terrible beauty is changed, utterly, in the final assessment Lewis adds to the revised version:
You see in the peasant of Brittany and other primitive districts of France a constant tendency to sarcasm. Their hysterical and monotonous voices--a variety of the "celtic" screech--are always with the Bretons pitched in a strain of fierce raillery and abuse. But this does not affect their mirth. Their laughter is sharp and mirthless and designed usually to wound. With their grins and quips they are like armed men who never meet without clashing their weapons together. Were my circus-proprietor and his kind not so tough, this continual howl or disquieting explosion of what is scarcely mirth would shatter them. [WB, 101]
Removing his Showman-counterpart (his own "kind") from vital contact with the audience, and withdrawing his earlier benediction on the "primitive wisdom" of their vocal culture, Lewis measures the difference of his later estrangement most dramatically in his refusal to admit that such laughter is mirth at all.
Has a theory of humor been confused or clarified in this process of change? Lewis mounted his challenge to the Bergsonian model of comedy from a Gourmontian platform, but he built it on the shifting sands of that littoral dialect. Yes, he reduced those coastal speakers to creatures of oral (and aural) habit; these mechanisms, apparently irreversible and insurmountable, defied the humanist hope in Bergson's vision of redemptive laughter. Yet the residual thrall of the vocal music of Brittany led Lewis to thrill at the very mechanical vitality he would abuse. The political perception of 1910 at least fuses his comic philosophy to its object of rebuke, the oral automaton, who receives no quarter now. Human music, an instrument of empathy and the detested social collectivism, offers the farçeur a target unmisted by fancy--the Celtic twilight of Lewis's own youthful muse. From a history as contrary as his, however, no literary theory stands free and clear. When he sets out the mature conception of humor in the essays collected in The Wild Body, then, he retains the twists and inconsistencies of this development and, in this way, confirms the lasting importance of its opening moment: the abiding role of the vocal culture of Brittany and his obsessive engagement with--and against--the empathic response it prompts.
Vincent Sherry teaches at Villanova University. His books include James Joyce: Ulysses , Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism , The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill , and two volumes on contemporary British and Irish poets that he edited for the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He is currently writing a book on the Great War and Anglo-American modernism.
1. Wyndham Lewis, "The Meaning of the Wild Body," in The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard Lafourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1982), 157; hereafter abbreviated WB. This edition reprints the texts of Lewis's 1927 compilation, The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories, and it supplements this with the earlier versions, as published in English journals in 1909 and 1910, and with various ancillary materials.
2. "Inferior Religions" was first published in 1917 and rewritten for the 1927 collection; the revision entailed mainly an addition of detail, not a change in the argument.
3. I employ the distinction elaborated by Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. 11-12. Unfortunately, but in line with critical preconceptions inattentive to Lewis's development, Levin's single mention of Lewis reduces his work to Enemy satire, an unalloyed art of ridicule.
4. See Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as Enemy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), 215.
5. E. g., "The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life. Consequently it calls for immediate corrective. This corrective is laughter, a social gesture that singles out and represses a special kind of absent-mindedness in men and in events" (Henri Bergson, Laughter [1900], in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher [1956; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980], 117). For the social uses and humanist values of laughter, see also 145 and 187.
6. The exchange between Murray and Lafourcade on the relevance of Bergson is typical insofar as it sidetracks into subtle but largely irrelevant distinctions on the idea of the "absurd"; see Robert Murray, "'Our Wild Body': Lewis's Forgotten Essay," Enemy News 14 (summer 1981): 15-17, and Bernard Lafourcade, "The Wild Body, Bergson, and the Absurd," Enemy News 15 (winter 1982): 23-25. The critical literature on modernist comedy is far from extensive. A fairly standard assumption is that modernism and comedy, at least in the traditional sense, are antithetical. This view is put forward by Laura Mooneyham, "Comedy Among the Modernists: P. G. Wodehouse and the Anachronism of Comic Form," Twentieth Century Literature 40 (spring 1994): 114-38, where the conventional comic rhythm of problem and reprieve is seen to belong to a vision of life no longer tenable. The main problem with this view is of course the undeclared assumption that there is a single sensibility in modernism; it seems more helpful to think of individual variations of certain basic premises about comedy.
7. Wagner, Wyndham Lewis, 230. That Lewis represents no significant reorientation of Bergson's comic philosophy is the argument repeated frequently by Wagner, 215-30.
8. The modern intellectual culture of idéologie is set out in the introductory chapter of my Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9-42. In the present essay I develop this background toward an idea of the comic not advanced in that study, where the chapter on Lewis focuses nearly exclusively on his political and fictional writing in the years between the two world wars.
9. See Remy de Gourmont, Le Problème du style (1902; Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), esp. 33, 37-38; idem, L'Esthétique de la langue Française (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), esp. 279-80, 288, and 315-16; and Julien Benda, Belphégor, trans. S. J. I. Lawson (New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929), esp. 90, 122, and 143-44.
10. The phrase is from Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour , I, iv.
11. That Lewis knew the work of de Gourmont and Benda (and Georges Sorel) during his Paris years is an assertion made without proof by Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 15-16; on this question it is important to note that Frederick Tarr, the Englishman and double of Lewis in Paris in Tarr, moves almost exclusively through a community of expatriates and makes virtually no contact with local French intellectual culture, let alone the signal res named by Meyers.
12. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up-To-Date (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 117.
13. Lewis discusses this work in 1935 in "Beginnings" (WB, 373-74), where he claims it as his first piece of fictional writing; it was left unpublished in 1909, possibly because it had not reached completion, and it appeared only in 1927. I believe the story to have been unrevisable at that later date. It had to appear as initially conceived, in line with the intensities and enthusiasms of that early moment: the absolute centrality not only of the death fetish but of the acoustic sublime in that re made this piece unamenable to the sort of revision Lewis carried out on other early stories.
14. See my Radical Modernism, 91-139, esp. 99-105.
.
The artist of the modern movement is a savage . . . this enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man.
--Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1
Mr. Bell assures us that Mr. Wyndham Lewis's art is practically independent of "association or suggestion." Obviously if this means anything it is that this gifted painter's art means nothing. Humanly speaking it is impossible for a man to picture things that are associated with nothing, suggested by nothing, and which suggest nothing.
--C. H. Collins Baker, "Post-Impressionist Prefaces," Saturday Review 9 November 1912
Among those blessed in Blast were George Robey, Shirley Kellogg, Harry Weldon, George Mozart, and Gaby (Deslys). 1 Wyndham Lewis is nevertheless not a painter we associate with the music hall (like Walter Sickert or Spencer Gore). If an affection for certain kinds of popular culture (cabaret, revue, boxing, early Chaplin films) parallels the interests of cubists and Futurists and sits well with the polemics of Blast, it seems to have little to do with the art: with Kermesse, for instance, considered one of the first cubist paintings in England and "a landmark in the development of modernist painting in Britain." 2 I want to argue on the contrary that Kermesse and its studies were richly suggestive and their associations locatable, and that the artist of the modern movement--though he might see himself as a primitive mercenary in the iron jungle of the modern city--was also an armchair flâneur at the Alhambra who riffled through the Tatler at the breakfast table. This "enormous, jangling, journalistic, fairy desert of modern life" was the social and discursive space of popular entertainment--"of music halls and motor-buses and women's legs in tights and newspapers and electric sky-signs spelling out words letter by letter"--rather than the direct expression of the industrialized modernity that underpinned it. 3
Lewis dated his maturity as a painter to 1912, to the year of Kermesse and its studies, the Timon series, and paintings exhibited at the second Post-Impressionist exhibition, including Creation and Mother and Child. 4 "Kermesse" is the term for a peasant fair or carnival in the Low Countries, one characterized by boisterous merry-making. 5 Kermesse was important to him: it was very large (nearly nine foot square), it was several times repainted and exhibited to some réclame, and Lewis himself at a moment of sober stocktaking considered it the touchstone of his prewar achievement. 6 It is probably the major loss among his early paintings and Lewis would not have balked at its landmark status. But it was more than a staging-post en route to abstraction. It was also "of" something, something that resides not in "what it depicts or resembles" but in what it is "causally related to or determined by"; its imagery and modernist handling served Lewis's private purposes as well as his professional ambitions. 7 More generally, the case of Lewis invites us to reconsider the tangled relations between popular culture and the prewar avant-gardes. These relations are usually conceived in one-way terms as a popular response to the avant-garde (where outrage or satire is the sine qua non of radical status), or an avant-garde address to the popular (where strategic raids on mass culture secure the vigor and modernity of a new cultural elite). But something more complicated seems to have gone on, something that partially undermined the high/low divide and involved the new fashionability both of popular forms like music-hall revue and of marginal forms like avant-garde art. Ragtime, Post-Impressionism, Futurism, and the tango craze excited a broad slice of the social spectrum, jostled for space in the newspapers with suffragette militancy and industrial unrest, and were often discussed in reciprocal terms ("Futurist politics," "ragtime painting," "anarchy in high art"). Social spaces (the salon, the gallery, the music hall, the studio, the bar), agents and networks of relations (between colleagues, rivals, patrons, critics, curators, dealers), formal and informal institutions and events (the Slade, the Café Royal, the Cabaret Theatre Club, the Omega Workshops, the Rebel Art Centre, the Post-Impressionist exhibitions, Ethel Levey in Hullo Ragtime!, Sergey Diaghilev at Covent Garden, F. T. Marinetti at the Coliseum): all these produced a world in which subjectivities, social relations, works of art, and aesthetic programs were being constantly and reciprocally retuned. 8 Perhaps this happens anyway, under modern conditions, but the process is at this moment newly self-conscious and peculiarly vivid. We can neither dissolve the art object back into the full complexity of its social context, hoping to rediscover it in its full historicity--context, like semiosis, is a story without end--nor offer an exhaustive account of its causes inferred from a reading of the object as "effect." In the case of Lewis, however, we can at least track some of the traffic between painting and performance, between the studio and the outside world (including the avant-garde as a phenomenon in the public world of newspapers, cabaret, decor, and fancy dress), between high culture and popular entertainment, between modernism and masculinity.
Many of Lewis's prewar works take dance as an explicit theme or a covert resource, a fact that should be taken a great deal more seriously than it is. The variety and significance of Edwardian dance forms, however, has been wildly underrated. The impact of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet has been allowed to eclipse the reputations of their contemporaries (many of them women) and the influence of eurhythmics, popular and vernacular dance forms, and dance in music-hall revue. Edward Marsh, an early patron of Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer, and Duncan Grant, certainly went to see Vaslav Nijinsky, but he also went ten times to Hullo Ragtime! at the Alhambra, often in the company of Rupert Brooke. 9 They would have heard Ethel Levey's rendition of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, presumably the inspiration for the painting by Christopher Nevinson, reproduced upside down in the Daily Sketch in October 1913 ("to show that it doesn't matter"), and described as "certainly ragtime art." 10 Marsh was one of those dragooned by Lady Muriel Paget into wearing the costumes she had commissioned from Nevinson and Lewis for the Futurism tableaux at the Albert Hall Picture Ball in December 1913. That he wore such a costume (and what D. H. Lawrence thought about it) we know from his biography, but the little we know of its appearance derives from photographs published in the Sketch. 11
It is now a commonplace that the early years of the twentieth century were marked by accelerating modernization in all the technological and social meanings of the term and that a single generation encountered the internal combustion engine, the radio, the telephone, the gramophone, aeroplanes, and the cinema. One of the less remarked but more influential developments was the introduction of photography into the mass-circulation dailies and weeklies of the period. 12 These had always been illustrated, if at all, with engravings. The half-tone reproduction process brought not just a change of technique but a change in content and impact. The photograph had a different kind of detail and immediacy, and lent itself to that promiscuous collage of items that makes up the substance of magazines like the Tatler, the Bystander, or the Sketch. This immediacy was enhanced in contemporary advertising and in the cinema actualités that formed a popular part of the music-hall program, and it was exploited both by the "invented traditions" of the establishment and the political tactics of contemporary pressure groups. This new photographic hegemony, if we can call it that, marks a key moment in the consolidation of a spectacular society: not just a society saturated with images, or with spectacles of different kinds--the audience for which was massively extended by photographic reproduction, mass literacy, and the huge circulations of the halfpenny papers--but a "society of the spectacle" in Guy Debord's sense, a society in which social relations are mediated through spectacle. 13
Art--although in many debates a term that acted as a repository for everything immutable and transcendent, the principal signifier of what could not be brought down to the terms of technological progress or the vested interests of politics or the marketplace--was itself caught up in the processes of modernization (and modern reproduction). Avant-garde artists particularly, shorn of the forms of patronage that kept society portraitists, the genre painters, academicians--or for that matter the New English Art Club--afloat, nevertheless had to make their reputations and their livings. They were notorious in a new way, partly by accident and partly by design, partly because their works confounded established criteria of competence and partly because they were (prepared to be) fodder for a voracious press that could now print photographs of their paintings, sometimes sideways or upside down. "Modern art" became a subcategory of the editor's repertoire of humorous, topical, or scandalous images, and labels like "Post-Impressionist," "cubist," or "Futurist" caused "copy to foam up under the pen like paper in a conjurer's hat to overflowing." 14
At the same time as artists like Lewis reacted to what they perceived as the "feminization" and "bourgeoisification" of art--and perhaps for this reason--they were seeking a living from wealthy, aristocratic, female patrons, some of them not averse to a certain butch allure, who wanted dining rooms, fancy dresses, and party favors in avant-garde styles. Contrary to the popular trope of the embattled avant-garde, the avant-garde was briefly and--on certain terms, it is true--fashionable. 15 Nevinson refers to lectures and soirées attended by prewar Society and "one hundred and one Guardees and Guinnesses"; 16 and Lewis to the years when "Coronetted envelopes showered into my letter-box." 17 In the Tatler the avant-garde rubs shoulders with the aristocracy, with sportsmen and adventurers, popular entertainers, dancers, and music-hall artists. Futurism, in effect, offered to broker relations between them. It produced a frenzied, self-consciously modern imagery of railway stations and states of mind, of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee or The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico. 18 It transformed the avant-garde artist into a sportsman-adventurer in the grip of technophiliac lust--a new prototype of masculinity roaring away from the fin de siècle in a gobble and whirr of pistons and propellers--and simultaneously into a performer (even a music-hall performer) in an ambiguous embrace of the demotic. Futurism offered newspaper readers a new entertainment, entertainers a topic for popular satire, the avant-garde a newly bombastic self-image, and a few aristocratic patrons a celebrity based not on birth, wealth, or attainment but on consumption and taste: an identity, indeed, derived from association with the avant-garde and from being seen as a consumer of outré commodities in the popular press. For those who chose to respond to it, from principle or expediency, this was a new, if compromised, space in which to operate. 19
We can bring these relations into sharper focus by looking at the studies associated with Kermesse--the painting itself was sold at auction in 1927 and disappeared after 1930--and at the kinds of performance in which they were implicated. 20 Take, first, Lewis's Lovers ( 1), a work on paper of 1912, 21 and its remarkable similarity to a photograph published in J. E. Crawford Flitch's Modern Dancing and Dancers ( 2). 22 Lewis's image may have been based on the photographs in Flitch, and certainly they reference the same event and the same way of choreographing relations between couples who in Lewis's title are specifically "Lovers." 23 But in what sense are studies like Lovers--including the Yale Kermesse (M72), Design for a Programme Cover--Kermesse (M52), and The Dancers (Study for Kermesse?)--"of" the dance? And of which dance? And what was the referent and work of "the dance" in Lewis's pictorial strategies?
The Flitch illustration is a photograph of Fred Farren and Beatrice Collier performing the "Danse des Apaches" from A Day in Paris, a ballet that opened at the Empire music hall in London on 19 October 1908 and continued well into 1909. 24 Paris was easily accessible yet peculiarly exotic: a place where tourism was not just a matter of viewing the principal monuments, collections, and promenades, but of experiencing a social and sexual geography of brasseries, cafés, markets, studios, dance halls, music halls and cabarets, all of them linked to an ethnography of writers, painters, students, dancers, clowns, prostitutes, gangsters, and grisettes. A Day in Paris revelled in the tourist's city. Its scenes were set in the Place de l'Opéra, on the quais, in the Champs Elysées, outside the Moulin Rouge, and inside the Artists' Ball. Its cast of characters included a panoply of Parisian types and the Bullivant Smiths, tourists from Brixton, whose visit provided the narrative conceit. The audience could revel in the myth of "Gay Paree"--the Paris of Trilby, the Moulin Rouge, and La Vie de Bohème--or affect a knowing distance from it by finding the tourists amusing. As Max Beerbohm observed in his column in the Saturday Review, Paris was now a pasteboard parody of its former glories: "All reality seems to have gone out of it, leaving only a hard artificial glare for the bedazzlement of tourists." It was "less like a city than a stage set": bohemia was dead. 25
The sensation of the evening was the "Danse des Apaches." The Times suggested that "for this alone A Day in Paris is well worth seeing"; it was rapidly written up, photographed, and caricatured in the press, in addition to being widely imitated. 26 (By February 1909, the Tatler observed that "at the present time--such is the penalty of success--the apache dance finds a place on nearly every music-hall programme throughout the country.") 27 More securely to the point, perhaps, than the comparison of Lovers with the photograph in Flitch, is the parallel between Lewis's characteristic aura of erotic menace and this account of the dance's emotional temperature:
The cold, compelling cruelty of everything he did, the calculated brutality to the girl who adored him for it, was a thing of great artistry, because the passion of the man for the girl he half strangled and threw about, was allowed to throb through in the most subtle and amazing way. Every movement, every poise, every piece of seeming brutality registered and was from the miming and dancing point of view, a work of art . . . such things come but once in a lifetime and the Apache Dance filled the Empire for months and still glows in the memory. 28
"Apaches" was a term coined in 1902 by the journalist Authur Dupin for the "savages" of the Parisian underclass: tribes of unemployed, violent, criminal hooligans with "the manners of the apaches, of the Far-West, the native scum of our civilisation." 29 In the early months of 1902 the headlines were filled with the vendetta between Manda and Leca, the leaders of rival apache bands, and in particular with accounts of an affray in broad daylight on 5 January, which left the rue Planchat splattered with blood and strewn with knives, axes, and revolvers. 30 Lewis himself lived for several years in the vicinity of the Montparnasse territory fought over by the gangs of "la Mouffe" and "la Maube." Like Augustus John and Christopher Nevinson (known in Montmartre as "l'apache qui rit" [PP, 65]), he had first-hand knowledge of the Paris apaches. 31 In Blast Lewis blessed Paris specifically for the "BALLADS of its PREHISTORIC APACHE Superb hardness and hardiesse of its Voyou type, rebellious adolescent" (an implicit riposte to the "BRITANNIC AESTHETE . . . SNEAK AND SWOT OF THE SCHOOL-ROOM"). 32 But the image of Lovers comes via the stage, not direct from the street.
From 1902 to 1914 the Parisian papers were constantly exercised by the problem of apaches. A major campaign in Le Matin (probably intended to counter liberal moves to abolish the guillotine) peaked in 1907. 33 In 1907 and 1908 Lewis was living in Paris while Max Dearly was choreographing his new Revue de la femme. The apaches in a sense were already "spectacular": each band distinguished itself in a particular way, though sharing a propensity for peaked caps or melon hats, pomaded hair and kiss-curls, collarless shirts with vivid silk neckerchiefs, and elaborate footwear (CO, 40). The violent, amoral, and flamboyant re of the apache condensed a range of social anxieties while offering what the image of the gangster has always offered: a seductive, unfettered masculinity, the revenge of the outcast on bourgeois propriety. Manda, Leca, and Amélie Hélie ("Casque d'Or"), the object of their affections, became household names and even folk-heroes. The beau monde flocked to see Leca and his apaches arrive at the cabaret of Le Bruyant Alexandre where Casque d'Or had been booked as a chanteuse. The Bouffes-du-Nord offered her a contract to star in a production of Casque d'Or et les Apaches. She was painted by Albert Dupré for the Salon and photographed by the Pirou studios for portrait cartes de visite wearing a pearl-grey costume and ostrich-feather hat. Her memoirs were published in serial form in the fortnightly Fin-de-Siècle. She had a starring role at the trial of Manda and his associates in May 1902, when the elegance of the public galleries rivalled that of a theatrical first night. 34
The apaches shared with even impoverished working-class Parisians a passion for dancing. 35 The bals of Montmartre and Montparnasse were legendary. What became known as the danse des apaches was not, however, the vernacular expression of a Parisian subculture, despite being occasionally taken as such. In fact it was wholly the invention of Max Dearly for a revue at the Moulin Rouge. 36 He danced it with Mistinguett, the stage name for Jean Bourgeois, as part of a show called La Revue de la femme, starting a vogue that first reached London in Fred Farren's choreography for A Day in Paris in 1908, in a scene set in the Moulin Rouge, and lasted into the 1950s.