Blasting and Bomardiering

by Wyndham Lewis

  A certain Bob MacAlmon I got to know about that time. He was a young American model and poet, who married Sir John Ellerman's daughter. I got, through him, when I went in his company to the black-bearded Sir John Ellerman's, a glimpse of the household of the richest of the rich. This shipping magnate seemed a very nervous man: for all the herds of Highland Cattle browsing above his staircases, no placidity was discernible in the atmosphere of that interior.

  Sir John Ellerman's fellow-magnate, Workman, on the other hand, whose house round the corner, with its windows in Park Lane, I often visited, was quite different. In that house, too, there were Highland Cattle. But a slumbrous calm obtained. With three liveried menservants at lunch incessantly pouring out champagne, from the most sedative Caledonian intonations that have ever massaged my ears, one obtained all the advantages of an all-too-brief Lochside holiday. And yet in this mansion there were more exciting things than Highland Cattle, for Mrs. Workman (of whom I did an excellent portrait) was one of the only people in England to understand French painting, of which she had some remarkably fine specimens.

  It was no doubt the greater cultivation that was productive of the superior calm. The moral is I think that there is no short cut, by way of Highland Cattle. The more exciting type of art has the more sedative effect—combined with a scottish accent. A Renoir or two and a Picasso secure poise. But not your faith in potboiling bucolics.

  CHAPTER VI

  cDeath to Mussoliniy

  A mgjji hurried into my workshop sat down, wrenched from his pocket a portentous cheque book a foot long, unrolled it, flung it open, produced a fountainpen and cried :

  'What shall I make this out for Mr. Lewis?'

  His name was either Boni, or Liveright—or perhaps both. He was a New York publisher.

  I was taken aback, so I said, 'What for?'

  'Have you anything to sell?' he asked peremptorily.

  I said there was much that I should be prepared to sell, indeed, very few things that I wouldn't, but the question was, what did he want to buy?

  'Have you a book to sell?' he shouted.

  I shook my head.

  'A book, no.' I said.

  'That's too bad,' he remarked, pitching his voice back into the key of everyday at once and with some difficulty getting the cheque-book back into his pocket.

  You may have been wondering when or how I wrote my books. With this plethora of small portraits this ca|phave been none too easy, one would say. My pen had not, however, been idle. Actually at the moment I had books, or the manuscript of them, within a few feet of where I stood. But they were not for sale.

  It was not my wish at this time to either publish or exhibit. If my money had lasted, I should have done no portraits. I should probably have gone nowhere and seen no one. But it is difficult to remain underground, unless you are a mole, without any money.

  . What I had in my drawer was a book called Hoadipip. And I had parts of another called Joint! Neither "saw the light, but these were the first approaches to yet another composition, of a later date, called The Childermass. Half of that has been published.

  This 'post-war' was full of work for me, for which I had not much to show. But until 1926, when my career proper began as a writer, my life was a private one. What I have undertaken to write here has no concern with an existence that was so private that only two or three people ever saw what was done in it, or knew in fact how I spent my time.

  My next public appearance that I can call to mind was at Venice. The malodorous lagoons and rios of that aquatic ruin was filling up with the Septembrini, as the Venetians used to call them—herds of lipsticked Nancyish nobodies, who put in an appearance at the commencement of September.

  The date of this visit is easy to check, because it was a few weeks before Mussolini's March on Rome. The hoardings lavatories, and railway stations had everywhere chalked slogans —'Death to Mussolini!' and counter-claptrap. But pickets and posses of militant blackshirts, fascist bands, with clubs and knives, clattered about on all hands. They were the modern equivalents of the 'prentices of London': cobblers, barbers, watchmakers and young watermen.

  These portents meant nothing to me. I would have drawn them, if they had stopped still, but I did not eye them as an alert historian. They interested me no more than the first batches of Septembrini, if as much.

  When I?|ound myself in Berlin, a long time after that—a year before Hitler came into power—I was determined not to be caught napping a second time. To the crack of revolver shots, and to the thunder of the charge of Gryzinski's botde-green police, clubbing the Nazi crowds, I lent an attentive ear. I set down my impressions—as a spectator, not as a partisan. But everybody in England at that time was determined to lend a deaf ear to those momentous sounds nearer home. I was laughed at and told I was dreaming. Had I ridiculed what I saw, assured the public that Hitlerism would be as dead as the Dodo within six months, I should have been complimented on my penetration and sense of reality.—A pity we should always

  want to hear what corresponds to our wishes and prejudices!

  So had I in Venice been able to foresee that some day I should be reading, in common with the whole of Europe, of the exploits of the 'Black Arrow' brigade at Bilbao, the Italian fascist legion, I should have paid far more attention to these excited bands of fanfaronading youths. I shared to some extent the anglo-saxon attitude of my companions, that these were political amusements of the dagolands, as tiresome as our football and cricket. Yet I was very observant and I cannot understand how I can have missed the meaning of all this.

  Even when, a year later, people in London used to discuss Mussolini and dismiss him as 'the Kerensky of the Italian Revolution', and say that he would only be there a few months longer, when the communists would take his place, I had no opinion to offer one way or the other.

  The sort of politician the War had made me was a straight 'leftwinger', as it would now be called. There were no complications, if you understand me. There were the Rich and the Poor, and the former massacred the latter in wars, to fill their pockets. That I was far too humane to accept as proper behaviour. Of course I knew that the term 'the Rich' was analysible in various ways. I had some understanding of the complexities. But I had not advanced far enough in those investigations to make head or tail of such an elaborate piece of political mechanism as Mussolini.

  This ex-communist blacksmith, whom Lenin described as the ablest of all Italian communists, who was about to establish what we now know as 'fascism', was entirely over my head. Had I known then of his theory of checks—namely that it was undesirable that any class should be in a position of ascendancy—I should have known better where I was. For English political philosophy is full of these compromise gadgets, of the golden mean. But neither I nor any one else had at that time heard of those theories.

  So I found myself on the spot, in the first stages of the Fascist Revolution in Italy, without the least suspicion of anything unusual being afoot.

  CHAPTER VII

  A Duel of Draughtsmanship in post-war Venice

  'He's the boy who's got Clouds!'

  A very tall figure was sauntering off (this is still in Venice) a man with a dimpled chin and fine brown eyes, which were a little those of a big child which looked out upon a nice but annoying world. He had just been standing over us, talking to Hugo Rumbold, who had been stammering away and convulsing our cafe-party. Hugo was a private clown who was literally worth his weight in gold. When we asked him who it was, that was Hugo's answer: 'Oh, he's the boy who's got Clouds.'

  The others seemed mildly surprised that he should have got Clouds, although Nancy Cunard said—'Of course! I ought to have known!' By this she apparently meant that he was the sort of boy who gets Clouds and that she, with her extensive experience of such boys, ought to have spotted him as a Cloud-boy at first sight.

  Richard, or more familiarly 'Dick' Wyndham, was with Hugo, it was later discovered. What I liked about Dick Wyndham was the attractive candour and absence of
vulgarity which made him seem almost like a nice workman among all these 'clever' people. He was the nephew of the distinguished late-Victorian dilettante, George Wyndham—and so a descendant, but with a bar sinister, of the famous Lord Egremont, who was the patron of Turner, and a great name in the world of painting. Hence 'Clouds': it is a house, and he'd just been left it by George Wyndham.

  At that time Dick was the simple soldier rather. I taught him how to sketch Venetian palaces—the fingers of one hand grasping the pencil and the fingers of the other grasping the nose, as all the best palaces are washed by cesspools. From this little seed has flowered the Richard Wyndham of to-day, whose pictorial achievements require no introduction from me.

  Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell were both there, the pleasant corpulence of the former vibrating to the impact of his own and Hugo's pleasantries; Sacheverell with the look of sedate alarm which at that period was characteristic of him. We would meet in the cafe every day. Eventually Bob MacAlmon turned up too.

  An impromptu combat was arranged in the cafe one night, when an Italian painter challenged me to a match of draughtsmanship. Egged on by the Sitwells, I took him on. William Walton—now the premier composer of Britain—was the object chosen for the exercise of our skill. Walton sat with his head on the plush back of the seat and we drew him.

  I won this match hands down. The Italian was crestfallen, but he had to admit defeat. And had I been living in Rome in the time of Caravaggio I should have been knifed that night as I went home, for a certainty, for muscling in on a pitch where I didn't belong. My antagonist was called Pietro di Cortina, quite in the old style. A rather romantic episode.

  I had gone to Venice at the invitation of Nancy Cunard, the daughter of Lady Cunard, to do her portrait, and was stopping in her palace. (Palace sounds very grand, but any big house is a palace practically.) Nancy Cunard I had first met when she was a debutante before the War, in the house of the Countess of Drogheda off Belgrave Square. She was very American and attractive after the manner of the new World, rather than the Old. She is still all this, and has been on the Aragon Front helping the Catalans to repel the attack of the 'Rebels', whether successfully or not it is impossible to say at present.

  Venice was very 'post-war'. It was typical of the time that anyone so sensitive to the trembling of the political veil as myself should have been able to remain mesmerized by Hugh Rumbold's intoxicating stammer, in an orgy of laughter, while Rome was burning (or rather being seized for Fascism). The communists and the fascists were already spitting and fighting all round us. How was it I was so hard of hearing? I will tell you. My political education, begun in the War, was not yet complete. I do not think that until the General Strike (1926) I finally discarded my anglo-saxon aversion for these plebian problems.

  Another 'Post-war' excursion of mine was a notable visit to Paris in the company of Charles Rutherston and Frank Dobson, the sculptor. My days were spent with Rutherston and Dobson, visiting collections of Chinese art, my nights with James Joyce; an exquisitely balanced arrangement. 'The Dante of Dublin', as Mr. Gogarty calls him, cast a dreamy spell over Paris-by-night, and Sung and Ming weighed in, in the daytime, with their more subtle spell.

  Sometimes, however, there was no day for me at all: only night. Once I had been up all night, for about the third time in succession, and I became entranced. Rutherston came into my darkened bedchamber to fetch me as usual about lunch time, and found me stretched out upon my back apparently dead, my hands together on my chest like a crusader. He gave a passable imitation of the last trump, he told me, but I did not move a muscle. I was deadly pale he said, and entirely like a statue or a corpse. So he left me. This alcoholic trance endured until the following morning. All this was bad for Joyce's rheumatic eyes, and Mrs. Joyce objected to my presence in Paris then. She thought I led the 'Dante of Dublin' astray. But we made our peace later on.

  The 'post-war', as I lived it, would be incomplete without Garsington, where I made a public appearance. Garsington was where Lady Ottoline Morrell lived, not far from Oxford. At week-ends forty or fifty undergraduates would come over for an all-day party, and week-end guests of Lady Ottoline would encounter this horde of the 'academic youth' of England. I met Forster there as a fellow guest, the 'Bloomsbury novelist'. A quiet little chap, of whom no one could be jealous, so he hit it off with the 'Bloomsburies', and was appointed male opposite number to Virginia Woolfe. Since then he has written nothing. But the less you write, in a ticklish position of that sort, the better.

  I may include a photograph of myself on the lawn where they played interminable croquet, in conversation with Lord David Cecil and other undergraduates—a post-war vignette. Lady Ottoline herself in the 'post-war' shared with Miss Sitwell the distinction of being the only woman not to succumb to the short-skirt fashion : both stalked about in sweeping trains, to the astonishment of a world which had gone strip-tease. Also the majestic splendour of their personal ornaments added to the general confusion in their neighbourhood.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Lawrence of Arabia

  After Adam and Eve I had a studio in Holland Park. This I rented from George Robey's daughter. Or rather George Robey let it to me, he having rented it for his daughter who was a painter. She was quite unlike her didactic parent—a slight, fair, intelligent face, and quite pretty. (This last is no reflection upon George's personal appearance.)

  One night I was sitting in this studio—a little gloomily for things were not going any too well. I had spent the last of my money and had not yet got the hang of the art-game and such humble money-spinnings as my simple wants prescribe. Outside the wind blew the leaves of Holland Park up and down the street, and within I sat before a fire, giving a companion the benefit of my opinion of sundry aspects of life as lived by the 'creeping Saxon', and wondering whether I should not throw in my lot with Leonce Rosenburg, the Paris dealer. That enlightened Parisian had seen some pictures of mine, and had said to me when I was in Paris: 'Lewis, these things of yours are the only things being done in England to-day which would interest Paris. Give me some of these, as many as you like, and I will sell them for you.' I agreed with my old friend Nina Hamnett that if you have to starve, it's much better to do so in Paris than in London. And I was feeling a certain nostalgia for the quays of the Seine.

  I have never been overburdened with the obvious forms of diffidence and I could at the time have barged my way into Paris. There under the wing of the great Leonce, I might have set the Seine on fire. I should have been the only Anglo-saxon painter who ever set the Seine on fire. Furthermore I should have been free to do what I liked, a thing no artist can do unless he is a rentier in London: Leonce would have egged me on to be more and more diabolically daring and devilishly inventive. Paris would have gasped. At present I should be living in a villa just outside Paris with a Japanese cook and a Zulu butler, with three highyaller kids getting ready to go to Eton. But Fate decided otherwise. Colonel Lawrence the 'uncrowned king of Arabia' broke into this promising dream.

  A knock came at the door. The wind howled, and blew the blowsy leaves of Holland Park against the studio window. My companion and I looked at each other. There was a second knock—a timid knock. I went to the door, half opened it, and went outside on to the steps. These led down to a locked gate. There was a small figure at the bottom of the steps. There was only one way he could have got there and that was over the wall.

  This clearly must be a dun, I thought. That at eight o'clock at night a tradesman's bully should scale my wall and present his bill seemed to me to be pressing too far the privilege of the creditor.

  'Who might you be?9 I enquired, not without a note of sarcasm.

  No reply came from the foot of the steps.

  I descended the steps, a little truculently perhaps, and stood beside the small and unobstrusive figure in a raincoat—hatless and it seemed to me furtive and at the same time odd.

  'Well,' said I. 'I await your explanation. Was it you who knocked upon my door?9
r />   'Yes,' muttered the stranger.

  'I should like to draw your attention to the fact that I rent these premises, that my gate is locked—which signified that I do not desire visitors—and that you are trespassing.'

  'I know,' said this enigmatical person, in a low and gentle voice, turning his head slightly to one side, as if the victim of a slight embarrassment—which did him credit and put me in a better humour.

  'Well,' said I. 'Who are you, anyway?'

  'I am Lawrence,' said he.

  Now for some moments I had been thinking that for a dun he was on the quiet side. And no dun says, 'I am Lawrence,' like that, when you ask him who he is. I had heard, also, that Col. Lawrence wanted to see me. Slowly it dawned on me who my visitor was.

  We were silent for a moment—while none-too-quickly, I was substituting the person of a political martyr for that of an economic thug. Then I took his hand, and apologized for my mistake. He did not come in then: but I saw him the next day and during the next few years I saw a good deal of Lawrence, at odd times. When he came up on leave from the camp where he worked as an aircraftsman, he would call on me, and we would have lunch in a neighbouring tea room.

  At the start I asked him why he was doing what he was doing. He said, what else could he do-—he had no money? I suggested some sinecure, of a minor administrative order, that would leave him free to occupy himself as he wished. But he said he could not do that. He said he could not be a don— he 'knew no latin or greek'; at least not enough to be a don— only the usual amount. He had no income. He had to live. He preferred to remain in the Army. I asked why he could not become an officer, instead of being 'Aircraftsman Shaw'. He said shortly that he was too old.

  The spectacle of this stupid waste of so much ability always depressed me. As he would turn up in his aircraftsman's uniform, having ridden at breakneck speed from Plymouth, or some East Coast Camp, I always felt distressed. It was a sort of hari-kiri that he was indulging in, and this self immolation disturbed me.