Blasting and Bomardiering

by Wyndham Lewis

  If we were in a taxicab with James Joyce, out he would spring in front of us. And before even we reached the pavement the fare was settled and the cabman was pocketing a disproportionately massive tip: whereas in a cafe no beer or coffee, whoever had ordered it, was ever paid for by anyone but the eminent recipient of the parcel of old shoes. Nor was there any means, whether that of physical violence or urgent persuasion, to redress this in the long run most burdensome balance in favour of us.

  We had to pay his 'Irish pride' for the affair of the old shoes. That was it! He would not let us off. He was entirely unrelenting and we found it impossible to outmanoeuvre him.

  Eliot and myself agreed that short of paying for meals before they were ordered, or knocking Joyce down every time he rushed forward to settle the taxicab fare, and holding him down while the other paid, there was no means of escaping. Ours was the female role of economic exemption, with its attendant humiliation, if regarded from the ancient standpoint of masculine convention. When alone with me Joyce would occasionally relax to the extent of allowing me to pay for an occasional drink of my own, never his, however. And even this was much later on.

  Towards T. S. Eliot Joyce maintained a punctilious reserve. In alluding to him, with me, he would say 'Your friend Mr. Eliot,' as if Eliot had been an obscure family friend, with whom I happened to be travelling, and who, out of polite humanity, must be suffered to accompany us. As to mentioning his writings, or as to ever a passing reference to him as a poet— that was the last thing that it ever occurred to Joyce to do, it seemed. Eliot perhaps had been accepted as the messenger sent by Ezra Pound with a pair of old shoes; to whom, if you like, out of courtesy to the good if misguided Ezra, Joyce offered hospitality. I was a different matter. But then, in any case, it

  was not I who had been the bearer of old shoes!

  What part the old shoes really played in the comedy I do not know. Contemptuous, tolerant, discreetly correct, the author of The Portrait of the Artist did not seem best pleased with what was not a pleasantry, but something else, of course— though exactly what it might be I am unable to decide. I do not suppose, for instance, that, in a spirit of heavy mischief, Ezra in fact calculated, in handing Eliot the securely wrapped-up parcel, upon these particular social effects. Or had he perhaps? Why no: it would have taken a different mind from that of Pound to foresee the stilted occasion, the ceremony of the handing over of the brown-paper parcel; that atmosphere of highly continental or cosmopolitan formality, of Irish social pomp, of solemnly-smiling transatlantic reticence, on the part of this biliously handsome paladin, and myself there genuinely uninterested at the unpacking, an unmoved observer! On the contrary I believe this little matter arose from the romantic charity of a man who, on a certain side, is unsusceptible to the influences of the external world of human stimulus and response. It was the work of a charitable egotist.

  When I remarked that James Joyce betrayed no knowledge of the identity of 'Your friend Mr. Eliot', that statement demands some qualification. There was, indirectly, one occasion, during our first meeting, upon which he showed that he was conscious of Eliot's existence, apart from the fact of his happening to be travelling in France in my company.

  This was when, as we sat together in the restaurant to which he had taken us (having breathlessly and with overpowering host-at-all-costly resolution ordered a full-course meal) he said to us—toasting us obliquely and ever so airily as he tasted his Chateau La Tour Rose with lung and tongue at once—'It appears that I have the melancholy advantage of being the eldest of the band,' or words to that effect. Band was not the word, nor group, but I cannot recall it nearer than this. He referred, of course, to the literary band, or group, comprised within the critical fold of Ezra Pound—the young, the 'New', group of writers assembled in Miss Weaver's Egoist just before and during the War. And of course Pound, Joyce, Eliot and myself were all within about five years of each other in the matter of age. At that time I imagine Eliot was about thirty, Joyce about thirty-six and I a year or two younger than him. So far as the classification of people by ages goes, we did certainly make, or we do make if you like a perfect 'age-class'.

  Surely the vanity of classification, however, was never better exemplified, than in the persons of these four Zeitgenossen! We are all familiar with the solemn groupification that occurs every year or so of, usually, a half-dozen 'poets' or artists, introduced to the world by their impresario as the team chosen (by him if not by destiny) to represent the absolutely newest generation. To-day these teams age and disintegrate with alarming rapidity. But new ones take their place. And always the rationale of their assemblage is that their members were all born of women about the same time.

  Well, sure enough, the birth years of Mr. Pound's little circle, including Mr. Pound himself, were 'all sprinkled up and down', as Eliot once remarked to me, 'the Eighties of the last century'. And if being born in a stable makes you a horse, why then being born in the same years is liable, perhaps, to make you an identical human product. A mechanical theory at the best, for the purposes of the literary pigeonholing of a complex society this method is useless. According to this simple-hearted rule, Herr Adolf Hitler is as like as two peas with any Cantonese or Peruvian born at the exact minute of the Eighties of the last Century at which Herr Hitler saw the light—irrespective of place, traditions, individual ancestry, glandular, nervous, and other bodily make-up—race, religion and what not! Here we have the time-philosopher's classification with a vengeance!

  But in the first place, even the time factor does not accord with this classification. In the Atlas Mountains to-day, or in the Tibetan hinterland, the inhabitants are anything but Zeitgenossen of the citizens of Chicago or of Fascist Rome. They are existing in what is the equivalent of our European feudal age. They are the contemporaries of Bayard and La Palice—or of Roland and Oliver—much more than of Litvinov and Count Ciano.

  So, as to the little age-group implicitly recognized in James

  Joyce's remark—with a solemn sidelong wrinkling of the nose and eye, meant for that busy Manager, and propagandist, Ezra —four people more dissimilar in every respect than himself, myself, Pound and Eliot respectively, it would be difficult to find. There is only one sense in which any such a grouping of us acquires some significance—we all got started on our careers before the War. This was, I believe, an advantage. In other respects, Joyce brought up by the Jesuits—in Ireland—in the 'Celtic Twilight'—trained as a medico—thereafter exiled in Trieste and Switzerland, and becoming an Italianate Irishman: what a different set of circumstances are those to the origins for instance and early environment of Eliot? Born under the shadow of the famous New England puritanism, but transplanted to a city south of the Mason and Dixon Line, returning to Harvard and sent into another hemisphere to get a polish at Oxford, and subsequently drafted to Germany to finish this complicated process of training. Hardly can you compel such disparities at all into a class. Substitute place for time, and suppose two people born upon the same square foot of ground, one in the age of William the Conqueror and one in 1937—one a Negro and one a Norman. It would be in vain to classify them according to identity of place, and hope for any fruitful results.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Our Lady of the Sleeping-Cars

  Eliot and myself remained in Paris for some days, I forget how many. All of our time was passed in the hospitable company of James Joyce. Paris might have been his demesne, though he had only been there a month—he only knew a few streets at that period and would lose himself between Invalides and the Chamber of Deputies and was uncertain of his whereabouts even in the Latin Quarter, once he was off his beat.

  Our stay was one long fete. Except for our hotel bill—which he made no attempt, as far as I know, to settle—we lived free of charge. A party would be suggested by us: and although of course Joyce paid for it, it was still our party. And then we could not refuse to accept a return banquet, to cap our banquet; when, in the nature of things, and hoping that this time we migh
t outwit this implacable payer, we proposed yet another meeting—on our own ground, at some restaurant of our own choosing; but always with the same result.

  To the last Eliot was treated distantly, as I have said. And this did not make these transactions any the more palatable for 'poor Tom'.

  'He does not take much notice of me!' he drawled one day, with sardonic resignation, when we were discussing the problem of how to stand our eminent colleague a glass of beer—agreeing, of course, that in fact it was a feat beyond our powers, for, with the best grace we could, we had admitted defeat by this time. 'But you might I should have thought do something about it,' he said, with heavy melancholy mischief.

  'I have expostulated with him in private and in public,' I answered. 'He does not appear to understand. He thinks he is obliged to pay. He has some idea that he must *

  I encountered, a little later on, a similar phenomenon to this in Venice. There I met Mr. Francis Meynell for the first time. I was introduced to him by Osbert Sitwell, at a large cafe in the Square of St. Mark's one evening. There were about ten people at our table I should think, and I was astonished to find after a time that Mr. Meynell always paid for the successive rounds of drinks.

  On expressing some reluctance to continue under this regime of enigmatical patronage, and making some expressive movement, indicative of my intention to break the spell, I was stopped by Osbert Sitwell, who whispered, in a purring, nasal, chuchotement which gives a special flavour to that gentleman's asides, that it was 'no use'.

  This puzzled me still more. And as Osbert Sitwell remarked that I was still not satisfied that all was as it should be, he explained, still under his breath, that Francis Meynell felt obliged, on account of his political opinions, to be responsible for the bill. Mr. Meynell was 'very sensitive' that was all I really understood. He was an outstanding Radical, so it was a case of noblesse oblige.

  The logic of what he told me appeared entirely satisfactory to Osbert Sitwell, and I raised no further objections, though completely mystified.

  Here at all events is what looks like a clear case of the same sort of fixed idea; namely that refreshments must be paid for by one member of a party and by no other member: indeed that drinks must be stood to all within sight: that there is a duty to do so, imposed upon a particular person.

  As to what I am persuaded was the true motive of the embarrassing liberality on the part of James Joyce, to return to that, it never I think, occurred to Eliot to allow for the emotional weight of the Pair of Old Shoes. He put it down to an attack of objectionable openhandedness, to which, as an Irishman, he supposed, Mr. Joyce was probably subject; and which our presence stimulated to an unprecedented degree. Joyce was showing off, he was probably always showing off: and his native aggressiveness caused him to affect to be icily unaware that he was in this way entertaining, nay over-entertaining, an angel, an angelic, an archangelic poet of great promise, with

  a brood of brooding Prufrocks behind him.

  'I find our friend,' said I, 'very affable and easy don't you, if a shade stilted?' But Eliot found him definitely burdensome, and arrogant. Very arrogant.

  'I do not think he is arrogant/ I said, astonished at this description of Pound's proud protege, who seemed to me to be a civil, unassuming man enough, of agreeable and accommodating manners, except for his obsession regarding economic independence, which was harmless after all. If he really got a kick out of dashing on the tips of the little patent leather shoes (so unlike those delapidated stogies dispatched by Ezra) towards the desk of a restaurant and putting us under obligations, according to suburban money-canons, well, there was no great harm at all.

  'He may not seem so!' Eliot answered, in his grim Bostonian growl. 'He may not seem arrogant, no.'

  'You think he is as proud as Lucifer?'

  'I would not say Lucifer!' Eliot was on his guard at once, at this loose use of the surname of the Evil Principle.

  'You would not say Lucifer? Well I daresay he may be under the impression that he is being "as proud as Lucifer", or some bogtrotting humbug of that order. What provincials they are, bless their beastly brogues!'

  'Provincials—yes!' Eliot agreed with contemptuous unction. 'Provincials.'

  'However he is most polite.'

  'He is polite.'

  'I have never succeeded in getting out of the door behind him, have you? He is very You First. He is very After you!'

  'Oh yes. He is polite, he is polite enough. But he is exceedingly arrogant. Underneath. That is why he is so polite. I should be better pleased if he were less polite.' Eliot was very grim.

  'I personally don't care if he is arrogant—all I ask, in the words of the New England literary chanty, is "a litde god-darned seevility and not much of that!" But I should be surprised if he is really arrogant.'

  'No-o?' Eliot was impressed by my persistence. 'You may of course be right. It doesn't matter.'

  'Not much really.'

  I puzzled over this charge of 'arrogance'—it was quite a new reading for me of this perhaps after all enigmatical discovery of Ezra's, who only a few hours before had sung us a love song, all about a young lady who was ill, who indeed was dying, whose death would be the heartbreak, the despair, of the male voice, all of the most disarming passionate bel canto.— I could not see, frankly, where the arrogance came in. This Dublin gondolier might be poor and proud, but he could not be arrogant. That did not go with gondolier.

  There was one occasion when Joyce did not pay for our food; but that was because it was not in a restaurant but in a private house. It was when he took us to the house of a friend of his, a Belgian journalist. This Belgian journalist's name it will not be necessary to mention, but a French mulatto lived at his flat as the lover of his wife, so he said, and he was very ribald in our presence about it.

  'Daniel, vous savez, couche avec ma femme!' he announced at lunch. 'Ah salaud va!' he apostrophized the mulatto. 'Dis! Tu couches avec ma femme, n'est ce pas, Daniel?'

  We looked astonished, out of politeness. Joyce raised his eyebrows with extreme detached urbanity, and most courteously wrinkled up his brow in a bland perplexity.

  'Mais oui!' our host continued, noting our response. 'She doesn't want me to say that, but he does sleep with her all the same. Isn't it true Daniel, you old blackguard? Isn't it true? Don't you sleep with my wife? Of course you do.'

  Daniel, the mulatto cuckoo-in-the-nest, who worked as a clerk in the War Ministry, and was a small quiet, dark-com-plexioned gentleman, of the most correct abord, turned upon the dully-blushing french Hausfrau, expostulating.

  'Mais non, mais quoi! c'est trop fort! Ecoutez Madame!' he began to protest, without disturbing himself very much it is true. 'Cannot you contrive to prevent your husband from making these assertions?'

  'Moi!' the wife asked. eMoi!'—pointing helplessly at a comfortable Eighteenth Century bust that protruded over her plate. 'Do so if you can yourself monsieur. Don't ask me to I beg of you!'

  The husband was jubilant. He laughed like a cuckolded hyena. With a crazy zest at the exposure of this curious little triangle which he sheltered beneath his roof, he plunged into analysis. At all costs he must show off the curiosities of this exotic minage a trois.

  'Do you know why Daniel appeals to her?' he shouted at us, beaming fiercely upon his wife. 'Can you guess how it is he comes to fascinate her?9

  We sat abashed, conveying by our silence that we were incapable of hazarding a guess.

  'Can't you see? It is plain enough however. C'est parcequ'il est negre! Evidement! It is because he is a nigger!'

  He threw himself back in his chair to enjoy our discomfiture at this masterly solution of the conundrum. He carried his eyes from the downcast face of Daniel, busy with his food, to ours, likewise evading his triumphant stare.

  'They all fall for niggers. All! No it is no use protesting Emmeline! They are all the same. All women. Yes—and those who protest most that they have a horror of a horrid black skin —they are those who secretly like nig
gers the best! It's a fact.'

  Daniel half rose in his place, waving a napkin, as if as a signal of distress.

  'Ma-dame!' he vociferated indignantly. 'Really your husband to-day is beside himself! Can you do nothing about him? Is it impossible to curb him?'

  'Quite impossible, as you know,' the wife answered. 'He is incorrigible. It is ces messieurs that excite him. I have never seen him so excited.'

  'Nor I—happily!' Daniel shrugged his strictly horizontal African shoulders, and slowly resumed his seat, with a sedate moue, and en hochant la tete, casting a rapid glance of comprehensive protest which included us. As if we, as guests, were en fin de compte, in some way responsible for our host. He may have considered that we were encouraging him. I alone responded to this uncalled for glance of the outrageous mulatto,

  who, as a fact, was merely a colonial French metis, or an African Jew, from Alexandria perhaps.

  'Our host is wrong about the negro,' I remarked.

  'How wrong!' roared the Belgian, in indignant amazement. 'How am I wrong?'

  'Some women prefer blonds,' I replied.

  'Jamais!'

  'It is only the Blond Beasts among our Frauenzimmer who care for the Black Man,' I declared.

  'Tu as tort! Ah! Mais tu as tort!'

  'No. Your wife is of a type who prefers a barbers-block in sugar-blond, complete with lemon moustaches of spun silk. That is her type. I do not say she does.'

  The Belgian was uproariously grateful for this contribution to the discussion.

  'My wife? A blond? She vomits at a blond!' he stormed. 'She loves only the tang of the African integument. A dash of the tar brush she insists on. It is a fact.'

  'He is mad!' remarked his wife.

  'And yet all the time she affects to find niggers repulsive! You will not credit it. And what is more, she believes what she says! That is what is extremely curious.' He gloated over this paradox. 'She really is persuaded that all coloured men are distasteful to her! N'est ce pas, c'est curieux? It is odd is it not? Tiens! I would not mind betting—I will swear she was surprised just now to hear that she slept with Daniel. Yes yes! She does not know that she does. I will swear it. She is hardly conscious of it. She thinks he lives here because he is a friend of mine. But he—Daniel now, he knows all about it. He is deep, is Daniel.—Thou art deep, is it not, Daniel! Speak!'