VOYAGEUR CLASSICS
BOOKS THAT EXPLORE CANADA
Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor
The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.
This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.
The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.
OTHER VOYAGEUR CLASSICS TITLES
The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Dr.
Collett Tracey 978-1-55002-666-5
Canadian Exploration Literature: An Anthology, edited and introduced by
Germaine Warkentin 978-1-55002-661-0
Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative by Scott Symons,
introduced by Christopher Elson 978-1-55488-457-5
The Donnellys by James Reaney, introduced by Alan Filewod
978-1-55002-832-4
Empire and Communications by Harold A. Innis, introduced by
Alexander John Watson 978-1-55002-662-7
The Firebrand:William Lyon Mackenzie and the Rebellion in Upper Canada
by William Kilbourn, introduced by Ronald Stagg 978-1-55002-800-3
In This Poem I Am: Selected Poetry of Robin Skelton, edited and
introduced by Harold Rhenisch 978-1-55002-769-3
The Letters and Journals of Simon Fraser 1806–1808, edited and introduced
by W. Kaye Lamb, foreword by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-713-6
Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada by Louis Hémon,
translated by W.H. Blake, introduction and notes by Michael
Gnarowski 978-1-55002-712-9
Mrs. Simcoe’s Diary by Elizabeth Posthuma Simcoe, edited and
introduced by Mary Quayle Innis, foreword by Michael Gnarowski
978-1-55002-768-6
Pilgrims of the Wild, edited and introduced by Michael Gnarowski
978-1-55488-734-7
The Refugee: Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada by Benjamin Drew,
introduced by George Elliott Clarke 978-1-55002-801-0
The Scalpel, the Sword: The Story of Doctor Norman Bethune by Ted Allan
and Sydney Ostrovsky, introduced by Julie Allan, Dr. Norman Allan,
and Susan Ostrovsky 978-1-55488-402-5
Selected Writings by A.J.M. Smith, edited and introduced by Michael
Gnarowski 978-1-55002-665-8
Storm Below by Hugh Garner, introduced by Paul Stuewe
978-1-55488-456-8
A Tangled Web by Lucy Maud Montgomery, introduced by Benjamin
Lefebvre 978-1-55488-403-2
The Yellow Briar: A Story of the Irish on the Canadian Countryside by
Patrick Slater, introduced by Michael Gnarowski 978-1-55002-848-5
FORTHCOMING
The Men of the Last Frontier by Grey Owl, introduced by James Polk
978-1-55488-804-7
The Silence on the Shore by Hugh Garner, introduced by George
Fetherling 978-1-55488-782-8
VOYAGEUR CLASSICS
BOOK STHAT EXPLORE CANADA
SELF
CONDEMNED
A NOVEL
WYNDHAM LEWIS
INTRODUCED BY ALLAN PERO
DUNDURN PRESS
TORONTO
Copyright © Dundurn Press, 2010
Introduction copyright © Allan Pero, 2010
Self Condemned was originally published by Methuen & Company in 1954.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
Project Editor: Michael Carroll
Copy Editors: Matt Baker and Nicole Chaplin
Design: Courtney Horner
Printer: Marquis
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Lewis, Wyndham, 1882-1957
Self condemned / by Wyndham Lewis ; introduction by Allan Pero.
ISBN 978-1-55488-735-4
I. Title.
PR6023.E97S4 2010 823'.912 C2010-903915-7
1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
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CONTENTS
Introduction by Allan Pero
Part One The Resignation
I That Other Man Again
II “You Are Not by Any Chance a Fool, My Son?”
III A Taxi Ride and a Dinner at “La Toulousaine”
IV Hester Hears the News
V Idealism Recognized
VI How Victor Saw the Matter
VII Rotter
VIII An Agreeable Dinner Party
IX How Much Can We Afford to Jettison?
X The Passenger Who Wore the Ribbon of the Legion of Honour
Part Two The Room
XI Twenty-Five Feet by Twelve
XII The Hotel and What Contains the Hotel
XIII Affie and the ’Roaches
XIV The Patroness of Rotten Janitors
XV The Marvels of Momaco
XVI The Word “Brute” Is Not Liked in the Beverage Room
XVII Vows of Hardship
XVIII Mr. Furber
XIX The Janitors
XX The Private Life of Bill Murdoch
XXI The Microcosm Becomes an Iceberg
XXII Had I the Wings of the Morning
Part Three After the Fire
XXIII Momaco or London?
XXIV The Party of Superman
XXV Dinner at the McKenzies
XXVI René Becomes a Columnist
XXVII The Black Fly
XXVIII A New Book on the Stocks
XXIX A Chair at Momaco
XXX Police Headquarters
XXXI The White Silence
XXXII The College of the Sacred Heart
XXXIII Return to the Normal
XXXIV The Cemetery of Shells
INTRODUCTION
BY ALLAN PERO
Wyndham Lewis has always been a flashpoint of controversy. A Modernist Renaissance Man, he is as famou
s for his brisk, whiplash line as he is for his satirical, crackling prose. In addition to his achievements as a visual artist, he was a novelist, satirist, philosopher, polemicist, poet, and art critic. He was born in Canada at Amherst, Nova Scotia, on November 18, 1882 (the same year as two of his contemporaries, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf). His father, Charles Lewis, was a wealthy ne’er-do-well who fought on the Union side in the American Civil War. One of the interesting features of the Lewis family is that several of its branches extended from the United States into French Canada. Charles’s brother, William, was a Montreal wine merchant, for whom Charles worked for a time. Lewis’s mother, Anne, was British. Their marriage wasn’t a happy one. After a brief period spent in Canada, the Lewises moved to England, and their young son, then called Percy, attended Rugby (the British preparatory school), and later won a scholarship at the Slade School of Art. These funds came in handy, since Charles Lewis had spent much of the family’s money, having run off with the maid some years earlier. Anne Lewis had been left in straitened circumstances to raise the boy alone.
Lewis quit the Slade in 1902, and for about six years spent his time travelling, studying, and painting in France, Spain, and Germany. Fluent in French, he attended lectures at the Collège de France given by Henri Bergson, a French philosopher then very much in vogue. During this time, Lewis became fascinated by the various artistic modernisms then beginning to emerge — among them, Cubism and Futurism. When he returned to England, he began to publish some stories based on his Continental experiences, which were eventually collected under the title The Wild Body. Along with Ezra Pound, Lewis has the distinction of being the co-founder of Vorticism, the only avant-garde group Britain has ever produced. The Vorticist movement’s manifesto BLAST, which published, among others, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, and Rebecca West, appeared a few months prior to the beginning of the First World War. Lewis was himself caught up in the conflict, first as a gunner and bombardier, and was later fortunate enough to receive a commission as an official war artist for the Canadian government in 1917. He narrowly escaped death several times; the devastation of the war prompted him to develop a larger conceptual framework for thinking about art, culture, and politics in what he several years earlier had called the “Melodrama of Modernity.” His first novel, Tarr, a sharp, Dostoevskian critique of the bourgeois-bohemian set in Paris, appeared in 1918.
Wyndham Lewis as a second lieutenant in the British Army during the First World War.
One of the results of the Great War was that it effectively killed the Vorticist movement. By 1922, Lewis’s own art production had begun to slow down as he became more engaged with the task of writing. He spent several years researching in the British Museum and started publishing, between 1926 and 1931, an astonishing number of prose texts: The Wild Body, The Art of Being Ruled, The Lion and the Fox, Time and Western Man, The Childermass, The Apes of God, Paleface, The Doom of Youth, as well as the sledgehammer title The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator. Together these books come to several thousand daunting but fascinating pages. The imaginative scope of these volumes, comprising fiction, philosophy, political theory, and art and literary criticism, offers trenchant analyses of culture and everyday life. They are a testament not only to the range of his thinking and reading but also to his titanic energy. Lewis’s persona became that of the Enemy, who would suddenly appear on the scene, provoking critique, laughter, and acrimony. As you might surmise, though he counted people such as Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Augustus John, Rebecca West, Marshall McLuhan, A.Y. Jackson, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, and the “Queen of Bohemia,” London painter Nina Hamnett, among his friends, he also made several enemies — like Virginia Woolf, the artist and critic Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, the Sitwells — but these antagonisms were sometimes taken more seriously by the public than by the participants (not that they didn’t feel the sting of one another’s barbs). Lewis once said of Edith Sitwell: “We are two good old enemies, Edith and I, inseparables in fact. I do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwell’s favourite enemy” (Blasting and Bombardiering, 91). He was right. She devoted an entire chapter to venting loving spleen about him in her autobiography, Taken Care Of, seven years after his death in March 1957.
Lewis’s reflections on the development of the Enemy persona surface in a brief 1932 article entitled “What It Feels Like to Be an Enemy.” His answer revolves upon the idea of intimacy: to be an Enemy is “Much the same as a Friend — a very intimate friend, who has forgotten why or how he ever came to begin the relationship” (Wyndham Lewis on Art, 266). In caricaturing his persona as the Enemy, Lewis ironically exploits the cultural and political implications of this confusion of the two terms, even as he acknowledges (with puncturing tongue-in-cheek) that his actions as the Enemy are also a self-mocking study in urban paranoia.
For example, his use of modern technology (“the telephone is an important weapon in the armoury of an ‘Enemy’”) is central to his ludic reign of terror:
After breakfast, for instance (a little raw meat, a couple of blood-oranges, a stick of ginger, and a shot of Vodka — to make one see Red) I make a habit of springing ... to the telephone book. This I open quite at chance, and ring up the first number upon which my eye has lighted. When I am put through, I violently abuse for five minutes the man, or woman of course (there is no romantic nonsense about the sex of people with an Enemy worth his salt), who answers the call. This gets you into the proper mood for the day. [Wyndham Lewis on Art, 267]
These fictional telephonic ambushes reveal to us our uncanny relation to the telephone; we have installed, at our own expense, hailing devices that simultaneously preserve and compromise both our anonymity and our sense of identity. His telephone calls alert us to our subjection; the disembodied voice, booming with malevolence and mockery, performs the subversive role of conscience. In the role of caller, his is the alien voice that signals to us our own uncanny nature. Lewis’s pranks are meant to show us that the ringing telephone doesn’t necessarily ensure and reaffirm who we are, or that we’re important. Instead, he playfully takes us to task for our compliance, for our complacent pleasure in following the rituals of subjection that lurk behind phrases like “Sorry, I’ve got to take this.”
In this regard, it’s no wonder that his engagement with media and technology would influence the thought of Marshall McLuhan. Lewis and McLuhan met in Windsor in the 1940s (where Lewis had moved after his unhappy sojourn in Toronto), when the latter was then starting his career at St. Louis University. As an accomplished and ingenious lecturer at Assumption College (then part of the University of Western Ontario, and now the University of Windsor), Lewis played a role in securing McLuhan’s two-year appointment to the faculty. The impact of Lewis’s thought on McLuhan’s work is obvious: McLuhan’s books are peppered with quotes and references to Lewis’s works. Apart from his analyses of advertising, temporality, and visual media, Lewis’s book America and Cosmic Man contains the seed of one of McLuhan’s most famous concepts: the global village.
At thirty-seven years old, Wyndham Lewis cut a dashing figure.
But any discussion of Wyndham Lewis must always return to a particular problem — his notorious “flirtation” with fascism. Indeed, for many people, Lewis’s relationship to fascism was much more than mere flirtation — it was a fine romance. At least, a romance in the sense that it is assumed that Lewis was happily in love with fascism and never questioned it or its aims.Yet I would suggest the opposite; his relationship to fascism was informed by nothing but questions. Even a quick glance through his political books of the 1930s reveals maddeningly contradictory stances. Fascism is variously described in these works as a problem, a cult, an alternative, a pose, a nostalgic return to classical imperialism, a tool for peace, and a product of war. What do we make of this panoply of contradiction? Rather than look upon it as mere “inconsistency,” I contend that we should think about its implications. At several moments he seems to suggest
a kind of approval of fascism, even as he elsewhere (often in the same text) criticizes and satirizes its politics. Suddenly, he will bizarrely declare himself on the political left, while at the same time inveigh against the brutalities of Stalinism in the Soviet Union (which in the 1930s was a very unpopular opinion among many leftists).
Lewis’s response to fascism assumed this trajectory: (1) a qualified, contradictory approval, followed by (2) a period of hectic activity in which he isn’t so much defending the “truth” of fascism as he is trying to contain (and explain) the increasing number of political fires set by it in Europe in the 1930s; (3) that in attempting to retain fascist Germany as part of Europe’s political landscape, he is working through his uncertain identification with Hitler by critiquing Europe’s failure to live up to its own egalitarian principles; (4) that as a veteran, he is genuinely horrified by the prospect of another world war; and (5) much of the last two decades of his creative and intellectual thought are devoted to the question: “Why did I not see what fascism is?” He would later dismiss his political writing of that period as “ill-judged, redundant, harmful of course to me personally, and of no value to anyone else” (Rude Assignment, 224). How many writers or political commentators would dare say such a thing about their own work? Not many.
After a series of trips to Europe in the 1930s, Lewis changed his political stance radically. Witnessing first-hand the effects of Adolf Hitler’s domestic policies, and the horrifying conditions Jewish people were forced to endure, Lewis confronted the important difference between the myopia of political abstraction and the brute clarity of political fact. The question of his political blindness (sometimes projected onto others) is putatively asked and answered in series of books, fiction and non-fiction alike: The Hitler Cult and How It Will End, Anglosaxony: A League That Works, Rude Assignment, The Writer and the Absolute, and Self Condemned.
Self Condemned Page 1