by A. N. Wilson
As far as Britain was concerned, it was the Vorticist movement, in the visual and plastic arts, which was the most dramatic visible sign of the change which had occurred. Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was its noisiest exponent. Augustus John’s 1905 portrait of him is of a Balzacian anti-hero of the 1840s – big, violent hands, a curling sardonic lip beneath the moustache, dark hair falling over ears and side-whiskers, dark eyes, hooked nose. Gertrude Stein, when she first met him in Paris, said he was ‘tall and thin … rather like a young Frenchman on the rise’.19
Lewis was of American origin. Born on his father’s yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia, he came, paternally, from a line of merchants and lawyers in New York State, though his mother’s family were of Scottish and Irish descent. When the marriage failed, Percy was still a child of ten, and his mother brought him to England, where she tried and conspicuously failed to have him educated as a conventional middle-class Englishman. As a schoolboy at Rugby, he would probably have seen the child Rupert Brooke, whose father was a housemaster there, but he entered the school some years before Brooke. He converted his study into a studio, and was delighted, both when this provoked the predictable, George V-like response from one of the other boys – ‘You frightful artist!’ – and, even more, when his mother was informed by his housemaster that the school was unsuitable. He was enrolled at the Slade School in 1898, the year that Augustus John, already legendary for his skill as a painter and seducer, had left it. His teacher Fred Brown did not find it hard to imbue his pupil with a hatred and distrust of Academy painting. In so far as, domestically, Lewis was drawn towards a group it was to the modern New English Art Club, and to the Camden Town School of Sickert. But it was always in Europe that he would find his inspiration, philosophical and visual.
In Paris, he threw himself utterly into the role of a self-conscious and self-created Bohemian. He attended Henri Bergson’s lectures at the Collège de France, and absorbed Bergson’s doctrine that an understanding of reality could never be entirely rational, but always intuitive. He dabbled with the extreme right-wing writers who contributed to Charles Maurras’s daily paper L’Action française, while having no desire to disown his friendship with the exiled Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), whose company he enjoyed. Lewis was a man who was drawn to extremes. In later life, his admiring articles about National Socialism in Time and Tide magazine saw the ‘Hitlerist dream as full of an imminent classical serenity’. Then he recognized the error of his ways and published an equally extreme denunciation in The Hitler Cult (1939). He was in many respects an archetypical twentieth-century artist–intellectual in that he wished to overthrow authority while worshipping power. He could see in the work of the Cubists not merely an attempt to break away from the formalism and decoration of nineteenth-century artistic traditions, but a desire actually to undermine the European cultural tradition, to take it to bits, to rebuild it in blocks. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was on one level an academic exercise, reworking a painting by El Greco which was by no means ‘realistic’ in the starkest terms. Augustus John, who first told Lewis about the painting, which he had seen in Paris, compared it to the ‘strange moonlights of Easter Island’. One of Picasso’s many revolutionary devices was to rework European themes through allusion to non-European styles. The fetishes of Africa or of other ‘primitive’ cultures could provide lessons in simplicity of form, of texture, of truth, ultimately, which the degraded fag-end of the classical tradition could no longer do. Lewis would also have enjoyed the tangible wickedness of Picasso’s great canvas, the fact that the young women are obviously prostitutes lolling about shamelessly between shifts of work. The great picture, one of the most important turning-points in human sensibility, could not have failed to impress Lewis, a young man in search of an artistic style and a philosophy for living.
But Vorticism, as it evolved as a separate development in Britain, separate from continental Cubism, while obviously drawing on Picasso’s inspiration, had distinctive features of its own. It is not whimsical to see the industrial machinery, and the instruments of war, developed since the 1880s as objects of far greater importance for the Vorticist artists than the academic art schools. David Bomberg’s inspiration for early abstract or semi-abstract works came from the tiled staircases of Schevik’s Steam Baths in Brick Lane, near his Whitechapel boyhood home. Jacob Epstein, who had come to London from America (the son of Polish refugees, escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia and Poland), made sculptures based closely on the rock drills used in the Rand gold mines. Bent over his Rock Drill is the semi-mechanized, semi-robotic figure of the miner himself, his torso metallic, his helmet dehumanizing. All that remains human of him is the phallus which both seems to merge with, and become, the backbone of the figure and to be a part of the drill itself. These powerful Vorticist sculptures of 1913–1620 do not come accidentally into being. They speak just as eloquently as any military history of what was going on in Europe as, hidden in tanks, or wedged down in their trenches, European males, in their hundreds of thousands, subsumed their individuality into a common, mechanized, destructive force.
In his manifesto for BLAST No. 1, 1914, the Vorticist periodical, Lewis lashed out to right and left. His pronouncements in bold upper and lower case are the verbal equivalent of machine-gun fire, let off in a crowd of civilians by a maniac. BLAST years 1837 to 1900, he began, promising to WRING THE NECK of all sick inventions born in that progressive white wake, Victorian sculpture and poetry (Swinburne’s last days are mocked as PURGATORY OF PUTNEY). And the whole GLOOMY VICTORIAN CIRCUS is gleefully consigned to history. LONDON IS NOT A PROVINCIAL TOWN, he thundered. Then, with heavy irony, but obvious admiration too, he wrote: ‘BLESS ENGLAND! BLESS ENGLAND FOR ITS SHIPS which switchback on Blue, Green and Red Seas all around the pink EARTH-BALL …’
The ships themselves are, when we see them in the photographs, floating Vorticist sculptures, their large planes of gun-metal grey, their tubular gun barrels at semi-parallel angles to one another, highly reminiscent of an Epstein sculpture or a Wyndham Lewis canvas. Figures such as Admiral John Jellicoe and Admiral David Beatty, Victorians who had done all in their power during the previous fifteen years to persuade politicians to keep building battleships, presided over a collection of huge destructive engines. Yet more Vorticist in outline were the submarines, the Unterseeboten, or U-boats. From his retirement the old first sea lord, John Fisher, builder of the modern British navy, urged upon the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, ‘Build more submarines!’21 ‘BLESS ENGLAND’, echoed Wyndham Lewis, ‘industrial island machine, pyramidal.’22
Many of those, perhaps Lewis included, who had watched the naval arms race before the outbreak of war might have expected that war, when it came, would provide the spectacle of some great naval battles. But while the land armies within months reached a near stalemate on the battlefields of France, the ships played a strategic role, rather than taking the risk of a modern-day Trafalgar in which outright defeat might be very hastily encountered. Churchill once remarked to Admiral Jellicoe that he was the man who could lose the war in an afternoon.23
The Kaiser was obsessed by the navy, and proud, until the outbreak of war, of his being an admiral of the British Fleet. Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History was a favourite book. To his American friend Bigelow, in 1894, Wilhelm II had telegraphed: ‘I am just now not reading but devouring Captain Mahan’s book and am trying to learn it by heart.’24
The Kaiser would have been ready to acknowledge, when it was over, that the war had effectively been won by the Royal Navy, and this not in spite, but because of the fact that there had only been one great naval engagement involving the German High Seas Fleet under Admiral Scheer fighting the Grand Fleet off the Danish coast on 31 May 1916 – the so-called Battle of Jutland. (The Germans sank fourteen British ships, and lost eleven of their own, but they were unable to budge the strategic superiority held by the Royal Navy.) After Jutland, the German Hig
h Seas Fleet was in effect stuck in harbour.
From the moment that the BEF embarked for France in 1914, the Royal Navy provided the army with its lifeline of supplies, its kit, its boots, its canned bully beef, its ammunition. It was British naval domination of the English Channel which enabled British troops in the trenches to have periods of home leave. It was the navy which enabled Britain, throughout the war, to draw on reserves from India and the dominions, and to deploy large armies in the Middle East and Africa. It was also the navy which imposed the greatest hardships not only on German ships but on the entire German population, by a repetition of the strategy, which had caused such vexation to Napoleon, of blockading Continental ports. So effective was the Royal Naval blockade that it cut off German financial trade, thereby causing tax rises in Germany to pay for the war effort. It also denied the Germans food imports, leading to the dreadful ‘turnip winter’ of 1916 to 1917, which greatly heightened social tension, and weakened the Kaiser’s position in the eyes of his people.
In March 1916, 89,000 French and more than 81,000 Germans were killed at Verdun. By the conclusion of the battle of the Somme in autumn, Allied losses were at 600,000, with comparable numbers on the German side.25
By December 1916, the Germans were offering peace negotiations to the Allies. Apart from these unconscionable losses in France, the British naval blockades had deadly consequences for the Germans at home; 88,232 civilian German deaths were attributable to the blockade in 1915, and in 1916 the number of deaths by starvation rose to 121,114. There were food riots in thirty German cities. Karl Liebknecht, a member of the Reichstag who had urged soldiers not to fight, had been expelled from the German parliament and condemned to two years’ hard labour, but there was overpowering political and social pressure on the Kaiser and his government to sue for peace. Instead, after a year in which tens of thousands of Europeans had been killed, for the sake of possessing thirty miles or so of French mud which had been pounded into a wilderness, both sides intensified their struggle, recruiting more troops, buying more machine guns.26
In such circumstances, with the possibility of revolution at home if the starvation continued, and a stalemate–slaughter in France, the Germans desperately stepped up submarine activity. For the English navy to starve 120,000 German civilians was fair tactics. For the Germans to attack British or American merchant vessels was a deadly war crime. The German torpedo attack on the Cunard liner Lusitania on 7 May 1915 had been a terrible tactical blunder. This supposedly civilian ship was thought by some to have been carrying American munitions to Britain, but it was also carrying passengers, and when the torpedo struck, exploding the munitions, 1,201 people drowned, including 35 babies and 128 Americans – among them the millionaire sportsman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and the theatrical impresario Charles Frohman. The German embassy’s press attaché in Washington, Dr Bernhard Dernburg, noted: ‘The American people cannot visualize the spectacle of a hundred thousand, even a million, German children starving by slow degrees as a result of the British blockade, but they can visualize the pitiful face of a little child drowning amidst the wreckage caused by a German torpedo.’27
The Vorticist magazine-title, BLAST, had been taken up, it would seem, by the leaders of the free world. Sir Martin Gilbert, meditating upon the invention of the machine gun, wrote: ‘Maxim’s invention had become the means whereby those who shared the highest values of civilization, religion, science, culture, literature, art, music and a love of nature, were to continue to bleed each other to death or victory.’28
Vorticism had been one of the indications that such a convulsion was in the air, even before the war. The Vorticists flirted with another group, this one Italian, the Futurists, but they had much in common. The future envisaged by Futurists was a bleak one, dominated by noise, nonsense and belligerence. Their chief spokesman was the firebrand Filippo Marinetti. At a memorable dinner given in his honour at the Florence restaurant in London before the war, Marinetti had declaimed his violent free verse, while the band played, ‘You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it’.29
‘A day of attack upon the Western Front,’ said Lewis later with characteristic lack of charity or taste, ‘with all the heavies hammering together right back to the horizon, was nothing in comparison with Marinetti’s unaided voice.’30
The First World War is the most horrible demonstration of life imitating art, that phenomenon first anatomized by Oscar Wilde, whose strange tomb, completed for the Père Lachaise cemetery in 1912 by the Vorticist sculptor Epstein, massive and Assyrian in inspiration, pays tribute to Wilde’s disruptive and revolutionary life-view rather than his whimsical capacity to amuse.
These were violent times, and art reflected the changes through which Europe was being torn. Marinetti, after one of his recitals, pummelled his own chest as sweat poured from his brow and exclaimed: ‘Il faut une force de poumon épouvantable pour faire ça!’ (You need a dreadful lung-power to do that.) Force, power, strength, Macht – these were the qualities, in war, in life, and in art, which were called forth by the times. The vapid lyricism of ‘Georgian’ poets, the landscapes and portraits executed by the British artists who stood aside from modernism, seem faded, deathly. The works of early modernism, whether of Cubist pictures or modernist poetry, still have a brutal strength, nearly a century later. And the art form which requires the greatest brute force, and which as far as Britain was concerned had been all but asleep since the Middle Ages, was sculpture. ‘Sculpture, which seems in one sense, peculiarly a thing of the twentieth century,’ wrote Pound. ‘No, acrimonious reader, do not seize that last clause by itself; let me explain what I mean. Sculpture of this new sort, Epstein’s, Brzeska’s, is perhaps more moving than painting simply because there has been for centuries no sculpture that one could take very seriously.’31
Gaudier-Brzeska himself called sculpture ‘this virile art’. Gaudier died aged twenty-three, having read aloud to the thirty men under his command from Pound’s rendition of Chinese verse, Cathay. ‘I use the poems to put courage in my fellows.’
Who has brought the flaming imperial anger?
Who has brought the army with drums and with kettle-drums?
Barbarous Kings.32
All his work is juvenilia – the hieratic, phallic head of Pound himself completed in 1913, the erect birds, the dancers. He was all but self-taught, having come to England as a trainee shipping-broker, attending drawing lessons in his spare time. Henri Gaudier was eighteen when he met Zofia Zuzanna Brzeska in a Paris library. She was nearer forty than thirty, and it was not for some years that they became lovers; but almost at once she became his muse. They lived together in a succession of poor lodgings and hotel rooms. He called her Mother or Mamus, she called him Pik, and when they first began to meet London Bohemians, they tried to pass themselves off as brother and sister. Gaudier was a slight, boyish figure. Zofia took him for a (very dirty) Spaniard when she first met him.33 His thin inquisitive face has in photographs the look of a fox which is not going to let the hounds have him. The great influences on him artistically were Brancusi and Epstein, but you can see and feel something quite new coming to birth in his few surviving works – now scattered through four continents. He could not afford materials. He had come from an ordinary French bourgeois family. Yet he seemed to feel and to confront the whole Western tradition with his fingertips and his chisel. ‘He was the first sculptor in a thousand years to work in modes that had been all that Homer, Ptahotep, Confucius and Sappho knew as beauty in stone.’34
In Gaudier’s work, we feel the Victorian curse lift. Art can cease to be decoration. Of course when an artist dies young there is a tendency to overpraise. Pound, however, was not given to that tendency. He saw in Gaudier ‘the most absolute case of genius I’ve ever run into’. What makes this death so continuingly haunting is that Gaudier-Brzeska’s vision of Europe, its art, its culture, and the moment it had reached, was not at variance with the war which killed him. Quite the contrary. The anti-war poets and artis
ts of this period tended either to be of poor artistic capability or to be retrospective in their hatreds – or both. Gaudier-Brzeska, hideously in tune with his times, embraced the struggle and saluted the violence. The huge numbers being slaughtered reduced the sense of each and every person being of unique value. As in modernist sculptures, men became almost indistinguishable from the tanks or submarines in which they set out to destroy one another, bringing about deaths in numbers which had hitherto only been known in slaughterhouses. From the nameless cannon-fodder arose an inevitable vision of humanity as something less than what it had once been – of people as ‘the masses’, scarcely distinguishable from one another. They awaited men of genius to lead or inspire them – and they certainly were not finding them in the bumbling, indecisive generals in charge of the battles of the Western Front, nor in the old aristocrats or classically educated Liberal politicians who sent the men to war. Pound chose as an epigraph to his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska an epigram from Machiavelli: ‘There are very few real men, and the rest are sheep – “Gli uomini vivono in pochi e gli altri son pecorelle”.’
11
Revolutions
Food shortages, which threatened the end of social order in Germany, were having their dire effect upon the Russians also. There were widespread strikes in all the Russian cities, and by March 1917 the discontents of the working class had become too widespread, too powerful, too acrimonious for the authorities to suppress. On International Women’s Day, organized by the socialists, fifty factories – 90,000 workers approximately – stopped work. The next day, 9 March, 200,000 were on strike, and the crowds swelled into the streets. It was in vain that the authorities insisted that bread had now reached the shops at last. A change had come upon Russia, and upon the world. The hardships of the war, the whole accumulation of horrors which afflicted civilians and soldiers, men and women, were of a magnitude which made it impossible, in any country, to go back to the old ways. The Romanov dynasty was finished. Their bizarre guru, the religio-sex maniac Rasputin, had been assassinated the previous December. In the Duma, the Russian parliament, the liberal historian P. N. Milyukov listed the misdeeds of the government in a superb piece of rhetoric; after each clause asking – ‘Is this stupidity, or treason?’ Russia, and all its mighty empire, was on the verge of anarchy. There were rebellions in the Muslim provinces. Turkestan, Samarkand and the Steppe Region were preparing to rise against their Muscovite overlords. The working class at home, and more crucially in the field of battle, had lost their instinctive loyalty to a royal family which had ruled Russia for 300 years.
