Literary Views & Reviews A CAREER OF QUARRELS

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30284, 9 November 1963, Page 3

Literary Views & Reviews A CAREER OF QUARRELS

The Letters ot Windham Edited by R. K. Rom - Methuen 580 pp. V, yndham Lewis may well out to be the Biake of ’? od€r " English literature. Ole . radical upstart to whom uJaln has 1501 been overindulgent, the genius in two •ns who fearlessly ignored contemporary can, ns of decorum, the visionary whose f e ? uta j lon to wait upon learned apologists. As a pa.nter he has been hailed $,. a cruc ial influence on modern an; his novels are *2metimes represented as landmarks in modern fiction; ?‘ s „,°“ er P ro se is supposed to glitter-with brilliant ideas, he reader who is disposed to accept these estimates will J? theae letters <over «» of them i as the revelation of a personality vibrating tilth intellectual energy; but the reader who has so far oeen less impressed will find just as much to confirm his suspicions. We should not usually judge a man on his merits as a private corresPondent; but many of these letters were addressed to new apapers or otherwise designed for immediate publicity, and not a few seem to nave been composed with this volume m mind. In his lifetime Lewis was never slow to co-operate with authors of Pamphlets or dissertations •bout h.iqejjj and it would be stran.g4Esf he did not sometimes anticipate a col- - I „e cA °n llke this in the same confident spirit. The editor Prints only about a quarter of the available material, but account of what is omitted does little to damage the book s obvious reference value Lewis lived at the centre a ? artlstic revolution, and the letters radiate in almost every direction—to Wells and Yeats, to Herbert Read Roy Au Bustus John, and Middleton Murry, to Allen late and Edmund Wilson and of course to Joyce, Eliot • nd Pound-in fact. to anv. body who’s anvbodv What ThT * e may think <* Lewis •hen, this collection is of first ‘mpurtance a s a document of cultural history. Lewis was the son of a prosperous upstate New ■X kcr /. nd an Englishwoman h °- . a ft, er ‘-heir separation contrived to send him to a succession of public schools. His diligence may be mea£S ed „ by u the l . fact that al last Rugby, he stood twentvsix h in a class of 26. There S w< t, l , three years at the of Art (18981901), where he impressed Sturge Moore and Laurence Ehnyon with budding intell h c . tua l power and eight years abroad, mostly pursuing la vie de boheme in Paris 1 Among h ls friends there incidentally was Kathleen I Bruce, the sculptress, who later married Scott, the explorer; her memorial to Scott will be familiar to Christchurch readers.) Lewis's «£ les h Published in 1909. he first exhibited his d “ Ve t s l’ y > e as a Painter m 1911: at the age of 30 he had become the theorist of the avant-garde; he was also on the way to a career of quarrels. What might have happened to the artistic factions which seemed to spring up in his wake (Futurists, the London Vort ‘cists, the Rebel en £ e ’I*’* had D °t been sriuea by the war, is any"PuJ’’s guess. The years 19111914 certainly developed in him a fixed antipathy to Roger Fuyer and particularly to Bloomsbury; and at this time began his life-long feud with Clive Bell. Letters about

(the two issues of the famous i “Blast” are incidentally nojticeable for their reference to some unpublished verses of *T. S. Eliot—“excellent bits of ■scholarly ribaldry”—which Lewfs rejected because of a j determination to have no t actual profanity in his j journal. 1 An exchange with Paul i Nash after the war shows Lewis’s clever bad-temper at !its most typical. The underjside of his personal charm seems to have been an irriI tating capacity for invective. . Nearly every friendship j seems to have reached a climax of impatience, or to have j flourished between intervals of coolness. As often as not ' he allowed artistic commen- | tary to develop into personal (criticism and in consequence his life was littered with friends w-ho found the strain of getting along with him was too much—witness the estrangement of Joyce after Lew’is’s essay on "Ulysses” in> ‘ “Time and Western Man” (1927), or the vendetta with ithe Sitwells after “The Apes [of God” (1930). He was evidently possessed of a naturally disputatious character, sadly lacking in appropriate humour; it may have been one whth his creative talent, but not everyone could tolerate it. Perhaps we should say that he paid the price of being a superb polemicist. (In this connexion, one of the most revealing by-products of the correspondence is the impression of extraordinary patience on the part of Eliot) The rejection of Lewis’s first portrait of Eliot by the Royal Academy in 1938 threw him into the noisiest and 1 most public controversy of his life. With some help from Winston Churchill, who spoke on behalf of the old guard at the academy’s dinner, it dramatised the war against orthodoxy which Lewis had been fighting for a generation. What had begun as a campaign against romanticism in art. partly inspired by T. E. Hulme, had quickly developed into an onslaught on Edwardian gentility and flabbiness; with the twenties it had assumed more obviously the shape of a social protest with the three issues of “The Enemy” and with “The Lion and the Fox” (studies of the machiavel in Shakespeare); by the thirties it had grown into a radical programme not unsympathetic to National Socialism. Unlike Pound, however, Lewis’s theoretic leanings never quite amounted to practical enthusiasm; a natural humanity and an unsuspected patriotism preserved him from exI tremes. , Apart from soldiering in the 11914118 war. Lewis had 1 never taken up a profession. I He had lived on his painting land his writing: and for the 1 most part it was hand-to-mouth existence. His work was done in haste and often in deplorable conditions. Know ing that his chaßces of employment in war time would be minimal, he contrived to get to America in 1939. The decision was illjudged. For the next six years he lived mainly in New York and Toronto, for the most ■part on hand-outs from sympathetic acquaintances. The [letters of this period, along i with the novel “Self ConIdemned” (1954), reflect' the I loneliness, uncertainty and I frustration of an angry young [man growing older without [an audience, without the [ chance for exercise. On his return to England ihe was, like everybody else. ' vexed at the limp which ■ Europe had developed, but I somewhat purged of his

j compulsive antinomianism [Opinion seemed to have ’ caught up with him too; re--1 cognition and honour were accorded to him now not as the rebel and avant-gardist but a£ a distinguished artist and public figure. As the editor says in one of his numerous passages of biographical commentary. “The enemy was almost respectable” From 1949. however, fulfilment was marred by a disease which induced first, blindness, and then, in 1957. his death. The high points of the later correspdndence are his loyal involvement in the unhappy affairs of Pound, and the ~ continuation of “Childermass.” with the active encouragement of the 8.8. C., as the trilogy “The Human Age " Of the many merits which this book has, not the least is the light it will throw on the cultural revolution which marks the beginning of our century. Lewis spoke of “the men of 1914.” meaning himself, Joyce, Eliot and Pound. The situation is that the correspondence of three of these writers is now available. In the event of Eliot permitting his life to be documented in a similar way, what happened between the end of the Victorian era and the emergence of contemporary' civilisation may begin to assume its proper shape. It is becoming more and more obvious that the years between 1890 and, say, 1930. should be thought of as a period: and documentation of the kind that this volume represents must be given a prominent place in any such attempt to understand the years in which so many contemporary cultural and historical developments originate. If in the process Lewis himself emerges as a giant, well, good luck to him.