Books: Rebel Against the Senses

THE LETTERS OF WYNDHAM LEWIS edited by W. K. Rose. 580 pages. New Directions. $8.50.

Some called him a revolutionary, others called him a reactionary, and T. S. Eliot called him the “most fascinating personality of our time.” The time was the 1920s and ’30s, and the man was Wyndham Lewis. Since then, Lewis has died, and the many battles he fought and which seemed so important at the time have passed into memory. Now Lewis’ collected letters recall those battles—the clang and clatter of cubism, futurism, imagism, vorticism; the boisterous challenge to the literary establishment of “the Men of 1914”: Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and, not least by a long shot, Wyndham Lewis.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, the tempestuous Lewis championed the intellect against the senses, ultimately turning on all his friends for deserting rationality. He had a horror of the “surging, ecstatic featureless chaos which is being set up as an ideal, in-place of the noble exactitude and harmonious proportions of the European scientific ideal.” His own ideal was ancient Greece. “The dialogues of Plato,” he wrote in Time and Western Man, “have not an effluvia of feminine scent; nor do they erect pointers on all the pathways of the mind, waving frantically back to the gonadal ecstasies of the commencement of life. [There was no] softening of the male chastity of thought.”

Perhaps because he distrusted the senses so much, Lewis was better at lecturing than creating. He thought that the novelist should write down what he sees, not try to dredge up the mind’s messy thoughts through stream-of-consciousness. His own novels (Tarr, The Apes of God), while wildly funny in places, are all surface and little depth. So many characters resembled recognizable people that Lewis was always being threatened for libel.

Verse for the W.C. The many sides of Lewis emerge from his letters: exuberant promoter of the arts, gifted literary infighter, thin-skinned egotist, kindly teacher. Dashed off hurriedly and often in hot anger, the letters are no match for Lewis’ best prose, but perhaps they better reveal the man beneath the controversialist.

Like other young writers of his era, Lewis enjoyed bohemian Paris for a few years, but he was hardly rebelling against his parents. He kept his mother, who was back in London, well informed of his escapades. Could his mother find a “nice, peaceful” cottage for a friend who was on the lam after shooting a man in a bar? Could his mother, please, come to Paris for a couple of weeks to get his mistress out of his hair? “I’ve come to that stage where I positively hate the sight of her, and I think we could amuse ourselves better without her. Still, in any relations but her love relations, she’s amiable enough.”

In 1909, Lewis came home and went i to work, tossing off paintings and pamphlets in an effort to prove that art can change the world. His letters of the period are mostly shrill polemics. “A most poisonous little bugger,” Lewis describes a fellow writer to Pound, “and with abominable teeth, not to mention his manner. He told me he had written a lot of filthy sexual verse, which if he sends it, I shall hang in the W.C. He described it as Verlainesque, damn his shifty little eyes.” “I am always regretting that I was not born in a volcanic land,” Lewis grumped to another friend, “the sort of place where the aesthetic structures have a slight shake-up every day and are periodically swallowed up altogether.”

Under fire in World War I, Lewis proved uncharacteristically cool, marveling in his letters at his own lack of fear. His venom was directed less at the enemy than his commanding officer, who dared order him not to go to a favorite restaurant. “I’m in your battery, not your Sunday school,” bellowed Lewis as he stalked off.

But when World War II began, an older and wearier Lewis retired to Toronto. The city was not to his taste, and he had the first inkling that he was going blind. He wistfully wrote an American friend: “If you know some old colleague or pupil who is now president of a girls’ college (an inferior Vassar) or of some obscure Midwestern or Southern university, write him and tell him about me. Tell him that I am one of those animals who is only méchant when attacked.”

No Return. In the course of his Canadian ordeal, Lewis mellowed. Back in England after the war, he worked hard for Pound’s release from the insane asylum where he had been put on treason charges. “I am told that you believe yourself to be Napoleon, or is it Mussolini?” he wrote Pound. “What a pity you did not choose Buddha while you were about it, instead of a politician.” He painted a portrait of T. S. Eliot. “The Nobel Prize and Sweden have freshened him up,” Lewis noted after the sittings, “but he still becomes drowsy when immobilized in one position and his bottom goes to sleep.”

Finally, Lewis became nostalgic: “It was a blessed situation when Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway and myself began. The reference was in altogether different directions—towards scientific, or artistic truth. There is no return to that. It was a Utopian accident.”