To purge “the bad effects of English education,” Wyndham Lewis set out in 1902, at the age of nineteen, to finish his schooling on continental ground. For six years he followed his instincts along the Franco-German axis we traced in the first chapter. In Munich (1902), he briefly entered a sphere already shaping the debates between the proponents of empathy and abstraction, Theodor Lipps and Wilhelm Worringer most prominently.¹ He would return to the city for six months in 1906, two years before the publication of Worringer's Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Yet the richest intellectual environment would prove to be Paris, where he arrived in 1903 and lived for most of the next five years. A singular, fiercely solitary figure, he moved on the distant fringes of Gertrude Stein's circles. He attended the lectures of Henri Bergson at the College de France, including the sequence on comedy. Passing through the meetings of the ultraconservative Action Française, where he met Charles Maurras, he became “familiar,” his biographer Jeffrey Meyers avers, “with the work of contemporary French thinkers: Georges Sorel, Julien Benda, Charles Péguy, and Rémy de Gourmont.”²

The names of Benda, Gourmont, and Sorel enter Lewis's vocabulary at a later, more predictable moment: he begins to cite these thinkers in the years after the Great War, when his prose has taken a turn toward a more discursive, speculative character. No detailed documentation of his intellectual interests survives from his first Parisian period. One may reasonably contend that a young artist like Lewis, driven by youthful curiosity and gifted with sensitive antennae, might follow the available leads to the work of Gourmont and Sorel, authors who had defined the values of the visual sense so provocatively. They had produced most of their major writings by 1908. Yet Lewis's recreation of his Paris years in the novel Tarr (1918) shows his counterpart, the English protagonist Frederick Tarr, moving almost exclusively through a community of expatriates—German, English, Russian, Italian; he makes no significant contact with local French culture, let alone with the signal figures named by Meyers. Of course one need not hinge the claim of Lewis's relationship to the French intellectuals on direct acquaintance. What is certain about his early exposures—Lipps in Germany, Bergson in France—is enough to have focused his mind on one side of the European discourse recounted earlier. Reacting against the idea of musical empathy, he moved intuitively into line with Gourmont and, later, Benda. Already in 1909 and 1910, in his first attempts at short fiction (based on a year of travel through Brittany and Spain in 1908), he expresses an understanding, like Gourmont's, of the susceptibilities of human hearing, and he moves these insights toward antidemocratic conclusions similar to those drawn by Benda a full decade later, in 1918, in Belphégor.

By the time Lewis turns to revise this early fiction for collection in The Wild Body (1927), he will have absorbed not only the writing of Gourmont and Benda, but most of the continental literature that provides the full, expository ground for these French authors, whose political aesthetic he will ratify and extend. This wider, seasoned awareness provides the broad focus of the present chapter. Yet Lewis's mature sensibility returns us to its origins to understand its core, its depth. We may compare two versions of one story—written as “Le Père François” in 1909, revised as “Franciscan Adventures” in 1927—to follow the intellectual biography, as it were, of this radical idéologue, who moves his original, empirical observations of human sensations toward an increasingly abstract formulation of political principle.

Picaresque farceur, the narrative persona of Lewis's early fiction journeys through the backwaters of Brittany and Spain to find comic incidents that also represent elementary laws of behavior. Here the human creature sounds his credulity and stupidity again and again through that circuit of aural and oral compulsion so severely mapped by Gourmont and—later—by Benda. In “Le Père François,” the narrator fiddles thus with his victim's voice:

After having been shown his throat, and having vainly attempted to seize between my thumb and forefinger an imaginary vessel that he insisted, with considerable violence, that I should find, our relations nearly came to an abrupt termination on my failing, and having, indeed, pursued song athwart his anatomy to its darkest and most lugubrious sources, I said irrelevantly that his hair was very long. He slowed down abruptly in his speech, but some sentences still followed. Then, after a silence, taking suddenly the most profoundly serious expression, he said, with a conviction of tone that admitted of no argument and paralysed all doubt, “I will tell you! It's too long! My hair is too long!”³

The mystery organ in the depths of this “florid aperture” is the source and site of the feelings of musical vitalism currently being identified and analyzed by continental thinkers. Having had the vitalist innards of his throat tickled and stimulated, Francis responds to the speech of the narrator in a way that conforms to Gourmont's own analysis of the effects of such vocal energy. In a rote, determinate reaction, the Franciscan merely repeats the (“irrelevant”) phrases imprinted into him.

The paces of aural habit through which this vibrant songbird has been put now lead the narrator to ponder the political implication of this sensory debility. “Music was his theme,” Lewis writes of this caricature-in-voice; “to look at him,” he continues,

one would have said that the only emotion he had ever experienced was that provoked by the topical and sentimental songs of his country. He had become a very disreputable embodiment of them. His was the face of a man who had wedded, and been mastered by, the vague and neurasthenic heroine of the popular lyrical fancy; from constant intercourse with this shade he had grown as nearly as he could make himself her ideal. … [H]e turned in my direction, stretching out the hand with the umbrellas, and began singing a patriotic song in a lusty voice. (WB, 277)

Lewis's political consideration does not emerge in the vocabulary of sociological treatise. He is thinking in terms of the mechanical comedy to which Francis's mouthy élan typically runs—in the language of physiology that is special to the new idéologie. Francis's fanciful marriage with the heroine of the song, following his “constant intercourse with this shade,” consummates the laws of physical sympathy fundamental to acoustic experience. Presenting that response as the femme fatale's “popular” draw, moreover, Lewis shows such empathy through sound as the populist way of feeling. Music binds the members of Demos into an acoustic amalgam and generates collective feeling, like the national hymns heard by Benda, as a function of its own sensory effect. Thus the songster Francis, exuding the same “lusty” mood that compels his imaginative marriage with the ballad bride, rides his “patriotic song” into elementary union with his conationals. Reversing this current of empathic projection but preserving its social meaning, he elsewhere invites the same populist aggregate to abide at his acoustic quick: he has “become a giant. … [N]ow that he is isolated everything has come to inhabit him, and he feels constantly in his spirit the throbbing of multitudes” (WB, 280). The modern political phenomenon of demotic gigantism thus whirls around his empty center. The vacant interior space of the individual craves such bogus relationships and expansions as musical empathy makes all too easy and available.

“Le Père François” forms a nearly complete basis for the political pronouncements Lewis writes into the 1927 revision. His initial observations about the mechanism of sensory life simply shift now into a more overtly discursive rhythm and diction, moving his early notions into a more abstract, taxonomic vocabulary: “What emotions had this automaton experienced before he accepted outcast life? In the rounded personality, known as Father Francis, the answer was neatly engraved. The emotions provoked by the bad, late, topical sentimental songs of Republican France” (WB, 121). Lewis's own emphases on Republican doxology throw the sentence into high allusive relief, reaching into the background sound for words like “fraternité” and “égalité.” Here he links the egalitarian and collectivist values of early Republican France to the group feelings induced by music, a sensory experience already dramatized by Francis in the 1909 manuscript and aligned now with its particular Cause and State. He repeats this point of political definition in the new image of Francis “standing in the middle of the road, the moonlight converting him into a sickly figure of early republican romance,” where “he sang to me as I walked away” (WB, 129; emphases added). Here Lewis adds only the “republican” label to the romance topos of 1909. Where Francis's original wedding with the “popular” bride of lyric fancy consummated the union of musical empathy and conformed to that newly discovered law of demotic solidarity, the same mode of feeling finds its theme song, its political motto and specific creed, in the mass equality of postrevolutionary France. This was of course the political and intellectual culture in which idéologie discovered its first uses, and its ethic and method are followed in the trajectory Lewis describes between 1909 and 1927: the sensory evidence adduced in the first story leads to the abstract idea named in the second. (The peculiar temper that earned Lewis his sobriquet as the Enemy is also manifest in this exercise: his is a reactionary ideology, like Benda's—an empirical analysis designed to expose the bogus character of a political concept based on human infirmity.)

Lewis undertook his 1927 rewriting at a considerable distance from the original story. He had passed through the eye of the Great London Vortex into the surge of the Great War; returned to London and secluded himself in the British Library; researched the philosophical and literary material for his prodigious output of speculative and creative work in the twenties and thirties. To assign his revisions to the circumstances of this later phase, however, is to poke the fire from the top: the developmental continuity should not be missed. It is equally important not to minimize the impact of the Great War. The popular sanction required for mass conflict—one fought, putatively, to make the world safe for democracy—reinforced Lewis's antipopulism, and the second of the two issues of Blast (July 1915, War Number) bristles with the resentment⁴ no less rebarbatively than his 1927 revision. This historical experience also served to strengthen Lewis's aversion to the acoustic empathy he had already identified as the basis of demotic fellow feeling. In Blast 2, the sound of “the Crowd cheering everywhere” is like the “perpetual voice of a shell. If you put W before it, it always makes War!”⁵

The impact of war on Lewis's developing ideology of the eye is more abrupt and disturbing. In his 1913 Composition, as already seen, the triumphant struggle for a purely perceptual dominance becomes politically radicalized, by 1915, in The Crowd. Here the artist shifts his vocabulary of optical dominance into an exact version of the medieval scheme of proximate vision, where the eye's own ability to foreground and isolate the object of attention in high focus is complemented by a similar institution of social authority.

These observations point up the political meaning of a similar process, visible in a comparison of designs in Blast 1 (June 1914) and Blast 2 (July 1915). The titles of the two prewar pieces, Plan of War and Slow Attack suggest that the charge of Mars can be bridled—planned or slowed—by the acts of visual severance that segment and organize their dynamic lines. Here the eye exerts the sort of physical superiority we found as the challenge and victory of Composition. For the black-and-white chock-ablock avoids the chromatic progression in the Futurists' dynamic sweeps; its optical disruptions seem to direct the currents of aggression onto the restraining grid of its own designs. Yet Lewis has woven most of these juxtaposed shapes so closely together that they seem to build rather than retard the momentum. Masses of compacted energy, they inscribe lines of staggered force; graphs of exertions more tremendous, finally, than the resistance being applied. Though undeclared, this alliance between dynamist content and visual form will appear unholy once signed into history on 3 August: once national élans batter each other into the quasi-aesthetic shape of the Western Front, that framed space of death. (Like Gertrude Stein, Lewis must also see the design of the European trench system as a gruesome parody of artistic—cubist or Vorticist—form.⁶) Accordingly, an equally abstract representation of 1915 decidedly reorients the eye's earlier compact with vitalist forces. Design for “Red Duet” loosens the close juxtapositions of black and white in the 1913-14 work, unraveling those graphs of densely compacted energy. Ampler, more frequent, his white spaces now fit like multiple margins of silence, voids against which the vectors of energy arrest or deflect themselves. Similarly, Lewis enhances the control exerted by the rectilinear frame as he repeats that containing shape several times within the design. Thus he already turns optical severance in a Bendan direction, into a pictorial language of severe mastery.

In this way Lewis develops his ideology of ear and eye from 1908 to 1915, thence to 1927. This sensibility provides the structuring, unifying force for his magnum opus of the postwar years. The six volumes he published between 1926 and 1930⁷—two novels (The Childermass, 1928; The Apes of God, 1930) and four discursive tracts (The Art of Being Ruled, 1926; The Lion and the Fox, 1927; Time and Western Man, 1927; Paleface, The Philosophy of the Melting Pot, 1929)—were all conceived and written originally as a single oeuvre, The Man of the World. This witnesses his attempt at the kind of major syntheses promised by the new idéologie. Adducing truths of human physiology as a basis for political concepts in the discursive books, Lewis extends these principles into the alternate world of the fiction—that sphere of virtual (aesthetic) sensations—to seek proof for his elementary axioms about physiology. In the first part of this chapter I will formulate Lewis's ideology of the senses and proceed to read the novels as test—but not testimony—of its success. For this painterly sensibility failed to generate a valid verbal art—an awareness Lewis himself disclosed, but initially only in the provisional framework of the fiction.

Benda condemned his early tendency to prescribe social solutions in aesthetic terms in La Trahison des clercs (1928), but Lewis will react to his own failure to consummate his artistic ideology in the fiction by extending it directly into history. Having failed (by 1930) to impose a pictorial ideal on the lexical experience, he turns to the Third Reich, and in Hitler (1931) he sees the Führer as hero in his own artistic scheme of proximate vision. This will be the second of his disappointments, and the rise and fall of that optical illusion will be traced in the second part of this chapter. How he assimilates this defeat into the fiction written through the mid- and late thirties provides the subject of the third part. Yes, Lewis shares the sensory preferences of Benda, as his frequent references to “the excellent Belphégor”⁸ attest. Yet the English writer's ambition will appear, in the end, equally more hubristic and self-limiting. At once over-reaching and self-chastening (Benda never confesses his own earlier treason), Lewis returns upon himself, generating a thought and art out of his intellectual and aesthetic failures.

There are two Lewises, then, in the years of l'entre deux guerres. If they contend with one another, they will also vie for the attention of his old friend, Ezra Pound, who discovers Lewis anew, we shall see, in the late twenties, and builds his understanding of their affinity through the thirties. That Pound responds to the Enemy mask of defiant hubris rather than the Lewis of individual reticence (who has slipped critical attention as well) is a choice freighted with a significance similar to that which frets his decision, made on the pages of the Egoist of 16 February 1914, to read Epstein's sculpture as a writ of elite authority and not a rite of populist collectivism. Not that Lewis presents the viewer of 1930 with two neatly defined options on the State of his art. His admission of aesthetic failure (and his abrogation of the artist's political project) is made obliquely, at first deflected into a self-parody that seems at times to triumph in the very political aesthetic he enjoys sending up. It is a performance curiously similar to Pound's in Mauberley (the resemblance will make the poet's inattention to the second of the two Lewises all the more telling): an ironic undermining of his aesthetic ideals, which have failed to attain literary success; which have driven him toward social conclusions equally high-minded and terrifying, and ultimately impossible to sustain.

Lewis's process of defining his artistic values, exaggerating their political prepotency, and admitting his fallacy is one that I will follow here without continual reference to Pound's own evolving views (their local contacts and specific similarities will be noted). His later influence on Pound represents a hermeneutic choice on the poet's part, a selection of one ally from the two available Enemies. The import of his decision may be best assessed (in chapter 4) by allowing Lewis's career to generate the full complexity of its double identity—a monument of twisted brilliance; a turning back on his own deluded, fiercely intelligent hubris, which averts its ultimate tragedy by recognizing its mistake: a misguided but compelling extension of the current tradition of European idéologie.

UNTUNING THE WORD

In Time and Western Man, Lewis writes:

It is in a thick, monotonous prose-song that Miss Stein characteristically expresses her fatigue, her energy, and the bitter fatalism of her nature. … [I]t is the tongue—only the poor, worried, hard-worked tongue—inside the reader's head, or his laryngeal apparatus, that responds to the prose-song of Miss Stein. (61)

The points of attack in Lewis's essay repeat the themes of Benda's aural physiology. Physical union with the acoustic stimulus is cartooned in this reader's sensual echoing of Stein's text. Merging with the material body of language, one mouths its sounds with a mindlessness equal to its originator's. The involuntary nature of acoustic sympathy and the listener's reflex imitations also recall the major point of Gourmont's analysis. Such rote repetition is the only response available to a listener who has followed the susceptibilities of the ear and entered into physical union with the sound⁹—with the “soggy lengths of primitive mass life” that Lewis finds in her fluent chant. To his ear, Stein recites to consumers attuned to the merely aural provocations of mass, vulgar culture: her sausage-links prose song is “undoubtedly intended as an epic contribution to the present mass-democracy” (TWM, 62). She appears in his democratic Dunciad as fellow traveler with Ernest Hemingway (and Aldous Huxley¹⁰); they have supplanted the well-born artifice of written prose for the bastard artistry of a plebian vocalese. This fictional language “is not written” at all; “it is lifted out of Nature and very artfully and adroitly tumbled out upon the page: it is the brute material of every-day proletarian speech and feeling” (MWA, 35).

The differences between oral and written models of language provide Lewis with a framework for a broadly based analysis of modern culture. While voice infects the printed literature of a democratic state, an aristocratic society tends to reverse this tendency: to influence and improve the material of speech by imposing a page-based standard of usage upon it. The leverage required for this effect depends on circumstances, he concedes, that have passed into history: on a restriction of the literate public to an upper class capable of supporting good writing. Predictably, Lewis's comments on the topic revert to cultural elegy, expressing a nostalgic wish for “the artless high spirits so important in a patron” willing “to pay a person to speak as Shakespeare did, or Dryden or [incongruously] Nash.” At other times, he directs such reverie into a focused, detailed apologia for those foregone conditions:

While England was a uniquely powerful empire-state, ruled by an aristocratic caste, its influence upon the speech as upon the psychology of the American ex-colonies was overwhelming. But today that ascendancy has almost entirely vanished. … [T]here is no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British “Banker's Olympus,” to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech. Americanization—which is also for England, at least, proletarianization—is far too advanced to require underlining.

Arguing that precision of verbal meaning escalates in relation to the level of literacy, Lewis is extending a long tradition of linguistic analysis. Unlike Jacques Derrida, who regards the printed word as locus and invitation for uncontrolled semantic play, an older convention of linguistic commentary, aptly surveyed by Walter Ong, sees selectivity and exactness of reference as priorities in a book-based experience of language: the separation of words into razor-sharp units on the page fosters the need for a correspondingly integral, single significance. (Hugh Kenner has speculated cogently on the relation between writing and the very conception of the word as an atomic unit of meaning.)¹¹ Yet a legacy no less relevant to Lewis's thought appears in the recent commentary of Benda and Gourmont, idéologues who have invested visual severance with a political value identical to the one Lewis invokes here: while the democratic ear merges, the aristocratic eye divides, achieving the separations on which clear conceptual understanding relies and, in their hermeneutic, proving the natural truth of a political elite. While optical separation stands as the emblem of an aristocratic class for the French critics, Lewis gives this political aesthetic a fresh impress on the page—in the lexical experience itself.

Conversely, the separation between word and referential sense appears widest to Lewis in sounds made by and for the Crowd, in the discourse of populist politics. Here the physical thrill of the word may not only substitute for the reality of the referent; it allows the auditor to wish into existence unreal or untenable social concepts. Calling this susceptibility the als ob—“as if”—principle of democratic culture, he asks “If, again, we cannot all be ‘free’ in the Roman sense, or be ‘persons’ as were all Roman Citizens, then should we use their words?” and answers, describing the delusion of that democratic password in terms of its acoustic charge: “The word ‘free’ is merely, as it were, a magical counter with which to enslave us, it is full of an electrical property that has been most maleficent where the European or American is concerned. … It is the ‘democratic’ conceit that is at fault, is it not?”¹² How these electric vocables stimulate the political fiction of democracy—universal freedom and equal citizenship are the specific associations—is a question that Gustave LeBon answers at greater length, in a passage that stands as a probable source for Lewis's own:

Words whose sense is the most ill-defined are sometimes those that possess the most influence. Such, for example, are the terms democracy, socialism, equality, liberty etc., whose meaning is so vague that bulky volumes do not fit it precisely. … [A] truly magical power is attached to those short syllables. … They are uttered with solemnity in the presence of crowds, and … all heads are bowed. … [The] very vagueness that wraps them in obscurity augments their mysterious power. … Certain transitory images are attached to certain words: the word is merely as it were the button of an electric bell that calls them up.¹³

Responding to the same electric signals Lewis hears in these words, the members of LeBon's crowd nod in blind unison to the vocal tokens proclaiming their collective equality. This feeling of empathy with the sound and with other auditors, both writers suggest, provides the true basis of democratic fellow feeling.

Lewis's objections to the acoustic delusion in language belong to the analytical, diagnostic, descriptive rhythm of his idéologie. They form the basis for his prophetic, curative, prescriptive measures. Here he uses the deficiencies of musical democracy to argue for the stark political alternative of fascism:

And yet for anglo-saxon countries as they are constituted to-day some modified form of fascism would probably be best. … In short to get some peace to enable us to work, we should naturally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be devised. … Complete political standardization, with the suppression of the last vestiges of the party system, will rescue masses of energy otherwise wasted in politics for more productive ends. All the humbug of a democratic suffrage, all the imbecility that is so wastefully manufactured, will henceforth be spared this happy people. There will not be an extremely efficient ruling caste, pretending to possess a “liberal” section, or soft place in its heart for the struggling people, on the traditional english model, but the opposite to that. There will be instead an organization that proclaims its intention to rule without interminable palaver, without a “talking house” to humbug its servants in, sweating them but enabling them to call themselves “free”. … (ABR, 320-22)

As words go over into music in demotic culture, and thus lose meaning, the judgmental, idiomatic sense of “humbug” picks up its original, mimetic idea: nonsense sound. Along the same lines, “palaver” returns its acquired association of vocal drivel to its cognate etymology—para-bolar, “to throw to the side”—in order to depict the essential deflection of meaning in words voiced aloud, in a democratic “talking house” (parliament). Here the acoustic charge of language short-circuits its significance and substitutes its sensory thrill—the melding effect conatural to the experience of sound—for the conceptual validity of collectivist, egalitarian passwords. Such manipulation of audience and electorate belies the high ideal of suffrage and conscious choice and thus, in Lewis's view, describes the supreme delusion of democracy. This system operates with a different but no less coercive authority than fascism itself.

Thus the newest, most startling inference of Lewis's argument is the idea that fascism differs from current democratic method mainly or only on the matter of linguistic directness. Fascists at least say what they do, and that, Lewis claims, is the least we can hope for: “All I wish to emphasize [in fascism] is a new factor, a political openness and directness, the initiative in which democracy cannot claim” (ABR, 75). What decides Lewis's preference for fascism over democracy is not the putative difference between the values of oppression and liberality; it is an aesthetic standard defined primarily in visual terms—for him the clarity and directness available (mainly) to the eye. His choice represents a distinction between better and worse states of perception, not between States founded on creeds either admired or disapproved. It is made by the radical idéologue, not the conventional modern ideologue.

It is in terms of this latter-day identity that Lewis is seen—often astutely—by Fredric Jameson. As a Marxist, however, Jameson reduces Lewis's political options to the binary dialectical model: the specter of communism has generated the single, predictable antithesis of fascism, which the Enemy must seize as the only available alternative.¹⁴ Yet Lewis's resistance to such conventional partisan divisions locates the essence of his political identity. Authority is his one value, and if it is properly (optically) established, it matters not one whit to him which partisan stripe it wears. In the passage above, in fact, he is describing the ideal regimen of a fascist or socialist state: “All marxian doctrine, all étatisme or collectivism, conforms very nearly in practice to the fascist ideal” of a “rigidly centralised” hierarchy, “working from top to bottom with the regularity and smoothness of a machine” (ABR, 321-22). And so Lewis taunts ideological faithfuls—in the early thirties—by placing his authoritarian squarely in the no-party's-land of idéologie: “politically I take my stand midway between the Bolshevist and the Fascist—the gentleman on the left I shake with my left hand, the gentleman on the right with my right hand. If there were only one (as I wish there were) I'd shake him with both hands.”¹⁵

This indifference to party allegiance helps to explain Lewis's lack of overt commitment to British fascism. In this home-grown species he could see close-up the actual machinations of party politics, even those of the authority he heroicized: its leader relied on a mass-based legitimacy, on demagogic oratory (a recognition he will need a full decade to make in Germany, whose distance from England affords him the vantage on which his ideals rely).¹⁶ Here is one soft point in the satirist's armored shell, the extraordinary naiveté of the Man of the World: an aesthetic conception of politics that subjects all parties to the same artistic criticism and that blinds him to the real difference between partisan values.

What joins dictatorial fascism to the right kind of socialism is, for Lewis, a specifically verbal directness: its Word shows what it means. This is his own literary hubris, one that he is asserting on the pages of his contemporary fiction. Overreaching the nonpainterly medium of language, he attempts to substitute (his) optical rules for normal lexical laws. The frustrations attending this project variously challenge and reinforce his desire to find his artistic ideal fulfilled in the political realm. To explore his troubles in the twenties with the theory and practice of visual linguistics is to locate a tension generating his more overt application of aesthetics to politics in the early thirties.

VISUAL LINGO

While Lewis sometimes admits the conflict between visual directness and verbal representation, he defies these differences just as often. In “Credentials of the Painter” (1922), to begin, he restricts vivid immediacy to the pictorial image alone, setting it categorically at odds with the elusive music of the verbal counter:

The fundamental claim of the painter or sculptor, his fundamental and trump credential, is evidently this: that he alone gives you the visual fact of our existence. … His art is in a sense the directest and is certainly the most “intellectual,” when it is an art at all. The word-picture of the writer is a hybrid of the ear and eye. He appeals to both senses. In his imagery he leaves you the emotional latitude almost of the musician. He says “the dog bayed,” and as you read it a ghost of a deep sound causes a faint vibration in your throat (you “bay”), and a vague hound appears with bloodshot eyes and distended neck in the murk of your consciousness. The painter paints you a dog baying; it is a new and direct experience. (WLA, 218)

Lewis's faith in the directness of pictorial presentation leads him to claim that a specifically acoustic effect may attain greater accuracy in paint than in language, even when the word is sounded out to mimic the aural referent.

The exaggerations he makes in favoring the painter over the writer only add to the demands on language when, at other moments, he proposes a union between his pictorial vision and his literary efforts:

I am an artist, and through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass. “The architectural simplicity”—whether of a platonic idea or a greek temple—I far prefer to no idea at all, or, no temple at all, or, for instance, to most of the complicated and too tropical structures of India. Nothing could ever convince my EYE—even if my intelligence were otherwise overcome—that anything that did not possess this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard exact outline, grand architectural proportion, was the greatest art. Bergson is indeed the arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in the apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. (ABR, 338)

Here Lewis joins the French faculty of severance to the eye of his English prose: optical separation (“hard exact outline”) combines intellectual definition (“conceptual quality”) with the unfettered directness (“simplicity”) of the integral verbal image. Claiming a directly presentational intelligence in language, this 1926 tract counters the cautionary words of 1922 and as such outlines the ambitious trajectory of this painterly writer. Yet the force of the earlier passage enters as fool to Lewis's Lear, subverting the visual hubris in ways equally subtle and conspicuous. The “tropical” zones and structures he seeks to elude provide a verbal reminder—the word shares its etymon with trope, “turning (away)”—of the essentially metaphorical, secondary character of linguistic figures. Despite the overt protest, Lewis's formulations reveal their deeper allegiance to Dora Marsden and the nominalist arguments of the New Freewoman and the Egoist (which had serialized Tarr). The “structures” of discourse are all too “tropical” and “complicated,” and the strain required to align the deflections of language with the arrow-straight compass of Lewis's idealized eye is evident in the special pleading he reverts to here.

The strain is already evident in 1922, in his “Essay on the Objective of Plastic Art,” where he takes Schopenhauer's dictates on visual severance as an absolute rule of all art:

“[Art] therefore pauses at this particular thing, the course of time stops: the relations vanish for it: only the essential, the idea, is its object.”

That might be a splendid description of what the great work of plastic art achieves. It “pauses at this particular thing,” whether that thing be an olive-tree that Van Gogh saw; a burgher of Rembrandt or Miss Stein. “The course of Time stops.” A sort of immortality descends upon these objects. …

Those words are, however, part of a passage in The World as Will and Idea. …“[A]rt … is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world's course, and has it isolated before it.”

We might contrast this with a Bergsonian impressionism, which would urge you to leave the object in its vital milieu. … The impressionist doctrine, with its interpenetrations, its tragic literalness, its wavy contours, its fashionable fuss, points always to one end: the state in which life itself supercedes art. … (WLA, 208-9)

While Schopenhauer restates the now familiar connection between visual separation (“it plucks the object of its contemplation out of … the world's course”) and conceptual definition (“only the essential, the idea, is its object”), Lewis goes on to discredit any mode of intellectual, aesthetic, or sensory perception other than this exclusively visual one. Isolation of the individual verbal figure from the lexical continuum must deprive it of the contextual, relational basis of modern linguistic understanding. The necessary play between figure and ground emerges here, in Lewis's judgment, as an operation of vitalist empathy and interpenetration at its Bergsonian worst.

To this protodemocratic milieu Lewis responds, in 1922, with the nascent force of his own developing vision of aesthetics and politics. The separation of figure from ground in the scheme of proximate vision achieves a spatial hierarchy, and this imaginative paradigm of authoritarian politics seeks a local habitation in the art of names as well as in pictorial images—though the strenuousness of its verbal realization will be apparent throughout Lewis's efforts. His attempt to elevate literature to that highly specialized method and standard of painting produces a body of fiction remarkable for the very ambitious terms on which it struggles and, in the end, makes an art of its own failure.

LINGUAL VISAGES

The emblem and instrument of Lewis's struggle as a pictorial stylist is the jagged, highly idiosyncratic character of his prose syntax. Working against the cursiveness of conventional English grammar (meaning is built on word order, not inflection), he seeks to replace its principle of continuity, which relates one word to the next in linear sequence, with a model of correspondence, where the individual word, separated from the normal syntactic flow, may recover an equally integral referent. Consider the contortions required to delineate the images for this cameo in Apes of God—a representative example from that largely plotless gallery of satirical portraits of Bloomsbury:

The impressive displacement (on the pattern of the heavy uprising from the pondfoam of the skull of a seal, with Old-Bill moustache, leaden with water, as exhibited at the Zoo) released the pinch of neck-flesh which had been wedged between the stud and shirt-band. … Head lazily rolled to one side he considered it—with staring swimming eyes and moist pink muzzle, pulpily extended—plum locked in plum. (AG, 59)

Disrupting the drift of the long sentence, Lewis checks the linear movement of subject-verb with a lengthy parenthesis. Thrusting against the momentum that undermines the visual specificity of single words, he fills the breach with a series of closely focused, separate images. The second long sentence proceeds from noun clause to main clause when, like the first, it frustrates its expected progression, refusing to produce the sort of flourish that normally attends the completion of the periodic structure: the movement from minor to major. Unmusical to a fault, the fragmentation of these noun phrases is assisted by the dashes. Syntax and punctuation conspire to produce a page-based illusion of resemblance between discrete verbal units and the images of individual things.

It is an art of more than usual illusion: the very vividness of its images relies on the exaggeration of extreme metaphors. Such similes play a crucial role in Lewis's practical poetics—as in the likenesses aped by the cat in the opening of his 1930 novel: “A cat like a beadle goose-stepped with eerie convulsions out of the night cast by a cluster of statuary, from the recesses of the entrance hall. A maid with matchless decorum left a door silently, she removed a massive copper candlestick. She reintegrated the gloom that the cat had left” (AG, 7). “Nothing is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision,” Robbe-Grillet remarks:¹⁷ “A cat like a beadle goose-stepped”—a virtual bestiary of fabulous comparisons. The very quest for vivid particularity in verbal reference has led Lewis to fetch his metaphors from so far away; the less striking the likeness, after all, the dimmer the image in print. Stuck to phantoms, unstuck from things, words seem “matchless” indeed—in the several senses of that aptly charged adjective, including “incomparable,” in a passage that relies on such extravagant comparisons to denote other quiddities. Such figurative, nonessential words are doomed to the duplicity of meanings that this one centers so ostensibly: a matchless candle-bearer, who is beyond compare, or is without lighting devices. Thus “matchless” integrates the true gloom of Lewis's passage—the darkness cast over the phenomenal world by the shape-changing shadows of words like that.

Like Pound's ideogrammic method, Lewis's art of extreme metaphor concedes the referential doubleness of English words, but only in an attempt to surmount it—to enforce the one meaning he projects through his aggressively visual tropes. An art of excess, it runs the risk of committing opposite mistakes. Stretching the credibility of the metaphors too far, he may also compensate by relaxing into the readily acceptable, conventional figure. In either case, the Enemy will have gone over to the side of his linguistic foe. Pushing the vividly imagined terms of his similes to an untenable distance from their originals, he release a flow of sensuous particulars as gratuitous and unattached as the self-propelled current of the Stein-stutter: a blind, mindlessly winding alley of purely verbal sensationalism. Understandably, he may resort to the established trope, and these dim but easily credible figures not only fail his own experiments; they confirm the adequacy of the same conventional usage his literary project exists to discredit. Going too far and not far enough and, on both counts, consorting with his enemies, Lewis's self-betrayal is evident in the technical practices as well as the fictions of these two novels.

The danger of figurative excess escalates when the technique of extreme metaphor repeats in series. The simile of extravagant visual abuse is the basic gesture of Enemy satire, and when Lewis widens its scope, filling out the satirical scene with multiple figures, the quick, sharp, glancing blows of those individual tropes seem to miss their targets. The verbal images often seem to spring less from their victims than from each other—one fantastical figure pulling the next in its wake. Consider the difference between the vividness of a single image and the smear of a serial crowd:

Stationary butterflies, his eyes fluttered bashfully as the three visitors came into the hall. (AG, 310)

Dense centripetal knots or vortices of people collect marginally, beneath the wall or beyond the path, but a march is kept up where the ground is even by an active inquisitive crowd of promenaders passing each other back and forth like the chain of a funicular. The vortices forming beneath the wall are watched from above in the manner of the Eton wall-game by disputatious idlers who interrupt from their vantages with peremptory vetoes, or launch red-herrings into the centre of the scent.¹⁸

When Etonian debates are staged as popular entertainment, “red-herrings” may well be thrown, not only (in the idiomatic sense) as rhetorical distractions, but as stinking fish from the stands. Preposterous metaphor, “red herrings” links its literal and figurative terms, achieving the same kind of tensioned correspondence that Lewis's other, equally radical comparisons need to succeed. And while this usage embodies just the sort of verbal brio that Northrop Frye regards as the driving spirit of satire,¹⁹ it serves only to highlight the excess of excess, when the vehicle of a metaphor drives away from its tenor into the intense inane. Not only does the overheated verbal imagination blur the visibility of the prospect here; its symptoms are streaked across the grammar as well. The flurry of alternative conjunctions—“Dense centripetal knots or vortices,” “beneath the wall or beyond the path,” “who interrupt … or launch”—reads as the sign of a focus refusing to settle, of an author being carried along by the autonomous force of language itself. Less interesting as referential image than word, “funicular” (rope, cord) shows that whirligig of linguistic energy sweeping the writer into its own eyeless vortex. While the desire to wring visual immediacy from verbal abstraction compels the technique of extreme metaphor, its elaboration manufactures an opacity greater than that which it seeks to overcome.

Lewis compensates with a complementary mistake: a usage excessively safe. In this excerpt from The Childermass (a massacre of the utopian myth of childhood), the radical thinginess of the unusual trope has been supplanted by a language of generic blandness: “Satters lisps, throwing a baby ravishment into his gaze. … Satters stickily lisps. ‘You're a perfect darling Pulley!’ in a florid whisper, on a hot and baby-scented breath. … Satters revives to pour out, in rich whining sibillation, leaning heavily on Pullman's arm … ” (Ch, 46-47). As an adjective, “baby” loses the solidity of the nominative for the vagueness of a general condition. Similarly, stickiness and floridity describe states of feeling, and show no concrete specifics of sensation (thus the need to repeat, for emphasis, “hot”). To turn the adjectival “whining” into a creature is a dog of a task—but its product would at least be visible. Little better his ornithology at the start of this passage from Apes: “Lord Osmund is above six foot and is columbiform. His breast development allies him also to that species of birds whose males are said to share the task of sitting feeding the young with their mates. The poulter-inflation seems also to give him a certain lightness—which suspends him like a balloon, while he sweeps majestically forward. His carefully-contained obesity may be the reason for his martial erectness” (AG, 350). “Columbiform” and “poulter”like offer “species” as the terms of imaginative comparison here. A language of taxonomic, Latinate generality has replaced the observed particular as the substance of Lewis's verbal art, and thus allowed the writing to lapse into a semidiscursive fluency—a manner utterly at odds with the sharp, darting, imagistic jabs of the literary satyr. What rescues this passage is that patch of unexpected visibility near the end: the image of the balloon swept majestically forward is unlikely (in the context of animal comparisons), sudden; like other shocking tropes, it relies for its visibility on an unpredictable rip in the discursive fabric—it comes just after the gratuitously inserted “—” (Lewis's visual imagination tends to penetrate language between dashes). And yet this anomalous, hypersyntactic metaphor depends on the abstract and normalizing language that precedes it, for that commentary provides a class category as frame for the unusual detail and, rhetorically, a kind of logical ballast to drag its airy extravagance to ground. As in farce, the humor turns on the sense of an impossibility becoming strangely reasonable, normal, indeed inevitable. This compromise between the eccentric detail and the normative voice is struck again and again in both novels, but to make it Lewis is going against his own strength as pictorial stylist.

Since the painter betrays his first principle of visual directness in his transactions with language, it is easy to see how Lewis's Enemy persona reflects an internal division. That mask portrays the artist's own split aesthetic identity. Verbal evocation and pictorial immediacy make their rival claims on this writer, but he has projected the personal conflict outward into a fixed, typical, political opposition: the musical indirection of democratic culture, the optical clarity of the fascist ideal. This separation, polemically maintained, suggests a need to hold apart forces that are, in fact, more complicitous—at least in Lewis's own literary practice. These opposites stand together in the locus of origins: in the fiction, most clearly in its dramatic personae, where characters of verbal (and vocal) obliquity merge into those typifying the directness intended by the painter. These personages focus a wide-ranging system of contradictions, which reveal the compromised nature of the linguistic medium in which they appear.

Such contradictions make up the figure and title of “The Split-Man” in Apes of God, Julius Ratner, who subsumes the vocal-musical character of James Joyce within the visual-presentational values of Lewis himself. Shaping Ratner's face to the austere outlines of Egyptian bas-relief—“The Arabs call him Split-Man”—Lewis shows him in angular profile; his highly defined features convey the impression (under the guise of the artistic convention that it is) of crisp, integral image, direct presentation. Yet this sternly abstract visage merely rests as facade over the vitalist innards of Ratner's Joycean voice. When Zagreus observes, “‘Exteriorly I always think of you in profile—like a bas-relief, you know. You always seem to me to be looking at me sideways—like a bird,’” he responds: “‘Really! You read a great deal into me Horace that is not there I fear—I never knew I was so interesting,’ Ratner croaked—his assumed worldliness breaking and cracking, the primitive gutturals [‘a bitter velvety bass’] getting the upper hand” (AG, 331). Jimmy Julius is speaking here to Horace Zagreus, whose two names include an opposition similar to his respondent's. The Roman stylist's terse epigrams provide the written equivalent of the succinct, well-defined outline of the Ratner profile; yet the fertility god Dionysus stirs in his second, Greek name. This antithetical title is an ample thematic resource, generating the extraordinary, indeed visionary, complexity of these sentences, where the first and last names collide as a multiple, ramifying paradox: “The entire Split-person, with a wolfish rush, came together, the dead half and the quick—it shook itself, it burst into action. The repressed instinct to strike, in the snake-like suspense of the faculties, in the rattish winter of his discontent beneath the horatian city, armed Ratner's tongue” (AG, 412). Just as musical élan undermines the nonvital geometry of Ratner's Egyptian profile, the Dionysian quick of his tongue violates the composure of a classical Horatian civitas. This city is the social extension of the visual values configured in the well defined bas-relief: optical discrimination creates an artistic-political elite, who preside over a city founded on the values of pictorial definition. As such, however, it is resented by a musical underclass—aggrieved, yes, but animated by an acoustic vitality like Ratner's, roiling “in the rattish winter of [their] discontent beneath the horatian city.”

While the apocalyptic division between these two camps appears familiar from Lewis's discursive opinions on political aesthetics, their inclusion in a single position—the single figure of Ratner—is not. The rigidity of their opposition in the polemical writing signals an attempt on Lewis's part to standardize and hold apart forces that run more compulsively (“wolfishly”) together in his literary practice, where he is more likely to concede the point: the pictorial directness he seeks in language is deflected into the acoustic density of words. The bitterness of this admission understandably casts the confession on an oblique angle (the focus of contradiction is James Joyce), but the grimness of his conviction lends the imaginative intricacy of these two passages a studied consistency.

Horace Zagreus takes his place in a chain of fictional personages, a sequence of characters who outline the essential direction and difficulty of Lewis's literary mission: the transmission of visual ideals into language. He is the emissary of Pierpoint. Never glimpsed in the novel, this potent but enigmatic figure is most clearly identified with the absent author: Pierpoint recalls, not only Percy Wyndham Lewis, but the name he nicked into his early letters—“Pierce-eye”—as ominous token of his later, aggressively pointed optical philosophy. A “painter turned philosopher” (AG, 129), like Lewis in the twenties, Pierpoint writes an encyclical, which Zagreus bears into the fictional milieu like a sacred scroll, in the ark of Lewis's new aesthetic Covenant: the extract summarizes the major points from the Man of the World's script. Extending the mystical wisdom of that encyclical into literary—and social—practice, however, entails a difficulty equal to the intricate network of its delivery. It moves from Lewis to Pierpoint, from Pierpoint to Horace Zagreus (already compromised by the rival claims of his double name), and thus to Zagreus's literary protégé, Dan Boleyn. Following in the fateful footsteps of Ann Boleyn, Dan is a tool in the dynastic ambitions of Pierpoint's aesthetics. His failure to give birth to the desired product—to pierce the fabric of language with an original visual intensity—will lead him to be discarded as easily as his namesake.

There is many a slip between Pierpoint's cup and Boleyn's lip, and Dan indeed gives some lip to the aesthetic of optical severity that has been passed to him: he allows the hard gaze of the pictorial artist to degenerate into vocal drivel, right from the start. Arriving at the party in the image of a “tall young man” with “great severity” (AG, 202), he scrutinizes the antics with “severe eyes” (204)—his visage the very image of visual severance, featuring high definition, intellectual discrimination, social elitism; he is the type-character of Lewis's visual idéologie. As soon as this optical intelligence enters language, however, it collapses into incantation, the wishful indecision of words in the mouth. The high aim of the eye is failed by language, uttered here both in internal monologue and aloud: “The tall boy swayed giddily, his expression all radiant with new-born hope and the sacred fire of the genius that one living creature at least believed in.—His own father had never said—it has been left to a total stranger to discover! ‘Melanie!’ in ponderous lisping rapture he articulated her name to call her attention. … ‘Can you teach me to paint pictures in oils oh do please say yes!’” (AG, 126).

Free indirect speech suits Lewis's purposes, he maintains in Satire and Fiction, mainly as satiric display.²⁰ Accordingly, Dan's appearance in the novel reverts continually from a record of his severe visual aspect to a chanting in mock unison with his vocalized thoughts. This constant modulation from his idealized visage to the dismal matter-of-spoken-fact thus adds the certitude of burlesque to the failure it repeatedly enacts: the optical linguistic being tested in Dan is going down in a verbal—vocal—farce, in comic rue. Zagreus's letter, dismissing the experimental subject, puts his deficiencies in these terms: “‘You may not be so fitted for these severe exercises of the intellect as I had at first believed. … I have felt myself in the midst of some sentimental ‘bottom-dog’ Revolt, or that I had taken to my bosom a barbarian, instead of one (as I had fondly believed) who had the makings of a disciplined and rational person—destined to be a fine Frontkämpfer of the new idea’” (AG, 608). While Dan's “severe eyes” should have suited him for “these severe exercises of the intellect,” he has belied Benda's (and Gourmont's)²¹ promise of visual discrimination and conceptual definition. Barbar-ian (a word used ever searchingly by Lewis) lends the sense of its acoustic etymon—a babbler—to its judgmental meaning, and thus characterizes the forces undermining the ocular project: nonsense sound hangs on, even in printed words, as a presence, residual but real as the root meaning of that word. This errant music deflects the high, civilizing aim of optical definition.

Lewis's failure to align his pictorial principles with the lexical medium leads him to the complementary admission: aesthetic ideals neither describe nor prescribe the facts of political life—not even the acts of his preferred parties. The representatives of fascism thus emerge as split men of their own. Divided between aesthetic antitheses as sharply drawn as Ratner's, these figures own no single artistic principle to extend into social formations. In Childermass, the Führer-like Hyperides finds his prime disciple (the chain of command resembles the network emanating from Pierpoint) in Alectryon. He combines the superior powers of the defining eye—visual severance creates his sharply lined visage and vaunts its prestige in his severely elitist mien—with an unregenerate stutter, consonant with the musical indecision of democratic culture and the nonsense sound of its literary spokesperson, Gertrude Stein:

He is the handsomest of all the Hyperideans with a large and languishing russet petasus tied beneath his chin. A black-cloak falls straight to his heels fastened with a Bangkok swastika temple design imposed upon a rough brooch and he carries a black leather portfolio of continental cut. His face has no feminine imperfections but is cast on the severest lines of an eager and wolfish symmetry. … (Ch, 293-94)

“I speak; and if I speak well it is through [Hyperides'] influence, though this task of mine, I humbly conceive, be by no means above my parts, which in their turn derive to me from the hardy conjunction of an armorial duke with a Big-Steel Jewess (albeit such descent in certain quarters smacks of attainder) the last devisee of the historic blood of him who brought back the blocks of the decalogue out of the cloud from which archetypal puppet I inherit the slight stammer you m-m-may have rem-m-marked.”

Bailiff. “No, Did Moses stammer?”

Alectryon. “He, Sir, was named the Stammerer in consequence of his stammer. Aaron did all the s-s-s-s-s-s-speaking.” (Ch, 300)

Likewise, in Apes of God the figure of Blackshirt defiles the ceremonies of visual innocence, the pristine scheme of optical directness, that provides the standard and value of fascist mastery for Lewis. Blackshirt makes vulgar appeals to Demos, showing an unexpected affinity with popular musical culture: “Blackshirt began expounding. It reminded Dan of a ‘broadcast.’ … ‘These Finnian Shaws’ said Blackshirt—and Dan thought he detected a certain vulgarity in the accents of his voice” (AG, 482). “The Blackshirt whistled softly Auld Lang Syne and Dan looked up in some astonishment. This display of musical ability in such an unbending realist was unexpected to say the least” (AG, 502-3).

This deconstruction of the ideal extends to the motives and method of Lewis's distinctive literary style. The gestural directness that he values in the political grammar of fascism and seeks to replicate in his own fictional prose—dislocating normal syntactic progression, forcing the musical flow into abrupt, quasi-pictorial signals, thus showing verbal images as distinct and integral things—goes over to its political and aesthetic enemies in this next passage. Appropriately, the Split Man beholds this duplicity, but Lewis encloses the contradiction in a pattern of verbal echoing too subtle for Ratner, who regards a crowd

strutting in a dance, to a music of drums, with contralto and counter-bass saxophones—period The Present. The studied mass-energy of the music, hurrying over precipices, swooping in switchbacks, rejoicing in gross proletarian nigger-bumps, and swanee-squeals shot through with caustic cat-calls from the instrumentalists, depressed him. It was as if he had written it himself! But still more did the vibrations of the voice of Horace Zagreus depress him—that it would be impossible to attribute to Ratner's handiwork, with the autocratic dominant strut of its sentences, but doubly stupid it was in Ratner's estimate, twice as tiresome as the idiot mass-sound of the marxistic music. (AG, 442-43)

The “autocratic dominant strut” of Horace Zagreus's sentences depicts the boldly gestural motive and effect that Lewis seeks to produce in the visual explicitness of his own prose—and finds in the direct, directing Word of fascist authority. This political aesthetic might earn full endorsement from its speaker's Latin namesake. In line with his identity as Dionysian Greek, however, the anarchic vitalism of the demotic street dance is swayed to the same strut, here called to that tune of the “idiot mass-sound of the marxistic music.” For the Horatian Lewis's elitist precision is all of a piece with the fertile confusion of the common tongue. The usual duplicity of word and referent survives even in his highly refined style, and especially in its extravagant metaphors, where the vivid particularity of the comparison only widens the chasm between word and referent.

Representing his failure to synthesize painting and writing in passages as bleakly remarkable, as bitterly original as these, Lewis might have resolved their ambivalent triumphs into one certain truth: subjecting politics to an aesthetic analysis is to commit the reciprocal fallacy. Lewis concedes this theme, but only—for now—in his fiction, where the elementary conflict between his literary medium and his pictorial goals simply forces him to admit the misalignment. The incompatibilities may indeed appear merely as subjects to be exploited in the novels; to feed the very machine of literature that Lewis's painterly ideal cannot drive.²² Yet the inclusive vision of the political state as a work of art continues to exert its fascination for the Man of the World. In face of his literary failure, indeed, the political possibilities of his aesthetic seem to exert an even greater attraction in the early thirties, when he writes a tract in support of Hitler, a figure whom he conceives and represents in terms of his own artistic schemes. This visual idéologie is rooted in the early days of Lewis's career, and it establishes itself firmly at the beginning of the Man of the World project: its rise (and fall) may be traced from the first postwar years.

THE FAILURE OF ART

The changes wrought by the Great War on Lewis's visual sensibility are summarized in his 1950 memoir Rude Assignment:

The war was a sleep, deep and animal, in which I was visited by images of an order very new to me. Upon waking I found an altered world: and I had changed too, very much. The geometries which had interested me so exclusively before, I now felt were bleak and empty. They wanted filling. …

War, and especially those miles of hideous desert known as “the Line” in Flanders and France, presented me with a subject-matter so consonant with the austerity of that “abstract” vision I had developed, that it was an easy transition. … And before I knew what I was doing I was drawing with loving care a signaller corporal to plant upon the lip of the shell-crater.²³

This new claim on painterly realism certainly comports with the values of pictorial directness that Lewis sought to instill in literature in the twenties. His need to witness the war experience might have propelled him in this direction, but his shift toward realism, at least in the immediately postwar period, seems to be exaggerated in retrospect—perhaps to assert the truth of the horror that occasioned the change.

His remembrance is qualified by the contemporary record, by Ezra Pound, who, reviewing the same work Lewis is referring to, but in 1920, remarks: “A few devotees will regret that Mr. Lewis shows none of his more abstract compositions, yet his control over the elements of abstraction was hardly ever greater than in some of these present drawings, and his independence of the actual never more complete than in his present subjugation of it to his own inner sense” (EPVA, 134). Pound is describing the aesthetic conscience of Lewis's war painting in line with the values he will extol, nearly twenty years later, as that “Form-sense 1910 to 1914” (GK, 134). Yet he is also correct to see a new kind of realism on these canvases (sampled later), geometric in emphasis. For the new painting retains the primacy of abstract design over naturalistic content—with a struggle that makes all the difference. The agonistic attitude that Pound could see as the generative force of its achievement—that “subjugation” of “the actual” to the “abstract” schemes of his “inner sense”—thus emerges as an active awareness in the painter's own practice, as Lewis's own recollection continues: “I can never feel any respect for a picture that cannot be reduced, at will, to a fine formal abstraction. But I now busied myself for some years acquiring a maximum of skill in work from nature—still of course subject to the disciplines I had acquired and which controlled my approach to everything.”²⁴ The language here is alive to the complexities of the original situation. Far from happy complicity with an easy naturalistic line, the Enemy's attempt to hold “nature … subject to the disciplines” of a “fine formal abstraction” reflects the struggle traced by Pound (whose review is echoed here as the truer record of Lewis's attitudes in the first postwar years).

This tension between formalism and realism plays onto broader political ground. For the architectural element in the war painting showed Pound, in February 1919, a distinctly social motive and goal. “These [“well composed, well constructed”] works are signally free from the violence which characterized Mr. Lewis's prewar productions,” he writes in “Wyndham Lewis at the Goupil”: “The artist is the antidote for the multitude. At least, there is antidotal art, whether one approve of it or no” (EPVA, 100). In other words, the painter could impose the formal order of his art onto the historical reality he enclosed in these designs. This model organization and authority both rearranged and corrected the chaotic actuality of mass society, as evidenced in the mass war that was Lewis's subject. Imposing design on representative content, the artist could be seen maneuvering for political vantage. Mastery is indeed the theme under which the painter's geometric schemes meet the random, variable, matter-of-recent-fact. (His analysis of Lewis's rage for order situates his own quest for poetic authority—particularly in Cantos IV-VII—in its postwar moment.)

Thus the form-making Vorticist acknowledges himself as legislator of the world in The Caliph's Design, a discursive fantasy written shortly after Pound's review. As though acting on that reviewer's “approval,” Lewis demands a social embodiment of his aesthetic vision. Hailing the “revolutionary epoch” that his own painting is part of, he tells artists to abandon their dated doctrine of art for art's sake; to model their work on the social conscience and public scale of the architects (the pamphlet is subtitled “Architects! Where is your Vortex?”); and to fashion this civil art in line with the most strenuous standards—the “hard and smart” lines of ultra-abstract artists. Theirs is a priestly tyranny of aesthetic legislators, a privilege embodied in Lewis's rhetorical persona. This caliph orders not just a city but a whole civil order to be built in accord with “a little vorticist bagatelle that I threw off while I was dressing.”²⁵ More than caprice, his demand extends the privileges accruing rightly, Lewis believes, to an artistic clerisy. Again in 1919, he affirms a small “public d'élite” as a center of correct—and correcting—aesthetic awareness,²⁶ and singles them out most of all for their capacity to see geometrically, abstractly. Hailing the diagrammatic aspect of art in “Prevalent Design” (1919), he suggests forcibly that such designs might prevail by force in the political sphere. His higher caste's “tyrannous talent for design” (WLA, 120) claims the same imperial means for levering aesthetic schemes onto the social realm as the Caliph's own.

The privileges of Lewis's clercs hinge on the form-making powers of their visual intelligence, and he exercises this authority through its signature pattern—proximate vision, as named and described by Ortega. To foreground the focal image is to discriminate; the consequent hierarchy of planes—in the sensory language of the new idéologie—endorses the idea of class echelons in society. Thus Lewis's 1919 painting A Battery Shelled puts his officer class securely in the frontal position. The authority he thereby sanctions is matched by a high aerial vantage of his own: he detaches the eye from the scene with the same kind of insouciant power that he depicts in their relaxed, apparently confident command. The naturalistic lines he weaves into the vestments of preeminence stand in equally sharp relief to the stick-men figures massed in the rear. This contrast may serve the perception that the members of the higher class might alone attain the kind of individuality he has contoured into these living, untypical shapes. But it is also possible to see the disparity as a formal and thematic irony, whereby the authority revered in the very scheme of this painting has reverted to the work of war—an aberration of the civilizing function Lewis accords these privileged individuals and reflects in their own sophisticated mien.

This reading also helps to explain the differences between the war painting and the design of The Pole Jump (1919-1929), where the rightful authority finds no errant preoccupation, where no such complication attends the configuration of power. Dominating its frontal plane, these juridical figures extend their authority over the plebian mass in the background by a rather extraordinary trompe-l'oeil. Inclining their hats in one direction, Lewis describes a single line of force that rises, in dramatic effect, to halt the vaulted body suspended in midair.

The difference between A Battery Shelled and The Pole Jump goes to their controlling perspectives. The lifted vantage and distancing effect in the war painting ensure that one is looking at a representation of authority, and this viewpoint allows for a rueful, distanced, even elegiac consideration of its subject. The angle of sight in The Pole Jump shifts into that of the frontal figures. Looking through the eyes of privilege, the viewer has moved into the dramatic economy of power, and the surging gaze transmits the feel of dominion intensely. While the convention of proximate vision obtains equally in the two paintings, the detached symbolic representation in the first has given way to an actualizing involvement in the second. The difference witnesses a movement from the virtual world of aesthetic shapes to the sphere of real political experience. Not content with using the schemes of proximate vision to depict a hierarchy in society, he seeks indeed to live inside its configuration of absolute power. This desire is so deep it can only be sharpened by deferral. When the pictorial stylist confesses the necessary failure of his scheme in Apes of God, in 1930, he will seek to realize it in Hitler's emergent State.

This development witnesses Lewis's own habitus, the inward bent of his character, and not simply a strategy of compensation. The same movement we see in the two paintings above can be followed again in a set of passages from The Lion and the Fox. In each he deploys the pattern of proximate vision with its familiar political content, contrasting the single figure of the privileged king with the subservient Many, but he shifts its angle of view, subtly, tellingly; a representation of this scheme in the first excerpt yields in the second to a participation in the political dynamic it depicts:

So the King in these early societies played the game of the One and the Many with a small chosen team, in a small chosen world. And the many on their side were not so many, not so many as ever to be “the crowd” or the many-headed multitude: but enough to reproduce the general contrast of numbers to singularity. …

The feudal european king was essentially not a patriarch, but a stranger and an enemy. The king and his nobles were usually of another race to the subject, their mastery beginning in physical conquest. …

These russian or anglo-saxon serfs had their individual stranger (a small personal god) quartered on them, giving a personal form to all the anonymous outer power of the universe, against which it was impossible to fight, but against which … he agreed to protect them. He was their enemy, a representative of the outer hostile world, between whom and themselves the terms of propitiation and sacrifice had been systematized.²⁷

The first passage sets out the class hierarchy that is preserved in the pictorial convention of proximate vision, and Lewis uses that design in a reasonably neutral, give-and-take, dialectical consideration of the political reality it reflects. In the sequel, he enters that diagrammatic scheme. Instead of looking at the ruler from the perspective of one gazing at the picture, where the privileged king is wreathed by the plebs, Lewis has taken up the vantage of the subject, through whose eyes “all the anonymous outer power of the universe” can be felt as the lord's resource of authority. And the poetry to which Lewis rises in portraying the dark, anarchic empowerment of antique rule measures the degree to which that aesthetic scheme—convenience for explanation in the first excerpt—is heated here with a lived intensity.

On one hand, he knew better. Already in 1934, in “Power-feeling and Machine-age Art,” he will assert that political force must move at cross-purposes with aesthetic form; the necessary dynamics of the State are at odds with the true order of art.²⁸ By this time he will have started to see (as we will see) how far Nazi society diverges, in actuality, from his own artistic charter. On the other hand, the artificial schemes of painting abide as his primary model for personal and political life, and this pressure—the sedulous pleasure of conceiving and dealing with history in terms of artistic paradigms—will be countered only gradually, momentarily, tentatively, through the later thirties. To live in the aesthetic scheme is Lewis's deepest wish, a hubris whispered to this unpublished fragment (192?) from “Notes Toward [a] Theory of Painting”: “The life I am indicating (and which I regard as the most developed and which interests me most) is the mind that wishes to live wholly in NOTHING: to live eternally in some arbitrary (of man the point of view of experience, UNREAL) state or condition, where everything is represented, and where the opposites merge in an ordered repose.”²⁹ The ordered repose of The Pole Jump, where the power thrust of the privileged gaze meets its object in a lively but contained stasis, follows the aesthetic form under which Lewis will experience Nazi Germany, thus idealizing and resolving its brute mastery.

His vision of ordered repose in the dictator's plans—“the Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity”³⁰—testifies already, in 1931, to the delusive powers of this aesthetic view. Now, the imminent Reich had not yet revealed its matter of sordid fact to everyone. But already, in The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis has agreed that postwar circumstances may require a violent, dictatorial oppression. On this political reality Lewis imposes his aesthetic screen, and its effect can be measured by the number of sheerly personal antipathies he had to overcome in order to admire Hitler. “Neither [Hitler's] obscure origins, personal appearance, artistic taste, intellectual attitude, youth cult, emotional rhetoric, racial theories, military spectacles nor rabid nationalism appealed to him,” Jeffrey Meyers cogently remarks, and such traits were clearly evident to Lewis during his two-month visit to Germany in 1930.³¹ These points of difference add up to measure the strain under which he must labor to sustain the authority of the Führer in the cleaner, nobler lines of the artistic paradigm. Proximate vision indeed exerts a formative force, showing its influence already in the frontispiece to Hitler (1931): a lurid close-up of the leader's face (full page in the first edition) preserves that model design of privileged command.

Lewis describes the attitudes behind this angle of view a decade later, when his analysis of his conceptual mistake—his misguided (German) nationalism—retains the outline of the older, more potent, sensory-aesthetic scheme of proximate vision:

I believed, say, twelve years ago, that the doctrine of national sovereignty was an indispensable guarantee of freedom. At present I believe the opposite. I regard that as archaic thinking. …

Freedom of the kind I formerly advocated is not possible, then, because scientific techniques have so diminished distance, and telescoped time, that the earth, which was once for man an immense, mysterious, and seemingly limitless universe, is no longer that, but a relatively diminutive ball.³²

The worldview in which the national sovereign functions depends on an angle of sight exactly congruent to the one Lewis drew in The Lion and the Fox, where he mapped the scheme of proximate vision into the dynamics of total political control—where the equally “archaic” prerogative of absolute royal force was seen to rely on the same dark, anarchic background that Lewis projects as the source of the national dictator's authority here.

Of course this modern tyrant drew his power from his public: the fascist is a dictator with a mass-based legitimacy. Master demagogue in practice, Hitler consolidated his political audience by orchestrating their voices into his own, that medley of dialects equally guttural and sweet. While his national character-in-voice projected a single political will as its effective fiction, the social body he created thereby was magnetized to his own in a supreme, massive example of musical empathy. Indeed, Hitler flourished by the very methods the Enemy had spent two decades analyzing and excoriating. That the social critic deafens himself to the lesson of his own twenty-year jeremiad is an obverse testament to the force of a single aesthetic preconception. (Idéologie creates as effective a screen as ideology.) Viewing the Leader as luminous hero in the scheme of proximate vision, as protagonist in that atavistic drama of total control, he simply refuses to hear, in Hitler's rhetoric of the Reich, the truth of his own sardonic critiques. The sage analyst of musical democracy and the politics of acoustic sympathy has in fact become its unwitting victim, a naive respondent all too ready to endorse its chief effects. Since musical empathy fosters the illusion that the speaker is part of the audience, Lewis welcomes Hitler again and again as a man of the people. No sinister enemy-other, this friendly familiar stands free from the machinations of elitist cabals: “Maurras, a great ‘intellectual,’ aristocratic in temper, is untypical: whereas Hitler is a sort of inspired and eloquent Everyman” (H, 33; emphases added). Later he adds: “Hitler's words in the above passage are worth noting—not in secret conventicles—in the Camorra of a militant minority, in fact—but in open, hundred-thousand-strong, visible masses of the citizenry, are nationalsocialist ends to be achieved” (60-61). Once again Lewis repeats that self-betraying appreciation of Hitler as the vocal hero of Demos: “Hitler is a very new type of Nationalist in Germany. The people who follow him know that the Junker-spirit plays no part in his eloquent workman's evangile” (10).

The aural incredulity that Lewis must give up in order to attend so raptly upon this musical demagoguery is recovered from time to time. It is as though the artist needed to cleanse his aesthetic conscience thereby. Yet he never subjects the Führer to such a critical auditing. He allows other examples of mass acoustic sympathy to operate like lightning rods for his inveterate rebuke: all the more evident, then, his willed inattention to Hitler's political orchestrations. Here the old Enemy launches a characteristic blast, blaming the demagogue for manipulating the emotional excitement generated by songs, but the salvo flies toward a site fetched from afar—the Celtic hinterlands: “[all that] Mr. De Valera has to do is come and strike some sad sobbing notes out of the Irish harp, and to howl in a melodious, carefully-cultivated brogue, about ‘Ould Ireland’—and the trick is done! These blood-brothers are at each other's throats … a few bold, shrewdly-aimed blows upon the Welsh Harp, with a wild wail or two—that would have just the same effect!” (H, 142). The closer Lewis approaches to Germany—to Hitler—the more oblique the critique. The complaint about Goebbels's vocal affect in the following passage is sufficiently strong to make its absence felt in the Führer's case:

In this gigantic assembly of twenty thousand people there was something like the physical pressure of one immense, indignant thought. … Goebbels … was a tiny, nervous figure, whose voice rose constantly to a scream, as he denounced the present misrule—the tribute politics, Erfühlungspolitik—the Terroristic methods—the stream of taxation, the credit monopolies of the Social-democratic, and now the Centre coalition, ruling dictatorially by Presidential decree—of Brüning and of Severing, and their Erfühlungskabinett. (H, 10-11)

Attempting to meld his audience to his coercive call, the minister finds his answer in the mimic rant of Lewis's own text: fusing itself with the orator, it offers both parody and symptom of the togetherness inspired by such vocal performances.

This kind of musical mock-up is spared Hitler on account of the optical ideal under which Lewis perceives the leader. He displays that whole process of wishful seeing and willed nonhearing in this representation of a typical meeting of the Hitlerjugend: “[I]f you want to see ‘Youth’ at work and in its element—with all its characteristic passion and ‘idealism’—you cannot do better than go to the meetings of the Hitlerists. There Youth-at-the-Helm is not a phrase, but a fact, and Youth with its eyes wide open!—But that is not at all what is expected of ‘Youth’ by the golden-tongued, insinuating Youth-fans” (H, 98-99). While the devotees' “wide-open eyes” reflect Lewis's own visual infatuation with Hitler, the political reality of mastery and dependence is being cast into the ideal optical model of proximate vision. The scene recalls the prospect in that seminal passage from The Lion and the Fox where the plebian viewers, like the youth here, are protected from the dark backward and abysm of space by the strong, strongly foregrounded hero in the aesthetic scheme: Hitler steadies the eyes and hands of the youth, ready to steer them out into the void behind him, for Lebensraum. To substantiate his pictorial paradigm in political fact, however, Lewis must rebuke the demagogic music of the actual proceedings. Like the other attacks in this book, it is indirect: he lambastes the “golden-tongued” youth cult—but of his own Anglo-American acquaintance: the baby babble of Gertrude Stein, that anthem to the comfortable nonsense sounds of democratic culture. The Enemy thus seeks to regain the high critical ground he has in fact given up.

What Lewis resists seeing here is the full truth of the recognition he made in the passage cited earlier from The Art of Being Ruled: both fascism and democracy rely on a domination of their publics. Those emphases might now just as easily be reversed. Should he not admit that the authority he seeks in fascism relies on a mass-based approval and, as such, consorts rather than contrasts with the musical follies of democratic—demagogic—politics? To make this recognition is to unmake the political vision of The Man of the World. This awareness develops through the thirties, understandably, in a kind of cryptoglyph, although it already underlines the characterization in Apes of God, written in the late twenties.

By the time Lewis writes The Hitler Cult (1939), he will have opened his ears fully to the musical demagoguery of the Führer. For he spends the latter part of this decade confronting the difference between the practical reality of fascism and the optical aesthetic under which he once apprehended and sanctioned it. The advance of history leaves the schemes of avant-garde art further and further behind. The pamphlets he publishes in 1936 and 1937—Left Wings Over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing and Count Your Dead: They are Alive! or A New War in the Making³³—offer more stolidly pragmatic rationales for the political system the artist had regarded earlier as the supreme artifact. Along these lines, his 1937 condemnation of Pound includes a decree of absolute divorce between the perfection the poet desires equally, and wrongly, in politics and aesthetics: “he demands perfection in action, as well as in art. He even appears to expect perfection, or what he understands as such, in the world of politics.”³⁴

Lewis's critique may be true, but it misses the fact that Pound's hubris will have been fueled by the Enemy's own example—at least by his earlier insistence on a State built upon the best aesthetic principles. In 1938, in fact, Pound still praises Lewis for his early “discovery” of Hitler, attributing this insight (like his own find, Mussolini) to the superior powers of the painter's—the Vorticist's—designing eye: “Form-sense 1910 to 1914” (GK, 134). In Italy now for over a decade, Pound is presenting a memory of Lewis, whose true development over this decade witnesses another meaning entirely: a gradual unmaking of the aesthetic premise of politics and a revamping of the political conclusion to which it drew him.

For his juridical statements of 1937 reach further back in the decade for their inner conviction. Historical reality has been growing apart from the aesthete's dream of society at least since 1933. He expresses his artistic disaffection from the new German state in “Berlin Revisited” (1933-34)—an admission too bitter, evidently, to publish. In these scattered manuscripts he notes the heightened level of material prosperity in Nazi Germany, but he is noticeably disappointed by the failure of the revolution to raise literary awareness to a comparable degree: they are reading Galsworthy (not Lewis!). The separation of economic from intellectual well-being gives the lie to the Man of the World's synthetic vision, and (in the dramatic aside of this suppressed text) he concedes his defeat equally in spirit and in detail. Thus the German consciousness, unimproved by the optical intelligence (of writing like his), has reverted to the old musical ways of gentile democracy. Like their English familiars, les hommes moyens sensuels of Hitler's Reich use the pleasant but sedulous acoustics of words for political self-hypnosis. They substantiate the vacuous ideology of middle-class respectability with comfortable sounds, thus wishing that empty ideal into material existence:

We have in England a disease called “refaynement”—something that causes the poor fellow afflicted with it to say “nayce” instead of nice.

But the German can be just as “refayned” if not more so. Do not run away with the idea that any German gives utterance to a trenchant “nein!” when desiring to express negation. No, there are just as many Germans who say “Nayn” or “fayn” for “nein” or “fein” as there are Englishmen who say “nayce” for “nice.” … I must confess to having experienced a certain shock upon realizing the incredible “nayceness” of the modern German mind.³⁵

As a lost possibility, his vanished hope still abides in his rhetoric: that desirably “trenchant ‘nein!’” would enclose in its harsh and abrupted note the exact sense of its French etymon—trencher, “to cut”—and thus shape its speech to the pattern of visual severance and definitional directness that Lewis had nurtured as his inner vision of the Reich. To that painterly plan of the polis the Germans have delivered their long musical “nayn.”

The travel diary foretells the changing model of Lewis's political perceptions in the thirties. With increasing clarity and acuteness, he hears the music of mass empathy shouting down the pristine ideal of a visual elite. He tells this story of personal disillusion in grim detail, most pointedly in his 1939 record of the Nuremberg rallies.

To catch the exact curve of his despair here, one needs to see that political theater through Lewis's eyes: a visible emblem of his former, aesthetic ideal of State. It preserved the contrast pattern central to the design of proximate vision, and it animated that scheme in a dramatic architecture of light and shade. The obscured, moving mass of soldiers set the lifted figure of the Führer into bold relief, while the illumination trained on him offered him as the favored, truly luminous hero of the painterly design. That scheme was enhanced by Albert Speer's additional light effects. On the perimeter of the field 130 upturned searchlights sent powerful and well-defined beams as far as twenty thousand feet into the air, creating the look of a “cathedral of light,” Speer proudly writes, a “vast room, with the beams serving as mighty pillars of infinitely high outer walls”³⁶ as cosmic boundary for the rally. In such surrounds the leader could play his part in that archaic drama of total control that Lewis had scripted in the spatial diagram in The Lion and the Fox: the tyrant both impersonates the terrible background—the Führer shares its spectral glow—and terrifies his people with it.

In Lewis's 1939 account, the terrible beauty of this social sublime looks back to the artistic paradigm that nurtured it, but as a foregone ideal. Lewis longs wanly for “the well-ordered repose” of a political artifact. In the “Goethean calm” of the old aesthetic outline, the true “aristocratic” character, which is “exclusive,” could be sanctioned in the foreground of proximate sight. Now that Hitler's source of power stands revealed (the idealized populism of 1931 no longer operates), Lewis's disillusionment shows itself in the following sequence in The Hitler Cult. He moves in a serial reenactment of his own changing views. An elegiac recollection of true (classical-Nietzschean) aristocracy—equated with an aesthetic state—slides into a cartoon of mass musical empathy and demotic solidarity more lurid than any drawn before:

How Nietzsche, the theoretical “aristocrat,” came to mistrust the Prussian Imperialist technique, is made plain by Nuremberg. … The mass methods of standardized “Germanism,” as Nietzsche saw it, were heading in the opposite direction to the Olympian exclusiveness of Goethean calm. They were headed towards … a really demoniacal Demos. …

A second image suggests … a more intimate and spontaneous exhibition of the same demoniac Demos. … [During] a visit I paid to a night club, … the orchestra—accordions, drums, and saxophones—broke into popular airs; and chains of people, thirty or forty men and women, sitting at one of the massive tables, swung from side to side, their hands joined across their bodies, shouting the refrain of the song. This swaying chain became intoxicated with the beautiful animal sound of peasant jubilation. … One of the schoolroom forms on which they were sitting tipped over, and one end of the human chain crashed to the floor. But they all still went on swaying from side to side, chanting their peasant dirge of joy.³⁷

Just as the Nuremberg report reenacts Lewis's own shifting perspectives on Reich aesthetics, his biographical account of the Führer presents the career of this political artisan in stages that match his own developing view of it. Here Hitler fails his first, higher calling as painter and architect, then lapses into the facile channels of musical politics, in the same way that Lewis had to give up his optical model of ideal authority in order to hear the sounds of that mass-orchestrating demagogue. Hitler

had tried to enter the schools of painting, and the schools of architecture, and engage in that laborious apprenticeship that … leads (sometimes) to fame. Now he found—after thirty years—that all the time the solution lay right inside his mouth. No training, to speak of, was necessary. The jaw-muscles would soon get used to delivering verbal broadside and discharging torrents of pent-up sentiment. It was sufficient to open his mouth and out would pour a whirlwind of platitude which simply swept everybody off their feet. (HC, 88)

Lewis's account of the Führer's betrayal of the painterly ideal tells a tale of personal disillusionment as obliquely and compellingly as the Nuremberg story.

Lewis admits the visual mistake of Hitler frequently in The Hitler Cult, but obliquely, self-defensively. Stabbing jokingly at the Führer's visual aspect, ranging from his eyes to the effect of his image on others, Lewis is in fact lashing out against his own optical infatuation—one recalls the frontispiece to Hitler all too clearly here: “[T]o see Hitler face to face is I suppose a bit of a sensation. (Many people seem to find it so, to judge by the numbers that repaired to Nuremberg every year, in the hope of getting a sort of electric shock from a handshake with a ‘world-conqueror,’ and by gazing into his ‘magnetic’ eyes)” (HC, 4). Elsewhere he notes: “It was not on account of Herr Hitler's beautiful eyes … that I adopted ‘neutrality’” (vii). The very grimace in these grins displays the strenuous effort needed to conceal the memory of Lewis's early visual fascination. His forced humor about the sight of Hitler shows itself as camouflage and distraction as soon as one confronts some discarded, unpublished passages from a draft of Rude Assignment. Here, as he concedes his severe misreading of the Führer's look, he goes on to label his mistake a failure of pictorial perception above all. “Why has nature provided us with no psychical insight so that when we encounter a mass murderer we are apprised of the fact by an instantaneous repulsion?” he asks himself, and confesses: “As a portraitist I feel I should have detected the awful symptoms, even if I was wanting in the visionary power to see this little figure, only a few years later, popping into his gas ovens. …”³⁸

If this admission reads like the final chapter of Lewis's intellectual autobiography in the thirties, it might be said that he wrote what came before in invisible ink. It is perhaps unfair to ask Pound to have seen the reversal of opinion occurring, as it does, just below the surface of the work published before 1939. Of Lewis's books, however, the poet most admired Apes of God (his praise will be detailed later), which fully anticipates the later deconstruction of the political aesthetic. He might have looked as well at the fiction Lewis produced through this decade.

THE ART OF FAILURE

The three novels Lewis wrote in the thirties extend the awarenesses he reached in drafting the two of the twenties. His increasingly self-conscious failure to attain visual directness in words affords him, paradoxically, an ever greater inspiration. With growing ingenuity and humor, he dramatizes his own demise as a painterly hero in words. For he cannot halt the temporal momentum of language; cannot carve his pictorial integer onto the page. The attention he pays to the impossibility of painterly writing complements the concern he shows for its parallel fallacy: the aesthetic perception of politics. The failed state of his art now makes an art of the State impossible. The fallacy he had fallen into formerly will become starkly clear to him by the end of the decade, yet he rejects his inclusive vision in his nonfiction prose only gradually, usually obliquely, or in terms of careers other than his own. Thus the novels of the thirties seem to thrive on the kind of self-knowledge he denies or deflects in his discursive writing. This inconsistency runs true to the pattern established in the twenties: the Man of the World's argumentative tracts espoused the sort of major syntheses that the novelist was busy undoing. Having now abandoned his ambitions for a composite art, the older novelist still uses the incompatibility of paint and words as his imaginative theme, thus generating the literature that the pictorial stylist could not. The sheer need to produce, however, does not limit the quality and significance of these later novels. The painterly writer turns the illustration of his necessary defeat, we shall see at length, into a searching critique of the political conditions and aesthetic conventions of English literary culture in the thirties.

While Childermass and Apes of God froze linear plot in favor of the pictorial moment, all three novels of the thirties show the interest of fast-moving intrigues. They are basically thrillers. Snooty Baronet (1932) tells of a literary agent's attempt to arrange a fake kidnapping as publicity stunt for an author he represents, and Lewis advances the stratagem with an eye to narrative excitement above all.³⁹ Equally well-paced but more richly textured, the plot of The Revenge for Love (1937) weaves romances into a scheme to run guns across the Spanish border; the plot includes an international cast, who lend political interest to the developing intrigue (though the novel was finished before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War).⁴⁰ Disguise motifs and the threat of detection supply the narrative incentive in The Vulgar Streak (1941): a working-class man poses as an aristocrat, and this counterfeit character makes his living by passing counterfeit money. Here various subplots enrich the main story line through counterpoint. The impostor's developing romance, for example, provides motive for the maintenance of cover. Throughout the novel a kind of future memory operates to give the events the momentum of history that has already happened: a series of allusions to the Czech crisis of 1938 mirrors the protagonist's deception and expands its significance.⁴¹ By the end of the decade, the suspense plot essential to all three novels has reached a masterful elaboration. Yet the heightening of the time line and the feeling of momentous sequence here witness the very temporal sensationalism that Lewis will have spent two decades identifying and condemning. Triumph manqué, his great success in these conventional efforts turns on the defeat of his own aesthetic philosophy, and Lewis masters that failure with somber gusto.

The opening moment of a novel (or a chapter) holds the potential of standing as a time out of time—as an instant not yet swept up in the militant continuum of plot. The pictorial stylist struck his static pose most strikingly in the first paragraphs of Childermass and Apes of God. He brings the same ambition to the same place in the later works. Inserting clear reminders of the plastic ideal toward which his writing has aspired, moreover, he engineers the evident irony of its now elaborate travesty at the start of The Vulgar Streak:

At the end of the Venetian street were the waters of the Grand Canal, graved with the denilunar wavelets of Venetian art. They were passing small shop-fronts as they talked. It was the morning and the September sun was hot. The taller of the two men was athletic, handsome and elegant; his companion on the other hand was a tweed-clad Briton with a Peterson pipe—of that “tweed and waterproof class,” as registered by the eye of Concord.

“Venice g-g-grows on me,” said the pipe-sucker, who cultivated a mild stammer. (VS, 9)

Presenting the waterscape of this initial prospect as a radiant engraving, Lewis proceeds to undermine the possibility of a complementary verbal frieze, releasing the fluid content of language in an appalling but now familiar vocal cartoon. Speech displays the temporal dimension of language more dramatically than print—spoken words come and go, unlike those fastened to the page—and Lewis enhances the standing of the enemy Time in the stammerer's character-in-voice. Like Gertrude Stein's, the stutter repeats meaningless serial sounds as a virtual anthem to the temporal sensationalism language may lapse into. This is an antiphon already sounding the loud defiance of words to the verbal artist's attempts at engraved stasis and fixity of significance.

The proof of Lewis's motive in this intricate artistry lies in the recurrence of the pattern, and the opening moment of chapter 6 (part I) both repeats the design and enlarges discursively upon it. Here the painterly vision of the first paragraph stands in manifest defiance of time. Once the account has swung into the second paragraph, and thus clearly initiated the sequence of narrative, Lewis dwells with bitter eloquence on the demise of his ideal of timelessness:

The gondola, that snail-like craft, in defiance of Time only pretended to move. Its glistening trail was only painted no more, upon the dark green waters. To April it seemed that they had been painted too. Vincent and she, as neither moved, their faces going dark like the faces in old pictures. The red mist of the defunct sunset impended above the ivy-green of the red-tipped waves. …

They had spent the latter part of the day upon a dilapidated island. Time had stood still there too. Time, rather, had pretended to stand still. Indeed Time had been stupidly pretending to stand still all day. But how absurd that was of Time, for as anyone could see, Time moved with a violent speed that took one's breath away. It was the modern age of course. It hadn't always. That was why one felt so old, although one was quite young. (VS, 48)

Here the propulsions of Time have moved from his own text to the driven behavior of the modern world, but Lewis does not lose sight of his primary linguistic theme. Language abides in time, and speech beats out a temporal imperative most perversely and urgently. Thus the time-minded paragraph shifts its register into the free, indirect speech of April, whose voice records an obsession with temporal sequence equal to its own immersion in Time. “This was Monday,” her oblique oration begins, “and she had met Vincent for the first time last, last … when was it, Tuesday? And now they called each other by their first names and she felt she had known him the whole of her life. Just now when she had been talking about her childhood in Wiltshire she felt surprised suddenly …” (VS, 48; emphases added).

While Lewis's failure to realize his ideal of plastic composition in words has generated an art of masterful despair, his defeats do not always disport themselves with the capricious ease of The Vulgar Streak. The overture to Revenge for Love expresses the demise of a composite art in a cryptic but bitter fable, featuring romantic betrayal as its chief motif. The scene is a Spanish prison:

“Claro,” said the warder. “Claro, Hombre!” … he repeated, tight-lipped, with the controlled passion of the great logician. “We are never free to chose—because we are only free once in our lives.”

“And when is that?” inquired the prisoner.

“That is when at last we gaze into the bottom of the heart of our beloved and find that it is false—like everything else in the world!” (RL, 13)

In an opening moment like this the word engraver has enjoyed a provisional reprieve from the closing prison house of narrative time. Accordingly, Lewis's spokesman here confines the possibility of liberty to one moment—like the opening instant of a novel, this time out of time. As the theme of freedom winds down into a sardonic joke about deception and unreal ideals, the reader may see an old lesson enacted anew. The progression from first to second and third paragraphs once again typifies the continuity on which narrative relies, and the ideal of an art free from time is broken like a promise across the rueful sequence of that ruse. The rhythm of expectation and reversal carries the rise and fall of Lewis's own geste, cancelling his hope to write the static intaglio and correct the wrongs of linguistic time.

The pictorial writer's struggle against Time is nurtured as well on the romantic myth of passing inspiration. While Lewis usually directs his animus at the temporality of discourse, he also outlines this crisis on the Coleridgean and Shelleyan model of revelation's fading coal. Unique, unduplicatable, the superior vision disappears here into the temporizing hands of its recipient, Victor Stamp, the Australian painter in Revenge for Love, who “had seen, even as a student, well enough what was what—so long as the brushes were not in his hand. Or he had been visited by intelligent vision in a flash, that had faded out the moment he had started. … Even, when he had started, he had known what he had to do. But he had reckoned without his hand. For his hand had proceeded to do something entirely different from what his eye had told it …” (RL, 82). As rare as the single instant of its occurrence, Stamp's vision is lost to processes of craft no less time-driven than language itself. Since the original vision must vanish in the timeful channels of its execution, the one masterpiece Stamp can produce is a masterful imitation—of the cubist painter Georges Braque. The cubist's multiple perspectives may be read as the sequence and signature of the time-mind, and thus celebrate the very temporality that annuls Stamp's attempt at holding his own moment of authentic sight.

In line with Lewis's embittered fiction of his failure as pictorial stylist, and in keeping with his tendency to turn such defeat into thematic material and technical incentives, Revenge for Love culminates in a highly ironic triomphe du temps. An elliptical but insistent narrative has driven the momentum of expectation up to this end point, where Victor Stamp attempts to run his (Margot's) car around a Spanish blockade at the French border. Lewis expands the breakthrough moment as an apotheosis of linear time, characterizing it as such right at the start: “‘Stop!’ as a hollow report her voice summoned Victor. ‘Stop!’ It was her duty, too, to halt him. But it was quite unavailing to shout at events—at events three seconds off. As well talk to Time and tell it where to stand!” (RL, 320). From here a two-page slowdown to a millisecond-by-millisecond presentation of the event provides the verbal equivalent of “A Nude Descending the Staircase.” Like the Futurists, Lewis creates the sensation of dynamic time by crafting a series of discrete instants. The smaller the interval in the sequence of events, the more frequently piqued is the expectation of what comes next. The disequilibrium between a lagging narrative and a quickening anticipation witnesses a shift of attention from time as objective fact to the momentous inner tide of subjective time. The Enemy has spent twenty years analyzing and condemning this fallacy in Gertrude Stein, but he now subjects the reader to the same experience of time as merely serial (and passive) sensation—through the senses (mainly the ears) of Margot:

She saw the two Guards get bigger and get bigger. It was as if in a series of blinks, or similar to the jumps of the hands of a large public clock, where the hands were the size of scythes. … She saw one of [the Guard's] eyes close up, the lid went neatly down over it; and there was the other at the root of the barrel of the carbine. And as they bore down upon this puppet with its painfully deliberate mechanism, the frantic clamour of their klaxon filled her head to bursting point, in spasm after spasm of menacing sound. She closed both her own eyes as she saw the steel-shutter go down over the Guard's: then she released a long chuckling scream, clawing at her mouth to hold in this offensive outburst. (RL, 321)

Lewis's follow-up to the slow-motion episode suggestively links its rampant temporality to the machinations of language itself. Placing a newspaper leader's fragmentary account of the event at the center of the page, he juxtaposes the discontinuous phrases of its headline style to the more fluent verbal interpolations of its reader, Percy Hardcaster:

TWO OF THE GANG. CONTRABANDISTAS. DEAD. A POSTMAN. PRECIPICE. …

In the three seconds—no more—he allowed himself, Hardcaster saw that the bodies of one Victor Stamp and of a woman known as Margot had been found. They were at the foot of a precipice. A French postman found them—proceeding to a mountain village. Assumption: the pair had walked over the edge of the precipice. Probably in a storm. There had been a storm. … (RL, 335)

Since Lewis insists that Percy could not absorb the whole story (Percy is wrong, for example, about the pair walking over the precipice), it is clear that the cause-and-effect account is no comprehensive record of the actual event. Percy has shifted the separate and integral facts of the leader onto a temporal axis that anchors itself nowhere. The discrete facts have been swept up into a serial fiction that reflects nothing but the temporal imperative of language; the progression of words determines the continuous story. It takes Percy “three seconds” to do his sight-reading; this was also the time elapsed between Margot's intimation of the event and its completion—“three seconds off”: thus the principle driving that distortion of narrative sequence, the inner tide of subjective time, operates as a function of linguistic apprehension primarily. Percy's narrative moves upon the waters of language. But his words ape a diabolical god's. He is riding the same wave of gratutious, subjective, momentous energy that Lewis released in his narrative of the event and presents, in the end, as a symptom and function of verbal time.

The failure of words to achieve visual definition and exact presentation provides a formative pattern for the novels of the thirties, where the falseness to which language is prone displays familiar political uses as well. Verbal perfidy works most subversively when language is voiced, Lewis has pointed out elsewhere, since the sensuality of the acoustic token easily supplants the reality of its referent. Accordingly, his tales of disguise and deception tend to feature impostors-in-voice, where an assumed accent or artful inflection stands in place of its true character. In Revenge for Love, for example, the Irish agent Sean O'Hara simulates the speaking manner of the English working class and thus insinuates his way into the party of Demos, a political body Lewis usually cartoons as a gullible ear. In line with his inveterate critiques, he steers Vincent Penhale's confession of his bogus tongue into an indictment of acoustic illusion in demagogic politics, where the sounds arbitrarily associated with leadership take the place of the fact: “‘An Englishman just follows you around, if you've got an Oxford Accent. You don't have to do any leading. All you have to do, is to open your mouth, and allow a few words to escape, with that magical inflection, hall-marked Cam or Isis, and it's all right. You are his Leader by virtue of your accent. (Hence the bankruptcy, of leadership)’” (VS, 219).

These narratives of vocal disguise illustrate aesthetic and political themes well known from the polemical tracts of the previous decade, but Lewis now adds a further dimension to the old cultural exposé. His artistry has argued that verbal representation cannot capture the writer's original visual inspiration; thus the whole concept and value of literary originality seems invalid. This bitter admission yields a dividend to the satirist. It affords him a chance to represent, analyze, and parody the political faith that raises nonoriginality into an ethical and aesthetic standard—a simplistic Marxism (a twist unnoted by Frederic Jameson). It is an opportunity grasped by Lewis, grimly and masterfully, in the novel that recreates the artistic culture of the Marxist thirties.

The industry of forging pictures that sustains Victor Stamp and his colleagues in Revenge for Love is the workshop of a Marxist program. Idealizing it as such, the communist Tristy offers a demotically garbled version of the rationale being advanced roughly simultaneously by Walter Benjamin in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”⁴² Like Benjamin, Tristy welcomes the flourishing existence of copies—first, to destroy the element of private property in art, in order to make it available to the people; ultimately, to renounce the figure of the privileged subject, the originating artist, who disappears into the serial reproduction. Equating private property and originality, Tristy delights in the particular hypothesis that Vincent van Gogh, like Victor, worked as forger (RL, 235). While Victor Stamp's family name obviously fits his current occupation as copier, his first name shares a Latin root with Vincent van Gogh's, and this correspondence also serves—under the form of an etymological conceit—to annul the idea of unique subjects as originators of art.

The Marxist campaign against the individualist premise in literature finds its chief spokesman in Mr. Mateu, a career communist and sometime man of letters. His literary project takes literacy itself as its target. He “snarled as he thought of the printed word. There had only been fifteen years of communism, but more than twice that number of centuries of fascist authorship. Even when the earth had all turned to Marx, there would still be this ominous shadow of the earth—that is, its time set up against its space—fascist to the marrow, controlled by Athenian and Roman aristocrats. The super-earth, of this dark immortality of books! A book was a blackshirted enemy” (RL, 302). While this tirade follows a party-line ethic, predictably equating individual authorship with a privileged authority over the means of production, it includes an emphasis peculiar to Lewis's own aesthetic. The spatial dimension of books disturbs this Marxist, but his rhetorical negative on this issue simply presents Lewis's own literary value in reverse echo. A page-based language lends itself to the operation of the visual intelligence, thereby providing a field for optical discriminations. In this way Lewis has sought to free words from their common ground in the parole—to sever the flow of the vocalese and shape the pictorial integer out of its fluid material. While this individual reformation of language stands as the boast of the Enemy, it provides the animus of the standardizing Marxist, and the rhetorical fabric of this novel collapses (strategically) under the assault of the populist challenge, thus mocking the old ideals of Lewis's political aesthetic in a bitterly original comedy.

Entering his narrative language as an Everyman-in-voice, Lewis puts on the motley of the anti-individualist word, allowing the highly stylized signature of his own distinctive prose to dissolve into the free, indirect speech of a typical Englishman: Jack Cruze. The Marxist meaning of this literary discourse is spelled out clearly when Jack plays novelist to the character of Gillian Phipps. He echoes this English communist's words in the same way that Lewis submerges Jack's quotations into his own narrative text:

He heard all about the backbite direct as you might call it, or mental communism were Gillian's words. No thoughts hidden away from your brother-biped but all laid naked to inspection, share and share alike: so that no one could say that anyone was keeping anything away from anyone else, or claiming they had a self, as she put it. Properly considered, she said, aren't we all just one Big Self? So nothing must be kept back and locked up, like a private possession which is all that self is, she said. (RL, 179)

Repeating the slogans that Gillian herself has repeated from the orthodox script, Jack parrots her attack on the dangers of the private self and affirms the values of such standardization, rejecting in principle the privilege of singularity in utterance. Lewis repeats this political theme as he allows his own shapely writing style to be swallowed by the fluid ease of Jack's demotic vocalese.

Orchestrating a collective hubbub into Jack's voice, Lewis uses this speaker to represent the clamorous multiplicity of a wide populist average. At the upward end of his vocal reach lie the tones of shabby gentility that Lewis heard in Joyce's lower-middle-class Dublin accent. He scores these notes into Jack's English inflection, which he reproduces through the words of narrator and character: “In Jack's line of business they see all sorts and the great Mr. Tristram Phipps came into his office one day, on the off-chance of finding him in, sent by young Hailes, about his income tax” (RL, 94). “‘Well, Mr. Phipps, sir,’ says Jack, taking him by the hand and shaking it, very cordial indeed to be sure” (RL, 116). Despite this affectation of commercial propriety, the Jackish discourse drags the narrative language into its subsistence idiom—demotic vulgarity—with a force as constant as gravity: “She'd jump out of his arms just as he was getting busy, after a spell of all-in and no-quarter, and left him panting there with his tongue out like a dog in a drought” (RL, 179). Jack's demographic inclusiveness functions dramatically as well as symbolically; he breathes his way into the fictional language with a force equal to his own mass identity. When Gillian sees Jack as a colossal populist figure, and reproduces (in oratio obliqua) Lewis's own antipathies to this figure, her own free indirect speech is invaded by “well!”, a Jackism dubbed in with the very indomitable ease that she presents as the trait of this majority character: “She watched Jack's jaunty back as he breasted the swing door, nodding a cheery good night to the porter. The working-class man again! The dregs—the majority! The backboneless, mindless mob. Well!” (RL, 203).

The Jackish manner exerts its momentous effect on the global scale as well, moving into ever greater possession of the narrative language in part III. At first darting in and out of those gypsy rhythms, Lewis seems to display this clown of the vulgate, not to identify with him. By the end of the third part, the practice of modulation between author and character has given way to long passages of sustained single voice, where Jack appears, not as an intermittent or subtextual sound, but as the steady state of narrative speech. Compare the first paragraph of part III with an extended excerpt from its final vignette:

Jack Cruze was known as “Jack” to everybody, much as Falstaff is in Shakespeare's pages; and “Jack” he was to himself as well. Or it would be better to say that because he had always thought of himself as “Jack,” others did the same. The fact that “the Garbo” is the accepted way of describing the Swedish Queen of Hollywood must just mean that she saw herself as that, rather than as “Greta.” That sort of impersonal style she must have carried about with her—shutting out the familiar, the diminutive, or the fond. But old Jack Cruze was the opposite of that. No one could be above a half-hour with him without dropping the “Mr. Cruze.” He was a natural “Jack”! (RL, 93)

They threw themselves back after this and there was a long silence. I need not say perhaps that Jack was not in too sweet a temper by this time—after having listened to these people discussing his business principles, but agreeing that he was too stupid anyhow to be held responsible for the crimes he committed in the name of business.

For some time Jack'd had an itching in his throat, and he'd wanted to cough like billyoh. But he'd had to stop himself because he wasn't supposed to be there. They both started when he cleared his throat and spoke at last. It was like as if Jack had got into the room on tiptoe and they had not known he was there till he opened his mouth.

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said he with the nastiest grin he could command to put round the words coming out of his mouth, for Jack could be nasty at times, and letting them have it in the voice he uses in his office, when he feels a little under the weather and anyone tries to teach him his business or question his honesty: “Well, ladies and gentlemen. …” (RL, 120-21)

The breath only faintly traceable to Jack at the outset—the demotic fillip of “old Jack Cruze,” the rakish inversion of “‘Jack’ he was to himself as well”—has expanded by the end to lay its stain across the whole verbal fabric.

In a controlled display of uncontrol, Lewis plays at being enslaved by the same linguistic forces that he has in fact mastered as the material of this symptomatic, diagnostic art. The insistent, progressive loss of his authorial autonomy to Jack's populist rabble emerges as his well-commanded strategy in part III, as he suggests forcibly through a single episode in the narrative. Here Percy Hardcaster, nominal double of the writer Percy Wyndham Lewis, is placed on this peculiar set of speaking terms with the Jackish manner: “Percy had a feeling that something was wrong, not for the first time, and looked up quickly. But he could not guess that he was taking part (at times) in a Jackish dialogue! And so he remained with his sensation that all was not quite as he would have expected it to be …” (RL, 187). Percy's unwitting, subvocal dialogue with Jack exactly matches the designed effect of Lewis's rhetorical fiction in part III, where the narrative language is overcome by the pressure of Everyman's voice, effective but only dimly recognized. Representing the technical drama of this section so clearly, Lewis shows how surely he has directed his own demise as individual author and distinctive stylist.

Just as the final episode in Revenge for Love provides a kind of summa temporis, ironically consummating the philosophy of time that drives its suspense stratagem, so too that long, last flourish of the Jackish trumpet sounds its own triumph manqué. The Enemy revels sardonically in the rival aesthetic of vocal populism. No less cynical in motive than sinister in practice, Lewis's left-handed play with language moves to a purpose as rightist and single-minded, moreover, as the political animus that generates the experiment. Injecting the Jackish infection into the narrative, tracing the tumescence of a mass verbal consciousness, and thus demonstrating the ephemeral nature of the author's single identity, Lewis uses his own role as victim of a Marxist campaign against individuality to claim the victory of a cartooning exposé. Yet the wheel of satirical parody goes a turn further: Lewis enlarges the ground of his critique from literary Marxism to the elementary operations of language.

Through the example of Sean O'Hara, Lewis shows the Marxist principle of standardization operating as a rule of verbal imitation in language, where mindless mimicry seems to govern all linguistic apprehension. This Irish member of the Third International infiltrates the party of the English working class by copying its generic accent; he conforms in spirit as well as in vocal letter to its mass standard. And the narrative language around Sean demonstrates a reliance on laws of imitation equally grim, indeed more subtle and insidious. Thus Sean's wife Eileen is said to own Irish ancestry, a notion that influences the style of speech entering slyly, freely but indirectly, into the narrative:

But Eileen, his wife, was Eileen because her good old Surrey and Surbiton father had always had a weakness for the Colleen Bawn, and when he heard The Wearing of the Green played by a good trombone at the street-corner he would hum to himself: “They're shooting lads and lasses for the Wearing of the Green,” and would get quite moist-eyed about these beautiful shootings, or rather about the fact that they should have been so romantically provoked—by the wearing of such a lovely and patriotic color as green. And when he had to christen his offspring he gave her an Irish name and would not have been averse to her being mistaken perhaps one day for a product of the Lakes of Killarney, or (had he known about it) of the Lake of Innisfree; and sure his old mater once said she had had an “Irish ancestor” (so hot-blooded!) which accounted for the violet tint of her eyes. … (RL, 128)

The mere presence of the Irish name sets the narrative language into evident mimicry: the loosely strung whimsy and sentimentality of the Irish parole at its stagiest (“beautiful shootings”; “such a lovely and patriotic color”; “and sure his old mater”). A passage ostensibly concerned with genealogy and parentage thus outlines a bleakly causal and determinist rationale for linguistic usage.

While the Paddy inflection stands as a kind of national lampoon-in-voice, it belongs in dramatic context to Eileen's mostly English father, who may stand thus as a pattern for the book's full, international variorum of dramatic speakers. These characters obtrude their prescribed texts into Lewis's own prose and, from those half-submerged quotations, generate its narrative language. Driven to mimic the mannerisms of the character on whose verbal ground he finds himself, chameleon-like, Lewis's narrator seems little more (or less) than the rainbow of vocal colorings he has put on to correspond with those speaking determinants. Submitting to this apparently random medley of speakers, the narrative blends a splendidly various symphony of echoed talk. The practice resounds not as aesthetic achievement, however, but as evidence for Lewis's most severe gravamens on the mimetic nature of linguistic usage.

This dispiriting precept emerges most acutely in one of its most humorous examples. As the speaking character of Agnes Irons blithely recites her upper-class lexicon of party mots, Lewis interrupts the oblique oration to indict her verbal helplessness and, adroitly, to indicate his own:

There was an interval during which Agnes expatiated upon the topping character of her uncle, whose jolly old Rolls was always looming up at the psychological moment, and rolling the jolly laughing person of his sporting niece away in this direction or that. And then other persons, who were beastly rich, also would keep breaking into the narrative. “Rolls Royces—butlers and footmen—pots of money!” was a wistful incantation never for long off her chuckling lips. The major words were drawled out in a tone of comic commiseration at the absurdity of the “pots of money” these same sahibs had and which, of course, one could not help noticing. … (RL, 219-20)

“Other persons” have indeed “been breaking into” Lewis's “narrative” no less coercively than the manual of high-tone phrases being dictated into Agnes's papery voice here. Accordingly, the narrator submits to the same parole—the archly emphasized “would,” the typically mannered “beastly rich”—that he identifies as the risibly determined content of her talk. A quotation mocking a quotation, Lewis's onionlike verbal comedy unpeels to an empty center somewhat less terrifying for the laughter he generates out of that space.

The aping clown that Julian Benda and Rémy de Gourmont depicted as the character of aural apprehension emerges, then, as the mimic figure of verbal understanding and usage in Revenge for Love. The failure of originality that Lewis enacts so inventively here also admits the painterly writer's failure to realize his initial, visual inspiration in language: the unique, authentic image gives way to class concept, a word that simply reiterates a type; the creative hero of optical perception becomes a duplicating fool in the lexical-vocal medium. Exaggerating the inadequacy of his foe, the Enemy uses satirical parody as a potent strategy, but its humor should not obscure a fact as disquieting as the animus that drives this linguistic farce. As the artist withdraws from the lower verbal dimensions into a higher visual intelligence, he gives language its obstreperous head, releasing and accelerating its momentous energies. “Going over to the opposition” appears as motif in Lewis's later autobiographical novel, Self-Condemned (1954),⁴³ which offers a telling retrospect on the developments we have seen in the work of the thirties.

Like Wyndham Lewis, René Harding has left England in disgrace in early September 1939 and sought a bleak refuge in the “sanctimonious icebox” of Toronto, Canada. In a twelve-by-twenty foot room he finds his version of Lear's heath. Self-recognition relies on the assistance of another: Professor MacKenzie, a character obviously modeled on Marshall McLuhan. In conversation MacKenzie points the historian toward a developing irony in his life, as mirrored in the professor's own account of modern intellectual history.

MacKenzie sees the nineteenth-century philosophy of material progress taking a puritanical, elitist turn in the twentieth. Here supermen of geometric vision in the plastic arts are matched by the priestly tyranny of Bolshevism in the political sphere (SC, 314-21). This vision of cultural history provides the terms of searching introspection on Harding's part—“All his lifework (so long neglected) … had been burst open, as it were, and scrutinized, by a stranger of intelligence. A shaft of hard light had been cast upon [its] intellectual structure” (SC, 324). For MacKenzie's outline explains the dramatic paradox of Lewis's own intellectual, literary, and political careers. A mind that has aggressively resisted the delusions of automatic evolutionary progress has advanced technical programs founded on meliorist, perfectibilist claims of their own: “One might … find in his adoption of the superman position a weakening; the acceptance of a solution which formerly he would have refused.” Like “his life,” moreover, human life, as a function of this progressive vision, “was being mechanized upon a lower level” (SC, 356)—the exact opposite of his original aim. In terms of Lewis's own career, a literary project that sought visual purity and sculptural mastery in words produces novels that mark the triumph of indirect musical discourse, the time mind, and the autonomy of language. The defeat that Lewis redeems in his fiction with the elaborate travesty of his enemies thus appears with an unchecked bitterness in his truer counterpart, René Harding.

The same defeat, suffered nearly thirty-five years earlier by Ezra Pound, was assimilated into the dramatic fiction of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. For Mauberley's aesthetic ambitions—similar to Lewis's earlier high ideals—have led him to the obverse triumph of “Medallion,” his final poem (like the “Envoi” ironically crowning E.P.'s career). The demanding standard of a sculptural prosody here reverts to its opposite. His appeal to an elite readership is undermined with the cryptic and cynical concision of the allusions:

Luini in porcelain!
The grand piano
Utters a profane
Protest with her clear soprano.
The sleek head emerges
From the gold-yellow frock
As Anadyomene in the opening
Pages of Reinach.
(Poems, 69)

The reference to Salomon Reinach's Apollo (1904) directs one to his comments on the work of Bernadino Luini, whose project is described as being “carried out not altogether without vulgarity, for his elegance is superficial, his drawing uncertain, and his power of invention limited. His most characteristic trait is a certain honeyed softness that delights the multitude.”⁴⁴ How does Mauberley's cultivation of the most exacting aesthetic sense decline into the vulgar indulgence of Luini?

This reversal receives its most accurate and provocative gloss from Lewis, who would live it out in his own (Mauberley-like) career. For this painter realized that the pure form on which his early, ultra-abstract manner relied was indeed the triumph of its enemy: these shapes promoted, not the hyper-cerebral activity of a visionary art, but a vulgar holiday for the eye. Freed from the duty of perceiving realistic content, it creates the “visual music” of mere optical sensationalism.⁴⁵ Correspondingly, the cut-and-fit measure of Mauberley's own optical prosody serves to detach blocks of language from the meaning supplied by continuous discourse, putatively to build new “concepts” out of those radical particulars, but in fact to produce only the accumulation of sensuous phrase upon sensuous phrase. Thus the “grand piano” that “Utters its profane / Protest” to the sacral sculpture of Mauberley's words introduces no dissonance. The root meaning of “pro-test” is not to object but, through that intensive prefix, “to witness strongly.” The pianola and gramophone lend their low pleasures of acoustic sensation in perfect consonance with Mauberley's art.

The reversal Lewis perceived in his career as an abstractionist had of course been repeated in history. The cerebral elitism of the visual sense: this pictorial dream led Lewis to Hitler, who succeeded indeed as its manifest antithesis—a demagogic giant, a triumph of the mass musical empathy on which totalitarian dictatorships rely. The reversal Pound experienced in 1919 was of course absorbed into a different moment of political and cultural history. His aesthetic ideal, not yet invested in a particular Cause or State, remains innocently at odds with history—not yet betrayed by the developments of l'entre deux guerres. Its social values still stood as immanent possibilities. How Pound negotiates its first failures, ultimately recovering his visual idéologie with the help of Lewis's own work of the twenties, may engage us next.

Notes

1. Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment: A narrative of my career up-to-date (1950; rpt. London: Hutchinson, 1951), 113. The trip to Germany and the Munich milieu are described well by Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as Enemy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 6-7.

2. Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 15-16. For Lewis's attendance at Bergson's lectures on comedy, see Wagner, 215; for several details in Lewis's French experience between 1903 and 1908 I am indebted to Victor Cassidy, author of a biography which, though unfinished, has followed the few available leads in recreating Lewis's Parisian years.

3. Lewis, “Le Père François (A Full-length Portrait of a Tramp),” The Tramp: an Open Air Magazine (September 1910); rpt. in Wyndham Lewis, The Complete Wild Body, ed. Bernard La Fourcade (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1982), 278. This gathering of first versions and the later revisions (in The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and other stories [1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928]) will be cited parenthetically as WB.

4. See Blast, 2, July 1915, War Number, ed. Wyndham Lewis; facsimile rpt. (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1981), for example, “The God of Sport and Blood,” 10: “The directors of the German Empire have shown their vulgarity and democratization as clearly in their propaganda of ferocity, as in their management of medievalism and historic consciousness. … From this supposedly ‘aristocratic’ Junkerish country has come the intensest exhibition of democratic feeling imaginable.” The contrary draw to a traditionally conceived elite is expressed in “A Review of Contemporary Art,” 42: “The leisure of an ancient Prince, the practical dignity required by an aristocratic function … are all things very seldom experienced to-day, but that it might be desirable to revive.” He responds to that possibility: “Should we not revive them at once?”.

5. Blast, 2, 97.

6. Gertrude Stein, Picasso (1938), rpt. in Gertrude Stein on Picasso, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Liveright, 1970), 18-19: “Really the composition of this war, 1914-1918, was not the composition of all previous wars, the composition was not a composition in which there was one man in the centre surrounded by a lot of other men but a composition that had neither a beginning nor an end, a composition of which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of cubism.” Despite her emphasis on lack of central focus, this description might fit the serial arrangement of abstract shapes on many Vorticist canvases.

7. Lewis alludes to his seclusion through these years in his early autobiography, Blasting & Bombardiering (1937; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 4-5, 231, 339. See also Meyers, The Enemy, 102-5, for an account of this period.

8. The phrase occurs in Time and Western Man (1927; rpt. Boston: Beacon, 1957), 283; hereafter cited parenthetically as TWM. Lewis focuses on the aesthetic and political—specifically “democratic”—doctrine of empathy (183-84), here invoking Benda as he does so. Elsewhere he concentrates on an equally essential point of Belphégor: “as Benda also immediately noticed,” the contemporary “world of Europe” represents “a musical society” (TWM, 31-32). Thus he invokes Benda again as he sets the culture of musical populism at odds with the aristocratic intellect (TWM, 292). He repeats this praise for Benda's analysis of empathy in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1989), 232; hereafter cited parenthetically as ABR. Rather than organizing this chapter around a documentation of Benda's single influence on Lewis, I wish to show the operation of the more wide-ranging, pan-European colloquy in which the Frenchman figured so prominently. A helpful introductory survey of Lewis's political ideas (qua political ideas) is by D. G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London: Cassell, 1972). Bridson presents Benda's influence on Lewis, not in terms of the musical politics of democracy, but chiefly as a means of reinforcing Lewis's aversion to Bergson, 62-63. The aesthetic basis of Lewis's antidemocratic stance emerges indirectly in the comments on “group rhythm” by Wagner, A Portrait, 44-59, although the notion of musical empathy acquires no real conceptual focus or analysis here. Wagner does provide a more extensively historicized discussion than Bridson on the French backgrounds to Benda, 8-13; the appeal of authority in contemporary French culture is traced, 12, to the needs of a nation recently defeated in the Franco-Prussian war.

9. Also in line with Gourmont and Benda is the formulaic distinction Lewis draws between musical empathy and visual separation, as in “The Credentials of the Painter” (1922); rpt. in Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913-1956, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), 219: “No one has ever wept at the sight of a painting in the way they sometimes weep when they listen to music. You could not by showing people a picture of a battle cause their hearts to beat and their limbs to move, eyes to water, as it is fairly easy to do by beating on a drum, and blowing into a fife. … The coldest musician … cannot help interfering with your body and cannot leave you so cold as a great painter can. … [L]ooking at Botticelli's ‘Birth of Venus’ would cause you as little disturbance of that sort as looking at a kettle or the Bank of England.” The writings collected here will be dated and cited under WLA.

10. In “The Taxi-Cab Driver Test for Fiction,” in Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934; hereafter MWA), Lewis uses the obsessive concern with sound in this unidentified passage (from Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point) to make his own point of literary politics:

    “You won't be late?” There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice, there was something like entreaty.

    “No, I won't be late,” said Walter, unhappily and guiltily certain that he would be. Her voice annoyed him. It drawled a little, it was too refined—. …

    [S]he could not prevent herself from speaking; she loved him too much, she was too agonizingly jealous. The words broke out in spite of her principles.

    This single tell-tale page appears to me to be terribly decisive: for no book opening upon this tone of vulgar complicity with the dreariest of suburban library readers could … become anything but a dull and vulgar book.

    “ ‘You won't be late?’ There was anxiety in Marjorie Carling's voice.” That is surely so much the very accent of the newspaper serial (even down to the cosy sound of the name of the heroine) … this is the very voice of ‘Fiction’. (301-2; emphases added after quotation)

    Huxley's saturation of his passage with acoustic images serves to shift the language from the optical frame of the page to the register of the inner ear, where a “cosy name” like Marjorie Carling's can unfold its delectable sounds. Here parataxis (used three times in this short excerpt) also recovers its original oral force—magnet and channel for easy reading, Lewis might have argued, by a plebian public.

11. Lewis, The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 6; MWA, 32. Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 42-47; Hugh Kenner, “Reflections on the Gabler Era,” James Joyce Quarterly, 26 (1988), 11-12. See Jacques Derrida, for example, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in his Writing and Difference, ed. and trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), esp. 196-99; the dichotomy is pressed less strenuously by Derrida than by Derrideans.

12. Lewis, The Apes of God (1930; rpt. New York: Robert McBride, 1932), 610, hereafter cited parenthetically as AG. Paleface, The Philosophy of the Melting Pot (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 72-73.

13. LeBon, The Crowd, 102-3.

14. Thus the ideology of the prevailing Eye is discarded in favor of the standard political opposition of fascism and Marxism by Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), esp. 17-18, where Jameson challenges Lewis's “attempts to justify his immense and wide-ranging cultural critiques in terms of the defense of the rights of the visual and the painter's practice. The untenable squaring of the circle allows him to repress the structural center of his work, which lies not in the position of the observing subject, but rather in his implacable lifelong opposition to Marxism itself.” For application of the communism-fascism polarity, see also Jameson's Appendix, “Hitler as Victim,” 179-85, esp. 184, where he aligns the formalized dichotomies of the Cold War with that “structural center” of Lewis's work in the earlier decades. Jameson's view of history as a series of competing ideologies—(proto)fascism and Marxism above all—is set out interestingly, 15-16, and it provides a complex model for narrative time in Lewis's novels, 16ff.

15. Answer to Questionnaire circulated to writers and printed by New Verse, October 1934, 7-8. See also ABR, 70, “Fascism … is a faction of the extreme and militant Left who have burst round and through to the Right, as it were,” and 71: “Fascismo … is Leninism adapted to an ancient and intelligent population.” Lewis's indifference to the complexities of history—in favor of the cleaner, simpler lines of an aesthetic construction of the State—is attested in a letter excerpted in the Introduction to The Essential Wyndham Lewis, ed. Julian Symons (London: Deutsch, 1989), 2-3: “My mind is ahistoric, I would welcome the clean sweep. … I could build something better, I am sure of that, than has been left by our fathers.”

16. In The Old Gang and The New Gang (1933; rpt. New York: Haskell, 1972), Lewis opens by discussing the fascist movements in Germany, Italy, and England in terms of the youth cult, 17, which he regards throughout his work as the most typical infatuation and obvious delusion of contemporary mass culture. He soon exempts Italy and Germany from this disreputable connection, 22-23. But not England: “Have we nothing but boy scouts and girl guides? Are we quite out of it? … It's all plain-sailing in Germany—in Russia it's as plain as print. But old England has its ‘New Gang.’ … We are all of us far too ready to assume that, in contrast to those revolutionary states over on the mainland and to the North, we in Old England have no ‘Youth’ politics to speak of. That is a great mistake. In the political field it is not even disguised” (27-28). It is not disguised in England because it does not enjoy the distance on which his idealizing perspective—on Germany, Italy, Russia—relies. The membership of the British Union of Fascists defied his ideals. Largely transient and lower-working-class at the start (1933-35), those filling the ranks fell far short of the regimental paradigm Lewis admired in Germany. See the one demographic study, Stuart Rawnsley's “The Membership of the British Union of Fascists,” in British Fascism: Essays on The Radical Right in Inter-War Britain, ed. Kenneth Lunn and Richard C. Thurlow (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), 150-65, esp. 154-57. The standard political history is by Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (1961; rpt. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1963), which focuses more on Oswald Mosley than on the English social context. For Mosley's reversion to the demagoguery of mass politics, see the discussion in Robert Skidelsky's “Reflections on Mosley and British Fascism,” in British Fascism, ed. Lunn and Thurlow, esp. 95-96.

17. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 165.

18. Lewis, The Childermass (1928; rpt. London: John Calder, 1965), 239; hereafter cited as Ch.

19. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 236.

20. Lewis, Satire and Fiction (London: The Arthur Press, 1930), 47.

21. Lewis accepts the Gourmontian term and value of “le visuel” as the defining strength of his satire in Satire and Fiction, 46.

22. When Lewis attempts to separate his discursive ideology (variously political and aesthetic) from his literary practice, in fact, he seems only to reveal his underlying attraction to major syntheses. He writes thus to Pound in 1925, detailing the individual works in the emergent Man of the World series and asserting their interrelation, in Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, ed. Timothy Materer (New York: New Directions, 1985), 144-45 (hereafter P/L):

    After one attempt only I saw how difficult it would be to find a publisher who would give me what I wanted for my five hundred thousand word book, The Man of the World—(longer than War & Peace, Ulysses, & so on). Luckily its form enabled me, without very much additional work, to cut it up into a series of volumes. In each part of the original book I had repeated the initial argument, associating it with the new evidence provided by the particular material of each part. … There is a hundred thousand word volume, called The Lion & the Fox about Shakespeare, principally. There is one called Sub Persona Infantis [The Art of Being Ruled] which deals with a particular phase—you know the one—of the contemporary sensibility. The Shaman [part of The Art of Being Ruled] about exoliti & sex-transformation. The Politics of the Personality (100 thousand) [Time and Western Man] principally evidence of philosophy, one (100 thousand) called The Politics of Philistia [in The Art of Being Ruled] & one called The Strategy of Defeat (40 thousand) [in Time and Western Man and The Art of Being Ruled]. Then there are 2 volumes < (not of course part of The Man of the World) = of The Apes of God (fiction) the first of which is nearly done. Joint (sketched & partly done) [a separate narrative in the style of The Childermass] Archie (complete, thirty or forty thousand) [beginning mass. of The Apes of God]—The Great Fish Jesus Christ [not written?] (45 thousand).

    (Materer supplies helpful identifications of these provisional fragments.) The words placed in angle brackets were added to the typescript by Lewis, and the palimpsest tells the story of an aborted fusion. He detaches the novels from the polemical work, but only as a second thought. His initial script reflects his first impulse: to write the fiction as integral part of a single, inclusive oeuvre.

23. Rude Assignment, 129, 128.

24. Ibid., 129.

25. Lewis, The Caliph's Design (1919); rpt. WLA, 129, 130, 145, 133. Since “The life of the crowd, or the Plain Man, is external [and] he can live only through others and outside himself,” he “in a sense is the houses, the railings, the statues, the churches, the roadhouse,” 138; thus Lewis calls on architects “to work for formal beauty, for more intelligent significance in the ordering of our lives,” 136. In this essay the word “Demos” now recurs like a sardonic refrain. It also contains the first reference to Rémy de Gourmont, whose views on contemporary architecture are shared by Lewis, who also wishes for the demise of a naturalistic standard (146-47).

26. Lewis, “What Art Now” (1919); rpt. WLA, 115: “It is on the possibilities of rendering this smaller public d'élite more supple, more interested, and much more learned in the matter of pictorial art [“the ‘new art,’” 114], that the healthy flourishing of painting in this country for the next twenty years depends.”

27. Lewis, The Lion and The Fox (London: Grant Richards, 1927), 122, 124-25. In “The Figure of the King” (121-29), Lewis focuses repeatedly on mystique of royal isolation; see also 92. Hereafter cited parenthetically as LF. For the same theme of royal isolation, see ABR, 93.

28. Lewis, “Power-feeling and Machine-age Art” (October 1934); rpt. in Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society, 1914-1956, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1989), 236-40.

29. Lewis, “Notes Toward [a] Theory of Painting,” Cornell University Library.

30. Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931), 184. Hereafter cited parenthetically as H.

31. Meyers, The Enemy, 187; for a good account of Lewis's visit and the Germany he found, see Meyers, 187-89.

32. Lewis, Rude Assignment, 92.

33. Lewis, Left Wings over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing (London: Cape, 1936); Count Your Dead: They are Alive! or A New War in the Making (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937).

34. Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering, 279.

35. Lewis, “Berlin Revisited,” Cornell University Library.

36. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 59.

37. Lewis, The Hitler Cult (1939; rpt. New York: Gordon Press, 1972), 226-27. Hereafter cited parenthetically as HC.

38. Lewis, mss. Rude Assignment, Cornell University Library.

39. Lewis, Snooty Baronet (London: Cassell, 1932).

40. Lewis, The Revenge for Love (1937), ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1991). Hereafter cited parenthetically as RL.

41. Lewis, The Vulgar Streak (1941; rpt. New York: Jubilee, 1973). Hereafter cited parenthetically as VS.

42. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, 1968), 219-53. The contemporary culture of English literary Marxism emerges lucidly in Valentine Cunningham's British Writers of the Thirties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 296-340; see esp. 316-17, where Cunningham surveys the cultivation of the common tongue in the literature and journalism of the thirties.

43. Lewis, Self-Condemned (1954; rpt. London: Methuen, 1955). Hereafter cited parenthetically as SC.

44. Salomon Reinach, Apollo, trans. F. Simmonds (1904; New York: Scribner's, 1924), 191.

45. See Lewis's rejections of his early abstract manner in “After Abstract Art” (July 1940) and “The 1956 Retrospective at the Tate Gallery” (July-August 1956): Vorticism, its predecessors and descendants, merely “build up a visual language as abstract as music” (WLA, 452); “All that our abstract experiment of twenty years ago did for painting, it seems, was to substitute sensationalism for the cultivation of the senses” (WLA, 359).