SOURCE: Introduction to Unlucky for Pringle: Unpublished and Other Stories, Vision Press, 1973, pp. 7-17.

[In the following introduction to a collection of Lewis's short fiction, Fox and Chapman provide an overview of Lewis's work in the genre and touch on some major elements that mark his short stories, including their peculiar sense of dark comedy; rootedness in the politics and culture of the day; unsympathetic portrayal of women; interest in violence; and recurrence of the figure of the Impostor.]

Recalling the early stages of his career, Wyndham Lewis wrote in 1935 that "The short story, as we call it, was the first literary form with which I became familiar . . . The 'short story' was the crystallization of what I had to keep out of my consciousness while painting."¹ The latter part of this statement would seem to relegate Lewis's short fiction to a disproportionately secondary place in his œuvre. For, from the beginning of his 45 years as a visual and literary artist, Lewis was quite prolific as a fiction writer and, with the exception of the later 1920s and the 1930s, the short story figures prominently among his works in this field.

Lewis's first published stories appeared in 1909—a year after Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives' Tale and a year before H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay—and the last stories published during his lifetime were contemporary with Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim and Lawrence Durrell's Justine. It is not only that the time-span of Lewis's creative life makes it difficult to place him as a writer. The diversity of his fiction is also formidable, ranging as it does from The Apes of God (which, he wrote, paid unprecedented attention to "The externals—the shell, the pelt, the physical behaviour of people"),² to Self Condemned which, in its intensely subjective analysis of self-destruction, stands comparison as a tragic novel with Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Gogol for the early writing; Dryden, Pope, Smollett, Swift for the satires; the Classics for The Human Age—few critics attempting to place Lewis into a literary tradition look to his contemporaries. In one of the earliest reviews of Lewis's writing, Rebecca West suggested Dostoyevsky's influence on Tarr, and I. A. Richards, talking about The Childermass more than 40 years later, invoked Dante, Plato and Fielding. Like D. H. Lawrence, Lewis had no time for "novels that were copies of other novels," and both writers—in their very different ways—used fiction to embody and explore their predilections. Such formal beauties as integritas, consonantia, claritas—preoccupations of Joyce as well as of Stephen Dedalus—were not primary considerations with Lewis. That art is " about something" was axiomatic for him and, as he wrote in Men Without Art (1934): "Implicit in the serious work of art will be found politics, theology, philosophy—in brief all the great intellectual departments of the human consciousness."³ Lewis's concept and practice of the fiction of ideas is nearer to the Augustan satirists, in its assertion of positives by the savagely indignant destruction of falsity, than to the varying degrees of Peacockian sophistication in contemporaries such as Norman Douglas, Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley. It is much easier to say which writers Lewis is not like than to suggest resemblances and, in literature as well as in painting, it is as a unique phenomenon that he must finally be considered.

The present volume gathers together works of short fiction by Lewis which have remained unpublished or, having been scattered through little magazines between 1910 and 1956, were never collected for purposes of a single book. Naturally of special interest are the previously unpublished stories, most of which were apparently destined for inclusion in a volume to have been entitled The Two Captains. The bibliography of E. W. F. Tomlin's British Council pamphlet on Lewis (1955) mentioned an impending book of short fiction, but this book never materialized.

In any event, the stories published here for the first time are part of a 1930s reworking of "The Crowd Master," initially published in Blast No. 2 (1915); "Junior," "The Two Captains" and "The Man Who Was Unlucky With Women" (all from the 1950s); and three tales written by Lewis during his 1940 stay in Sag Harbor, New York—"The Yachting Cap," "The Weeping Man" and "Children of the Great." Not included in this volume are any of the stories in the two collections of short fiction Lewis published in his lifetime, The Wild Body (1927) and Rotting Hill (1951).

All of the previously unpublished stories are not of equal literary merit. Nor are they generally on a par with the stories Lewis managed to have published during his life-time. Yet, when grouped together with other unfamiliar Lewis material, even marginal works by the author of Tarr and The Wild Body take on added interest sufficient to warrant publication, especially if an effort is made to show how such stories blend with the general corpus of his fiction. Juxtaposed in this way with what turn out to be related works, they also enlarge the understanding of Lewis's literary aims. It should be remembered, however, that Lewis habitually did considerable revision on his writings in the "proof stage of their production. Since none of the previously-unpublished stories apparently went to press, they lack that extra "Finish" characteristic of The Enemy at his proof-slashing best. There have been additional difficulties about the text of at least some of this heretofore-unprinted material. The final typescripts of the stories seemingly to have been published in the 1950s—those of "The Two Captains," "Junior," "The Weeping Man," "The Yachting Cap," "The Man Who Was Unlucky With Women" and "Children of the Great"—were unavailable. But good carbon copies or other duplicates were found. In the case of "The Two Captains," a holograph mostly in Lewis's hand helped the editors rectify a number of imperfections, mainly dropped commas or simple typographical errors, in the carbon-copy typescript. Any lapse of a more elaborate order is signified accordingly.

The book called Rotting Hill was made up partly of sketches from life in the Notting Hill area of London during the post World War II "Crippsean Ice Age" with its pervasive physical and metaphorical "rot." The stories in this present book, on the other hand, are notable for, among other things, the absence of the political preoccupation prevalent in Rotting Hill But obviously there are similarities, quite apart from the drive and sparkle of Lewis's prose at its best. The Rotting Hill ambience of the bedraggled Britain of the 1940s obtrudes somewhat in "The Two Captains," and Lewis's life-long fascination with rooms and flats as microcosms is as apparent in "Unlucky for Pringle" as it is in the Rotting Hill sketch called "The Rot." The historian Paul Eldred in another of the Rotting Hill tales is as much a "celebrated ruin" exploiting forever afterwards the temporary visitation of a muse as is Thaddeus Trunk in "Doppelgänger" (1954), a story included here.

But the stories in this new collection are more closely related to The Wild Body than to Rotting Hill if only because, as a whole, they are in the category of what might be called pure fiction as opposed to semi-fictional reportage. The Wild Body, a modern classic, is a book which, like Rotting Hill, brings together works sharing a common theme. In the former collection that theme is the primitive human breed, like "big, obsessed, sun-drunk insects,"⁴ which fascinated Lewis as painter and writer in his early years. As such, The Wild Body's inspiration comes closer than that of most of his other books to drawing on themes simultaneously at work in his pictures. Lewis's pre-World War I drawings abound in strange, ritualized figures. But Bestre and Brotcotnaz in The Wild Body are as much "executants of a single ritual" (the phrase is Walter Michel's) as are the figures in such drawings as "Indian Dance" and "Courtship" (1912). "Their enormous vitality," writes Michel, "is in the service of an obsession."⁵ Lewis observed humanity like an anthropologist scrutinizing a newly-discovered species of homunculae, at once unbelieving and delighted by their absurdity. These wild bodies, driven either by demoniacal ides fixes or the vagaries of a perverse autonomic system, cavort over the canvases and through the stories of the young Lewis.

In The Wild Body Lewis defined his theory of the comic as rooted in "observations of a thing behaving like a person."⁶ This is an idea to which Lewis adhered throughout his career and it is evident in most of the stories here collected. Polderdick ("The King of the Trenches"), for instance, is as mechanical as his "Flying pigs," and Kipe in "The Yachting Cap" is a tatterdemalion Canute as elemental as the ocean he defies. Similarly, Monsieur Chalaran in "Unlucky for Pringle," with his "Animal-like selfishness and self-absorption," is very much in this Lewis tradition and that story as a whole is a tale merely transposed from the French or Spanish settings of the original Wild Body universe into an English scheme of things. "Unlucky for Pringle" has been chosen as the title story of this collection because, though written while Lewis was still in his twenties, it provides a precocious demonstration of virtually all his gifts and attitudes as a writer. With hindsight, the critic might see in this story an uncannily accurate premonition of the fate that awaited Lewis in the subsequent five decades of Anglo-Saxon literary history.

All of Lewis, it can be said, is in "Unlucky for Pringle." There is, for instance, the presence of the rootless connoisseur of rooms from Brittany to Morocco, via frigid Canada, Bayswater and Chelsea; there is the "gusto for the common circumstances of his life," and the ability to infuse the lowliest objects with a bizarre and exciting vitality. But there is also, embodied in Pringle, that "Mysterious power of awakening hostility" which Lewis later ascribed to Rousseau in The Art of Being Ruled (1926) and which he felt in himself. From his position "outside," Lewis persevered all his life in starkly recording—through his social and literary criticism as well as in his fiction—what in Self Condemned (1954) he called "The madhouse of functional character." But like Monsieur Chalaran, this malignantly insane element does not relish the presence of a recording mind. In "Pringle" the crash of a looking-glass, customarily an omen of misfortune, should have warned the hero of the consequences of his "Mystic contentment." Like the ultimate fate held for René Harding by the Hotel Blundell in Self Condemned and that reserved by the Anglosaxon cultural establishment for Lewis himself, the destiny of Pringle's lodging house was to "vomit him forth; it could not assimilate him . . . its inhabitants became filled with mysterious hatred for him."

Together with "Pringle," the other writings in the first section of this book give a preliminary display of how Lewis worked from the raw material of life, whether it was the Roland-centred domestic constellation of "A Breton Innkeeper" or the fictional presentation of an actual salon event under the shadow of war in the "Crowd Master" story. The rest of this collection exemplifies in an even more positive way the main themes evinced in all of Lewis's literary work. It is these themes, to the extent that they manifested themselves in the stories that follow, which determined the form given to this book as a whole.

First there is world war, a twentieth-century fact of life which, in Lewis's case, makes itself powerfully felt not only in the autobiographical Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) but also, if more obliquely, in later books such as Self Condemned and The Human Age (1955). Lewis called the war of 1914-18 "a cyclopean dividing wall in time: a thousand miles high and a thousand miles thick, a greater barrier laid across our life."⁷ However, as C. H. Sisson has suggested, Lewis was intellectually steeled, as his Georgian contemporaries were not, to absorb a shock of these proportions. "The Lewisian apocalypse was a pre-war affair," says Sisson. "It was not an excitement borrowed from events but an intellectual performance of his own."⁸ Perhaps as a consequence of this, Lewis's most fascinat-ing fictional insight into what the war was doing to Western Man came in a story written prior to his initial taste of military action. In the words of a Rotting Hill character created years later, Rob Cairn in "The French Poodle" (written 1915) swiftly finds himself "Forcibly, violently, reborn" once he becomes a soldier on the western front. This whole story is a subtle analysis of that shell-shocked rebirth and also of the war's wider implications. Even in 1915, when martial enthusiasm on the home front had still not given way to weary disenchantment, Lewis's Cairn, with grim prescience, sees the great conflict as "The beginning of a period, far from being a war-that-will-end-war." In "The King of the Trenches," on the other hand, the focus is on mad Captain Burney Polderdick for his own sake rather than for purposes of any general exploration of the meaning of the war. This is, par excellence, a cracking good front-line yarn, although Burney shares some of the characteristics of the hollow-men protagonists found elsewhere in Lewis's fiction, being "A sort of prolongation" of his old self. As monarch of "The terrible narrow Kingdom" of his madness, he merits a prominent place in the galaxy of gargantuan puppets which remain impressive monuments to Lewis's distinctive literary powers.

Unlike Polderdick, however, with his typically modern addiction to mass, mechanized violence as an outlet for pent-up savagery, some of Lewis's characters find their release in metaphysical battles and on another front: against Woman as personification of "The devil Nature." The fictional Benjamin Richard Wing in Lewis's "The Code of a Herdsman" proclaims, for instance, that "women, and the processes for which they exist, are the arch conjuring trick: and they have the cheap mystery and a good deal of the slipperiness, of the conjuror."⁹ In most of his literary depictions of women, Lewis fell far short of the ease and grace that typified his portrayal of them in scores of paintings and drawings. In his fiction there is a degree of the deliberately grotesque, but also of genuine awkwardness, about the presentation of his female characters. At the same time, a number of his main male personae ridicule their women companions rather in the manner of the "propagandist indictment of the feminine" brilliantly paraphrased by Lewis in The Art of Being Ruled, where the female physique is pilloried as a "chocolate-cream trap to catch a rustic fool."¹⁰ Describing the projected theme of Self Condemned to a publisher seven years before the book's appearance, Lewis wrote: "Woman has been called 'the eternal enemy of the absolute': so our perfectionist (René Harding) must encounter immediate difficulties when he comes in contact with woman."¹¹

The central male characters in "Cantelman's Spring-Mate," "The War Baby" and "Junior" are by no means perfectionists. Instead—except for John Leslie in "Junior"—they are self-styled übermenschen. Leslie differs from his two forbears in that he is not aggressively intent on dominating Woman but, like a debased Cantelman figure, flees from an overbearing and over-fecund femininity which he both fears and despises.

Yet there is a strange beauty about some of the very images of derision heaped on characters like the pregnant Tets in "The War Baby" who is "softly sculpting a Totem, whereas others had not had that art—or craft." Gestation—"The toad-life at the bottom of the tank"—is a central, indeed menacing fact in all three of these stories just as, along with creation and nativity, it served as an important theme for Lewis's painting during that arduous period of exile, the 1940s. The women portrayed here, however, emerge as anything but defeated parties from the contests into which they are plunged. Tets, for instance, scores a vicarious victory, and a contemptuous Perdita is able to hurl the epithet "insane" at John Leslie in "Junior." "Insane" (though also heroic) is the description René Harding too might merit. "She has the effrontery to set herself up as my defender against myself," complains Kell-Imrie in bewailing the machinations of the much-lampooned Val in the novel Snooty Baronet (1932).¹² It could be said that this was also the role of Hester in Self Condemned, and Lewis had René suffer a living death as the penalty for ascribing to the protective Hester nothing more than an "effrontery" meriting only haughty rejection. In "Pish-Tush," the bluff Lionel Letheridge learns the price of unduly crossing womanhood. His actions arouse the virulence of that "volatile aura" which necessarily is all Constance-the-Spook retains of the redoubtable female life-force, with its "Mysterious indomitable will."

As do many of Lewis's stories, "Pish-Tush" ends with an eruption of violence. To Lewis, violence was of the essence of human personality. "Within five yards of another man's eyes we are on a little crater, which, if it erupted, would split up as would a cocoa-tin of nitrogen," he wrote in The Wild Body. This explosiveness lurks beneath the surface of personality and "The finest humour is the great play-shapes blown up or given off by the tragic corpse of life underneath the world of the camera."¹³ Memorable "play-shapes" swarm through Lewis's fiction and elsewhere in his work. He revelled in close-ups of such elephantine grotesques: Bestre and Brotcotnaz in The Wild Body, Kreisler in Tarr, the Bailiff in The Human Age, Jack Cruze in The Revenge for Love (1937), Charlie the janitor in Self Condemned, Augustine Card in The Red Priest (1956), Borzo the hotelkeeper in Filibusters in Barbary (1932) and Brandleboyes in America I Presume (1940). In the present stories there is "Bob" Allen Crumms racked by the same "convulsions of meaningless mirth" as shook Harding when he pondered the hotel fire and the "Absurd" extinction of Affie, the wily but lovable hotel manageress in Self Condemned. Or there are the Card-like fighting transports of Dickie Dean in "The Man Who Was Unlucky With Women," or the superb anti-oceanic posturings of Kipe, the bum à la Beckett rendered with a flamboyant Lewisian twist in "The Yachting Cap."

Finally there is another Lewis speciality represented in the pages that follow. This is The Impostor. The American academic faculty to which René retires at the end of Self Condemned was unaware that this celebrated British historian had become by that time "A glacial shell of a man," the authenticity of whose work was by now merely a delusion. Far more deliberate and relentless in his activities as Impostor was Vincent Penhale in The Vulgar Streak (1941), whose bourgeois mannerisms were as carefully counterfeited as his false fivers. In the present book, "The Two Captains" explores the idea of The Counterfeit not only in its characterization but also, as in The Vulgar Streak, in its Social Credit-like ruminations on the subject of money. As for "Children of the Great," it in part is an elaboration of a concept later broached again by René Harding when he remarks: "The children of the great are their deeds. Their biological offspring is generally the dullest or vilest."¹⁴ But, beyond this, "Children of the Great" provides another variation on the Impostor theme in the person of Derek Gilchrist, a living "libel upon the great." An authentic reincarnation of the Genius of whom Derek is a cruel parody ultimately takes shape in the story, just as a similar personification of The Real materializes in "Doppelgänger," the third and finest study of an Impostor figure included here. Thaddeus Trunk is a great poet who has been transformed by his clamorous, adoring public into a publicity figure. It is Thad's folly actually to become this figment of his fan-club's imagination. As a pioneer Student of Publicity—a subject dealt with at length in such books as Time and Western Man (1927) and Doom of Youth (1932)—Lewis was well qualified to probe the techniques of "image-building" responsible for sundry forms of star status in contemporary western society. "A man's publicity is a caricature of himself," says the narrator of "Doppelgänger." "It is really how the public sees 'greatness.'" The destiny of Thaddeus Trunk, majestic word-man consumed by his "publicity scarecrow," has obvious parallels in the real-life world of letters, which—under the logic of twentieth-century civilization—tends to be as dominated by the star system as is show business.

Thus this collection ends with Lewis re-emerging from the realm of fiction and assuming once more his equally characteristic functions as sociologist. His command of this latter genre forms a natural whole with his gifts as fictionist, especially as short-story writer. The Art of Being Ruled draws on the same masterly sense of group rhythms as does "A Breton Innkeeper"; or, in the category of travel writing, the account of film-star absurdities in Filibusters in Barbary; or, among the novels, the microcosmic goings-on at the Hotel Blundell; or, even in Lewis's painting, the abstract of mob dynamics represented by the great 1914-15 oil, The Crowd. In the crowd, yet not of the crowd: this is the quintessential Lewisian position. Lewis "Manoeuvres in the heart of reality," with a voracious eye alert for any new "stylistic anomalies" worthy of satiric note. Lewis called his Wild Body stories "essays in a new human mathematic" and spoke of wanting "To compile a book of 40 of these propositions, one deriving from and depending on the other."¹⁵ In a sense, The Art of Being Ruled might qualify as that book. In any event, as Geoffrey Grigson once wrote, "All Lewis's work is one work."¹⁶ And it is with this unity in mind that the reader should approach the stories here collected.

Notes

¹ Walter Michel and C. J. Fox, eds., Wyndham Lewis on Art.London: Thames and Hudson, 1969, pp. 294-5.

² W. K. Rose, ed., The Letters of Wyndham Lewis. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1963, p. 191.

³ Wyndham Lewis, Men Without Art. London: Cassell and Co. Ltd., 1934, p. 9.

⁴ Lewis, Rude Assignment. London: Hutchinson and Co. Ltd., 1950, p. 117.

⁵ Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971, p. 49.

⁶ Lewis, The Wild Body. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927, p. 246.

⁷ Lewis, The Writer and the Absolute. London: Methuen, 1952, p. 38.

⁸ C. H. Sisson, "The Politics of Wyndham Lewis," Agenda (London), Autumn-Winter, 1969-70, p. 109.

⁹ Lewis, "Imaginary Letters: The Code of a Herdsman," The Little Review (New York), July, 1917, p. 6.

¹⁰ Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled. London: Chatto, 1926, p. 276.

¹¹The Letters of Wyndham Lewis, p. 410.

¹² Lewis, Snooty Baronet. London: Cassell, 1932, p. 308.

¹³The Wild Body, pp. 238-9.

¹⁴ Lewis, Self Condemned. London: Methuen, 1954, p. 261.

¹⁵The Wild Body, p. 233.

¹⁶ Geoffrey Grigson, A Master of Our Time. London: Methuen, 1951, p. 18.