SOURCE: "Natures, Puppets and Wars," in Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires, Vision Press, 1973, pp. 47-67.

Looking back on his first published writings, Lewis recalled their genesis in his "long vague periods of indolence" in Brittany:

The Atlantic air, the raw rich visual food of the barbaric environment, the squealing of the pipes, the crashing of the ocean, induced a creative torpor. Mine was now a drowsy sun-baked ferment, watching with delight the great comic effigies which erupted beneath my rather saturnine but astonished gaze. . . . The characters I chose to celebrate—Bestre, the Cornac and his wife, Brotcotnaz, le père Françis—were all primitive creatures, immersed in life, as much as birds, or big, obsessed, sun-drunk insects. (Rude Assignment, 117)

These primitive creatures were eventually to emerge as "wild bodies" in the 1927 collection of that name, but in their early form these pieces are not, in the accepted sense of the term, short stories. They are plotless travel sketches peopled by Breton "characters" whose idiosyncratic social relationships are the raison d'être of the vignettes.

"The Pole" was published in Hueffer's The English Review in May 1909; it was, Lewis recalled, "My first success of a practical nature." An exercise in imaginative social psychology, "The Pole" describes the curious phenomenon of permanent Slav boarders at Breton pensions. With the analytical eye of the social scientist, Lewis states his proposition at the outset; the remainder of the piece offers illustrative case-histories and inductive generalizations about the type. These early stories, wrote Lewis twenty-five years later, were "The crystallization of what I had to keep out of my consciousness while painting," and although the eye of the visuel is very obvious, it is usually subordinate to the polemical design of the whole.

"Some Innkeepers and Bestre," Lewis's second publication, appeared in the following issue of The English Review and showed similar preoccupations.

The truest type of innkeeper is to be found in France. And as these papers deal with some of my experiences in Brittany last summer it is chiefly with France that I am concerned. (473)

"These papers" suggests that Lewis saw his early publications as imaginative reportage or documentaries rather than fictions, and his tone is often that of the sociologist—of the recorder rather than the creator:

So the study of the French innkeeper is especially fruitful, for he veritably puts his whole soul into his part, everything in him blossoms prodigiously within the conventional limits of his trade. (479)

The reality that Lewis records, however, is not at all mundane. Delighting in the absurd, the grotesque and the bizarre, the more civilized "I" of the narrative wanders amongst the primitive "sun-drunk insects" assiduously noting their behavioural tics and exploring the tensions between roles and personalities. "So subtle is their method and manner of charming the public that it has an opposite effect," writes Lewis of his "eccentric exponents" of the astonishing art of innkeeping. As if to support his general truth by concrete evidence, Lewis appends—as exemplum to moralitas—the case-history of Bestre.

In The English Review version of the story, rather than seeing Bestre in action, the reader is told about his furious and demonic battles of glares. Presentation of character is limited by the exemplary role in which it functions—like the Poles, Bestre is a footnote in Lewis's thesis in social psychology. When these stories were reworked for publication in The Wild Body (1927) it was, however, the sociological aspect which was relegated to the footnotes, and the characters, rather than the thesis, become the raison d'être of the writing. In turning "The Pole" into "Beau Séjour," Lewis is not so insistent in his attempts to "nail things down"; the discursive exposition becomes a short story and, in Lawrence's phrase, the characters "get up and walk away with the nail." From the multiplicity of minor characters in "The Pole," Lewis selects the ménage of Mme Peronette, Carl and Zoborov, placing their interrelationship into a formal framework. Picaresque meanderings take on beginning, middle and end; minor characters, if not omitted altogether, are strictly subordinated to the central relationship. Similarly, in the transition from "Some Innkeepers and Bestre" to "Bestre" (as it appears in The Wild Body), the prolegomenous, discursive material—"Some Innkeepers"—is filtered out completely, leaving the magnificently grotesque Bestre at the centre of the stage.

Although The Wild Body is still very much written to a thesis, this is not expressed in exegetical running commentaries as in the early versions, but stated separately in two essays, "Inferior Religions" and "The Meaning of the Wild Body." These expound the philosophical assumptions which underlie the comic vision of the stories:

First, to assume the dichotomy of mind and body is necessary here, without arguing it; for it is upon that essential separation that the theory of laughter here proposed is based . . . we have to postulate two creatures, one that never enters into life, but that travels about in a vessel to whose destiny it is momentarily attached. That is, of course, the laughing observer, and the other is the Wild Body. . . . There is nothing that is animal (and we as bodies are animals) that is not absurd. This sense of the absurdity, or, if you like, the madness of our life, is at the root of every true philosophy. (243-244)

Reason is the "laughing observer" and the "wild body" is the autonomic physiological system to which it is fettered. Not only can the reflective intellect observe the absurdities of others, but—standing back from the wild body in which it is housed—it can apprehend its own absurdity. In the light of this Cartesian dualism, there is something fundamentally absurd in the very fact of human existence; Kerr-Orr, the narrator, recognizes this in himself as well as in others:

This forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned gut-bag, with its two bright rolling marbles with which it sees, bull's-eyes full of mockery and madness, is my stalking-horse. I hang somewhere in its midst operating it with detachment. (5)

It is Kerr-Orr's Socratic awareness of his own position which places him above the mechanistic wild bodies. He operates his autonomic system: the wild bodies are operated by theirs. Representing mind over matter, he struts through the Breton countryside searching out bizarre examples of the machine in control of the operator or "The thing" running away with "The person."

Lewis's concept of comedy, of course, derives a great deal from Bergson and, as Geoffrey Wagner has written, "Bergson's Le Rire is a primer of Lewisian Satire." The French philosopher's basic point about comedy—that it is "la transformation d'une personne en chose"—becomes the crux of Lewis's definition:

The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person. But from that point of view all men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons. . . . To bring vividly to our mind what we mean by "Absurd," let us turn to the plant, and enquire how the plant could be absurd. Suppose you came upon an orchid or a cabbage reading Flaubert's Salambo, or Plutarch's Moralia, you would be very much surprised. But if you found a man or woman reading it, you would not be surprised.

Now in one sense you ought to be just as much surprised at finding a man occupied in this way as if you had found an orchid or a cabbage, or a tom-cat, to include the animal world. There is the same physical anomaly. It is just as absurd externally, that is what I mean.—The deepest root of the Comic is to be sought in this anomaly. (246-247)

Paraded and presented by Kerr-Orr, The Wild Body is a collection of such anomalies.

Kerr-Orr is the Lewis-man of these stories, and the persona is representative of a type which recurs throughout Lewis's fiction—"The nature." In The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Goethe's distinction between puppets and natures is quoted with approbation. Homo stultus is mechanical, puppet-like, ignorant: "Natures," the super-species, are distinguished by self-awareness and control. Even if all men are fundamentally absurd, some are less so than others—Kerr-Orr is one of these:

I know much more about myself than people generally do. For instance I am aware that I am a barbarian. By rights I should be paddling about in a coracle. My body is large, white and savage. But all the fierceness has become transformed into laughter. . . . Everywhere where formerly I would fly at throats, I now howl with laughter. . . . My sense of humour in its mature phase has arisen in this very acute consciousness of what is me. In playing that off against another hostile me, that does not like the smell of mine, probably finds my large teeth, height and so forth abominable, I am in a sense working off my alarm at myself. So I move on a more primitive level than most men, I expose my essential me quite coolly, and all men shy a little. . . . I will show you myself in action, manoeuvring in the heart of reality. (3-4, 5, 7)

This physically primitive "soldier of humour" has harnessed his natural violence. As his mind gazes dispassionately upon his own "Anomalies" and upon the world's, the fundamental ubiquitous absurdity gives rise to a philosophy of laughter:

It sprawls into everything. It has become my life. The result is that I am never serious about anything. I simply cannot help converting everything into burlesque patterns. (4)

It is as a connoisseur of the grotesque that Kerr-Orr catalogues specimens for his human menagerie. Anxious to catch the slightest comic nuances of behaviour, he installs himself in the midst of his exhibits, often acting as catalyst as well as recorder:

It was almost as though Fabre could have established himself within the masonries of the bee, and lived on its honey, while investigating for the human species. (120)

The physical closeness of Kerr-Orr's scrutiny—like a gorgonian lens—turns people into things. The description of Ludo, the blind Breton beggar, petrifies the living face into a mask—physiognomy becomes form.

As I looked at him I realized how the eyes mount guard over the face, as well as look out of it. The faces of the blind are hung there like a dead lantern. Blind people must feel on their skins our eyes upon them: but this sheet of flesh is rashly stuck up in what must appear far outside their control, an object in a foreign world of sight. So in consequence of this divorce, their faces have the appearance of things that have been abandoned by the mind. What is his face to a blind man? Probably nothing more than an organ, an exposed part of the stomach, that is a mouth. (179)

This is what Lewis elsewhere calls "The truth of Natural Science" as opposed to the "Truth of Romance": the non-human gaze which plays over the "dry shells and pelts of things," confining itself to the "visible machinery of life" ("Studies in the Art of Laughter").

While action explodes all around, Kerr-Orr, like a ringmaster in a well-organized arena, surveys and controls his charges with consummate ease. He is "The showman to whom the antics and solemn gambols of these wild children are to be a source of strange delight" (232). This is not the Lawrentian fascination with the primitive: Lewis is less interested in the differences between the civilized and the unsophisticated, and more in their similarities. The Breton peasants exhibit, writ large, the "solemn gambols" of all humanity. In laughing at them we are not, like visitors to Elizabethan asylums, laughing at these "carefully selected specimens of religious fanaticism" (234). These grotesques are not on show as curious mutations of nature. Lewis postulates no norm against which his madmen are to be measured, but rather suggests that this "Madness" be taken into account in any definition of humanity. Driven by various permutations of idées fixes, ruling passions, fetishes and the arbitrary functioning of their autonomic systems, the wild bodies are units in "A new human mathematic," the basic premise of which is that "we have in most lives the spectacle of a pattern as circumscribed and complete as a theorem of Euclid" (233).

One such theorem is the ritual of violence performed by Brotcotnaz on his wife. These beatings are his bloody obeisance to dark gods. Julie, the wife, suffers her perpetual crucifixion in doleful silence:

Her eyes are black and moist, with the furtive intensity of a rat. They move circumspectly in this bloated shell. She displaces herself also more noiselessly than the carefullest nun, and her hands are generally decussated, drooping upon the ridge of her waist-line, as though fixed there with an emblematic nail, at about the level of the navel. Her stomach is, for her, a kind of exclusive personal "calvary." At its crest hang her two hands, with the orthodox decussation, an elaborate ten-fingered symbol. (208)

The imagery suggests Julie's martyrdom at the hands of Brotcotnaz's "inferior religion": only the rat-like furtiveness of her eyes distances her from the conventional hagiological type. Julie, too, bows the knee to an inferior religion of her own: she secretly drinks, and attempts to pass off her bruises as "erysipelas." Although both "secrets" are widely known to friends and neighbours, Julie pretends, for form's sake, that certain things are true. The neighbours, also for form's sake, are party to the groundrules of their private ritual and the whole affair becomes a complex skein of unspoken assumptions and understanding.

The Brotcotnazs' ceremony of violence is like the formal, highly-patterned dance they perform for Kerr-Orr. The steps are preordained and there is no margin for improvisation. Yet there is no real contact: each partner is aware of what is to come, and the partern exists independently of themselves:

"Viens donc, Julie! Come then. Let us dance."

Julie sat and sneered through her vinous mask at her fascinating husband. He insisted, standing over her with one toe pointed outward in the first movement of the dance, his hand held for her to take in a courtly attitude.

"Viens donc, Julie! Dansons un peu!"

Shedding shamefaced, pinched, and snuffling grins to right and left as she allowed herself to be drawn into this event, she rose. They danced a sort of minuet for me, advancing and retreating, curtseying and posturing, shuffling rapidly their feet. Julie did her part, it seemed, with understanding. (218)

The dance is a pastiche of reality; attitudes are donned like masks as these two peasants act out a courtly minuet. Just as the minuet exists beyond the dancers, or a Euclidean theorem beyond the page, so the violence of Brotcotnaz is almost impersonal, having its genesis beyond the personalities involved. Running in behavioural grooves seemingly too deeply scored to be changed, their life-style is as mindless a ritual of stimulus-response as that of Pavlovian salivating dogs. However, a near-fatal accident to Julie serves to break the pattern and, like an interrupted dance, things are never the same afterwards. The iconographical fetish of action is smashed, the "inferior religion" falls apart, and Brotcotnaz cannot assimilate the new events into his old ways.

The machinery of habit, the "religious" fascination of people for things, and people for people, all are functions of the wild body. The violent energy which erupts periodically in the brutality of Brotcotnaz is often a feature of these characters—in "The Cornac and His Wife" the violence is just as great, but exists beneath the surface, emerging as the performer's hatred of his audience. The Cornac is head of a troupe of itinerant acrobats who scrape a meagre living by giving displays to groups of Breton villagers. He and his wife have an "implacable grudge" against the spectators:

With the man, obsessed by ill-health, the grievance against fortune was associated with the more brutal hatred that almost choked him every time he appeared professionally. . . . These displays involved the insane contortions of an indignant man and his dirty, breathless wife, of whose ugly misery it was required that a daily mournful exhibition should be made of her shrivelled legs, in pantomime hose. She must crucify herself with a scarecrow abandon, this iron and blood automaton, and affect to represent the factor of sex in a geometrical posturing. (136, 137-8)

As with Julie, this life is a self-willed perpetual crucifixion: habit is both torture and palliative; there is no escape from the ritual pattern of existence. The performance witnessed by Kerr-Orr is a ceremonial defiance of the audience. Because a local by-law forbids the appearance of his young daughter, the old man is forced to drag his own weary body through the painful contortions of the act for the pleasure of the audience. A "whistling sneer of hatred" acknowledges the applause; he is aware that they have come to see "The entire family break their necks one after the other" (139). The laughter of the clown and the crowd is another expression of this violence; another primitive response to the latent dangers of the act. "The herd-bellow at the circus is always associated with mockviolent events, however, and (this) true laughter is torn out of a tragic material" (162). The reflex actions that Lewis explores—the nervous laughter in the face of tragedy, the "brutal frisson" inspired by danger—are the gut-reactions and mysterious spasms of the human mechanism. As in a Giacometti sculpture, the "civilized" accretions which have gathered around the wild body are pared away, until, in these Breton peasants, "That small, primitive, literally antediluvian vessel in which we set out on our adventures" stands revealed.

Bestre, the finest creation of The Wild Body, is, like the Bailiff in Childermass, a superb grotesque. The story is very simple: Bestre, a Breton innkeeper, indulges in furious battles of glares with a Parisian artist and his wife. The plot charts the battle and details Bestre's tactics. Kerr-Orr is not interested in the depth-psychology of Bestre's obsession—the ruling passion is a donnée, its cause buried in the viscera or the subconscious—but he observes Bestre with such precision that his own activity borders on the obsessive. The prose is thick and glutinous—what Hugh Kenner has called "A species of verbal impasto"—full of biological imagery and verbs of startling action. Bestre emerges:

His tongue stuck out, his lips eructated with the incredible indecorum that appears to be the monopoly of liquids, his brown arms were for the moment genitals, snakes in one massive twist beneath his mamillary slabs, gently riding on a pancreatic swell, each hair on his oil-bearing skin contributing its message of porcine affront. . . . On reaching the door into which he had sunk, plump and slick as into a stage trap, there he was inside—this grease-bred old mammifier—his tufted vertex charging about the plank ceiling—generally ricochetting like a dripping sturgeon in a boat's bottom—arms warm brown, ju-jitsu of his guts, tan canvas shoes and trousers rippling in ribbed planes as he darted about—with a filthy snicker for the scuttling female, and a stark cock of the eye for an unknown figure miles to his right: he filled this short tunnel with clever parabolas and vortices, little neat stutterings of triumph, goggle-eyed hypnotisms, in retrospect, for his hearers. (117-118)

Bestre is not exhibited, like the fat lady in the fair-ground booth, to be mocked as a freak. He is, in a sense, the hidden side of Everyman: if humanity, by definition, is all that humanity has produced, then Lewis, in these stories, is holding up the wild bodies as a mirror to the reader. Bestre's routines are as rigid as those of the donkey turning the water wheel, and his inferior religion is typical of the driving forces behind other Wild Body characters: Valmore's idée fixe that he is all-American dominates his life ("A Soldier of Humour"); Ludo, the blind beggar in "The Death of the Ankou," is hounded by a primitive death-god; Françoise has moulded his personality on the "emotions provoked by the bad, late, topical sentimental songs of Republican France" ("Franciscan Adventures"). All are automata: wound up by predilections, they whirr on their giddy way. The right response, according to KerrOrr, is a "bark of delight" at the proximity of such absurdities. Yet even in the recognition and enjoyment of the "stylistic anomalies," Kerr-Orr is himself absurd:

Flinging myself on the bed, my blond poll rolling about in ecstasy upon the pillow, I howled like an exultant wolf. (29)

Observer and observed alike are implicated in the pervasive comic vision. For Lewis, any definition of human life must include this element of the absurd and in his description of "perfect laughter" ("Studies in the Art of Laughter"), he outlines this vision:

Perfect laughter . . . would select as the objects of its mirth as much the antics dependent upon pathologic maladjustments, injury or disease, as the antics of clumsy and imperfectly functioning healthy people. . . . There is no reason at all why we should not burst out laughing at a foetus, for instance. We should after all, only be laughing at ourselves! —at ourselves early in our mortal career. (514)

In Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis praised T. E. Hulme for "rubbing everybody's nose . . . in the highly disobliging doctrine" of Original Sin. There are many similarities between Hulme's Weltanschauung and Lewis's, and the former's dictum that "Man is in no sense perfect, but a wretched creature who can yet apprehend perfection" (Speculations), could well be taken as a definition of the ethos underlying much of Lewis's work. An aesthetic which sees satire as a universal "let-down" of the species and a technique of "human defamation" is akin, in many ways, to a notion of Original Sin—a secular Original Sin. This moral vision—implicit in The Wild Body and embodied more fully in The Apes of God—is voiced discursively in The Art of Being Ruled:

Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men. As active, erect, and humane creatures they are in a constantly false position, and behaving in an abnormal way. They have to be pushed up into it, and held there, till it has become a habit only to lie down at night; and at the first real opportunity they collapse and are full length once more. (281)

The vision is as profoundly despairing as that embodied in Swift's Struldbruggs or Beckett's Unnamable and How It Is. In the light of this philosophy, the wild bodies are representative of the yahoo in all humanity—yet something saves them from the total bleakness of, say, Lady Fredigonde in The Apes of God. Lewis, as well as Kerr-Orr, delights in—indeed "celebrates"—their absurdity. The satirical attitude here is ambiguous—as if Swift had, paradoxically, admired the vitality of his yahoos—and it is this very ambiguity which gives rise to the unique tone of The Wild Body. This is the stage prior to The Apes of God-attitude where human life is portrayed as "A very bad business indeed": here, it is very absurd indeed, and the artist revels in this absurdity.

Traces of the wild body ethos are to be found in a good deal of Lewis's writing outside The Wild Body itself. The early story "Unlucky for Pringle" which appeared in Douglas Goldring's magazine The Tramp (February, 1911), is very much part of this universe, but set in London instead of Brittany. James Pringle is a Kerr-Orr figure with a "gusto for the common circumstances of his life" and an aesthetic appreciation of rooms and their inhabitants as microcosms of an infinitely entertaining reality. Pringle's fastidiousness about the adequacy of rooms as studios has become removed from the realm of necessity to that of fascination. He changes rooms promiscuously, and "Rooms to Let" has a strange, sexual significance for him:

On the very frequently recurring occasions on which he set out to look for rooms he would savour the particular domestic taste of each new household he entered in the course of his search with the interest of a gourmet. Smiling strangely, as she thought, at the landlady who answered the door, he would at once go to her parlour—come for a debauch that she would never suspect. . . . He had passed like a ghost, in one sense, through a hundred unruffled households. Scores of peaceful landladies, like beautiful women caressed in their sleep by a spirit, had been enjoyed by him. Their drab apartments had served better than any boudoir. (404, 413)

Pringle rents a room from a French couple, the Chalarans, and installs himself in the midst of their life "like a worm in a wall," gradually usurping the indolent, wild-bodied Chalaran as patriarch. Sensing that he is being "enjoyed" by Pringle, Chalaran—in a series of marvellously indirect acts of cognitive dissonance—manages to oust this connoisseur of the ordinary. Chalaran, as much as Bestre or Brotcotnaz, is a wild body, whose frenetic and tangential outbursts are a locus classicus of deviations of object and aim:

. . . in a burst of energy that lasted two afternoons (Chalaran) built a summer-house at the bottom of the garden. The summer-house, no doubt, saved Pringle. But had Pringle grasped then the at once compact and elemental character of these bursts of activity, and his own position as regards Chalaran, he would have shaken in his shoes. For who could say whether the next time a storm of such violence as to build a summer-house might not seize on some more substantial and apposite object. (413)

Similarly, the protagonist of "Sigismund" (a short story first published in 1920 and appended to The Wild Body collection in 1927) is an idiot son of an idiot tradition who, forever peering into the depths of his aristocratic past with pathological single-mindedness, is a wild body driven by a wild mind. Unlike the corporeal fixation of, say, Brotcotnaz for his wife—which is as physical as pain, hunger or fear—Sigismundos obsession is of the intellect and, in many ways, he is as near to the "Tyro" species as to the wild bodies. His wish to progress backwards is stronger than most people's to progress forwards, and he becomes an embodiment of his pathological studies. In Sigismund's case, and in the Lewisian taxonomy of obsessions generally, the psychological assumptions are closer to those of the seventeenth and eighteenth century than those of early twentieth-century "alienists." Lewis pursues the Bergsonian "Thingness" behind the human façade, and his creatures are reduced to their most dominant characteristics. These caricatures of humanity—as in Ben Jonson's comedy of humours or Pope's presentation of "Ruling Passions"—are personifications. There are many similarities between Lewis's reifications and such simplistic moral psychologies, but his "primitive creatures" and "sun-drunk insects" do not function within a morality framework. Representing nothing beyond themselves, they exist to encourage that human bark called laughter which, wrote Lewis, "is per se a healthy clatter" ("Studies in the Art of Laughter," 515).

Lewis wrote several stories with World War I as either setting or backcloth, and in these he looks at social phenomena more sophisticated than the primitive group psychology of the wild bodies. In "The French Poodle" (The Egoist, March, 1916), war is presented as one of the "Tragic handicaps" of existence which has been exalted into a way of life in modern society. The ever-present threat of death and the first-hand experience of slaughter create "Trench scars" in the mind of Rob Cairn. Suffering from shellshock, Cairn is both physically and emotionally scarred. What man has done to man utterly disgusts him; in place of this inhumanity Cairn postulates "The sanity of direct animal processes." But he has been conditioned to brutality; he kills and is killed; there is no escape from the man-made environment of violence.

In The Wild Body, Lewis had focused upon primitive—if complex—individuals in primitive environments; in the war stories he looks at the effects of complex—if, ultimately, uncivilized—environments upon the individual. "The King of the Trenches" is the only story of Lewis's to deal directly with life at the Front. It appeared in the second edition of Blasting and Bombardiering (1967) and draws on the same experience as is brilliantly recorded in that autobiography. Captain Burney Polderdick is a much-decorated officer in command of a battery of trench mortars, and his exploits are described by Lieutenant Donald Menzies, the Lewis-man of the story. From the outset it is obvious that Polderdick is quite mad—his "eccentricity" having that compulsive power which pushes it beyond acceptable limits. His actions are not always under the control of the rational mind and, in a stressful situation, he becomes a mélange of tin-hat and flying limbs. Unlike Cairn, Burney is not viewed as a tragic figure caught in a web of war. He represents, rather, the wild body at war:

When Polderdick arrived the Line was quiet. A few days afterwards the Trench was constantly shelled. Polderdick was there. They began shelling with shrapnel. At the first patter of the shrapnel Polderdick dived headlong into a dug-out, but his tin-hat crashed with great force against the tin-hat of an infantry captain who was darting out at the moment. They both disappeared, Polderdick's buttocks revolving as he fell inside. (173)

Polderdick's deranged "Ha! Ha!" is yet another category in Lewis's anatomy of laughter: it is the explosion of a mind signalling its unwillingness to adhere to that consensus of opinion called reality. Polderdick's insanity consists of an idiosyncratic restructuring of experience and the creation of a new reality in which he becomes "King of a terrible narrow kingdom."

"I am the King of the Trenches!" he shouted. "Didn't you know who I was? Yes! I am Burney Polderdick, the king of the Trenches!—Ha! Ha!" He flourished his stick, twirled it lightly, lunged forward, and dug the Colonel in the middle of the stomach. (182)

There is a sympathetic attractiveness about Menzies's account of Polderdick, as if he senses that this wild body madness is no more insane, and certainly less dangerous, than the madness of war. Polderdick, however, is transferred to a Training Depot in England, and his demented reign ends in exile.

As Blasting and Bombardiering illustrates only too well, war can have the effect of dehumanizing men until they become mere cogs in the great impersonal war-machine. Yet, in the Bergsonian sense of people behaving like things, this dehumanizing can still be seen as comic. Lewis's description of the West Indian sergeant (in Blasting and Bombardiering) presents him as a lithe man-machine who returns to his post as automatically and exactly as shells find the breech:

At our Nieuport position one dark night the negroes were rolling shells up to the guns—very large ones, since the guns were outsize. This operation had to be effected without so much as a match struck, lest the German air patrols should spot us. A negro sergeant I noticed was not only stationary, and peculiarly idle, but actually obstructing the work of the dusky rollers. I spoke to him. He neither looked at me nor answered. I could scarcely see him—it was very dark, and he was dark. I ordered him to do a little rolling. This was a word of command. It elicited no response from the dark shape. Whereupon I gave him a violent push. This propelled him through space for a short distance, but he immediately returned to where he had stood before. I gave him a second push. As if made of indiarubber, he once more reintegrated the spot he had just left. After this I accepted him as part of the landscape, and the shells had to be rolled round him, since they could not be rolled through him. (152-153)

Soldiers as part of the landscape, the gigantic guns and shells as alive as they—or the soldiers as thing-like as their guns—are features of many of Lewis's war paintings. Caught in mid-action, the soldiers in the background of "A Battery Shelled" (1919) are transfixed in static geometrical positions reminiscent of the figures of Lewis's Vorticist period. These puny metallic shapes, labouring to the massive totemic guns which block out the sky, are sometimes indistinguishable from the ammunition stock-piled beside them. Like the palm of a gigantic hand, the earth is ploughed and furrowed, far more vital than the transmogrified humanity it grasps. The three figures loitering in the foreground of the painting are more realistically portrayed and have an air of authority. Apparently disengaged from the hellish activity continuously grinding on below them, they are more in control, more withdrawn, not so involved in the destructive machine and hence better able to observe its functions. This "outsider" position is everywhere stressed by Lewis, and through his Cantelman persona in Blasting and Bombardiering he sums it up thus:

In the first days (after the declaration of war) he experienced nothing but a penetrating interest in all that was taking place. His detachment was complete and his attention was directed everywhere. (77)

In the original Cantelman story, "Cantelman's Spring-Mate" which first appeared in The Little Review (October 1917), the war is in the background, but casts its shadow over all "ordinary" life. Cantelman is an infantry officer who is on leave, but, about to depart to the Front for the first time, "his thoughts and sensations all had, as a philosophic background, the prospect of death." Played out against this threat of cataclysmic violence, every action has about it a tenseness and a sense of urgency. Like the eponymous hero of Tarr, Cantelman is a Kerr-Orr figure who, while all too aware of the limitations of his fellow men, aspires to übermensch status—and fails. Perceiving that violence is inherent in all life, that both Nature and humanity are red in tooth and claw, Cantelman attempts to defeat life at its own game.

His body feels itself at one with wild Nature and is beguiled by the sensuality of spring; his mind is appalled at the body's grossness and its desire to be part of "The madness of natural things." Cantelman is Cartesian man par excellence: combining the traits of both wild body and laughing observer, he observes his own desires in action. "Dissecting his laugh," he compares it to the pig's grunt; without the intellect the wild body would be free to rut with the abandon of pigs, but man is animal capax rationis and hence aware of his own absurdity. It is upon Stella, his spring mate and Nature's agent, that Cantelman wreaks his revenge. By humiliating her, he believes, he will be undermining a natural and universal order that is both grotesque and brutal. Stella is a young country girl, quite unaware of the complex reactions she has loosed in her lover. She awakes in him "All the sensations he had been divining in the creatures around him, the horse, the bird and the pig." His relationship with her satisfies both the "gnawing yearning in his blood" and, paradoxically, his wish for revenge upon a Nature which makes him feel such desires. Acting towards Stella "with as much falsity as he could master," his calculated seduction of Nature's "Agent" is an attempt to outwit her "hostile power." Remaining "deliberate and aloof," through the medium of Stella, Cantelman feels he is raping Nature:

On the warm earth consent flowed up into her body from all the veins of the landscape. That night he spat out, in gushes of thick delicious rage, all the lust that had gathered in his body. The nightingale sang ceaselessly in the small wood at the top of the field where they lay. He grinned up towards it, and once more turned to the devouring of his mate. He bore down on her as though he wished to mix her body into the soil, and pour his seed into a more methodless matter, the brown phalanges of floury land. As their two bodies shook and melted together, he felt that he was raiding the bowels of Nature. (Reprinted in Calder and Boyars' Blasting and Bombardiering, 310)

The complexity of Cantelman's desire for Stella, his hatred for his own weakness, and the ambiguous attractiveness of his revenge, are all allusively conveyed in the violent imagery of intercourse. In his mood of "impartial malignity," Cantelman feels that he has won the laurels in his vendetta with Nature, but the whole tenor of the writing denies this. Far from disrupting the pattern of Nature, he plays an integral part in every stage of the natural progression of copulation, birth and—when beating out a German's brains—death. Cantelman's callous and vicious treatment of Stella is an attempt to defeat Nature on her own amoral terms and thus, by remaining above the processes, avoid the "souillure." But the story reveals the insufficiency of the Nietzschean concept of "Will" in this struggle: it is impossible to remain "indifferent to Nature's threat," even when the essence of this threat is intellectually recognized. To be in life is to be tainted by life; this is the lesson learned by so many of Lewis's Supermen manqués, and only Pierpoint in The Apes of God, by eremetically withdrawing from life, manages to function successfully as disembodied mind.

Where the early Wild Body stories presented idiosyncratic characters and conflicts illustrative of human psychology, "Cantelman's Spring-Mate" presents conflicts which embody ideas. Published the year after "Cantelman," "The War Baby" ( Art and Letters, Winter 1918), pursues similar concepts against a similar wartime background; but Richard Beresin, the soldier-protagonist, is much more of a buffoon than Cantelman. Beresin's ideals are not the product of strenuous philosophy, but were bred from the "Tenacious middle class snobberies" of public school, nurtured by Paris, Huysmans and Nietzsche, and now—tended by a "soldier-servant"—are in full flower. A puppet driven by subjective dreams, Beresin inhabits an idealistic realm cut off from the real world by snobbish illusions. His grandiose vision invades—indeed submerges—reality with the Nietzschean equivalent of Romanticism. Charlie Peace, The Brides in the Bath, Oscar Wilde, Huysmans, together with Nietzsche, all romp promiscuously in Beresin's idiot pantheon, and are responsible for his delusions of grandeur. In the Prologue to the first edition of Tarr (1918), Lewis diagnoses the Nietzschean cult which has produced "The ungainliest and strangest aristocratic caste any world could hope to see":

In Europe Nietzsche's gospel of desperation, the beyond-the-law-man etc., has deeply influenced the Paris apache, the Italian Futuriste litterateur, the Russian revolutionary. Nietzsche's books are full of seductions and sugar-plums. They have made aristocrats of people who would otherwise have been only mild snobs or meddlesome prigs . . . they have made an Over-man of every vulgarly energetic grocer in Europe, (x)

Like Cantelman, Beresin represents a critique of his philosophy. In different ways, both are attempting to live out their ideologies and impose their own patterns upon existence; but once translated into action, ideas lose their purity and become tainted by the imperfections of humanity. In a similar manner, John Porter Kemp, the central character of Lewis's dialectical drama The Ideal Giant (1917), propounds a philosophy of extreme action which, however coherently expressed, is shown to be, in practice, totally ludicrous. Kemp's conversations represent his groping towards a satisfactory personal philosophy, and he concludes that conventional behaviour, because mechanical, should be shunned. However, what is intellectually valid and clear-cut can, in action, become chaotic and vague. Philosophy has no law beyond itself, whereas life is hedged in with a multitude of contingencies which blur the edges of ideal forms. When Kemp's "philosophy of action" is put into practice the result is a bizarre emblematic comment upon his original ethic.

Kemp tells Rose that "honesty is a rhythm; it must be broken up," and the important thing is to act positively (instead of merely "playing"):

"My point is plain. It is entirely a question of whole hogging, and escaping from the dreariness and self-contempt of play. We play at everything here—at love, art, winning and losing—don't we? . . . Yet action, if you could find the right action, is the 'sovereign cure for our ills'. . . . Any wildly subversive action should be welcomed. We must escape from the machine in ourselves! Smash it up: renew ourselves"

The insistence upon a cataclysmic personal violence beyond the bounds of good and evil is distinctly Nietzschean. Kemp is disgusted with his own puny attempts to break the conventional rhythm of honesty and confound a mundane reality with lies. Similarly, believing that Rose has stolen some spoons as a symbolic act, Kemp tells her that such gesturing is merely playing at desperation:

"I feel that my lies and your spoons were about as playful as some of the absurdities with which we reproach our art friends. Compared to death on a barricade, or the robber Garnier's Swedish exercises while he was in hiding in the suburbs of Paris, they are slight exploits. The blood that spurts from a tapped proboscis is not enough. A spoon will not thrust you into jail for so long that you forget what the Earth looks like. For the hair to turn white, the heart to turn grey, in an hour, you require the real thing, ma mie."

But, unknown to Kemp, Rose has committed herself in the manner set forth by him: she has killed her father. Touched with bloodstained hands, philosophy has become sullied. As a policeman attempts to apprehend Rose, the play ends with a ludicrous scramble of bodies on the floor of the cafe.

In The Ideal Giant Lewis treats important themes through a veil of heavy irony. It is as if he finds, like Kerr-Orr who is "never serious about anything," that even momentous issues are Janus-faced and are forever pushing forward their absurd aspect. Kemp's philosophizing is, on one level, an attempt to hammer out what Lewis in The Art of Being Ruled calls a "working system of thought." Lewis manages to catch that nice balance between recognizing the importance of Kemp's attempt, while, at the same time, satirizing it most savagely. With Rose's arrest Kemp achieves his mock anagnorosis; the folly of his übermensch idealism is revealed. It is doubly ironical that Kemp should have learned, not through the folly of his own Dostoevskyan extravagance, but through the actions of a female doppelgänger. Throughout the play Kemp believes that he is playing Raskolnikov to Rose's Sonia, but finally he discerns that, in fact, the roles have been reversed.

Cantelman, Beresin, Kemp—all are defeated by life. They do assert positives, but the fiction is an embodiment of their inadequacy rather than their validity. Almost as an answer to the mauvaise foi of these characters, the fictional Benjamin Richard Wing lays down his premises for the good life in "The Code of a Herdsman" (The Little Review, July 1917). Just as the first versions of the Wild Body stories showed Lewis exalting argument above design, so "The Code" represents a fictional presentation of ideas without plot or character. In the form of a letter, this epistolary dramatic monologue is a short but comprehensive set of rules for the avoidance of "The obscenities of existence" and the type of social contacts which dogged the other failed "Natures." Wing is quite dogmatic in his assertions: Mankind and the Exceptional Man cannot coexist and so the only answer is a rigidly divisive Olympian life-style for the "Herdsmen" or "Mountain people." The deliberately extravagant irony of the piece does not mask the seriousness of intent: "The Code" contains the seeds of the Manichean vision of The Art of Being Ruled, Pierpoint's Encyclicals in The Apes of God, and Lewis's own "Enemy" persona. The sine qua non of Wing's argument rests upon the assumption that humanity can be divided, on the one hand, into "Herd" and, on the other, into "Mountain people" or "Herdsmen." It is also understood that any trafficking with the "Yahooesque and rotten herd" must be distasteful in the extreme:

Spend some of your spare time every day in hunting your weaknesses, caught from commerce with the herd, as methodically, solemnly and vindictively as a monkey uses with his fleas. You will find yourself swarming with them while you are surrounded by humanity. But you must not bring them up onto the mountain. . . . Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd. Do not allow yourself to imagine "A fine herd, though still a herd." There is no fine herd. The cattle that call themselves "gentlemen" you will observe to be a little cleaner. It is merely cunning and produced with a product of combined soda and fats. But you will find no serious difference between them and those vast dismal herds they avoid.

The basis of this elitism is ontological not social and, like Plato's exaltation of the Philosopher-King, proceeds from an unquestioned acceptance of the primacy of the intellect. The arrogant Mosaic tone of the piece is brilliantly sustained throughout, and much of the sardonic humour derives from the straightfaced precision with which the allegory is pursued:

There are very stringent regulations about the herd keeping off the sides of the mountain. In fact your chief function is to prevent this happening. Some in moments of boredom, or vindictiveness, are apt to make rushes for the higher regions. Their instinct always fortunately keeps them in crowds or bands, and their trespassing is soon noticed.

The inhumanity of the attitude lies in the deliberate confusion of image and reality: "herd" gradually loses its metaphorical sense and the "Yahoos of the plain" are spoken of, quite literally, as animals. "The terrible processions beneath," writes Wing from the heights, "Are not of our making, and are without our pity." This superb egotism reduces others to mere functions of the self, and one is reminded of Kerr-Orr's confession in The Wild Body:

I admit that I am disposed to forget that people are real—that they are, that is, not subjective patterns belonging specifically to me, in the course of this jokelife, which indeed has for its very principle a denial of the accepted actual. (4)

Wing looks upon humanity with all the indifference that Joyce characterized as central to the aesthetic attitude. Paring his fingernails, Wing does not "Forget" the reality of others—he denies it. Yet, apart from Pierpoint, Lewis's characters never long endure the rarified air of the Mountain (even Wing has "A pipe below sometimes"), and a recurrent theme throughout the fiction is just this conflict between the concepts of the Mountain and the exigencies of the Plain.