The Necessity of Wyndham Lewis? Claiming the ‘Enemy’ for the Left!

Wyndham Lewis the self-styled enemy of the Edwardian and inter-war period bourgeoisie who challenged, antagonised and shocked in equal measure was no socialist or liberal (fashionable with the literary intelligentsia to which belonged) He provoked from the position of the right, was a committed individualist, was influenced by the ambiguous Nietzsche, flirted with fascism and regarded the masses and woman or rather feminization with utter contempt, so in what sense can such a man be useful in furthering a left-leaning agenda and why is his voice so important for the arts today?

Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (1920 – 1) Ferens Art Gallery, Hull City Museums and Art Gallery © The Estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust

The Need for agency and the Master

Recently the Marxist philosopher and equally as individualistic public intellectual Slavoj Zizek has declared that politics needs a ‘Thatcher of the left’ perhaps most notably in his ‘New Statesman’ piece,

“What we need today is a Thatcher of the left: a leader who would repeat Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction, transforming the entire field of presuppositions shared by today’s political elite,” Zizek, The New Statesman, 17 APRIL 2013

Zizek is not simply suggesting a toughened left winger should punish the right, Cameron, Gove and so on, he is imagining a figure, a new ‘master’1 with all the attendant charisma and authority, who will change or punish all the mainstream ‘liberal’ positions of the modern world which lack authenticity and energy. Whose presence would disrupt the equilibrium that has been established and is a problem maintained by all sides. A figure like this would be an enemy to all those committed to the status-quo.

In art, we need a Wyndham Lewis of the left! An enemy, who will punish or rather, show up the lack of authenticity, phony generosity and general greed of the art world, where serious or difficult ideas are not pushed on the masses rather they or we are pandered to, patronized and distracted, the serious left has abandoned the field into obscurantism, practice led research degrees, academic in fighting and writing for each other in terms not easily accessed by anyone, the right swing between ruthless opportunism or a retreat into stale tradition and quaint tired practices bemoaning the pretentiousness of an art world saturated with glib sentimentalism or total frivolity, but mount no attack.

There is trend in the arts that sees an outwardly money and fame orientated attitude personified by the old YBA’s and their media stunts and yuppie ethos evolving into a more superficially concerned and traditionally liberal, sympathetic persona like that of Grayson Perry in visual arts or David Baddiel in literary circles, both men have recently in their own work and on television attempted to sympathize with the masses and deconstruct masculinity, Baddiel goes for those at the top exploring Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory – the view that history is formed by the impact of certain charismatic men in his addition to the BBC’s ‘Arts Night’ and his book, ‘The Death of Eli Gold’ 2011, he imagines the last great man of writing a Phillip Roth type on his death bed surrounded by people he has wounded and inspired, his dirty laundry aired and life assessed.

Perry spreads his net a little wider over three programs on channel four, ‘All Man’ explores masculinity, and in his first outing Perry visits men in the north east obsessed with fighting and mired in their postindustrial strife, he laments at one point that men sometimes don’t know they are sad and calls traditional masculinity a ‘callous’ on a human being. What’s the problem with this? Well it represents a simplification of masculinity and a misunderstanding of why a culture in this case the North East may lapse into a kind of cultural cringe,2 its lack of purpose and education which breeds this problem not machismo which is simply a side-effect, Lewis observed,

“Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse. Wyndham Lewis,” ‘Call Yourself a Man!’ The Art of Being Ruled 1926.

1 I am applying this term in the Lacanian sense as in the ‘masters discourse’ Lacan’s concept identifies four discourses; Master, University, Hysteric and Analyst, he suggests that these relate dynamically to one another. The discourse of the master is based on Hegel’s ideas of the master/slave dialectic. It is however simple enough to say that the master makes decisions and is essential for agency. 2 The term comes from cultural studies and social anthropology and is thought to have been first applied in Australia by the poet Henry Lawson. It describes an inferiority complex that leads to an anti-intellectual attitude and macho acting out due to factors such as economic decline or colonialism.

It’s not that Lewis should be employed to celebrate what the fighters in ‘All Man’ are about rather he would discern the problem faster and more accurately his words above acknowledge the performative and collaborative essence of masculinity. Indeed Lewis was less than impressed when famously watching Ezra Pound boxing with Ernest Hemmingway, his and Hemmingway’s differing interpretations of the event are explored in David Trotter’s review, ‘A most modern misanthrope’ Lewis is cool headed in the face of this kind of display.

Perry is already celebrating the fighting culture himself anyway, he sees their (the fighters and old miners) issue as one of not being in touch with their feelings or one of being too tough to talk about their past rather than the problem being their over fascination with physical violence and neglect of personal agency, this is wholly false, the men in the film are all too ready to discuss their personal tragedies and squishy feelings it’s this which is essential to the he-man acting out they present, it rationalises their violence and is a part of their self-mythologizing. At one point a fighter with a criminal past talks candidly about the death of his brother to Perry and the camera crew he’s just met,

“A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them,” Wyndham Lewis, Tarr 1918.

Perry fails these men because the things he says and the work he makes as a result of meeting them further affirms the cycle they are all caught on by celebrating their world and adding the wrongly assumed missing element, feelings which were ever present, the same fighter remarks, I think all fighters have a story, how right he is.

But it is intelligence that’s missing, the ability to see cultural and political violence which the fighters lack which means there is recourse to the most low and animal violence, the kind we all see and as animals impresses us all too easily. Perry does not want to be a master, he won’t tell the men in the program they are wrong or foolish because he doubts his own position as master, as the one who knows or has authentic authority and so despite the best possible intent he offers them no agency which is the masters role, he simply smiles sympathetically and leaves them as he found them,

“The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened,” Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, 1926

Its authority that’s in question rather than masculinity and its authority that’s lacking, while this may be linked for men to masculinity it is not a wholly male problem there are female masters too, the old modernist expert type like Lewis had this authority and made declarations, one could agree or disagree with the modernist master, they did not go out of their way to pander to the masses but at least the way was clear, Lewis was not afraid of being disliked even hated and was unconcerned with producing a positive legacy.

Instead of abdicating from the responsibility of being this agent (Perry) or picking over the carcass of the old modernist master (Baddiel) why can’t Baddiel and the so called men he represents further their own project and identify with their own ideas with conviction, instead they mythologize the modernist master, his great intellect, womanizing, seriousness while wagging a finger at the misogyny and hubris they feel they have avoided. Baddiel, interviewing a sympathetic fellow writer makes a point of mentioning he changes nappies and is fully involved in his family life? Were all the great men of the arts really so difficult? and if so why does this matter? It matters to Baddiel because, and it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see it, because part of him really wants to be this master. The idea this might disrupt his family life is avoidance of the worst sort, you don’t need to become a womanizer or neglect your children just act, what’s really at stake is being wrong and being called out on it. Lewis knew this only too well with his book on Hitler (Hitler, 1931) and subsequent

works which took back so to speak the sentiments of that book.3 Lewis is not consistent but then who is? It isn’t infallibility which is important for the master but the courage of their convictions and the ability to make clear decisions, this is the opening that we need in order to have agency. Both Baddiel and Perry have elements of this voice the ‘callous’ of masculinity they both bemoan and characterize as lack of empathy men have for themselves (Perry) or for others (Baddiel) is not a trait of the master but of the past, many people in the early 20th century were racist or misogynistic many men who achieved nothing also neglected their families instead of doing this to write a book or paint a picture they drank or whored in poor areas, the projection of this problem onto greatness is an excuse not to bother and a fear of responsibility. Right or wrong Lewis didn’t have this problem.

Lewis’s Friends as Enemies and Enemies as Friends…

Lewis is difficult to pin down, he had friends who outright disagreed with him at the deepest political level (Rebecca West) enemies he made out of people like Marinetti who would have been a natural ally and he changed his mind on Hitler writing contradictory books, we can however see Lewis as a type of iconoclast and generally a destructive force, its destruction which inspired the appropriation of vortices for his art movement after all and the creativity that came out of destruction which gives Vorticism its dark appeal. Saying that however Futurism was in part influential on Lewis despite his efforts to distance himself and despite his criticisms of Marinetti,

“Futurism, as preached by Marinetti, is largely Impressionism up-to-date. To this is added his Automobilism and Nietzsche stunt, With a lot of good sense and vitality at his disposal, he hammers away in the blatant mechanism of his Manifestos, at his idee fixe of Modernity," Wyndham Lewis, The Melodrama of Modernity, Blast 1 p. 143, 1914.

The strong resistance of Lewis to Italian Futurism is in part due to his individualism and his ownership of the movement he had founded wanting desperately to define it as different from what was happening in Europe, this combined with his nationalism and the sheer size of the egos involved prevented Vorticism from becoming a longer lasting international movement an extract from Lewis’s account of a conversation with Marinetti shows just how resistant to Marinetti’s advances Lewis was,

“But you Wops insist too much on the Machine. You’re always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s years” Wyndham Lewis ‘Blasting and Bombardiering’ 1937.

Futurism taking as a starting point the aesthetic insights of Picasso and Braque imbibed their movement with an enthusiasm for speed and a general celebration of technology and the future in direct antagonism with tradition. Among modernist movements, the Futurists rejected anything old and looked towards a new Italy. This was partly because the weight of past culture in Italy was felt as particularly oppressive. In his Manifesto, Marinetti asserted,

‘We will free Italy from her innumerable museums which cover her like countless cemeteries.’ Marinetti, ‘Manifesto del Futurismo’ first appearing in Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909

This background provided Marinetti with the most striking contrast to assert and champion his movement against,

“They were all Italian; to be Italian then was to inherit a culture dominated by the weight of the Tuscan and Roman Past and by a technologically backward economy,” Robert Hughes, ‘The Shock of the New’ 1991

3 Most obviously in, The Jews, Are They Human? (1939) and The Hitler Cult and How it Will End (1939)

With the rise of fascism in Italy the background that once helped to highlight futurism by contrast began to change and the movement was pulled into open support of Mussolini, Marinetti and the futurists believing that the energetic and aggressive approach of the new regime was in line with their own unsentimental ideology, famously referring to the hygiene of war, its cleansing quality to rid the world of superfluous people,

‘We will glorify war-the world's only hygiene, militarism, patriotism , the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman,’Marinetti ‘Manifesto del Futurismo’ first appearing in Gazzetta dell'Emilia in Bologna on 5 February 1909

Mussolini though was not a total convert to futurism he like Hitler was not modern enough for modern art and like Hitler rejected it in favour of a more Roman, traditional aesthetic. Lewis through sheer stubbornness and inflated ego rather than sound judgement had avoided further association with Fascism.

Enrico Prampolini designed the newspaper Futurismo, edited by Filippo Marinetti and Mino Somenzi (1933)

The Futurism of the Left; Futurism in these two movements was either a brash celebration of technology (Marinetti) or a hard edged attitude to the masses and tradition (Lewis) Both groups might have benefited from either a friendly or antagonistic relationship with H.G. Wells who was a little older and politically left leaning, such as the relationship the Surrealists enjoyed later with Freud and his writing on psychoanalysis. Wells was well equipped to enrich and broaden the horizons of each movement, subjecting as he did technology and social change to criticism and celebration while maintaining a strong optimistic belief in socialism. He was well ahead of his time in exploring the ‘integral accident’ (Paul Virilio, 1999) In works such as the Invisible Man, and The Island of Doctor Moreau and his formal understanding of science might have offered greater detail to the artists enthusiasms. Since both Marinetti and Lewis were politically right wing and since both regretted their initial enthusiasm for Fascism they may have also benefited from greater exposure to Wells politics.

Futurism: 1909-1945

Vorticism: 1914-1918

(Group X in 1920)

There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that Marinetti was influenced by Wells in his work, ‘The Untameables’ (as investigated by Maria Teresa Chialant4) And for Lewis Wells was a familiar figure in London’s literary circles (Ford Maddox Ford linked both men as did Rebecca West) Lewis had received a letter of praise from Wells regarding the novel ‘Childermass’ which Lewis then put on hold only to reply years later. The missed opportunity of a truly international Futurism with Wells providing the sole is an alternative future worth exploring.

4 The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe edited by Patrick Parrinder, John S. Partington

Representative Artists;Filippo Tommaso MarinettiGiacomo BallaUmberto BoccioniCarlo CarràGino Severini

Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia.

Richard Aldington, Malcolm Arbuthnot, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Cuthbert Hamilton, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth

Vorticism was a short lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century, partly inspired by Cubism. The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of BLAST, which contained its manifesto.

Marinetti, Wells and Lewis in 1915-18, Marinetti had visited England to give lectures and Lewis shared friends and haunts with Wells, both movements needed a new direction to counter the depressing

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Marinetti image: 1915 Hulton Archive/Getty Images Lewis: photographed by Alvin Langdon Coburn in London, 25 February 1916. H. G. Wells image: Daily Mirror photograph approx. 1915-1918

H.G. Wells managed to explore the themes and implications of Nietzsche’s ideas, a strong influence on Lewis and the growing expectations (and numbers) of the popular masses without losing faith in positive projects, 5

'I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment... Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue. The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'

"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss...What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...

"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves,’ from Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, p.3,4,5, Walter Kaufmann transl.

Wells explores these themes most notably in,

The Time Machine: 1895,

The Invisible Man: 1897,

When the Sleeper Wakes: serialised between 1898 and 1899,

A Modern Utopia: 1905.

While admittedly Marinetti had limited opportunity to meet Wells, Lewis frequented the same social circles as Wells and was a good friend of Wells lover Rebecca West despite their obvious political differences, he recalls upon seeing Wells,

5 The rejection of altruism is often interpreted as a confrontation between the old warrior master and new ‘Christian Master’ Nietzsche himself encouraged this, however it’s worth noting that Marx also rejected altruism and spoke of a world where you might, ‘do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic,’ The great man of capitalism is the master that Nietzsche criticized along with the herd.

‘I saw H.G. Wells there on several occasions. He did not belong to the circle of which I am speaking. He came independently, with parties of his own. My friends observed him with something approaching horror. One of them said ‘whenever I see H.G. Wells I feel uncomfortably refined.’ In looking over I saw a not particularly butcher-like, but certainly unromantic pepper-and-salt figure, springing about in a suit too tight for him, as he induced ladies into chairs and did all the honours,’ Wyndham Lewis, Blasting & Bombardiering, 1937

Lewis is more flattering in his portrait of West (below) asking her to contribute to the first edition of the Vortisict magazine ‘Blast’ (July 1914) all three were linked by a relatively small literary social circle which on and off revolved around the publication ‘The English Review’ (1908 to 1937) and the editor Ford Maddox Ford who published and enabled lots of talented writers including the Vorticist poet and futurist Ezra Pound.

West enjoyed Lewis’s company and took him seriously as a writer and artist an insightful essay regarding the dynamics of Lewis, West and another committed socialist Naomi Mitchison in ‘Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity’ by Michael Hallam explores this in depth there Hallam suggests that avant-garde experimental tendencies and mutual respect held together their friendships. West kept her powder dry so to speak however and remained philosophical about her inclusion in ‘Blast’ and her status as a Vorticist,6

“I have just seen about Blast in the times literary supplement. It is described as a manifesto of the Vorticists. Am I Vorticist? I’m sure it can’t be good for antony if I am,” Rebecca West ‘The Selected Letters of Rebecca West’ (Henry McBride Series in Modernism & Modernity, 2000)

6 Billy Mills writing in ‘The Guardian’ explores this also in ‘Rebecca West, the forgotten Vorticist’ 2011. Wests contribution to Blast was titled, ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’

Rebecca West (1932)National Portrait Gallery (NPG 5693) © The Estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial

The artistic movements of Futurism and Vorticism then in Italy and England respectively were bold and brash, they crashed into the art scene of the day with total confidence and absolute violence, the energy however of Marinetti’s and Lewis’s art movements flung themselves apart and both, (although more so with Marinetti) flirted with fascism and a so called hard edged outlook, although both men regretted that, they never lost their cynical disdain for both the fatted elite and the lumpon masses. Much of this dash and malice approach which was also especially present in Nazism was due to a misinterpretation of the philosopher Nietzsche’s Supper-man and an enduring fear of the ‘last man’.

Edwardian society was worrying away at this concept before the war and its said (Patrick Bridgewater7) that Wells may have introduced the concept of the Übermensch to the British public when he has Ostrong from ‘The Sleeper Awakes,’ say,

‘The day of democracy is past…the day of the common man is past…this is the second aristocracy. The real one…Aristocracy, the prevalence of the best-the suffering and extinction of the unfit, and so to better things….The crowd is a huge foolish beast. What if it does not die out? Even if it does not die it can still be tamed and driven. I have no sympathy with servile men…The hope of mankind-what is it? That some-day the Over-man may come, that some-day the inferior, the weak and the bestial may be subdued or eliminated. The world is no place for the bad, the stupid, the enervated. Their duty-it’s a fine duty too! –is to die. The death of failure! That is the path by which the beast rose to manhood, by which man goes on to higher things….So long as there are sheep Nature will insist on beasts of prey….The coming of the aristocrat is fatal and assured. The end will be the Over-man-for all the mad protests of humanity,’ Ostrong chapter 19 The Sleeper Awakes (1899, 1910)

Of course this identification is not the point of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch rather he proposes the Ubermensch is posited by man as a goal. An interesting modern imagining of a confrontation between the deluded all too human Randian8 superman and an actual Ubermensch occurs in Ridley Scott’s ‘Prometheus’2012 where the wealthy Randian business man and scientist Weyland after waking up and engaging with the engineer is violently cast aside as a total irrelevance,

The mistake, the misunderstanding being, that one might assume the mantel of this concept and imagine that understanding the words somehow inured the reader with the superiority of an Ubermensch. It’s as deluded as imagining that grasping the concept of self-knowledge means you have it. Any appropriation of Lewis should bare this lesson in mind! His use is not to reaffirm a cynics disdain for the masses and prop up a false sense of

7 Patrick Bridgewater Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought: a Collection of Essays edited by Malcolm Pasley.8 Ayn Rand famously personified her superior people as self-interested business men most notably in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ 1957, her rejection of altruism and celebration of the ‘creative entrepreneur’ is influenced by Nietzsche, however Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is not a proponent of the market nor does he exploit others.

Weyland: ‘You see this man (points to the android David) I made him in my own image, so he would be perfect. You and I we are superior, we are creators, we are gods, the gods never die!’… The Engineer uses David’s head to strike Weyland fatally. Stills from ‘Promrtheus’2012

superiority but to undermine the other dominant voices with that of the true master one who declares, one who acts and one who dares to be wrong, creative practice needs this voice as does politics.

Group X

Wyndham Lewis attempted to reignite the flame of Vorticism with Group X in 19209 but lacking direction and co-operation from all participants it never got off the ground, he commented,

‘But what could be done with an X? Art at the cross-roads? X marks our goal? No. X refused to co-operate. Group X set out, but got nowhere. X marked our beginning and our end,’ Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity edited by Dr Nathan Waddell, Ms Alice Reeve-Tucker.

It’s not simply a matter of dispensing with Lewis and Marinetti they both offer a great deal in terms of the work they championed and in the work they produced. Its Lewis however with his aggression and potency as both a writer and a painter who offers an interesting model for modern artists, Lewis was unsentimental, delighting in upsetting his contemporaries and provoking his audience, sentimentality as Oscar Wilde observed is a state where,

“One who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it,” Oscar Wilde, (1905) De Profundis (letter)

He (Lewis) was also intelligent and creative he wanted to be serious and subjected his contemporaries to criticism, the missed opportunity of a closer and more collaborative relationship with people like West and Wells is unfortunate they might have all improved one another.

There are tantalising hints that an appetite for just such a blending of extremes might be written into the very text of ‘Blast’ The illustrated Manifesto (left) featured in ‘Blast’ includes the statement, We discharge ourselves on both sides…first on one then on the other, It seems this potential was never fully realised, the respect and friendship of characters like West and Mitchison along with ambiguous statements is as far as it gets this as much actual contradiction Lewis can contain within himself. When Lewis encountered Marxist ideas even those diluted in the welfare state he was openly disdainful he saw Marxism as a ‘sham’ Lewis writes critically of left leaning politics in ‘The Art of Being Ruled’

Lewis had a similar relationship with feminism it seems where ever he detected resentment he was disdainful which means despite his support of female artists and his friendships with left leaning activists he is often remembered as the man who said things like,

9 A group of British artists formed in 1920 that showed their works at the Mansard Gallery, at Heal & Sons, London, between 26 March and 24 April of that year. The core of the group was made up of the former Vorticists, Wyndham Lewis, Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, William Roberts and Edward Wadsworth. They were joined by Frank Dobson, Charles Ginner and McKnight Kauffer. The exhibits in the main were characterized essentially by a propensity to angular figuration not far removed from other experimental styles of the period. Group X was arguably an attempt by Wyndham Lewis to revive Vorticism, but this failed. Note from the Tate archive

“If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman's industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman,” Wyndham Lewis, ’Family and Feminism’, 1926

While feminism does contain contradictions and inconsistencies which have become more pronounced over the last fifty years 10and despite activists and friends of Lewis saying things like,

“I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat,” Rebecca West, ‘Mr. Chesterton in hysterics’ 1913 Lewis writing in 1926 must have seemed deeply unsupportive to the wider publics (woman’s) struggle with sexism and the ways they transferred ideas into practical action, his disapproval of revolution as something ‘dull’ and his use of the family as a symbol to beat the feminists with was divisive, knowing that this kind of strategy would work well to garner support for his criticisms with the sort of traditionalists (mainly men) he otherwise repudiated! Lewis has however a shockingly modern voice,

“With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping ''homeliness'' entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all ''sentiment'' is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called ''the Public,'' the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state,” Wyndham Lewis

Up until the last sentence Lewis is correct isn’t he? He could be talking about our own society with its schizoid projection of images; adverts, charity appeals, dramas, comedy, the news, all smashed into the faces of a person watching an hour of television in the 21st century each component assuming a false equivalence, appeals for money to save dying children one moment and the next an ad for coffee! Achieving nothing and propagating apathy or worse glib sentiments, that Lewis directs the blame for this to feminism is a limitation of his time and reaction rather than good explanation of the problems he describes.

10 I am thinking here of the difficulty traditional feminism has had incorporating other cultures who’s traditions are offended by the implication that they might be sexist, also the difficulty encountered when traditionally exploitative roles such as prostitute or stripper are declared empowering for certain woman who have become wealthy and independent of men as a result. These ideas can be traced in looking at ‘post’ feminism.

11

11 Brigid Peppin writes on the Tate website in her essay, ‘Women that a movement forgot’ of the woman in Vorticism, ‘Jessica Dismorr (1885–1939), who was independently wealthy, holds a purse; Helen Saunders (1885–1963) carries a copy of the journal, the second issue of which was published and distributed from her flat. Despite their close involvement (closer in fact than that of Etchells, who did not sign the manifesto), Roberts positions them as marginal figures. The painter Dorothy Shakespear (1886–1973), who was to contribute to BLAST II, is not shown,’ the essay highlights the contributions of women to the movement.

William Roberts ‘The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel’: Spring 1915

Lewis at the centre of his friends and colleagues Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr are included in the group (top left) Lewis and Saunders had painted panels in Paris together. By the time of group X Lewis’s ability to shepherd artists in the direction he wanted clearly wasn’t what it had been.

Science & Modern Man, the right and wrong way to take Lewis.

On Man

In the images above Lewis demonstrates his aptitude for unsentimental depiction in ‘The Crowd’ (1915), he appears to be showing us a conflict between two factions the people however are displayed like Tetris shapes they are drone like, they are mechanistic like cogs or insects it’s the modern industrial city which emerges as the main protagonist of the piece rising up and literally moving and dividing the people as it ascends. Lewis doesn’t appear to take sides the perspective offered to the viewer is a gods eye view , more like turning over a rock and looking down at the writhing mass than being connected or subject to it ones self.

As if to offer a chilling conclusion of that division and the thrall-like violence of the blank figures, we see ‘Inferno (1937) This image might be the outcome of the drone conflict in ‘The Crowd’ a great pillar of blood red emanates from piled up bodies who’s dead faces seem to mock the viewer’s assumed sympathy. There is also something unsettling in how that image also seems to predict a scene which while fantastic at the time it was painted would become real in the years to come with the full extent of nationalism, WW2 and the Holocaust yet to unfold.

While stylistically the images are quite different the apparent lack of identification Lewis has with the protagonists is common to both images, these images prefigure much of the Chapman brothers output and

(1937) ‘Inferno’ Wyndham Lewis© The Estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust,

(1915) ‘The Crowd’ Wyndham Lewis

© The Estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust,

shows a president for the so called, brutal tragic comedy which brings the Chapmans much praise for its apparent originality. Jake Chapman for example talked about removing Goya’s12 heroic ego from the old masters famous ‘Disasters of War’ series which in its original state clearly depicts the artists cataloguing of horrendous events subject to his enlightenment morality, for the Chapmans however,

“…we cannot hear Goya’s words and cannot learn from our mistakes – we can only denounce the violence we are condemned to repeat…” Jake Chapman, Insult to Injury: the Marriage of Reason and Squalor, 2003.

In this gesture they (the Chapmans) eliminate the dignity of Goya’s artwork and the potential for, in their minds a false kind of identification or pathos which would decrease the real horror of history, so in what sense is this a problem? The gesture only achieves replacing one so called fake defensive position lame sentimentality (the ability for the viewers horror, shock and ultimate agreement with Goya to contain the idea of war within the territory of meaning, in short to avoid trauma) with another, assumed distance, a kind of Pilot’s clean hands approach to the social field. The Chapmans repeat the mistake of Lewis himself; they allow a privileged position or perspective to become a sense of elitist superiority, they open no doors for the viewer (unlike Lewis) and like the aforementioned Perry or Baddiel they represent a different style of rejection to project making or if you prefer to responsibility.

If Perry won’t tell us what to do because he respects our right to our ignorance and Baddiel won’t become the great modernist writer for fear of transforming into an ego monster then the Chapmans simply join this pair to make a holy trinity of impotence, for them we aren’t even worth saving at all! We are simply doomed like lambs to the slaughter.

The horror confronted (man’s inability to escape the sausage machine of history) is not so deluded as the horror avoided, even the Chapman’s brutal black hole of an oeuvre if identified with gives the viewer this distanced perspective a sense of separateness from the mechanisations of the automata, of us, a sense of safety from the mass. Jake Chapman in an interview confirms this, on being asked by Mark Kermode, what do you want people to take from the work?

“A small group of people will go away with a smug sense of robustness” Jake Chapman interviewed on the ‘Culture Show’ by Mark Kermode, 2007.

Their practice might have some of the over intellectualised superiority knocked out of it when seen as a huge defence against the need for a positive project and the will to make it happen, instead it’s just another, all be it vailed form of affirmation for a slightly different audience13. All three practices represent a certain kind of rationalisation of why they won’t build a positive project, evidence that so many creative voices are still

12 The Disasters of War ( Los desastres de la guerra) are a series of 82 prints created between 1810 and 1820 by the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (1746–1828) Goya protests the horrors of the Peninsular War and its effects on the human psyche.

‘Inferno’ (DetailWe can see here from a detail of Lewis’s image that the mocking clown of history repeating itself is present in the piled bodies, similarly the Chapmans evoke this horror in adding clowns faces to Goya’s famous work.

suffering the aftershocks of two world wars and the holocaust. No one wants to be responsible or even wrong and that is stultifying for the audience. However it is also worth pointing out that the position of the Chapmans doesn’t work even if they really are as misanthropic as they pretend to be, since the distance opened up by their work is purely performative, for show, all that vitriol and scorn for the enlightenment or religion does nothing to actually protect them or their small group of robust, smug audience members from either history or the future.

Although Lewis himself is often bitterly negative about the masses and has little good to say about the political or educational programs which attempted to advocate for them,

“Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind is the dullest thing on earth... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!” Wyndham Lewis quoted in ‘Modernism, Cultural Production, and the British Avant-garde’ By Edward P. Comentale

He did propose a positive project to his audience twice trying to get this off the ground (1914 and 1920) Vorticism’s dynamism its aggression and atavism was an attempt to take deadly serious the implications of abstraction and the way image making might express a mentality one affected and changed by modernity there is both a desire for something new in Vorticism (especially in the context of a rather dry Edwardian art scene in England) and a re-positing of a primitive or rather ancient energy in the arts the inclusion of jagged diagonals, simplified forms and bold colour bring to mind the violence under the surface of a culture channelled and transferred by the Vorticists into the sphere of art. It marked a shift brought on by many prompts among those Lewis identifies,

“The Relativity theory, the Copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time,” Wyndham Lewis, "The Great God Flux", The Art of Being Ruled 1926

Lewis’s relationship with the sciences and technology is sceptical and this is important in acknowledging what makes Vorticism more useful that Futurism to modern creatives keen to avoid the stale mate described previously (Perry, Baddiel and Chapman).

Lewis mentions again and again his main objection to Futurism and to Marinetti is the fetish for machines and the general romantic couching of things like trains or motor bikes in Futurism, for Lewis this tendency doesn’t fully take account of what’s happening to subjectivity in the early 20th century it continues an unbroken thread from the romantic period which sees man mounting metal rather than say a horse. Lewis is more interested in what’s actually at stake in modernity, so what is at stake? In the quote above Lewis highlights the impact of Copernicus who in his research unseats man as the centre of the universe, the ‘convulsion’ he mentions is the re-configuration of personal, national or human selfhood after this happens since it literally de-centres humanity and puts in question our special place in the universe, this fact however is barely perceptible to the masses at the time of Copernicus who have many decades to adjust since their lives literally don’t give them time or the inclination to learn such things. In modernism its different, in Lewis’s own time both knowledge of the various convulsions and the dissemination of that knowledge to the masses through media made it harder and harder to avoid the implications with any credible or authentic naivety, people do in Lewis’s time have the

13 Perry affirms an audience eager for superficial identification who he panders to with decorative works that parody or homage folk culture this is also reflected in his programs that often include confessionals meant to humanise the people in question. Baddiel is affirming a type of artist/audience who likes to think they fall short of greatness because they are morally superior or intellectually less eccentric than the ego maniac creatives they secretly admire. The Chapmans simply complete this triad by appealing to the ironic and cynical and reassuring them that their passivity is probably justified since anything else will lead to another failed utopia, what a mess were in!

opportunity and inclination to know, they can hardly ignore it since technology; ensures safety (weapons) guarantees life (medicines) invigorates the economy (mass production) and ensures free time (labour saving products) It’s not hard to see why scientists and technological innovation could be viewed as purely begin forces.

Lewis however has honed a potent scepticism and knows that its contingency and catastrophe that drive forward human development, to harness that you need an animal that is alert and prepared not fixated on shiny things. Interestingly H.G. Wells would have sympathised with this,

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers,’ H.G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1895

Marinetti’s faith in machines is misplaced; technology is always a silver lining with a cloud so to speak it will always bring with every new benign innovation a fresh catastrophe,

"When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution...Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress," Paul Virilio Politics of the Very Worst, New York: Semiotext(e), 1999.14

A vortex is a kind of catastrophe and Lewis’s attempt to cease the energy of catastrophe is Vorticism. He wanted his movement to be the true harnessing of that reality a reality which won’t let us relax or rather congeal into perfect mechanisms.

14 This is further explored by Virillio in the ‘Original Accident’ “To invent the sailing ship or the steamer is to invent the shipwreck. To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment. To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.” (The Original Accident, Cambridge: Polity, 2007, p. 10).

The images above from the same year seem to make this point, the dancers struggle against these forces and so for Lewis have some dignity and power while the ‘Mechanics’ appear broken and arranged like discarded paper crumpled and anonymous. We might also remember that when Lewis makes a portrait or sketch of friend more classical form remains to preserve their individuality.

Would Lewis have Approved? No!

There can be no appropriation of Lewis which imagines it would find favour with the man, either in form or attitude, Lewis would likely have been dismissive of much that I have written here and I regret that I am unable to read/hear such a response, however to a certain extent that is the point. A radical appropriation of Lewis must be political to do justice to his ambitions, it must be unsentimental to be true to the man or useful to the public and must come from the left to avoid Lewis’s own foibles, realising what he hinted at but could not do himself as a man of his time and as an individual already holding together many contradictions in one person, Lewis did write,

“To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time,” Wyndham Lewis, The Tyro, 1922.

This rather poetic sentiment perhaps evidences some foresight of how Lewis himself might be used in the future. Lewis provides further openings when he says,

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up,” Wyndham Lewis, quoted in, The Essential Wyndham Lewis, 1989.

Picking the sharpest and most jagged ‘broken’ pieces we should use Lewis as a model to strike at hypocrisy, false sentiment and mindless greed, there is so much fat to cut away from our current creative milieu, that sentiment I am confident he would have approved!

Michael Eden MA (artist)

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Percy Wyndham Lewis, The Dancers – Study for Kermesse, 1912. Bridgeman images © Wyndham Lewis and the estate of Mrs G A

Percy Wyndham Lewis, Two Mechanics, 1912. Bridgeman images © Wyndham Lewis and the estate of Mrs G A Wyndham Lewis

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