My God, they stink!

Apologists​ for art have often set about their task by associating the workings of the imagination with other sorts of mental activity of which people tend to think well. The Romantics were especially drawn to this form of vindication, their defensiveness due no doubt to the nagging suspicion that, while the imagination seemed all-important to them, most of their contemporaries regarded it with blithe indifference. Keats found a stirring analogy between imagination and empathy, a useful act of emotional intelligence which often appears in accounts of the moral life: the poet, best epitomised by Shakespeare, is able magically to conjure himself into modes of being quite other than his own, ‘continually in for and filling some other Body’, as Keats wrote in a letter. Shelley sought to make the link between artistic creation and rectitude even more absolute by the simple expedient of claiming the empathetic imagination – ‘a going out of our own nature’ – as ‘the great instrument of moral good’. The experience of reading poetry, then, is a workout for the imagination, a fortifying of your ethical sinews, as Shelley rather ingenuously put it, ‘in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’.

Wyndham Lewis – novelist, painter, thinker-at-large – could sound quite as adulatory about the figure of ‘the Artist’ as Shelley: ‘The moment a man feels or realises himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time,’ he announced in the ‘Manifesto’ to his short-lived periodical, Blast. But more generally, like most of his modernist contemporaries, he set himself noisily against Romantic pieties, and in nothing was his animosity more pronounced than in his disdain for the idea that art might be justified by its kinship with agreeable things such as fellow feeling.

The main inspiration for Lewis’s hostility was the boisterous anti-Romanticism of his difficult friend T.E. Hulme, who proclaimed the coming of a new kind of art, ‘all dry and hard’, free of the sentimentality of ‘humanism’, and liberated from the ambition to be lifelike that had disfigured artistic endeavour for too long. Hulme’s militant manner was unmistakeably his own, but many of his big ideas came from the contemporary art historian Wilhelm Worringer, whose book Abstraction and Empathy (1907) contrasted the realism that had dominated art since the Greeks with the ‘instinctive urge to abstraction’ that you find in older and more primitive civilisations. The first, Worringer said, was the aesthetic impulse of people who feel at home in their lives – possessors of what he called, with a faint curl of the lip, ‘a happy, world-revering naturalism’. Artists of a naturalist dispensation are masters of Romantic empathy, ‘of projecting themselves into the things of the outer world, of enjoying themselves in them’, whereas ancient artists regarded that outer world as alien and confusing, a place one had quite enough of without having to also encounter it in art. Their task, accordingly, was ‘to wrest the object of the external world out of its natural context, out of the unending flux of being, to purify it of all its dependence upon life’, ‘eternalising it by approximation to abstract forms’.

The polemical energy that Hulme drew from all this was partly a result of the excitingly counterintuitive way it turned the old values upside down: ‘life’ and ‘nature’, shibboleths of Romantic thought, were now bad things, and Hulme has much fun startling the horses by praising ‘the dead form of a pyramid and the suppression of life in a Byzantine mosaic’. Lewis was quick to learn. ‘Anything living, quick and changing, is bad art, always; naked men and women are the worst art of all,’ opines Tarr, the titular artist-hero of Lewis’s early novel, in which he does a lot of opining: ‘Deadness is the first condition of art.’ Lewis would say similar things in his own voice: ‘The living death that is represented by Egyptian culture is the very atmosphere for the sculptor and painter to thrive in.’ So he must have been flattered when Hulme praised his paintings of people, especially because Hulme admired them for betraying no interest in the human body, aside from ‘a few abstract mechanical relations perceived in it, the arm as a lever and so on’. Everything that would once have made a painting sound like a failure was now the secret of its success: ‘The interest in living flesh as such, in all that detail that makes it vital, which is pleasing, and which we like to see reproduced, is entirely absent.’

Lewis reproduced some of his own paintings in Blast which show what Hulme had in mind. One picture, from a sequence inspired by Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, is an assemblage of geometric forms, possibly organised into a sort of tower. Just conceivably it is a portrait of the hero, disaggregated into an array of blocks and curves that look like parts of some industrial concern, all set within an imponderable abstract space. But the whole idiom of the painting is a challenge to the uninitiated viewer to make something of it, and it could quite easily be entirely abstract, a representation of the violent misanthropy of the drama as a whole. The title of Portrait of an Englishwoman might promise a helping hand; but then again maybe not: the lady has been replaced by an impossible pile of stacked and suspended slabs, a giant non-figure of fantastic reinforced concrete viewed from somewhere around her unseen feet. ‘THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY,’ Lewis wrote elsewhere in the magazine. At the excitingly inhuman heart of the new aesthetics was the somewhat mysterious doctrine of the ‘Vortex’, a word he had picked up from Ezra Pound to describe the Blast ideal of energy and tough-mindedness: ‘The Vorticist does not suck up to Life. He lets Life know its place in a Vorticist Universe!’ The thrill of the Vortex didn’t last very long, but the same impulse shaped later pronouncements, as when Lewis declared in an editorial in the Tyro, another short-lived journal, that modern art ‘aims at nothing short of a physical reconstruction and reordering of the visible part of our world’.

According to Hulme the ‘re-emergence of geometrical art’ had the quality of being at once a throwback to savingly pre-civilised modes of consciousness and a thoroughly up-to-date response to the modern world. ‘He and I preferred to the fluxions in stone of an Auguste Rodin (following photographically the lines of nature) the more concentrated abstractions-from-nature of the Egyptians,’ Lewis later recalled. The bad example of Rodin seemed to back their shared belief that ‘the Art-instinct is permanently primitive.’ But such abstraction also showed the impress of a new militarised age of machinery: ‘We preferred something more metallic and resistant than the pneumatic surface of the cuticle. We preferred a helmet to a head of hair.’ In his excellent memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), Lewis summons up those old battling days with obvious fondness and a certain rivalry. ‘All the best things Hulme said about the theory of art were said about my art,’ he declared, a comment he characteristically considered ‘altogether without conceit’. Had Hulme survived the First World War, he wrote, ‘I should undoubtedly have played Turner to his Ruskin’; but as things transpired, he had to undertake both roles himself.

Lewis also fought in the war, ‘an interminable nightmare’, including service at Passchendaele, ‘an epic of mud’. ‘I, figuratively, have never smiled again,’ he said, finding himself deeply affected by the conviction that he (and, as he thought, most soldiers) had brought home: that a warlike state of emergency was in fact not exceptional but ‘a permanent thing’, and that ‘gentleness, beauty, sweet reason must veil their heads, they must give way to arguments of power.’ Robert Graves writes in his autobiography that, back in the hills of Harlech, he found himself ‘still mentally and nervously organised for war’, automatically sizing up the landscape for places to site a Lewis-gun and provide cover for his rifle-grenade section. Contemporaries similarly saw in Lewis a man shaped, or misshaped, by the experience of war, and the pun on ‘Lewis-gun’ was certainly too good to resist. ‘This officer of artillery never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in Lewis’s judgment, than which there could be no higher praise. (‘He needed to be.’) Hulme was pugilistic in life – he once transfixed Lewis upside down on the railings of Soho Square – and just as fierce in print: when someone dared to patronise Jacob Epstein, Hulme responded that ‘the most appropriate means of dealing with him would be a little personal violence.’ Lewis assiduously cultivated something of the same quality, framing himself as ‘the Enemy’, the conveyor of ‘vivid and violent ideas’. True, Eliot remembered him as ‘incomparably witty and amusing in company’, and the reminiscences of younger admirers such as Geoffrey Grigson and E.W.F. Tomlin describe a private man of punctilious courtesy. But generally the impression was quite different. ‘He conceived the world as an arena,’ Augustus John observed; and another painter, William Roberts, remembered that his whole manner appeared predisposed to altercation, ‘striding along, the broad shoulders tilted slightly, like a boxer advancing to meet an opponent’. That at least allows a note of the heroic, but Nancy Cunard, with whom Lewis had an affair, came to the conclusion that ‘on the whole, he was half a SHIT,’ while Paul Nash told Lewis that his character was ‘strangely sub-human’. His bellicosity towards those reckless enough to be generous towards him was even fiercer: when a cheque from his patron Fanny Wadsworth didn’t turn up promptly, she received a postcard that read, in its entirety: ‘Where’s the fucking stipend? Lewis.’

‘Life has been something of a war for me,’ he wrote in forlorn self-exile at a New York hotel in 1939; but this cast of mind predated his time in the army. His very earliest stories were written while he was staying in Brittany in 1908, belatedly collected as The Wild Body twenty years later, and they show that Lewis instinctively associated art with belligerence, truculence and power – the ‘aggressivity’ (agressivité, I suppose) that Fredric Jameson identifies as the ‘lifelong constant of both the form and the content of his works’. Lewis’s stories depict Breton life as merciless and ferocious; the characters are variously in battle with one another, and their machinations are regarded by the narrator with absorbed repulsion. The combative talents of the narrator of ‘A Soldier of Humour’ are limited to a protracted and pointless battle for the conversational upper hand over another tourist, but the more general point is clear: life in the Lewis world is a matter of surviving ‘the violences of all things’, a phrase that occurs in ‘Enemy of the Stars’, an apocalyptic account of two figures locked in a pact of mutual destruction, written about the same time and published in Blast. The bleak social comedy of the Breton stories lies, Lewis perhaps unnecessarily explained, in ‘making a drama of mock-violence of every social relationship’. The book was ‘an excellent manual for the hard-boiled’, Cyril Connolly wrote in wary admiration.

The star turn in The Wild Body is a grotesque called Bestre, an innkeeper who regards his customers as foes to be humiliated and conducts long campaigns of ‘Bestre-warfare’ against his neighbours. He is an exemplification of the thought that looks could kill: ‘What he selected as an arm in his duels, then, was the Eye,’ we are told; and it is quickly obvious that Lewis shares his choice of weapon. Purely through the force of his prose style, he re-envisions Bestre’s wild body and makes it an example of his own art: ‘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 glands, gently riding on a pancreatic swell, each hair on his oil-bearing skin contributing its message of porcine affront.’

‘They stink! My God, they stink!’ D.H. Lawrence summed up Lewis’s attitude towards his subject matter. The anti-hero of ‘A Soldier of Humour’ is no less cheerfully disgusted by his own odour: ‘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.’ That is Lewis going for it, as he was inclined to do. Take this sentence from ‘Enemy of the Stars’: ‘They sat, two grubby shadows, unvaccinated as yet by the moon’s lymph, sickened by the immense vague infections of night.’ ‘Mr Lewis is the greatest prose master of style of my generation,’ Eliot said in a late appreciation, ‘perhaps the only one to have invented a new style.’ Not everyone has responded so positively: ‘the worst writer of English prose in the 20th century’, the philosopher Anthony Quinton believed; and Bonamy Dobrée identified in Lewis ‘an almost panic-stricken avoidance of the cliché’. But such divergent views are probably different ways of seeing the same thing: if the style is in some ways bad, it is bad in the same way that Hulme praised Lewis’s paintings for being ‘bad’ representations of what they depict. It involves a refusal to be like the others and, as Lewis put it in an early manifesto, ‘eschew all clichés implying a herd personality’. ‘The principle,’ Hugh Kenner observes in his excellent study from 1954, ‘is that Lewis’s words emanate very decidedly from him.’ Style here is a sort of triumph of the will over the external world of people and things, ‘that fat mass you browse on’, as Lewis rather horribly put it. ‘The act of creation … is always an act of the human will,’ he insisted, ‘like poisoning your business rival, or setting your cap at somebody.’

The young William Empson, reviewing the Breton stories in Granta, acknowledged that they ‘gratify our strong and critical curiosity about alien modes of feeling’, and concluded that this showed ‘our need for the flying buttress of sympathy with systems other than our own’. Lewis drew a very different moral: ‘I learned a good deal from Bestre,’ his alter-ego narrator says. ‘He is one of my masters.’ ‘I believe with a Calvinistic uncompromisingness that one cannot be too hard on the stupidities of one’s neighbours,’ he announced to John. Their principal stupidity lay in being corporeal. Lewis helpfully included an essay in The Wild Body explaining the theory: ‘The root of the Comic is to be sought in the sensations resulting from the observations of a thing behaving like a person’; everyone was up for the treatment because ‘they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons.’ It may not seem the richest joke, but it has impeccable philosophical credentials, drawing as it does on Henri Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France Lewis had attended in the early years of the century. ‘We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing,’ according to Bergson, meaning those moments when someone trips up some steps or walks into a lamppost, losing ‘the living pliableness of a human being’ and exhibiting instead ‘mechanical inelasticity’. The truly appalling figure of Kreisler in Tarr, who proceeds from outrage to outrage, culminating in rape, acting throughout on brutal autopilot, is a ‘large rusty machine of a man’.

Lewis was keen to claim as a virtue that characters like Kreisler were ‘not creations but puppets’, thus overturning a whole tradition of critical appreciation. ‘Shakespeare’s characters are men; Ben Jonson’s are more like machines,’ Hazlitt said. Quite correct, Lewis countered, but Hazlitt was drawing the wrong moral – it was precisely because men were like machines that Jonson was right to depict them that way. Lewis is splendidly contemptuous about what he calls, in full Hulmean mode, Hazlitt’s ‘humanist values’ – the way he admires Shakespeare for ‘letting us into the minds of his characters’. That is not the business of art at all: art is about ‘the outside’, its task ‘a mechanising of the natural … analysed far enough, it substitutes a thing for a person every time.’ For Bergson, such moments were salutary, even socially useful, because they alerted you to the existential peril of living as an automaton, being ‘man as a jointed puppet’. Lewis disapproved of such a state too, of course, but he was always more inclined to accept that this is just the way things are, at least for most people.

It turned out, on inspection, that Shakespeare was a kindred spirit after all, at his best anyway. In The Lion and the Fox (1927), at once a dazzlingly counterintuitive study of Shakespeare and an oblique self-portrait, Lewis set out to abolish ‘gentle Shakespeare’ and to offer in his place an author who loathed the action-man tragic heroes whom he depicted and whom it was his job to finish off like an executioner. Lewis finds in the plays not serene genius but a great ‘outpouring of fury, bitter reflection, invective and complaint’. Eccentrically, but consistently, he thought the sourly disillusioned world of Troilus and Cressida was where the Shakespearean imagination really found itself; and as his early sequence of pictures implied, he admired, too, the vociferous misanthropy of Timon of Athens. A play that for a Romantic critic like Hazlitt was a real outlier – ‘the only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind’ – was for Lewis an exemplary play with an exemplary hero, ‘an inhabitant of Shakespeare’s personal system’. Timon of Athens was the closest Shakespeare came to producing a satire, and this for Lewis was itself a marker of the play’s modernity and what mattered about it: ‘All art is in fact satire today,’ he wrote in his trenchant analysis of the contemporary scene, Men without Art (1934). Satirists have traditionally offered their own moral justification for their art, one based not on empathy or moral intuition, but on the claim that they are doing good by identifying and thus helping to rectify the shortcomings of society. Lewis generally scorned such improving notions as rudely as he did the Romantic case: ‘There is no prejudice so inveterate, in even the educated mind, as that which sees in satire a work of edification,’ he complained. ‘I am a satirist, I am afraid there is no use denying that. But I am not a moralist: and about that I make no bones either.’ What he was after was something paradoxical, ‘non-ethical satire’ or ‘“satire” for its own sake’. The Shakespearean ‘system’ of which Timon was the inhabitant, Lewis insisted, ‘had no ethical basis, but was entirely an aesthetic phenomenon’. And the last thing any satirist needs is the cast of mind that Hazlitt and the rest of them attributed to Shakespearean genius, one which lets ‘the reader “into the minds of the characters”’ and enables us to ‘see the play of their thoughts’. ‘Satire is cold, and that is good!’

Men without Art and The Lion and the Fox were products of an extraordinarily concentrated burst of writing that followed Lewis’s return from the First World War. As his wife later recalled, he ‘went into hiding to avoid people and get on with his work’ – this period lasted for eight years. In one of his autobiographies Lewis said that those years were to be marked ‘strictly private’; but he had nothing much to report: his time seems to have been spent almost entirely in a concerted attempt to work out a philosophy of art and life. The original, distinctly loopy, plan was an immense work of some half a million words, a ‘megalo-mastodonic masterwork’ to be entitled The Man of the World. ‘I work incessantly at it,’ Lewis told Eliot. ‘I am never in bed before 2, or often later; and for the present dine alone to get it done.’ The book was quite impracticable so Lewis split it into six volumes, each of which is still pretty substantial, and published them between 1926 and 1930. They range so widely from politics to epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, cultural analysis and literary criticism, that, as Samuel Hynes observed, it is very difficult to see how the work could ever have cohered into a single enterprise. Each volume is hectic, overwritten, easily distracted and confusingly organised, fighting on several fronts at once. ‘It would be in your own interest to concentrate on one book at a time, and not to plan eight or ten books at once,’ Eliot advised, speaking as a publisher as well as a friend, but Lewis paid no attention. Leavis, provoked by negative remarks about his hero Lawrence, wasn’t entirely unjustified in saying that ‘their air of sustained and ordered argument is a kind of bluff, as the reader who, having contrived to read one through, can bring himself to attempt a summary of it discovers.’ Elsewhere, he more fairly admitted ‘a uniquely vigorous style and a mind more than usually well-stored and inquiring’; and the recurrence of certain keynotes means that there is some justification for what Lewis claimed for himself – ‘a pattern of thinking’, if something short of a system.

The first volume​ to appear, in 1926, was entitled The Art of Being Ruled, a huge study of statecraft: the book grew from the antithesis of persons and things that had shaped his thinking about art, now translated to a fantastic political anthropology. Here Lewis most certainly comes across as a moralist: rather like the great 19th-century sages, he has his sights set on mechanistic philosophy, big business, ‘liberalism’, coercive public opinion, the ‘hypnotism’ of mass media and an unmitigated trust in science, the effect of all of which is to persuade normal people that they are ‘not persons, not human’. In an interesting twist, this turns out to be their own fault because ‘they do not, in their heart, desire “freedom” or anything of the sort.’ Indeed, they find ‘their greatest happiness in a state of dependence and subservience’ for, as the wise ruler recognises, ‘in the mass people wish to be automata … they wish to be obedient, hard-working machines, as near dead as possible … without actually dying.’ It is grabbing stuff until the realisation dawns that it’s you he’s talking about. Unlike you, the ruler would be leading a difficult, disillusioned and isolated life, quite separate from the ruled, who are now released into a happy existence of automatic responses and ‘kind, protective illusions, like a screen round a child’s bed’. We’re even given a vignette of daily life under this benevolent regime: the ordinary citizen, relieved of ‘all “highbrow” matters he had from the cradle disliked, would disappear around the corner to the local bridge club with cheery words on his honest lips, ejaculating contentedly, “it takes all sorts to make a world.”’

It sounds awful, and needless to say it’s impossible to imagine Lewis joining him at the card table. What Lewis calls ‘the creative minds of the world’, currently crushed by the pseudo-values of the mass, have a different vocation to fulfil in a world freed by centralised rule, though it is a little hazy what it is. ‘The intellect is more removed from the crowd than is anything,’ Lewis says, striking a heroic note, but that’s not to say the crowd isn’t also the beneficiary of highbrow endeavours: ‘It is not a snobbish withdrawal, but a going aside for the purposes of work, of work not without its utility for the crowd.’ Suitably vague; but when his policy recommendations are more specific they are not usually very happy: you do not need to be a zealous libertarian to dislike the way the wind is blowing. How much better it would be to have just one state brand of soap: no horrible advertisements would be necessary! Appalled by the spectacle of ‘a never-ending stream of luxurious omnibuses’ taking women to the shops, Lewis proposes a travel permit system that would keep them at home; similar restrictions could stop tourism: this might look disagreeably coercive but ‘the mass of people do not want it.’ ‘Most people are born molluscs,’ Lewis says. ‘There is no offence in saying it, for it is quite true.’

The Art of Being Ruled built on Lewis’s long-held Nietzschean disdain for what he called ‘herd-hypnotism’. The ‘Man of the World’ to whom the great work was originally to be devoted was a figure he condemned, ‘a man who is himself small and weak … and the constant adversary of the individual’. The next book to emerge, in 1927, was Time and Western Man, which also sought to rescue man from the world, but in metaphysical terms. Lewis thought it ‘my biggest book of philosophic and literary criticism’: it is a good choice to inaugurate this new Oxford edition of Lewis. Due to span 42 volumes, it is an enterprise that feels like a throwback to a more heroic age of publishing, and its indication of institutional recognition would have surprised Lewis himself. Even with his gift for ingratitude, he could hardly fail to be gratified by the scrupulous erudition with which Paul Edwards has gone about the undertaking.

Edwards concedes that Time and Western Man is ‘organised rather idiosyncratically’, and doesn’t quite persuade you that it adds up to a cohesive whole. Kenner proclaimed it ‘one of the dozen or so most important books of the 20th century’, but this is hard to credit. It is a study of another ‘mystical mass-doctrine’, not the illusion of democratic individualism that Lewis described in The Art of Being Ruled but, more abstractly, what Lewis calls ‘the Time-mind’ or ‘the Time-view’. The adherents of this mind are very numerous and apparently diverse, among them Einstein, Darwin, Spengler, William James, as well as writers such as Gertrude Stein, Joyce and Proust, artistic schools such as naturalism and futurism, and cultural phenomena such as the ‘child cult’ exemplified by the regrettable popularity of Charlie Chaplin. The principal villain however is Bergson, not in his capacity as an analyst of laughter this time, but as a philosopher of consciousness. The charismatic metaphysics of Bergson, as Lewis must have remembered from his lectures, described human identity, at its most primal and non-intellectual, as the creature of a numinous time deeper than the mere succession of the clock. Like many of his contemporaries, Hulme was rather taken with this and propounded Bergson’s idea of the ‘real time’ that intuition might discern ‘at a certain depth of mental life’ with characteristic force. But on this point, Lewis parted company with his old comrade: he understood Bergson to be advocating a rampant subjectivism, dissolving into pure consciousness objects that one might have otherwise naively assumed to exist independently of one’s experience of them. Repelled by Bergsonian flux, Lewis proposes as an alternative ‘a philosophy of the eye’, a celebration of ‘the concrete and radiant reality of the optic sense’; and this (to my mind) rather appealing realist impulse prompts the reappearance of an old friend of whom Hulme would have approved: ‘the deadness, the stolid thickness and deadness, of nature … that deadness is essential.’

The appeal to ‘deadness’ is a rebuke to Bergson’s exalted concept of a universal evolutionary vitality which ‘makes of the whole series of the living one single immense wave flowing over matter’. Bergson ended Creative Evolution (1907) by encouraging the philosopher of the future to see ‘the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming’. Lewis was not remotely attracted by the idea of melting into anything – ‘we should retain our objective hardness, and not be constantly melting and hotly overflowing’ – so he had a double complaint to make: not only does Bergsonian thought strip you of ‘the clearness of outline, the static beauty, of the things you commonly apprehend’ but it also takes away ‘the clearness of outline of your own individuality which apprehends them’. Bergson often writes with heady rapture about things interpenetrating and merging, and Time and Western Man is largely a statement of Lewis’s opposite preference, ‘them standing apart – the wind blowing between them, and the air circulating freely in and out of them’.

Lewis repeatedly champions here ‘the beautiful objective, material world of common sense’ over ‘the “organic” world of chronological mentalism’ and remarks at one point that ‘my case is an overwhelmingly good one.’ But whether his argument amounts to much is another matter. This is the sort of thing he says, a comparison of our experience of a statue, existing in space, and a piece of music, existing in time, the upshot of which is meant to be that we have a strong ‘space’ sense which the prevailing Time-mind ignores or denies: ‘You move round the statue, but it is always there in its entirety before you, whereas the piece of music moves through you, as it were. The difference in the two arts is evident at once, and the different faculties that come into play in the one and the other.’

From our instinctive response to the statue we are meant to infer the independent reality of objects. But I am not sure this will do: the time-besotted Bergsonian need only point out that your experience of the statue occurred in time for you to find yourself back at square one. You never see the statue ‘in its entirety’, your opponent might follow up, seeing you on the back foot: the entire statue is a hypothesis you concoct on the basis of what he would probably call ‘les données immédiates de la conscience’. Lewis’s appeal to ‘a sense of reality’, that is to ‘our sheer sensation that there is something real there before us,’ is certainly heartfelt, but no more effective as an argument than Dr Johnson kicking the stone to refute Bishop Berkeley – which is not to deny that it is in its way a gesture of great power that repays consideration of the right kind. ‘The history of the philosophers we know, but who will write the history of the philosophic amateurs and readers?’ Hulme asked, by implication including himself in the latter category. Lewis does not seek to disguise that his thoughts are primarily those of a painter. ‘No visual artist would ever have imagined (or had he imagined, he would have turned in horror from) such a world as the Bergsonian, relativist world,’ he says towards the end, which, whatever its authority, could not be said to constitute a philosophical argument at all.

Several years before Time and Western Man Lewis had already labelled Bergson ‘the philosopher of impressionism’, a movement of which he took a very dim view and came to see as another expression of the Time-mind, ‘the glorification of the life-of-the-moment’. This is a very incomplete account of Bergson, but I suppose it is fair to say that Impressionism’s tenets – ‘catching the Moment on the hop; of snapshotting that Moment of Nature with the eye, and so forth’ – were hardly likely to appeal to someone who thought ‘Life’ was just what an artist should not suck up to. The still lifes of Picasso and Braque were merely uneasy compromises with Impressionism, attempting to be experimental but still in harness to the objects on the breakfast table, what Lewis disparages as ‘the debris of their rooms’. And literature suffers from the same complaint. Lewis spends some entertaining pages attacking Stein for offering ‘monstrous, desperate, soggy lengths of primitive mass-life, chopped off and presented to us as a never-ending prose-song’; but his more unexpected target is Joyce’s Ulysses, which is accused of merely reproducing ‘the fluid material gushing of undisciplined life’: ‘into that flux it is you, the reader, that are plunged.’ You can see the role Joyce is being called on to play within the choreography of the book, but Ulysses, which must be one of the most over-organised books in the world, seems an odd choice for an example of ‘undisciplined life’.

It’s perhaps an odd choice in another way, since you might have thought Joyce epitomises the attitude towards external things that Lewis is championing. The trouble with Joyce, Lewis said, was that ‘you were not in the open air, but closed up inside somebody’s head’; but in truth you can easily imagine the author of Ulysses echoing what Lewis announces: ‘I am for the physical world.’ Indeed, maybe more emphatically. The bar of lemon soap in Bloom’s pocket which spends the novel on a miniature odyssey of its own would seem a much more jubilant creature than the glum bar of state soap that Lewis imagined in The Art of Being Ruled. There is something paradoxical about Lewis’s celebration in these pages of ‘the beautiful objective, material world’ when so much of his thinking about art emphasised a battle of will hard-won over the ‘objective, material world’. At his most emphatic he pronounces that the very best artists ‘do not depend upon the objective world at all’ or, as Tarr puts it, that ‘Life is art’s rival and vice versa.’ ‘Nature was thoroughly subjected and controlled by these artists,’ Lewis said admiringly of the painters of the Ajanta caves, contrasting them with the world-bound nature morte of Cubism: ‘Permission did not have to be asked to arrange objects in this way or that.’ It is true that in other places he maintained that artists had to be ‘great experts in the objective and material world in order to do our work properly’; and in his late autobiography he remembered consciously setting himself to get some ‘flesh and blood’ to serve as ‘filling’ for his early highly abstract manner. Nevertheless, he added, ‘I can never feel any respect for a picture that cannot be reduced, at will, to a fine formal abstraction.’ The point is one anticipated by Hulme. If it is the pleasure of geometric forms that you are after, Hulme says, then a pure cube might seem the solution: in practice, though, it is uninteresting. But ‘if you can put man into some geometrical shape which lifts him out of the transience of the organic, then the matter is different.’ It is not just formal abstraction alone that you want, in other words, but also enough trace of the original world to show what abstraction has conquered – rather as the lions at the circus used to be expected to snarl a bit to show that the tamer had mastered something worth mastering. ‘Loathsome as the world is, I do like to see it,’ as Lewis wrote in later life when the creeping blindness that finally afflicted him was becoming obvious.

The great disaster of Lewis’s writing life was a farcically ill-judged book about Hitler, published in 1931, in which, among other things, the Führer was described as ‘a man of peace’. The result was, as he recalled, that he woke one morning to find himself ‘not famous but infamous’. His notoriety was one factor in the failure of his greatest work, the novel The Revenge for Love. Published in 1937, it languished for a few years before falling out of print; the book didn’t appear in America at all until long after the war. The novel tells the story of Victor and Margot, a second-rate artist and his devoted wife, who, through innocence and inadvertence, get themselves caught up in Spanish revolutionary politics in which they do not believe, and end up sacrificed to a cause they do not understand. The novel has a fascinating relationship with the rest of Lewis’s work because it is, as Kenner says, ‘a sustained anomaly’: the truculence and grotesquerie of the normal Lewis mode are quite forgone. There is a good deal of hearty satirical disgust at the posturing self-indulgence of radical intellectuals, somewhat reminiscent of Conrad’s in Under Western Eyes, but the book’s main energy is not satire: it is pity, as though things are being imagined from the puppets’ point of view. The puppets who matter in this book are the two central figures, a painfully ordinary couple, heedlessly manipulated by people who have contrived to possess power over them. The portrait of Margot, especially, is remarkable for the way it imagines at once her tenacity and fragility, a study in what might seem the least Lewisian of topics, vulnerability, and all done without a stroke of sentimentality.

Margot, it seems, was modelled on Lewis’s wife, Froanna, a rather shadowy presence in the biographies as she was in Lewis’s public life. Grigson had known him for two years before Lewis admitted that he kept a wife downstairs, ‘a simple woman, but a good cook’. That is purposefully gruff: the relationship seems to have been very close, but almost entirely unseen. Lewis’s portraits of her are tender and beautiful, and, again, an exception to his normal manner. As Edwards has said elsewhere, it is in the portraits of Froanna, especially those of the 1930s, that we see Lewis most ready ‘to recognise the humanity of another person’. There is no question here of remaining unsympathetically on ‘the outside of people’. It doesn’t take a Winnicott to suspect something deeply damaged in Lewis’s insistence on solitariness and non-connection, his opposition to merging, even his declared preference for a world of objects standing one apart from the other with the wind blowing between them. But Froanna does seem to have been to Lewis what Virgilia is to that case history of vituperative damage, Coriolanus – a ‘gracious silence’ mysteriously accompanying and secretly redeeming a public life otherwise full of belligerence and self-engendered strife. That persona, needless to say, remained robust to the very end. As he lay in hospital dying in 1957, so Grigson tells us, the nurse asked him: ‘And when did we last open our bowels, Mr Lewis?’ Lewis was never much of a ‘we’ man: ‘Mind your own bloody business,’ he replied.