Blasting and Bomardiering Read online

  Blasting and Bombardiering

  by Wyndham Lewis

  Originally published by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937.

  Reviaed and issued as a second edition by Calder & Boyars Ltd in 1967.

  Wyndham Lewis Estate 1937, 1967 and 1982

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  SUBSIDISED BY THE

  Arts Council

  OF GREAT BRITAIN

  ISBN 0 7145 0130 1

  Printed by Tien Wah Press (Pte) Limited, Singapore

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1

  part i—lion and bombardier

  I. Bombardiering 21

  II. Mr. W. L. as Leader of 'The Great London

  Vortex' 32

  III. Some Specimen Pages of Blast No. 1 (June 20,

  1914) 37

  IV. 'Britannia's hard on the Lions' 46 V. The Prime Minister and Myself, 1914 50

  VI. In Berwickshire, August, 1914 56

  part ii-declaration of war

  I. I Hand over my Self-Portrait to my Colleague of

  Blast 63

  II. Morpeth Olympiad 66

  III. Journey during Mobilization 69

  IV. The War-Crowds, 1914 78 V. The 'Author of Tarr' 84

  VI. The Sitwells, a 'Book-Dictator', and Mr. Richard

  Sickert 91

  VII. The 'Bull-Gun' 95

  VIII. 'Hulme of Original Sin' 99

  IX. The 'Savage Messiah' is Killed 105

  part iii—a gunner's tale

  I. The Romance of War 113

  II. Howitzers 117

  III. How the Gunner 'Fights' 123

  IV. A Day of Attack 130 V. Trench-fever and 'Hell-Fire Corner' 137

  VI. Our Home in a Pillbox 141

  VII. Passchendaele 148 VIII. The 'O. Pip' on the Ridge 154

  IX. Hunted with Howitzers 160 X. Among the Brass Hats, and Sir William Orpen 168

  XI. The King of the Trenches 171

  XII. Political Education under Fire 184

  XIII. Kamper makes Whoopee 189

  XIV. The Booze Artist 196 XV. King John 200

  part iv—adam and eve

  I. Captain Guy Baker—In Memoriam 207

  II. I go Underground 212

  III. The High Wall at Adam and Eve 217

  IV. The Wedding of Roy Campbell 221 V. Sitters 225

  VI. 'Death to Mussolini' 230 VII. A Duel of Draughtsmanship in Post-war Venice 233

  VIII. 'Lawrence of Arabia' 237

  part v—the tale of an old pair of shoes

  I. War and Post War 249

  II. The Period of Ulysses, Blast, The Wasteland 252

  III. Towards an Art-less Society 257

  IV. First Meeting with James Joyce 265 V. First Meeting with Ezra Pound 271

  VI. First Meeting with T. S. Eliot 282

  VII. An 'Age Group' meets Itself 290

  VIII. Our Lady of the Sleeping-Cars 295

  IX. Cantleman's Spring-Mate 304

  X. The War Baby 312

  Conclusion

  The New Guy who's got into the Landscape 339

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE

  For this second, revised edition of Blasting and Bombardiering Anne Wyndham Lewis has made several changes from the text of the first edition [London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937] : she has deleted or modified some passages, and added new material in several places throughout the text. The chapters entitled "The King of the Trenches," "Cantleman's Spring-Mate," and "The War Baby" did not appear in the first edition.

  PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

  A few introductory remarks should be made on the occasion of the republishing of BLASTING AND BOMBARDIERING which contains the author's memories of people and events leading up to the War, its duration and aftermath.

  The War-Crowds, the tide of Chapter IV, is part of an unfinished war book which depicts the remarkable crowds which packed London on Mobilisation and their extraordinary one-mindedness, the violent upsurge of emotion which the declaration of war unleashed. The few remaining chapters of this book have now been added at the end of the volume. The style of this book is light and sardonic but contains the essence of this tragic war embodied in the Serviceman's reticence in relating horrors seen and endured at the Front.

  Peace with its terrible epidemic, the Roaring Twenties with its disillusion, despair and growing unemployment. Veterans begging in the gutters and unemployed miners filling the streets with their beautiful songs. All this is captured here and is shown to lead to the horror of the General Strike.

  One quotation from a work of that period seems to be particularly appropriate here.

  'Peace is a fearful thing for that countless majority who are so placed that there is no difference between Peace and War— except that during the latter day they are treated with more consideration. In war, if they are wounded they are well treated, in peace, if struck down it is apt to be nothing like so pleasant.'

  Anne Wyndham Lewis

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  from photographs

  Mr. Wyndham Lewis 88

  The Mother and Father of the Author 89

  The Bombardier and the Battery Officer 89

  The Author of Tarr 120

  portrait heads by wyndham lewis

  Augustus John 121

  Flight-Commander Orlebar 121

  The Rev. M. C. D'Arcy, S.J. 121

  Roy Campbell 121

  Ezra Pound 184

  Rebecca West 184

  Self Portrait 184

  James Joyce 184

  Douglas Jerrold 185

  T. S. Eliot 185

  Nancy Cunard 185

  Noel Coward 185

  paintings by wyndham lewis

  Girl Reading 216

  Contemplator 216

  The Three Sisters 217

  Dawn in Erewhon 217

  Introduction

  This book is about myself. It's the first autobiography to take only a section of a life and leave the rest. Ten years about is the time covered. This is better than starting with the bib and bottle. How many novels are intolerable that begin with the hero in his cradle? And a good biography is of course a sort of novel.

  So you first encounter the hero of this book a few months before the outbreak of war, blissfully unconscious of its sinister proximity, on the right side of thirty but with much European travel behind him, in the course of which he has collected a strange assortment of clothes, of haircuts, of exotic mannerisms. You are supplied with a contemporary photograph to give you an idea of all this. When you have been made thoroughly to understand what the war made of him you bid him adieu. What has happened to him after that is unbelievably romantic. But that is another story.

  This book is about what happened to me in the Great War, and then afterwards in the equally great Peace. I always think myself that 'great' as the Great War undoubtedly was, the Peace has been even greater. But this is only a point of view.

  The War is such a tremendous landmark that locally it imposes itself upon our computations of time like the birth of Christ. We say 'pre-war' and post-war', rather as we say b.c. or a.d. This book is about the war, with a bit of pre-war and post-war sticking to it, fore and aft.

  I find a good way of dating after the War is to take the General Strike, 1926, as the next milestone. I call 'post-war' between the War and the General Strike. Then began a period of a new complexion. It was no longer 'post-war'. We needn't call it anything. It's just the period we're living in today. Some people would call it one thing, some another. Best perhaps to call it nothing, until we see what it turns out to be.

  One only writes 'biographies' about things that are past and over. The present period is by no means over. One couldn't sit down and write a biography about that. But t
he War and the 'post-war' are over long ago. They can be written about with detachment, as things past and done with.

  As well as being about myself, this book is about a number of people in all walks of life. I have met an immense number of people. I have done a lot of things and moved about a great deal, so of course I have rubbed against a quantity of people. I tell you about a good few of them here, any one of them that fits into my pattern.

  A book of course can be said to have a 'pattern', like a carpet or wallpaper. People who write about books are very fond of the word 'pattern'. But it's not a bad word to use about a thing like a book, which, unrolled, would be a long narrow thing, like a rug or stair-carpet.

  This may be a new notion to you : and you start wondering, perhaps, what this book you have picked up has in the way of a 'pattern'—whether it's all pothooks and sunflowers, or bunches of roses, or what? Well, it's not any of those, as a matter of fact. It's a sort of Japanese affair.

  My book is about a little group of people crossing a bridge. The bridge is red, the people are red, the sky is red. Of course the bridge is symbolic. The bridge stands for something else. The bridge, you, see is the war.

  Upon one side of the bridge is a quite different landscape to what meets the eye upon the other side, as if the stream spanned by the bridge separated a tropic from a polar landscape. And the principal figure among those crossing this little bridge—that is me—does not know that he is crossing anything, from one world into another. Indeed, everybody else seems to know it except him.

  He does not see the cold stream. He scarcely sees his companions. Yet he is not a sleepwalker: he has his eye fixed upon a small red bird, upon a red bough, within a large red tree. Rather pretty, isn't it ?

  Let me, however, formally introduce myself. I am just as genial a character as Mr. Bernard Shaw, to give you an idea. I am rather what Mr. Shaw would have been like if he had been an artist—I here use 'artist' in the widest possible sense—if he had not been an Irishman, if he had been a young man when the Great War occurred, if he had studied painting and philosophy instead of economics and Ibsen, and if he had been more richly endowed with imagination, emotion, intellect and a few other things. (He said he was a finer fellow than Shakespeare. I merely prefer myself to Mr. Shaw.)

  But Mr. Shaw was a journalist, and so am I. Mr. T. S. Eliot—you may have heard of him, if you are a keen churchman—says I am the best journalist alive. That's a big order. I should not put it quite so high as that. But I do pretend to be able, like Defoe or Swift, to make myself intelligible to an average panel doctor or the teller in a bank: and I speak to them as man to man, not as a Regius Professor to his maid-of-all-work.

  I will go over my credentials. I am an artist—if that is a credential. I am a novelist, painter, sculptor, philosopher, draughtsman, critic, politician, journalist, essayist, pamphleteer, all rolled into one, like one of those portmanteau-men of the Italian Renaissance.

  I am a portmanteau-man (like 'portmanteau-word'). I have been a soldier, a yachtsman, a baby, a massier, a hospital patient, a traveller, a total abstainer, a lecturer, an alcoholic, an editor, and a lot more. So I have met other editors, alcoholics, lecturers, patients, soldiers, etc., etc. You will find some of them here.

  I am not writing this book for other highbrows like myself, more than for anybody else. Most of those who will read it will have a smattering of knowledgeableness of course. They wouldn't know which end to pick up a Picasso by, though. I'm not going to teach them that.

  Life is what I have gone out to get in this book—life where it is merging into something else, certainly. But I catch it just before it goes over into the fastuous element. The fish is still in the stream. Or if you like, this is the raw meat in the kitchen— destined, perhaps, for the Banquet of Reason, but as yet highly irrational.

  You will be astonished to find how like art is to war, I mean 'modernist' art. They talk a lot about how a war just-finished effects art. But you will learn here how a war about to start can do the same thing. I have set out to show how war, art, civil war, strikes and coup d'etats dovetail into each other.

  It is somewhat depressing to consider how as an artist one is always holding the mirror up to politics without knowing it. My picture called 'The Plan of War' painted six months before the Great War 'broke out', as we say, depresses me. A prophet is a most unoriginal person: all he is doing is imitating something that is not there, but soon will be. With me war and art have been mixed up from the start. It is still. I wish I could get away from war. This book is perhaps an attempt to do so. Writing about war may be the best way to shake the accursed thing off by putting it in its place, as an unseemly joke.

  The present is the moment to give the War, and all that nestles round it and was mixed up with it, a fresh inspection. The hens of the War are all coming home to roost: and the roosters of the 'post-war' have crowed themselves hoarse or to a standstill. A few less noisy birds, therefore, like myself (for I am not noisy) now have an opportunity of getting their native woodnotes wild 'on the air'. That noisiest of all old cocks, Mr. Shaw, is silent at last. Mr. Auden has grown into a national institution. It is many years since Mr. Forster opened his mouth. In short, everything seems to indicate a change of cast in our national theatre.

  Of course the 'big noise' is in the main a phenomenon of mass-advertisement. What it would be more exact to say is that myself and a few other people are now likely to have our turn at the loud-speaking mechanism, because the times are rapidly changing. People are more ready for such messages as mine to-day than they were yesterday. Time's revenges!

  During the 'post-war' I was incubating and was pretty silent. My personal story was an interesting one during those years but it's not my business to talk about that here. 1918-26 is a period marked 'strictly private'. In the last few chapters of this book I flash over it on silver wings, coming down in the middle of 1926 and bowing myself off the stage. But I give you nothing but an air-picture of it, like a diagram.

  I'm now becoming a 'popular' author—not an Angel-Pave-ment artist, but I'm looking up. I'll have to explain that. I started as a novelist and set a small section of the Thames on fire. My first book Tarr was a novel (1918). Then I buried myself. I disinterred myself in 1926, the year of the General Strike-—but as a philosopher and critic. This was considered very confusing.

  Time and Western Man (my biggest book of philosophic and literary criticism) had a stupendous Press (that means the reviews about it in the papers). But it treated of topics which only a handful of people in England know or care about. 'The Subject as King of the Psychological World', and 'The Object as King of the Physical World', are awfully interesting things if you have a bent for such topics. But only a few dozen people out of forty million have.

  I might as well have been talking to myself all that time and that's a fact. Take the Lion and the Fox. That was a big book, too, all about Shakespeare's politics. You can imagine how many people read that! Who cares about Shakespeare, much less Shakespeare's politics, of all godforsaken things!

  But they care about their own politics. And that's what I write about now. For one person who reads you if you write about Machiavelli, there are a hundred who will read you if you write about Earl Baldwin or Mr. Roosevelt. I write about them. Then, having ever with me that Lust zu fabulieren that Goethe speaks about, I have now married the novelist to the philosopher—my fiction is taking me into quarters where politics—like politics as a whole—become more like fiction every day. All this fits in with my particular talents. The times are propitious for me.

  So this is a 'good-bye to all that' sort of a book, in a manner of speaking: though its purpose is quite different from Mr. Graves' masterly winding-up of a bankrupt emotional concern. It is not 'Farewell and be damned to you': there is nothing emotional about it. Rather it is a trip to a stricken area. A spot of tidying-up had to be effected. It was an area of my past which requires a little retrospective attention.

  Don't you often feel about some
phase of your existence that it requires going over with a fine comb and putting in order? We get involved with so much that does not belong to us and then our past 'form', our successive 'handicaps', can with advantage be checked up, from time to time, or at least once or twice in a lifetime—I hope you are a golfer?

  Say you have been married, and are now separated from the 'only girl'. You are on your own again, I suppose. The years, or months, of onlygirlishness cry out for inspection perhaps. Yes, and revision. They still have a life of sorts, while you live, and they just tumbled out upon the floor of time in a disorderly heap. They must almost be re-lived, for antiseptic purposes. It is desirable to establish a principle of order as we go along in this chaos of instinct called 'living', is it not ?

  That is the principle upon which this self-history is composed. I rope in a given area—full of the goings and comings of a certain Bombardier, of a literary militant, a 'Tarr', of a painter up in arms against the dead hand of an obsolete authority. With this selected area or section I deal as would a tidy god.

  The god was of course mortal at the time he experienced the events in question. Having attained immortality, he feels he had better go back and have a look round—like a week-end trip to a Flanders Battlefield, but more curious than sentimental.

  You and I, you see, all men, in the matter of our past are little immortals. It is not an 'immortality' to be very puffed up about, it is true. Still there it is: even last year, even last week, answers to that description, and bestows upon us a portion of rather uncomfortable god-hood. I am in this sense a conscientious godling.

  Revolving in my mind then was a book about the War. In the first artillery attack upon Passchendaele I was in an observation post, with the German trenches a few yards ahead, and beneath me. My line to the Battery had been cut by shell-fire, and after a time, as there was nothing to do, I went down into the dug-out and took a note-book I always carried with me and described what I had just seen. I thought of starting my book with the flickering of the candle upon the rat-infested waters of the dug-out: but when I mentioned this plan to a critical publisher he said he thought that no one would read about the War—that the War-baby, or Cantleman's Spring Mate1 was all right, but now everyone wanted to forget the War.