K.
“Lewis was an AVANT GARDE by himself, the greatest pictorial draughtsman of his time, the most controversial prose stylist of our day. For readers who are accustomed to action in prose narrative Lewis is baffling. Especially his early novels provide passage after passage which are like nothing so much as a package of materials with directions for making a painting. As Dr Johnson said of Richardson’s novels: ‘If you were to read them for the story, Sir, you would hang yourself.’ A good deal of work is left for the reader. But the result enables the reader to SEE. And the effect is finally more vivid than a ready-made painting. Lewis the painter turned to literature in an age of passive mechanical photography. As a writer he set out to educate the eye by means of deft organization of gestures. He translates what he sees into terms of painting, and translates this in turn into words which embody, in embryo, as it were, the same gestures. So that these translations issue as painter’s instructions, as in this passage from ENEMY OF THE STARS:
‘Hanp and his master lie in a pool of bleak brown shadow, disturbed once by a rat’s plunging head. It rattles forward yet appears to slide upon oiled planes…. Beyond the canal, brutelands, shuttered with stony clouds, lie in heavy angles of black sand. They are squirted upon by twenty ragged streams; legions of quails hop parasitically within the miniature cliffs.’
“Passages of this kind are not background to an action. They are not an aura for characters, but have to be mentally painted by the reader. Lewis’s painter’s eye having translated the situation into painter’s terms and then back into words, the reader must approach the passage as he would a translation from Chinese, for instance.
“The image is the primary pigment; and the syntax, the painterly line and gesture by which Lewis directs the reader’s hand and eye in a do-it-yourself exploration of the visible world with which the ordinary eye is quite unable to cope.
“It was precisely this ‘do-it-yourself’ discovery of poets and painters some fifty years ago which outraged the conventional art consumer who had long been accustomed to swiftly moving conveyor belts of narrative action and imagery which arrived untouched by the human hand and ready for instant and effortless consumption.
“Mechanical photography released the painter from literal representation just as a little later the movie released poet and novelist from the business of backdrops, costumes and stage properties.
“As the mechanical world became frantically activated the artist turned to a more severe form of contemplation than had been known in the Western world…. He (Ed. – Lewis) continues, however, to explain why he repudiates his early fanaticism for the abstract in painting insisting on the painter’s right to tell a story the simplest could understand saying: ’This he has as much right to do as the literary man, a Dickens, or a Tchekov, or a Stendhal.’ Lewis tells how he was liberated from his early abstract passion by his experience in the first war:…”
L.
“Ten years later in THE CHILDERMASS Lewis used the medium of the talking picture before it had been invented. It is a talkie in full colour. A passage will provide a striking contrast with the prose from his later novel, SELF CONDEMNED. Lewis went blind in his last years with the result that his prose was much changed in the direction of colloquial, conversational narrative. But here is a do-it-yourself passage or package from his middle period. It concerns those in a state beyond life, as in Dante:
‘They stagger forward, two intoxicated silhouettes, at ten yards cut out red in the mist…. Only trunks and thighs of human figures are henceforth visible. There are torsos moving with bemused slowness on all sides…. In thin clockwork cadence the exhausted splash of the waves is a sound that is a cold ribbon just existing in the massive heat. The delicate surf falls with the abrupt clash of glass, section by section….’”
M.
“… Lewis was well aware that it was, in the age of the new media, quite impossible for the serious artist also to be a crowd or a mass-artist like Shakespeare or Dickens. But this awareness led him to seize on the mass media of movie and B.B.C. to make of them instruments of art. In a way quite distinct from Eliot or Joyce, Lewis made the press and radio, movie and television modes of his vision. So that whereas Dante’s world is built according to the scale of moral perfection, the world Lewis presents in his great trilogy THE HUMAN AGE is scaled according to the audience ratings of the medium and the programme. ’Third City’ in THE HUMAN AGE is the B.B.C.’s Third Programme.
“Lewis was a visionary for whom the most ordinary scenes became the means of intense seeing. The artist’s personality at hostile grips with the environment is dramatically offered not for its pathos or anguish or as a moral evaluation, but as a means of clairvoyance.” – Marshall McLuhan, “Lewis’s Prose Style”, WYNDHAM LEWIS: A REVALUATION: NEW ESSAYS, Edited by Jeffrey Myers, 1980, pp.64-67
9.
AMERICA AND COSMIC MAN, 1948
“It is easy for anyone to see the sacrifice entailed in the narrowing down of human life, where material power is the sole aim. Personal freedom, that great luxury, has to be largely foregone. The conditions, to some extent, of a police-state supervene. Standardization compels all those non-conformities we speak of as ‘freedom’ into a single giant mold. Mass-production has as its corollary the mass-mind – ’syndication’ is productive of the syndicated mind. Anything comes to be denounced as ‘un-American’ which does not respond with a zealot ‘Yes!’ to some fiat of government.”, pp.80-1
“The fluctuating emotional cycle, of alternations of self-centered passivity and of great spasms of aggression, by which the political life of America has been characterized, offered in the year 1898, to the inquiring student, a perfect opportunity for field-work.”, p.85
“Not to go back to ’the Great Strike’ of ’77, things really came to a head in the eighties and nineties. Capitalism had then reached its full stature: men had begun to feel themselves threatened with imminent destruction by this new steel-age mastodon walking the earth, with as little care for mankind as if they had been blades of grass. The Civil War was a victory for the corporative principle of Union: simultaneously it was a triumph for Northern Capitalism. A quite new America was there all around them suddenly, totally unlike what the pre-Civil War American had known: unlike, as a matter of fact, anything experienced before by man.”, p.109
“Post-French Revolution America, impelled thereto by Thomas Jefferson and his adherents, followed the abstract, Gallic, ideologic path. Then the constantly expanding empire, to which Americans became committed, drew them into a sort of jingo imperialism of their own, in the sweep and surge of which the early idealism foundered.
“Their traditional habits of thought were excessively sanguine and self-confident. Then, as I have said, came the impact of this new force, and the rapid and fundamental change in their outlook. One day, as usual, Yankee Doodle went to town: but this time Yankee Doodle faltered, and turned back.
“Most Englishmen are at least sixty years out of date in their idea of the typical American. The American they see in their mind’s eye died sixty years or more ago. Certainly there is enough of exuberance left in a small number of Americans to sustain the illusion. Of course, too, much ‘brashness’ and noise accompany all the activities of the publicist and publicity rackets: that is misleading. But the general run of people in the States are quite unassuming, and quite modest about their destiny, as they are anywhere else. They awakened from their pipe-dream long ago. When, in the decade or so preceding the Boer War, or the Spanish-American War, their old jingo confidence and complacency abandoned them, or began to do so, the long-accepted libertarian jargon was, they began to growl to each other, ‘the bunk’.
“Even, it occurred to many of them, it might be a rich man’s trick, designed to conceal from them how imperfectly free was, nevertheless, the lot of most Americans. That their hereditary right to say ’Shake’ to their President, if they happened to be near him, meant that he was right at the heart of the hoax. For at all times numbers of inventive and intelligent people were to be found in this swarming population: living in a society where honor and power go to the least desirable type of human being, equipped with the simian cunning of the three-card-trick man, is depressing, at the last, for such minds. Demoralization set in. A new social-consciousness was born.
“The recovery from the wounds of the Civil War had been slow, and the South, of course, became a slum, and such it has remained.”, pp.110-1
“Atomic or nuclear energy apart – which puts in question everything – the permanent revolution which scientific techniques entail makes our politics look absurd, like an archaic buggy upon an autobahn. What figure we can find to describe our ECONOMIC system I hardly know. An ox-drawn cart making its way up Fifth Avenue will have to serve, though really that is far too snappy a conveyance at all adequately to represent what is meant. Gold is the arch-symbol of the barbarous nature of our twentieth-century institutions. All that is not technique stands still. Not only science, but scientific thinking, stops at the doors of our banks, and at the gates of our parliaments….
“Could a new body of laws be enacted every week end, and the old ones thrown out, that would guarantee the efficient functioning of the national body….
“… When kings and queens were superseded by politicians, the understanding was that importance of that kind was at an end. The People became the King, and politicians were the People’s servants. The politician’s task was supposed to be a quite humble one. Otherwise why not have carried on with the kings and queens, emperors and empresses? So, if you notice that a superstitious veneration is shown for politicians, you may be quite sure that undue power is once more being exercised; is vested in the ruler or rulers. That is, of course, if you believe in the possibility of ‘popular sovereignty’, and do not regard that as just a beautiful phrase.
“In effect we know – however much we may believe in the ultimate possibility of full ‘popular sovereignty’ – that at present to say that ‘men are competent to govern themselves’ (see my above proviso) does not agree with the facts.
“A law made in a free society by a quite unimportant functionary – a mere politician – would be a day-to-day affair. Our society admittedly does not quite answer the description of free. Nevertheless, with conditions altering all the time, as is the case just now, and with such rapidity, laws require to be overhauled incessantly. This is not subservience to our techniques; the radio, television, the flying machine, and now atomic energy are not easy to ignore. It probably saves time to conform – be ’subservient’. And the most portentous of statutes is only a technique which should be scrapped with as little compunction as we do an obsolete mode of locomotion, or a lighting and heating system.
“Yet the stark contradiction remains between more and more rapidly modified conditions of life – vastly multiplied power of production, etc., on the one hand, and the inherited rigidity of law on the other.”, pp.154-6
“But the New World is a mercurial, electric continent of great size and great climatic range, responsible for alligators in its Southern part, and black sub-arctic squirrels and sub-zero weather in its Northern part: it began at once to make their correct, well-articulated, perfectly balanced State-edifice of checks and balances look like a mirage.”, p.168
“In earlier chapters I stressed the wizard speed of its waxing, so characteristic of America – the mass-power of its Technic rushes everything into being with magical suddenness. Therefore, all about which I am speaking are things many of which may have come to pass only a few years after the ink is dry upon this page. Others will take longer; but none so very long.”, p.169
“The ruler is traditionally anything but a rooted person. Kings had roots in every country, just like a modern American, and so had many nobles too….
“Today the parliamentary rulers, who have succeeded the kings and archdukes, take every opportunity of traveling outside their national frontiers. Their roots must get frayed a good bit, from so much moving about, and this is in general an excellent sign. We should always welcome movement of any kind.
“Now I arrive at the goal of these particular observations. The ‘rootless Elysium’, as I have called it, enjoyed by the great polyglot herds in the American cities, is what will come to exist everywhere after universalism is established: after the final change-over from a plurality of competitive nationalist societies to one great cosmic society. And for the new principle of brotherhood, and the essential de-snobbing of the various racial stocks, we can depend, I suggest, upon the atom bomb. It sounds ridiculous put in that way. But all our behavior is ridiculous, and there is no rational road to a more sensible world.
“When that change has been effected, it is obvious that there cannot but be an immense RELAXATION of the kind experienced by the earlier immigrant to the United States. Consider how the elimination of one great department of our political life labeled ‘Foreign Affairs’, with its corollary, ‘War’’, would revolutionize our lives. The change would be far greater than it is easy to imagine. Were we informed that our span of life was henceforth extended to an average of two hundred years – the man of forty becoming the man of a hundred – that would have a very great effect upon our lives, would it not? But hardly greater than will this change I am discussing.”, pp.190-1
“But the word ‘American’, as I use it here, covers a new culture, an incipient universalism – in the nature of things eclectic: not an old-style nationalism. That is why geography does not matter. Paris, Illinois, has no advantage over Paris, France, unless you are thinking in the old national terms, and the latter is a much better place to work in for intellectual workers – or WRITERS.”, p.216
“In the West, the ‘rebel’ is the most popular type of free man. What is free is felt about as something mildly criminal. In America, where the social conscience is more uneasy than in England, legislation is forever tending to classify as a penal offense anything for which men crave – such as the consumption of alcohol, or of tobacco, indulgence in the sexual appetite, or the possession of a faithful hound. There is no country where sumptuary laws blossom more naturally.”, p. 220
“At this point he (ED. – Laski**) might have added that, untrained as they are to judge whether the solutions suggested by the rival candidates are wicked or charitable, the Press and Radio step in, so that they may know how to vote; and that the Press and Radio are not such politically Simon Pure agents as they claim to be. These additional factors demand attention, to make democracy thoroughly intelligible, since, as Bryce*** pointed out, it is impossible to imagine a modern democracy without the Press (to which the Radio has since then been added).”, pp.223-4
“So we have that ‘basic condition that ultimate power must be confided to those who have neither time nor desire to grasp the details of its working.’ The bulk of those in any parliamentary democracy have quite trouble enough just living, without politics; ’their capacity will be exhausted by the mere effort to live; and the search to understand life will lead them into complexities they have rarely the energy, and seldom the leisure, to penetrate…. The context of their lives which is, for the majority, the most important, is a private context… they set their wills by the wills of institutions they rarely explore…. They obey the orders of government from inertia; and even their resistance is too often blind resentment rather than a reasoned desire to secure an alternative.
“A very promising company upon whom to bestow absolute power will be the reader’s reflection all along. However, it is only in name that this horde governs. ‘The administration of the modern State is a technical matter, and… those who can penetrate its secrets are relatively few in number.’ It is, then, pretty obvious that the State, in fact, will be governed by these few ‘technicians’ (or what Mr. Burnham would call ‘managers’), and that the ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, is just a political fairy-tale. A fairy-tale told to the people to lull and please them, while the group of technicians are busy, in their inaccessible administrative fastness of power, governing, in whatever way they please.”, p.224
**ED. – These quotations come from Professor Harold Laski’s book, THE GRAMMAR OF POLITICS, pp.15-90.
*** Rt. Hon. Viscount Bryce, author of AMERICAN COMMONWEALTH, 1893
