Blasting and Bomardiering

by Wyndham Lewis

  These manifestoes require, I suppose, in order to be popularly consumed, and at this distance of time, some explanation. Take the first Blast, 'Blast Humour'. That is straightforward enough. The Englishman has what he calls a 'sense of humour'. He says that the German, the Frenchman, and most foreigners do not possess this attribute, and suffer accordingly. For what does the 'sense of humour' mean but an ability to belittle everything— to make light of everything? Not only does the Englishman not 'make a mountain out of a molehill'; he is able to make a molehill out of a mountain. That is an invaluable magic to possess. The most enormous hobgoblin becomes a pigmy on the spot. Or such is the ideal of this destructive 'humorous' standpoint, which has played such a great part in anglosaxon life—just as its opposite, 'quixotry', has played a great part in Spanish life.

  This manifesto was written (by myself) immediately before the War. And of course 'the sense of humour' played a very great part in the War. 'Old Bill' was the real hero of the World

  War, on the English side, much more than any V.C. A V.C. is after all a fellow who does something heroic; almost unenglish. It is taking things a bit too seriously to get the V.C. The really popular fellow is the humorous Ole Bill a la Bairnsfather. And it was really 'Ole Bill' who won the war—with all that that expression 'won the war' implies.

  Against the tyranny of the 'sense of humour', I, in true anglo-saxon fashion, humorously rebelled. That is all that 'Blast Humour' means. I still regard 'humour' as an exceedingly dangerous drug. I still regard it as, more often than not, an ignoble specific. In a word, I still 'blast' humour. (But then we come to the 'Blesses', and since there are two sides to every argument, you find me blessing what I had a moment before blasted. And example of English 'fairness'!)

  Take my next Blast—namely, 'Blast years 1837 to 1900'. The triumph of the commercial mind in England, Victorian 'liberalism', the establishment of such apparently indestructible institutions as the English comic paper Punch, the Royal Academy, and so on—such things did not appeal to me, they appeal to me even less to-day, and I am glad to say more and more Englishmen share my antipathy. Boehm was, of course, the sculptor responsible for the worst of the bourgeois statuary which, prior to the war-sculptors, like Jagger, was the principle eyesore encountered by the foreign visitor to our 'capital of empire'. The 'eunuchs and stylists' referred to in this second manifesto would be the Paterists and Wildeites: and lastly the 'diabolics' of Swinburne are given a parting kick. For in 1914 there was still a bad hang-over from the puerile literary debauchery of that great Victorian who reacted against the 'non-conformist conscience'; who was 'naughty' before the 'Naughty Nineties' capped his sodawater wildness with a real live Oscar.

  The third of these manifestoes (all of my composition) is 'Bless the Hairdresser'. That will be a little more difficult to understand. This might equally well have been headed 'Blast Fluffiness'. It exalts formality, and order, at the expense of the disorderly and the unkempt. It is merely a humorous way of stating the classic standpoint, as against the romantic. Need I say that I am in complete agreement, here, with Mr. W. L. of 1914?

  As to 'Bless England', that requires no explanation. Our 'Island home'! And 'Bless all Ports' is just a further outburst of benediction—more 'Island home' stuff. That winds up the specimen pages of the manifestoes from Blast. However, here they are, as far as possible produced in facsimile, though you lose the scale of the 12 in. high Blast page.

  BLAST HUMOUR— Quack ENGLISH drug for stupidity and sleepiness. Arch enemy of real, conventionalizing like gunshot, freezing supple Real in ferocious chemistry of Laughter.

  BLAST SPORT— humour's first cousin and accomplice. impossibility for Englishman to be grave and keep his end up psychologically.

  impossible for him to use Humour as well and be persistently grave.

  Alas! necessity for the big doll's show in front of mouth. Visitation of Heaven on English Miss.

  gums, canines of FIXED GRIN Death's Head symbol of Anti-Life. curse those who will hang over this Manifesto with silly canines exposed.

  BLAST— years 1837 to 1900 curse Abysmal inexcusable middle-class (also Aristocracy and Proletariat).

  BLAST—

  Pasty shadow cast by gigantic BOEHM (imagined at introduction of BOURGEOIS VICTORIAN VISTAS).

  WRING THE NECK OF all sick inventions born in that

  progressive white wake.

  BLAST their weeping whiskers—hirsute

  RHETORIC of EUNUCH and STYLIST-

  SENTIMENTAL HYGIENICS ROUSSEAUISMS (wild nature cranks) DIABOLICS— —raptures and roses of the erotic bookshelves culminating in PURGATORY OF PUTNEY

  BLESS the HAIRDRESSER. He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee. Hourly he ploughs heads for sixpence, Scours chins and lips for threepence. He makes systematic mercenary war on this

  WILDERNESS.___

  He trims aimless and retrograde growths

  into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES AND ANGULAR PLOTS.

  BLESS this hessian (or silesian) EXPERT correcting the grotesque anachronisms of our physique.

  BLESS ENGLISH HUMOUR

  It is the great barbarous weapon of

  the genius among races.

  The wild mountain railway from idea

  to idea, in the ancient Fair of life.

  BLESS SWIFT for his solemn bleak

  wisdom of laughter. SHAKESPEARE for his bitter northern

  Rhetoric of Humour. BLESS all english eyes

  that grow crows-feet with their fancy and energy.

  BLESS this hysterical wall build round the ego.

  BLESS the solitude of LAUGHTER. BLESS the Separating, ungregarious BRITISH GRIN.

  BLESS ENGLAND—

  for its shps

  which switchback on blue, green and red seas all round the pink earth-ball

  big bets on each.

  BLESS ALL SEAFARERS— they exchange not one land for another, but one element for another, the more against the less abstract.

  BLESS the vast planetary abstraction of the OCEAN.

  BLESS the Arabs of the ATLANTIC.

  This Island Must be Contrasted With the Bleak Waves.

  BLESS ALL PORTS—

  ports, restless machines of scooped out basins heavy insect dredgers monotonous cranes stations

  lighthouses, blazing through the frosty starlight, cutting the storm like a cake beaks of infant boats,

  side by side, heavy chaos of

  wharves, steep walls of

  factories womanly town

  BLESS these machines that work the little boats across clean liquid space in beelines.

  BLESS the great ports hull

  liverpool london

  newcastle-on-tyne bristol glasgow

  BLESS ENGLAND,

  workshop, its apex at BLESS cold magnanimous delicate gauche fanciful stupid

  ENGLISHMEN.

  industrial island machine, pyramidal Shetland, discharging itself on the sea.

  CHAPTER IV

  'Britannia's hard on the Lions'

  Blast appeared on June 20th, 1914. There was not long to go until the 'fog of war' came down. The actual blaze of publicity was therefore brief. Before that, for say a year, publicity had been accumulating about my head. Blast gave the finishing touch. Then I fell into anonymity. I became the Bombardier. Though even in that capacity, as you have seen, my publicity pursued me.

  I didn't become a Bombardier at once. For the first nine months of the war I was hors de combat—either with respect to this new description of Combat, or mortal combat, or what still remained of play-boy operations upon the art-front in the preliminary sham-war. I had been poisoned and had got some infection. Tarr was written, a War Blast appeared. I lived at No. 4 Percy Street, much in the company of Captain Guy Baker attempting to rid myself of this trouble without operations, part of the time in bed. And then I enlisted.

  Now especially in the weeks succeeding the publication of Blast, and less intensively for a number of months prior to that, I passed my time
in the usual way when a 'Lion' is born. I saw a great deal of what is called 'society'.

  Everyone by way of being fashionably interested in art, and many who had never opened a book or bought so much as a sporting-print, much less 'an oil', wanted to look at this new oddity, thrown up by that amusing spook, the Zeitgeist. So the luncheon and dinner-tables of Mayfair were turned into show-booths. For a few months I was on constant exhibition. I cannot here enumerate all the sightseers, of noble houses or of questionable Finance, who passed me under review. They were legion. Coronetted envelopes showered into my letter-box. The editor of Blast must at all costs be viewed; and its immense puce cover was the standing joke in the fashionable drawing-room, from Waterloo Place to the border-line in Belgravia.

  It was extremely instructive. As a result of these sociable activities I did not sell a single picture, it is perhaps superfluous to say. But it was an object-lesson in the attitude of what remained of aristocratic life in England to the arts I practised. This lesson I took to heart; and the war concluded, I have never, except for an occasional outburst of lunching and dining, entered upon for some strictly limited purpose, consorted with what Mr. Arlen called 'those delightful people'.

  As a practical person, and devoid of any emotional bias, I can assert that the district south of the Marble Arch but north of the Ritz, and enclosed on the east and west by Regent Street and Park Lane, is strictly speaking useless to anybody, unless they have an appetite for a sort of bogus 'high-life'—or it was, I perhaps should say. For at present it is plastered with TO LET notices. The Great Slump delivered the coup de grace. May-fair is no more.

  As ever—for we have literary history to prove it—these good people of the British beau monde looked upon an artist as an oddity, to be lion-hunted from expensive howdahs. In the snobbish social sunset of 1914 I did my stuff, I flatter myself, to admiration. As regards the poor results of all this publicity I was easily the most good-natured 'lion' that ever stepped. The people I met entertained me as much as I entertained them. Rapidly I understood that the champagne of luncheon tables and the vulgar paraphernalia of butlers and druggets were all that was to be got out of them. But this nursery of almost mindless spoilt-children was a sort of barren accolade, of a farcical celebrity. Good-humouredly I accepted it; for, indirectly, it might serve the cause of 'rebel' or of 'abstract' art and revolutionary letters, I reflected. I was content to starve on champagne and caviare for a season. And then came down on top of all of us the greatest war of all time: came Heartbreak House, came Red Revolution, came everything that you would expect to come, upon such a long-established blank of genteel fatuity.

  Besides, I had been warned. Roger Fry had told me, and what he did not know in that connection was not worth knowing, that he had never encountered a rich person of unmitigated British stock who had been of any service to him as a 'patron'. Supporters of his ventures in the arts had never been the typical inmates of Mayfair. Always it had been an American, or Russian, or Irish, or Jewish importation.

  Then again, I remembered a dream which Augustus John had recounted to me. It was about the time of my first meeting with that standard celebrity. He had dreamed, he said, that he was conversing with a society woman of astonishing brilliance, who was so witty that his dream scintillated with the most unexpected retorts and sallies. All he could recall of them, however, upon waking up, was one saying, 'Britannia's hard on the lions!'

  Britannia's hard on the lions! That was what the lion dreamed! And it was true to the letter. Very hard indeed, though uncommonly charming of course in the hard-boiled English fashion.

  And if I had benefited from the experience of the living, the dead had told me the same tale. Voltaire and David Hume, to take at random two distant figures, had shocks of the same sort: David Hume returning to the capital of Scotland cursing the 'grinning barbarians who dwell by the side of the Thames'; Voltaire amazed to find a great man-of-letters ashamed to be one, and desirous only of being taken as a typical 'man-about-town'. Or, if Disraeli is considered a more level-headed witness, he may be cited equally well. So let us turn to Coningsby.

  'Nothing strikes me more in this brilliant city (Paris) than the tone of its society, so much higher than our own. What an absence of petty personalities! How much conversation, and how little gossip! . . . Men, too, and great men, develop their minds. A great man in England, on the contrary, is generally the dullest dog in company.. ..

  There is, indeed, throughout every circle of Parisian society, from the chateau to the cabaret, a sincere homage to intellect; and this without any maudlin sentiment. None sooner than the Parisians can draw the line between factitious notoriety and honest fame; or sooner distinguish between the counterfeit celebrity and the standard reputation. In England we too often alternate a supercilious neglect of genius and a rhapsodical pursuit of quacks.'

  This is possibly the reason why in England 'genius' is obliged to affect the methods of the quack, in order to survive at all. And it is quite certain that what happened to me, in those first days of furious junketing, was that I was mistaken for a quack; it can only have been that.

  However, I was thoroughly prepared as you see : I was not surprised, luckily, when I became a lion, to find this gilded Tamer a tough customer. I began studying her ways with curiosity, this spoilt and cocksure goddess of the ocean wave. I filled a notebook with Stendhalian observations.

  CHAPTER V

  The Prime Minister and Myself, 1914

  In my last chapter I have been describing how the richest society in the world reacts to its lions, and how its lions react for the most part to this society. But all the people I met at that time, before and after that comic earthquake, Blast, were not true to type. And all the people I met, as a consequence of my sudden fame, were not the standard inhabitants of Mayfair. Some lived east of Regent Street, and some south of the Ritz. The most interesting society in London was not in Mayfair at all.

  There was Lady Ottoline Morrell, for instance; sister of the Duke of Portland, a grande dame of Bloomsbury, and whose destiny had been involved with that of so many distinguished people: who has been a friend of D. H. Lawrence, of Mr. Augustus John, of Mr. Aldous Huxley, of Mr. W. B. Yeats. She held crowded receptions in her house in Bedford Square. Those great parties, of fashion and 'intellect' mixed in equal measure, would have satisfied, I am sure, even milord Beacons-field.

  The old Liberal society was then still intact, with Asquith for its political figurehead. And Asquith was of course Prime Minister. So actually the people who were the most alive were the people who were in power. They plunged England into an unprecedentedly destructive and unsuccessful war, they were the people who accepted and worked the Entente Cordiale policy of Edward VII. But upon the social side they contrasted very favourably with the Baldwins and Macdonalds who have come after them—and whose policies look as if they might exceed in destructiveness even those of 'Encirclement' No. 1.

  It was at Lady Ottoline's that I met for the first time Lord Oxford, then Mr. Asquith and Prime Minister. As to his person-aiity, it was that of a cultivated old clergyman, or he inhabited a borderland where Law and Divinity met. And he certainly had the manners a little (with me) of an investigating attorney, tempered with the courteous mildness of a lettered sky-pilot. I might have been a client of his—a client whom he regarded with considerable mental reserve. And he would sit down beside me and start his questions, as if resolved to thoroughly go into the case, incessantly pulling at his nose, as if he were taking snuff.

  Mr. Asquith unquestionably displayed a marked curiosity regarding the 'Great London Vortex', in which he seemed to think there was more than met the eye. He smelled politics beneath this revolutionary artistic technique. I, of course, was quite at a loss to understand what he was driving at. That it should be suspected that an infernal machine was hidden in the midst of the light-hearted mockery of my propaganda was to me fantastic. I was cross-questioned at length about my principles. I remember especially that he asked me 'whether I was
in touch with people of similar views in other countries'. Yes, I admitted, I had corresponded with continental painters, critics and men of letters. He nodded his head thoughtfully at this. It was obvious it gave him food for thought. Here was a movement masking itself beneath the harmless trappings of the fine arts, and camouflaged as a fashionable stunt of the studios, but with wide ramifications in all countries, and with unavowed political objectives. It cracked jokes, attached to it was a technical mumbo-jumbo to rattle and hoodwink the fashionable crowd. Its so called pictures looked like plastic cyphers or properties of the magician. And here was its high-priest! A pale, tall, exceedingly romantic looking young fellow, who was civil, good-humoured, and quite impenetrable. This learned P.M. was reminded of illuminism, doubtless. He thought of the philosophes. He saw in 'the Vortex' a political portent. His attitude to it, and to me, was that of an expert on his mettle, confronted with a political crossword-puzzle of the greatest ingenuity.

  I was, I protest again, completely innocent of all political motives. I saw that if London was to be pulled down (and this

  I advocated, and still advocate) that vested interests would be involved. That much was evident, but even of that I was not over-conscious. While I was full of the problem of 'Ancient Lights', the mind of the politician, in the nature of things, was busy with the question of the Royal Prerogative, the Mutiny Act, a Second Chamber: of coup d'etats and of the Rights of Man. I was thinking of a little tube of paint, of Emerald Oxide of Chromium, with which I had just worked wonders. He was thinking of secret reports of torpedo tubes, say, in 'mystery' U-boats, and of the subtle attack upon the European order by the back-door—of the studio, the study, and the newspaper office. I was turning over in my mind the duel of Otto Kreisler, in my novel Tarr: but the politician had a whole nation of Teutons on his hands or knew he soon would.