Self Condemned

by Lewis, Wyndham

  This reprint of Self Condemned is based upon the first edition published by Methuen in 1954, three years after Lewis went blind, and three years before his death (even then a period of enormous productivity in which he produced some of his best work). Self Condemned is in part based upon the experiences of Lewis and his wife, Gladys Anne (always called Froanna), who left for Canada the day before war was declared in September 1939. Although he had predicted (for once, rightly) in The Hitler Cult (1939) that the Second World War would last six years, he never intended to remain in North America for the duration of the fighting. The trip was expected to be an opportunity to pick up portrait commissions from wealthy Americans and Canadians. Regrettably, very few actual commissions materialized, though he did paint Eleanor Martin, the mother of former Prime Minister Paul Martin. A recurring cycle of bad luck, debt, cash-flow problems, and social isolation all contributed to the Lewises’ largely unhappy stay in the long-gone Tudor Hotel on Sherbourne Street in Toronto — a dismal refuge that Lewis at the time generalized as his “Tudor period” (Letters, 311). Strangely, he took very little advantage of his family connections in Montreal, which was, of course, a lively cultural centre even in the 1940s. Indeed, some Montreal painters and writers — among them, Jori Smith, Marion Scott, John Lyman, and Prudence Heward — were readers of his work. Lewis made several notorious pronouncements about Canada and Toronto of the 1940s, which rankle or delight, depending on one’s sensibility. He referred to Canada as “a sanctimonious icebox,” and offered this diagnosis of Toronto the Good: “‘Methodism and Money’ in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness” (Letters, 309, 327).

  But it would be a mistake to confuse the novel with autobiography. René Harding, the main character, is not Wyndham Lewis. Nor is Hester Lewis’s wife, Froanna. The differences are crucial. In the novel, René Harding, a professor of modern history, decides to renounce his professorship and chooses intellectual and social isolation in Canada, rather than remain in Europe and watch the brutal spectacle of the Second World War. His self-imposed exile from Britain to Canada on the eve of war (engineered by him without Hester’s knowledge) is a form of “protest” against the ravening psychosis of history, of which the coming war figures as a prime example. Rather than become what he imagines as inevitable — an apologist for the collapse of imperialism — he gives up his teaching post, offers a condescending farewell to his mother and siblings, and thrusts himself and his wife into poverty.

  The couple’s ultimately disastrous move to Momaco (the fictional double for Toronto) accelerates the process by which René’s sense of agency shrinks to that of a small room. In this respect, the novel is a fascinating example of the kind of externalized psychology Lewis believed in. That is to say, he wasn’t a believer in psychoanalysis or any interior notion of consciousness; mind and body are locked in combat with each other, but the field of battle is always an external one. Lewis tended to regard people (himself included) as having what one might call an exoskeletal psychology; relationships were about the external play and clash of shells, carapaces, pelts, rather than the internal conflicts of different souls or psyches. The novel is a compelling anatomization of Harding’s psychic collapse, whose overweening intellectual arrogance and seemingly limitless capacity for denial lead him and his wife into a domestic inferno.

  Wyndham Lewis and his wife, Gladys, aboard the Empress of Britain, bound for North America in September 1939.

  This dualism, which recalls that of Descartes (Lewis gave Harding the name René with good reason), is projected both onto the Hardings’ marriage and onto the room they are forced to inhabit. These projections become the occasion for one of the most sustained metaphors in the novel. Part Two of the story, entitled “The Room,” is an extended meditation on the emotional effects of co-existing in a hotel room extending only twenty-five feet by twelve. The Hardings’ relationship becomes a study in paranoia as the Room begins to take on the status of a separate consciousness, as if a mind were something which “could be entered through a door and sat down in” (Self Condemned, 214). As their idea of themselves as independent people continues to crumble, bodies become estranged from their voices. The voice, an important symbol of one’s individuality, begins to attach itself to the Room, and not necessarily to René or Hester.

  In another sense, their marriage, descending as it does into depression, suspicion, and mutual accusation, is a microcosm of the global conflict raging outside the walls of their cell. The Hardings’ confinement is, the novel suggests, a phenomenon that ranges over the whole continent “like the Chinese toy of box within box within box. And these boxes were all of a piece, all cut out of the same stuff. They were part of the same organism, this new North American organism. Their cells would have the same response to a given stimulus” (Self Condemned, 226). Hotel Blundell can be hived off from these containers as a “microcosm” of the world outside (Self Condemned, 227) — a “highly unstable box” that contains and is contained by psychosis. The hotel is a site of constant violence; they overhear brutal domestic abuse, a beloved worker in the hotel, Affie, is murdered, and René himself is slugged in a tavern. This cramped space at first permits René to give vent to an increasingly misogynistic attitude to his wife. He casts himself in the role of mind, and she in the role of body; his frankly ugly fantasies that her only worth is as a sexual object slowly recedes to yield a new insight — “In the other world, Hester, I treated you as you did not at all deserve. I cut a poor figure as I look back at myself ” (Self Condemned, 281).

  On the surface, René’s acknowledgment of his former brutality seems admirable, even romantic, as he concedes that “This tête-à-tête of ours over three years has made us as one person.... It is only when years of misery have caused you to grow into another person in this way that you can really know them.... I am talking to myself and we are one” (Self Condemned, 281). But this rather banal declaration of love and vulnerability has a sinister undertone. The oneness he feels is simply another version of the egoism that drove them from England in the first place. As he begins the slow process of resuscitating his intellectual career, René’s smug sense of superiority revives along with it. In effect, their relationship is a tragic allegory of the global catastrophe from which they seek refuge. The disaster ends in marking the hotel itself; one blazingly cold winter night it goes up in flames, and in the aftermath of fighting the flames, the building is encased in a hollow shell of thick ice.

  The Tudor Hotel, the real-life Hotel Blundell, in Toronto after the fire on February 15, 1943.

  Increasingly frustrated by her isolation, Hester argues with René about the possibility of returning to England. He flatly refuses, obsessing over the self-imposed notion that “it was Momaco or nothing, and he began to know this hysterically, fanatically, almost insanely. For he knew quite well that it was a fearful thing to know” (Self Condemned, 361). His career, he now believes, is absolutely tied to North America, and that any other choice — namely, Hester’s choice, London — would be death. Work, his latest muse, takes her place. And with traumatic consequences. René’s abandonment leads to Hester’s suicide: she throws herself under a truck, severing her head and legs from her body. In a brilliantly written, gruesome scene of identification, René encounters the gaze of death:

  Topmost was the bloodstained head of Hester, lying on its side. The poor hair was full of mud, which flattened it upon the skull. Her Eye protruded: it was strange it should have the strength to go on peering in the darkness. René took a step forward towards the exhibit, but he fell headlong, striking his forehead upon the edge of the marble slab.... As he fell it had been his object to seize the head and carry it away with him. [Self Condemned, 425]

  How does one confront a scene like this? Hester continues to peer without seeing into the darkness. She looks at him, but she neither sees nor recognizes him. Just as he wouldn’t see her point of view in life, René must face that her perspective is now utterly closed to him. But why does he reach for her s
evered head? Why this grotesque gesture? It is as if he is trying, even after her death, to bring her gaze into line with his, as if they could again have the single perspective he fought so long to wrest from her. The desecration of her body is a radical form of denial — not just of the fact of her death but that he is in part responsible. In a variant ending to the novel, Lewis brings the Hardings back to London, by turns condemning René to working as an academic hack, and Hester to her suicide. But the important difference between the two endings (and the published one is superior, in my opinion) is that it focuses on René’s emotional collapse and the hollowing out of his psyche. In the published version, the inability to look upon his guilt produces a total dissociation from reality, which the novel calls “The White Silence.”

  He falls into another kind of cell — an achromatic prison that cuts off all feeling and all perception, a blinding labyrinth in which “the mind began to dream of white rivers which led nowhere, which developed laterally, until they ended in a limitless white expanse” (Self Condemned, 428). When he slowly emerges from this psychosis, he finds himself haunted by his dead wife. He comes to dismiss these apparitions as “Hesteria,” effectively placing the blame for her death and his illness exclusively on her. And this gesture produces the final irony — it is in this moment that he is truly condemning himself; his academic career revives and flourishes, but at the price of his humanity. He is now, like the hotel that once housed him, a glacial, fiery husk of a man awaiting death. The chilling clarity with which Lewis is able to write such an agonizing, yet human novel is a testimony to his enduring power as a prose stylist. And the fact that he doesn’t flinch from telling us this story is an avowal of his confidence and respect for us, his readers.

  The original dust jacket, with an illustration by Michael Ayrton, of the first edition of Self Condemned, which was first published in 1954.

  Wyndham Lewis continued to write even after becoming blind in 1951.Three years later he published Self Condemned.

  Some Books by Wyndham Lewis

  America and Cosmic Man. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1948.

  America, I Presume. New York: Howell, Soskin and Company, 1940.

  The Apes of God. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

  The Art of Being Ruled. Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1989.

  Blast. 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

  Blasting and Bombardiering: An Autobiography (1914–1926). London: John Calder, 1982.

  The Childermass. London: Chatto and Windus, 1928.

  The Complete Wild Body. Ed. Bernard Lafourcade. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1982.

  The Hitler Cult, and How It Will End. London: Dent, 1939.

  The Jews — Are They Human? London: George Allen and Unwin, 1939.

  Malign Fiesta. London: Methuen, 1955.

  Monstre Gai. London: Methuen, 1955.

  Men Without Art. Ed. Seamus Cooney. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1987.

  The Revenge for Love. Ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1991.

  Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography. Ed. Toby Foshay. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984.

  Self Condemned. London: Methuen, 1954.

  Tarr. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.

  Time and Western Man. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.

  Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays. Ed. Alan Munton. New York: Carcanet Press, 1979.

  Wyndham Lewis on Art. Eds. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969.

  Further Reading

  Ayers, David. Wyndham Lewis and Western Man. London: Macmillan, 1992.

  Chapman, Robert T. Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires. London: Vision Press, 1973.

  Edwards, Paul. Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

  Foshay,Toby Avard. Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.

  Gasiorek, Andrzej. Wyndham Lewis and Modernism. Tavistock, Eng.: Northcote House, 2003.

  Jameson, Fredric. Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.

  Meyers, Jeffrey. The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

  Michel, Walter. Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971.

  O’Keeffe, Paul. Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis. London: Pimlico, 2001.

  Powe, B.W. The Solitary Outlaw. Toronto: Lester, Orpen, and Dennys, 1987.

  Quéma, Anne. The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s Allegories, Aesthetics, and Politics. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999.

  PART ONE

  THE RESIGNATION

  I

  THAT OTHER MAN AGAIN

  “If you call five six, you embarrass five, seeing that people then are going to expect of him the refulgence of six.” He looked up, coughed, and continued. “If you rename six seven, far more bustle is expected of him. I have been speaking, naturally, of the ante-meridian. In the post-meridian it is the reverse. Put your clock on, call five-thirty six-thirty, and people will exclaim how much more light six-thirty has. You push back the night. If you call Clara Stella, people would say how dull Stella has become, or how bright Clara has become. Five and six, post-meridian, are like Stella and Clara. See?”

  “The little girl sees,” Essie Harding said.

  From the other side of the breakfast table Essie had stared at her husband under a wide clear brow, with blankly bold, large, wide-open eyes. It was a mature face, the natural wide-openness not disagreeably exploited: the remains of the child-mind were encouraged to appear in the clear depths of the grey-blue. But as he spoke of five and six, she thought, rather, of forty-seven and of thirty-seven (but not of thirty-four and twenty-four). She renamed ages: as her husband spoke of renaming the hours of daybreak and the sunset, she shuffled about the years of life, calling thirty forty and vice versa. As to the explanation of what occurred when you put the clock forward or backward, Essie did not follow or would not follow. Allergic to learning, as are many children, for her the teacher was a lifelong enemy. As she had stared, wide-eyed and with her mind a wilful blank, at her mistress as a child, her eyes hung open like a gaping mouth; and the fact that her husband was a professional teacher, a trained imparter of knowledge, caused Essie all the more readily to drop back into the mulish trance of childhood; expertly unreceptive she stripped her large defiant eyes of all intelligence, and left them there staring at his face, while her moist red lips were parted as she slowly raised a fresh spoonful of sugared porridge.

  “Have I made it clear what it means to put the clock on?” he enquired, with no expectancy that the reply would be that he had.

  “No.” She shook her head.

  He laughed.

  “You are lazy,” he told her. “Had you been a boy, and had you lived a few decades ago, your bottom would have been furrowed up by the cane; fessée after fessée would have been your lot.”

  She slowly sucked the spoon, and there was substituted in her eyes for the aggressive blank, an amorous and inviting light, as he had expected.

  Deliberately he had referred to the caned posterior, as if it were a bait the other way round in order to provoke the reaction in question. He looked at her curiously. For a moment he almost embarked upon a didactic account of the periodic nature of sexual desire in the animal kingdom. Instead he enquired, “Why this sudden interest in daylight saving?”

  “Rosemary …”

  “Ah. I see. Just repeat what I said about calling five six. She is a bright child, you will not have to interpret.”

  Essie laughed. “Any more questions of that sort and I shall explain that I am dumb, and that she must wait until Gladys gets well. She has one of those enquiring minds. I think she is an awful littl
e brat, between ourselves.”

  “Her mama has an enquiring mind, too. It’s a beastly thing to have, I agree.”

  He lighted a cigarette and watched her almost furtively for a few seconds. Then he placed his hand upon an open letter at the side of his plate.

  “What shall we do about Richard?”

  “When does he want us to go?”

  “About the tenth, I think, of next month. How do you feel about it?”

  She sat with her hands behind her head, staring silently at the wall behind his head. Neither spoke for some minutes.

  “I do not feel terribly like the idyllic landscape of England just at present,” he observed. “Do you feel like going down yourself for a weekend? It would do you good.”

  “Not by myself; because I look countryfied, they would want me to milk their cow and draw water from their well. I came back last time from their place thoroughly worn out.”

  “Right. Anything would be better than bucolic England just at present, for me. I must write him.”

  A bell in the little hallway exploded into hysterical life. A door, from behind which the hum of a vacuum cleaner had for some time been heard, opened, and one of London’s Dickensian charladies stood there without moving for a moment, a small bird-like figure with a white crest, which bobbed backward and forward, and an irascible eye. This eye was directed across the breakfast table towards the front door. The char-lady propelled herself around the room, head shooting in and out, and darted at the front door, ready for battle. Her small, raucous challenge was heard, “What is it? Ooder ye want?” The landing was extremely dark, and Mrs. Harradson never could see who her enemy was. In the present case a telegram appeared out of the shadows impolitely near her little beak. She seized it, and, with considerable suspicion, holding it between thumb and forefinger, she re-entered the breakfast room.