Sydney and Violet

by Stephen Klaidman

  Sometimes the writers were trying to get even, as in Huxley’s parodies of Lewis and Nancy Cunard in Antic Hay, and sometimes they satirized friends and benefactors for no obvious reason except that they were vulnerable, which seemed to have been the case with poor Lady Ottoline, whom dear friends Lawrence and Huxley subjected to ridicule. Huxley especially upset her because apart from herself and her husband, virtually the whole Garsington ensemble—Bertrand Russell, Dora Carrington, and Mark Gertler among them—were made to look foolish in Crome Yellow. She must have been an especially appealing target, though, because she was also satirized by Osbert Sitwell, her friend Gilbert Cannan, and Walter Turner, another friend, at least by the standards of the day. Their satire was broad and often cruel, but it differed from Lewis’s, which was grotesque.

  Lewis, on the other hand, was hard to parody because he was a living, breathing caricature of himself. This is perhaps best illustrated by Osbert Sitwell’s 1938 work of fiction, Those Were the Days, Panorama with Figures, in which Sitwell’s character Stanley Esor is so much like the real Lewis that no one who knew anything about him could have possibly mistaken Esor for anyone else, or have thought Sitwell was being anything other than faithful to Lewis’s irrepressible self. Those who knew nothing about him surely would have concluded that the characterization was meant to be satirical or more likely that Esor was a fantastic invention. With the exception of one low blow—the fictional Esor was rejected for military service in World War I, while Lewis served as an artilleryman and later an officer and war artist—Sitwell’s portrait is spot on, as this brief but typical example of his misogynistic behavior demonstrates:

  Nevertheless, wherever he lived—and he moved his abode at very frequent intervals, so as to add to the aura of romance and secrecy with which he liked to invest himself or often, perhaps, for other, more practical reasons—his slaves, at a distance, would accompany him; dim, gaunt, tall, sturdy, freckled, faded females, who, after the manner of the vague, sandy-haired goddesses of northern countries, always seemed to inhabit some cloud, suspended above him, at the back of his studio. Yet these Amazons, plainly of an altogether formidable strength and character, existed, it appeared, only to serve him. Thus no one was ever able to discover their names, the positions they occupied, or what professions they followed; apart from him they seemed to have no being; but, at the least sign of trouble for their master, at once they would materialize out of the void, sure and inalienable … How did they know; why did they care? Their mothering of him, he may have felt, ill matched the superman vision of himself which he was trying to fix in the eye of the world; that vision of a strong man, self-willed, a solitary being of unique grandeur, defying the past and saluting the future.

  Apart from its arch tone, this description could easily have come from either of the admirable and generally admiring Lewis biographies cited in this book. It is quite simply an accurate rendering of the man as he was.

  The Apes of God appeared to mixed, strongly partisan reviews. It is not the kind of book that reviewers, or anyone for that matter, would be wishy-washy about. Among those in the pro-Apes camp was Lewis’s friend the poet Roy Campbell, whose review was rejected by the New Statesman for being excessively laudatory. Campbell was asked to revise it but refused. Richard Aldington also wrote a rave review, which was published in the Sunday Referee. After noting that Lewis’s satire was cruel, he wrote ecstatically that Apes was “one of the most tremendous farces ever conceived in the mind of man. For comparison one must fall back on Rabelais and Aristophanes.” He concluded by anointing it “the greatest piece of writing since Ulysses.” A year later, however, a letter he wrote to Sydney reflected a radically different point of view:

  My objections to the satire of Lewis I imagine are similar to your own. This satire almost invariably springs from deep personal rancor, at the expense of persons who are either insignificant or quite innocent. It is labored to the point of being intolerable through its damned iteration. It becomes grotesque and inhuman, because all proportion is lost; gigantic puppets are hewn into pieces without the slightest danger to the swordsman, who nevertheless pretends to be in imminent peril from his own harmless monsters. It is butchery, not artistry. And it is fundamentally inhuman. Nevertheless, one must recognize the energy and the remarkable gift of vituperation.

  Aldington, a well-respected poet, novelist, and critic, seems to have been struck by a bolt of intellectual lightning sometime between June 1930, when Apes first appeared, and June 1931, when he wrote to Sydney. Or he was just being two-faced, a mode of behavior as common then as it is now. Sydney certainly would have read or at least heard about Aldington’s review in the Sunday Referee, and Aldington would almost certainly have assumed he had read it. If this is correct it would have been shameless of Aldington to write as he did without at least explaining his dramatic turnabout. On the other hand it was taken for granted in those days that writers would lie about the obvious, as when they denied they had modeled their characters on their friends and acquaintances. The only firm conclusion I can draw from any of this is that Aldington was a lot closer to the critical bull’s-eye the second time than he was the first.

  Lewis was so angered by the New Statesman’s rejection of Campbell’s review of Apes that he was moved to publish a sixty-three-page pamphlet defending the book, for which he solicited letters in praise of it from friends. Two of the more interesting ones are from H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats. Wells’s brief missive is notable for three reasons: It is addressed to the Arthur Press, Lewis’s self-publishing entity, not Lewis himself; the praise is conditional; and the letter contains unexplained ellipses. Yeats’s letter is descriptive and favorable in spirit, but it is ambiguous and avoids direct praise of Apes. It also chides Lewis for satirizing Edith Sitwell, whose book Gold Coast Customs he praises.

  A trio of characters animates the action in The Apes of God. Horace Zagreus is a kind of agitator whose primary role is to provoke the Apes into revealing their true selves. His secondary role is to act as a mouthpiece for a shadowy figure known only as Pierpoint, whom everyone considers a genius but who never actually appears in the book. Zagreus “broadcasts” Pierpoint’s “wisdom” to the Apes, sometimes at great length, revealing an outlook on life remarkably similar to Lewis’s and in effect providing instructions on what to make of an otherwise opaque work. The third character is Dan Boleyn, the dull-witted young man ironically labeled a genius by Zagreus. Although the scholar Robert T. Chapman refers to him as a kind of “medium” for channeling the satire, to me on the whole he seems superfluous.

  CHEZ LIONEL KEIN, ESQ.

  Compared to the gentle jabs of Leverson, the Grossmiths, and Hichens, Lewis was launching grenades in The Apes of God. The portrait of the Schiffs in the chapter devoted to them is spiked with crude anti-Semitism, innuendoes of homosexuality, and obvious allusions to social and intellectual pretension and naive hero worship. The critic John Gawsworth, who shared some of Lewis’s prejudices as well as his spectacular misjudgment of Hitler, wrote generally and approvingly: “Conscience never makes a coward of Lewis. He feeds it no sops. Jews, homosexuals, Lyon’s tea shops, he blasts them all, soundly and impersonally, for the good, if not of his soul, at least for the improvement of the present and the hope of the future.” We can stipulate here that Lewis’s anti-Semitic references in The Apes of God were ad hominem attacks not deserving a response and that despite several references in A True Story to homosexuality and one in his letters to Proust, there is no evidence that Sydney was homosexual. His pretension and hero worship of Proust were fair game.

  Part Nine, like every segment of The Apes of God, begins with a Lewis drawing. It is an unmistakable likeness of Sydney in the Vorticist style.

  A group of distinguished persons have gathered for dinner at the elegant London residence of Lionel and Isabel Kein. Mr. Zagreus and Dan Boleyn are among the guests. Zagreus wastes no time. From the moment he arrives he sets out in workmanlike fashion to provoke and antagonize both Keins. H
e begins with gratuitous references to Lionel’s deafness and his servant Hassan’s effeminate affect. Then, after overhearing Isabel singing German lieder, he asks her in German, “On which Jew street did you get that accent, dear Isabel?” And just in case any reader might still have failed to figure out that the Keins are the Schiffs, Lewis introduces a multitude of Schiff-related allusions to music, painting, Proust, and Sydney’s novel Myrtle, which he has transparently renamed Primrose.

  After this bombardment of obvious references, Lewis takes aim at Lionel’s love affair with Proust, goading him with an irritating question designed to elicit an unconsidered response. “Would I like to be one of Proust’s characters,” Kein repeated, “do I understand you Zagreus, that is your question? I should consider it well worth the privilege … of having known Proust, to be treated in any way by him that he thought fit!” Zagreus, or Lewis, must have licked his lips thinking he had succeeded brilliantly. Lionel, on the other hand, being Sydney, knew full well that Proust’s characters, with few exceptions, ranged from disagreeable to repulsive. But it didn’t matter. He had unlimited faith in Proust’s literary integrity. And his own commitment to honesty in art was unshakable, which he had demonstrated by the dispassionate way he treated himself in A True Story. So it seems only natural that he would put himself in the hands of his literary god, who he was certain would tell the truth, which he welcomed rather than feared. It would have been a rational choice, an opportunity to be grasped, not a pitfall to be avoided.

  Lewis pursued the theme more directly. Most people when looking at the world saw everything but themselves, Zagreus argued. But then if they did see themselves, captured unsentimentally and accurately as Proust would have done, they wouldn’t have been able to bear it. There is nothing wrong with that fairly commonplace observation except its source: Self-awareness was not among Zagreus/Lewis’s conspicuous virtues. Lionel/Sydney was not a paragon of self-awareness either—he seemed unaware, for example, that his compulsive honesty might offend other people—but compared to Zagreus/Lewis he looks like Mr. Introspection, a superhero of self-awareness.

  In keeping with his concept of himself as a great artist, Lewis set up a contrast between Wyndham “the great” and Sydney and Violet “the little.” He wrote that “the atmosphere of the salon,” which he characterized as organized pettiness, “has been adapted always to provide a place where the little can revenge themselves upon the great.” It seems highly unlikely that Sydney and Violet, who were appropriately categorized as salon keepers, ever had the slightest desire to impose anything “upon the great,” a category in which they came close to including Lewis, other than their admiration and hospitality. But the idea of revenge would have been completely out of character for them. Lewis exhibited the same fault here that he did in the Proust reference above. Satire, if it is to inflict even a minor wound, must have a reference point in reality.

  After another long lecture by Zagreus/Pierpoint the action, such as it is, moves to the dining room. The scene opens with a description of Isabel: “The herd ate and drank beneath the eyes of Mrs. Kein, who drank water and ate a little toast. Such restraint in public as regards nourishment was god-like and enhanced her arrogant detachment towards her guests. Her brilliant handsome profile was like a large ornate knife at the head of the table. A certain taint of craft was suggested, in her face, by the massive receding expanse of white forehead, from which the hair was pulled back—by the vivacity of the great, too-conspicuously knowing eyes—the long well-shaped piscine nose, like a metal fish.”

  Setting aside the unflattering physical description, it is at first hard to know exactly what to make of this paragraph: godlike restraint; arrogant detachment; a taint of craft; too-conspicuously knowing eyes, and (physical, but too good to leave out) a nose like a metal fish. But with a little reflection it is not impossible, if you cut Lewis a little slack. Violet suffered from a variety of ailments that might have accounted for her Spartan eating habits and, given her perennial equanimity, it is not too much of a stretch to accept that her demeanor could legitimately have been satirized as godlike. As far as arrogant detachment is concerned, she did not suffer fools and might well have come across as detached in certain company. The detachment probably wasn’t arrogant, but the adjective seems permissible in satire. Did she have a taint of craft, or more than a taint? Of course she did. And what about those too-conspicuously knowing eyes? I’m prepared to concede, since there is no evidence to the contrary, that Violet had knowing eyes and that Lewis did not exceed the reasonable bounds of satire when he labeled them too conspicuous. I have no idea, however, what to make of Lewis’s description of her nose looking like a metal fish.

  In another self-regarding instance a little further on, Lewis casts a cynical light on Sydney’s ability to retain a certain loyalty and even fondness for someone who has shown a lack of gratitude for his generosity and maligned him unfairly. Lewis the puppet master has the puppet Lionel express his feelings for and about the genius Pierpoint, who, we must remember, is Lewis:

  Well as you know I’ve stuck to Pierpoint through thick and thin. Isabel and I will never change in our regard for him—our deep regard. Once we give that we never take it back! But there are things about Pierpoint which even his most devoted friend would find it difficult to defend—that it is impossible to deny. I am sorry to say. I wish I could! Poor Pierpoint! I wish I could have helped him to—to, not to lay himself open to so much hostile criticism. What he will do now I really do not know—Isabel and I often ask each other that! We often wonder—. We talk a lot about it.… He has no money. What I’m terribly afraid of is that he may—well really go under—a man like that depends so much on the support of a few friends—good friends!

  Lewis must have planted a bug at 18 Cambridge Square. Sydney could have spoken Lionel’s lines exactly as they were written and he would have meant every word of it. Lewis reconstructed his feelings precisely and came close to re-creating his voice. At first it seemed as if he wanted Pierpoint to come across as pitiful and Lionel as compassionate. But that was a setup. As the conversation developed, what Lewis, who depended on patrons but hated feeling patronized, was actually getting at became clear. Lionel was shamelessly promoting his own benevolence and lying to boot. Zagreus explained to Dan Boleyn that “It’s all fantastically untrue … they never utter anything but a pack of lachrymose lies.”

  A bit later Lewis introduces a Scottish journalist named Keith who was based on Edwin Muir. He then attempts to slay Keith and Lionel with a single thrust. He declares that Lionel had “vamped up” a “little book” that he immediately sent off to Keith for review. The book itself he characterized as “Li-ing self-portraiture,” punning on the English nickname for Lionel, which is pronounced “lie.” It was “about Li’s school days (… resorted to in order to reach a vein of homosexual episodes.…).” Setting aside Lewis’s belittling comments about the book and his innuendoes about Lionel’s sexuality, his main point was that Lionel had sent his book off to his friend Keith in the hope, or perhaps the certainty, that it would get a good review. But this tactic was as common then as it is now, Lewis indulged in it as much as anyone, and anyone likely to have read The Apes of God would have known about it and in many cases used it, so what exactly was Lewis’s point?

  By the end of the episode Lewis, apparently so enraged that he was no longer capable of satire, was reduced to pure invective: “Kein at last has ‘an admirer’! Oh ho! A something-for-nothing, a boob in the flesh—an authentic unpaid supporter! Demented curiosity in the Kein household! Who is the unknown idiot? Who can this unmatched moron be.…” Et cetera.

  Lewis had still more to say about Sydney’s literary efforts, which he denigrated on the one hand and attributed to Violet on the other. He also mocked Sydney’s love for Violet, referring to her extravagantly as “that astonishing jewel,” language that once again would have seemed perfectly natural and hardly risible coming from Sydney’s lips. And then Lewis returned to one of his pet prejud
ices, pederasty. “Lionel, as you know,” he wrote, “since Proust’s imposition of the pederastic motif upon post-war society, has not of course become a practitioner—his years preclude that: but as far as possible he has worked into his scheme of things the pederastic pattern. Nothing if not in the swim, old Li: so he immediately on realizing the way the wind was blowing, secures a pederastic major-domo (our friend the butler), who is encouraged to ogle all his male guests in the hall, valse away with their coats and hats and so on—as you have seen.” And as if that were not enough, Lewis manipulated his puppets Li and Keithie in a way that intimated Sydney had made a play for Muir, “from the purist pederastic position,” whatever that means.

  Lewis, the frequently and vociferously self-proclaimed artist/satirist, who never seemed to know when enough was enough, next launched another assault on Violet’s (or Isabel’s, if anyone is still inclined to think she’s not Violet) personal appearance. It is worth reproducing here not so much to provide another example of Lewis’s unpleasantness, but rather to demonstrate that certain techniques of cosmetic enhancement that we tend to think of as typical of our own era have a long history: “I do not at all mind Isabel. Her face has been lifted they say nineteen times—gathered behind the ear, you know, and laterally adjusted—she has had paraffin injections beneath the skin—she cannot see clearly more than a foot and a half: in spite of the fact that she eats nothing, Isabel is fat.”

  With heavy-handed irony Lewis attributed Isabel’s beauty aids, and here it has to be Isabel, because there is no evidence that Violet had either face-lifts or paraffin (the Botox of its day) injections, to her “perfect good-sense.” He then went on, redundantly once again, to insist that Violet was the true author, “the all pervasive editor,” of Sydney’s books. While there is no doubt that she played an editorial role, and probably a significant one, nobody knows how significant and no one else, to my knowledge, has suggested that it was a larger role than is played by good editors everywhere. Zagreus continued mockingly about the book Lewis called Primrose and was actually Myrtle until Isabel finally lost her temper and hissed, “That’s enough Zagreus! Take your latest boy somewhere else if you wish to slander people!” Lionel, who had some difficulty following what was going on because of his deafness, finally caught up and told Zagreus, “My wife wishes you to leave.… Will you please do so as you have annoyed everybody.” Isabel, however, was not satisfied. “He has not annoyed everybody,” she cried out. “He has insulted me—deliberately. Tell him to go—at once!”