RE-ASSESSMENT
Lewis as Spaceman
By ANTHONY BURGESS
rr HOSE of us who have accumulated big unsys- tematic libraries find Wyndham Lewis a curiously unlosable writer. My signed first edi- tion of The Apes of God always gets in the way when I'm looking for something else: like a big unwanted dog, it interposes its bulk and demands at least to be distractedly, patted. But I rarely take it out. I have a copy of the July 1915 issue of Blast, with its Pound and Eliot poems and its stop-press obituary on (mort pour la patrie) Gaudier-Brzeska. I occasionally re-read many of the contributions, but I never want to go through Lewis's exhortations or manifestoes. Nothing dates so quickly as the gnomic didactic or reads so boringly. Lewis the painter remains alive and fresh; Lewis the author was always somehow stillborn. His works are huge monsters frozen in the act of snarling or clawing, the children of manifesto rather than real impulse. Had Lewis not been so good a pictorial artist, he would not have formulated the literary theory he did. The theory came first and the books after. That's where the trouble starts.
Pictorial art is, of course, spatial: emptiness is filled with solid objects that the observer instan- taneously views. The art of the novel is tem- poral, like the art of music, though most great novelists have been uneasy about time: three contemporaries of Lewis—Proust, Joyce and Vir- ginia Woolf—were obsessed with dredging the lastingly significant out of an endless flux they knew to be oppressive. Concentrate, said Proust, on the events that seem to ride on time, and they will become real things, not mere occur- rences; le temps retrouve is a kind of eternity and the flux is no more. Virginia Woolf encap- sulated history in Orlando and Between the Acts, so that time became a solidity to hold in the hand. The year of Finnegans Wake—AD 1132—is strictly symbolic: 11 for the renewal in digital counting (the resurrection), 32 for the velocity of falling bodies (the fall). But to Lewis all these authors were slaves of the flux : the eye, that non-temporal all-down-in-one-swallow organ, would provide the best release from its thral- dom. Fiction should be a kind of painting.
Lewis's own words were these: 'Dogmatically . . . I am for the Great Without, for the method of external approach.' The external approach relied 'on the evidence of the eye rather than of the more emotional organs of sense.' Fill up your novel with solid bodies and you have put time in its place. Certain limitations will ensue, but these can be made into virtues. To a painter like Lewis human beings are bodies as chairs and apples and buildings are bodies; Bergson (Whom Lewis and his contemporaries read) taught that when human bodies and inanimate bodies
meet and collide in a common zone, then laughter must follow. Lewis was committed to the comic, but the manifesto-maker in him preferred to call it satire. Of his kind of satire, The Apes of God is as good an example as any.
In my view it is not good satire. Satire should (pardon the pun) be swift, and The Apes of God —all 650 pages of it in the recently published
Penguin edition'—merely shambles along. The impression of extreme slowness derives from 'the careful brushwork, but we should be looking at the ■results of this, not be asked to admire .the
• Penguin Modern Classics, 6s.
process. it is the time and the paint that Lewis gives us, not the instantaneous image dredged out of time; we're borne along—by a dreadful irony—in a flux that's near-frozen:
. . . Dick flung his body into 'a sofa (which gasped in its wheezy bowels) and then slightly eructated. with a heavy zigzag movement up his body, the back of his flat occiput becoming for a moment as stiff as a poker—from hair en brosse, flourishing straight up into the air in the same plane as his neck, and so in a sheer undeviating drop to his coccyx, against the high- backed squatting apparatus to which he had brutally committed his person. Once more a ball of wind made its way irresistibly up his neck. His trunk shook, contracted and relaxed. to assist the slight explosion.
These are the ingredients of a picture, but the taste of a cake is not to be found in its recipe. It is the writers without painting talent who have produced the best word-pictures; knowing that time cannot be conquered with the waving of a manifesto, they learn the trick of taking a quick photograph while time is off its guard. Lewis's method not only breeds ponderous rhythms, but encourages time-consuming verbosity for its own sake.
The external approach turns human beings into objects of immense solidity powered by creak- ing clockwork. Introspection being out, we have to learn about these human beings by the behaviourist method, and this takes a long time. When we evaluate them it is usually in mechanis- tic terms, and, after a lengthy sentence that freezes a Charleston step on to canvas, we ad- mire their ability to make human movements with the indulgence proper for a robot at a schoolboys' exhibition of the 'thirties. It is not well done, but one is surprised to see it done at all.
The object of Lewis's satire is insufficient for the massive apparatus that (does anyone remem- ber Heath Robinson?) Lewis sets into motion for its devastation. It is nothing more than the little London art-world of the late 'twenties— the dabblers, dilettantes and racketeers. A youth so innocent as to be mindless—winds of inanity whistling through a huge sculpted body—is set by his mentor to learn the ways of the Apes. and this he does, with immense slowness and eye- aching detail. Some things that shocked in 1930. when the book first appeared, will not shock now—the Lesbian Apes, for instance. Indeed, Lewis's own capacity to be shocked (that artist's solidity often has the puddingy heaviness of Jean Bull philosophe) militates against the satire, but not so much as the way in which, after thirty- five years, the life has gone out of the satirised. For all these strictures, The Apes of God ought to be read, if not all through (life being short). The big indigestible prose draws on a vast vocabulary and can be precise if not concise; it is also the idiosyncratic garment of a great, if pig- and wrong-headed, British personality. The visual concentration is a fine corrective in an age of careless and perfunctory description. It is no bad thing to send young novelists to art-class or to set them to the reading of exhibition catalogues —a useful part of their training, though it should not be the whole of their life. But, as a satirical novel, The Apes of God is an awe-inspiring failure. In Finnegans Wake, Joyce put a good deal of Lewis into the Ondt, collector of solid objects. Time was not to be conquered in that way; time had to be converted into form, story, melody. That's why the Gracehoper (Joyce himselQ sang: Your feats end enormous. your volumes immense. (May the Graces I hoped for sing your Ondtship song sense!),
Your genus is worldwide, your spacest sublime! But, Holy Saltmartin, why can't you beat time?
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