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Home , Cuthbert Hamilton, Edward McKnight Kauffer, Edward Wadsworth, El Lissitzky, Frederick Etchells, Group X

Casting Spells: The Vortex and the Absence of a

British Avant-garde ______

Owen Hatherley

SOME BLEAK CIRCUS, UNCOVERED, CAREFULLY-CHOSEN, VIVID NIGHT. IT IS PACKED WITH POSTERITY, SILENT AND EXPECTANT. POSTERITY IS SILENT, LIKE THE DEAD, AND MORE PATHETIC. , Enemy of the Stars (1914) ( B1 51)

1929, , capital of the Union of British Socialist Republics (U.B.S.R.). A decade after the end of a short and brutal Civil War, and fourteen years after the British Expeditionary Force was driven out of by General Ludendorff’s victorious offensive. The capital of a devastated country, denuded of its Empire but now tentatively regaining some of its former prominence as the most industrially powerful of the Socialist Republics that now make up half of Europe. Trade between them is difficult, with the Baltic Sea cut off by the vast German Empire, its trade embargo assisted by the anti-communist United States. At the turn of the 1930s, the U.B.S.R. is starting to construct new cities. This is not happening without controversy. Through much of the country, pastoral garden cities are rising from the ruins, the towns destroyed first by Zeppelin raids and then by the Black and Tans. New towns like Connolly outside Dublin, Maxtonburgh in Strathclyde, or Morristown in Hertfordshire have been planned by Raymond Unwin using local materials, craftsmanship, and winding streets, to the splenetic derision of the Vorticist International. Based in London, Glasgow, Newcastle, and , but with corresponding branches in Budapest, , , and Leningrad, this group has the ear of the more enlightened commissars of the U.B.S.R.’s four constituent republics. and ’s redesign of West Yorkshire into a model Vorticist metropolis is proceeding apace, with their intricate, jagged structures of concrete and glass sprouting walkways and towers that criss-cross the factory chimneys of Halifax and Huddersfield. Wyndham Lewis, the group’s chair, is finally completing his government commission to transform ,

1 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies which was halfway through Reginald Blomfield’s neo-baroque redesign when interrupted by the 1919 Whitechapel Insurrection. Monumental sculptures by adorn the House of Soviets on the site of the demolished Houses of Parliament, though the ‘compromised’ classical-Vorticist design by Charles Holden was subjected to much Vorticist scorn on publication. Opponents of the Vorticists are keen to remind them of their roots in a pre-revolutionary . Commissar Harry Pollitt told the Daily Worker that ‘not so long ago these were bohemians who sneered at the proletariat, who hoped to “kill John Bull with art” when John Bull was trying to kill the British ’. Some mutter darkly about counter-revolutionary activity during the Civil War on the part of some in the group, with Edward Wadsworth under particular suspicion. Although their eager participation in the reconstruction has allayed the suspicions of many in the Trades Unions and the Workers’ Councils, perhaps their antisocial reputation isn’t completely undeserved. Interviewed about his work on Regent Street, Lewis, dressed in a far from proletarian dinner jacket offset by a hammer and sickle pin, told the Daily Herald ‘when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would gain by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks’ ( CD 39).

Old Vort

This little attempt at a counterfactual sounds silly, perhaps more so than it should. Something in the notion of an artistic avant-garde engaged in the transformation of everyday life seems inherently un-English, hence perhaps the employment of a French term to cover experimental or advanced cultural practices. Avant-gardism’s connotations of war, Leninism, conflict, and upheaval don’t accord with how the English like to see themselves. Hence also the popularity of an Arcadian, pastoral aesthetic in that most urban, industrial, and warlike of nations. In the 1920s, aesthetic innovators usually had to follow the model of the lone eccentric – a , a Ronald Firbank, but no Mayakovsky, no Brecht. In the ferment that preceded the First World War, however, there were two groupings in Britain that necessitated the title of vanguard. Most famously, that upper-middle class clique of geniuses and

2 Casting Spells talentless toffs, the , and more significantly the Vorticists, an extremely short-lived group of painters, propagandists, sculptors, and writers active for (at a stretch) about seven years, from 1913 to 1920 – Wyndham Lewis as its intellectual Cromwell, with a retinue including the brilliant Edward Wadsworth, , Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, and, as chief cheerleader, . But the collectivity that marked the avant-garde of the first half of the century was seemingly anathema to the individualistic Vorticist sensibility, with most of these figures assimilated into a history of literary rather than the avant-garde, exemplars of a patrician ‘right modernism’ more sympathetic to than to . Yet how much does this have to do with contingent political circumstances? A perusal of, say, the Russian Futurists’ 1913 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste reveals a document no more or less ‘revolutionary’ than BLAST (1914). In fact, the latter embraced political turmoil more explicitly than soon-to-be such as and Victor Khlebnikov. Both movements refused to share in the proto-fascist exaltation of the mechanized slaughter of colonial War that could be found in Marinetti’s pre-1914 texts, and neither were as enthusiastic as the Italian Futurists when European war arrived. And in aesthetic terms, has far more in common with the Suprematists (most prominently, Malevich, , and ) who would set about in the late than it does with any other movement. Like Vorticism, Russian was a kind of frustrated architecture, a series of sketches towards a new urbanism that could not be realized in the present circumstances but which would, one day, be brought to fruition. ‘Casting spells’, Lewis called it in the mid-1930s in the essay ‘Plain Home-Builder: Where Is Your Vorticist?’ ( CHC 248). The point of my introductory fancy is to make clear how much the break-up of Vorticism owed to political circumstance, specifically to the success of cultural and political reaction in the countries that ‘won’ the First World War. While the losing side – , Hungary, Austria, – all had greater or lesser periods of rule by Workers’ Councils and intensive avant-garde experiments in the transformation of everyday life, had the neo-classical ‘return to order’ and Britain had a disastrous period of architectural and artistic reaction from which it took decades to recover. It is not so extraordinary to imagine a different outcome, and Lewis, for one, hedged his bets until the late 1930s. As he wrote in 1934 in response to a questionnaire on writers’

3 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies political views: ‘Politically I take my stand exactly midway between the Bolshevik and the Fascist – the gentleman on my left I shake with my left hand, the gentleman on my right with my right hand. If there were only one (as I wish there were) I’d shake him with both hands’. 1

Anarchy and Degradation

Certainly, the British cultural Establishment was profoundly unnerved by Vorticism, as press reports from the time attest. The sheer hostility of the Edwardian arbiters of taste towards the possibility of an artistic avant-garde can be seen in some of the press reports of the Post- Impressionist Exhibition of 1910 (rather mild: Gaugin, Van Gogh, Monet, with one or two more daring Kandinskys here and there). With all the jittery force of a moral panic, the press evoked political conflict, sexual licentiousness, and moral breakdown: ‘anarchy and degradation’ and ‘morbid excrescences’ in the Morning Post , ‘disease and pestilence’ in The Nation , and ‘of no interest except to the student of pathology and the specialist in abnormality’ according to the Connoisseur . Naturally, the ante was upped somewhat for the Vorticists themselves; and, equally unsurprisingly, their non-Englishness was commented upon, their infection with a continental cultural disease – a ‘corrupt intellectuality’ to the Daily Express , ‘Junkerism in Art’ for .2 These reactions were in fact symptomatic of the terror generated by a supposedly uncharacteristic extremism creeping into English cultural and political life: the suffragettes’ move into direct action, the suppression of revolt in Ireland, and a wave of Trade Union militancy – all of which would find echoes in BLAST , the ‘journal’ of the Vorticist movement. BLAST ‘blessed’, among others, the suffragettes Lillie Lenton and Freda Graham; Unionist advocate of political violence, and prosecutor of Oscar Wilde, Edward Carson; and Trade Unionist Robert Applegarth ( B1 28). Note also the blessing of Cromwell ( B1 28), a reminder of how precedes the continent in its penchant for revolutionary violence. Much of BLAST is taken up with a re-imagining of England as the centre of a technological that would supersede the Italian and French that preceded it. Given the Vorticists’ evident enthusiasm for the pre-War environment of strikes, syndicalism, and terrorism, it’s not unlikely that, had post-War politics taken a different turn, they would have been far from aloof from any upheaval. So what did this avant-garde consist of, and what

4 Casting Spells differentiated it from that other ‘vanguard’ in Bloomsbury and from the fascist avant-garde in ?

The Great English Vortex

“[Y]ou Wops insist too much on the Machine. You’re always on about these driving-belts, you are always exploding about internal combustion. We’ve had machines in England for a donkey’s years. They’re no novelty to us ”. ( BB 34)

The birth of Vorticism as an independent movement involved the symbolic killing of two fathers: first, the Bloomsbury set centred on ’s ; and second, Marinetti and the Futurists. The former was depicted in the infamous ‘Round Robin’ letter written by Lewis and others in 1913 as representing all that was weak, arts-and-crafts, and ‘amateur’ in – the bourgeois dilettantism of Clive and or , those who would be the London Fauves: mere ‘Prettiness, with its mid-Victorian languish of the neck’ ( L 49). The early incarnation of the Vorticists was a split from and repudiation of the Omega Workshops – the ‘Rebel Art Centre’, made up of Wyndham Lewis, Edward Wadsworth, and C. R. W. Nevinson. Their ex-compatriots would soon be scorned in BLAST as the ‘BRITTANIC AESTHETE’ ( B1 15), ‘AMATEUR’, and ‘ART-PIMP’ ( B1 16). The break with Marinetti followed soon after, although as late as May 1914 Lewis hailed Marinetti as ‘Man of the Week’ in The New Weekly , and early Vorticist work shows the influence of Balla and Severini in particular. 3 The latter’s 1913 Dancer and Sea , in its collection of cylinders and polygons delineating motion, bears similarity to Lewis’s 1912 Timon of Athens portfolio, though here the lines are sharp and angular, the sense of drama and mechanization carried without the implication of movement. The dabs of Pointillist colour and curve in Severini would soon be purged from the British offshoot. Meanwhile, Nevinson would himself be purged from the nascent group for co-authoring a manifesto with Marinetti, which has much in common with BLAST in its attack on English provincials and sentimentalists ‘who stupidly adore the pretty-pretty, the commonplace, the soft, sweet and mediocre, the sickly revivals of Medievalism, the Garden Cities with their curfews and artificial battlements’. 4 Nonetheless, Nevinson’s work, which features in BLAST , evolves contemporaneously with the Vorticists, from the of girders in Loading Timber at Southampton Dock (1917) to the bleak,

5 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies foggy Gotham of his 1920 The Soul of a Soulless City (New York: An Abstraction) , with its Marxian title. The justifications of the schism can be found in BLAST , in particular in Lewis’s many manifestos and Pound’s ‘Vortex Pound’ ( B1 153-54). This hinges on the more advanced state of mechanization in Britain, and on a faintly racist depiction of the Italians as excited children, with a primitive, uncivilized over-excitement in technology and scale: ‘Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly’ ( B1 8). Pound’s definition of the Vortex sees Futurism as a spending of energy, as an overenthusiastic ‘DISPERSAL’, the ‘disgorging spray of a vortex with no drive behind it’ ( B1 153) as opposed to the cool efficiency of the Vorticist. Futurist speed leads to transience, a ‘state of flaccidity’ ( B1 154). The Bergsonian temporal obsessions of the European avant-garde are linked to death, putrefaction, and the organic: ‘Futuris[ts], [who are] only an accelerated sort of Impressionis[ts], DENY the vortex. They are the CORPSES of VORTICES. POPULAR BELIEFS, movements, etc., are the CORPSES OF VORTICES. Marinetti is a corpse’ ( B1 154). Again, this turn to precision was paralleled by the Russian avant-garde, as would be made clear through the involvement of some Constructivists in engineering. 5 If, then, Vorticism is to be considered as a movement apart from Futurism, then its independence lies in a few scattered artefacts. The two issues of BLAST , a selection of , shown at exhibitions up until ‘’ in the early 1920s; related works by sympathizers like Jacob Epstein and ; more arguably, poems by Pound and sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska; and occasional prose works, such as Helen Saunders’s ‘A Vision of Mud’ and the 1910s output of Lewis himself. The reproductions in BLAST show Vorticist style at a peak of metallic propulsion, but a distinctive adaptation of Cubism and Futurism can already be seen in something like Lewis’s 1912 ‘The Vorticist’, a furious figure, in the act of ‘blasting’ an adversary. The colour rejects Fauvist chromaticism for rust grey, while its sweeping lines of comic-book motion reveal the manner in which the Vortex’s modernism is nearer to pulp science fiction than the ‘pulpiness’ of faithfully-rendered flesh – a crass, Boy’s Own figure of man-machine fervour, its arm morphing into a machine gun. Compared with the accelerated of, say, Boccioni’s 1911 painting Modern Idol , the advanced status of Vorticism is clear.

6 Casting Spells

‘THE ACTUAL HUMAN BODY BECOMES OF LESS IMPORTANCE EVERY DAY’

Edward Wadsworth’s work of the period is intense in its starkness and industrialism. It is explicitly influenced by the industrial landscape of urban England, the ‘Industrial Island machine’ ( B1 23) of BLAST . His ‘Newcastle’ is pointedly included therein after the blessing of ports ( B1 29). The 1915 painting Abstract Composition , meanwhile, veers all the way into non-objectivity, its right-angled contortions and glaring colours suggesting nothing other than the experiments in rectilinear abstraction being made by at the same time. At this point the Vorticists and the Suprematists, though it is very unlikely that they were aware of each other, had gone furthest into the machine aesthetic of the international style that would dominate the avant-garde for the next half-century. Put Wadsworth’s Mytholmroyd woodcut (1916), with its interlocking girders and abstracted factory chimneys alongside much work created ten years later and it would seem advanced. The early Wadsworth, and works in BLAST 2 – such as the propulsive rectilinear geometry of ’s The Engine , Frederick Etchells’s Progression , and Helen Saunders’s Atlantic City – have more in common with El Lissitzky’s 1918-22 Prouns, a form of architectonic painting developed for use both in political and design research, the similarly architectural Elementarism of and , or the Architectural Fantasies of Iakov Chernikhov, than they do with the next fifty years of British art. This was not necessarily just a formal question. Vorticist art excelled at reproduction. It can often be slightly disappointing to see the rather painterly original of one of the xeroxed ferocities in BLAST . In this sense, Vorticism has a great deal in common with , particularly the fixation on mass production held by the ‘Productivist’ group that included , , , and others, where the individual painting and sculpture were being discarded for their lack of inherent reproducibility, for their fetish value. The latter may not have been foremost in the mind of Edward Wadsworth, but his woodcuts – such as Liverpool Shipping and Drydocked for Scaling and Painting (both 1918) – achieve a startling effacing of the original signature and the organic body, episodes from a history of what Lewis Mumford called the ‘paleotechnical’: the dirty, noisy, lumbering industry of pre-electronic industrial powers like Britain. 6 Drydocked reflects the experience of mechanized war in its looming, intimidating

7 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies machinery. Set in an entirely man-made landscape, the easily penetrated and bruised curves of the human are entirely absent, reduced to angular figures applying ‘dazzle paint’. The black-lined geometries present an obstructive web. This painting depicts the proletariat as the inorganic collectivity, fusing with the red timbers. This should not be regarded as some sort of intentionally socialist aesthetic, however. Despite being the most ‘Constructivist’ of the Vorticists, and the most industrial and ‘northern’ in his sensibility, Wadsworth was a Huddersfield factory- owner’s son, and gave his services and his car to the government in the general strike of 1926. 7 Another ‘Russian’ element of Vorticism was its obsession with a kind of technologized primitivism, akin to the peasant Futurism of and . Lewis claims in BLAST that ‘the Art-instinct is permanently primitive […] The of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an “advanced,” perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Marinetti’s limited imagination): this enormous, jangling, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did more technically primitive man’ ( B1 33). That Edward Wadsworth’s woodcuts like Drydocked and Liverpool Shipping depicted ‘dazzled ships’, essentially warships with abstract painting designed to evade the enemy’s radar – given a lick of war paint – is sadly apt, the only major outbreak of Vorticist art into life. Even before the outbreak of war, Vorticism was preoccupied with warfare and the potential for modern man to be reduced to a ‘savage’ or updated to a robot, and in both cases capable mainly of destruction. But, unlike Futurism, it did not embrace war ideologically when it arrived. Gaudier-Brzeska was alone in his enthusiastic early enlistment with other Vorticists such as Lewis, William Roberts, and Edward Wadsworth enlisting belatedly in 1916. Many Vorticist canvases suggest a human body becoming insectoid, eschewing softness for a metallic exoskeleton. Helen Saunders’s 1915 Vorticist Composition (Study for Cannon) depicts such a figure, adopting the posture of a praying mantis. Atypically, we have here a figure with a recognizable and limbs, though each is straightened into lines and points. Its ‘face’ has a single eye, obstructed by stark black. The pink tone of the body suggests flesh in mockery, with the rest of the body attached to a battery of machinery. Saunders’s image resembles Jacob Epstein’s contemporaneous Rock Drill or Lewis’s Before Antwerp (used for the cover of BLAST 2 ) in its proto-science fiction qualities of pulp modernist machine gothic.

8 Casting Spells

‘B will see what is hidden to D’

‘Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up’. 8

My contention here is that the triumphalism that followed victory in the First World War was what fundamentally did for Vorticism, reducing its main proponent to a ‘one man avant-garde’ – but according to the received critical wisdom, it was the War itself that killed off the movement, with the deaths at the wartime Front of Gaudier-Brzeska and the sympathetic critic T. E. Hulme. Vorticism’s semi-official war art continues the pre-1914 preoccupations of abstracted, dehumanized combat; it does so in a similarly ambiguous, unnerving fashion to Russian Futurist war art such as ’s (1916) or ’s The German War (1915). For instance, William Roberts’s work in BLAST 2 takes the geometric humanoids ushered in by David Bomberg’s (1914) and sets them against each other. Lewis’s state-commissioned war paintings are less extreme, in that they show rather distressed figures involved in the tedious duties and tasks that made up most of the time not being directly threatened with death. But their avant-gardism is clear enough. Lewis’s commissioned works, such as (1919), similarly return to the figure, only to distort it with Vorticist jaggedness, treating the chaos of No Man’s Land with the same threatening geometry as his 1914 Plan of War . The shelled battery is, in Tom Normand’s phrase, ‘a fragmented Vorticist architecture’, stylistically consistent with his pre-War work, if now setting it in a recognizable historical time and place. 9 There is no noticeable ‘break’, save perhaps for an intensification of Vorticism’s bleakness. The Vorticist attitude to war sometimes resembles in its veering from a glorying in destruction, to an oblique irony, to deliberate nonsense. In the ‘War Number’, BLAST 2 , ‘The Crowd Master’ claims that the War caused the popular press to resemble the splenetic sloganeering of BLAST itself, while ‘A Super-Krupp – or War’s End’ in BLAST 2 breezily predicts perpetual war: ‘We might eventually arrive at such a point of excellence that two-thirds of the population of the world could be exterminated with mathematical precision in a fortnight. War might be treated on the same basis as agriculture’ ( B2 14). Then we have the point that ‘nobody but Marinetti, the Kaiser, and professional soldiers WANT war’ ( B2 14) followed by the more disturbing

9 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies contention (which points the way to Lewis’s later espousals of fascism, here with a more bohemian tinge): ‘All men cannot, and never will be, “philosophic men.” So what are they going to be: Soldiers and politicians, a good many, I expect; and much happier and more amusing that way […] Do not let us, like Christian missionaries, spoil the savages all round us’ ( B2 14). Here, there is a perception of a dumb mass that is best enjoyed as a savage spectacle, which, if not outrightly Fascistic is hardly socialistic. It is this fundamental outsider’s perspective, with its queasy misanthropy, which perhaps suggests that Lewis may not have made a great Bolshevik; though, again, similar views were at earlier points held by the Russian Futurists. That perspective is itself worth some investigation. Vorticism, as we can see, shared with Futurism and the avant- gardes that would follow it (Constructivism, De Stijl, Neues Bauen) a desire to change much more than just art practice. It sought to alter and everyday life – a desire born of Lewis’s permanently conflicting duality of ‘art’ and ‘life’, with one or the other becoming supreme at various points throughout his career. In the event, they never quite manage to fuse, unlike his inadvertent continental successors. These contradictions are worked out in the Nietzschean Code of a Herdsman (written 1914; published 1917) and the urbanist treatise The Caliph’s Design (1919). The former is a restatement of the artist’s primacy, with its misanthropy and misogyny unleavened by the familiar droll contrarianism. Most remarkable here is the advocacy of a divided subjectivity: not the Bergsonism Lewis derides in BLAST (and would devote much of the 1920s to demolishing) but the self as a series of contraries. The line is similar to the ‘without contraries there is no progression’ of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93), put thus: ‘ Never fall into the vulgarity of being or assuming yourself to be one ego. Each trench must have another one behind it. Each single self – that you manage to be at any given time – must have five at least indifferent to it. […] B will see what is hidden to D’. 10 Yet, dialectical as it may be, this is not so much the language of explicit political commitment as a statement from someone who would like to eagerly shake the Communist and the Fascist with one hand each. The motif of the self divided, a mutant version of Cartesian dualism, recurs in the stories collected as The Wild Body . These stories mostly precede Vorticism, but the statements of intent are recognizably akin to the aphoristic, telegraphed sloganeering spluttering of Vorticist prose: outlining a vision of humanity inspired by ridicule, ‘essays in a

10 Casting Spells new human mathematic’ or depictions of ‘intricately moving bobbins […] not creations but puppets’ ( CWB 315-16). The Wild Bodies are ‘not living beings. Their mechanism is a logical structure’ ( CWB 316). The role of the satirist then, is to thump us ‘like a racing engine in the body of a car’ ( CWB 318). The 1918 version of represents an attempt to transfer this prose into an (almost) conventional novelistic form, laying the foundations for a ‘cinematic’ style based on fragmentation, sudden close-up, and montage that would mark his novels of the 1920s and 1930s. ‘[I]t was my object to eliminate anything less essential than a noun or a verb. Prepositions, pronouns, articles – the small fry – as far as might be, I would abolish. Of course I was unable to do this, but for the purposes of the novel , I produced a somewhat jagged prose’ ( L 552- 53). This is at work most obviously in the 1918 Tarr ’s descriptive passages, such as this example from a dancehall scene, in which the figures in conflict across the room appear as a more figurative version of a Vorticist abstract painting:

=Their hostess also was dancing. Kreisler noted her with a wink of recognition. =Dancing very slowly, almost mournfully, he and his partner bumped into her each time as they passed. The widow felt the impact, but it was only at the third round that she perceived the method and intention inducing these bumps. She realised they were going to collide with the other lady. This collision could not be avoided. But she shrank away, made herself as small as possible, bumped gently and apologized over her shoulder, with a smile and screwing up of the eyes, full of meaning. =At the fourth turn of the room, however, Kreisler having increased her speed sensibly, she was on her guard, and in fact already suggesting that she should be taken back to her seat. He pretended to be giving their hostess a wide berth this time, but suddenly and gently swerved, and bore down upon her. The widow veered frantically, took a false step, tripped on her dress, tearing it, and fell to the ground. ( T1 155-56)

This partially successful linguistic purging results in a fitful, circular style, fitting the geometries of the dancers. The regular use of the ‘=’ sign has a montage effect, rupturing the text and jolting it forwards. Used here, it suggests moments of particular intensity in the movements, stuttering the queasy flow; the characters analyse their own movements in formal, mechanistic language as if describing the movement of machines under

11 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies their control, while for Lewis, they appear as occasionally precise, occasionally all-too-human elements in a ballet mécanique . The most extreme point of Vorticism in prose is Enemy of the Stars , which was first published in BLAST 1 . To disassemble this chaotic mess of pronouncements, atrocities, apocalyptic imagery, and disjointed description into a sequence of events is all but impossible. It traces the agonistic battles of two protagonists, one of whom eventually is killed by the other. The title aligns it with the ‘Storming Heaven’ attempted by the avant-garde, with Malevich/Matyushin/Kruchenykh’s (1913) or Marinetti’s La Conquête des Étoiles (1902), though with this utopianism dragged down into Vorticism’s industrial wasteland. The figures themselves are part of the landscape – a broken tangle of flesh, nature, machinery, and industrial waste. The Yard in which part of it takes place is:

Rouge mask in alluminum [ sic ] mirror, sunset’s grimace through the night.

A leaden gob, slipped at zenith, first drop of violent night, spreads cataclysmically in harsh water of coming. Caustic Reckett’s stain.

Three trees, above canal, sentimental, black and conventional in number, drive leaf flocks, with jeering cry.

Or they slightly bend their joints, impossible acrobats; step rapidly forward, faintly incline their heads.

Across the mud in pod of the canal their shadows are gauky [ sic ] toy crocodiles, sawed up and down by infant giant? ( B1 62)

The Marinetti-inspired ‘destruction of syntax’ aspired to in Tarr is here complete, and we have something which has very little in common with the canonical rendering of , but much more with such avant-gardes as and . The succession of incongruous yet evocative images marks it out as a rare English follower of Lautréamont’s ‘Chance Meetings’ in Maldoror (1869). Aside from the intriguing, horrifying maze of the style, this incarnates Lewis’s vision of a society and self in endless conflict. In his work there runs a kind of negative, unresolvable dialectic, with destruction as the only possible

12 Casting Spells outcome. In ‘Physics of the Not-Self’ (published 1925; republished 1932) Lewis writes of ‘the human mind’ as an ‘enemy of life’, an ‘oddity outside the machine’ ( CPP 195). This total metaphysical pessimism would seem to come from elsewhere than a faddish, self-dramatizing art movement, though this is essentially what Vorticism was, and the source of its strength.

‘The PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE’

“Kill John Bull with Art!” I shouted. And John and Mrs. Bull leapt for joy, in a cynical convulsion. For they felt safe as houses. So did I. ( BB 36)

Even amid the post-War return to order, there were small hints of what Vorticism could have become, an analogue of the constructive avant- gardes of Russia and Germany, with their aims to transform everyday life. This is held back by ego, however, by Lewis’s refusal to take his own advice in his constant insistence on his status as Artist, possessor of a superior perception, the most fundamental difference between him and the self-abolishing art of the Soviet or German 1920s. At the very least, the cast spells went some way towards becoming cast sculptures. At the last Vorticist exhibition, the ‘Group X’ of the 1920s, Wadsworth exhibited a speculative sculpture, a plan for a Vorticist building. It was an almost formless but austere concrete fist, with a wrought, tactile surface, impenetrable and alien, with absolutely nothing in common with, say, the modernism of the Parisian return to order, the clipped rationalism of Le Corbusier, whose Maison Citrohan was exhibited around the same time, and would in time dominate . Structures like Wadsworth’s might not have been built in the 1920s and 1930s, but structures much like it would turn up in English cities not long after. Vorticism, as Lewis stated when critically surveying the tentative modernism of 1930s Britain, ‘was aimed essentially at an architectural reform […] [Vorticist pictures] were often rather exercises in architectural theory – rather pictorial spells , as it were, cast by us, designed to attract the architectural shell that was wanting – than anything else’ ( CHC 248). For the Vorticist the clean, antiseptic modernism resulting from the early adaptations of Corbusier, among others, was also wanting: ‘You should not be afraid of desecrating these spotless and puritanic planes and prudish cubes’ ( CHC 255).

13 Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies

Steps in this direction were made by the Canadian architect Wells Coates, a disciple of Lewis’s – the Isokon building in London, with its masses of sculpted concrete was intriguingly described as ‘protobrutalist’ by Manfredo Tafuri, and is the inter-War period’s nearest equivalent to a Vorticist building. 11 Yet if it does have an architectural analogue, it is the New Brutalism of the post-War era, as practised by such architects as James Stirling, Rodney Gordon, and a legion of anonymous local authority designers. Reyner Banham was almost accurate in describing Brutalism as the first significant British contribution to modernism – which in its techno-primitivism, its rictus rectilinearity, was Wadsworth’s Vorticist architecture made ferro- concrete flesh, barely imaginable anywhere else but in Britain. In some cases, this was anecdotally acknowledged. Denys Lasdun’s Institute of Education (1969), a conflict of jagged, protuberant concrete stairtowers and long, black glass classrooms which, aptly enough, destroyed a large swathe of Bloomsbury, was considered by Lasdun’s partner Graham Lane as an attempt to design a building that, at the rear, had Vorticist components, which effected an aggressive irruption into Bloomsbury's serenity. 12 This affinity is a matter of both aggression and aesthetics. In a commonly-used art textbook, the entry on Vorticism admonishes that ‘[b]rutality is not usually an admirable quality in art, any more than in life’. 13 The last Vorticist tract is the 1919 The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? Here Lewis advocates the effective reconstruction of London in accordance with Vorticist principles. This reconstructive vision pervades the works of the 1920 ‘Group X’ exhibition, from Wadsworth’s proto-Brutalist studies for a Vorticist architecture to a canvas like ’s startling Reconstruction , in which the debris of Vorticism is given blaring colour, seething with life, embodying the illusory victory. This cleaning away of the wreckage of history parallels the pamphlet’s tone: ‘We are all perfectly agreed, are we not, that practically any house, railing, monument, wall, structure, thoroughfare, or lamp-post in this city should be instantly pulled down […]?’ ( CD 28). Such statements are, however, tempered by an ironic paternalism, that such a permanent revolution is necessary if only for the artist to gain acceptance, as in the following passage from the pamphlet, evoked in my counterfactual above: ‘when I say that I should like to see a completely transfigured world, it is not because I want to look at it. It is you who would look at it. It would be your spirit that would benefit by this exhilarating spectacle. I should merely benefit, I

14 Casting Spells and other painters like me, by no longer finding ourselves in the position of freaks’ ( CD 39). Lewis would claim in the 1950s that ‘Vorticism was what [he], personally, did, and said, at a certain period’ ( WLA 451), to the justified outrage of such surviving members of the movement as William Roberts. This refusal of collectivity appears at first to be the reason for the movement’s demise, something explained at least in part by Lewis’s insistence – mostly retrospective, but real enough – on Vorticism’s efficacy only as a vehicle for his own ideas. Undoubtedly Lewis was the prime theorist and ideologist of the movement, but to no greater extent than the way in which, say, Theo Van Doesburg dominated De Stijl, which certainly didn’t lead to the dissolution of the Dutch avant-garde. What happens next to Lewis is fascinating, in that he morphs himself into his own internally-contradictory collectivity, ‘shaking the Bolshevist with one hand and the Fascist with the other’, what McLuhan notoriously called a ‘one-man avant-garde’, transferring what elsewhere in Europe was the collective’s role onto his own persona as ‘The Enemy’, an inevitably quixotic campaign. 14 However, the fundamental failure of the English avant-garde was a consequence of the outcome of the First World War: Britain smugly victorious, unwilling to face the unforgiving, harsh face of turned to it by the Vorticists, yet so shaken by the experience of total war that it would shelter in its arcadian fantasy until rudely awakened again only twenty years later. It would be assisted in its slumber by the United States, gradually assuming its worldwide role and responsibility as guardian of laissez-faire and imperialism, effacing the residues of what Reginald Blomfield called ‘the dubious continent of Europe’ in his critique Modernismus , the only acceptable architectural continental influence being occasional outgrowths of Parisian , which had cut itself off from the -Moscow currents of the new avant-garde, enjoying its own luxuriant slumber in a slightly more aesthetically daring manner than the English. 15 Due to nationalistic and practical obstacles, the United Kingdom was cut off from the Moscow-Berlin axis, and when this avant-garde arrived, it did so as an import when emigrated from that axis in the 1930s, rather than through genuine engagement. This decline was swift and tragicomic. Take, for instance, Nevinson’s pretty, vacuous Deco poster for the 1925 Wembley Exposition for the transition from BLAST to Betjeman. A counter- argument to this could perhaps be found under the city, in the form of the . In a startlingly original analysis, Michael T.

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Saler has claimed that the Tube, under the aesthetic supervision of , sustained the avant-garde through the fallow years of the 1920s, employing Vorticist associates like Epstein, Wadsworth, Roberts, and most frequently Edward McKnight Kauffer. 16 By giving equal prominence to (by this point somewhat subdued) ex-Vorticists and Arts & Crafts designers, Pick created a synthesis of the competing impulses in my counterfactual, of Raymond Unwin and Wyndham Lewis, though certainly without the latter’s participation. But to see what happened instead of the Vorticist reconstruction of London advocated in The Caliph’s Design , go to Aldwych, largely laid out in the 1920s, to Bush House’s Beaux-Arts, neo-classical tribute to British-American Friendship. Walking up from Bush House along Kingsway, then turning into High Holborn, is an office block. Designed by Frederick Etchells, signatory of the Vorticist manifesto, this was the first modernist building in London, as late as 1930, a taut, angular, and harsh construction of concrete and chrome. Etchells was the translator of Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (1923). His deliberate mistranslation of the title was perhaps his most famous intervention; making it Towards a New Architecture (1927), he turned Le Corbusier’s essentially classicizing text into a polemic. Although there are, arguably, affinities between the architectonic painting and sculpture of Vorticism and the architecture of Brutalism, these were hardly conscious. Brutalists like Alison and Peter Smithson, where they cited paintings, were more inclined to reference Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut, which Lewis would no doubt have excoriated with a vehemence as funny and accurate as his earlier critiques of Soutine and child-art. The Independent Group involved Brutalist architects like the Smithsons and Erno Goldfinger, but the painters involved were such Pop Artists as Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. These cast spells, if they had an effect, had it anonymously. There is another legacy of the Vortex – that of crazes and media fads, to the point at which their successors were Malcolm McLaren and, finally with explicit acknowledgement, Marshall McLuhan. The Vorticists were adepts at creating a moral panic, leading the press to make the connection between leftist art and leftist politics that Lewis later disdained. This reached its highpoint soon after the publication of the first issue of BLAST , when Lewis was asked by the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, to assure him that he had no subversive intent. Michael Bracewell, in his attempt to slot Vorticism into a very particular canon of ‘Englishness’, sees this as a Vorticist ‘blueprint for self-

16 Casting Spells advertisement that would do credit to the most accomplished of contemporary PR companies’. This makes it all the more unsurprising that McLuhan would draw on Lewis, not merely as an analyst of mass society but as a designer and propagandist – the telegraphed style of The Mechanical Bride (1951) owes a great deal to Vorticism. Bracewell also, less surprisingly, sees BLAST as ‘a blueprint for punk rock’, and the most public advocate of Lewis’s work throughout the 1980s was the ‘pulp modernist’ Mark E. Smith and The Fall, with whom Vorticism shares more than it does with the proudly vacuous Britartists. 17 It’s curiously deflating, though, that a group so concerned with timelessness, stillness, and an impregnable centre orchestrating energy, would be most influential in its use of sudden shock and the transient moment of outrage, and hence would have more of an influence in the aesthetics of advertising than of politics. Nonetheless, Vorticism, if nothing else, makes entirely clear that the historical avant-garde did, for a time, have a British outpost, one that was prematurely foreclosed. Its claim was that ‘a movement towards art and imagination could burst up’ in an ‘“unmusical, anti-artistic, unphilosophic”’ England with ‘more force than anywhere else’ ( B1 32), and that still sounds like a precise description.

Notes

1 Julian Symons (ed.), The Essential Wyndham Lewis (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989), 9. 2 Press quotations taken from Jonathan Black, ‘Taking Heaven by Violence: Futurism and Vorticism as seen by the British Press, c. 1912-20’, in Jonathan Black, (ed.), Blasting the Future!: Vorticism in Britain 1910-1920 (London: Philip Wilson, 2004): 29-39, 33-35. 3 Christopher Adams, ‘Futurism and the English Avant-Garde’, in Black (ed.), Blasting the Future! : 9-17, 13. 4 F. T. Marinetti and C. R. W. Nevinson, A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art , published in the Observer 7 June 1914, quoted by Jonathan Black, ‘Excerpts from Key Texts’, in Black (ed.), Blasting the Future! : 105-109, 106. 5 For an analysis of Constructivist participation in industrial production and design, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 6 Mumford uses the phrase to describe Victorian industrial development and its aesthetic. See Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).

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7 See Jeremy Lewison (ed.), Edward Wadsworth – A Genius of Industrial England (London: Arkwright Art Trust, 1990). 8 Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Code of a Herdsman’ (1914), in Symons, The Essential Wyndham Lewis , 29. 9 Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist: Holding the Mirror up to Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 103. 10 Symons, The Essential Wyndham Lewis , 27. 11 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (London: Faber 1986), 230. 12 Personal communication from Alan Munton, based on his conversation with Graham Lane, June 2010. 13 Paul Overy, ‘Vorticism’, in Nikos Stangos (ed.), Concepts of from to (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 109. 14 Marshall McLuhan, ‘Lewis’s Prose Style’, in (ed.), Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation (London: The Athlone Press, 1980): 64-67. 15 Reginald Blomfield, Modernismus (London: Macmillan, 1934), 82. 16 Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 17 Michael Bracewell, England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie (London: Flamingo, 1998), 36-38.

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