Storm from the North”

chapter 1 Introduction: “Storm from the North”

Nathan O’Donnell and Philip Coleman

On the title page of the first issue of BLAST, the date of publication is marked as 20 June 1914, though in fact the magazine was not published until 2 July, a discrepancy which serves as an early indication of one of the foremost quali- ties by which the magazine is distinguished; the sense, embodied in this quite substantial collection of visual art, poetry, fiction, and drama, of anticipation overrunning reality. This impression marks the magazine throughout. In ap- pearance alone, this oversized, thick, “puce-coloured cockleshell” (B2, 5), as its editor Wyndham Lewis would later refer to it, represented a visual riposte to the seemliness of English literary publishing. Also on the title page, it is an- nounced that BLAST will be “Published Quarterly”; an annual subscription is offered for “10/6”. However, only one further issue appeared, and that a full year later: the considerably scaled-down “War Number” of July 1915. In retrospect it seems obvious that BLAST was never going to be sustainable as a quarterly publication. As well as a collection of contributions by artists and writers, the first issue is itself a singular typographic experiment. The cover, across which the title, in bold capital letters, runs diagonally, signals what is to come: much of the text is presented in bold capital letters, in a sans serif font, wildly er- ratic font sizes, arranged in striking geometric patterns, horizontal and verti- cal, creating the large 12.5 x 9.5 inch pages. As has been noted often, the design of BLAST borrowed very explicitly from the language of advertising.1 In this visual vernacular, manifesto follows manifesto, some referred to as “vortices”, some untitled, all of them brash, disputatious, didactic, outlining an England of the future, one in which the industrial bedrock of the nation is a source of pride rather than embarrassment for a new generation of visual artists intent

1 Jodie Greenwood, in her contribution to a collection of essays on Wyndham Lewis, juxtaposes a page of BLAST with an ad for a “short sea route to Belgium”, which ran in the Manchester Guardian throughout Spring, 1914. The parallels between typographic arrangements are striking. See Jodie Greenwood, “The Crisis of the System: Blast’s Reception”, Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity, eds Andrzej Gąsiorek, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, 91.

2 O’DONNELL AND COLEMAN on revolutionizing the practice of painting, print, poetry, drama and sculpture. The driving force of this startling magazine was a core group of more or less unknown artists and writers – marshalled by Lewis and Ezra Pound – intent on articulating their idea of what the future might look like. These were the Vorticists. Yet to call BLAST a Vorticist journal would be to reproduce an oversimpli- fied account of its production. BLAST was presented as Vorticist, but as Paul Edwards has recently demonstrated in a thorough exegetical analysis of the journal’s production, much of the textual material had already been written before the decision to treat Vorticism as a movement had been reached.2 Take the series of opening manifestos, for instance. Of these numerous manifestos, two are listed – as “Manifesto i” and “Manifesto ii” – on the contents page, while the introductory (and itself quite manifesto-like) two-page text, “Long Live the Vortex”, one of the later insertions into the magazine, is not. The first of the two listed “Manifestos” – not referred to as a “Manifesto” in the text how ever – is the famous series of “blasts” and “blesses” that provide the title of the magazine.3 This is succeeded by a more conventional numbered manifesto – entitled “Manifesto” – at the foot of the final page of which is reproduced a list of signatories. This includes the majority of the contributors to the journal, certainly: Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Cuthbert Hamil- ton, Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders (misspelt “Sanders” in the list of signatories on page 43), Edward Wadsworth, and Wyndham Lewis. But it also includes the names of some who did not contribute: Richard Aldington, Malcolm Arbuthnot, and Lawrence Atkinson. Furthermore, some contributors are not signatories. Ford Madox Hueffer, the eminent editor of The English Review , contributed the first instalment of his novel, The Good Soldier, but did

2 Paul Edwards, “BLAST and the Revolutionary Mood of Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism”, Vorticism: New Perspectives, eds Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Edwards builds upon two important earlier sources in his analysis: Paul O’Keefe, “The Troubled Birth of BLAST”, Internationaal Centrum voor Structuuranalyse en Construc- tivisme Cahier, 8/9, 1988; and Michael E. Leveridge, “The Printing of BLAST”, Wyndham Lewis Annual, 7, 2000. The latter was in fact written by the descendent of William Henry Leveridge, the printer who set BLAST in 1914. 3 There has been some speculation as to the origin of this rhetorical dichotomy; in his contribution to this volume, Alex Runchman outlines some Futurist precedents. Another source might be identified in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he makes use of a similar rhetorical dichotomy: “Damn braces: bless relaxes”. Eugene Jolas would reproduce this line in his later anti-populist manifesto, “The Revolution of the Word”, published in transition, 16–17 (June 1929), a document to which Lewis in turn reacted – in another short- lived magazine he was to establish and edit, The Enemy – with some vituperation.