Raging Briton

ROTTING HILL (307 pp.)--Wyndham Lewis--Regnery ($3).

BLAST years 1837 to 1900 Curse abysmal inexcusable middle-class (also Aristocracy and Proletariat).

BLAST

BLAST their weeping whiskers--hirsute RHETORIC of EUNUCH and STYLIST--SENTIMENTAL HYGIENICS ROUSSEAUISMS (wild Nature cranks) FRATERNIZING WITH MONKEYS DIABOLICS--raptures and roses ...

In 1914 Wyndham Lewis tried to rouse a whole generation of Englishmen with that manifesto, but Englishmen had every excuse for not paying attention. The manifesto appeared just as they were girding to meet the greater blast of World War I. Thirty-year-old Painter-Poet Lewis was soon in the army himself, and the authorities showed unusual imaginativeness by assigning him, as war artist, to the Canadian artillery at Vimy Ridge.

London's Imperial War Museum today houses many of the products of this period of the artist's life--spiky, devastated landscapes spotted with cubic gun pits, decorated with friezelike rows of artillery shells, and peopled by angular, steel-helmeted robots. The postwar years showed that Wyndham Lewis conceived of peace in much the same terms as war. Nature, to him, was a savage, unruly landscape, to be translated by the artist into what he called the "more tense and angular entity" of rational thought. He exclaimed:

BLESS the HAIRDRESSER

He attacks Mother Nature for a small fee . . .

He trims aimless and retrograde growths into CLEAN ARCHED SHAPES and ANGULAR PLOTS.

Big & Little Men. Boiling with energy, Painter Lewis had become a writer as well. In his first novel, Tarr (1918), he tore into sentimentality and romanticism. In poems, books (The Art of Being Ruled, Time and Western Man) and pamphlets, he attacked the little man, the big man and the "mass units" of democracy. A rogue male who belonged to no herd, no party, he was worshiped by a few and tolerated by many--until the fateful day when Adolf Hitler loomed up on the horizon and captivated him. "To my eternal shame," groaned Lewis last year, "I ... wrote that Hitler was a man of peace!"

His political blunder put Lewis in the dog house for a good many years. He broke loose by roving over Canada and the U.S. for eight years, returning to Britain only in 1948. Since then, with his novels reissued and his paintings re-exhibited, his stock has slowly but steadily risen. One reason is that Britons have become more used to Lewis' honest vehemence, more conscious of the truths wrapped up in it. Another is that since 1949 he has suffered the worst fate that can befall a painter: the gradual loss of his sight.

The Dream-Blind. The sympathy of his fellow countrymen has not softened Blaster Lewis much. His newest book, Rotting Hill, is a volume of nine short stories--in which most of the stories are not stories at all. They are the polemics of an enraged preacher who is neither Labor nor Tory, Christian nor pagan, democrat nor aristocrat. Their aim is to tell

British readers flatly that "our collective stupidity" is the only reason why Britain is "shabby, ill-fed, loaded with debt." The title is a typical Lewis play on the decayed London quarter of Netting Hill, where he now lives, and rot is the keynote of all the stories. At the roots of the rot are a decayed aristocracy, a "disintegrating middleclass" and "the laziest workmen in Europe." Six years of Labor government, Lewis believes, may have left the underdog better off, but they have also loosed a flood of delusive dreams. And now the man in the street is dream-blind to,the "universal wreckage and decay" that surrounds him. Examples: P: In The Bishop's Fool, an art-loving clergyman wants to buy a painting from Wyndham Lewis. But Lewis soon discovers that the Rev. Mr. Rymer is in many ways a typical Church of England parson of the postwar period. He supports a wife and daughter on -L-6 a week (about $17), and allows himself five shillings pocket money. "Dressed in garments literally dropping to pieces . . . [he] is one of the first English clergymen to stand for poverty and want. And as he moves around . . . doors shut quickly at his approach as if he were infected with some complaint . . ." Is it not a rotten society, Lewis asks, which raises the wages of the worker but lets the spiritual shepherd become "the village bum"? The danger is that, in its hour of triumph, socialism will forget "the ethics by means of which it was able to mount to power," and substitute "a violent caricature of the Hegelian State for the City of God." P: In Time the Tiger, Lewis shows the denizens of Rotting Hill making pots of tea out of rationed pinches of "alleged Darjeeling" and "pseudo-Ceylon," sawing slices of "brick" that pass for bread and devouring them with a strawberry jam made of "pectine and/or carrot pulp." Rotting Killers put on shirts whose holes are too small for the buttons, shoes whose government-controlled laces are just too short to meet in a bow, tweeds that give off a stench of "ersatz peat." After vainly attempting to trim their nails with scissors made "of a metal formerly unknown to cutlery," they step forth to face another day--each man so beset with petty exasperations that he has become "a potential outlaw."

P: In The Room Without a Telephone, Lewis shows that he can be a brilliant writer of formally constructed short stories when he pleases. He tells a hilarious tale about a Rotting Hill esthete who detests the National Health Service and chooses to have his operation in a nursing home run by nuns. The all-round Irish atmosphere goes to his head: hosts of "stunted female gossoons" make his bed to the tune of "an incessant hissing"; outside his door, "hundreds of Hibernian gnomes were charging up & down the corridor, with food, flowers, bedpans, and hot-water bottles." When Esthete Eldred gets back to Rotting Hill, he has adopted the Mother Superior's habit of staring into the distance and twirling her thumbs, and is all set to add to the prevailing confusion by posing as a convert. P:In The Rot, the theme is reduced to its essence when Lewis' own house begins to crumble from dry rot. Carpenters and plasterers ("the merriest, noisiest, laziest in this bankrupt land") burst in upon Lewis and his wife and celebrate the triumph of the Welfare State by hacking the place to pieces. Their destructive joy reminds Lewis that he, too, is involved with the collapsing middle class--"the dry-rotted yes-people who are clay in the hands of carpenters." Today, he reflects, it is he and his class who are disintegrating under hammer blows; but tomorrow, when the Welfare "honeymoon" is over, will it not be the turn of the workers of Rotting Hill?

Wyndham Lewis has written better books than Rotting Hill, but these stories show that he has lost none of his genius for laying a horny forefinger on his subjects. They are full of the "tense and angular entity" of reality, and they are also the work of a man who, exiled to what he calls "the land of blindman's buff," has taken his humor and courage along. His worst enemies respect the man who has said of his fate as a painter, "I have often thought that it would solve a great many problems if English painters were born blind"; and of his future as a writer, "Well, Milton had his daughters, I have my Dictaphone."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.