Self Condemned (4 page)
Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography
. Ed. Toby Foshay. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984.
Self Condemned
. London: Methuen, 1954.
Tarr
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926.
Time and Western Man
. Ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1993.
Wyndham Lewis: Collected Poems and Plays
. Ed. Alan Munton. New York: Carcanet Press, 1979.
Wyndham Lewis on Art
. Eds. Walter Michel and C.J. Fox. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969.
Further Reading
Ayers, David.
Wyndham Lewis and Western Man
. London: Macmillan, 1992.
Chapman, Robert T.
Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires
. London: Vision Press, 1973.
Edwards, Paul.
Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer
. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Foshay,Toby Avard.
Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics
of the Intellect
. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.
Gasiorek, Andrzej.
Wyndham Lewis and Modernism
. Tavistock, Eng.: Northcote House, 2003.
Jameson, Fredric.
Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist
as Fascist
. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Meyers, Jeffrey.
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Michel, Walter.
Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1971.
O’Keeffe, Paul.
Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis
. London: Pimlico, 2001.
Powe, B.W.
The Solitary Outlaw
. Toronto: Lester, Orpen, and Dennys, 1987.
Quéma, Anne.
The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s Allegories,
Aesthetics, and Politics
. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999.
“I
f you call five
six
, you embarrass five, seeing that people then are going to expect of him the refulgence of six.” He looked up, coughed, and continued. “If you rename six
seven
, far more bustle is expected of him. I have been speaking, naturally, of the ante-meridian. In the post-meridian it is the reverse. Put your clock on, call five-thirty six-thirty, and people will exclaim how much more light six-thirty has. You push back the night. If you call Clara Stella, people would say how dull Stella has become, or how bright Clara has become. Five and six, post-meridian, are like Stella and Clara. See?”
“The little girl sees,” Essie Harding said.
From the other side of the breakfast table Essie had stared at her husband under a wide clear brow, with blankly bold, large, wide-open eyes. It was a mature face, the natural wide-openness not disagreeably exploited: the remains of the child-mind were encouraged to appear in the clear depths of the grey-blue. But as he spoke of five and six, she thought, rather, of forty-seven and of thirty-seven (but not of thirty-four and twenty-four). She renamed ages: as her husband spoke of renaming the hours of daybreak and the sunset, she shuffled about the years of life, calling thirty forty and vice versa. As to the explanation of what occurred when you put the clock forward or backward, Essie did not follow or would not follow. Allergic to learning, as are many children, for her the teacher was a lifelong enemy. As she had stared, wide-eyed and with her mind a wilful blank, at her mistress as a child, her eyes hung open like a gaping mouth; and the fact that her husband was a professional teacher, a trained imparter of knowledge, caused Essie all the more readily to drop back into the mulish trance of childhood; expertly unreceptive she stripped her large defiant eyes of all intelligence, and left them there staring at his face, while her moist red lips were parted as she slowly raised a fresh spoonful of sugared porridge.
“Have I made it clear what it means to put the clock on?” he enquired, with no expectancy that the reply would be that he had.
“No.” She shook her head.
He laughed.
“You are lazy,” he told her. “Had you been a boy, and had you lived a few decades ago, your bottom would have been furrowed up by the cane;
fessée
after
fessée
would have been your lot.”
She slowly sucked the spoon, and there was substituted in her eyes for the aggressive blank, an amorous and inviting light, as he had expected.
Deliberately he had referred to the caned posterior, as if it were a bait the other way round in order to provoke the reaction in question. He looked at her curiously. For a moment he almost embarked upon a didactic account of the periodic nature of sexual desire in the animal kingdom. Instead he enquired, “Why this sudden interest in daylight saving?”
“Rosemary …”
“Ah. I see. Just repeat what I said about calling five six. She is a bright child, you will not have to interpret.”
Essie laughed. “Any more questions of that sort and I shall explain that I am dumb, and that she must wait until Gladys gets well. She has one of those enquiring minds. I think she is an awful little brat, between ourselves.”
“Her mama has an enquiring mind, too. It’s a beastly thing to have, I agree.”
He lighted a cigarette and watched her almost furtively for a few seconds. Then he placed his hand upon an open letter at the side of his plate.
“What shall we do about Richard?”
“When does he want us to go?”
“About the tenth, I think, of next month. How do you feel about it?”
She sat with her hands behind her head, staring silently at the wall behind his head. Neither spoke for some minutes.
“I do not feel terribly like the idyllic landscape of England just at present,” he observed. “Do you feel like going down yourself for a weekend? It would do you good.”
“Not by myself; because I look countryfied, they would want me to milk their cow and draw water from their well. I came back last time from their place thoroughly worn out.”
“Right. Anything would be better than bucolic England just at present, for me. I must write him.”
A bell in the little hallway exploded into hysterical life. A door, from behind which the hum of a vacuum cleaner had for some time been heard, opened, and one of London’s Dickensian charladies stood there without moving for a moment, a small bird-like figure with a white crest, which bobbed backward and forward, and an irascible eye. This eye was directed across the breakfast table towards the front door. The char-lady propelled herself around the room, head shooting in and out, and darted at the front door, ready for battle. Her small, raucous challenge was heard, “What is it? Ooder ye want?” The landing was extremely dark, and Mrs. Harradson never could see who her enemy was. In the present case a telegram appeared out of the shadows impolitely near her little beak. She seized it, and, with considerable suspicion, holding it between thumb and forefinger, she re-entered the breakfast room.
“It’s for you Professor Harding, sir.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Harradson.”
“Shall I tell ’im there’s an answer, sir?”
Harding opened the telegram, and shook his head. “No, thank you, no reply.”
Having banged the front door upon the uniformed intruder, Mrs. Harradson with her violent gait re-entered the bedroom, from whence she had come, and almost on the instant there came the angry hum of the indignant vacuum.
It was a large, gaunt, and very dark room in which they sat. It was lighted only by one window in the extreme corner, opening onto the central air hole. Between the window and the front door was a shadowy dresser, and a minute water closet nestled indelicately in the small hall, the first thing to confront the visitor. The room in which the Hardings sat was eccentrically withdrawn from the light of day, as though London had been Cadiz: had it not been for the electric light they could not have seen to eat. For more than half the year no more than a token daylight found its way through the corner window. “The house was designed by an imbecile or an Eskimo,” Harding would say. “Why do we stop here?” To which Essie would reply, “That I have often wondered myself.” It was an incomplete cylinder, for its central air hole was little more than a semicircle, the back yard of another house completing it on one side. Opening off this cavernous chamber (dining room, kitchen, storeroom, all in one) were a bedroom and sitting room. Both of these were, in the ordinary way, day-lit: but because of the tower-like design of the building, they had a somewhat eccentric shape.
Rainfall was occurring, a thunderstorm threatening London, and the immured Hardings felt the need of more light. René Harding sprang up to switch on a standing lamp.
“Another beastly day,” he said absentmindedly.
“From whom is the telegram?” Essie enquired.
“From Canada. It is from a colleague of mine with some information I required.”
Essie was looking at him, as if expecting the answer about the telegram to complete itself. Professor René Harding was tall, about five foot eleven, with broad shoulders and such markedly narrow hips that the lower part of his jacket was inclined to flap. His beard did not crudely blot out his face, nesting his eyes in a blue-black bush or surrounding them with a disturbing red vegetation. It merely lengthened the face, and stylistically grained and striped it with a soft material not differing greatly from it in tone, reminiscent of the elegant stone hair which leaved, curled upon, and grooved the long French faces upon the west façade at Chartres. His eyes were of a brown to match the somewhat sallow skin.When he laughed, rather than bisecting his face laterally, he thrust forward his bristling mouth in what might be called the ho-ho-ho position, employed by the actor if he wishes to give the idea of something stiltedly primitive. Should it be one of an archaically masculine, bearded chorus of uncouth warriors that he has to represent, that is when he ho-ho-ho’s (not ha-ha-ha’s). René’s eyes were at the cat-like angle, glittering out of a slit rather than, as with his wife, showing the eye in its full circular expansion. He was one of those men it is difficult to imagine without a beard: and who one felt was very handsome bearded, but did not feel sure about its being so becoming were he to be beardless.
Speaking generally, he was inclined to furrow up his forehead
à la
Descartes, and to assume half-recumbent attitudes by choice, rather than to sit erect.
These physical idiosyncrasies corresponded to an innate preference for the dressed rather than the undressed, even if the costume or the disguise was nothing more than hair. His wife was of course a born nudist; and he had recently, it is true, come to feel, especially at breakfast time, that he was in a nudist camp.
But this was a very abstracted man. He seldom saw his wife in full focus, but behind, or through, something else. He did not often
completely
withdraw himself from the intellectual problem he had in hand, when conversing with an intimate or even with a stranger. Inside him, he left simmering as it were, in the background of his mind, the dominant problem, in the way that a housewife reduces to a simmer something she has in hand, to leave her free for a short while for action elsewhere, in response to a sudden summons.
As he sat down he placed the telegram in his pocket and picked up the
Daily Express
. Filling himself a fresh cup of coffee he drank this in a long gulp. Replacing the cup in the saucer with
fracas
he continued to stare dully and angrily at the
Daily Express
headlines.
Monday, 15th May, 1939.
THE KING WILL BE TWO DAYS LATE
IT’S THAT OTHER MAN AGAIN
DUCE SAYS PEACE
“Nothing to Justify a War.”
Essie was still looking at him, and now she asked, “What is in your paper, René?”
“It’s that ‘Other Man Again,’” he replied, almost mechanically, echoing the headlines. He looked up at her, his face wrinkled, with a dismally roguish smile. “The German chancellor, you know.”
“So I gathered,” Essie said, and slowly lowered her head to look at her own paper, the
Daily Telegraph
.
For about ten minutes, husband and wife read their papers without speaking. Rather abruptly Harding rose, wiped his moustache, and exclaimed, “Are you going out to the shops, my dear?”
Hester Harding rose, too.
“A little later, yes.”
“See if you can get me the
Times
, will you? Also the
Manchester
Guardian
. I am going in to work now. If anyone should telephone, do not put them through.”
“No one?”
“No one at all!”
“All right,” said Essie. “You look preoccupied. Is there anything in the papers you don’t like?”
“A damn lot, but not more so than usual! I shall be through with what I have to do about one o’clock!”
They had rented the next-door flat, a one-room affair, the front doors facing one another across the dark landing. He was inserting his key in the opposite door, that of No. 7, as he was closing his own. This other flat, which he used as a study, was walled with books. There was a small desk at which he now seated himself hurriedly and drew the telegram out of his pocket.
For her part, Hester went into the room where Mrs. Harradson was still at work with the vacuum cleaner, a novelty she greatly appreciated.
“Oo, ma’am, Mrs. Harding, I didn’t hear you, ma’am,” said Mrs. Harradson jumping up and down, an excitable marionette, as she heard Essie’s voice. She turned off the vacuum.
“What do you think that old wretch Hitler has done now, Mrs. Harradson?”
“Oo! I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am. What is it, ma’am, the nasty ole man?”
“Yes, he’s a horrid old beast. He says woman’s place is it the kitchen.What do you say to that, Mrs. Harradson?”
“Oo, ’e do, do ’e, ma’am! What does that dirty ole German want to be givin’ us orders for, where we oughter be, nasty ole man.”
“I don’t know what their wives are doing. That is a man’s country where women seem to have no rights at all. The men shave their heads in the most disgusting way; they don’t mind what they look like. If my husband shaved his head I would sue for divorce on the spot!”