TIMOTHY MATERER

UNIVERSITYOF MISSOURI

The English Vortex:

Modern Literature and
the "Pattern of Hope"

AT THE AGE OF 77, EzraPound published his final memorial to the

Vortex, the association he began with Wyndham Lewis and T. S.
Eliot in the crisis year of 1914. "FromCanto CXV,"one of Pound's
Drafts & Fragments,laments the disappointed hopes of the group
and commemorates its central figure, Wyndham Lewis. The poem
opens with an extravagantbut moving tribute to Lewis:
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.1
A brain tumor blinded Lewis in 1951. He "chose blindness" when
he refused to undergo surgerythat risked darkeninghis mental fac-
ulties. Lewiscontinued to paint even while his sight was failing (for
example, his second portraitof T. S. Eliot),and total blindness could
not stop the writing of his novels and social criticism. In a figurative
sense, Lewis'blindness relates him to the writersPound describes in
Canto CXV:"all the resistersblacked out" (p. 781). Lewiswhen alive
was the greatest "resister"in England."A great energy like that of
Lewis,"Pound wrote in 1938, "is beyond price in such a suffocated
nation...."2
Yet the tone of this elegy for Lewis becomes less enthusiastic as
Pound reflects on his failure to enlist men like Lewis and Eliot,
among others, in his causes:

'The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New Directions, 1970), p. 794. Canto CXVwas first published in 1962.
2EzraPound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; rpt. New Directions, 1968), p. 106.1123
1124 MATERER
TIMOTHY

When one's friends hate each other

How can there be peace in the world?
Theirasperitiesdiverted me in my green time. (p. 794)
These lines are characteristicallyoverstated. There was no hate
among Lewis,Eliot,and Pound at least, even in the 1930swhen their
relationswere most strained.But Pound was deeply frustratedwhen
he failed to convince the two writers to direct their concerted
energies at the economic issue. After reading Lewis'LeftWings over
Europe(1936), Pound pleaded with him to direct his political blasts
at the usurers.And he persisted in his vain efforts to educate the
man he addressed as "the Vort"on the money issue.3Eliotwas per-
haps more interested in economic issues than Lewis,but Pound be-
lieved that Eliot'sCriterioncould have no positive social impact. He
concludes bitterly in Canto 102: "But the lot of 'em, Yeats, Possum,
Old Wyndham / had no ground to stand on" (p. 728). To under-
stand the depth of Pound's disappointment, the sense that the fail-
ure of the Vortex implied the crash of an entire culture, we must
examine Pound's "green time" and the "asperities"that so diverted
him and raised his hopes.

II
Vorticismprimarilyrepresented a visual ratherthan a verbal revo-
lution. Although Pound invented the term "Vorticism" in 1914,
Lewis was using a vortex motif in his drawings as early as 1912.
Lewis himself was influenced by the London exhibitions of Italian
Futuristsin 1912 and 1913, especially by Boccioni's States of Mind
series, which employs the vortex pattern.4In Lewis'Timonof Athens
illustrations (1912), the geometrical shapes of armored figures
struggle in a whirlwind that draws them into its vortex. Although
the Vorticists'abstractforms were not invariablybound to the vor-
tex design, it gave them a clearly recognizable trademark.
In literature, however, Vorticism cannot be clearly defined, nor
even satisfactorilydiscriminatedfrom Imagism.In his essay on Vor-
ticism, Pound wrote that "The image is not an idea. It is a radiant
node or cluster; it is... a VORTEX,from which, and through which,

'The correspondence between Lewis and Pound, as well as that between Lewis and Eliot, is in the
Wyndham Lewis Collection at the Cornell University Library.My debt to this collection runs throughout
the article. I am grateful to the late George H. Healey of the Department of Rare Books at Cornell for
assistance in using the Lewis collection.
'See William Lipke, "Futurism and the Development of Vorticism," Studio International, CLXXIII(April,
1967), 173-179.
THE ENGLISHVORTEX 1125

and into which, ideas are constantly rushing."5This makesVorticism

seem a more ambitious and dynamic kind of Imagism. By 1913,
Pound was exasperated with the Imagist group and the bullying
way Amy Lowell had taken it over. The theories he developed in his
Imagist phase drew new energy, if not a clearer formulation, from
his association with Lewis and with the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska.
He used the term "Vortex"quite subjectively to describe the crea-
tive energy the Imagistslacked, as in this description of Lewis'art to
John Quinn: "It is not merely knowledge of technique, or skill, it is
intelligence and knowledge of life, of the whole of it, beauty,
heaven, hell, sarcasm, every kind of whirlwind of force and emo-
tion. Vortex.That is the rightword, if I did think of it myself."6
Though vague, "Vorticism"was a useful word because it could be
applied to more than a single art. Vorticismgave a poet like Pound,
a painter like Lewis, and a sculptor like Gaudier-Brzeskathe sense
that they were working for a common goal. In BLAST,the magazine
Lewis founded in June of 1914 to publicize Vorticism,Pound wrote
in a section entitled "VORTEX. POUND":
Everyconcept, every emotion presents itself to the vivid conscious-
ness in some primaryform. It belongs to the art of this form. If sound,
to music; if formed words, to literature;the image, to poetry;colour in
position, to painting; form or design in three planes, to sculpture.
(BLAST, No. 1, p. 154)
Whatever his art, the Vorticistuses "primaryform." In Lewis'"Com-
position in Blue" (1915), the geometric shapes are nonrepresenta-
tional and exist only to set off the area of blue watercolor against
the black lines and shadings of the composition. In what could be a
comment on this severe design, Pound wrote that "Vorticismis art
before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and sec-
ondary application" (Gaudier-Brzeska,p. 88). Similarly,Pound's fea-
tures are recognizable in Gaudier-Brzeska's"Hieratic Head of Ezra
Pound" (1914), but the emphasis falls on the relationship of the
curved masses of the hair,the domed forehead and slitted eyes, and
the geometrically shaped nose, mouth, and goatee. Could literary
Vorticism attempt a similarly abstract treatment of primaryform?
Pound had little success in doing so until his Cantos were well un-
der way.

'Ezra Pound, "Vorticism," in Gaudier-Brzeska, A Memoir (New Directions, 1970), p. 92. Many of the es-
says of Pound's Vorticist days are collected in this memoir.
6The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), p. 74.
1126 TIMOTHYMATERER

Vorticismnot only tried to bridge the visual and the verbal arts;it
also hoped to humanize the quantitative world of the sciences. In
the Vorticism essay, Pound gives us the mathematical formula for
the circle, which represents "the circle free of space and time lim-
its": "Greatworks of art contain this... sort of equation. They cause
form to come into being. By the 'image' I mean such an equation"
(Gaudier-Brzeska,pp. 91, 92). At this point in the essay, he redefines
the image as the Vortex.This term is ideal because a vortex defines a
pattern of energies, as it does in the whirlwind of forces in Lewis'
Timon drawings;and patterned energies also constitute the physical
world. Pound tells us that science reveals "a world of moving
energies... magnetisms that take form...."7 The Vorticists hoped to
reflect this world in their art. As one critic of Vorticismwrites, "Re-
cent advances and popularizationsof physics had forced many, like
HenryAdams,to quail before the 'new multiverseof forces,' but the
Vorticists had no such fears and gladly took on the task of con-
ceptualizing this new world as a world of forms."8
"'Vorticism,'" Lewiswrote in a 1939 reminiscence, "accepted the
machine world: that is the point to stress."9When Lewiswrote this,
he was opposing Herbert Read's claim that the abstract artist was
fleeing from the mechanized world of science into an imaginary
world. The Vorticist Manifesto in BLAST,on the contrary,asserted
that the modern artistmust be inspired by "the forms of machinery,
Factories,new and vaster buildings, bridges and works" (BLAST,No.
1, p. 40). The Vorticistswould not deny that the landscapes created
by industrialism were generally hideous. But the Vortex would
sweep up this ugliness, blast it to pieces, and reassemble it in beau-
tiful, painted forms. In BLAST,Lewiswrites:"A man could make just
as fine an art in discords, and with nothing but 'ugly' trivialand ter-
rible materials, as any classic artist did with only 'beautiful' and
pleasant means" (BLAST,No. 1, p. 145).
An "artin discords"suggests the finest pieces of verbal art BLAST
offered, T. S. Eliot's"Preludes"and "Rhapsodyon a Windy Night."
Eliot was not one of the original Vorticists,and Lewis did not even

'LiteraryEssays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New Directions, 1968), p. 154.

8Herbert N. Schneidau, "Vorticism and the Career of Ezra Pound," Modern Philology, LXV (February,
1%968), 221.
'Wyndham Lewis on Art, Collected Writings, 1913-1950, eds. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox (Funk & Wag-
nails, 1969), p. 340.
THE ENGLISHVORTEX 1127

know him when BLAST No. 1 was published. Butsometime before the
next issue, Lewiswalked into Pound'striangularflatin Kensingtonand
met, as he describes it, "the author of Prufrock-indeed... Prufrock
himself: but a Prufrockto whom the mermaidswould decidedly have
sung...."10 Eliotwas still studying at Oxfordthen, but he followed the
Vorticists' activities in London and tried to break into BLASTwith
appropriatelyenergetic poems. "I have corresponded with Lewis,"
Eliotwrote to Pound, "but his PuritanicalPrinciplesseem to bar my
way to Publicity.I fear that King Bolo and his Big BlackKween will
never burstinto print."11 Lewistold Poundthat he wished to use Eliot's
"excellent bits of scholarlyribaldry...but stick to my naif determina-
tion to have no 'words ending in -Uck, -Unt, and -Ugger.' "12

"Preludes,"however, made a positive contribution to the Vorti-

cist cause that "King Bolo," one suspects, could not have. Eliot's
poems were the only literaryproductions in BLASTthat matched in
force and originalitythe designs of Lewis,the painter EdwardWads-
worth, and Gaudier-Brzeska.BLASTNo. 1 did print a section from
Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (then entitled The Saddest
Story). Butthe novel's prose seems tame next to the Vorticists'proc-
lamations and "Blasts,"and its technical innovations could not be
appreciated in a brief excerpt. As for Pound, Lewis was right when
he commented years laterthat Pound's "fire-eatingpropagandistut-
terances were not accompanied by any very experimentalefforts in
his particularmedium."13Pound mixed awkwardsatire ("Letus de-
ride the smugness of 'The Times' / GUFFAW!")with uninspired at-
tempts to use primary form (as in the two-line poem "L'Art":
"Green arsenic spread on an egg-white cloth, / Crushed straw-
berries!Come let us feast our eyes" [BLAST,No. 1, pp. 45, 49]).
Eliot'spoems, on the other hand, were compressed enough to at
least seem inspired by the Vorticist theory of primaryform. The
modern urban life they reflected was assembled from the poem's
"sordid images." Like a work by Gaudier-Brzeska, the poem
presents a human figure, but one unlike a conventional representa-
tion of a realisticcharacter:

'"Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre& Spottiswoode, 1937), pp. 283-4.
""A Bundle of Letters," in Ezra Pound, Perspectives, ed. Noel Stock (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company,
1965), p. 111.
'2TheLetters of Wyndham Lewis, ed W. K. Rose (New Directions, 1963), pp. 66-7.
'Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (1927; rpt. Beacon Press, 1957), p. 39.
1128 TIMOTHY
MATERER

You had such a vision of the street

As the street hardlyunderstands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands. (BLAST,
No. 2, p. 48)
The powerful sense of character conveyed by the images of "yellow
soles" and "soiled hands" arises from an art, to repeat Pound's
phrase, that has not "spread itself into... elaboration and secondary
application."
But unfortunately Eliot began his association with the Vorticists
as the movement was dying. In the second issue of BLAST,follow-
ing a "Vortex" sent from France by Gaudier-Brzeska, appears the
black-bordered notice: "MORT POUR LA PATRIE.Henri Gaudier-
Brzeska: after months of fighting and two promotions for gallantry"
(p. 34). Soon Lewis had also joined the army. As Lewis wrote in his
last editorial, "BLASTfinds itself surrounded by a multitude of other
Blasts.... [It] will, however, try and brave the wave of blood, for the
serious mission it has on the other side of World-War" (p. 5).
The first short-lived phase of the Vortex and the one to follow
correspond to what Pound calls the first two phases of "Kulchur":
"the nineteen teens, Gaudier, Wyndham L. and I as we were in
Blast, and the next phase, the 1920's. The sorting out, the rappel a
I'ordre" (Guide to Kulchur, p. 95).

III
By dispersing the Vortex, World War I destroyed England's hope for
a new Renaissance. This statement may seem extreme, but it repre-
sents Pound's and Lewis' opinions. In Februaryof 1915, Pound could
still write: "new masses of unexplored arts and facts are pouring into
the vortex of London. They cannot help bringing about changes as
great as the Renaissance changes" (Gaudier-Brzeska, p. 117). The Vor-
ticists were in effect following Pound's prescription for the making of
a Renaissance, as he outlined it in Patria Mia (1913). First,dead ideas
must be demolished: "A Risorgimento implies a whole volley of liber-
ations; liberations from ideas, from stupidities...." By its very name,
BLASTpromised to do the demolishing, as well as provide two more
qualities Pound thought essential to a Renaissance, "enthusiasm and
a propaganda."14 A major target of the Vorticists' blasts was the Victo-

'Ezra Pound, Patria Mia (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher, Publisher, 1950), pp. 79, 42. Although this work was
published only in 1950, it was finished in 1913.
THE ENGLISHVORTEX 1129

rianage, as in one of the manyeditorial"Blasts"in Lewis'publication:

BLAST
years 1837 to 1900....
BLASTtheir weeping whiskers-hirsute
RHETORICof EUNUCH and STYLIST-
SENTIMENTALHYGIENICS
ROUSSEAUISMS(wild Nature cranks)
FRATERNIZING WITHMONKEYS(BLAST,No.1, p.18)

With the remnantsof Victorianismcleared away, the artscould lead

the way to a remade culture: "This will have its effect not only in
the arts," Pound wrote of his Renaissance,"but in life, in politics,
and in economics. If I seem to lay undue stress upon the status of
the arts, it is only because the arts respond to an intellectual move-
ment more swiftly and more apparentlythan do institutions"(Patria
Mia, pp. 41-42). In 1939, Lewis reflected on the intense hopes of the
BLASTdays; he speaks of himself in the third person, as if to disas-
sociate himself from his own "green time":

He thought the time had come to shatter the visible world to bits, and
build it nearer to the heart's desire: and he really was persuaded that
this absolute transformation was imminent.... The war looked to him
like an episode at first-rather proving his contentions than otherwise.
(Wyndham Lewis on Art, p. 340)

The Vorticists imagined that the war might finish the job of demol-
ishing Victorianismthat they had begun. With terrible irony, Gau-
dier-Brzeskawrote in the "VORTEX" he sent from Francejust before
his death: "THISWARISA GREATREMEDY" (BLAST,No. 2, p. 33).
When Lewis himself went to the front in 1917, he quickly lost any
illusions about the "remedial" aspect of the war. Before he was
transferredto LordBeaverbrook's"CanadianWar Memorials"proj-
ect, he saw heavy fighting. (Lewis'friend and colleague T. E. Hulme
was killed in a battery less than a quarter of a mile from Lewis'
own.) Lewiswrote in 1939 that he understood the war's significance
when "he found himself in the mud of Passchendaele"and realized
that "the community to which he belonged would never be the
same again: and that all surplus vigour was being bled away and
stamped out" (WyndhamLewison Art,p. 340).
Although his disillusion was intense, much of his vigor, or Vorti-
cist energy, did survive the war. "The thought of the modern and
the energy of the cave-man," Eliotwrote in 1918 to describe Lewis'
1130 TIMOTHYMATERER

works.5 Lewis was full of new schemes to rebuild the visual world,
but he did not know how to activate them. Plans for a new issue of
BLASTfell through. Although the Vorticist painters (including Ed-
ward Wadsworth and FrederickEtchells)reassembledas "GroupX,"
they broke up after one exhibition. Pound, Lewis,and Eliotcould at
least publish together in The Little Review, which Pound an-
nounced as "a place where the current prose writings of James
Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and myself might appear regu-
larly, promptly, and together....16 But the focus of Pound's energies
was obviously shifting from England.Evenby 1916, he had probably
started on what he called his "farewell to London," Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley. Mauberley,according to Hugh Kenner, is "an elegy for
the Vortex."7And in section V it is an elegy for men like Gaudier-
Brzeska,who died before they could remakea moribundculture:
There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
Foran old bitch gone in the teeth,
Fora botched civilization....
While Pound was planning to move to Paris,Lewis and Eliotwere
active in London. They had drawn closer after the War and took a
holiday in Francetogether in the summer of 1920, when, as bearers
of a present from EzraPound (it turned out to be a used pair of
brown shoes), they visited Joyce in Paris."1In London, they cast
around for financial backing for a new magazine. Lewis had inter-
ested Sidney Schiff (the author "Stephen Hudson") in financing the
project, but he was doubtful because he thought Lewis and Eliot
would be the only first-ratecontributors to it. Finally, Lewis pub-
lished his own tiny and inexpensive publication, The Tyro,in 1921.
Since the paper surveyed the artof painting ratherthan general cul-
tural trends, The Tyrodid not meet Eliot'sstandards.Nevertheless,
he loyally contributed three essays and a poem before The Tyro
folded in 1922.
By 1922, of course, Eliot had begun to dominate London intellec-
tual life as the author of The Waste Land and editor of The Crite-

"T. S. Eliot, "Tarr,"The Egoist, V (September, 1918), 106.

"Ezra Pound, The Little Review, IV (May, 1917), 3.
"Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (University of California Press, 1971), p. 287. See also Kenner's chapter,
"Vortex Lewis."
"See Blasting and Bombardiering, pp. 270-76.
THE ENGLISHVORTEX 1131

rion. Although The Waste Landwas at first read as an obituary for

Western culture, it contains positive elements. First,by the very fact
that it was a great poem it bore witness to a degree of vitality in the
modern age. Pound felt that it "justified"modern poetry, and after
seeing the drafts for it wrote to Eliot, "It is after all a grrrreatlit-
tttttteraryperiod" (Letters,p. 170). Secondly, although the poem de-
spairs of the present state of culture, it makes us aware of the
traditions our culture lacks and implies the need for individual re-
sponsibility in attaining them. "Shall I at least set my lands in or-
der?" one of Eliot's protagonists asks. Through the Criterion,Eliot
intended to recognize his responsibility.
Unless the three writers published together, there could be no
Vortex, which Pound once defined as a "convergence" of the best
minds available. Eliot therefore needed Lewis and Pound for The
Criterion.He told Lewis that he wanted to keep their "association
before the public mind," and requested a contribution from him,
including a regularartchronicle, in every issue of the quarterly(The
Lettersof WyndhamLewis, p. 150). Eliotalso editorialized on Lewis'
literary and social criticism-books like The Art of Being Ruled
(1926) and Timeand WesternMan (1927). In his commentaryon the
1926 work, Eliot saw Lewis as representative of the "dispossessed
artist,"who "may be driven to examining the elements in the situ-
ation-political, social, philosophical or religious-which frustrate
his labor."19In his study of Eliot's intellectual development, John
Margolis credits Lewis' example with strengthening Eliot'sdecision
to broaden The Criterion'sinterest in social issues.20
Nevertheless, by 1927 Lewis had lost confidence in Eliot'sediting
of his quarterly.He felt that Eliothad opened it to the very forces it
should be fighting. For example, Eliot published sections from
Lewis' great satire of the London art world, The Apes of God, and
told Lewis that "It is worthwhile running the Criterionjust to pub-
lish these" (Letters,p. 140). But at the same time he was also print-
ing works by some of Lewis' prime satiric targets-Sacheverell
Sitwell, for example, and Lewis' estranged patron Sidney Schiff.
Lewiswas doubtlessly over-sensitive. Yet Pound felt much the same
as Lewis about Eliot'sediting. Pound often urged Lewis to contrib-

"T.S. Eliot, "Commentary," The New Criterion, IV (June, 1926), 420.

"John Margolis, T. S. Eliot's Intellectual Development (University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 83.
1132 TIMOTHYMATERER

ute more to The Criterion,since it was by default the best outlet in

England,and wrote over twenty articles and poems for it himself.
But he continually criticized Eliot for his lack of commitment, par-
ticularlyon economic issues. He closed a complaining letter to the
Criterionwith the reservation,"Farbe it from me to deny or affirm
or in any way uncriterionisticly to commit myself...."21 In an eco-
nomic journal, he wrote that an analysis of many of The Criterion's
contributorswould result in a libel action.2

IV
The Vorticistswanted to build a new world, but they were forced
to squander their energy demolishing the old one. Theirefforts be-
gan to diverge because they did not find a programto unite them.
Although they all shared a commitment to order and authority,the
events of the 1930s subjected their political ideas to pressuresthey
could not bear.
In For Launcelot Andrewes, Eliot praised Lewis because he was
"obviously strivingcourageously toward a positive theory...."23Yet
Lewis' major theoretical work, Time and Western Man, is almost
wholly destructive criticism-an attack on what he calls the "time-
cult."Accordingto this Bergsonian"cult,"all experience is reducedto
temporal flux;even one's identity is merely a series of chronological
events. Lewiswrites, in the most "positive"statement he offers,
So what we seek to stimulate, and what we give the critical outline of,
is a philosophy that will be as much a spatial-philosophy as Bergson's
is a time-philosophy. As much as he enjoys the sight of things 'pene-
trating' and 'merging' do we enjoy the opposite picture of them
standing apart... much as he enjoys the 'indistinct,' the 'qualitative,'
the misty, sensational and ecstatic,-very much more do we value the
distinct, the geometric. (pp. 427-8)
Lewis associates the temporal sense with the emotions and a ro-
mantic condition of becoming, and the spatial sense with the intel-
lect and a classical state of being. (The reference to "geometric"
qualities is related to T. E. Hulme's view of modern classicism.) All
experience should be clearly ordered ("with usura is no clear de-
marcation,"Pound writes in Canto XLV).But even though the terms
of Lewis'"criticaloutline" are suggestive, they are no more related

2Ezra Pound, "Letter," The Criterion, X (July, 1931), 730.

UEzraPound, "Mr. Eliot's Quandaries," New English Weekly, IV (March 29,1934), 559.
3T. S. Eliot, For Launcelot Andrewes (Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p. 142.
THE ENGLISH VORTEX 1133

to a "positive theory" than Eliot's ambiguous statement (in For

LauncelotAndrewes) that he considered himself "classicist in liter-
ature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" (p. vii).
Only his Anglo-Catholicismcommitted Eliotto specific beliefs, but
even it did not lead him to support any direct social action-as
Pound observed. Reacting to the religious viewpoint of After
StrangeGods (1934), Pound complained that Eliot"implies that we
need more religion, but does not specify the natureof that religion;
all the implications are such as to lead the readers' minds into a
fog."24
Pound's own "positive theory," based on Major Douglas' system
of Social Credit,was a specific one. And his jagged technique in the
Cantos was meant to keep the reader'smind alert:comparingdiffer-
ent men and cultures and drawing economic moralsthat illuminate
Douglas' system. Pound invites us to correlate "luminous details":
Malatesta'senormous efforts to build the Tempio (Canto IX),John
Quinn's story of the "Honest Sailor's"financial success (XII),the
hell faced by Gaudier-Brzeska,Hulme, and Lewis in World War I
(XVI),and Kublai Kahn's invention of paper money (XVIII).This
technique, as several critics have noted, is related to the theories of
Vorticism:"The innumerable disparate elements that make up the
Cantos can be thought of as 'planes in relation'... united visually,or
spatially, in the same manner as a Lewis painting or a Gaudier
carving."2
Whatever positive ideas were held by these three artists,the real
problem was to put these ideas into action. This was not so much
Eliot'sconcern because he thought that the intellectual should criti-
cize and compare social theories ratherthan put them into practice.
But Pound and Lewis tried to take more direct action, with di-
sastrous resultsfor their careers.
"The great protector of the arts,"Pound wrote in 1913, "is as rare
as the great artist,or more so" (PatriaMia, p. 77). Pound was always
watchful for such a patron and found one in John Quinn. He wrote
to Quinn, "If there were more like you, we should get on with our
renaissance" (Letters,p. 51). In Mussolini, Pound believed that he
had found not only a man sensitive to the arts (as in Canto 41), but

""Mr.Eliot's Quandaries," p. 559.

'William C. Wees, "Ezra Pound as a Vorticist," Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VI (Win-
ter-Spring, 1965), 70-71.
1134 TIMOTHY MATERER

also one capable of reforminga usurious economic system. The art-

ist's duty was to recognize such a leader when he appeared. By
presenting figures like Malatesta and Thomas Jefferson in the Can-
tos, Pound supposedly preparesus to recognize the promisingqual-
ities in Mussolini. Pound accepted the weakest indications that
Mussolini would reform Italy'seconomics. Behind his desire to be-
lieve that the dictator would do so is his conviction that only au-
thoritarianrule could distribute economic goods fairly:"In a hide-
bound Italy,fascism meant at the start DIRECTaction...." He thus
convinced himself that "the Duce will stand not with despots and
the lovers of power but with the lovers of ORDER."26
Lewis also felt that only authoritariancontrol could change an
economic system. In 1931, he wrote a book that was sympathetic
toward German National Socialism, a book that he almost immedi-
ately regretted,Hitler. Lewiswas careful to point out that he was an
"exponent," not an "advocate," of Hitler's programs. But he was
clearly sympathetic to Hitler'seconomic views (rejecting, however,
their anti-Semitic aspect) and at one point cited Eliot on Social
Credit to explain the Germanposition on the war debts imposed at
Versailles. Like Pound, Lewis believed the simplistic theory that
wars are caused by the manipulation of financiers:"the Versailles
TreatyMakers must have known that the more 'nations' you make
(or break the world up into) . . .the more pickings for the
Outsider."27
All three men approachedthese issues as, to use Eliot'sphrase for
Lewis, "dispossessed artists." As artists, they would all probably
have agreed with Lewis'justification of a strong, central authority:
"to get some sort of peace to enable us to work, we should natu-
rally seek the most powerful and stable authority that can be de-
vised."28Best of all, however, would be the kind of authority that
would give the artist some direct influence on society (Pound
thought that Mussolini would make this possible in Italy).The work
that best reveals the fundamental reason for this fascination with
authoritariangovernment takes us back to the conclusion of the
first Vorticist phase: Lewis' pamphlet of 1919, The Caliph's Design,
Architects! Where is your Vortex?

'Ezra Pound, lefferson and/or Mussolini (1935; rpt. Liveright, 1970), pp. 70,128.
'Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (Chatto & Windus, 1931), p. 76.
,Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled (Chatto & Windus, 1926), pp. 369-70.
THE ENGLISHVORTEX 1135

This brilliant and exuberant critique of the arts begins with a

"parable." Lewis imagines a Caliph rising one morning, sketching
out some strange designs, and then summoning his chief engineer
and architect. He tells them that he is dissatisfied with his city, "so I
have done a design of a new city, or ratherof a typical street in a
new city. It is a little vorticist bagatelle...." The Caliph's men are
amused and puzzled, then terrifiedas they learnthat they have only
a few hours "to invent the forms and conditions that would make it
possible to realize my design," or else "your heads will fall...." Un-
der these conditions, the job gets done. The plans appearon sched-
ule, "And within a month a strange street transfiguredthe heart of
that cultivated city" (WyndhamLewison Art,pp. 133-4).
"A VORTICIST KING!WHY NOT?"BLASTinquired. An enlight-
ened monarch, by transforminga city's architecture,could ennoble
its citizens' lives and make them happier with their lot, as Lewis ar-
gues in The Caliph'sDesign. He furtherdeveloped this argument in
The Tyro:
A man might be unacquainted with the very existence of a certain
movement in art, and yet his life could be modified directly if the
street he walked down took a certain shape.... Its forms and colours
would have a tonic or a debilitating effect on him.... The painting,
sculpture and general design of today, such as can be included in the
movement we support, aims at nothing short of a physical recon-
structing... of the visible partof the world."
In admiringthe above passage, Stephen Spender finds that it reflects
one of the great characteristics of modern art: "The invention
through artof a pattern of hope, influencing society." Lewisand the
Vorticists believed, to use Spender'swords, "that modern art might
transformthe contemporary environment, and hence, by pacifying
and ennobling its inhabitants, revolutionize the world...."30 We
should not forget the idealism of these early hopes. But unfortu-
nately the VorticistCaliph was an artist'sdream, the fascist dictator
a political reality.

V
The EnglishVortexrevealsnot the development of a social or intel-
lectual program,but ratherwhat Spender calls a "patternof hope."

"Quoted in Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern (Hamish Hamilton, 1963), pp. 85-86.
"Spender, pp. 83,84.
1136 TIMOTHYMATERER

Modernliteraturewas not bornin despairafterWorldWar1,but before

the War,with the hope of transfiguringevery aspect of life through a
new Renaissance. By the middle Thirties this hope was no longer
viable. Pound alone kept pushing for a revivalof the Vortex, even
suggesting a new issue of BLASTtoLewisin 1936.His supportof Lewis
continued, as Lewislearnedto his distressafterthe War,when Pound
went on Fascistradio in ItalyduringWorld War II.
Pound's fate during and after the War is well-known. Lewis' fate
was not so severe, but harsh nonetheless. His unpopular political
writings of the Thirties,especially the Hitlerbook, put his entire lit-
erarycareer under a cloud; and a series of illnesses left him deeply
in debt. His skill as a painter was as fine as ever, and he received
valuable publicity when the Royal Academy refused to exhibit his
magnificent 1938 portraitof T. S. Eliot-which led Augustus John to
resign from the Academy in protest. But the pre-War market for
paintings was barrenfor even the best of artists,and in 1939 Lewis
and his wife left for America, where he was promised some com-
missions. He planned on a short stay, but the War stranded him in
Canadawith no way of obtaining money to return.His lonely, pov-
erty-strickenyears in Toronto became the subject of his greatest
novel, Self Condemned (1954).
Lewis' novel is representative of the kind of introspection all
three writers underwent as a result of the War. The spirit of both
Self Condemned and The Pisan Cantos is reflected in the following
great lines from Eliot's"LittleGidding," in which he lists the "gifts
reservedfor age":
the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughterat what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm....
Although the theme of Self Condemned is in these lines, it is no-
where stated with this precision and confidence. Sometimes it is
hard to tell whether Lewis is justifying or condemning his protago-
nist. But the greatness of the novel lies in what Eliotcalled its tone
of "almost unbearablespiritualagony."3'

3T. S. Eliot, "A Note on Monstre Gai," Hudson Review, VII (Winter, 1955), 524.
THE ENGLISHVORTEX 1137

Lewis' protagonist in Self Condemned, Rene Harding,resigns his

chair of history shortly before World War II breaksout because he
thinks that his subject as it is presentlytaught encourages a war psy-
chosis. He claims that historiansdignify the war-makersand system-
atically ignore the economic causes of war. Although he is
heartened that "the student masses have begun to regard the
world...with a cold eye,"32he feels that he can no longer compro-
mise himself and leaves for Canada. Once there, however, poverty
and intellectual isolation transformhis rebelliousness and hope into
despair. He now believes that the brief periods of civilization man
has known will always be the exceptions and animal brutalityand
greed the rule. Western civilization is dying, he believes: "He esti-
mated that we were perhaps rathermore than half-way across that,
in geological terms, infinitely brief era of 'enlightenment' " (p. 211).
This passage echoes the conclusion of one of Lewis'favorite books
of the post-World War I period, Julien Benda's La Trahison des
Clercs. But in this post-World War II novel such ideas are put in a
new and harsher light. In Harding'scharacter,they lead to a con-
tempt for the masses who are producing what he considers a new
dark ages. Two years before he published Self Condemned, Lewis
admitted in The Art of Being Ruled that "intolerance regardingthe
backward, slothful, obstructive majority-'homo stultus'-is
present."33 This intolerance, in an extreme form, corrupts Rene Har-
ding. One senses the book's "spiritualagony" as Lewis traces this
corruption in his autobiographicalhero. As Hardingloses his ideal-
ism and writes historicalstudies that despair of human progress,he
ironicallybecomes a famous author;but he "no longer even believed
in his theories of a new approach to History... for him it had all
frozen into a freak anti-historicalwax-works, of which he was the
Keeper, containing many libellous wax-works of famous kings and
queens. He carriedon mechanically with what the bright, rushing,
idealistic mind of another man had begun" (p. 400).

"Wyndham Lewis, Self Condemned (Methuen & Company, 1954), p. 84. Lewis may have had Pound in
mind when he created Rene Harding. Rene's London flat, as Hugh Kenner has informed me, is based on
Lewis' memories of Pound's triangular flat in Kensington, where Lewis first met T. S. Eliot. (For a descrip-
tion of this flat, see Lewis' "Early London Environment," in T. S. Eliot, A Symposium [London: Editions
London Poetry, 1948], pp. 24-32.) Two details in Lewis' description of Rene in the first chapter recall
Pound: his "eyes were at the cat-like angle, glittering out of a slit," as in Lewis drawings of Pound in 1920,
and his inclination "to assume half-recumbent attitudes," as in Lewis' 1938 portrait of Pound.
"Wyndham Lewis, Rude Assignment (Hutchinson & Company, 1950), p. 188.
1138 TIMOTHYMATERER

Bythe novel's end, his misanthropyhas turned him into a "glacial

shell of a man."
"Yuss.my beamish buckO!" Pound wrote after reading Self Con-
demned, "this IZsome book," and he added in a later letter from St.
Elizabeth's,"Shd / get yu the Nobble."34Pound had plenty of dis-
ciples around him at the asylum, but he wasn't deceived by their
mere youthful energy. He continued to write to Lewis about his
long-standing wish to revive the spirit of the Vortex:"WORTEXXX,
gorrdammit,some convergence." He told Lewis,"Have always held
re / vortex, dominant cell in somatic devilupment...."35The Pisan
Cantos show that even his thoughts about Englandhad mellowed.
In Canto LXXX, he recalls his first meeting with Lewis at the Vienna
Cafe, and in Canto LXXVIII he asserts that Lewis and Gaudier-
Brzeskaare still vital influences:
in whom are the voices, keeping hand on the reins
Gaudier'sword not blacked out,
nor old Hulme's,nor Wyndham's.... (p. 479)
As for himself, Pound reveals the kind of remorse Lewisexpresses in
Self Condemned. Pound writes, though not consistently, of a man
self-condemned, "that had been a hard man in some ways":
J'aieu pitie des autres
probablementpas assez, and at moments that suited
my own convenience.... (p. 460)
One finds a similarconfession in one of Lewis'war-time letters from
Canada.He admitsthat his politcal writingswere too concerned with
achieving the best conditions for the "tribe"of the artist:"I now see
that I thought if anything too much about our tribe...not enough
about"le genre humain"of the revolutionarysong" (Letters,p. 324).
But Pound kept driving at his social credit theory. Lewis'descrip-
tion of his "rock-drillaction... he blasts away tirelessly, prodding
and coaxing" delighted Pound,6 and he used Lewis' term for his
Section: Rock-DrillDe Los Cantares(1955). His ambitions still were
high in the 1959 Thrones, which he described as "an attempt to
move out from egoism and to establish some definition of an order
possible or at any rate conceivable on earth."37 They declined only

'Pound to Lewis, November 19,1954; December 6,1954. Both letters are in the Wyndham Lewis Collec-
tion at the Cornell University Library.
3Pound to Lewis, January 20,1955; December 7,1956 (Cornell Lewis Collection).
6Wyndham Lewis, "The Rock Drill," in Stock, ed., p. 198.
3Donald Hall, "EzraPound: An Interview," Paris Review, XXVIII(Summer/Fall, 1962), p. 49.
THEENGLISH
VORTEX 1139

when he was in his eighties. In Drafts& Fragments(1969),he admits

his failures,but in lines of poetry that are themselves a triumph:
I have brought the great ball of crystal;
who can lift it?
Can you enter the great acorn of light?
But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errorsand wrecks lie about me. (pp. 795-6)
His weariness marksthe elegy for Lewisof Canto CXV,with which we
began this surveyof the Vortex.The"asperities"of his "greentime"no
longer amuse, and Lewis'time / space categories, or any system that
tries to order human experience, now seem meaningless: "Time,
space, / neither life nor death is the answer"(p. 794). Pound had the
grandestdesigns forthe new cu turethe Vorticistshoped to build, and
he was consequently more painfully disillusioned than Lewis and
certainly more than Eliot.
Butwhatever the practicalfailuresand the errorsof judgment, the
"patternof hope" lives in theirworks.The orderedsociety that would
foster greatartwas never to be. As Lewiswrote of the "men of 1914,"
"We arethe firstmen of a Futurethat has not materialized.We belong
to a 'great age' that has not 'come off.' "38 They have left us instead
"some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on
earth,"as Pound himself suggests in his memorialfor Lewis:
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal.... (p. 794)

"Blasting and Bombardiering, p. 258.