Wyndham Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros):
The Classical and the Modern
________
Kitty Hudson
Catullus, Propertius, Horace and Ovid are the people who matter […].
Catullus has the intensity, and Ovid might teach one many things.
Ezra Pound1
The First World War, though cutting short Wyndham Lewis’s leadership
of the Vorticist movement, was a crucial period in his career. The
enforced hiatus brought about by the War allowed his philosophy – and
the notion of classicism in particular – to crystallize in his mind. Lewis’s
close association with Ezra Pound clearly played a part in this respect.
While the characters in his novel Tarr (1918) indicate Lewis’s initial
exploration of the ‘romanticism-classicism’ dichotomy, the explicit
reference to a classical author in A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) (M P31, Plate
74; 1920-21) seems to signal his decision in favour of the classical. One
can point to many direct analogies between the poetry of Ovid and the
painting of Lewis. However, there are multiple layers in this painting
which attest Lewis’s dialogue with classicism in different and more
complex ways. Moreover, Lewis was far from an isolated example of an
artist turning to the classical for inspiration or for subject matter in the
aftermath of the First World War. There was a significant return to
classicism throughout Europe during this period, and its adoption by
such painters as Picasso meant that classicism became inextricably tied
to modernism. Thus Lewis’s engagement with classicism can be viewed
as a response to this wider development. However, it was his immediate
contemporaries in London – notably Pound and T. S. Eliot – who had
perhaps the most direct influence in this respect during these crucial
post-war years.
In Paleface (1929) Lewis outlined his conception of the classical in
oppositional terms: ‘“Classical” is for me anything which is nobly defined
and exact, as opposed to that which is fluid – of the Flux’ (P 255). The
concept of the ‘neo-classical ideal’ can be traced back to Matthew
18
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
Arnold, who in Culture and Anarchy (1869) redefined it as, in Hugh
Witemeyer’s paraphrase, a ‘cosmopolitan internationalism of intellect
and culture, a transcendence of provincial, monolingual perspectives,
and an awareness of the best that has been thought and said.’2 The
opposition that Arnold set up between ‘Hellenism’ and ‘Hebraism’ is
echoed in T. E. Hulme’s ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (c. 1911-12), in
which Hulme defines the classical as ‘finite and fixed’, encapsulating the
‘intrinsically limited’ nature of man as opposed to the infinite
possibilities of the ‘romantic’ vision.3 He prophesies a ‘period of dry,
hard classical verse’ as the inevitable reaction ‘after a hundred years of
romanticism’.4 Lewis’s close – though far from straightforward –
relationship with Hulme, dating from the Ideal Home row in 1913 and
the creation of the Rebel Art Centre, would have made him keenly
aware of Hulme’s arguments.5 In Tarr, Lewis uses the eponymous
protagonist to articulate his ideas on the classical-romantic dichotomy,
with the character of Kreisler employed to represent, in Alan Starr’s
words, the old world of ‘Bourgeois-Bohemia’ with all its ‘Romantic
faults.’6 The two characters are used to explore the dialogue between the
values of reason and the intellect, on the one hand, and those of the
senses, of intuition and emotion, on the other. Alan Starr perceives the
novel as ‘an explanation of Lewis’s aesthetic and philosophical position
c. 1915’ – so far as it was established by this date – and in this sense the
novel paves the way for Lewis’s artistic statement of classical values in
the Tyro paintings in 1920-21.7
Another important, though complicated, influence on Lewis in
this respect was Henri Bergson. Lewis attended Bergson’s lectures at the
Sorbonne in 1911, and though he respected the philosopher whose
impact on modernist thought was so pervasive, he went on to attack
Bergson’s opinions with venom.8 In Lewis’s view, the ‘time-notions’ of
philosophers such as Bergson, A. N. Whitehead, and Samuel Alexander
had ‘substituted the vagueness of emotion for the clarity of intellect.’9
Their insistence on intuition and the interior world as a vital force
subverted the external, Kantian world of common sense that Lewis took
for granted. This, along with the false optimism he saw in Bergsonism,
turned Lewis against his former teacher, in Paul Edwards’s words, ‘with
the resentment of an apostate who has seen through what once deceived
him’ (TWM 467). Notions of the classical in an abstract sense were
therefore central to Lewis’s personal response to modernity – and he
articulated them in a characteristically aggressive and oppositional
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Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
fashion. But what was it that prompted such a direct reference to Ovid,
such an insistence on his classical heritage, in the early 1920s? Lewis
employed classical allusions in the service of satire, to criticize the postwar social and cultural environment. These allusions were thus both a
response to European neo-classicism, and a product of Lewis’s
immediate personal experience of the post-war world.
Educated at Rugby, Lewis would have been familiar with classical
literature, which dominated the English public school curriculum.10 But
this does not explain the widespread revival of interest in the classics by
the modernist avant-garde, those rebel ‘men of 1914’. Indeed, one might
more readily expect them to reject anything that spoke of the past,
tradition, and conformity. Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) is a clear
example of this contradictory attitude, and a visual parallel to T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Ezra Pound’s Cantos, which also
borrow from the classics. Indeed, Stephen Spender referred to Lewis
and Pound as ‘revolutionary traditionalists’.11 Why did Lewis, whose
relationship with his cultural heritage had up to this point been
ambivalent, now so explicitly turn to tradition at this particular moment
in his career?12 The post-war context appears central to this change of
attitude. The disorientation experienced in the aftermath of the fouryear conflict, augmented by the pace of change in modern society and
its technological advances, was overwhelming. There was no longer any
appetite for a direct attack on the cultural establishment, and artists
opted either for a withdrawal from active experimentation or for a
subtle critique of the new, disordered, and seemingly valueless world.
As Elizabeth Cowling writes in her introduction to the Tate
catalogue ‘On Classic Ground’, the ‘return to order’ following the First
World War was Europe-wide.13 It was characterized by a spirit of
‘something like classicism’, despite the fact that this new strain of
classicism was far from being conservative or reactionary, as Charles
Harrison seems to imply in his survey of the period.14 Cowling
emphasizes the movement’s modernist credentials by citing such
examples as Picasso’s Three Dancers of 1925.15 Was Lewis’s apparent
espousal of classicism a response to these wider movements in the art
world – an attempt to keep up with the avant-garde in Paris? Or was it
rather the reverse, a subtle mockery of continental art world trends?
Paris was the hub of the art world, setting aesthetic standards and
attracting artists and writers from across the world. Lewis, however,
remained in London, perhaps aware that he could he could not compete
20
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
with his European counterparts, and temperamentally unsuited to being
a follower rather than a leader. From a detached stance, his paintings
both engage with, and on another level parody, the continental interest
in the classics. Paul Edwards notes that in Paris there was an ‘exaltation
of Hellenic and Latin elements in French culture’, and he goes on to
describe ‘Lewis’s return to representation, adoption of a “classical”
linear style of drawing […], [and] return to traditional genres’ after the
war.16 The War had inflamed nationalist passions to a new level, and in
France this was manifested in a strong desire to emphasize the nation’s
classical, Latinate roots.17 A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) might, in this still
jingoistic post-war context, be read as a satire on the glorification of
national heritage, the Tyros’ incomprehension revealing the French
claim to the classical past to be unconvincing and politically expedient.
Lewis was demonstrably aware, and contemptuous of, the French
nationalistic claim to the classical, writing in The Caliph’s Design (1919)
that ‘the hysterical second-rate Frenchman, with his morbid hankering
after his mother-tradition, the eternal Graeco-Roman, should be
discouraged’ (CD 139).
Despite the mocking and derisive reaction of the Tyros, who with
a ‘substantial laugh’ undermine any serious ‘reading of Ovid’, Lewis’s
work does seem to fit the mould of ‘modernist classicism’ that Cowling
describes. Lewis adeptly combines the radical abstracting processes of
Vorticism with a figurative, almost allegorical, approach that tacitly
acknowledges the weight of tradition. The Tyros’ linearity and sleek
geometrical forms embody a machine-age aesthetic, while the intersecting arcs and facetted appearance show the influence of Cubism.
However, their bashful grins seem to undermine the challenging stare of
Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), poking fun at their posturing as
classical deities. The Tyros reveal the impossibility of tainted modern
man to approximate the Greek ideal. The blank background behind
them likewise denies the classical landscape tradition, a domestic version
of which formed the response of many British artists in the post-war
years – denies in fact any context for them at all. They are placed in the
contemporary world purely by means of their sharp modern apparel,
and linked to the classical only by the appeal to Ovid in the painting’s
title. Perhaps this reference may be seen as a mask behind which a
shallow and empty modernism hides its foolish face; if so, the mask is
ineffective, as Lewis depicts the Tyros’ ignorance and incomprehension
of the volume they peruse. If the Tyros signal a certain classicism in
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Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
Lewis’s outlook, it is certainly not one of nostalgia. Their mischievous
grins show a refusal to participate in a ‘return to order’, deliberately
counteracting the motive behind classicism’s revival elsewhere at this
time. They show a spirit of brazen anarchy rather than caution,
threatening to disrupt any fragile post-war consensus. Yet, with an ironic
incongruity, they look to Ovid as their guide.
The First World War seemed to Lewis to separate absolutely the
past from the present. But though he celebrated the release from
oppressive and outdated Victorian values, he also acknowledged that
nothing had yet replaced them, leaving a moral vacuum in British
society. Looking back to the classical age may have offered to artists
such as Lewis a sense of stability, a cultural basis from which to counter
the anxiety of adapting to a new, post-war world. For some, this could
simply be seen as an insecure clinging to the raft of tradition, a nostalgic
appeal to the past in the hope of explaining the present in
comprehensible terms of progression and/or continuity. Although he
was searching for a new set of values, Lewis himself seemed to reject
any recourse to the past, as he proclaimed in the first issue of The Tyro in
1921: ‘The dead never rise up, and men will not return to the Past’
(WLA [195]). Rather than accepting the past as a life-raft in what he
describes as a ‘No Man’s Land’, Lewis’s reference to Ovid in the title of
his painting – arguably a symbol of classical heritage in general – may be
a means of ridiculing this tendency in his peers, and of criticizing the
weakness of those who shy away from making a fresh start and
embracing modernity.
But of all classical authors to refer to by name, why Ovid? It is
true that there was significant research on Ovid appearing in scholarly
journals during the decade before the appearance of the Tyros, and a
number of new translations of his work were published.18 However,
there is no reason why this should have had an impact on Lewis. The
Loeb Classical Library, founded in 1911, perhaps made a greater impact
on the general reading public, and in intellectual circles well known to
Lewis. As Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘The Loeb Library, with its Greek or
Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift
of freedom’.19 Cyril Connolly recalled his reaction to the Loeb translations as follows:
From that moment one could no longer […] spend hours over an
author without discovering what he was like. And the knowledge
22
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
was poison. Several of us began to understand what we read, and
to find out that we had been learning by heart the mature,
ironical, sensual, and irreligious opinions of a middle-aged
Roman, one whose chief counsel to youth was to drink and make
love to the best of its ability […]. Henceforth the invective of
Catullus, the bile of Juvenal, and the aristocratic bawdy of
Petronius became the natural food of our imaginations […].20
It is certainly easy to see the Tyros as schoolboys, caught out poring
over the more scurrilous passages of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Richard
Humphreys comments that the Tyros are ‘clearly enjoying a salacious
passage from the great Roman author’, which tallies with the general
view of Ovid’s poetry as sexually explicit.21
It is also worth considering ‘Ovid’ as a reference to the Ovid
Press, founded by John Rodker in 1919. As a printer of radical
modernist writers, including Eliot and Pound, could Rodker’s reference
to classical literature have provoked Lewis’s subsequent titular
juxtaposition of classical and modern? David Peters Corbett suggests
that Rodker was the ‘main formulation of the figure of Ratner in the
preliminary draft’ of The Apes of God (1930), and thus he is ‘effectively
being consigned to the trivialisation diagnosed in Bloomsbury art and
aesthetics’.22 Ian Patterson supports this identification, although he
acknowledges that the critique might ‘extend more generally to the
major modernists such as Joyce, Stein, and Lawrence’, many of whom
Rodker published.23 The Tyros symbolize the degenerate state of postwar British society, and particularly those artistic amateurs who made
life so difficult for the ‘true’ artist. As in the written portrait of Ratner,
then, the inclusion of Ovid in Lewis’s painting may likewise implicate
Rodker in this biting visual satire. The identification of the volume in
Lewis’s painting as Ovid rather than a popular bestseller appears as a
deliberate dig at those self-satisfied dabblers in the arts who, pretending
to be highly cultured, in fact have no understanding of the classics. The
book functions merely as an accessory to the projection of their desired
public image, the desire to belong to a long-established and esteemed
heritage. Tom Normand sees the Tyros as a critique of the intellectual
classes who have fallen ‘into the manner of the mob’, relinquishing their
cultural duties; this reading emphasizes their empty posturing, and an
urge to conform based in mass psychology.24 There are similar
references to Ovid by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, which was
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Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
dismissed by some contemporary critics as a joke or obscure satire.
Stephen Helmling emphasizes the ‘compulsive sarcasm’ and ‘selflacerating jokes’ voiced throughout the poem.25 The incongruous
juxtaposition of a volume of Ovid and the sharp-suited Tyros in Lewis’s
painting fits this interpretation; as Richard Humphreys puts it, ‘the satire
on neo-classicism is unmistakable, the meeting of Ovid and the brash
children of the new age creating an absurd chasm between tradition and
contemporary reality.’26
The recurrent appearance of classical literature in modernist art
and writing illogically asserts, by its intrinsic difference, similarities with
the post-war situation. Paul Edwards remarks of Lewis’s painting that ‘it
both makes the ideal of classicism […] look a little foolish and asserts a
continuity with Ovid’s Rome that is belied by the blue business suits and
modern hats of the readers’, whose response attests ‘Ovid’s survival and
contemporary relevance.’27 If the term ‘classicism’ can be used to
embody a wider political and philosophical viewpoint, in opposition to
those attitudes summarized by the term ‘romanticism’, then the
reference to Ovid might appear as a statement of the artist’s ideological
stance: rational, detached, intellectual, firmly on the side of order and
hierarchy. The figures of the Tyros, in contrast, represent a base
physicality, a purely emotional response to the text. As Robin Gibson
puts it, ‘these vacuous creations, grinning lewdly over Ovid, are Lewis’s
symbols for the intellectual dishonesty he sensed among his
contemporaries.’28 In this sense the ‘contemporary relevance’ of classical
literature becomes clear as a rallying point in the post-war ideological
and intellectual disorder. This chimes with T. S. Eliot’s defence of
tradition and his assertion that classicism is a ‘goal toward which all
good literature strives.’29 Eliot is far from saying that literature should be
backward-looking. Rather, he stresses that without taking into account
existing literature, which will be fundamentally altered by the addition of
the new, modern art loses any lasting meaning – this meaning being
dependent on an ‘historical sense’ of relation to previous writers and
artists.30 Referring to Ovid in the title of his painting appears a
deliberate strategy on Lewis’s part to force the viewer to recognize that
the painting belongs within a long artistic and cultural history. However,
his method is novel in its boldness and rejects the subtle references that
are usually only apprehended by connoisseurs. Rather than inserting
subtle visual clues, he leaves the painting largely devoid of allusive
24
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
details, directing the viewer towards the classical past by the frank
signpost of the title.
The use of myth to draw analogies between the ancient and contemporary, and to address wider themes of culture and civilization in
order to critique the modern world, is important in the post-war
context.31 Alan Dundes describes myth as ‘a sacred narrative explaining
how the world and man came to be in their present form’; thus defined
in aetiological terms, ‘myth’ seems an appropriate description of the
modernist attempt to characterize the present by situating it within a
continuous and broad historical sweep.32 That myth should have a
‘sacred’ function is also interesting. Science and technology had, over
the course of the industrial revolution, made the actual substance of
religious ritual largely redundant, and yet many modernist writers
recognized a deep human need for essential moral values which only
religion seemed able to provide. Eliot’s The Waste Land was influenced
by James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (first published in 1890), which
elaborates a ‘myth-ritual’ theory, explaining the creation of myths
around ancient magical rituals to give them a religious purpose. Thus
both the Holy Grail legend and Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be tied
mythologically to modern civilization, allowing Eliot to ‘draw together
the central themes of religious and sexual sterility’ and point up the
degradation of the current age.33 Roland Barthes asserts that modern
culture looks to religious experience in ‘an attempt to connect with a
perceived moral past, which is in contrast with the technological
present.’34 Lewis’s interest in the question of religion is demonstrated by
his essay ‘Inferior Religions’ (1917). In this context, the Tyro figures
may be perceived as personal religious idols, a theory supported by
Lewis’s letter to John Quinn in which he writes that his painting ‘would
make a good altarpiece.’35 It is unlikely that the Tyros were painted in
the spirit of a ‘sacred narrative’, but it is evident that they pose an
unspoken challenge to the supremacy of science and technology. The
book that embodies the proposed narrative of the painting appears
weighty and ancient – the antithesis of the modern paperback novel; it
has the aspect of a medieval psalter or a book of spells, from which the
Tyros greedily devour esoteric truths.
The celebration of technological progress in the aesthetic forms
of the Vorticist avant-garde prior to the War had been discredited in the
wake of the horror wrought by tanks and machine guns, and Lewis’s
mechanical puppets, like automata liable to malfunction, metaphorically
25
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
acknowledge this error of judgement. In the introduction to the ‘Tyros
and Portraits’ exhibition catalogue (1921), Lewis himself describes the
Tyros as ‘partly religious explosions of laughing Elementals’ (WLA 188)
and goes on to explain that it is ‘the child in him that has risen in his
laugh […]. Every child has its figures of a constantly renewed
mythology’ (WLA 190). The religious reference seems at odds with the
modernism of the portrayal. Yet the iconic, hieratic aspect to Lewis’s
figures and a certain mystery in their motives signal something opposite
to definable reality, which could reasonably be described as ‘religious’.
Ovid may show the way to a new, classical, and moralistic religion,
which would render the chaotic and meaningless modern world
explicable. Ovid’s tales in Metamorphoses fulfil the function of myth in
their use of allegory and personification of abstract ideas to establish
models for behaviour and to validate a certain social order. This role
could be applied to the Tyros, who symbolize Lewis’s hopes for a new,
socially engaged art. They are didactic in the sense that religious art
aimed to teach the illiterate by example, to illustrate the corrupt state of
the world and to encourage the faithful to follow a more moral path.
Classical mythology is perhaps proposed as a more pragmatic and liberal
alternative to Christianity, the latter intrinsically linked to the state and
to those ‘father figures’ of authority who were held accountable for the
War.
In ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), Eliot argues that James
Joyce’s use of the Odyssey had ‘the importance of a scientific discovery’,
in providing ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history’, concluding that ‘[i]nstead of narrative method,
we may now use the mythical method.’36 Eliot arguably adopted this
same method in The Waste Land, a poem described by B. C. Southam as
offering ‘a perspective of history in which (by succinct allusions and
references) twentieth-century forms of belief and disbelief, of culture
and of life, are kept in a continuous and critical relationship with those
of the past.’37 Rebecca Beasley describes Pound’s modus operandi in very
similar terms: Pound ‘draws out the continuity between myths, legends
and history, suggesting the permanence of certain ideas, emotions and
beliefs.’38 However, Gilbert Highet asserts that both Joyce and Eliot
‘sometimes use Greek myths […] to degrade life’, which, as J. A. K.
Thomson notes, is contrary to the spirit of classical art – indeed this
reading turns the positive use of myth by the modernists on its head and
26
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
instead suggests that they were in ‘spiritual rebellion against the
classics.’39 They certainly use mythological elements with a new freedom
that to an extent distorts the original (often didactic) meaning or
purpose of the myth. But a degree of distortion is only to be expected in
shifting the context of a narrative by a thousand years. This shift is
highlighted – celebrated, even – in the juxtapositions of classical myth
and contemporary reality. Lewis’s Tyros personify this ambiguity. Do
their grins convey confidence in a new world, or cover a tense anxiety?
Are they ultimately cynical or optimistic? Normand perceives a tragic
element in Lewis’s work that is linked to a faith in the classical; he posits
Lewis as ‘like Nietzsche […] a hopeless nihilist, conscious of the absurd
pointlessness of existence.’40 The interpretation of the Tyros’ forced
hilarity as a mask, ‘putting on a brave face’ in the stereotypically English
way, can be read as a stalwart reaction to the recent War and also to war
in general. The mythological approach emphasizes the continuity of
human failings, notably the recourse to violence, and thus tends towards
a pessimistic world-view – but this is met with audacity by the Tyros,
and satire provides the chief weapon of defence against despair.
The parallels between the poetry of Eliot and Pound, and Lewis’s
painting in the early 1920s is striking. All three figures had been well
acquainted since the Vorticist years before the War, and therefore a
mutual interest in each other’s work was natural. It is quite probable that
Lewis’s decision to identify Ovid so baldly in his painting’s title was a
technique learned from Eliot and Pound, both of whom borrowed
directly from Ovid, among others, in their poems. References to literary
predecessors was no novelty; it was rather the manner of interjecting
entire phrases from a diverse range of sources that construed a radical
departure. As Yeats later recalled, Pound described his vision for the
Cantos thusly:
There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of
discourse, but two themes, the Descent into Hades from Homer,
a Metamorphosis from Ovid, and, mixed with these, medieval or
modern historical characters.41
The specific reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses foregrounds the theme of
transformation. The concept of metamorphosis was clearly useful to
both poets in expressing complex ideas of cyclical change and
continuity, and in adapting to the state of flux in which the post-war
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Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
world was caught. David Peters Corbett highlights the same theme in
Lewis’s painting, suggesting that, by naming Ovid, Lewis alludes to the
transformation, both physical and mental, that the recent War had
engendered.42 He posits the Tyros as mutilated victims of trench warfare
– ‘the chair legs become crutches and stumps on which the figures
hobble or bob’ – but this is depicted in so ambiguous a fashion as to
offer a parallel comment on the characters’ ‘psychic repudiation of the
realities of warfare.’43 Viewed in this way, Lewis’s reference to Ovid
makes a subtle but specific comment on the effects of modern warfare,
which had left a previously unimagined number of mutilated veterans all
too visible on the streets of London. The War had had a dehumanizing
effect, the sheer scale of casualties turning men into ‘cogs in the great
impersonal war-machine.’44 The personal injuries attributed to the Tyros
stand as abstract symbols for the injury of war on human society. Thus
detached, we can laugh at the Tyros’ antics, and they condone, even
encourage, our laughter by laughing at themselves. Yet the same
uneasiness felt on reading lists of reported casualties without a flicker of
emotion also lurks beneath the surface as one joins the Tyros in their
mirth. A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) is a complex and contradictory response
to the War; although it undoubtedly offers a tacit response to the
conflict, it also denies it, paradoxically drawing attention to that which is
absent.
Rebecca Beasley sees in Pound’s early Cantos and Eliot’s The Waste
Land the impact of the War manifested not only in literal or indirect
references to the recent conflict, but also in the ‘broader moral
framework’ of the poems, which both treat the War as ‘a symptom of
their main subject: the disintegration of civilisation in the modern
world.’45 The classics, among other sources, here provide a counterpoint
against which to contrast the sterility of the present – the similarities of
idea, emotion, and belief serving to throw the contrasts into even
greater relief. Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius (1919) draws analogies
between the Roman and the contemporary experience of war. Pound
reflected that:
It presents certain emotions as vital to me in 1917, faced with the
infinite and ineffable imbecility of the British Empire, as they
were to Propertius some centuries earlier, when faced with the
infinite and ineffable imbecility of the Roman Empire.46
28
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
Visually, the volume of Ovid in Lewis’s painting can be seen as symbolic
of this historical continuity, linking past and present; human nature
remains flawed, and wars continue to be fought from one century to the
next.
A bitter, ironical humour is more literally represented by Eliot in
the Ovidian figure of Tiresias, whose ‘self-lacerating grin expresses an
ironist’s jaundiced view of the saint’s project’, forcibly anchoring the
poem in a secular and flawed reality, mocking the temptation of Tiresias
(or the author?) to ‘conceive of himself as a Messiah.’47 Eliot and Lewis
were both influenced by Hulme, who condemned the ‘romantic’
tendency to conceive of man as a god. He advocated the classical view
that the ‘fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity’, and the
‘romantic’ tendency, he believed, was the result of natural instincts being
suppressed by the ‘perverted rhetoric of Rationalism.’48 His pragmatic
perception of man as limited, as fixed in an imperfect state, is at the
heart of his classical world-view, and forms a key element in the new
mode of satire that can be seen to emerge in the 1920s. Tiresias’s
emblematic grin, a fatalistic recognition of the impossibility of
perfection in this world, is replicated visually by Lewis’s Tyros. It is an
essential aspect of these characters, as Lewis describes in the
introduction to his 1921 exhibition ‘Tyros and Portraits’:
These immense novices brandish their appetites in their faces, lay
bare their teeth in a valedictory, inviting, or merely substantial
laugh. A laugh, like a sneeze, exposes the nature of the individual
with an unexpectedness that is perhaps a little unreal. […] These
partly religious explosions of laughing Elementals are at once
satires, pictures and stories. The action of a Tyro is necessarily
very restricted; about that of a puppet worked with deft fingers,
with a screaming voice underneath. (WLA 188-90)
The English satirical tradition that Lewis inherited owed a clear debt to
classical writers such as Ovid. As Paul Edwards writes, Dryden’s translation of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria assimilated the classical text into the
‘tradition of Fielding and Hogarth that the Tyros continue.’49 However,
at the same time as acknowledging this comic heritage, Lewis’s Tyros
affirm that a juncture has been reached at which modern values no
longer tally with the accepted norms upon which traditional satire rests.
The basis of Lewis’s satire now rests on that rupture, the crucial element
29
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
being the incongruity between the figures and their reading matter, the
latter insisted on by the title of the painting and by the positioning of
the book, visually, at the centre of the composition. This positioning
confirms that Ovid, and classical literature more generally, was still at
the heart of English culture, due to the dominance of the classics in all
public school education. But, as the Tyros’ blank and ignorant reception
of it illustrates, the classics had come to mean very little to the modern
man, so abstracted had its teaching become from practical everyday
issues. Connolly’s reminiscences show the extent to which schoolboy
translations had become wholly meaningless exercises, a tool of
discipline rather than intellectual engagement. Consequently, what
meaning does classicism as an ideal – in political or cultural terms – have
in the modern age? Lewis endorses the spirit of classicism that Hulme
had prophesied, in reaction to the Victorian values he characterized with
contempt as ‘romantic’, but with an awareness of the distance now
existing between the living spirit of classicism and its desiccated,
intellectual sense. The detachment from the ‘ideal’ of classicism,
symbolized by Ovid, is conveyed in the contrast of the pulsating vitality
of the Tyros. Modern man is shown as having fallen so far from the
ideal that he no longer comprehends it, but yet asserts it as his birthright
with a misplaced pride.
Ovid’s own poetry was primarily satirical, and therefore his
appearance in A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) could simply be Lewis’s way of
acknowledging his predecessor in the genre he had recently chosen as
his primary means of expression. However, the details of Ovid’s life also
throw up interesting parallels. The seismic political changes that the
Roman world underwent in Ovid’s early life in some ways mirror the
turmoil in Europe after the First World War. The death of Julius Caesar,
civil war, and a return to imperialism under Augustus must have
effected as disorientating an environment as the collapse of the AustroHungarian and Ottoman empires, the defeat of Germany, and the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. Perhaps recent events sparked a
connection in Lewis’s mind, and naming Ovid was a means of
articulating his historical perception. Eliot and Pound – as evidenced by
previous citations – took a similarly broad historical perspective, so it
seems not inappropriate to make such suggestions. Moreover, Ovid
found himself suddenly cast into exile in the middle of his career,
isolated in Tomis, in an area known as Scythia. This throws up two
interrelated themes – that of being in exile in his own land, and that of
30
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
struggling to be understood among barbarians – which seem especially
pertinent in relation to Lewis.
In Tristia, a record of his time in exile, Ovid repeatedly refers to
the Scythians as ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’; the identification of the
Scythians with barbarism subsequently acquired a long historical lineage,
most notably through Shakespeare’s use of the synonym in King Lear.
Lewis inherits this etymological palimpsest through his education, and
he might have assumed his contemporaries to be as knowledgeable. The
volume of Ovid serves as a memory prompt for the viewer who may
interpret it as he will; but reading it as Tristia, rather than as Ars Amatoria
or Metamorphoses (as has previously been suggested), would give the
painting a more personal depth, Lewis here seeming to posit himself as
the misunderstood genius surrounded by the uncivilized, intellectual
barbarism of his contemporaries. The Tyros thus become the
aforementioned barbarians, their uncouth grins and primitive physicality
accentuating this fact.50 This opposition mirrors very closely the contrast
drawn by Ovid between the civilized culture of Rome and the wild
appearance and barbarous dialects of the Scythians. As he writes:
These barbarian tongues ignorant of the Latin language,
This Greek speech submerged in the sounds of Getic.51
Lewis is not literally exiled, but metaphorically and psychologically so.
The War cut off his career at its peak, and on returning to civilian life he
found society fundamentally changed. His consequent detachment
afforded him an outsider’s view of society; the Tyros embody the
‘philistine’ modern man, the contemporary parallel of the Scythian
warriors among whom Ovid felt so isolated.52 And their slang, sharply
parodied by Lewis in The Apes of God, is likewise condemned in his
painting if one applies Ovid’s criticism, quoted above, to the perceived
bastardization of the English language in the 1920s. With his selfconscious adoption of a ‘classicist’ stance, Lewis pits himself against a
public, in the shape of the Tyros, who can’t – or do not want to –
understand his metaphorically ‘foreign’ tongue. Meanwhile, the Tyros
laugh perhaps a little too raucously, turning to ridicule in an attempt to
hide their discomfort, equally ashamed and angered at their feelings of
incomprehension and ignorance. The idea of the ‘barbarian’ or
uncultured ‘other’ is reciprocal, each party viewing their own language
and culture as the legitimate standard, and judging all others as
31
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
aberrations that diverge to a greater or lesser extent from the ideal. In
Lewis’s case, it is a barbarism of the intellect that he addresses, of mass
psychology versus individual intelligence. But at the same time he targets
high modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein and James Joyce for their
‘linguistic anarchy’, attacking their rejection of accepted literary
principles and what he calls, in pejorative anti-Bergsonian terms, their
‘surrender to the flux’.53 Lewis’s positioning of himself, through
association with Ovid, as the speaker of a pure, classical ‘Latin’, as
opposed to a modernist colloquial ‘babble’, once again confirms his
classicist stance and his status as an outsider, one who is consciously
separated from the modernist literary élite.
However, both Lewis and Ovid find that the complex
relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is overturned. Ovid realizes that in
Scythia, he is the barbarian, describing the laughter at his cultured
phrases, which is echoed by the Tyros almost a thousand years later:
Here I’m the barbarian no one comprehends,
The Getae laugh foolishly at my Latin words.54
In his self-portrait, Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro (M P27, Plate 74; 192021), Lewis also tacitly acknowledges that he is part of the society he
condemns, and is the object of his own critique. He puts himself in the
position of those who do not understand his ‘language’ and mocks his
own projected image of intellectual superiority, positing as ‘barbarian’
both himself as an artist and his painted image. By focusing on himself
as the object of his own ridicule, Lewis achieves a simultaneous
identification with and ironic detachment from his subject, complicating
the interpretation of the image. His satire is directed towards modern
society as a whole, and the self-portrait shows Lewis’s awareness that he
is inescapably a part of this society and implicated in all its failings.
However, the painting also attests Lewis’s higher intelligence in being
able to view himself objectively, historically, and as part of a complex
social network. Reference to Ovid also allowed Lewis to address the
status of the exile, the idea of the visionary reviled by his own
countrymen, both in a personal, literal sense, and as part of a historical
tradition. Trying to re-establish his artistic credentials in post-war
London without the support of any avant-garde group, Lewis certainly
felt isolated and misunderstood. An aggressive and disillusioned stance
developed, defined in the late 1920s by his ‘Enemy’ persona. This
32
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
outlook gradually hardened; from a dynamic and forceful challenge to
modern society in the Tyros, his antagonistic pose became bitter and
negative towards the end of the decade, as Lewis gradually lost faith in
the power of his art to effect real change in society. Post-war Britain
became for Lewis what Scythia was to Ovid: part of the homeland with
which he identified, yet, somehow, suddenly and totally foreign.
The barbarian comparison continues in Lewis’s use of intense
primary colours. Herodotus wrote of the Scythians’ ‘deep blue eyes, and
bright red hair’, to which the brick red of the Tyros’ faces and the
intense blue of their suits seems a striking parallel.55 Andrew Causey
likens the Tyros to the ‘Hawaiian war gods with red feathered faces and
sharks’ teeth that Lewis would have seen in the British Museum’, a
description which again emphasizes the elemental and primitive in direct
contrast to the erudite, civilized connotations of classical poetry.56 On
the other hand, the bright, acidic tones could signify an opposition to
the sensual colours of ‘romanticism’, denoting the former, by default, as
‘classical.’57 Their red skin and sharp features give the Tyros not only a
primitive but also a demonic look; grinning in their modern suits, they
prophesy the fall from grace of contemporary society. The attempt of
these Tyro-demons to comprehend the morality and ethical wisdom
contained in the corpus of classical literature seems doomed to futility,
and therefore ridiculous.
Alexander Blok’s poem ‘The Scythians’ (1918) picks up the
Ovidian notion of the ‘barbarian’ in a contemporary context. It is
possible that this was published in English around 1920, just at the point
when Lewis would have been formulating his Tyro imagery. Although
there is no evidence of Lewis having read this poem, it does not seem
implausible as an influence upon him, bearing in mind his interest in
Russian literature.58 Identification of the Russians with the Scythians and
ideas of modern ‘barbarism’ must have seemed especially pertinent in
the light of the recent Russian Revolution. Blok’s poem expresses ‘the
dichotomy inherent in the Russian Revolution: internationalism as well
as nationalism’, echoing the wider debate surrounding the ‘classical’
versus the ‘romantic.’59 Blok’s broad historical conception of Russia’s
role in the world also has parallels with Ovid. Russia is perceived as an
imperial mediator in much the same way as Ovid’s Rome. On a personal
level, Blok was also an exile in his own country, an intellectual in
conflict with the new Bolshevik regime as well as with Western values;
his sense of estrangement from the culture to which he felt bound
33
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
seems comparable to Ovid’s. There is a more direct borrowing from
Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the allegorical reference to the Sphinx, which in
the Oedipal myth pits practical intelligence against superstition. If Blok
equates Russia with the Sphinx, about to be toppled by the Oedipus of
Bolshevism, could Lewis be proffering Ovid as an example in the same
way? The Tyros must in this case represent the superstitious Scythian
narrators of Blok’s poem who ‘love the flesh’, and whose ‘barbaric lyre’
calls to the ‘old world’ with all its sensuous, physical allure.60 This
reading reasserts Lewis’s concern with the conflict between the intellect
and the emotions, and the figures of the Tyros embody this tension,
their sleek, mechanized forms jarring with the atavistic primitivism
suggested by their leering faces and suppressed energy. The act of
laughter itself would have designated the Tyros, in a post-Edwardian
society, as uncouth savages, akin to Blok’s ‘wild Tatar horde’, the
unpredictable aural outburst an unlikely contrast to the regularity
suggested by their machine-like exterior.
The Tyros, one imagines, would speak a Scythian dialect or
Bolshevik argot of their own time and place. The threat of Communist
or proto-Fascist movements pervaded Europe at this time, and the
figures of the Tyros echo this anxiety. Their identical appearance is
suggestive of a civilian uniform, a shared political or class-based identity,
and with their secretive glances the (literally) ‘red peril’ might be plotting
a revolution. In this scenario, Lewis may also hint at the element of selfdeceit in contemporary mass political movements, whether left or right
wing, in calling upon history to justify their principles or actions. He
appears to ridicule the attempt of the Tyros to place their pragmatic
modern creed on an intellectual basis, highlighting their idiocy by
choosing a classical writer who is almost completely irrelevant to their
cause (when he could have selected, for instance, Plato’s Republic). The
incongruity of Ovid, in relation to the immediate concerns of socialist or
fascist movements in restructuring a modernist state, is risible. However,
these movements relied heavily on the use of political rhetoric to appeal
directly to the masses – a mode with its origins in the classical age – and
in Lewis’s painting the Tyros appear to have discovered in Ovid a means
of articulating their mysterious plans.
Between Tarr (1918) and Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis had
clearly considered the ideas of neo-classicism at length, and so it is
hardly surprising that it should surface in both his paintings and his
written work. In A Reading of Ovid (Tyros) Lewis not only refers explicitly
34
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
to a classical author but also uses the classical tradition as a fundamental
element in a politically and socially engaged form of satire. The Tyro
paintings seem to offer a new approach to the critique of modern life –
and, in cynically defining the modern world, the classical plays an
essential role. The paintings relate the past to the present, the classical to
the modern, attesting Lewis’s reconciliation with the weight of tradition
as well as his engagement with modernity. They also witness an
historical moment, a personal assessment of the specific post-war
situation, and thus play a key part in defining British art more broadly in
this uncertain decade. In the wake of the First World War all previously
held principles required readjustment, and this metaphorical blank
canvas provided the catalyst for a redefining of terms and a refiguration
of art-historical traditions. It was a challenge that Lewis couldn’t resist –
and he seized upon the classical as his intellectual and narrative basis.
Notes
1 Ezra Pound to Iris Barry (20 July 1916). Cited in J. P. Sullivan (ed.), Ezra
Pound: A Critical Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 60.
2 This is noted by Hugh Witemeyer in ‘Early Poetry 1908-1920’, in Ira B.
Nadel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999): 43-58, 44. Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) is a
work of social criticism in which the values of Hellenism (leading to ‘a
harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity’) are extolled in
contrast to Hebraism (the tendency ‘to sacrifice all other sides of our being
to the religious side’). Arnold saw human history as held in tension between
these two modes. See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. J.
Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 11 and 14.
3 In defining the Classical in opposition to Rousseau’s romantic assertion of
the infinite possibilities of man, Hulme writes: ‘man is an extraordinarily
fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by
tradition and organization that anything decent can be got out of him.’ See
T. E. Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (c. 1911-12), in Karen Csengeri
(ed.), The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994):
59-73, 61.
4 Ibid., 69.
5 Paul Edwards writes that Hulme publicly took Lewis’s side in the ‘battle
with Bloomsbury’, though tension was caused by their rivalry for Kate
Lechmere and for control of the Rebel Art Centre. Likewise, in intellectual
35
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
terms, Hulme was important in transmitting the ideas of Wilhelm
Worringer regarding ‘empathetic and geometric art’, and in rejecting
idealizing accounts of human nature, but again he and Lewis disagreed over
the details. See Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 99 and 112. Lewis wrote of Hulme
that ‘[w]e happened […] to be made for each other, as critic and “creator”’
(BB 100), though he also stated that ‘Bergson dominated him […], and
anything tainted with Bergsonism could not help being suspect to me’ (BB
6HH DOVR $QGU]HM *ĊVLRUHN ¶0RGHUQ $UW LQ (QJODQG FLUFD Hulme and Wyndham Lewis’, in Mark Antliff and Scott W. Klein (ed.),
Vorticism: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 51-67
6 Alan Starr, ‘Tarr and Wyndham Lewis’, ELH 49. 1 (Spring 1982): 179189, 181.
7 Ibid., 179.
8 SueEllen Campbell states that Lewis’s concept of ‘space and stability is
much the same thing as what Bergson means by the classical ideal’, but that
Lewis nevertheless positioned himself in direct opposition to Bergson, his
attacks, mainly citing Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice (1907; published in
English in 1911), appearing in Time and Western Man (1927) and ‘The
Revolutionary Simpleton’ (1927). See SueEllen Campbell, ‘Equal Opposites:
Wyndham Lewis, Henri Bergson, and Their Philosophies of Space and
Time’, Twentieth Century Literature 29. 3 (Autumn 1983): 351-69, 358.
9 Ibid., 351.
10 Cyril Connolly writes that ‘the week-day god whom […] we struggled to
cultivate was Horace’. See Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963), 7. T. S. Eliot, addressing the Classical Association on the
15th of April 1942, argued for the importance of a classical education: ‘for
many generations the classics provided the basis of the education of the
people from whom the majority of our men of letters have sprung’. See T.
S. Eliot, The Classics and the Man of Letters (1942; London: Oxford University
Press, 1943), 12.
11 Stephen Spender cited in Vincent Sherry, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and
Radical Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3.
12 This ambivalence is illustrated in the first number of BLAST (1914), in
which Lewis writes: ‘BLESS SWIFT for his solemn bleak wisdom of
laughter. / SHAKESPEARE for his bitter Northern Rhetoric of humour’
(B1 26). By contrast, the recent past of Victorianism is blasted (see B1 19).
13 Editorial ‘Introduction’ to Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy (eds),
On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and the New Classicism 1910-1930
(London: Tate Gallery, 1990): 11-30, 11.
36
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
14 Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900-1939 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994), 156.
15 Cowling and Mundy (eds), On Classic Ground, 28.
16 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 226.
17 In 1898 Charles Maurras founded Action française, which was based on the
idea of an ‘integral nationalism’ with monarchism its principal cause.
Maurras saw French national identity as rooted in a Latin heritage, which
united France with a revered cultural and artistic legacy of Italy and Greece.
18 Ellis Robinson gave public lectures at Oxford on Ovid’s Amores (1912)
and Tristia (1913), while no fewer than four new editions of the Heroides
appeared in 1910-11, and five edited volumes of the Metamorphoses between
the years 1910 and 1921. In addition there were regular scholarly articles on
Ovid published in journals such as The Classical Review, The Classical Quarterly,
and Classical Philology during the decade prior to 1921.
19 Virginia Woolf writing in The Times Literary Supplement in 1917. See The
Loeb Classical Library (www.hup.harvard.edu/features/loeb/history.html).
Accessed 28 May 2013.
20 Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 8.
21 Richard Humphreys, Wyndham Lewis (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 43.
Joan Booth describes poem 5 of Ovid’s Amores as ‘a near cinematic sexscene’. See Joan Booth, ‘The Amores: Ovid Making Love’, in Peter E. Knox
(ed.), A Companion to Ovid (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009): 61-77, 65.
22 David Peters Corbett, ‘“Grief with a yard wide grin”: War and Wyndham
Lewis’s Tyros’, in David Peters Corbett (ed.), Wyndham Lewis and the Art of
Modern War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 99-123, n. 55
(at 230-31).
23 Ian Patterson, ‘John Rodker, Julius Ratner and Wyndham Lewis: The
6SOLW0DQ :ULWHV %DFN· LQ $QGU]HM *ĊVLRUHN $OLFH 5HHYH7XFNHU DQG
Nathan Waddell (eds), Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011): 95-107, 96.
24 Tom Normand describes Lewis’s satire as a reaction to the ‘treason’ of
his fellow intellectuals who had ‘connived in the democratisation of culture
and the concomitant debasement of all values’, and had thus ‘betrayed the
social duty of their class by failing to maintain a stratified, ordered and
authoritative public world’. See Tom Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist:
Holding the Mirror up to Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 88 and 187.
25 Stephen Helmling, ‘The Grin of Tiresias: Humour in “The Waste Land”’,
Twentieth Century Literature 36. 2 (Summer 1990): 137-54, 137.
26 Humphreys, Wyndham Lewis, 43.
37
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 261-62.
Robin Gibson, catalogue note in Joanna Skipwith (ed.), The Sitwells and the
Arts of the 1920s and 1930s, exhibition catalogue (London: National Portrait
Gallery, 1994), 104.
29 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot,
ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975): 175-78, 176.
30 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), in Selected Prose,
37-44, 38.
31 See Witemeyer, ‘Early Poetry 1908-1920’.
32 Alan Dundes, ‘Introduction’, in Alan Dundes (ed.), Sacred Narrative:
Readings in the Theory of Myth (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984): 1-3, 1.
33 Rebecca Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra
Pound (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 85.
34 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (New York: The
Noonday Press, 1991), 79.
35 Lewis to Quinn (21 May 1921). Cited in Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 261.
36 Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’, 178.
37 B. C. Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot (London:
Faber and Faber, 1987), 126.
38 Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry, 86.
39 J. A. K. Thomson, review of Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek
and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949), The Classical Review 1. 1
(1951): 42-45.
40 Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist, 61 and 197.
41 W. B. Yeats cited in Sullivan (ed.), Ezra Pound, 100.
42 Peters Corbett, ‘“Grief with a yard wide grin”’, 120.
43 Ibid., 120.
44 Robert T. Chapman, Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires (London: Vision
Press, 1973), 60.
45 Beasley, Theorists of Modernist Poetry, 80.
46 Pound cited in Witemeyer, ‘Early Poetry 1908-1920’, 52. Paul Edwards
has told me that Lewis wrote to The Observer in defence of this poem on the
18th of January 1920, which seems to support my assertion that Lewis’s
painting might reflect similar sentiments.
47 Tiresias ‘narrates’ part III of The Waste Land (‘The Fire Sermon’), and
Helmling identifies his ‘grin’ in line 186 – ‘and chuckle spread from ear to
ear’ – as ‘implicated’, if not explicitly described, in later passages (such as
the scene of the typist and the clerk, ll. 222-56) which exemplify what he
describes as ‘the humour of the moralising satirist’. See Helmling, ‘The Grin
27
28
38
Lewis’s A Reading of Ovid (Tyros)
of Tiresias’, 148. In After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot writes: ‘It is fatally easy,
under the conditions of the modern world, for a writer of genius to
conceive of himself as a Messiah’. Eliot cited in Helmling, ‘The Grin of
Tiresias’, 147. Conrad Aiken recalled that a psychiatrist, when asked about
Eliot’s writer’s block, pronounced that he (Eliot) ‘thinks he’s God’, and that
this ‘intrusion’ sparked The Waste Land. See Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘The
Waste Land: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s Collaboration on Hysteria’,
Twentieth Century Literature 34. 2 (Summer 1988): 113-39, 115.
48 Hulme, ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, 61 and 62.
49 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 262.
50 I owe this idea of a possible identification between the Tyros and the
Scythians to David Peters Corbett, in conversation.
51 Ovid, Tristia, Book III, I: 1-46 (‘His Book Arrives in Rome’); ibid., Book
V, II: 45-79 (‘His Prayer to Augustus’). Available online at this web address
(http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Ovidexilehome.htm).
Accessed 28 May 2013.
52 ‘Philistine’ is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an uneducated or
unenlightened person; one perceived to be indifferent or hostile to art or
culture, or whose interests and tastes are commonplace or material; a
person who is not a connoisseur […] aesthetically unsophisticated’.
53 Chapman, Wyndham Lewis, 35.
54 Ovid, Tristia, Book V. X: 1-53 (‘Harsh Exile in Tomis’). Available at
(http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Ovidexilehome.htm).
Accessed 28 May 2013.
55 Herodotus, The Histories, Book IV, trans. George Rawlinson (London:
David Campbell, 1997), 346.
56 Andrew Causey, ‘The Everyday and the Visionary’, in Susan Compton
(ed.), British Art in the 20th Century: The Modern Movement (London: Royal
Academy, 1986): 196-97, 196.
57 Normand, Wyndham Lewis the Artist, 189.
58 Augustus John writes of the influence of Dostoyevsky in the early years
of the twentieth century: ‘The advent of Dostoievsky on our consciousness
was an important event about this time’ (John cited in Starr, ‘Tarr and
Wyndham Lewis’, 184). Kurt Dowson describes Alexander Blok as a
‘Russian intellectual in the Dostoyevskian tradition’ in the introduction to
his translation of ‘The Scythians’ (1918) in International Socialism, 6 (Autumn
1961): 24-25 [online]. This article – accessed 28 May 2013 – is available at:
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj/1961/no006/blok.ht
m.
39
Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies
Dowson, 24-25. Lines such as ‘We like the Gallic wit’s mordant sensation
/ And dark Teutonicindecision’ resonate with Julien Benda’s discussion of
the modern tendency towards national consciousness ‘in everything which
makes them distinct from others’, to the extent that personal characteristics
are extended to an abstract nation. See Julien Benda, The Treason of the
Intellectuals (New York: The Norton Library, 1969), 84. Originally published
in French as La trahison des clercs (1927).
60 Alexander Blok, ‘The Scythians’ (1918). This text is available online at
(http://web.mmlc.northwestern.edu/~mdenner/Demo/texts/scythians_bl
ok.html). Accessed 28 May 2013.
59
40