'The Art Of Being Ruled'

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  • G. H.
    Here is yet another chapter from the « The Art Of Being Ruled » by Wyndham Lewis. E-copies of, respectively, « Paleface », and « Time and Western Man »
    Message 1 of 3 , Feb 12, 2018

      Here is yet another chapter from the « The Art Of Being Ruled » by Wyndham Lewis. E-copies of, respectively, « Paleface », and « Time and Western Man » are available at https://archive..org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.135019 and https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.226089.


      'Bolshevism and the West'


      The european community which participated at the great change-over from the predominantly agricultural to the industrial age presented us with the French Revolution, which was made possible by the super-agriculturist dreams of Rousseau. While these people bustled into factories, or were driven into them, building themselves more rigidly and irretrievably into a mechanical urban life, they exploded in dreams of bucolic 'freedom'. Pictures of the 'freedom' of the noble savage and the child of nature excited them to a great outburst at the very moment when (as they must from their own point of view have regarded it had they not been so full of a false and exotic emotion) they were enslaving themselves more thoroughly to men. So it has been in the name of nature always that men have combined to overthrow the natural in themselves.


      For their instinct to be so fallible, where, it would seem, so much is at stake for them – for them to proclaim so ardently that they wish to be 'free' and nature's children, and yet, in effect, to carry through great movements that result in an absolute mechanization of their life, – can only mean one thing. It must mean that they do not really know what they want, that they do not, in their heart, desire 'freedom' or anything of the sort. 'Freedom' postulates a relatively solitary life: and the majority of people are extremely gregarious. A disciplined, well-policed, herd-life is what they most desire. The 'naturalistic' form that eighteenth-century revolution took was because all violent revolution is saturnalian. A rare saturnalia is necessary for most people, but it exhausts their passions, and the rest of the year they are anything but their saturnalian selves. The few years of youth is such a saturnalia: but youth, in that case, is not synonymous with life.


      That men should think they wish to be free, the origin of this grave and universal mistake is the (usually quite weak) primitive animal in them coming into his own for a moment. It is a restless, solitary ghost in them that in idle moments they turn to. The mistake can be best appreciated, perhaps, by examing a great holiday crowd. How can these masses of slowly, painfully moving people find any enjoyment in such immense stuffy discomfort, pretty friction, and unprofitable fatigue, you may ask yourself as you watch them. They ask themselves that, too, no doubt, most of them. That is the saturnalian, libertarian, rebellious self that asserts itself for a moment. But if they have to choose between what ultimately the suggestion of 'free' self, and the far steadier, stronger impulse of the gregarious, town-loving, mechanical self, would lead to, they invariably choose the latter. So to be 'free' for another would be. Most people's favourite spot in 'nature' is to be found in the body of another person, or in the mind of another person, not in meadows, plains, woods, and trees. They depend for their stimulus on people, not things. So inevitably they are not 'free' nor have any wish to be, in the lonely, 'independent', wild, romantic, rousseauesque way. In short, the last thing they wish for is to be free. They wish to pretend to 'free' once a week, or once a month. To be free all the time would be an appalling prospect for them.And they prefer 'freedom' to take a violent, super-real, and sensational form. They are not to the manner born where 'freedom' is concerned; and so invariably overplay it when they affect it.

    • G. H.
      Wyndham Lewis « Paleface » was fancifully reviewed at www.counter-currents.com
      Message 2 of 3 , Feb 16, 2018

        Wyndham Lewis « Paleface » was fancifully reviewed at www.counter-currents.com (https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/12/wyndham-lewis-paleface-the-philosophy-of-the-melting-pot/). The features of this book are presented in a more balanced manner in the review below (found at http://wl2012.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/3/13237441/robert_e._murray.pdf). See also « From 'Paleface' to 'Cosmic Man' » in « Wyndham Lewis and Western Man » by D. Ayers (partly viewable at https://books.google.be/books?id=D92vCwAAQBAJ&hl=nl&source=gbs_book_other_versions).



        WYNDHAM LEWIS’S ‘MELTING-POT’: UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?


        ROBERT EDWARD MURRAY


        More than any other British writer and social critic in the inter-war and post-1945 periods, Wyndham Lewis addressed the issue of racial integration in a white-dominated society. This is not as immediately apparent as it might have been because his agenda was primarily a cultural, rather than socio-economic or socio-political one. Even the one book that does address the idea of the ‘Melting-Pot’ – Paleface: a Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) – does so in terms which are so ambivalent that it is hard to discern whether Lewis actually desired the advent of such a society. That particular book lies at one end of a spectrum of thought – or perhaps a series of speculations might be a better way of describing it – in which he allows himself to become at times overwhelmed by the other issues that arise out of the notion of ethnic integration that he fears may be undertaken in the cause of a falsely conceived ideology. This would seem to portray a distinctly dystopian view of a wrongly mediated policy of integration. At the other end is the optimism of America and Cosmic Man (1948), which expresses a convincing and heartfelt desire for the melting-pot to come into existence, one that came the closest Lewis ever did to a utopian view of the world.


        Definitions and Implications of the ‘Melting-Pot’


        The term ‘Melting-Pot’ was first popularised by the popular British writer Israel Zangwill (famous as the author of Children of the Ghetto, 1892, amongst other works) as the title of a play in 1908, which was staged on Broadway to great acclaim. Yet the primary concern about integration concerned actual white European immigrants to the US, rather than the indigenous Black population, not to mention Native Americans and Hispanics; the barriers between members of different races remained and seemed insurmountable. Zangwill actually wrote: ‘America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!’ (1) Lewis’s proposal that members of all ethnicities should be fully integrated, not just into American society, but into the social structure of the British Empire, was truly radical.


        Lewis saw the British Empire as an already outmoded construction, even in economic, as well as political terms, one founded on deceit and intended purely for the gratification of the capitalist interests he so greatly scorned. In excluding the working-classes from full participation in the process of empire-building, thereby allowing them to gain from the benefits in terms of immigration to a place with better living conditions – and, indeed, forbidding interbreeding with native populations, British imperialism was a contradiction in the terms of what ‘colonialism’ was actually meant to be. As he wrote in The Hitler Cult (1939): ‘In passing, all that is necessary to remark is that the English poor are not wanted in this Black-farm of an empire, which is the preserve of the English millionaire class, and its middle class public school personnel, and not at all of the English people as a whole, to whom such ‘Imperialism’ is repugnant..’ (210) America, for all its evident faults, offered the chance for an end to this misguided concept of colonialism and the establishment of a society that was more just and, correspondingly, more attuned to the artistically-led principles which he upheld above any more material, politically-oriented, ones.


        For Lewis, the ideal society, or at least a more ideal one, existed in the form of a melting-pot, a diverse ethnic aggregation not defined by considerations of class or the legacy of slavery which may have once existed. This was apparent in his anthropologically-directed travel book Filibusters in Barbary (1932), which placed the negro element of the population of Morocco into an environment where it existed naturally and not in a continued state of slavery – ‘No bones were made about this inky blood’. (69) (2) Neither were such people a mere cipher for any number of qualities – artistic, political or otherwise – that the modern white hierarchy had now imposed upon them in the cause of their supposed ‘liberation’. That the American Black in particular was the focus for the celebration of the misguided ideal of primitivism by cultural practitioners that Lewis saw as abandoning their responsibilities to uphold the standards of Western civilisation and not Blacks (or Native Americans) was the polemical concern of Paleface.


        However, throughout his writings on the subject, Lewis was never really engaged with what he referred to, according to the term current at the time, as ‘the Negro’. The continuous use of the now-derogatory ‘N-word’, is used in a way that may be couched in terms of paraphrase and irony, but which is often too casual and too frequent for the modern reader to be really comfortable with and reveals a degree of crudity that Lewis does not use when referring to other ethnic groups. He was certainly not involved in the emotional sense that early white supporters of Black liberation – like his one-time lover Nancy Cunard – may have been; like many writers of his time, he simply did not have any actual contact with Black writers, either from America, or from Africa. In the episode of his giving considerable help to the Guyanese painter Denis Williams, in 1950, there was no sense, in his letters of request to Alfred Barr and Herbert Read, that he was doing anything other than the right thing for a fellow struggling artist. (3)


        In this he was doubtlessly influenced by his friend, the South African poet Roy Campbell. Campbell may have been an embodiment of the specifically right-wing consciousness that Lewis often fell into, but he was no racist, being highly critical of the policy of discrimination against blacks in South Africa by the Boer republics before it was ratified with the introduction of the apartheid system in 1948. He had the same even-handedness in considering the position of Blacks in the colonial world because he himself had assumed an identity of a ‘white African’, although his autobiography, Light On a Dark Horse (1951) makes it clear that he himself did not subscribe to any notion of the melting-pot. Lewis was also a close reader of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and had a real understanding of how societies outside America and Europe operated, something he used to great effect in his work of Shakespearean criticism, The Lion and the Fox (1927).


        However, Lewis never actually attempted an analytical portrayal of the black character in his work – certainly not as much as the Jewish character, which was more complex. It was Lewis himself who shot down in flames any white authors who dared to presume that they could attempt to analyse – or at least construct – any sort of black character, fictional or otherwise, as he showed throughout Paleface (the then-popular American writer Sherwood Anderson in particular). Yet there are elements of a ‘Black discourse’ in the same way as there is a ‘Semitic discourse’ throughout his work. This is mediated by his interest in, if not the fully-realised black character, then the black figure. This was seen in his Vorticist art-theories, where Lewis shared the enthusiasm amongst Modernist artists for the abstract qualities of African sculpture. As he wrote in Blast no. 1:


        His sculpture is monotonous. The one compact human form is his Tom-Tom. (141)


        The black figure was not such an oppositional totem, an obvious Other, for the aesthetic and philosophical ideals that Lewis projected, whereas the Jewish character was and correspondingly became an object of increasing fascination for him. The black figure was accepted by Lewis initially as a pure abstraction; later, in his observations of other societies, he became a component for his notion of a melting-pot, before it became something of an ideal.


        Displacement and Slavery:


        For Lewis, an artificial melting-pot, one enforced through the imposition of slavery, was something that could definitely be described as dystopian and which belonged to a past and a future he wanted to avoid. In Paleface, he expresses his disdain for the uniformity the industrial age has imposed upon all its subjects, regardless of their ethnicity, yet derides Anderson for doing the same in his sentimentalised view of a pre-industrial black existence in America, one that surely excuses the condition of slavery from which it had emerged:


        But Intensive Industrialism is what Mr. Anderson never ceases to fulminate against. And his reasons for hating it appear to be precisely that it does merge people in the way that he exultantly describes the Negro workers as being merged, in one featureless anonymous black organism, like a gigantic centipede. So in the same breath he is gloomy and joyful over the same phenomenon! The black skin appears to have the power of disguising the reality from him. A subsidiary confusion is caused, in this instance, by the fact that the mechanical Negroes are given as a characteristic feature of the free natural life of the Mississippi before the arrival of Industrialism, which put an end to the mechanical trotting Negroes – ‘running up and down the landing-stage […] lost in each other.’ (221)


        The racial restrictions of imperial and plantation society were extended to class and the creation of an industrialised form of slavery, one that he noted was portrayed in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis in Paleface. (4)


        This explains why he disregarded the apparent impossibility – because of the social strictures brought about by race-laws – of the realisation of the melting-pot and kept the concept within the realm of the ideal and achievable, rather than an expression of a utopia that may never be achieved.


        This is not to say that an element of the utopian is absent from Lewis’s work. The unpublished and unfinished work, Hoodopip, part of the creative basis of his megalithic satire The Apes of God (1930) was described by him as a ‘Candide-like piece’, although it more resembles Samuel Johnson’s derivation Rasselas, having a similar setting in a specifically black world, that of Ethiopia, a country that at the time was the hub of the ethno-mythology of both Afro-centric and Euro-centric concerns. Hoodopip himself is described as overtly exotic: ‘Hoodie, bare-legged, with golden sandals, black and as feverishly lovely as ever …’ (5) It may be that Lewis intended the setting of ‘Hoodopip’ to be a black one, although not necessarily a ‘typical’ pre-colonial country classified as a place populated by natives waiting to be introduced to Western civilisation. Ethiopia was a country separated from the rest of Africa through maintaining its independence (and staunchly defending it against invasion by the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896). The world of ‘O’, which Hoodopip is destined to rule, is a utopia, albeit one that exists in the blissful ignorance that underpins the world of the deluded ‘apes’ of the later satire.


        When placed in an unnatural environment of enforced subservience, the black figure often remained unapproachable and resistant, as in Lewis’s description in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) of the reluctant Jamaican soldier he tried unsuccessfully to stop obstructing a military detail (‘I never got the right touch with the West Indian negro’). (6) Yet ultimately the alien being has to be accommodated within the greater social body in order for both entities to continue to exist. In the same book, the encounter in Paris with the voluble, would-be racist, Belgian journalist and his wife and their dispute over their black lodger, Daniel – a figure who is himself of mixed race (a metis from North Africa) – echoes the continuous quest in the earlier ‘Wild Body’ series of stories and vignettes of the individual to find a place within an often hostile environment and enable its continued existence. As a poet – albeit one with a government job – Daniel is a black equivalent of the figure of ‘The Pole’ featured in the story of that name (initially published in 1909 and revised for The Wild Body collection in 1928 as ‘Beau Sejour’). Like the impecunious bohemians who inhabit the pensions of Brittany, and are maintained by their hosts in the hope that their artistic efforts will eventually bring handsome financial reward, Daniel is an unpaying guest. He is the captive of his landlord’s apparent good nature, the Belgianbeing the only one who recognises his genius as a poet and who seeks to invest his divided household with a new form of creative energy.


        Ethnic Transference:


        As unlikely as it may have appeared, the idea that there could be some form of ethnic transference had already taken place within white society, and Lewis had taken note of this in his work. The central protagonist of Apes was Horace Zagreus, modelled on the notorious practical joker Horace de Vere Cole, who perpetrated the infamous ‘Dreadnought Hoax’ in 1910 by disguising himself and his party as a royal delegation from Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then known and which was, as befitting its independent status, a possible customer for ship-builders and arms manufacturers). Again, in Blasting and Bombardiering, just before the incident described above, he recalled the occasion in the trenches when he tried to separate two Jamaican artillerymen from fighting each other and ended up covered in mud, thereby effectively changing his skin colour.


        Lewis surely must have recognised the comic possibilities of this act of identity-switching. The act of ‘blacking up’, then common in the British music-hall, was featured in the climactic scenario of Apes, a party held by Lord Osmund Finnian Shaw (a character modelled on Sir Osbert Sitwell) whereby one of the guests appears ‘[…] with black grease paint, counterfeiting the negritic hue, a compliment to the black bar-tender, in the costume of an african rajah out of Purchas or Mandeville [...] smiling at the broad-mindedness that made it possible for him to eclipse his skin’s white and become a brotherly-black on the same footing as the nigger’. (7) The crudity of both the author and the easy assumptions of his briefly glimpsed character echoes that of the earlier tradition of blackface in the American minstrel show, one which forces home the point that although whites can appear to be black, the social and political barriers between different races remain.


        Lewis wished to nullify the implications of skin-colour, thereby undermining the Black American thinker W. E. B. Du Bois’ contention that white skin that is actually a negation of colour and that black and brown skin is the true mark of human identity. Lewis saw the innocent pursuit of physical (and possibly spiritual) health, through the burgeoning craze for sunbathing, as signifying the wholesale decline in Western civilisation. His description of the seaside resort on the German Baltic coast in Doom of Youth (1932) inverts the image of his own reluctant change of skin-colour in the trenches:


        The sun-bathers stretched out at full-length all over our Continent in the summer months – they are the first instalment of a predestined savagery. Just as much as Al Capone and ‘Legs’ Diamond (or for that matter the poor huddled, mud-caked, half-starved savages called ‘Fritz’ or ‘Tommy’, 1914-18) that is so [...] hundreds of thousands of persons are burned to a negro mahogany yearly, from toe to crown, and you might get the illusion, I suppose, of a primitive negro community. This, it must be allowed, would harmonize with the Jazz that hums in their heads, those airs to which they nightly stalk and stumble.

        (250-251)


        In view of what was to happen a few years later throughout Europe – and in most of the rest of the world – Lewis’s condemnation of a wilful return to a supposed state of Eden was prescient.


        One of Du Bois’s fictional works, the somewhat slight Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), is described and quoted from at length in Paleface, while his more profound books, which deal specifically with the Black American character, most notably The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by then a classic text, is ignored. An innocuous statement from the novel – ‘“The Congo […] is flooding the Acropolis”’ (33) – is turned into a provocative slogan that Lewis repeatedly uses in his book to warn of the dangers of the primitive overcoming the ideals of Western classical culture. (8) A year later, in Apes, going back to the American Bar at Lord Osmond’s lenten party, when told by the black bar-tender that he has just come over for the occasion from an engagement as an exotic factotum in Athens, Zagreus exclaims, in paraphrase, ‘The Congo has come from the Acropolis! The Congo has actually come from the Acropolis!’ (445) The music in the background, just as that which accompanies the nightly rituals of the proto-Club Med, is jazz, the soundtrack to an act of, not so much ethnic transference, but one of cultural apostasy.


        Jazz was a particular bug-bear for Lewis.. Throughout his work of the time he derides it often and in terms that are at once crude (it is ‘the nigger hubbub’ in Hitler, 1931, 23) and eloquent (‘[…] a music of drums, with contralto and counterbass saxophones […] [T]he studied mass-energy of the music, hurrying over precipices, swooping in switchbacks, rejoicing in gross proletarian nigger-bumps, and swanee-squeals shot through with caustic cat-calls from the instrumentalists […]’ – in Apes, 443). Here the image of the tom-tom (‘[…] that ice-cream tomtom of the savage New-Rich […]’), is as threatening as the untamed jungle in countless Hollywood films, an unknown territory that Lewis wishes to leave alone and not invite into his own domain, such as the fashionable London night-spots like the Café Royale or the Savoy which featured jazz, especially for the specific purpose of accompaniment to dancing. (9)


        Lewis’s extensive description of the sound of jazz – cacophonous, rather than in any way harmonious – informs his view of a dystopian melting-pot, as particularly described in The Childermass (1928). In an after-world determined by the application of the time-philosophy he so vehemently opposed, Blacks resemble film-extras and are otherwise passive components of a social hierarchy that gives prominence to a whole panoply of, in the words of the character Hyperides: ‘[…] fools, lost souls, cardboard-men, sticks, fuel for the World-bonfire, fashionplates, pseudo-niggers, poor white trash, bought and fooled, Nanmen and Pip-squeaks’. (10) As his classically-derived name implies, Hyperides is a figure who embodies an objectively-defined authoritarianism, as opposed to the subjective one of the Bailiff, whose role is, ostensibly, to hear the appeals of those ‘lost souls’ who wish to gain admittance into Heaven. The word ‘pseudo’ here suggests that Blacks are misrepresented by a white-mediated ‘jazz culture’ and it is only the Bailiff, in an episode during his hearing of the appellants’ court, who gives them a voice by proxy, in a grotesque parody of Black American English that echoes the ‘stump speech’ routine common to American minstrel shows, in which a ‘wise’ black (i.e. ‘blacked-up’) character relays home-spun philosophy. Whites can also sound, as well as look, black, but the implications are perhaps even more sinister. Language – the ultimate tool of communication – is ultimately rendered devoid of meaning.


        Yet Lewis sees jazz as an exclusively Negro means of expression. In Doom of Youth, a polemic that was otherwise satirically aimed at the encouragement of a stage of arrested development by consumer capitalism, he refers to the taste for jazz among the English upper-classes and condemns their embrace of the seemingly primitive as full of false sentiment: ‘They sing the slave-songs of the industrial serfs of the metropolis (their sobbing factory folk-music) […] [B]ut all that is borrowed, in this way, from the arts and manners prevalent in the



        Heartbreak House of the Underdog […]’ (254-256) In other words, he was dismissing the superficial form of jazz in its ‘white’, sanitised, format, and implicitly supporting the idea that it should be played in its original, exclusively black one. He actually reveals some understanding of the connection between the ‘pure’ concept of jazz in its original black format and its roots in the blues, which in turn was based on the spiritually-influenced ‘sorrow songs’ sung by slaves on the American plantations (‘… the sobbing slave-music of the plantations – jazzed by Berlin or by Gershwin’ – DY 82). Amidst all the protests made by Lewis against jazz, he was aware of its greater significance outside the context of providing a soundtrack to the shallow world of the white upper-classes whom he really despised. As an inadvertent musical critic, he touched upon the idea of authenticity in jazz that was to be the critical impetus crucial to the music’s later development.


        Lewis was also aware of the uneven relationship between the white proponents of jazz and the elements of a population that were kept in political and economic oppression. He gives more consideration, albeit briefly, to the arguments against this contradiction by another Black American thinker Alain Locke. In Paleface, Lewis insists that jazz is an inferior art-form, although his argument is actually made less convincing by placing it within a larger cultural melting-pot:


        The ‘cultural’ present that the Negro has made to White America, and through America to the whole White World, can be summed up in the word ‘jazz’. It is a very popular present and white people everywhere have tumbled over each other to pick it up, and it has almost superseded every other form of activity. But what it is impossible not to ask whether it deserves quite so large a ‘reward’ as Mr. Locke claims for it. The White arts that the Paleface has turned away from in order to cultivate these Black arts, were certainly as good as the latter: and all that the ‘Afroamerican’ has succeeded in supplying is the aesthetic medium of a sort of frantic proletarian sub-conscious, which is the very negation of those far greater arts, for instance, of other more celebrated ‘coloured’ races. The Chinese or even the Hindu would never have been captivated by nor even paid any attention at all to that sort of inferior Black art. But the White has: and it is very unreasonable of him to deny social equality to the Negro: about that there can be no question at all, under the circumstances. (It is only the circumstances that ought never to be there.) (65)


        Culture was more important than ethnicity in this regard and for Lewis it was perfectly reasonable to encourage black artists to practise a white culture – thereby becoming, effectively, white. Lewis’s reference to the singers Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes in Paleface may be obvious choices for such an act of cultural and ethnic transference but, like his relative ignorance of the significance of the work of Du Bois, he seemed completely unaware of the Harlem Renaissance that was going on at the time of his visit to New York in 1927 and was not able to recognise the existence of a separate and strong black literary culture, one that was not so exclusively musical. The discourse that he was engaged in remained one-way.


        Miscegenation – An Immodest Proposal?


        What made Lewis’s melting-pot truly radical was his insistence on a policy of inter-breeding between the races, especially between Negroes and Caucasians. He gives his statements of the subject a utopian air, regardless of the social taboos he suggested should be broken. As he wrote in The Hitler Cult:


        If I wanted to, I should certainly cohabit with a Negress, or wed … Anna May Wong, if that beautiful Chinese and myself were of a mind to become man and wife. As to a Jewess, that is not an ethnographical term, but belongs to a widely distributed and extremely mixed community’ (67-68).


        Miscegenation was not a dirty word to Lewis, only a mere extension of what Zangwill had earlier conceived of as the ‘melting-pot’. In Light on a Dark Horse, Roy Campbell, despite his assumption of the identity of a ‘white African’ as a fait accompli, rather than a wilful act of ethnic transference (he was caricatured as such as ‘Zulu Blades’ in Apes), scorned this idea in suitably Lewisian terms:


        Hybrids are rarely any good, except in the case of a donkey stallion and the mare of a horse. When super-annuated English society-tarts take up negro lovers, it is generally a sort of perversion like the exaggerated feeling for dogs and cats. (163) (11)


        When it came to the actuality of what was an illegal act in much of the white world, Lewis also expresses doubts as to how this would work in practice. In fact, he seems to have developed something of a psychopathological complex with regard to inter-racial relations, at least in his writing. In the episode from Blasting and Bombardiering briefly described above, the tension in the household is sexual, as the Belgian journalist claims that he is a cuckcold because, despite his wife’s apparent distaste for Blacks, she is attracted to Daniel. Lewis himself some sort of undoubtedly felt some jealousy towards Henry Crowder, the Black American jazz band-leader who succeeded him as Nancy Cunard’s lover (which possibly explains his professed hatred of the music). (12) His own desire for non-white women, if it existed, would probably not transcend the social barriers that Cunard so easily disregarded. Lewis was ambivalent, almost fatalistic, about the future of the white race as a whole, although he did not see this as any great loss, writing in Doom of Youth: ‘Our “White Epoch” is, doubtless, doomed. But do not let us be too enthusiastic over that, any more than too sad.’ (251-252)


        The concept of miscegenation is politically subversive and this may have been the overriding appeal for Lewis, especially when that subversion is initiated by a figure of authority. In the continuation of his excursion into the after-world in The Childermass – Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (1956) – Lewis played out a scenario whereby two seemingly opposing entities of angels and humans, were encouraged by the Devil, Sammael, to co-habit and interbreed (thereby providing the trilogy’s collective title, ‘The Human Age’). This expands upon the biblical legend of the Nephilim, the giant progeny of the sexual union between the divine and the mortal. (13) Some angels were already discreetly living with women, but Sammael wants to increase the number, effectively colonising the state of the divine with the human, himself making a show of taking, in quick succession, two fiancées, the first of which was herself of mixed race (‘an octoroon’), the second a Jewess posing as a Russian princess, although he soon has his secret police dispose of both of them. The fact that the plan ends ignominiously, incurring the wrath of God who sends his forces to crush what he sees presumably sees as an act of apostasy as much as one of genetic perversion, suggests that Lewis did not expect such a utopian project to succeed. Perhaps it was left to a more earth-bound world to achieve this.


        Cosmic Man’


        Lewis’s melting-pot depended less on the demarcations of skin-colour than the roles he would have assigned to them according to their artistically-derived social status. This was not necessarily a democratic endeavour, as seen in his promotion of the artist at the summit of any conception he had of a utopian society – the one factor that is consistent throughout his polemic work – and the denigration of black culture, something that continued even after the conciliatory sentiments towards this made in America and Cosmic Man. In his second autobiography, Rude Assignment (1950), he maintains that:


        I saw only the obscene burlesque, only registered the howling and the stamping of the primitive African horde. And I regretted Johan Sebastian Bach in the midst of a universal Boogiwoogie.


        Immediately after, he contends:


        When all is said and done, there was, and is, a cultural problem there to which our great sympathy for the Negro and horror at the conditions of semi-serfdom in which he still lives (and I was at Detroit at the time of the race-riots) should not blind us. (218) (14)


        What roles Blacks were meant to have assumed in Lewis’s version of the melting-pot it may be hard to say, especially if they were to be deprived of their music and their literary culture not recognised, despite his obvious empathy for their struggle for what was later to be termed ‘civil rights’. In his post-1945, ‘cosmic’, period of thought, he was more conciliatory towards the existence of a separate black culture. He equated the American Black with the modern world that was embodied in an urban environment that had now all but eradicated the rural one of slavery. Yet it was now the character of the Black American – ‘[…] the almost solar power of their warm-heartedness […] their mirth […] which explodes like a refreshing storm’ that he finds attractive, asserting that ‘(T)he colored people are the artistic leaven; out of their outcast state they have made a splendid cultural instrument’. (15) This could only refer to jazz and it seems that Lewis must, by that time, have realised that it had some cultural merit on its own terms and, if it was not the basis for achieving the cultural melting-pot that he sought, then it was not so antipathetic to this. In his favourable review of the paintings of Denis Williams the motif of the tom-tom again resumes its positive attribute, as he sees African art for what it is in terms of its aesthetic qualities:


        ‘… with the monotony of the tom-tom, practically only one colour is used: namely yellow. Its effectiveness in sustaining precisely the reaction he requires of us is remarkable. It is wearying, in the way intended.’ (15)


        The ‘Melting-Pot’ was never realised as a grand plan for integration, but it remained in the American consciousness until it was superseded by the more solid, but perhaps no more realisable concept of multiculturalism and ethnic diversity that informs political and social debate today. Of the two concepts, Lewis would have opposed the latter (he would surely have approved of a re-elected US president of mixed heritage). As he noted in America and Cosmic Man:




        (Message over 64 KB, truncated)

      • G. H.
        Lewis first read Nietzsche (not in the original German, but in French translation) at roughly the same time as he was reading Bergson, and was soon deploying
        Message 3 of 3 , Jul 9, 2018

          Lewis first read Nietzsche (not in the original German, but in French translation) at roughly the same time as he was reading Bergson, and was soon deploying him in his critique of Italian Futurism. In the first issue of his Vorticist review, Blast, for instance, Nietzsche is neither blessed nor blasted, but appears by name in an attack on Filippo Marinetti: “His war-talk, sententious elevation and much besides, Marinetti picked up from Nietzsche.” Nietzsche returns, ever so slightly masked, in The Caliph’s Design (1919) as that “German philosopher” who subscribes to the notion of an “aesthetic justification of the universe,” an idea treated, if not with mockery, at least with skepticism, by Lewis:

          A German philosopher, living in the heyday of last century German music, accepted the theory of an aesthetic justification of the universe. Many people play with this notion, just as they play with Art. But we should have to disembarrass “art” of a good deal of cheap adhesive matter, and cheap and pretty adhesive people, before it could appear a justification for anything at all; much less for such a gigantic and, from every point of view, dubious concern as the Universe!

          The allusion here is to the following, celebrated statement in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872): “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”

          The first extended analysis of Nietzsche’s thought by Lewis occurs in Part IV (“Vulgarization and Political Decay”) of The Art of Being Ruled (1926). Surprisingly — at least for those who consider Lewis an out-and-out Nietzschean, or who would contrast his attitude to Nietzsche with his attitude to Bergson and the other “time-philosophers” — Lewis’s reaction to Nietzsche here is scarcely less negative than his reaction to Bergson in Time and Western Man (1927). Just like every other figure in the modern pantheon (including all the major literary modernists, from Pound to Eliot to Joyce to Woolf), Nietzsche is the target of polemical attack by Lewis. In The Art of Being Ruled, Nietzsche is identified as “the archetype of the vulgarizer.” The object of his vulgarization is “the notion of aristocracy and power,” which, Lewis argues, is “surely the most absurd, illogical, and meaningless thing that he could have chosen for that purpose” (ABR, 113). By “vulgarization” here, Lewis means at once popularization and devaluation: Nietzsche leads the populace to believe in its own aristocratic nature, thereby negating the very principle of the aristos. In this act of vulgarization, Nietzsche might be said to be the first properly modern philosopher. In The Art of Being Ruled, Nietzsche forms an unholy trinity with the two other great “vulgarizers” of the modern age: Bergson and Freud. Through an argument that is itself clearly a repetition of Nietzsche’s own strategy, Lewis turns Nietzsche back against himself, making of the self-declared anti-Christian Nietzsche a philosopher of Christian humility: “Nietzsche was in fact himself, where philosophy was concerned, a sort of Christ” (ABR, 114). What Lewis means by this is that Nietzsche preaches, self-contradictorily, an aristocratism that is open to all, the empirical proof of this being the sudden waxing of Nietzsche’s posthumous star: “A few years after his dramatic exit from the stage he became the greatest popular success of any philosopher of modern times” (ABR, 114); in this, Nietzsche anticipates the popularity of both Bergson and Freud in the early decades of the twentieth century.

          However, if Lewis’s attack on the popular (because vulgarizing) Nietzsche is in fact scarcely less virulent than his attacks on Bergson, this is not because Lewis is simply opposed to Nietzsche rather than neatly aligned with him. The targets of Lewis’s polemics are precisely those figures with whom he shares something essential, and Lewis certainly finds “truths” in Nietzsche, not least the “truth” of that depthless surface which underlies Lewis’s own externalist aesthetic. Later in The Art of Being Ruled, for instance, Lewis declares: “that we are surface creatures, is the truth that Nietzsche insisted on so wisely” (ABR, 231). More generally, however, one might argue that Lewis’s polemos, a polemos that includes Nietzsche while being governed by him, takes the form of what Derrida in his later work terms “autoimmunization,” which is to say, a procedure whereby the self (autos) turns back on itself suicidally, ruining its own integrity. Nietzsche, then, as Lewis’s polemical other, is none other than Lewis himself, or at least a certain Lewis. And, crucially, for Lewis to constitute himself as a theorist of “Vulgarization and Political Decay” — in other words, as a theorist of what he will later term “nihilism” — he has to engage in this radical act of self-separation or self-aggression, by way of a certain Nietzsche, a Nietzsche himself split by Lewis into, on the one hand, the great vulgarizer and, on the other hand, the truth-bearer, the philosopher who articulates the truth of the depthless surface, which calls for the very externalist art that Lewis himself will aim both to theorize and to practice, most elaborately in The Apes of God (1930). Lewis’s polemos with Nietzsche, then, is not simply the expression of a rampant individualism, but rather a practice of autoimmunizing self-assertion that would deconstitute the very thing it serves to constitute.

          Returning to Lewis’s critique of Nietzsche in The Art of Being Ruled, we find that the heart of that critique concerns the will to power (Wille zur Macht), which Lewis, anticipating Heidegger, identifies as “the central feature of his thought” (ABR, 117). Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power is, he argues, inextricably rooted in the “Willschool” of philosopher, and thus can be traced back to Schopenhauer. In his attempt to overcome Schopenhauer’s “pessimism of thought and knowledge,” Nietzsche proposes a countering “affirmation” that is essentially the expression of a “will to action” directed against the intellect, which is to say against Lewis’s own principal value. The will to power itself is simply surplus energy, above and beyond the energy required for the Darwinian “struggle for existence.” In Nietzsche, this surplus (or “creative”) energy is not invested in art, which is where, according to Lewis (and indeed a certain Nietzsche), it should be invested; rather, this surplus energy is reinvested in the very struggle that it exceeds. This, according to Lewis, is Nietzsche’s great failing, the failing that Lewis’s own work would correct:

          Any criticism of Nietzsche must rest on that point: that of his suggested employment and utilization of this superfluous energy to go on doing the same things that we should be doing without it. . . . He was so impregnated with the pessimism of Schopenhauer, and his health was so broken by his experiences in the Franco-Prussian War, that he could not imagine, really, the mind doing anything else with itself than what it did in post-darwinian or schopenhauerian pessimism: to just go on contemplating the horrors of existence. And in reality the will to enjoy was dead in Nietzsche, much as he clamoured for latin light-heartedness. He had plenty of Will left: only, it was Will to struggle merely, not Will to live. (ABR, 118)

          In other words, Nietzsche remains fixated by, and imprisoned within, the very nihilism that he was the first both to diagnose and to attempt to overcome. Lewis’s Nietzsche is the first of the great reinvestors in European nihilism, the first of the great reinvestors in that greatest of devaluations, that absolute devaluation of the “highest values” which reduces existence to “horror.” The ambivalence of Lewis’s own relation to Nietzsche is to be understood, then, not simply in terms of an élitism that could not abide sharing its preferences, but more fundamentally in terms of a nihilism that Nietzsche diagnoses but from which he is unable to free himself. That Nietzsche himself was not unaware of this is suggested, of course, by his description of nihilism as the “uncanniest of all guests.” Given such an analysis of Nietzsche, it is scarcely surprising that in his later works Lewis should repeatedly associate Nietzsche with the “time-philosophers” (above all, Bergson) and the art of music (an inward, temporal art, the very antithesis of that “externalist” art advocated by Lewis). In an irony that returned to haunt Lewis himself, Nietzsche, the great diagnostician of European nihilism, is aligned with the very nihilism against which his great “affirmation” was supposed to militate.
           
          (Extracted from "Nietzsche among the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis", https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/320384.pdf)

           


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          Onderwerp: [evola_as_he_is] Re: 'The Art Of Being Ruled'
           
           

          Wyndham Lewis « Paleface » was fancifully reviewed at www.counter-currents.com (https://www.counter-currents.com/2017/12/wyndham-lewis-paleface-the-philosophy-of-the-melting-pot/). The features of this book are presented in a more balanced manner in the review below (found at http://wl2012..weebly.com/uploads/1/3/2/3/13237441/robert_e._murray.pdf). See also « From 'Paleface' to 'Cosmic Man' » in « Wyndham Lewis and Western Man » by D. Ayers (partly viewable at https://books.google.be/books?id=D92vCwAAQBAJ&hl=nl&source=gbs_book_other_versions).



          WYNDHAM LEWIS’S ‘MELTING-POT’: UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?


          ROBERT EDWARD MURRAY


          More than any other British writer and social critic in the inter-war and post-1945 periods, Wyndham Lewis addressed the issue of racial integration in a white-dominated society. This is not as immediately apparent as it might have been because his agenda was primarily a cultural, rather than socio-economic or socio-political one. Even the one book that does address the idea of the ‘Melting-Pot’ – Paleface: a Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) – does so in terms which are so ambivalent that it is hard to discern whether Lewis actually desired the advent of such a society. That particular book lies at one end of a spectrum of thought – or perhaps a series of speculations might be a better way of describing it – in which he allows himself to become at times overwhelmed by the other issues that arise out of the notion of ethnic integration that he fears may be undertaken in the cause of a falsely conceived ideology. This would seem to portray a distinctly dystopian view of a wrongly mediated policy of integration. At the other end is the optimism of America and Cosmic Man (1948), which expresses a convincing and heartfelt desire for the melting-pot to come into existence, one that came the closest Lewis ever did to a utopian view of the world.


          Definitions and Implications of the ‘Melting-Pot’


          The term ‘Melting-Pot’ was first popularised by the popular British writer Israel Zangwill (famous as the author of Children of the Ghetto, 1892, amongst other works) as the title of a play in 1908, which was staged on Broadway to great acclaim. Yet the primary concern about integration concerned actual white European immigrants to the US, rather than the indigenous Black population, not to mention Native Americans and Hispanics; the barriers between members of different races remained and seemed insurmountable. Zangwill actually wrote: ‘America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!’ (1) Lewis’s proposal that members of all ethnicities should be fully integrated, not just into American society, but into the social structure of the British Empire, was truly radical.


          Lewis saw the British Empire as an already outmoded construction, even in economic, as well as political terms, one founded on deceit and intended purely for the gratification of the capitalist interests he so greatly scorned. In excluding the working-classes from full participation in the process of empire-building, thereby allowing them to gain from the benefits in terms of immigration to a place with better living conditions – and, indeed, forbidding interbreeding with native populations, British imperialism was a contradiction in the terms of what ‘colonialism’ was actually meant to be. As he wrote in The Hitler Cult (1939): ‘In passing, all that is necessary to remark is that the English poor are not wanted in this Black-farm of an empire, which is the preserve of the English millionaire class, and its middle class public school personnel, and not at all of the English people as a whole, to whom such ‘Imperialism’ is repugnant..’ (210) America, for all its evident faults, offered the chance for an end to this misguided concept of colonialism and the establishment of a society that was more just and, correspondingly, more attuned to the artistically-led principles which he upheld above any more material, politically-oriented, ones.


          For Lewis, the ideal society, or at least a more ideal one, existed in the form of a melting-pot, a diverse ethnic aggregation not defined by considerations of class or the legacy of slavery which may have once existed. This was apparent in his anthropologically-directed travel book Filibusters in Barbary (1932), which placed the negro element of the population of Morocco into an environment where it existed naturally and not in a continued state of slavery – ‘No bones were made about this inky blood’. (69) (2) Neither were such people a mere cipher for any number of qualities – artistic, political or otherwise – that the modern white hierarchy had now imposed upon them in the cause of their supposed ‘liberation’. That the American Black in particular was the focus for the celebration of the misguided ideal of primitivism by cultural practitioners that Lewis saw as abandoning their responsibilities to uphold the standards of Western civilisation and not Blacks (or Native Americans) was the polemical concern of Paleface.


          However, throughout his writings on the subject, Lewis was never really engaged with what he referred to, according to the term current at the time, as ‘the Negro’. The continuous use of the now-derogatory ‘N-word’, is used in a way that may be couched in terms of paraphrase and irony, but which is often too casual and too frequent for the modern reader to be really comfortable with and reveals a degree of crudity that Lewis does not use when referring to other ethnic groups. He was certainly not involved in the emotional sense that early white supporters of Black liberation – like his one-time lover Nancy Cunard – may have been; like many writers of his time, he simply did not have any actual contact with Black writers, either from America, or from Africa. In the episode of his giving considerable help to the Guyanese painter Denis Williams, in 1950, there was no sense, in his letters of request to Alfred Barr and Herbert Read, that he was doing anything other than the right thing for a fellow struggling artist. (3)


          In this he was doubtlessly influenced by his friend, the South African poet Roy Campbell. Campbell may have been an embodiment of the specifically right-wing consciousness that Lewis often fell into, but he was no racist, being highly critical of the policy of discrimination against blacks in South Africa by the Boer republics before it was ratified with the introduction of the apartheid system in 1948. He had the same even-handedness in considering the position of Blacks in the colonial world because he himself had assumed an identity of a ‘white African’, although his autobiography, Light On a Dark Horse (1951) makes it clear that he himself did not subscribe to any notion of the melting-pot. Lewis was also a close reader of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and had a real understanding of how societies outside America and Europe operated, something he used to great effect in his work of Shakespearean criticism, The Lion and the Fox (1927).


          However, Lewis never actually attempted an analytical portrayal of the black character in his work – certainly not as much as the Jewish character, which was more complex. It was Lewis himself who shot down in flames any white authors who dared to presume that they could attempt to analyse – or at least construct – any sort of black character, fictional or otherwise, as he showed throughout Paleface (the then-popular American writer Sherwood Anderson in particular). Yet there are elements of a ‘Black discourse’ in the same way as there is a ‘Semitic discourse’ throughout his work. This is mediated by his interest in, if not the fully-realised black character, then the black figure. This was seen in his Vorticist art-theories, where Lewis shared the enthusiasm amongst Modernist artists for the abstract qualities of African sculpture. As he wrote in Blast no. 1:


          His sculpture is monotonous. The one compact human form is his Tom-Tom. (141)


          The black figure was not such an oppositional totem, an obvious Other, for the aesthetic and philosophical ideals that Lewis projected, whereas the Jewish character was and correspondingly became an object of increasing fascination for him. The black figure was accepted by Lewis initially as a pure abstraction; later, in his observations of other societies, he became a component for his notion of a melting-pot, before it became something of an ideal.


          Displacement and Slavery:


          For Lewis, an artificial melting-pot, one enforced through the imposition of slavery, was something that could definitely be described as dystopian and which belonged to a past and a future he wanted to avoid. In Paleface, he expresses his disdain for the uniformity the industrial age has imposed upon all its subjects, regardless of their ethnicity, yet derides Anderson for doing the same in his sentimentalised view of a pre-industrial black existence in America, one that surely excuses the condition of slavery from which it had emerged:


          But Intensive Industrialism is what Mr. Anderson never ceases to fulminate against. And his reasons for hating it appear to be precisely that it does merge people in the way that he exultantly describes the Negro workers as being merged, in one featureless anonymous black organism, like a gigantic centipede. So in the same breath he is gloomy and joyful over the same phenomenon! The black skin appears to have the power of disguising the reality from him. A subsidiary confusion is caused, in this instance, by the fact that the mechanical Negroes are given as a characteristic feature of the free natural life of the Mississippi before the arrival of Industrialism, which put an end to the mechanical trotting Negroes – ‘running up and down the landing-stage […] lost in each other.’ (221)


          The racial restrictions of imperial and plantation society were extended to class and the creation of an industrialised form of slavery, one that he noted was portrayed in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis in Paleface. (4)


          This explains why he disregarded the apparent impossibility – because of the social strictures brought about by race-laws – of the realisation of the melting-pot and kept the concept within the realm of the ideal and achievable, rather than an expression of a utopia that may never be achieved.


          This is not to say that an element of the utopian is absent from Lewis’s work. The unpublished and unfinished work, Hoodopip, part of the creative basis of his megalithic satire The Apes of God (1930) was described by him as a ‘Candide-like piece’, although it more resembles Samuel Johnson’s derivation Rasselas, having a similar setting in a specifically black world, that of Ethiopia, a country that at the time was the hub of the ethno-mythology of both Afro-centric and Euro-centric concerns. Hoodopip himself is described as overtly exotic: ‘Hoodie, bare-legged, with golden sandals, black and as feverishly lovely as ever …’ (5) It may be that Lewis intended the setting of ‘Hoodopip’ to be a black one, although not necessarily a ‘typical’ pre-colonial country classified as a place populated by natives waiting to be introduced to Western civilisation. Ethiopia was a country separated from the rest of Africa through maintaining its independence (and staunchly defending it against invasion by the Italians at the Battle of Adwa in 1896). The world of ‘O’, which Hoodopip is destined to rule, is a utopia, albeit one that exists in the blissful ignorance that underpins the world of the deluded ‘apes’ of the later satire.


          When placed in an unnatural environment of enforced subservience, the black figure often remained unapproachable and resistant, as in Lewis’s description in Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) of the reluctant Jamaican soldier he tried unsuccessfully to stop obstructing a military detail (‘I never got the right touch with the West Indian negro’). (6) Yet ultimately the alien being has to be accommodated within the greater social body in order for both entities to continue to exist. In the same book, the encounter in Paris with the voluble, would-be racist, Belgian journalist and his wife and their dispute over their black lodger, Daniel – a figure who is himself of mixed race (a metis from North Africa) – echoes the continuous quest in the earlier ‘Wild Body’ series of stories and vignettes of the individual to find a place within an often hostile environment and enable its continued existence. As a poet – albeit one with a government job – Daniel is a black equivalent of the figure of ‘The Pole’ featured in the story of that name (initially published in 1909 and revised for The Wild Body collection in 1928 as ‘Beau Sejour’). Like the impecunious bohemians who inhabit the pensions of Brittany, and are maintained by their hosts in the hope that their artistic efforts will eventually bring handsome financial reward, Daniel is an unpaying guest. He is the captive of his landlord’s apparent good nature, the Belgianbeing the only one who recognises his genius as a poet and who seeks to invest his divided household with a new form of creative energy.


          Ethnic Transference:


          As unlikely as it may have appeared, the idea that there could be some form of ethnic transference had already taken place within white society, and Lewis had taken note of this in his work. The central protagonist of Apes was Horace Zagreus, modelled on the notorious practical joker Horace de Vere Cole, who perpetrated the infamous ‘Dreadnought Hoax’ in 1910 by disguising himself and his party as a royal delegation from Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then known and which was, as befitting its independent status, a possible customer for ship-builders and arms manufacturers). Again, in Blasting and Bombardiering, just before the incident described above, he recalled the occasion in the trenches when he tried to separate two Jamaican artillerymen from fighting each other and ended up covered in mud, thereby effectively changing his skin colour.


          Lewis surely must have recognised the comic possibilities of this act of identity-switching. The act of ‘blacking up’, then common in the British music-hall, was featured in the climactic scenario of Apes, a party held by Lord Osmund Finnian Shaw (a character modelled on Sir Osbert Sitwell) whereby one of the guests appears ‘[…] with black grease paint, counterfeiting the negritic hue, a compliment to the black bar-tender, in the costume of an african rajah out of Purchas or Mandeville [...] smiling at the broad-mindedness that made it possible for him to eclipse his skin’s white and become a brotherly-black on the same footing as the nigger’. (7) The crudity of both the author and the easy assumptions of his briefly glimpsed character echoes that of the earlier tradition of blackface in the American minstrel show, one which forces home the point that although whites can appear to be black, the social and political barriers between different races remain..


          Lewis wished to nullify the implications of skin-colour, thereby undermining the Black American thinker W. E. B. Du Bois’ contention that white skin that is actually a negation of colour and that black and brown skin is the true mark of human identity. Lewis saw the innocent pursuit of physical (and possibly spiritual) health, through the burgeoning craze for sunbathing, as signifying the wholesale decline in Western civilisation. His description of the seaside resort on the German Baltic coast in Doom of Youth (1932) inverts the image of his own reluctant change of skin-colour in the trenches:


          The sun-bathers stretched out at full-length all over our Continent in the summer months – they are the first instalment of a predestined savagery. Just as much as Al Capone and ‘Legs’ Diamond (or for that matter the poor huddled, mud-caked, half-starved savages called ‘Fritz’ or ‘Tommy’, 1914-18) that is so [...] hundreds of thousands of persons are burned to a negro mahogany yearly, from toe to crown, and you might get the illusion, I suppose, of a primitive negro community. This, it must be allowed, would harmonize with the Jazz that hums in their heads, those airs to which they nightly stalk and stumble.

          (250-251)


          In view of what was to happen a few years later throughout Europe – and in most of the rest of the world – Lewis’s condemnation of a wilful return to a supposed state of Eden was prescient.


          One of Du Bois’s fictional works, the somewhat slight Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), is described and quoted from at length in Paleface, while his more profound books, which deal specifically with the Black American character, most notably The Souls of Black Folk (1903), by then a classic text, is ignored. An innocuous statement from the novel – ‘“The Congo […] is flooding the Acropolis”’ (33) – is turned into a provocative slogan that Lewis repeatedly uses in his book to warn of the dangers of the primitive overcoming the ideals of Western classical culture. (8) A year later, in Apes, going back to the American Bar at Lord Osmond’s lenten party, when told by the black bar-tender that he has just come over for the occasion from an engagement as an exotic factotum in Athens, Zagreus exclaims, in paraphrase, ‘The Congo has come from the Acropolis! The Congo has actually come from the Acropolis!’ (445) The music in the background, just as that which accompanies the nightly rituals of the proto-Club Med, is jazz, the soundtrack to an act of, not so much ethnic transference, but one of cultural apostasy.


          Jazz was a particular bug-bear for Lewis.. Throughout his work of the time he derides it often and in terms that are at once crude (it is ‘the nigger hubbub’ in Hitler, 1931, 23) and eloquent (‘[…] a music of drums, with contralto and counterbass saxophones […] [T]he studied mass-energy of the music, hurrying over precipices, swooping in switchbacks, rejoicing in gross proletarian nigger-bumps, and swanee-squeals shot through with caustic cat-calls from the instrumentalists […]’ – in Apes, 443). Here the image of the tom-tom (‘[…] that ice-cream tomtom of the savage New-Rich […]’), is as threatening as the untamed jungle in countless Hollywood films, an unknown territory that Lewis wishes to leave alone and not invite into his own domain, such as the fashionable London night-spots like the Café Royale or the Savoy which featured jazz, especially for the specific purpose of accompaniment to dancing. (9)


          Lewis’s extensive description of the sound of jazz – cacophonous, rather than in any way harmonious – informs his view of a dystopian melting-pot, as particularly described in The Childermass (1928). In an after-world determined by the application of the time-philosophy he so vehemently opposed, Blacks resemble film-extras and are otherwise passive components of a social hierarchy that gives prominence to a whole panoply of, in the words of the character Hyperides: ‘[…] fools, lost souls, cardboard-men, sticks, fuel for the World-bonfire, fashionplates, pseudo-niggers, poor white trash, bought and fooled, Nanmen and Pip-squeaks’. (10) As his classically-derived name implies, Hyperides is a figure who embodies an objectively-defined authoritarianism, as opposed to the subjective one of the Bailiff, whose role is, ostensibly, to hear the appeals of those ‘lost souls’ who wish to gain admittance into Heaven. The word ‘pseudo’ here suggests that Blacks are misrepresented by a white-mediated ‘jazz culture’ and it is only the Bailiff, in an episode during his hearing of the appellants’ court, who gives them a voice by proxy, in a grotesque parody of Black American English that echoes the ‘stump speech’ routine common to American minstrel shows, in which a ‘wise’ black (i.e. ‘blacked-up’) character relays home-spun philosophy. Whites can also sound, as well as look, black, but the implications are perhaps even more sinister. Language – the ultimate tool of communication – is ultimately rendered devoid of meaning.


          Yet Lewis sees jazz as an exclusively Negro means of expression. In Doom of Youth, a polemic that was otherwise satirically aimed at the encouragement of a stage of arrested development by consumer capitalism, he refers to the taste for jazz among the English upper-classes and condemns their embrace of the seemingly primitive as full of false sentiment: ‘They sing the slave-songs of the industrial serfs of the metropolis (their sobbing factory folk-music) […] [B]ut all that is borrowed, in this way, from the arts and manners prevalent in the



          Heartbreak House of the Underdog […]’ (254-256) In other words, he was dismissing the superficial form of jazz in its ‘white’, sanitised, format, and implicitly supporting the idea that it should be played in its original, exclusively black one. He actually reveals some understanding of the connection between the ‘pure’ concept of jazz in its original black format and its roots in the blues, which in turn was based on the spiritually-influenced ‘sorrow songs’ sung by slaves on the American plantations (‘… the sobbing slave-music of the plantations – jazzed by Berlin or by Gershwin’ – DY 82). Amidst all the protests made by Lewis against jazz, he was aware of its greater significance outside the context of providing a soundtrack to the shallow world of the white upper-classes whom he really despised. As an inadvertent musical critic, he touched upon the idea of authenticity in jazz that was to be the critical impetus crucial to the music’s later development..


          Lewis was also aware of the uneven relationship between the white proponents of jazz and the elements of a population that were kept in political and economic oppression. He gives more consideration, albeit briefly, to the arguments against this contradiction by another Black American thinker Alain Locke. In Paleface, Lewis insists that jazz is an inferior art-form, although his argument is actually made less convincing by placing it within a larger cultural melting-pot:


          The ‘cultural’ present that the Negro has made to White America, and through America to the whole White World, can be summed up in the word ‘jazz’. It is a very popular present and white people everywhere have tumbled over each other to pick it up, and it has almost superseded every other form of activity. But what it is impossible not to ask whether it deserves quite so large a ‘reward’ as Mr. Locke claims for it. The White arts that the Paleface has turned away from in order to cultivate these Black arts, were certainly as good as the latter: and all that the ‘Afroamerican’ has succeeded in supplying is the aesthetic medium of a sort of frantic proletarian sub-conscious, which is the very negation of those far greater arts, for instance, of other more celebrated ‘coloured’ races.. The Chinese or even the Hindu would never have been captivated by nor even paid any attention at all to that sort of inferior Black art. But the White has: and it is very unreasonable of him to deny social equality to the Negro: about that there can be no question at all, under the circumstances. (It is only the circumstances that ought never to be there.) (65)


          Culture was more important than ethnicity in this regard and for Lewis it was perfectly reasonable to encourage black artists to practise a white culture – thereby becoming, effectively, white. Lewis’s reference to the singers Paul Robeson and Roland Hayes in Paleface may be obvious choices for such an act of cultural and ethnic transference but, like his relative ignorance of the significance of the work of Du Bois, he seemed completely unaware of the Harlem Renaissance that was going on at the time of his visit to New York in 1927 and was not able to recognise the existence of a separate and strong black literary culture, one that was not so exclusively musical. The discourse that he was engaged in remained one-way.


          Miscegenation – An Immodest Proposal?


          What made Lewis’s melting-pot truly radical was his insistence on a policy of inter-breeding between the races, especially between Negroes and Caucasians. He gives his statements of the subject a utopian air, regardless of the social taboos he suggested should be broken. As he wrote in The Hitler Cult:


          If I wanted to, I should certainly cohabit with a Negress, or wed … Anna May Wong, if that beautiful Chinese and myself were of a mind to become man and wife. As to a Jewess, that is not an ethnographical term, but belongs to a widely distributed and extremely mixed community’ (67-68).


          Miscegenation was not a dirty word to Lewis, only a mere extension of what Zangwill had earlier conceived of as the ‘melting-pot’. In Light on a Dark Horse, Roy Campbell, despite his assumption of the identity of a ‘white African’ as a fait accompli, rather than a wilful act of ethnic transference (he was caricatured as such as ‘Zulu Blades’ in Apes), scorned this idea in suitably Lewisian terms:


          Hybrids are rarely any good, except in the case of a donkey stallion and the mare of a horse. When super-annuated English society-tarts take up negro lovers, it is generally a sort of perversion like the exaggerated feeling for dogs and cats. (163) (11)


          When it came to the actuality of what was an illegal act in much of the white world, Lewis also expresses doubts as to how this would work in practice. In fact, he seems to have developed something of a psychopathological complex with regard to inter-racial relations, at least in his writing. In the episode from Blasting and Bombardiering briefly described above, the tension in the household is sexual, as the Belgian journalist claims that he is a cuckcold because, despite his wife’s apparent distaste for Blacks, she is attracted to Daniel. Lewis himself some sort of undoubtedly felt some jealousy towards Henry Crowder, the Black American jazz band-leader who succeeded him as Nancy Cunard’s lover (which possibly explains his professed hatred of the music). (12) His own desire for non-white women, if it existed, would probably not transcend the social barriers that Cunard so easily disregarded. Lewis was ambivalent, almost fatalistic, about the future of the white race as a whole, although he did not see this as any great loss, writing in Doom of Youth: ‘Our “White Epoch” is, doubtless, doomed. But do not let us be too enthusiastic over that, any more than too sad.’ (251-252)


          The concept of miscegenation is politically subversive and this may have been the overriding appeal for Lewis, especially when that subversion is initiated by a figure of authority. In the continuation of his excursion into the after-world in The Childermass – Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta (1956) – Lewis played out a scenario whereby two seemingly opposing entities of angels and humans, were encouraged by the Devil, Sammael, to co-habit and interbreed (thereby providing the trilogy’s collective title, ‘The Human Age’). This expands upon the biblical legend of the Nephilim, the giant progeny of the sexual union between the divine and the mortal. (13) Some angels were already discreetly living with women, but Sammael wants to increase the number, effectively colonising the state of the divine with the human, himself making a show of taking, in quick succession, two fiancées, the first of which was herself of mixed race (‘an octoroon’), the second a Jewess posing as a Russian princess, although he soon has his secret police dispose of both of them. The fact that the plan ends ignominiously, incurring the wrath of God who sends his forces to crush what he sees presumably sees as an act of a

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