Abstract
An outrageous fancy-dress banquet extends over more than a third of The Apes of God (1930). It is so timed as to desecrate the traditional fast and thus transgress the normal bounds of Carnival. The climax of this blasphemous masquerade is to be a display of magic put on by the flamboyant Horace Zagreus.2 As he dresses for Lord Osmund’s Lenten Party, Zagreus seems ever more the hierophant in some revival of the Ancient Mysteries (AG 341–62). Until clad in his weirdly emblematic robes and headgear — resembling not so much Harlequin as the quintessence of the Other — Zagreus rivals the most grotesque of Arcimboldo’s teasing inventions.3 Close upon Zagreus’s heels, like his shadow, follows Ratner in the hardly less bizarre guise of ‘the terrible Barin Mutum or African Half-man’ (AG 347). The acolyte is the role that this ‘Split-Man’ is forced to play, ‘the Jinn’ or Slave of the Lamp to his patron (AG 348). Two other protégés are also in the retinue of ‘the First Conjuror to Lord Osmund’. The waspish Archie Margolin is the latest in a string of ‘geniuses’ whom Horace makes a habit of discovering. The new favourite is gradually displacing his predecessor Dan Boleyn. Boleyn is an Irish youth, tall, handsome but painfully shy, naive and awkward to the extent that one suspects him of imbecility. While Archie pesters the other guests, flicking matchstick ‘arrows’ at them, the hapless Irishman is repeatedly humiliated. He has come reluctantly disguised ‘as a Cinquecento exquisite-white silk tights’.
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Notes
Part 12 of The Apes of God. Terry Castle’s often illuminating Masquerade and Civilization (London: Methuen, 1986) neglects Wyndham Lewis. Hence the importance of Paul Edwards’s ‘Augustan and Related Allusions in The Apes of God’, Enemy News, 24 (Summer 1987) pp. 17–21, hereafter cited as Edwards. See also Peter L. Caracciolo, ‘Carnivals of Mass-Murder: the Frazerian Origins of Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass,’ in Robert Fraser (ed.), Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1990) p. 210; hereafter cited as ‘Carnivals’.
See Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London: Routledge, 1990); and the exhibition catalogue for The Archimboldo Effect: Transformations of the Face from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth-Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), especially pp. 240–3.
John Dryden, Essays, edited by W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900) vol. II, pp. 92–3, hereafter cited as Dryden. Lewis owned a copy of this edition. As with the other books in his surviving library, referred to below, this is now among the holdings in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Lewis owned both The Poems of John Dryden, edited by J. Sargeaunt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1910) and The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, edited by H. F. Cary (London: Routledge, 1849). Among other neoclassical masterpieces in Lewis’s possession were the satires of Jonathan Swift. At the climax of one episode during Lord Osmund’s masquerade, the reader may well recall the maelstrom created by Pope’s Goddess of Dullness, as does Timothy Materer, ‘The Great English Vortex’, Agenda-Wyndham Lewis Special Issue, VII, 3,1969–70, p. 63, hereafter cited as Agenda. Paul Edwards points out a number of other vital allusions to ‘The Dunciad’ in Lewis’s text (Edwards 17). See also Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960) chapter V, hereafter cited as Elliott; and Hugh Kenner, ‘Wyndham Lewis: the Satirist as Barbarian’, in Claude Rawson (ed.), English Satire and the Satiric Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984) pp. 264–75.
Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980) p. 161, hereafter cited as Meyers. Chapter 10 surveys the origins of The Apes of God. For a list that helps further to identify the characters of this roman à clef, see Paul Edwards’s Afterword to his edition (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1981) pp. 635–6, hereafter cited as Edwards, Afterword. See also Dennis Brown, Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group-Joyce, Lewis, Pound, Eliot (London: Macmillan, 1990) pp. 147–51, hereafter cited as Brown. The allusion to the psychoanalytic work that had been done on ‘dual consciousness’ (’splätung’) implicit in Lewis’s teasing about ‘the Split-Man’ finds confirmation in Ellmann’s biography of Joyce. Ellmann notes how, despite Joyce’s expression of a preference for Vico, Ulysses shows the influence of Freud. See Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 126, 436–8, 693.
For one blatant contemporary example, see Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster (ed.), Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (London: Anthony Blond, 1968) pp. 105–6.
S. P. B. Mais, ‘Recent Fiction’, Daily Telegraph, 12 July 1930, p. 6, cited in Bradford Morrow and Bernard Lafourcade, A Bibliography of Wyndham Lewis (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978) p. 284.
Brown 145–51. See also Antonio M. Feijo, ‘Wyndham Lewis’s Knotty Relationship with Ezra Pound’, Enemy News, 32 (Summer 1991) pp. 4–10, hereafter cited as Feijo.
K. K. Ruthven, Ezra Pound as Literary Critic (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 136, hereafter cited as Ruthven. See also Ezra Pound’s 1916 memoir, Gaudier-Brzeska (Hessle, East Yorkshire: The Marvell Press, revised edition, 1960) p. 92, hereafter cited as GB.
See Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976) pp. 88, 102, 113–14, 119, 121, 125–6, 128, 264–5, 292, hereafter cited as Bush. In early 1918 Pound complained that ‘it takes such a constitution to read [The Golden Bough]’ (SL 134).
‘Art Notes’, New Age, 11 December 1919, pp. 96–7, reprinted in Harriet Zinnes (ed.), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (New York: New Directions, 1980) p. 126, hereafter cited as Zinnes.
See Peter L. Caracciolo, ‘Ezra Pound as David and Goliath Part 1’, Enemy News, 19 (Summer 1984) pp. 13–20.
Virginia Woolf, Letters, vol. II: 1912–1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (London: Hogarth Press, 1977) p. 572. See also, for instance, the entry for 28 October 1918, in ‘Extracts from a War Diary’ in Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience (London: Faber, 1963) p. 140; and ‘The Pound/Lewis/Hecht Interview’, quoted by W. K. Rose, in his ‘Pound and Lewis: the Crucial Years’, in Agenda, pp. 130–1.
See Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988) pp. 129–32, 209, 244, 398–9, hereafter cited as Carpenter; and Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris (London: Harrap, 1928) pp. 96–104, hereafter cited as Huddleston.
See the BBC interview with D. G. Bridson, and the Paris Review conversation with Donald Hall, both quoted in ‘An Anthology of Statements by Ezra Pound on the Cantos’, in William Cookson, A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1985) pp. xxi, xxii. See also, pp. xvi, xviii, xx.
Uno Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian (1927) vol. IV, pp. 407–10
Mardiros H. Ananikian and Alice Werner, Armenian, African (1925) vol. VII, p. 31, hereafter cited as Werner
W. Max Muller and Sir James George Scott, Egyptian, Indo-Chinese (1918) vol. XII, pp. 12, 30–33, 365–6, 428. The series was brought out on behalf of the Archaeological Institute of America and all these volumes were in the British Museum in the year of their publication, as also were Hartley Burr Alexander’s North American (1916) and Latin American (1920) vols X and XI. It is more than probable that in the British Museum Reading Room Lewis met some of the scholars involved in producing this anthropologically more up-to-date and winningly illustrated rival of The Golden Bough.
See Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954) p. 100
Geoffrey Wagner, Wyndham Lewis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957) p. 232.
See W. B. Yeats, Letters, edited by Allen Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954) pp. 760, 762, hereafter cited as Yeats. See also Feijo 7–8.
See Meyers 88, 90–1, 98–9,103,156–7; John Harwood, Olivia Shakespear and W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1989) pp. 171–3; and W. B. Yeats and T. Sturge Moore: Their Correspondence 1901–1937, edited by Ursula Bridge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953) pp. 63–114. Lewis’s relations with Yeats are a topic that I explore more fully in an essay forthcoming in Yeats Annual.
Bush 264. On Pound’s patronising attitude, see James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats and Modernism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. 20–1,147–50, 267. But John Harwood remains unconvinced that Pound had any serious interest in the occult. See ‘The Hollow Man’, Yeats Annual No. 8 (1990) p. 257.
See George Moore, Hail and Farewell (1911), edited by Richard Cave (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1976) p. 189, n. 172
Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Improvement of Life’, in BLAST I (London: John Lane, 1914) p. 146, hereafter cited as BLAST I.
From the early eighteenth-century on, some of the costume-designs for masquerades were inspired by the more exotic colonial encounters. See Aileen Ribeiro, The Dress Worn at Masquerades in England 1730 to 1790 (New York: Garland, 1984) ‘Appendix VI’, pp. 445–52. See also, George W. Stow, The Native Races of South Africa (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1905) p. 133; A. J. N. Tremearne, Hausa Superstitions and Customs (London: John Bale and Danielsson, 1913) pp. 109,123–4; and Werner, Chapter 8. Cf. AG 347, 355.
Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1927) p. 39, hereafter cited as TWM.
See Wyndham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled, edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989) pp. 258–67, here-after cited as ABR.
Waldemar Bogoraz, The Chukchee (Leiden: Brill, 1904–9) pp. 420–1, 424, 431, here-after cited as Bogoraz.
ABR 260. And as Satters in The Childermass (London: Chatto and Windus, 1928)-who sometimes acts as if shellshocked (e.g., pp. 12, 52)-was a’ second-loot back in the battery’ (p. 55), so Lewis as a subaltern in the Royal Artillery served with siege batteries on the Western front, enduring gas attack and heavy fire. See Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1937) parts II and III.
AG 611–12. There are echoes here of what was ‘the most commercially successful’ trick of stage magic ever invented:’ sawing a Woman in Two’ was created in 1920 by P. T. Selbit and developed by Horace Goldin. The latter performed ‘Vanishes’ disguised as the Devil. See Milbourne Christopher, Panorama of Magic (New York: Dover, 1962) pp. 190–3.
Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972) p. 388.
Shamanism ‘appealed to the growing individualism of an age for which the collective ecstasies of Dionysus were no longer sufficient’. See E. R. Dodd, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) p. 142.
GB 23, 85. Pound makes further references here to Epstein’s exotic piece (GB 99, 100). See also Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), especially pp. 34–5, 55, 59, 62–4, 87, 155–6. At his death, the sculptor’s incomparable private collection included well over a hundred pre-Columbian items. See Ezio Bassani and Malcolm D. McLeod, Jacob Epstein: Collector (Milano: Associazione Poro, 1989) pp. 68, 164–81.
The Great Coatlique, the Calendar Stone, an Aztec Colossal Head and Chakmools are frequently illustrated in a number of the studies of this subject published during the period. See, for instance, Thomas A. Joyce, Mexican Archaeology (London: Philip Lee Warner, 1914) plates ii, iii, viii. ‘Much of the background for Pound’s notion of Homeric primitivism can be reconstructed’ from books like Jane Harrison’s Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature (1882), where she links Hades with the Aztecs’ subterranean temple Michtan. See Bush 126. ‘Three Cantos’ was published in Poetry (Chicago, 1917), collected later that year in the American edition of Lustra, and reprinted in Quia Pauper Amavi (London: Ovid Press, 1919). Excerpts appeared in the London periodical Future in February-April 1918. On the Hieratic Head, see Richard Humphreys, ‘Demon Pantechnicon Driver’, in the exhibition catalogue, Pound’s Artists (London: The Tate Gallery, 1985; hereafter cited as PA) p. 51. Although he omitted the confrontation between Cortes and Montezuma, Pound’s Englishing of some of Fontenelle’s Les Dialogues des Morts (Pavannes and Divisions [New York: Knopf, 1918] pp. 49–92) helped further to stimulate Lewis. Lewis first uses the genre in the discussions between Socrates, Montaigne and Cézanne at the ‘Infernal Fair’ in Joint. See Agenda, pp. 198–208. He then uses it again in The Childermass and its postwar sequels. The imaginary post-humous conversation being a genre that facilitates both satire and informal philosophising, these latterday dialogues of the dead are easily assimilable within a modern version of Dante’s Inferno. Moreover, the narrator in this genre tends to behave like a gossip columnist at a modern masquerade. (See Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead [New York: Columbia University Press, 1973] p. 5.) This further indicates the affinity between The Childermass and The Apes of God.
Reprinted in Zinnes 35. Perverse though its application, Pound’s choice of cultural analogy was brilliant. For ‘in the grammar of historical change, the Mexican conquest is like a paradigm’. See George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962) pp. 59–60.
Roger Fry, ‘American Archaeology’, Burlington Magazine, 33, November 1918, pp. 155–7, reprinted as ‘Ancient American Art’, in Vision and Design, edited by J. B. Bullen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) pp. 74–80, especially p. 76. Later Henry Moore and Giacometti are similarly inspired.
As he wrote to James Thrall Soby, amongst ‘the savage symbols’ which as a student he remembers seeing in the Museum’s ‘very fine collections [were] Pacific and S. American stuff’. Wyndham Lewis, Letters, edited by W. K. Rose (London: Methuen, 1965) p. 407.
Since these calendrical sign-systems are outlined in Joyce’s Mexican Archaeology, chapters 3 and 10, it is possible that there was a Mesoamerican dimension to the ‘marriage of abstraction and figuration [which] really excited’ T. E. Hulme when giving his celebrated 1914 exposition of Worringer’s revaluation of archaic art. Pound reviewed this in the Egoist (see above, n. 40). ‘Modern Art and its Philosophy’ is reprinted in T. E. Hulme, Speculations, edited by Herbert Read (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987) pp. 73–109. See also Richard Cork, Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age (London: Gordon Fraser, 1976) vol. I, p. 141. North American Indian as well as Mexican culture influenced Lewis’s work. See ‘Carnivals’ 211–17 and plate 2.
Alexander 96. On the political dimension of the prevailing messianism, see, for instance, J. P. Stern, Hitler (London: Fontana, 1990) chapters 10, 11. Even in March 1914, Lewis disapproved of such inflammatory anti-Christianism. See J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris (Pennsylvania State University Press. 1990) p. 148.
Walter Michel, ‘Books from one of Lewis’s Libraries’, Enemy News 19 (Summer 1984) p. 29. See W. J. Perry, The Growth of Civilization (London: Methuen, 1926); and ‘Books of the Quarter’, Criterion, III, 10, January 1925, pp. 311–15, reprinted in Wyndham Lewis, Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change, edited by Paul Edwards (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow, 1989), especially p. 113. A copy of Prescott’s The Conquest of Peru remains in Lewis’s library.
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude (London: Penguin, 1990) pp. 307–8. In ‘Artaud, Mexican Ritual and D. H. Lawrence’, Gordon Brotherston focuses on the more benign influences of Mesoamerican culture. See Francis Barker et al. (eds), 1936: The Sociology of Literature, the Politics of Modernism (Colchester: University of Essex, 1979) pp. 133–45. However, in Artaud’s fantasising about a ‘theatre of cruelty’, Hitler does figure; see Artaud on the Theatre, edited by Claude Schumacher (London: Methuen, 1989) pp. 166, 172. Similarly, in the contemporaneous writings of Georges Bataille, there are continuities observable between his ‘understanding’ of the practice of human sacrifice in pre-Columbian America and certain Fascist tendencies that develop in his politics; see, for example, ‘Extinct America’ (1928), ‘Counterattack’ (1936),’ sacrifice’ (1939–40), translated in October, 36 (Spring 1986) pp. 3–9, 26–7, 61–74, also 109, 122–3, 150; and ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’, in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–39, edited by Allan Stoekl (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985) pp. xvi–xix, 137–59. Among English-speaking writers, obviously, Pound was not alone in being bewitched by dangerous exoticisms of the kind found in Mussolini’s New Rome, for D. H. Lawrence that perilous lure proved to be literally Mexican socialism’s propagandist use of Aztec culture. In August 1927, at much the same time as André Breton was endeavouring to ally his movement with the Communist Party-see Helena Lewis, The Politics of Surrealism (New York: Paragon House, 1988) chapters 3 and 4-one of Surrealism’s most important Anglophone supporters, transition, no. 5, printed a reproduction of the Great Coatlique entitled’ statue de la Mort Violente, Azteque’ (between pp. 94 and 97). Although in the Enemy, II, September 1927, Lewis had little difficulty in detecting such links between the fashionable interest in pre-Columbiàn blood-sacrifice and the twentieth-century intellectual’s seduction by totalitarianism (p. 94), by an even grimmer irony, within a year of the publication of The Apes of God, their satirist himself had been momentarily seduced by Nazi Blutsgefühl. Paradoxically, Lewis was blinded by the very light that he shed on Lawrence’s perilous infatuation with ‘the marvellous romance of the plumed Serpent God’. Appallingly, Lewis’s Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931) displays the impercipience towards the Fuhrer which was typical of many demoralised democrats before Hitler revealed his true nature upon gaining power in the 1933 elections. See, especially, pp. 117–19. Nevertheless, one should recall how traumatised by the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and their aftermath was Lewis’s generation.
Mary Ellen Miller, The Art of Mesoamerica (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986) pp. 210, 214.
George Kubler, The Art and Architecture of Ancient America (Harmonds-worth: Pelican, 1984) p. 97.
Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1913; reprinted 1920) vol. IX, 299–300. See also, ‘Carnivals’, especially pp. 215–22.
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Caracciolo, P.L. (1993). ‘Like a Mexith’s renowned statue bristling with emblems’: Masquerade, Anthropology, Yeats and Pound among Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God. In: Gibson, A. (eds) Pound in Multiple Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11194-7_5
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