Requiem for the Peckerwood

“Frankness as never before,
Disillusions as never told in the old days,
Hysterias, trench confessions, 
Laughter out of dead bellies.”

Ezra Pound, 1920

The Artist as Enemy

The rallying of troops for the election, with democracy itself once again at stake, could not conceal the implosion of progressive hopes in the final year of Bidenism. The feminist and anti-racist crusades of 2017-20 that electrified mainstream liberal opposition to the then sitting president were perceived at the time to be of momentous significance by supporters and detractors alike but with hindsight that seems less obvious. While a now familiar discourse on a culture of complaint and victimhood offered some scathing rejoinders, even its more intelligent exponents seemed unable to comprehend the wider dialectic of progress and backlash to which their brand of common sense moralism partook. An objective evaluation of these protests presupposes a rare detachment from the ideological fray, and as most of the educated seem to be satisfied with the feel of their own values, this kind of outside perspective has had few takers. Although many lament today’s humorless ideological conformism, impartial judgements can be funny in a way that not everyone will appreciate. A cold hard look into the origins of these values might nonetheless satisfy a currently unmet need for that proverbial man from Mars point of view. Approximating this ideal, a seemingly eccentric prognosis of the trendline of civilization from the inter-war era might provide some welcome relief from the stultifying atmosphere of our controversies over race and sex.

The forecast comes from a figure who now does require an introduction. Wyndham Lewis is remembered by his devoted admirers, if not more widely, as a novelist, painter, sculptor, and founding member of the avant-garde movement, Vorticism. Across this variety, the genius of Lewis was caricatural figuration of men embodying sham ideas trapped in bleak, monadic worlds. Though Dryden and Swift occupied a distinguished place in the national literary tradition, Lewis felt that the English had lost their taste for the kind of writer who dared to portray his contemporaries in the true colors of their inanity and corruption. No stranger to other European literatures, he would find in Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet a model for a satire that would set aside the moralism characteristic of the genre from Roman times. 

“For Flaubert, any taint of Christianity such as he found in the Socialism of Louis Blanc…aroused his hostility, so we should not in any case expect to find a moralist basis to this bleakest of satires.”

As a satirist, Lewis declared war against both what he called the “old gang” at the Royal Academy, as well as “the new gang” at Bloomsbury, and took aim at all the rising stars of the modernist literary scene, some of whom he counted as friends. In short, nearly everybody of note in his world. “I should be the last person to expect the satirist to be allowed to pass his life in peace. I literally expect anything from the outraged nobodies or their buddies whose class is dying and they with it.” While more inclined to offend the pieties of the Left, Lewis nonetheless strove to be ideologically unclassifiable, and identified himself with only one camp, the always unpopular and currently disorganized minority of highbrows. “In the small highbrow community alone the appetite for the real survives and it is there only that something of the classical standards is encountered. Outside all is niceness and because of that, of course, true satire cannot at this time exist for satire is never nice.”

In a flurry of belligerent salvos, Lewis made the case for a criticism written from a vantage point open to radical change, yet hostile to all the warring parties of a decadent age. The Occident steps forth as a scatter-brained invalid of the world war it had brought down on itself. These writings were inspired by the conviction that the ideological deliria of the times were transitional symptoms of profound changes in the socio-economic structures of a capitalist West raising the possibility of a politics that could usher in a more rational order of things. Prophecies of inexorable decadence, he warned, encouraged a last-ditch posturing that while occasionally stimulating were politically always a dead end. Sobriety of the intellect had a sunnier aspect.

“The same industrial age will, in the end, I am ready to believe, produce a new and more intellectual civilization than that of the wigged wits who took snuff and pointed their toes, or that of the bewhiskered clubmen, who drawled about Thackeray or Darwin through their ‘roman noses.’ It is of the meanwhile that I write.”    

Although a mean polemicist, Lewis simultaneously upheld the value of an implacable objectivity on the premise that taken to an extreme, Wertfreiheit—freedom from all values other than objectivity itself—becomes war-like. Lewis was convinced that the old ivory tower and art for art’s sake point of view were no longer defensible and the highbrow now had to take a keen interest in political affairs, for both his bread and dignity were now at stake as never before. In the aftermath of the war, one could no longer count on any automatic mechanism of progress to a higher stage, a scientifically organized society, the necessity of which had been recognized by the most far-seeing European minds going back to Saint-Simon. The life of the mind was at stake in a new mass capitalist society increasingly hostile to it. In the meantime, there was the dirty work of intellectually machine gunning the economic quackery, pseudo-philosophy and bad art that had risen to the top in the chaotic circumstances of war’s aftermath. Lewis took up the task with gusto though often hinted that what he really wanted to do was get back to making art, his true vocation. 

The result was a distinctive conception of the role of criticism in politics. Lewis wrote on current affairs as if ideas and their offshoots were tenacious, animated beings, and even when already half dead needing special forces to take out. 

“The fact is that political theories are endowed with the faculty possessed by the hero of the Border-Ballad. When their legs are smitten off they fight upon their stumps. They produce a host of words and ideas associated with those words which remain active and combatant after the parent speculation is mutilated or dead.” 

Lewis’s essays and novels of the late 20s and 30s provide a vivid reconnaissance of this strange new terrain of spiritual warfare along with the drafts of a plan of battle. The old class division of society, now traversed by the new front lines of gender, age, and race wars, could only be overcome by the most sweeping measures. The Bolsheviks had shown that it really was possible to make everything new. No fan of revolutionary violence, Lewis believed that in Western Europe the bloodthirsty excesses of the Russians could possibly be avoided by what he saw as the more civilized alternative offered by the radical Right. Firmly in the saddle from 1926, the year he began his career as a political writer, the Fascists came into consideration as the sort of tough rulers that might be up to the task but he found the Marinettian histrionics of their leader unbearable, and would be unmoved by his friend Ezra Pound’s fulsome acclamations. Futurist paeans to the beauty of war and machines Lewis dismissed as the clownish bravado of a backward national mentality. By contrast, he initially saw Mussolini’s German counterpart as an unpretentious man of the people venting legitimate national grievances. Britain should accommodate Hitler if it wanted to avoid another world war, one that he foresaw would bring an end to its empire and probably what remained of the high culture of the West. Churchill and his supporters were objectively doing the work of the Communists, he insisted in screeds from 1936-37 directed at the Spanish Republic’s many English sympathizers. The escalation of polemics with local anti-fascists, keen to take the measure of the great dictators, drove him to adopt some outré positions that he would then renounce in 1938, when it belatedly became clear to him that the new gang in Berlin was even more bent on total war than the old clubby one in London. 

In an intellectual autobiography published in 1950, he reflected back in a flattering light on the Hobbesian problem that drove him to ever more radical conclusions in the decade leading up to the war. 

“With candour and with an almost criminal indifference to my personal interests, I’ve given myself up to the study of the state. The first incentive to so unattractive a study was selfish or at least a personal one. I wish to find out under what kind of system learning and the arts were likely to fare best: a craft interest that is to say. Of course, later my intellectual zeal transcended this limited and specialist inquiry. I saw that human life itself was threatened in the frenzy of our party games and economic lunacies. How do I not think of the state when it shakes about under our feet and is no longer able to hold down the primitive chaos which is its most obvious if not its only excuse for existing?”

Though dismissive of romantic notions of the state as a work of art, Lewis brought to bear a painterly eye to the inter-war scene in these now little known polemical essays and tracts. The reluctance of later critics to explore this body of writing may, in part, stem from a desire to downplay his contrarian expressions of regard for the Führer from which his reputation—once placed alongside Pound and Eliot—never fully recovered. In Fables of Aggression, Frederic Jameson examined the deeper ideological pattern of Lewis’s novels, organized, he argued, around a primary political antagonism: in his pre-war debut Tarr, this was the rivalry of European great powers, while subsequently its constitutive logic became the opposition of revolution and counter-revolution—Revenge for Love, for example. But even Jameson ignored Lewis’s political and philosophical writings on the subject, arguably making it easier to tag him as a ‘fascist.’ A closer reading of these works suggests a far more quicksilver author who cannot be said to have belonged to this or any other ideological camp, not even as a fellow traveler. Others whose reputations have held up better wrote far worse, so why did Lewis’s fail to ever recover? While there remain admirers of his portraits, sculpture, and fiction, in his more philosophical tracts he set himself against every other tendency in modern art and letters. This combative, self-imposed isolation certainly contributed to his relegation to the margin of 20th century literary history.

Beware the Flow 

At the start of this outpouring of polemics and satirical novels, Lewis laid out a bold politico-philosophical program for a party of opinion, a party of one as it would turn out. In The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), and The Enemy vol.1 and 2 (1927), he took aim at what he saw as the intellectually fashionable cult of Time, or Temporality as it came to be known. Bergson, he believed, lay at the source of this frothy current lending philosophical credibility to the morbid chatter of the Zeitgeist. In the literary sphere, the celebration of the Great God Flux was, he sought to show, exemplified by the Pickwickian stammering of Gertrude Stein and Joyce’s equally incontinent stream of consciousness. Even at its best—he later professed to admire the artistry of many of the sentences of Finnegans Wake—the experimental word craft of literary modernism, with its defiance of clear and distinct intellection, was a crash and burn, one-off show, that would eventually trail off, he predicted, towards the formulaic and trivial. But literary decadence was only an aspect of the rejection by the higher intelligentsia of Great Britain of the modernism of order that he had once championed. “The decay of all form and elegance is the expression of our defeatism, or pessimism. We no longer feel able to cope with our world, much less give it a beautiful order. We eschew ‘beauty’ therefore. But it is not merely the effort to create it that is too great. We no longer desire it.” Against this ‘we,’ in 1926 Lewis resolved to raise the banner of what he thought was a not yet lost cause.

Although his focus was on developments in Anglo-Saxony, the canvas he unfurled encompassed Paris in the 20s and Berlin of the early 30s. Long passages from N. Machiavelli, Mathew Arnold, and Kwang-tze among many others juxtaposed to the latest best-sellers and advertisements clipped from newspapers are marshaled to build a case. While seeming to focus unselfconsciously on nothing but the things themselves Lewis was quite conscious of the literary qualities of a text that would give off the appearance of having been composed by a jarring, alien logic. The inhuman worlds of his cramped prose, portraits, and battlefield landscape paintings bristle with a barely sublimated disgust at the spectacle of civilization’s downfall, a pathos from which he would later distance himself.    

“In 1925 I was not yet emancipated from tribal, national superstition. Western civilization still had an exclusive meaning for as a tradition responsible for my mind’s particular configuration for its rational bent. I could not see that disintegrating without emotion. I was fascinated and amused by the spectacle as well as extremely depressed. The mingled depression and exhilaration is not an unusual state of mind in times like these… I saw the advantages to be gained from the demise of a society of an ethos and I traced the road out of the disgusting maze. But for some time, I was very sore and that soreness increased if anything during immediately ensuing years.”

Lewis’s polemics owe much to Julien Benda’s denunciation of the irrationalism of pre-war France’s new literary and philosophical celebrities, and revolves around the same familiar opposition of Classical and Cartesian lucidity to the mad outpourings of the Romantic imagination. While Benda denounced the mystical, blood and soil rhetoric of a neo-traditionalist Right, Lewis had in his sights English and American intellectuals of a more counter-cultural streak. Unlike in France and Germany, here talk of sensation and intuition valorized the colored, the feminine, and the child. The reader may be reminded of today’s more intelligent conservative diatribes against ‘wokeness’ but the resemblance conceals an independence and originality of outlook that arguably distinguishes Lewis from the reactionary pack then and now. Although many of the targets of his literary ‘blasting and bombardiering’ can be seen as the modernist predecessors of postmodern identity politics, with its monotonous rhetoric of the diverse and non-binary, Lewis wrote at a time when denigrations of whiteness, maleness, and sexual normativity had not yet coalesced into a recognizable pattern, let alone attained the status of an orthodoxy. Closer to the 20th century origins of the culture wars, Lewis was able to examine the incubation of a new progressive mentality and the backlashes it would trigger, long before the reflexes of these warring stances had become second nature. 

Asylum of Objective Reason

The contemporary reader of may get the sense that while his polemics are pertinent to today’s culture wars, their animus and point of view is almost impossible to situate. They nonetheless can speak to us by evoking the bare existence of perspectives from outside our world of values, emoting, and phrases. The unrecognizable tone and analytic angle of his political writings can seem to estrange us from our ideological universe more than the outraged decency that animates the usual satire of outlandish times. Writing of an American admirer and literary collaborator, he specified his own ideal. “What seemed to me astonishing was something like tolerance although it was not that—what I may describe as an ability to withdraw herself at once from anything that repelled her and as it were from another dimension see it without passion.” For with Lewis the hostile eye of the critic occupies no recognizable vantage point of critique, and certainly no return to the mirage of a first nature is ever entertained. The human nature evoked by the conservative satirist was only raw material for an artistic and philosophical ruler whose indifference to the colorful drama of ordinary life would make him benevolent like the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws.  

Lewis was the first to advance the thesis that progressive campaigns targeting the prejudices of the morally backward are the vehicles of a ‘social engineering’ employed by an administrative nanny state in the interest of the enlightened factions of capital. In The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis coined the terms ‘capitalo-socialism’ and ‘the revolutionary millionaire society’ to designate the cultural logic of a western world in the process of shedding its older class moralities and tastes while also neutering the liberatory impulses that had once been expected to result from this shedding, and transforming them into new compulsions. The old class struggle had been overridden by a new one that was, in turn, but a variant of an even older antagonism hearkening back to the literary origins of satire as the ridicule of homines novi.  

“Now at the heart of every Western democracy at the present time there are two principles at war, as I see it. Indeed, they are engaged in the life and death struggle. These two protagonists are not anything so simple as ‘Labour’ and ‘Capital.’ These are not the real protagonists. It is rather two masters that are in question—one, if you like, a revolutionary master, and one a conservative master. Of these two principles one is the representative of the old individualistic system…and the other is what Mr. Baldwin calls an insolent plutocracy.”

Lewis felt there was little point in openly attacking a dying old regime and directed nearly all his fire at “the all too winning side.” In his senescence, the conservative master cut a ludicrous figure whose essential features Low had nailed with his cartoon Colonel Blimp. “Gad, sir, Lord Beatty is right. We must build a bigger navy than the enemy will build when he hears we’re building a bigger navy than he’s building.”  

Unsurprisingly, his proposals would be less defined than his highly unsettling observations of a time out of joint. In his essay ‘The “homo,” the child of the “suffragette,”’  Lewis envisaged the new division of Western electorates into the opposing camps of educated progressives and less educated reactionaries, and, disconcertingly, of a permanent feminist revolution led by ‘male inverts.’ The aftermath of the Great War had set into motion a truly weird psycho-sexual transformation that had started from the head and was now creeping down the spine into the genital region. 

Despite striking some similar notes, today’s so-called dissident Right will find no grist for its mill in these writings—no denunciations of an emasculating feminism, no churlish expressions of racial or national supremacy—and if they read any further, the typical online straight talker will likely find Lewis’s proposed solutions to the decline of the West off-putting and even repellent. Not only does he point out that, from the high-brow perch to which he invites his readers to ascend, all these would be champions of the rugged western male culturally speaking belong to the herd they profess to despise, and perhaps contrary to expectation, he goes further to profess that their delusions make them even more insufferable. Indeed, he recommends to his intellectual fellow travelers that they help promote the leveling down of this troublesome individualist who has always, going all the way back to the Greeks, been clamoring noisily for his rights and for more wars. This personality type would have to die off now and this would be, by and large, for the man’s own good.

“The loss of appetite for power and heroism was for the European then and is now the beginning of Bliss or to speak more accurately the beginning of the end of an evil, as the European has for so long suffered from an excess of will, such that the extinguishing of this will, by contrast, will be so wonderfully agreeable as to deserve the name utopian.”

If Lewis in some sense belongs to the Right, it must be said that this pacifying, leveling leitmotif alone sets him apart from even the more intellectually idiosyncratic members of that ideological tribe. While he took pride in his stint as a second lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, serving as a bombardier and then official war artist for the British and Canadians after the Third Battle of Ypres, he came to the conclusion that war was the chief evil of modern times and that all cultural trends leading to the neutralization of nationalist fury, however revolting in their incipience, had to be regarded with a measured sympathy. 

In the US and UK, however, Lewis felt the stick was probably now being bent too far in the other direction. After all, the talented few of the male half of the species surely had a legitimate, less bellicose claim to some degree of intellectual superiority. The rest of this lot were obviously no better than the average woman, child or colored person, although there was no reason why individuals from the ranks of the latter could not eventually level the score with the European, or perhaps exceed him as the Orientals of old had done for so long. 

So where did Hitler fit into the picture? Lewis seems to have thought that the modern cultural trends denigrating the intellect in the name of youthful energy had split into two opposing tendencies. In Germany, a right-wing movement had raised the Aryan banner of war, whereas in Anglo-Saxony, society was being flooded with infantilizing, feminizing, and deracinating cultural vogues that he saw as essentially propaganda for a society ruled by talentless creative types. On this point, he may have taken his cue from Oswald Spengler who had predicted that the decline could take two forms: a heroic, pessimistic will to industrial and military power for its own sake, or alternatively, a descent into a fellah-like consumerism followed by destruction at the hands of worthier people; for Spengler, this was the fateful hour of decision between these distinct paths. No such either/or can be detected in anything Lewis ever wrote. In fact, for all his acute observations on what was new, promising, and terrible on the inter-war scene, the overall picture might come off as simply incoherent: how could Anglo-Saxony be frolicking towards Sodom while at the same gearing up for another world war? (Though, on second thought, perhaps the domestic and foreign agendas of today’s American-led West suggest that such a complexio oppositorum is far from inconceivable.)  

Lewis acknowledged the City he saw coming into view at the end of the line would not as a whole make for a pretty picture but this spoke to his taste in pictures. He calmly accepted the inevitability of what we might call a shitlib-dsytopian future and asked: what were the possibilities here? The best regime, in his view, would secure a perpetual modus vivendi between two fundamentally incompatible human types. “This should be our aim…what is socially valuable in human life should be put out of reach of the elemental inanity in man just as we place the national treasures in a place of safety when expecting bombardment from the air.” Such a solution would lend a serenity to the arts of this new order that he foresaw would be free of both the vulgarity of today’s Massenmensch as well as the turbulence and preciousness of the kind of modern arthe disliked.

The Ke-mo sah bee Exits Stage Left   

Paleface is Lewis’s account of the origins of Western anti-racism with the America of the 20s as the main exhibit. He explained that while the culturally specific expressions of this new mentality were the products of current intellectual fashions, this influence from above could not explain why a much larger segment of the white majority was for the first time proving receptive to a revaluation of the hierarchy of racial values as manifested by their embrace of black music and a new dance culture that contemporaries agreed did not look very white. Lewis does not mention it, but the change in sensibilities also manifested itself in the new visibility, if initially only grudging acceptance of superstar black athletes beginning with the legendary boxer Jack Johnson. What can explain this massive vibe shift with all its momentous longer-term consequences? Lewis attributes this previously unforeseen openness of a generation of younger whites to black and black influenced popular culture to their experience of the futility of bearing the old white man’s burden that the world war and its outcomes had made apparent. Today’s reader might find its premise hard to swallow: surely white anti-racism was a response to the struggles of non-Whites within the West and on its colonial outskirts. According to this view, privilege is never abandoned except under intense political pressure from below. This conception of privilege arguably makes it difficult to explain why anti-racism has from its beginnings attracted so many eager apostles and camp followers among those who presumably are its beneficiaries, i.e. from above. Paleface begins with this question, one that today’s progressive race discourse cannot answer and offers a compelling genealogy of the strange historical phenomenon of white anti-whiteness.   

Lacking any sympathy for Marxism, Lewis’s explanation nonetheless cuts to the chase of the underlying material determinations. “Step by step the sensation that he was dealing with a being of a lower order was bound to be wormed or beaten out of the average White, for the simple reason that the average White has the same master as the average Black; and although that master’s skin is more or less White, he is not a man of sentiment.” This “more or less” is a hint that we are no longer dealing with the old kind of white master. At the other end of the stick, the same compulsions that drove factory owners to employ women and children in the last century would inevitably lead to the absorption of American Blacks and Browns into the industrial work force bringing down the wages of whiteness, as the first phase of an ever-widening global leveling. The Detroit of the 20s was a bellwether of a great coming transformation in global race relations, and were it not for the ideological turbulence generated by progressive campaigns to harass the already beleaguered white male, and the ugly backlashes this would periodically trigger, he was confident that the change would by and large be for the good. 

Lewis’s ironical Marxism offers a counterpoint to the scholarship on labor history that now serves as the foundation of ‘Whiteness Studies.’ While now discredited in the eyes of some by its association with the new corporate disciplinary regime devoted to rooting out racial bias and microaggressions, historians like Alexander Saxton, George Rawick, Noel Ignatiev, Theodor Allen, or David Roediger began their careers by bringing to light the labor movement’s heroic efforts to build interracial working-class solidarity in ground breaking studies. The successors of this tradition of scholarship seem to have less interest in working class solidarity and often take a colder view of the white working class, like Lewis himself. 

What has become of the wages of whiteness that until recently one heard so much about? The ideological reflexes of defunct ideas—‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy’—lead most of the Left to keep on insisting that racial and gender privileges are inherent to capital, as opposed to being, at least in the long-run, at odds with it. And more disturbingly, it might seem as if the degree to which these evils decline, the deeper becomes the feeling of belonging to the underprivileged and the greater the demand for redress. One might recall here Lewis’s quip about the Pythonesque hero of the border ballad, who fights on though his limbs have been blasted off, except that when it comes to politics, the knights of decapitated ideas soldier forth indefinitely. 

The dis-alignment of the white working class from the privilege checking Left has been going into high gear as the harsh truths of vulgar Marxism, of brutal class reductionism and even that old chestnut of absolute immiseration, can once again be heard knocking on dreamy heads. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s 2020 book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism alerts us to this new class and racial reality from which many on the Left avert their eyes.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, African Americans working in inner cities experienced events that, in retrospect, share some features with what happened to working-class whites thirty years later. The first wave of globalization hit blacks particularly hard, and jobs in the central city became scarce for this long-disadvantaged group. Better-educated and more talented blacks deserted the inner cities for safer city neighborhoods or the suburbs. Marriage rates fell as once-marriageable men no longer had work. Crime rates rose, as did mortality from violence, from drug overdoses in the crack cocaine epidemic, and from HIV/AIDS, which disproportionately affected blacks. Blacks, always the least favored group, had that status reinforced by being the first to experience the downside of a changing national and global economy that was increasingly shedding less skilled workers.”

Long before it had come to this point, Lewis anticipated this convergence of white and non-White workers and its cultural consequences. “Our streets both day and night swarm with every variety of beggar. All these are White people, and they rule the world, suffering to a man from superiority complexes. It is a paradox for they have a strange way of testifying to their superiority.” He looked ahead to a time when these complexes would begin to crumble under the hammer blows of economic change and the cultural re-conditioning that would culminate in the DEI ideological state apparatus. The same system that reduced the once proud native Americans to hopeless, alcoholic fatalism was heaping an added psychological burden of denigration onto the material forces leveling down the late great white male pleb.  

“The neighbors of the Chukchi deprived of their freedom and of the natural expansions of their deep rooted ‘way of consciousness’ or soul sink back into their Arctic torpor, languish, and die. In my book The Art of Being Ruled I suggested that it was not only geographically unimportant races like these subarctic tribes that were prone to these collapses if suddenly interfered with or defeated to such an extent that the deepest consciousness or soul is impaired. Also, great nations or races, I contended, may similarly suffer and sink into a discouraged torpor and in that book I suggested that there were many symptoms in postwar Europe of such a collapse.” 

Who is promoting this dispiriting entropy of peoples, the discrediting of all the flattering little bonuses that once motivated the man of the majority to keep going through the drudgery of work and family? During his stint as a Hitler-Versteher, Lewis entertained the possibility that perhaps the Jews were behind it—the claim that the communists and capitalists of this people were birds of a feather was a familiar trope he would tentatively reach for—before coming back to his senses in 1938. Up to then, the old Vorticist had sped forward with the animus that the greater evil was to be found east of the Reich: “there’s no powerful race with whom we are in contract whose ‘alien consciousness’ could affect us in this way, unless you count the half- asiatic masters of Russia, whose ideas it is true are pouring through our consciousness, and in a modified and diluted form of whose gospel has established itself in our midst.” The literature of this half-European people had testified to its destiny which would be enact on the world stage “an unrelievedly gloomy epic of spiritual freedom.” 

Paleface, Lewis’s study of the literary expressions of the new cultural phenomenon of white guilt, was written before his controversial interventions of the 30s but sheds light on the thinking that informed them. Lewis proposed that a specific form of Nietzschean bad conscience had taken root in Jazz Age America where the cultural tide had turned against the great white hopes of the decade. Changes in racial attitudes were activating a new cluster of psycho-sexual relationships between white and black Americans through music and dance but also long dormant feelings of guilt about the fate of the American Indian among the new, more sensitive Yankees.  

“Having wiped out or subjugated all peoples who had not had the advantages of Christian training in gentleness and other-worldliness, the puritan Palefaces of America and Europe naturally were very contrite and tried to make up for it to those who were left. Quantities of edifying books were produced, pointing out what a beast the Paleface was. There were just a few Palefaces who tried to bluff it out and pronounced roundly that they were ‘blond beasts’—but such sectaries abused both their brother Palefaces and their imported ‘Pale Galilean’ God into the bargain, so that made no difference.”

Lewis’s portrayal of the new anti-White talk of the time as sweeping everything before it is occasionally troubled by his peripheral awareness of the recent rise of the Klan’s invisible empire. But he remained confident that such violent outbursts, often directed at Catholics, would likely further alienate the majority from whiteness itself which eventually proved true. In an echelon above the level of these pop cultural developments, a talented and energetic writer was mercilessly hammering away at Yankee self-regard in the pages of The American Mercury, reinforcing what Lewis saw as the wider current of racial devaluation. In his view, the journalist and critic H.L. Mencken had a played a decisive role in this great demoralization having attained a national stature that he could only dream of. What Mencken had been to the American ‘booboisie,’ a castigator of its ludicrous prejudices and hypocrisies, Lewis aspired to be for a more select group of Anglo-American highbrows, a like-minded faction of whom he hoped to rally to his cause.          

“Toning down the American is coeval I suppose to give it a fairly exact convenient date to activities of Mr. Mencken I do not of course mean that this great transformation has been affected by the editor of the American Mercury, but the Americana of that writer is not calculated to inspire a very acute sense of self respect in the American bosom. Certainly, attacks by Mr. Mencken upon the traditional national conceit must have been a powerful factor bringing to the surface this gradual sensation of insecurity the habit of self-criticism dissatisfaction to which I’m alluding at the present moment which is growing it would seem into what is actually an inferiority complex.”

Although an admirer of Mencken, Lewis accused him of picking on those who, if they did not have one set of idiotic prejudices, would simply have another. The Voltairean assumption that one could enlighten an entire public by intellectually crushing the infamous was no longer credible for capitalist societies perpetually swept up in the latest crazes. The critic should instead aim his blows at the intellectual head instead of the gut or below the belt socially speaking. Punching up, one could have an impact on how underlying material transformations manifested themselves in regions of the superstructure where there was still a degree of freedom. Lewis perhaps thought that his task would be made easier by the fact that the intellectual fountainhead of the great devalorization of Whiteness in America from which Mencken was drawing his polemical energies was not American at all, and expressed what for the body politic was an incongruous European mood of pessimism and decline. 

“In its search for the Savage and the primitive (resulting in rather artificial romantic constructions) this movement has a philosophy which has a philosophy which is scarcely that of the superb natural physical vigour… of the early, purely european, American. It has all over it the stigmata of the neo-barbarism of the postwar gilded rabble of Café, studio and counting house. And the neo barbarism so elaborate and sophisticated is european—not anything that can be called ‘american’ in origin. It is of the Ritzes and Carltons, of the Côte d’Azur, of the luxurious vulgar Philistine bohemianism of the European cities.”

While English and European writers and artists (Gaugin, D.H. Lawrence etc.) are adduced as examples of a  wider experience of racial boredom, Paleface seems to have been conceived as an intervention into an emerging American discourse on race relations and makes the case that its intellectuals should resist the European siren call of white doom and gloom. America did not labor under the Old World’s Spenglerian predicaments and so perhaps would avoid the extremes of the age, although Lewis undeniably exhibited an openness to the right-wing of these extremes.  

“In general outline my argument will be this: against this dark demon I oppose everywhere a white demon or demon spirit of the white race against the spirit of the dark race—the mystical dark race of the romantic white imagination.”

Wyndham Lewis primarily conceived of the 20th Century Race Question through the terms of this opposition of two kinds of Whites: as we saw it was the old master vs the new in a society at large, but in the intellectual arena, there raged the war of the white demon of the impartial intellect and severe eye against the dark one of what Lukács would call ‘parasitic subjectivism’ in all its aestheticized and intellectualized forms. It is interesting then to see how he responded to the unfamiliar sound of a new black subjectivity speaking from outside of this shop-worn opposition of the classical to the romantic.

A Darkening World 

Although Lewis followed the cultural side of American controversies over race, he showed little interest in what he saw as mundane issues of civil rights. He would later express regret that his views on “cultural miscegenation” may have reacted in any way “unfavorably upon the chances of Negro emancipation” as he had become more aware of “the extent to which discrimination against colored people constituted a monstrous social injustice.” Back in the mid-20s though, he had fired away with fewer qualms, gleefully offending the liberal sensibilities of his time. And as he may seem literally intolerable from the vantage point of our own, it is important to note that Lewis never took doctrines of racial inequality at all seriously and regarded the race ideology of his own era as a half-dead Sorelian myth, one of the many belligerent, zombified ideas of the age.

In preparation for the writing of Paleface, Lewis began to follow the American conversation on race, more specifically those moments of it where political issues overlapped with cultural and intellectual ones of greater interest to him. The argument of this small text was framed in response to one of the speakers at a legendary debate held at Columbia University whose main exchanges Lewis recounted in some dramatic detail. The old fashioned, pseudo-scholar Lothrop Stoddard stood for the now morally suspect view that America must take measures to ensure that it remained a white nation, while Alain Locke, voice of the New Negro, and impresario of the Harlem Renaissance, captivated the audience with his rebuttal. Wholly uninterested in what Stoddard had to say, he felt Locke’s case for the recognition of the rights and contributions of American blacks clearly did deserve a response. 

Locke held that the Negro Question went to the heart of the country’s intrinsically color-blind democratic ideals. But he also advanced the very different claim that American Blacks deserved the citizenship promised by these ideals. He held up Roland Hayes and Paul Robeson (both of whom broke the color barrier in classical music in the 1920s) as harbingers of the prominent role that black artists and intellectuals would come to play in shaping America’s conception of itself. Locke implied that all black Americans deserved citizenship on the premise that “successful peoples are rated, and rate themselves, in terms of their best. Racial and national prestige is, after all, the product of the exceptional few.” Lewis noted a contradiction between Locke’s conception of democracy and the “highly undemocratic truth” behind his hopes for a Talented Tenth. It was the latter view that Lewis took seriously, leading him to pose the question: how would an impartial judge like himself rate a) the more popular cultural accomplishments of American blacks, as well as b) those of the exceptional few from their ranks. 

“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 superseded every other form of activity. But what it is impossible not to ask is whether it deserves quite so large a ‘reward’ as Mr. Locke claims for it.”

Although the new music and dance was driving the shift in racial values, the ‘Negro Literature’ of the 1920s was playing a part too providing Lewis with a point of entry into the topic via criticism. He was fascinated by a series ‘The Negro in Borzoi Books’ published Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf. The couple’s publishing house had launched with translations of European literature and commentary, including Maupassant, Gogol, and Spengler, and then backed H.L. Mencken’s The American Mercury from 1923-34. The ‘Borzoi Books’ was an irreverent ad campaign for a longer series that came to include a number of novels and poetry collections associated with the Harlem Renaissance including: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Wooings of Jezebel, The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes for the Jew, Quicksand, and Dark Princess: A Romance by W.E.B. Du Bois. He professed to recognize the sincerity and compassion of these works but noted that they all took an “exceedingly partisan and bellicose attitude.” Deracialization was coming and was not per se unwelcome but left to its own devices, liberal society would botch the whole thing, squandering an immense opportunity to refashion society onto a more rational pattern.       

Of all these novels and volumes of poetry, The Dark Princess stands out for having been written by figure who later became a renowned historian and public intellectual. Lewis knew nothing else of Du Bois aside from the fact that he was the author of this strange novel. Reading it, Lewis may have felt something of a shock: here was a bona fide black American intellectual disclosing what were for him unknown dimensions of racial experience in the form of a fantastical tale of heroic self-discovery. Through the wooden prose, Lewis may have heard a sound unlike what he had heard from all those white charlatans seeking the dark side. In the pages of Paleface Du Bois is discussed with an uncharacteristic respect and openness. 

The Dark Princess tells the story of Matthew Towns beginning with an act of defiance towards a Philadelphia medical school Dean who has denied him a residency in obstetrics on account of his race. “Do you think white women patients are going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies?” Towns throws his certificate in the Dean’s face and flees America. He winds up in Berlin, at the Victoria Cafe on the Unter den Linden, brooding over the white world. The psychological atmosphere of the scene must have been distilled from Du Bois’s own experience as a graduate student at the University of Berlin where he would attend lectures by Max Weber with whom he would discuss the Negro as a status group in America. (Unfortunately, no character resembling the sociologist appears in The Dark Princess.) Matthew Towns was probably the first black cafe-habitué in literature, a type which would soon become common in black expatriate fiction. At his cafe, Towns glimpses the Princess: a radiantly beautiful Indian woman. While watching her, the Princess is solicited and insulted by a white American. Towns comes to her rescue, knocking the man down, and whisking her away in a taxi. 

Towns finds himself in her apartment for a meeting of the “great committee of the darker peoples; of those who suffer under the arrogance and tyranny of the white world.” During the course of a debate, the Princess explains that she has just returned from Moscow where it has been decided that the Negroes of the United States are a nation and “not a mere amorphous handful.” Although published in 1928, the action of Dark Princess begins in 1923—in the interim the ‘Negro Question’ was being hotly debated at the Comintern. Those in attendance at the Princess’s Berlin residence discuss political issues but with a thick dollop of cultural concerns that surely caught Lewis’s eye. 

“They all looked interested, but the Egyptian broke out: ‘Ah, Your Highness, the New Palace, and what is the fad today? What has followed expressionism, cubism, futurism, vorticism? I confess myself at sea. Picasso alarms me. Matisse sets me aflame. But I do not understand them. I prefer the classics.’ ‘The Congo,’ said the Princess, ‘is flooding the Acropolis.’ ”

The novel portrays a conspiracy of anti-colonial elites who resolve to rise up against a West whose own arts testify to a turning of the tables. Perhaps the most interesting part of their discussion turns on the question of whether black America is up to the task of contributing to this great enterprise. Some of the Asiatic and Arabian worthies in attendance express skepticism. The stilted banter and revolutionary rhetoric of the delegates of Du Bois’s Afro-Asiatic international of colored aristocrats enact a geopolitical fantasy of a talented tenth spearheading the uplift of their race: here Bolshevism blends seamlessly with high-brow snobbery and confidence in the cultural superiority of the Other. Lewis immediately recognized the force emanating from the contradictions at play in the political unconscious of The Dark Princess. He reminds readers that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin “put the spark to the gunpowder of the Civil War.” It stood to reason that “hundreds of such books as Dark Princess, accompanied by films and plays, might reasonably be expected to have some such effect—a particular consciousness being evolved by this mass of books and plays, that is the point.”

After his encounter with Princess Kautilya and the Pan-Asian revolutionaries, Towns returns to America where he is compelled to work as a common laborer. He starts in the scullery of an ocean liner where he is forced to put up with first-class appetites and indignities. Disembarking in New York, Towns follows the orders of the Princess and visits the headquarters of a prominent black nationalist organization in Harlem. The leader, Perigua (no doubt a stand-in for Marcus Garvey), is a theatrical, West Indian demagogue who takes him on. The two men conspire to bomb a train carrying the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan among other civilians. Towns feels he must prove to the Princess and her fellow anti-Western conspirators that black people are not afraid to die but when he ponders on all the innocent who will likely perish in this operation, he resolves to destroy himself in a redemptive act of suicidal terrorism. Miraculously, the Princess appears as a passenger on the train whereupon Towns reveals the plot to the conductor. Refusing to snitch, he suffers in silence as a courtroom sentences him to ten years of hard labor in the State Prison in Joliet, Illinois. A snickering judge commends his “stoicism worthy of a better cause.” 

In the end, Towns and the Princess are reunited in Virginia and married. Du Bois’s portrayal of their holy wedlock has all the pageantry of a Wagnerian finale. Characters burst into song, even those long dead in the narrative. The chorus intones: “We are recognized—recognized by the great leaders of Asia and Africa. Pan-Africa stands at last beside Pan-Asia, and Europe trembles.” Then a young Chinese man sings: “The great day dawn…Freedom begins. Russia is helping. We are marching forward. The Revolution is on. To the sea with Europe and European slavery! O I am so happy.”

Like Uncle Tom, Matthew Towns is a character who when victimized, refuses to strike back but whose forbearance is laden with explosive political significance. In the 1920s Du Bois held that Black America’s long experience of withstanding violence and humiliation in good cheer would contribute to the redemption not only of itself but also of White America and, ultimately, of mankind as a whole. From being the least of the forces marshaling against the White World, American Blacks would become the first. While expressing solidarity with the wider anti-colonial cause, Du Bois’s racial utopia was at the same time a vision of an American city on the hill that had come into its own as a cosmopolitan democracy just as Alain Locke had called upon it to do back in the Jazz Age. The immense impact of black America on what would become a global pop culture speaks to the actuality of this vision and while the consequences hardly qualify as utopian the discrepancy some would maintain belongs to the fate of utopias more generally. 

Who’s Laughing Now?

Even before the end of the war, Lewis came to see America’s melting pot of peoples as a prefiguration of a coming world state that would do away with the chaos of great power politics. He looked back on his writings of the mid 30s with a measure of regret and drew up some conclusions.

“There was a great power thinking in those 1935 thoughts of mine which is entirely absent from my thinking today. To this I may add with regard to imperial policy that I should do exactly the same in India or Egypt as the present government is doing only I should depart with greater speed. Germany would also have to get on without me if I would John Ball Palestine too and a ½ dozen other places.”

While he had sounded the alarm in the 30s when the Reds had many friends in the West, he reacted with horror at the nuclear exterminism of the ex-card carrying members and fellow travelers of The God that Failed crowd who had denounced him a decade earlier. “In spite of the hearty ‘business as usual’ attitude—and a very firm hand with those who suggest that there is anything odd or screwy about it all: for all the ‘I can-take-it’ bursting gamely from the blue and swollen lips, and the ‘brave smiles’ fading only upon mortification on the faces of the cheerful radioactive dead—for all the well-known capacity to ‘keep smiling’ long after there was any conceivable thing to smile about, a miracle would happen…. My restrained optimism is then a by-product of atomic energy. One or two more wars it seems necessary to allow for—alas. Then the great climacteric in life on earth should come: the day on which man will resign himself to Peace. Time will then be available to attend to the fundamental problems of social justice, sidetracked continually by war.” The next stage of civilization will come, not from heroic struggles, but rather out of a great, sobering resignation.   

Although the onset of Cold War represented an ominous beginning to the era of the world state, as the issue of which of the two great Leviathans would swallow the world seemed to hang on the outcome of a final ordeal of fire, Lewis predicted that an America-led New West would eventually prevail, allowing the Old West to die in peace while transforming itself into a higher synthesis of civilizations and races. In this armed camp of the cosmopolis, he hoped the life of the mind might find an asylum. In the 50s, Cold War liberals, both the connoisseurs of Modernism as well as the culturally old fashioned, came to see Irony as the spiritual virtue that would allow the intellectual to hold his head above the turbulent waters of mass society, thus equating the freedom to equivocate and suggestively understate things with freedom itself. Expressed in very different terms, this remained the hope of the more relaxed post-modern liberalism that would triumph with the defeat of Communism and that would once again raise the banner of Irony as the emblem of the Abendland.   

A quarter century of the Western wars have ended up squashing the very idea of a healthy quotient of intellectual opposition. Our ruling classes no longer see the advantages of having so many gadflies buzzing about, or indeed any at all. As the West forfeits the superiority of its once vaunted liberties, new discourses of civilization will gain ground, for who can be so impressed with our values now? While this geo-politically driven transformation does not seem to presage the emergence of any intellectually compelling alternative to Western liberalism even, it must be admitted, in its current decadent and fearful state, the resulting normative disorder will perhaps generate the sort of thorough-going disillusionment that might clear the way for one. Today’s American-centric identity talk bears the imprint of an earlier 20th century convergence of domestic and international struggles for equality and dignity with a psychology of white exhaustion portrayed by Lewis in its embryonic state. The elasticity of the idea of race almost guarantees that it will assume new forms going forward, even as older notions and classifications lose their basis in collective experience. This hollowing out of inherited identities has begotten a spiral of reflexive and officious subalternism triggering periodic paleface revolts. For those who regard the protection of the life of the mind as the preeminent political consideration, such backlashes can seem like the lesser of two evils, for there are times when one looks to Beelzebub to drive out the Devil. Stronger spirits will seek respite from the prevailing, deadening niceness and with good conscience assess these alternatives purely tactically. The case of Wyndham Lewis nonetheless underscores the ever more apparent futility of this choice at a time when the system of warring states is once again failing to hold down the looming, primitive chaos.