Blasting and Bombadiering

by Wyndham Lewis

Book by Lewis, Wyndham

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Memoir

312 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1937

About the author

(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).

After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.

The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

The great English language memoirs of the First World War are Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, and Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That. Many lesser known works, however, are still worth reading for those with an interest in the war. One of these, which is often cited in histories and referenced in bibliographies, is Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering. Lewis was a writer, painter, critic, and satirist who gained some fame shortly before the war as a leader of the Vorticist group, a modernist art and poetry movement. He was also editor of the short-lived literary magazine Blast, which published works by Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Ford Maddox Ford.

The first third of Blasting and Bombadiering recounts the months before the start of World War I, and the last third is partly about his literary friendships after the war, and partly a chance for him to include a perhaps quasi-autobiographical short story. The book was written in 1937, as he reminds readers several times, when the clouds of war were gathering again, and published the following year.

Most British war memoirs are written in an elegiac style. They focus on the maelstrom of war, the randomness of death, the titanic waste of lives, and the inability to explain things to people back home who were fed a steady diet of war propaganda and believed the soldiers are always well led, well equipped, and happy to do their plucky best for King and Country. The best memoirs recount the authors’ experiences in and out of combat, the men they served with, the places they were billeted, and loving descriptions of the landscape. For men who spent much of their life in trenches below ground, sunrises and sunsets, poppies and larks, were reminders of better times. A good example would be from Max Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme: “for a few hundred yards, where the scrub is clear, poppies and cornflowers stud the ground about my feet and glow bright as jewels in the evening light. Behind the ruined spire of the cathedral, torn as if some beast had mauled its flanks, the sun goes down in a blaze.”

Lewis writes about his time in the army in a style of ironic detachment. Robert Graves did the same thing, but was better at engaging the reader, while Lewis sometimes comes across as a twit; his writing is a bit arch and his relentless attempts at drollery can wear thin. On the other hand, he sometimes hits his mark perfectly, and there is one scene that sounds like a Monty Python sketch: early in the war he was a non-commissioned officer trying hard to impress his superiors so that he would get a recommendation for officer training, and one day when he was teaching rifle drill to a batch of recruits the camp adjutant called him over. As he stood rigidly at attention the adjutant asked him what was the meaning of the Futurist art movement, and Lewis’s awkward response was to say that sensible people should ignore anything critics write because it is poppycock and they are all mad anyway. Lewis, of course was an art critic himself. He describes his discomfort at the situation by saying, “I stood there stock-still before this officer, my calves bulging beneath my puttees. I understood what it must feel like to be a butler, and to be inopinely cross-questioned about his sexual life or the conditions of his bowels by a snobbish master.”

The middle third of this book is where he recounts most of his experiences as an artillery officer in the British army, and he can do a good job sketching the unearthly destruction of the battlefield.

Beyond this battery was a short stretch of shell-pitted nothingness – for we had entered upon that arid and blistering vacuum; the lunar landscape, so often described in the war-novels and represented by dozens of painters and draughtsmen, myself among them, but the particular quality of which it is so difficult to convey. Those grinning skeletons in field-grey, the skull still protected by the metal helmet: these festoons of mud-caked wire, those miniature mountain-ranges of saffron earth, and trees like gibbets.” (p. 139)

I have appended several more quotes from this part of the book at the end of this review.

With the exception of fellow officers who are artists like himself, Lewis has very little to say about the men around him. Given the way he describes his life in the other parts of the book he seems to have been very self-absorbed, and the reader has the suspicion that he saw others as mere supporting characters in the great drama of himself. Friends back in England used their connections to get him reassigned to the Canadian army as an artist in residence, and he spent the rest of the war painting pictures of artillery pieces and their crews.

The first part of the book would be of interest mainly to readers wanting a glimpse of English society in the months before the war. Because of his literary reputation he was invited to all the right soirées, country houses, and clubs. He met Prime Minister Asquinth several times, and noted that Asquinth was convinced there were nefarious motives behind Vorticism, and quizzed him on his political beliefs each time they met. Through it all he tried to maintain a sense of amused detachment, but, while his writing style may have appealed to an audience in the late 1930s exhausted by the Depression and appalled by the prospect of another war with Germany, to a modern reader his descriptions of parties and high society comes across as social voyeurism.

The last third of the book seemed like filler, stuffed in to make it long enough to sell. It starts with him describing his famous literary friends, and its style is almost unreadable. Presumably he wrote it this way deliberately, perhaps trying to seem like he was abandoning the old literary conventions for a more personal approach, but it come across like the badly written diary of a teenage girl. Any editor would have thrown up his or her hands in despair trying to make it comprehensible. In it he recounts what should have been an interesting part of his life, since he was friends with three of the giants of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce, and knew Hemingway, Yeats, Auden, T. E. Lawrence, and just about everyone who was anyone in the literary world, but it comes across as trivial with no insight into their lives or work. For example, the scene describing his first meeting with James Joyce centers around delivering a box with a pair of old shoes, and Joyce arguing, in Italian, with his truculent son. No great insights here.

Following that, the book shifts to a short story which feels like a draft for a better short story. It recounts the rather tedious life of an officer awaiting posting overseas, the women he seduces, and the consequences therefrom. In 1918 Lewis had published a modernist novel called Tarr that was received to great acclaim (he quotes from the reviews), and he was hailed as having the psychological sensitivity of Dostoevsky. I put this novel on my to-read list, but after reading the short story at the end of Blasting and Bombariering I’m not sure I want spend more time with Mr. Lewis’s fiction. He writes his own epitaph when he says, “by the end of this century the movement to which, historically, I belong will be as remote as predynastic Egyptian statuary.” (p. 263)

For those with an interest in World War I the middle third of the book is worth reading. The rest of it, however, would appeal primarily to those with an interest in pre- and post-war English literary society.

Quotes from the book:

"‘Old Bill’ was the real hero of the World War, on the English side, much more than any V. C. A V. C. is after all a fellow who does something heroic; almost unenglish. It is taking things a bit too seriously to get the V. C.” (p. 47)

“It was in the comparative repose of Trowbridge Cadet-school that I got my ‘pip’ [Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery]. This I acquired with some degree of brilliance. The examination involved considerable mathematical ability, and I revealed myself as a natural master of the Calculus.” (p. 107)

“I have slept soundly through scores of full-dress bombardments. It is very few people who don’t, in a war of positions, where bombardments are almost continuous. Through a long artillery preparation for an Attack – a hoped-for ‘breakthrough’, with the enemy retaliating at full blast – in the very thick of the hubbub, with things whizzing and roaring all round – I have slept for hours together as peacefully as if I were in a London garden suburb. Rapidly one ceases to notice this orchestra. But although one forgets about it, one would miss it if were not there. These are the kettledrums of death you are hearing. And you would soon know the difference if they stopped.” (p. 124)

“The trouble about these [British] batteries was that they were overburdened with officers. The Germans arm a ‘five-nine’ battery – our opposite number – with one officer and two or three N.C.O.’s. If the officer became a casualty, it didn’t matter. While waiting for another officer the N.C.O’s carried on. We had six officers in this battery. Five too many.” (p. 131)

“The battery next to us...lost a couple of officers a week after I arrived. As usual, ‘reinforcements’ were available almost at once, in the shape of a little subaltern with cane and kitbag complete, who stepped briskly out of the battery sidecar, before their Mess dugout, took a couple of steps forward, and was hit in the jaw by a splinter from a ‘five-nine’, which had unexpectedly landed a few yards away. He was put back – but this time in a recumbent position – in the sidecar, and returned at top speed to the base from which he had arrived. He had spent exactly twelve minutes and a half in the Line, and would probably never see it again, as he was badly wounded.” (p. 131)

“As a battery officer at the Front my main duties were to mouch about the battery, and to go up before daybreak with a party of signallers to an observation post. This was usually just behind the Front Line trench – in the No Man’s Land just behind it. For there were blanks behind as before. This O.Pip [Observation Post] work was hard an often very dangerous. The former, the work at the battery position, was not work at all, and was only spasmodically dangerous.” (p. 134)

“At length we came out upon the last stretch, the empty approaches to the Front Line, and there to our great indignation were machine-gunned by a low-flying plane. It was the first time any of us had met with this particular type of aeronautical caddishness. I even didn’t know they could do it. I was intensely surprised. Now, of course, airmen think nothing of picking off shopper in the streets of a city, or whisking past a window and spraying a woman with bullets in her bath. It is recognized as one of the most triumphant assertions of man’s mastery over his biped handicap. And we’re all very proud to think that our airmen can retaliate and pick off bipeds of a discordant nationality. But at the time we all felt it was an uncalled-for interloping to say the least of it, on the part of a particularly vindictive type of flying Boche.” (p. 164)

“We met an infantry party coming up, about ten men, with earthen faces and heads bowed, their eyes turned inward as it seemed, to shut out this too-familiar scene. As a shell came rushing down beside them, they did not notice it. There was no sidestepping death if this was where you lived. It was worth our while to prostrate ourselves, when death came over-near. We might escape, in spite of death. But they were its servants. Death would not tolerate that optimistic obeisance from them!” (p. 143-144)

“The poilu had lived there before us. Unlike the English the French were concrete addicts. They mortared themselves in – they built for safety first. They had not altered this cottage outwardly, but had given it eight foot thick concrete walls to its one big room, and at least a ten foot thick roof. This room was a shell that would take some cracking. I was in it when it was hit. It was firm as a rock. It was a pleasure to be shelled in it.” (p. 148)

“The gas-shells were small, came down with a soft sickly whistle, and struck the ground with a gentle plock. Their very sound was suggestive of gas. There was nothing to be afraid of unless they got a direct hit on your chest….For weeks on end every man in the battery slept in his gasmask. In lying down we fixed our gas-masks, with the tin teat just up against our lips. Before we were all asleep one of us...would sit up, sniff, and say ‘gas!’ Then we stuck out tin teats in our mouths, and clipped the pincers upon our noses. So we would sleep for the rest of the night” (p. 151)

“The famous [Ypres] Salient was a stupid bulge, but one of which the high command was inordinately proud; not because it was of any strategic importance, but because a great many men had been killed in its creation. It is obvious why a ‘salient’ is an unsatisfactory place for the men who are in it. They can be shelled from three sides, more or less, instead of one. But this Salient was sacrosanct. It was the Salient. It was as great as it was costly as a feat of arms, to hold it. So it was kept intact, as a monument of ‘doggedness’. At the time I thought it was stupid to have a salient. Since I have found it was even more stupid than I had suspected.” (p. 157)

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is an autobiography so it's much more straightforward than most of his other books. it's also a pretty minor work i think, although it does have some nice anecdotes about being an artillery officer during ww1, and about many of your favourite modernists such as pound, joyce, eliot and te lawrence. my favourite part was probably when lewis and marinetti are sharing a taxi cab and marinetti gets increasingly mad and loud because lewis doesn't want to be called a futurist.

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wyndham Lewis was a painter, novelist and pamphleteer (before reading this I was most familiar with the catchy typography and pink covers of his BLAST manifestoes), and served in the British artillery. Lewis's opinions about the war and his fellow soldiers are much more recognizable than, say, Ernst Jünger's or Robert Graves's. By that I mean he's he's happy to withdraw from the front lines to a cushy job painting Canadian artillery in a quiet part of the front, and he describes some of his fellow officers more or less as lunatics.

This memoir was written just before the beginning of the second World War, and Lewis's cultural reflections are strikingly pessimistic. He expresses the view that every time there is a war, artistic production necessarily ceases, and when it resumes after the conclusion of fighting, "we take [the arts] back up again...with less assurance and less genius" (263). That's meant as some kind of explanation of his belief that "something has occurred in the world that has long ago caused the greatest creations to stop being born. No more will come" (261).

The most enjoyable section of the book is Lewis's description of his first meetings with James Joyce, TS Eliot, and Ezra Pound (including walking into an apartment when Ezra Pound and Hemingway are boxing each other).

To give a sense of Lewis's unrelenting irony, even when describing his friends, I'll just quote the following passage, which concerns an art collector who was fond of Lewis's paintings:

"Sir William Rothenstein was until last year principal of the South Kensington Schools and in that capacity irradiated his intelligence over the back areas of England, and many a poor fellow now can draw a cow--or, to be more accurate, teach another fellow how to draw a cow--who otherwise would have remained completely unresponsive to the presence of that quadruped" (220).

[José · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lo más interesante de esta biografía deshilvanada es la vivencia del autor en la guerra y su relación con los escritores ingleses de aquel momento.

[David Lily]

"I stumbled upon this book and was pleasantly surprised. The story line was enthralling from start to finish, filled with unexpected twists and turns that kept me guessing. I loved the author's writing style and the depth of the characters. A must-read for any book lover."

[Luis Morales · Rating 5 out of 5]

Principal fundador del Vorticismo, corriente artistica y la guerra. Este hombre narra sus experiencias en la Gran Guerra y cmo afecto a este ambito humano.