Love and Politics in Wyndham Lewis's Snooty Baronet

We tend to think of Wyndham Lewis as an artist preoccupied with art and sociopolitical reality at the expense of love or friendship. Whether in the novel Tarr (1918) or in his many interwar polemics concerning art, politics, and society, Lewis appears to typify the antihumanist brand of modernism that reduces love to sex in order to condemn it as a mistaken diversion of creative energies into life instead of art. ¹ Yet if we take seriously the dilemma Lewis articulates in a 6 April 1932 letter to his friend and staunch defender Roy Campbell on the subject of the novel Snooty Baronet (1932), a very different Lewis appears. ² Here the supposedly antihumanist novelist regrets killing off Campbell's fictional stand-in, Rob McPhail, and allowing the mistreatment of his corpse: ³

Your appreciation of [Snooty Baronet] . . . pleased and encouraged me more than I can say. But there remained a disagreeable feeling that you had misunderstood my intentions.--What in the first instance I wanted to do was to write about something that interested me . . . and . . . the part that would generally be identified, more or less, with you, as it first stood, was not a picture that anyone could interpret as unflattering. That was all written before "Snooty" came on the scene. The rest resulted from the necessity of altering and dislocating it if [it] was to be used as "fiction," and the forcible fusion of it with the drama of the preposterous "Snooty" resulted in the dramatisation of the things I borrowed from you. And that does certainly give rise to a problem. Even in play I feel one should not ask a friend to lie down and pretend to be dead, nor allow an ill-mannered and lunatic puppet to sniff at his corpse--and put upon his actions interpretations that are certainly not (need I say!) in my views [sic] true ones--such as proclaiming that you fight bulls because of your hatred of Man! . . . But for Heaven's sake do not consider that what my behaviorist puppet hints at is a reflection of anything that could ever possibly cross my mind. If there is one person I know who is on the side of Man more than another it is you. ⁴

The letter attests to a growing yet little-remarked concern with love and friendship in Lewis's work, beginning in the late 1920s. Serious problems arise for the artist's friendships, Lewis acknowledges, when he alters or dislocates living reality to permit its "forcible fusion" with aesthetic form. In a civilization structured in thought, word, and politics by a passion for violence, how, Lewis seems to ask, can art be a means to express peaceful, nonviolent love for one's friends?

It may seem strange, even perverse, to speak of Lewis as overtly concerned with nonviolence and love around the time that he wrote Snooty Baronet. Indeed, during the period 1926-31 Lewis lent varying degrees of support first to Italian fascism and Bolshevism and then to Hitlerism. ⁵ How could these political commitments coincide with such a concern? Snooty Baronet suggests answers to this question in its instantiation of the flawed aesthetic strategy Lewis developed to escape liberalism's supposed love of violence. Ironically, Lewis's enmeshment in the counterintuitive intricacies of his aesthetic led him to support regimes that stupendously violated his own criteria for judging political value.

The problems Campbell faced in discerning Lewis's intentions in Snooty Baronet resulted from Lewis's struggle in the 1930s to develop a complex artistic response to a supposedly behaviorist sociopolitical world. ⁶ Lewis insists, contrary to the early-twentieth-century scientific behaviorists (particularly John Broadus Watson), that the stimuli that elicit human social behavior are aesthetic, rather than natural. He believes that the confusion of natural with aesthetic stimuli lies at the heart of interwar Western liberalism's abiding self-destructive passion for...