Apes, Tyros, and Humans: Wyndham Lewis's Portraits

From July to October last year, the National Portrait Gallery in London held an exhibition of Wyndham Lewis's portraits, curated by Paul Edwards with Richard Humphreys. Once again, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound met in a single room, uneasily aware of one another—though Pound, uncharacteristically, was feigning sleep. Stephen Spender, Naomi Mitchison, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Edith Sitwell flanked them, along with patrons and other figures less well remembered, while the entrance was guarded by a self-portrait of Lewis himself, sporting a gargoyle-grin, empty-headed and forbidding. As a sort of rebuff or antidote, the exhibition concluded with a room dominated by several stiflingly intimate images of Lewis's wife.

It was a feat bringing these portraits back together. The 1938 portrait of T. S. Eliot, familiar from critical and biographical book jackets, had to be shipped from Durban, South Africa. Rejected by the Royal Academy in 1938—a famous controversy which led to Augustus John resigning from the Academy in disgust—it was sold to Durban Art Gallery for only £250. Lewis had hoped he could make a living from portraiture, first in the early 1920s, and then when he returned to it in the late 1930s and during the Second World War. But Lewis seems always to have experienced financial contracts as a threat to his dignity, and he succeeded in sabotaging his prospects by estranging and insulting all the people he depicted—even himself.

The mixed critical reception of this show in London suggests that Lewis is still not getting the respect he deserves.¹ The opening self-portrait, Mr. Wyndham Lewis as Tyro (1920-21), will not have helped. An obnoxious version of Lewis as spiv, heedless of any challenges to his little view of the world, leers out at us from under a sharply angled ovoid hat, his face an unhealthy sallow green set against an acrid yellow backdrop. It looks like a snapshot of a small-town lothario taken in the photo booth of a train station, and, placed here, it encourages the accusations of arrogance that Lewis liked to invite.

In fact, this mercilessly self-mocking painting belongs to a sequence of "Tyros" first exhibited in 1921. The tyros, in Lewis's account, are "immense novices" who "brandish their appetites in their faces, lay bare their teeth in a valedictory, inviting, or merely substantial laugh . . . most of them are, by the skill of the artist, seen basking, themselves, in the sunshine of their own abominable nature."² Lewis had been in the trenches, and, as Edwards and Humphreys point out, he casts himself in this self-portrait as a British Tommy, dying beneath the mask of that much-vaunted stoical British humor, which he had satirized in the first BLAST of 1914. As Tarr tells us in Lewis's 1918 novel of the same name, "all English training is a system of deadening feeling, a stoic prescription—a humorous stoicism is the anglo-saxon philosophy." This "gross and bouffonic illusion" is the atmosphere of Lewis's painting.³

Lewis imagined a universe of tyros, set twenty thousand years in the future and cut off from the earth, in which the tyros labor under an idiotic self-confidence, each considering himself "'more royal than the King'," sovereign in the petty universe of himself.⁴ In the painting, he has also captured this insular complacency in the pushy jostling way that his shadowless tyro-self occupies the whole picture space, without any furniture around him, forming no intelligent relationship with his environment. He exemplifies the semi-civilized state Lewis described in an early piece, "The New Egos": "a civilised savage, in a desert-city, surrounded by very simple objects and a restricted number of beings, reduces his Great Art down to the simple black human bullet . . . [he] cannot allow his personality to venture forth...