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37 / C. R. W. Nevinson C. R. W. Nevinson (1889–1946), English painter, was a friend to the Italian Futurist , F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), and, for a time, associated with the writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) at the Rebel Art Centre in London, though he was never a member of the avant-­ garde Vorticist group. He painted Lewis’s portrait in June 1924, and Lewis bought Nevinson’s painting of the Brooklyn Bridge soon after. Source: C. R. W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938), 236–38. Another sitter of mine was ­ Sinclair Lewis, the strangest literary man I have ever known. He was restless, clownish, and intense as only Ameri­ cans can be, and he prowled round my studio incapable of sitting still, while all the time he poured out the most remarkable monologue of love and hate, shrewdness and sentimen­ tality, that it can have been the lot of any portrait painter to hear. He used to leave me with a sense of exhaustion and elation that I have never known any other human capable of producing. He was obsessed with a dread of the future and of his own in particular, fearing that his creative faculties would dry up; and all this before he wrote Babbitt, The Man Who Knew Coolidge, and It Can’t Happen Here [1935]. His irony was devastating and I wish I dared write some of the thrusts he made at contemporary writers, French, English, and Ameri­ can, but I have been warned that it is possible in this country to write the truth only of the dead. All the time I am struggling with the awful fear that something I have said will be held in evidence against me. I have sometimes wondered if ­ Sinclair looks back on that particular visit to England with dissatisfaction. Never have I met a man so sensitive and yet with such a gift of putting his foot in it. He would break all the snob rules laid down by the mumbo-­ jumbos of English literature, and infuriate everyone with a taint of preciosity. Sometimes it would seem that a devil possessed him, although I recall two occasions when he was worsted. Part 5. Zenith / 105 Once we were at dinner with Somerset Maugham, and among those present were Mrs. Maugham, Knoblock, McEvoy, Osbert Sitwell, and Eddie Marsh.23 There was nobody in the party to whom ­ Sinclair Lewis could take exception; and as for our host, I have always noticed like many others that he is the one man admired by all authors. After dinner, ­ Sinclair Lewis took Eddie Marsh’s monocle , stuck it in his own eye, and began parading up and down with Eddie Marsh following like a dog on a string. Then, to amuse himself, he parodied high-­ brow conversation in the best Oxford manner, at times imitating McEvoy’s cracked voice, which was sometimes bass and sometimes treble. All of us were embarrassed , as the parody was grotesquely realistic, and I saw McEvoy pull his hair over his forehead and begin to look like a village idiot, a danger signal in him. I knew it would come, and sure enough McEvoy suddenly interrupted the parody and inquired if ­ Sinclair Lewis was an Ameri­ can. ­ Sinclair Lewis looked taken aback by the question, but fell right into trouble. “Yes,” he said. “That is what makes me so sick with you condescending Englishmen .” “I don’t care if you are sick,” replied McEvoy calmly. “In fact I should be rather pleased. But you are just the man to tell me why old Ameri­ cans are so much nicer than young ones.” Poor Lewis. The eyeglass fell from his eye and he was silent until we left. I took him on to a night club and he began to regain courage. A little Chelsea girl joined us; and, still sore, he began boasting. I knew this Chelsea girl to be a terror and by no means as innocent as she looked, but in spite of all my efforts to silence him he would talk about himself. With murmurs of disbelief the girl urged him on until he was announcing to the world at large that he was the author of Main Street, which had the largest circulation, bar the Bible, of any book in America. The wicked little girl looked at him with wide-­ open eyes and asked, “Are you a writer?” By now he was in a mood...

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