EDITORIAL  

A BLAST FROM THE PAST 

Crazy Oik art critic Jim Burns tips me off about the Wyndham Lewis exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in Salford (June 23 – January 1).  It should be well worth a look. Lewis was a fine artist and a prolific writer who produced over forty books of essays and novels. Yes, he was a bit of a Nazi, anti-gay and anti-Semitic who actually wrote in praise of Hitler in1931 but later retracted this stance in 1939 – well we all make mistakes. But, as a writer, was Wyndham any good? I have seven of his works but find myself agreeing with St George (Orwell) who said “Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels, such as Tarr or Snooty Baronet. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through.” Yep, I’ve never been able to get past page 10 myself. As St George continues: “Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin, is absent from them." Yet Eliot called him the greatest English prose stylist of the century. A good place to start is The Essential Wyndham Lewis edited by Julian Symons who writes: “Lewis was more greatly and variously gifted than any of his artistic contemporaries, his understanding deeper and his mind more audacious. He was also personally injudicious, arrogant …and sometimes produced wretchedly slapdash work in search of the popularity he despised.” 

More interesting, and germane to our recent preoccupations with little mags, is the brief phenomenon of Blast – Lewis’s magazine which appeared as a Vorticist manifesto in 1914. It disappeared just as quick in 1915 after issue 2 (it was intended to be a quarterly). There was a war on, of course, but that didn’t stop Cyril Connolly and John Lehman editing little mags throughout the 1940s. Then again, unlike Lewis, neither of those admirable aesthetes were distracted by trench warfare. 

Another founding member of Vorticism was Edward Wadsworth (see cover) – something of an oik on account of his engineering training in Munich (but before that he went to Fettes). William Roberts was also an acolyte who memorialized the historic launch of Blast in his 1961 painting The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915 (see back cover). I’ve always wondered just who was who in this painting and then came across a detailed run-down in an old copy of Ian Hamilton’s The New Review of 1974. Paul Overy in a piece entitled Puce Monster (WL’s description of his baby) writes: 

“[Roberts] shows the male Vorticists grouped round a table after what has obviously been a substantial meal while the waiter brings in champagne. Lewis, in broad-brimmed hat, and Pound, with bouffant hair style and a trace of goatee beard, are easily recognisable. Roberts himself, not yet 20 and the youngest of the Vorticists, is diffidently seated with folded hands next to the self-confident Lewis. Cuthbert Hamilton sits on a high stool at the far left, Frederick Etchells holds a half-opened copy of the chubby pink volume of the first Blast. The balding Edward Wadsworth is about to take a piece of tart on a plate held out by Rudolph Stulik, the pro­prietor of the Tour Eiffel, a frequent meeting-place of the Vorticists. Helen Saunders and Jessica Dismorr are just coming through the door.” 

This is quintessential little mag territory. Lewis did try again in 1922 with The Tyro which appeared in only two issues, and after that with The Enemy (1927) which got up to three issues.  So what’s all this got to do with the Crazy Oik? Perhaps our cover is symbolic. The dazzle ships weren’t camouflaged to become invisible, but instead used ideas derived from Vorticism and Cubism to confuse enemy U-boats trying to pinpoint the direction and speed of travel. Our posh, glossy covers may well bamboozle the innocent punter in search of an aesthetic frisson, but once inside…

Ken Clay April 2017

ALEXIS LYKIARD

AT 77 

A heavy package, half-inch thick, thuds on the front-door mat.
It's March, the finely-printed College Yearbook's here,
Chronicling Honours, Fellowships, distinctions of all sorts,
And arcane titles dear to academics, plus the top degrees.
Provost's Report - Professor Somebody's, whose name is new to me;
I clock how young he looks, compared to me at least;
Strange also, to recall my undergraduate days,
And skim these full, most fulsome, celebratory Obits 

Of various contemporaries. A vague curiosity, if that,
Seeps in as I review the faded, dreamlike details,
Fragments of fugitive events, or faces rarely seen again
After the bright intensity of those three, close-packed years.
Herewith some names, DOB, RIP... Nostalgia never fails:
Time to forget steroids and statins, raise a glass to mutter Cheers!

The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring 1915  - William Roberts