They had for long known that Momaco was the never-never land, was the living-death, the genuine blank-of-blanks out of which no speck of pleasantness or civilized life could come.
Eccentric opinions have their value. The literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith, who probably read more of 20th-century literature than any person in history, considered Wyndham Lewis to be the greatest English-language writer of the century. Even if I don’t agree with him, I’m grateful for his opinion, because it got me to read Wyndham Lewis. Against Seymour-Smith, you might want to take note of George Orwell’s claim that “enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis’s so-called novels … Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these books right through.”
Lewis was both a writer and a painter (one of the founders of an artistic movement known as Vorticism), but his approach to both art forms was guided by the same principles of upholding the Classical approach and opposing the Romantic one. In practice, this meant preferring hard to soft, cold to warm, external to internal, and intellectual to emotional. His early works (such as the novel Tarr) put a great deal of emphasis on the externalities of human behavior, so that the actions of his characters come across as resembling the functions of machinery or the instinctive behavior of animals. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of empathy, and the author’s impressively dense but chilly style gives the sense that he is looking down on his creations from a great, condescending height.
However, Self Condemned (yes, that’s the correct spelling – no hyphen) is a late work, and that sense of superiority is leavened by humanism. That’s probably because Lewis, over 70 when the book was published, is turning his gaze inward, dissecting his own experiences and environment this time. The novel is based on Lewis’ own bitter experiences of being an exile in Canada during World War II, and the author adopts an approach that is variously analytical, venomous, and comical. His subjects include the Anglo-American intellectual scene at the time; the country of Canada (especially its English-speaking part); and possibly himself, in the person of the novel’s main character, the distinguished historian René Harding.
Harding, author of a best-seller called The Secret History of World War II, has decided to leave England to avoid the very war that he has predicted, and try to restart his life in North America. There are indications also that his academic position has become untenable for ideological reasons, although Lewis is coy as to what precise role this plays in his resignation. In fact, this coyness serves as a useful narrative stratagem, allowing Lewis to introduce a range of entertaining characters from Harding’s milieu; they put puzzled queries to Harding about his resignation, which he bats away with lengthy circumlocutions. At one point, a dinner guest accuses Harding of having “fascist tendencies,” but given the complexity of the situation, this doesn’t tell us much.
The situation, however, mirrors Lewis’ own experience. During the 1930s, he had been a fascist sympathizer for a number of years; as the decade ended and war loomed, he renounced these sympathies. He had been born in Canada, which entitled him to a Canadian passport, though he had left that country when very young. His self-imposed exile was not so much a homecoming as a journey to a strange new world.
Self Condemned is divided into two halves. The first half, set in England, introduces René and his wife Hester, and describes the world they’re about to leave behind. It culminates with their voyage across the Atlantic. The second half recounts their difficult life in Momaco, which is Lewis’ made-up Canadian city. I’ve seen claims that this is merely his fictional name for Toronto, but the text names Toronto as a separate city several times, so in a literal sense this can’t be true. However, the material out of which Momaco is built obviously originated in Lewis’ own experience of living in Toronto (a city that he once described as “this sanctimonious ice-box”).
Lewis’ approach is a mixture of the essayistic and the starkly realistic. Some parts of the book read like sketches for a sociological treatise on contemporary Canadian reality; while providing useful context, they are not well integrated with the fictional narrative. It is in the purely fictional parts that Lewis shines as both a stylist and an observer of character.
Despite the depressing nature of most of the story, humor pops to the surface on regular occasions. The satirical edge relies heavily on Lewis’ older, “Vorticist” style, with its focus on externalities. Thus, one of Harding’s intellectual London friends is described in the following painterly fashion:
Robert Parkinson had a square head. It was like a fortress, and his body was a larger edition of that. He had a pipe, too, of a bulky type. He stuffed it, as he laid back in a strong soft chair, with plaits of bright yellow and black tobacco: a mixture whose stimulating pungency belongs to the family of smells including peat, tar, joss stick and burnt bacon.
Lewis is at his satirical best when depicting Harding’s encounter with a group of American academics, on the boat over.
The American spoke again. “I may as well say, sir, that my name is Dr. Lincoln Abbott. I am the president of the University of Rome, Arkansas. Ours is not a great College like Chicago or Cornell. But it has beaten both at football!”
Comical as this scene is, it plays an important part in this grim narrative. Harding is first flattered by the attention of what he considers a pack of mediocrities, then horrified to realize it means he’s going down in the world. This is the beginning of his decline into the anonymity, the sense of displacement, of exile. In England, despite opposition to his views, he was a prominent and widely recognized intellectual. In North America he will become a diminished alien figure of little relevance.
The Canadian half of the story begins in a chapter entitled “Twenty-Five Feet by Twelve.” This is a reference to the size of the hotel room where the Hardings live. Life in the hotel is a dreadful mélange of prostitution, noise, domestic violence, and a drunken brawl in the “Beverage Room” (so called because in puritanical Momaco, you’re not allowed to call it a bar). Cockroaches infest the place to a surreal degree; the hotel’s manager gamely assaults them with her “gas-gun.” René struggles to find work while Hester sinks into depression.
After they have spent three years in isolation there, the hotel goes up in flames. In a startling image, the vast amount of water disgorged by the firefighters turns the hotel (in the middle of a Canadian winter) into an ice palace:
It was a magnificent sight; a block of ice towering over everything in the immediate neighbourhood. It was of course a hollow iceberg… It was now an enormous cave, full of mighty icicles as much as thirty feet long, and as thick as a tree, suspended from the skeleton of a roof. Below, one looked down into an icy labyrinth: here and there vistas leading the eye on to other caverns: and tunnels ending in mirrors, it seemed.
No matter what Robert Frost thought, the Hardings’ little world ends in both fire and ice. However, they manage to relocate to another hotel, and very gradually, René’s fortunes begin to improve.
It is somewhat unfortunate that this novel, to the extent that it is noticed at all, has become best known as an expression of Wyndham Lewis’ own loathing of Canada.1 Upon re-reading Self Condemned, I conclude that this is more a result of Lewis’ own statements about the country where he spent his time in exile than a fair appraisal of the novel itself. The book is more nuanced than one would expect from the author’s intemperate Canada-bashing. René and Hester find themselves in the typical situation of exiles at that time – at one point, René makes an ominous reference to the suicide of the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig in Brazil. Even in the absence of prejudice against your new country of residence, such forced dislocation is difficult if not impossible to get used to. Between René and Hester, it is the former who makes an effort to adjust to his new surroundings, and the latter who finds them unbearable and constantly expresses her longing to get back to England. This dialog sums up the difference in their attitudes:
[René speaking:] “A city is good or bad, attractive or horrible, according to the people it contains, and which of its citizens you happen to know. You call it ‘horrible’ because of horrible conditions under which we lived for three years. If we had lived under similar conditions, London would be horrible.”
Hester laughed. “These class-room arguments get one nowhere,” she answered. “It may be a good piece of logic, but it has no connection with the reality. London was where we were born. I might agree with you if I had been born in Momaco – though I should know it was a pretty poor place to be born in (if I had any intelligence).”
It is not so much Canada (or any specific place) that is the issue; rather, the book is a study in contrasting personalities. Having lost his old world, René eventually becomes determined to find a place for himself in the new one. When he finally secures an academic position at the local university, he feels triumphant. Hester’s reaction, however, is a sneer of despair:
“If you had known ten years ago that you were going to end your days as a Professor in a small colonial city, what would you have felt like?... Worst of all is your attitude. You are as pleased as if you had received a… what is it called?... a Regius Professorship at Oxford.”
René’s moment of triumph – a sign that he is now permanently connected to Momaco – ironically leads to the biggest disaster in the entire story. A further irony is revealed when it turns out that his position in Momaco isn’t permanent after all. At the end, we are told that “a great university in one of the eastern States of the U.S.A. offered him a professorship.” He relocates, but something in him has been irretrievably lost: “the Faculty had no idea that it was a glacial shell of a man who had come to live among them, mainly because they were themselves unfilled with anything more than a little academic stuffing.” Like the burned-out hotel he once lived in, Harding ends up as a “glacial shell,” presumably ripe for demolition.
It says something about the power of Lewis’ writing that I first read the book something like 35 years ago and, even before I revisited it recently, still vividly remembered certain scenes and descriptions. Above all, Self Condemned is a riveting exploration of the pressures of exile and how differing personalities respond to it – in particular, to the way in which displacement results in a loss of identity and status. In this respect, it is only a coincidence that Lewis’ exploration of these things is set in the country that George W. Bush once called “our most important neighbor to the north.”
Here’s an interesting Canadian take on both Lewis and his novel. Among other things, I was unaware of his direct influence on Marshall McLuhan.