Self Condemned by Wyndham Lewis

"I am really awfully sorry; I sympathize with you most genuinely."  He sighed.  "What Canada is like I do not know.  They say it is a tough place."  Then he said facetiously, with a broad smile, "You may end up as a lumberjack!  That would be rather fun!"

Here's another novel by Wyndham Lewis, one of T. S. Eliot's favorite people.  Check out these blurbs if you think I might be exaggerating:

Damn, now that is a friend.

Self Condemned was first published in 1954, more than thirty years after Tarr, Lewis's first published novel, which I read in June.  As with Tarr, I got my hands on a copy of Self Condemned via interlibrary loan through a suburban Maryland public library.  When I picked up the 1955 printing of the novel, along with a 1951 printing of Lewis's Rude Assignment, the librarian who presented them to me said, "Wow, these books look old!"

The copy of Self Condemned which I read

Self Condemned is the story of René Harding, a 47-year old British college professor and successful author of two books; as our story begins he is living in London.  Harding has decided, without consulting his wife Hester (AKA "Essie") or his family (his French-born mother and his two married sisters), to quit ("throw up" is the phrase used) his position as Chair of History at some unnamed university and move to Canada.  Why is he leaving his "first-rate job, as good as a man of my mental habits can have," an act which one uncharitable character calls "committing suicide."?  Why is René abandoning a center of international culture, power and finance to live in what all the book's English characters think is some kind of godforsaken wilderness, a grim frontier where where he has no job prospects ("I may have to teach Algebra or--oh yes, or History in an elementary school...of course I may prefer to earn my living as a waiter....")?

The novel, like 400 pages in this edition, is split into three parts.  Part One, "The Resignation," consisting of ten chapters, is set mostly in London and its environs.  We accompany René as he visits in turn individual friends and family members to explain to them his shocking change of life and to bid them a final farewell.  Satirist Lewis entertains us with the amusing antics and odd personalities of Rene's acquaintances, most of whom are oddballs or creeps of one kind or another, while exposing us to René the intellectual's ideas and René the man's public and inner character. 

René's best friend is Robert Parkinson, AKA "Rotter," a writer of  articles and reviews for highbrow publications, and we get an extensive introduction to our hero's thinking when Rotter reads aloud--to its very subject himself--a draft of an article he has been commissioned to write about René.  René, we learn, is a master at interpreting and predicting historical events--his more recent book was entitled A Secret History of World War II, written and published before the actual war has begun!  René is bitterly hostile to Marxism and laments and condemns its pernicious effect on academia and on modern life--René believes that if it were not for the malign influence of Marxist thought and of the Soviet Union, that the 20th century, instead of a century of mass war and totalitarianism, could have fulfilled the dreams of peace and prosperity of the Victorian liberals.

Perhaps most importantly, René believes that historians, instead of focusing their researches on and dominating their narratives with rulers, most of whom are tyrants and mass murderers who live out tedious melodramas, should prioritize the small minority of inventive and creative people. In a later part of the book we get another look at René's theory of what historical writing should be when René is explaining his belief that the natural world is insane, is a madhouse:

If the chapter devoted to Rotter gives us a full description of Rene's ideas and his professional work, the chapters in which he has his final meetings with his French-born mother, his sister Mary and her husband Percy Lamport, his sister Helen and her husband Robert Kerridge, and his sister-in-law Janet and her husband Victor Painter, give us explanations and demonstrations of why Harding has chosen to go into voluntary exile from his field and his country.  Not only is Rene's brand of thinking not welcome in the academy, but he in turn looks at the world of academia as "fundamentally a racket" whose inhabitants are, to a man, "dishonest."  He can spend no more time in such an environment lest he lose his self respect!  His last encounters with Percy Lamport, Robert Kerridge (why are there two characters named "Robert?"), and Victor Painter give us an idea of the kind of dolts, jerks and phonies René has to deal with in England.  Percy is an anti-Semite and successful businessman who strikes a pose as a member of the progressive avant garde, collecting Marie Laurencin paintings and reading George Orwell, G. D. H. Cole, George Bernard Shaw and leftist periodicals: "the richer he [Percy] became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies moved."  Victor is a snobbish nouveau riche striver with whom René gets into a shouting match at their last meal together in a restaurant.  Robert Kerridge, husband of Rene's favorite sister Helen, is a leftist clergyman; at their last meeting, at the Kerridge home in Robert's country parish, Robert and his friend, a local leftist schoolmaster, insult René, calling him a fascist--Rene's hostility to Marxism and his calling out of the hypocrisy of those who abominate Hitler but admire the equally murderous and despotic Bolsheviks has attracted such attacks from many quarters.  (Self Condemned is to some extent I am not yet cognizant of autobiographical, and Lewis himself is often dismissed as a fascist.)

Lewis is adept at making some of these scenes funny, but also conveying René's sense of isolation from his peers in the educated middle classes and his and his sister Helen's sadness at parting, presumably to never meet again.  (Rene's last sight of Helen actually cleverly foreshadows his last sight of Hester, one of the devices by which Lewis encourages us to compare René's relationship with his wife and his favorite sister.)

The tenth chapter of Part One describes René and Hester's voyage across the Atlantic to Canada; during the journey Great Britain declares war on Germany (we are told that the ships' passengers were "very little affected" by the news or by the King's speech.)  We had Lewis, a successful painter himself, doing a little art criticism when he attacked Laurencin's paintings in Percy's mansion, and on the ship we get some Lewis literary criticism.  René, who has "read few of the English classics," tries to read George Eliot's Middlemarch, and after Lewis presents us a deadpan page-long summary of the novel's beginning, Rene wonders "Why am I reading this dull nonsense?" and throws the book over the side into the ocean.

As Part Two, entitled "The Room," begins, we learn that René and Hester have lived for over three years in the same hotel room in the fictional Canadian city of Momaco.  Lewis, born in 1882, spent the first five years of his life in the US and Canada, and spent World War II there as well; I haven't read any biographies of Lewis yet, but his description of the place in Self Condemned suggests he hated North America like poison!

Momaco has no cafes!  Momaco has no theater, and the cinemas only show Hollywood garbage, no French, Italian, or German movies!  And the weather!  If it is not thirty or forty below, the streets a treacherous sheet of ice, it is the brief summer, when the hard sunlight (sunlight in England, we are told, is soft) makes your eyes water and monstrous flies devour you!  Our heroes come up with divers hilarious euphemisms and nicknames for Canada/Momaco, like "the living death" and "the hideous ice-box."

The hotel in which René and Hester spend their first three Canadian years is ill-run and inhabited by dangerous criminals, maniacs, and whores, and René repeatedly describes it as a microcosm of North America and of the entire world.  North America, Lewis declares, is a matriarchy, and sure enough, the hotel's owner and its (mis)manager are women, a Mrs. Plant and a Mrs. McAffie, called "Affie."  The ethnic diversity of America, that we are all so used to hearing panegyrized, is by Lewis called "a jumble" and held up as one example of the characteristic mixed identity or multiple personality of the New World: "an incoherence customary on this new continent where nothing can ever be one thing."  The different ethnic groups that make up the population of North America all hate each other and contact with each other brings out the worst in each:

...the protestant English, backward and bigoted, rage against the papist hierarchy ruling the French.... the Anglo-Saxon suffers from a Hitlerian superiority feeling, and the 'Peasoups' (as the French are called) have to put up with a lot of contempt from the master-race.

When a Canadian thug and his American friend, a draft dodger, overhear René and Hester's English accents, our heroes are physically assaulted, and René is beaten up, even viciously kicked as he lays on the floor.  The hotel is full of violence, with fights in the bar a common occurrence and René and Hester often hearing the bloodcurdling screams of a German woman tenant as her live-in (American) Indian boyfriend beats her:

...the Indian--drunk as all Indians had been ever since the Whites had landed--dwelling amid the sentimental screams of his blonde Teutonic squaw...

Part Two of the novel concludes with a murder and then a tremendous fire, set by the murderer, that razes the hotel.

Part Two of Self Condemned is very (blackly) humorous, with Lewis presenting us with many strange and amusing figures.  These bizarre characters, among them a generous and wealthy homosexual book-collector, Mr. Furber (one wonders if this is somehow a reference to Faber and Faber, the famous literary publishing house), who hires René to aid him in organizing his library, and the aforementioned manageress of the hotel, Affie, who reads all the hotel employees' and tenants' futures in tea leaves and makes uncannily accurate predictions (her powers derive from her practices of steaming open everyone's mail before it is delivered and plastering her ear to keyholes), are each of them endearing, amusing, and sinister, all at the same time.

The ordeal of the fire and the need to move to another (less poorly managed) hotel works changes in the social and psychological lives of the Hardings.  Furber, macabrely fascinated by René's acquaintance with the hotel arsonist and murderer, intensifies their relationship and shows him off to friends, so that, after over three years in Canada, René and Hester receive their first dinner invitation, to the home of a British college professor, McKenzie, and his wife; the McKenzies moved to Canada a year or so after the Hardings, and experienced the Blitz back in England.  Talking to a fellow scholar reignites René's mind, which begins percolating with new ideas and theories, and he begins writing a new book; his new social contacts lead to a regular job writing a well-received newspaper column in which he applies his expertise to predicting the twists and turns of the raging war, and then a teaching position at a university in Momaco is offered to him!   René hopes that their improved financial circumstances, new intellectual stimulation, and new friends, will make Hester more amenable to their life in the New World, but their fiery expulsion from the vile hotel and intimate familiarity with murder has left Hester more than ever obsessed with returning to England.

"Whether Momaco ignores you or fetes you, it is always Momaco.  Do you really want to spend the rest of your life in this awful city?"  

René, however, has no interest in returning to London.  At the end of her rope, unable to dislodge René from his steadfast determination to stay in the "God-forsaken ice box," on page 369 Hester commits suicide by jumping in front of a moving truck.  René is physically and psychologically broken by the sight of her mangled body and the enormity of this catastrophe, and spends long months recuperating in a hospital and then a Catholic retreat, where he is surrounded by priests and considers converting to Catholicism.  The last 37 pages of the book consist of René trying to come to terms with his new life and sort out his radically shifting feelings about his wife and her final desperate act, feelings which range from love and pity to hate and contempt.  He achieves career success--wealth and a position at an important American university--but he is a hollowed out man, a man who went against the tide, who saw through all of the bogus stratagems and deceptions of the universe and of human society, but who has suffered from this enlightenment, been punished like a character in a Greek myth who defied the gods.

Self Condemned excels as an entertaining and moving story about unusual people and their unhappy fates, but Lewis doesn't see himself merely as a comedian and tragedian, but as a satirist, and he takes a dim view of our world and its people, and he works a number of satiric themes.

Prominent among these themes is the absurdity of life.  Lewis and René use the word "absurd" again and again, and several times Rene is taken aback by how absurdly other characters act.  Lewis also presents us with many incidents which are at once absurd, but also wholly believable.  The attitude of Affie and her staff about janitors, for example:

She actually preferred a man to be a thief and drunkard....the only kind of janitor she heartily disliked was a competent one, like a man called Jan--whom everybody hated because he was so clean, sober, and good at his job.

Another instance is Rene's job with the book collector, Furber; this guy is paying Rene to offer advice on the value of rare books and whether he should add such and such a book to his collection, but Rene is a scholar, not a bookdealer:

He knew as little about the market value of a book, as he did of the value of diamonds or fur coats...since most of Furber's books did not interest him, it was a waste of time consulting him as to the desirability of adding a little-known Marquis de Sade to the collection.  But he had to affect enthusiasm, in order to retain his position....  

The hotel, Canada, and the world: all one big madhouse!

A more recent edition

A related theme of the novel is the prolonged fit of insanity commonly called the Second World War.  We are accustomed, when WWII is discussed, of hearing such terms as "the finest hour" and "the greatest generation" when the Allies are the topic at hand, and denunciations of German aggression and Nazi racism in reference to the Axis powers.  Lewis does not take this tack.  As evidenced by the reaction of the liner's passengers to the King's speech (which I am told has recently been romanticized in a fanciful Hollywood picture), Lewis's characters feel disconnected from the war and are far from patriotic heroes.  When the war is directly addressed Lewis does not mention the stirring victories of military men or the noble sacrifices and selfless dedication of blitzed Londoners and "Rosie the Riveter;" rather, he has René and Hester hear reports on the radio about what we might consider Allied misbehavior, like the shackling of German prisoners in Britain and Canada and FDR's receipt of the gift of a letter opener made from the bone of a Japanese fighting man.  (Lewis does not provide any context for these regrettable British and American actions, such as the fact that they were responses to more systematic and severe German and Japanese atrocities, or that there was a public outcry in America against abuse of Japanese war dead and that FDR later repudiated the gruesome trophy Lewis cites.)  Mrs. McKenzie was far from willing to "do her bit" during the Blitz--she complains bitterly about how the local air warden harassed her over her failure to meet black out regulations and how the government tried to force her to house a crippled twelve-year-old Jewish refugee--she took it as a personal affront that they tried to pollute her home with a Jew!  Mrs. McKenzie also complains about the war profiteering of shopkeepers.  Both times Winston Churchill is mentioned by name it is not done to extol the man; one time it is only so Lewis can goof on him for using outdated American slang.  There is no talk about the German invasion of Poland or Japanese sneak attacks on Pearl Harbor or British Pacific colonies; when the characters blame the war on anything it is on government in general (Rene asserts that "Government is often in the hands of criminals or morons, never in the hands of first-rate men.")  Affie wins Rene's approval when she expresses her horror of the war in a way that condemns all authority and stresses continuity between the World Wars:

'They are taking our boys,' she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself and the fact that her eyes were dry was only because anger dried them up.  'They are taking our boys again.'

Lewis eschews the particular and the familiar when talking about WWII in an effort to argue that WWII is not as "special" as we are commonly lead to believe, not an episode of unique heroism among the Allied peoples and unprecedented evil on the part of Hitler and his henchmen and the German war machine.  In his telling, war seems like the inevitable result of immutable human evil, not the particular crime of individual malefactors or evil political parties.  In fact, the book René is inspired to write by his intellectually invigorating relationship with McKenzie has as one of its arguments the claim that the cataclysmic period of World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Depression, the rise of fascism and World War II is not some kind of horrible outlier, but a normal period of history: "His slogan was as follows: 'The past thirty years is typical, not exceptional.'"

And another

While relatively few passages address the war directly, many more seem to address it obliquely or symbolically.  One hilarious and somewhat disgusting scene covers Affie's enthusiastic warmaking on the cockroaches which infest the hotel--she is not reluctant to get up close and personal, down and dirty, in her pitiless campaign of extermination against the six-legged fiends, engaging with brio in chemical warfare and hand to hand combat with the vermin.  The hotel's barkeep, after a particularly desperate scrap, declares he is "neutral" and will no longer intervene in the regular bar fights.  And the fire that destroys the hotel occurs just after Rene predicts that the war will trigger the very quick ("overnight") dissolution of the British Empire.

Self Condemned's themes, topics and techniques are perfectly suited to my interests and temperament: loneliness, exile, and suicide; difficult sexual relationships; hostility to Marxism and disillusionment with academia; detailed descriptions of claustrophobic rooms and their psychological effect on those who live in them, who feel imprisoned in them.  Lewis even provides a page-long debunking of the romantic mythology that has grown up around motherhood!  Compared to Tarr, this is a more conventional and straightforward novel; it is definitely "easier" and its settings and characters are more clearly and more sharply drawn, so that you can see in your mind bold and disturbing images of the book's people and the places they inhabit.  I ate it up!

A good balance of laugh out loud humor, pathos, and Lewis's idiosyncratic and against-the-grain opinions make Self Condemned a fun, at times affecting, at times surprising, read.  I particularly recommend it to those who enjoy narratives about down-and-out self-important outsider smart guys, like those of Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski.