The Vulgar Streak by Wyndham Lewis

"Where's the sense," asked a neighbour with militantly folded arms, "in bringin' children up above their station, I should like to know?  That young lady...young Maddie, I should say--she doesn't never seem happy, do she, for all her dollin' up and puttin' on the talk?"

In his introduction to an excerpt of Wyndham Lewis's criticism of George Orwell in the collection Enemy Salvoes, C. J. Fox mentions Lewis's 1941 novel The Vulgar Streak, calling it "a book about a proletarian con-man's attempted rise to middle-class prosperity."  In his Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis, Paul O'Keefe reports that American publishers during World War II rejected The Vulgar Streak for being "too critical of England."  This sounded interesting to me, so I decided to read the novel.  I acquired a 1973 US printing via interlibrary loan; a scan of the same edition is available for free at the internet archive, though this edition is full of irritating typographical issues, so those interested should perhaps seek the 1985 edition from Black Sparrow (which I have never seen.)

From the start we see that The Vulgar Streak is about men who, to put it charitably, create or recreate themselves, or, to put it not so charitably, are fake phony frauds.  On the very first page of text we meet a man, Martin Penny-Smythe, a short and fat Englishman, who "cultivated a mild stammer."  Later we learn that he is a convert to Catholicism, and that he carries around a pipe (Lewis on that first page, before revealing his name, actually calls Martin "the pipe-sucker") in part to drive away women.  Martin is a man who has consciously created an identity for himself, crafted an image of himself to present to the world that is not entirely natural--he hasn't accepted the religion of his birth, nor even the speaking ability he has been born with.

On that first page Martin is walking ("strolling" is how the characters and Lewis describe it) in Venice in the late 1930s with another Englishman, an artist, the tall and elegant Vincent Penhale.  It is Vincent who turns out to be the novel's protagonist.  Vincent is even more affected (or self-created) than Martin.  While they ride a gondola, Vincent, jocularly referring to Martin's Catholicism, makes a "confession" to his friend, admitting that he is not the product of a middle-class family and a good school as he has led people to believe, but the child of a slum-dwelling working-class couple.  "...I am a sham person from head to foot," he tells Martin.  As Vincent flirts with a young Englishwoman, the niece of a baronet, April Mallow, he makes poses that she recognizes as theatrical, "reminiscent of the footlights."  We later learn that most of Vincent's artistic work has been for the theatre, designing costumes and the like, and that he is an actor who has appeared on stage.

In the first of the book's three parts, Vincent seduces April, who falls in love with him, despite her revulsion over another friend of Vincent's who makes an unexpected appearance, a thuggish working-class man named Bill Halvorsen, and her suspicions about a mysterious interaction Vincent has with the local police.  April is vulnerable to Vincent's advances for a number of reasons, including the tense atmosphere in which these British tourists in Venice are living: they all spend lots of time listening to the radio, scrutinizing the newspapers and assessing rumors regarding the possibility of war as a result of the ongoing Sudetenland crisis. 

The second part of the 247-page novel begins two months later, in London.  We learn that Vincent and April were married because April was pregnant; though April is as much in love as ever.  We become acquainted with Vincent's home and lifestyle, and meet Vincent's family, most of whom he hides from April and her wealthy family.  The one Penhale whom Vincent introduces to April is his beautiful sister Madeline ("Maddie.")  Like Vincent, Madeline has risen above her working-class origins, having married a professional cartoonist (whom Lewis tells us is "a hack.")  Also like Vincent, Maddie is perpetually putting on an act, and she too has a professional background redolent with artifice and performance, having done work as an artist's model.  Lewis emphasizes the tremendous amount of exhausting work it takes for Vincent and Maddie to keep up their facades ("One reason why she held herself so stately and unsmiling--perhaps a little queenly--was because she had had to be always on her best behavior"), in particular focusing on the study and concentration it takes for them to maintain their bogus Oxford accents.  Vincent, in one scene, gives Maddie lessons on how to pronounce "Buckingham Palace," complete with lecture notes and mnemonic devices.  Other characters remark that Maddie hardly ever talks--they don't realize that she keeps mum for fear of revealing her working class origins via some blunder in pronunciation.  Maddie even goes on "dates" with an educated man, Dougal Tandish, thus risking her relationship with her husband, because Tandish has, she believes, a good accent and she can learn by listening to him.

The reason Vincent and Maddie go to all this trouble, according to Vincent at least, is the stifling English class system.  "The relentless pressure of the English class incubus had poisoned the existence of one as much as of the other," Lewis tells us.  In this second part of The Vulgar Streak Lewis has various characters air their views on class.  Not only does Vincent discuss the English class system with a German therapist--a refugee from Nazi Germany--but we see Vincent interact with his working class siblings and in-laws--charwomen and automobile mechanics and the like whom Lewis gives broad accents--at his father's funeral.   

We hear lots of complaints from the Penhale clan about their treatment at the hands of the middle class and the government: e.g., doctors won't prescribe poor people the (expensive) medicine they need, and the tax-payer-funded hospital tries to speed up the death of poor patients rather than to cure them.  And then there is Vincent's pretentious lament to the curate who presides at Dad's funeral: "when are they going to learn, I wonder, to design a standard house for the Worker that is both sanitary and beautiful?"

More provocatively, especially for us 21st-century readers, Vincent compares the English poor to African-American slaves and to women in China.  In England, he opines, the working classes are considered an inferior breed, "creatures of another clay," and calls his siblings' accent and slang "a slave-jargon" that they can't help themselves from speaking.  He claims that:

"Since there are no niggers here, they had to create niggers.  The poor are the niggers in this country."

(Compare to this John Lennon / Yoko Ono production...at home with headphones on)

and:

"...the religion of class...in England restricts the personal development of any man or woman born outside the genteel pale.  It denies expansion to him or her as much as the shoes formerly worn by Chinese ladies denied normal development to the feet."

While Vincent (and the mysterious Bill Halvorsen, it turns out) are willing to go to any length, to take terrible risks, to escape their class or oppose the class system, most of the other working-class people in the novel accept their station and even resent Vincent and Maddie's "putting on airs."  There is the unnamed minor character quoted in the passage I use as an epigraph to this blog post, for example, and one of Vincent's sisters, Minnie, who vocally resents her siblings' attitude and declares "I belong to the working-class an' I'm not ashamed to say so."  It was not clear to me if Lewis expected the reader to see the wisdom of these working class people's resignation to their fate, or condemn them, as Vincent does, as complicit in their own oppression.

After the funeral, the plot of The Vulgar Streak becomes increasingly melodramatic.  We learn how Vincent is able to afford trips to Venice--he is passing counterfeit money for Bill Halvorsen, who is a socialist activist and engraver who forges banknotes as a way of undermining the capitalist system (Vincent even voices a precis of Halvorsen's views on monetary theory.)  When Maddie's boyfriend (or whatever he is) Dougal Tandish, who is too clever for his own good, starts to suspect something is fishy with Vincent and Bill, he investigates Bill's engraving shop, where Bill shoots him dead.  (The best joke in The Vulgar Streak is that Vincent starts calling Halvorsen "Buffalo Bill.")  Vincent helps Bill toss the corpse in the Thames, but the bobbies are on to them almost immediately.  Vincent's true origins and involvement in the murder are splashed all over the papers, leading April to collapse and have a miscarriage, from which she dies.  Maddie's husband the hack cartoonist abandons Maddie.  Seeing how he has ruined April's and Maddie's lives, Vincent hangs himself.  Maddie has to move into the slum quarters of her alcoholic widowed mother and her resentful sister, and take up modelling again to put food on the table.

The Vulgar Streak is a little lackluster; Lewis is an idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, and I was hoping for something surprising and strange here, but I didn't get it. Tarr was challenging and unusual, and Self Condemned was full of unconventional opinions as well as memorable incidents, characters and images and even some quite funny jokes, but The Vulgar Streak feels like a pretty ordinary novel. I can't really object to the book's ideas about class and the dangers of maintaining a facade (and associating with commies!), but these ideas are not particularly novel or surprising--I feel like people are deploring the English class system and exhorting you to "be yourself" all the time.  Maybe the ambiguity of the novel (on the one hand the English class system is restrictive, but on the other people who resist it cause unhappiness for themselves and everybody they come into contact with) is "literary."  As for the style, it is just acceptable; there were no particularly scintillating passages or images, and I didn't really feel for or care about the various characters.

There are a few interesting things here and there in The Vulgar Streak for us culture vultures.  Lewis, one of the most prominent of the early 20th-century British painters and a prolific art critic, fills the Venice part of the novel with references to Guardi, Canaletto and Ruskin, figures with whom I was familiar.  I was more excited to be introduced to The Magnet and Billy Bunter, an element of British pop culture to which I had never been exposed.  Near the end of the novel there is a little talk of Stendhal's The Red and The Black, which Martin has read but Vincent has not.  I haven't read it either, but the juxtaposition of red and black reminded me of Lewis's own metaphorical description of 1930s Europe as being a plain in which 90% of the people live docilely, trapped between mountains inhabited by menacing hill tribes, one tribe following the red principle of communism and the other the black principle of fascism.  (This parable of Lewis's is quoted at length in Paul O'Keefe's Some Sort of Genius, where I read it; originally it appeared in the book Left Wings Over Europe.)

The Amazon page advertising the 1985 edition of The Vulgar Streak gives one the impression that the book is about fascism, that Vincent is a fascist sympathizer, but there is not really much in the novel about fascism, and Vincent is vocally hostile to fascists.  (He calls Dougal Tandish, whom he abominates, a fascist, though it is not clear if this is an accurate assessment or just Vincent, who is constantly lying, maligning the man unfairly.)  Vincent does have something in common with Hitler and Mussolini, however: when he visits the German shrink the idea that Vincent is a man characterized by "an excess of Will" is raised, and the therapist notes that Mussolini and Hitler are "extreme, and curiously disagreeable, expressions of this morbid Will."  Maybe another thing about The Vulgar Streak that is "literary" is that it seems to argue that being a "go-getter," what Samuel Johnson might have called a "projector," is a terrible mistake, that you, your spouse, your colleagues, and your relatives will be made miserable if not outright killed if you embark on some grand scheme to change your station in life or, even worse, change the world.  Entertainment fiction, of course, regularly celebrates the hero who masters his environment and accomplishes some project or solves some problem, or tries to do so and nobly fails--in The Vulgar Streak if you are a charwoman or a motor car mechanic you probably should just embrace it.   

Not bad, but not really remarkable, I'm awarding The Vulgar Streak the "acceptable" rating that gets so much use here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Hopefully my next foray into Wyndham Lewis's fiction will be more exciting.