THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

‘Verbotens’ and about despising and ignoring ‘this impure Present’ but it grated nerves more than it shook
foundations. Lewis’s career beyond Blast is marked by some startlingly dynamic paintings and by a series of angry,
edgy texts. His most innovative novel, Tarr (1918), is set in an artist-dominated Paris in which a frantic bohemianism
has assumed a political and sexual arrogance in the face of bourgeois ‘sentimentalism’. It is written in what Lewis
described as a ‘jagged prose’, one in which he had attempted to eliminate ‘anything less essential than a noun or a
verb’. Ezra Pound remarked in 1920 that Tarr was ‘the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time’ and its
author ‘the rarest of phenomena, an Englishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European’. Despite the
sustained wit of Lewis’s staccato sentences his later, far more parochially ‘English’ novel, The Apes of God (1930)
reads like a satirical guide to the negatives and shortcomings of artistic London in the 1920s (it is particularly acerbic
about Bloomsbury). The Revenge for Love (1937), which begins in Civil War Spain, is by contrast an unsteady but
scathing attack on the political (and particularly Marxist) deceptions of the 1930s. The three completed novels of a
planned four-part sequence, The Human Age, began in 1928 with The Childermass but was resumed again only in
1955 with the publication of the grandly conceived sub-religious discourses, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta. Lewis’s
most considered, if jumpy, political and artistic manifesto The Art of Being Ruled (1926) argues that society had been
inevitably revolutionized by mechanical change and that both change and revolution ought to be embraced by the
artist. When he moves on to address the problem of a distinction between an artistic or intellectual elite and an
indifferent mass he writes with considerable panache though, as ever, he tends to knock down Aunt Sallies with as
much verve as he quixotically assaults windmills. He also determinedly abandons the use of certain capital letters as a
gesture against the inherited privileging of certain words and titles. The Art of Being Ruled glances forward to a time
when ‘Everyman’ will be loosed from the chains of poverty by a new absolutist state, a state which would do away
with old niceties, economic injustices and inefficiencies. ‘Can this poor man be the loser’, he asks, ‘has he
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anything to lose? — by his rulers shedding the pickwickian masks, the socialist noses, the kindly liberal twinkles of
the european egalitarian masquerade?’ In many ways Lewis’s slide towards a lonely kind of Fascism in the late 1930s
was inevitable.
Lewis’s tendency to refer to whimsical ideas as ‘pickwickian’ was picked up by Richard Aldington (1892-1962)
when he looked back in his autobiography of 1941 to Pound’s confident announcement of the existence of ‘Imagism’.
Poems by Aldington and his American wife Hilda Doolittle (‘H.D.’) were published with brief notes ambiguously
explaining that the Imagists were ‘a group of ardent Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments in vers
libre’. Precise definitions of the new poetry remained as vague, though an insistence on the ‘principle of liberty’
implicit in the irregular rhythms of vers libre remained constant. The Imagists were not Symbolists, Pound later
insisted; where the Symbolists had dealt in ‘association’ — ‘in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory’ — the images of
the Imagists had ‘a variable significance like the signs a, b, and x in algebra’. Pound was also emphatic that ‘the
author must use his image because he sees it or feels, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or
some system of ethics’. This loose emphasis opened the way to the inclusion of a considerable variety of poets and
poetic techniques in the Imagist anthologies. Des Imagistes of 1914 printed poems by Aldington, H. D., Pound, and
James Joyce; the three later volumes entitled Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917) introduced work by Ford Madox
Ford and D. H. Lawrence. All these anthologies, which ultimately determined the future of American literature more
than they did English, also contained seminal poems by the American poets Amy Lowell, John Gould Fletcher,
Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams.
Since the 1920s, Aldington has been remembered more as a remarkably perceptive assistant editor of the
periodical The Egoist (1914-17), as the controversial biographer of his sometime friend, D. H. Lawrence (1950), and
as a sharply observant novelist than as a poet. In 1916 he had enlisted in the Infantry and his profound unsettlement
as a result of the war is reflected in the often brilliant cynicism of his first novel Death of a Hero (1929), which deals
with both the frustrations of pre-war English society and ‘the false ideals, the unintelligent ideas ... the humbug, the
hypocrisy, the stupidity’ of those who waged the war. Its ‘hero’, George Winterbourne, resists the dullness of
convention with a kind of angry paganism, but as its poetic ‘Epilogue’ implies, the final mood of the novel is shaped
by ‘an agony of helpless grief and pity’. The disillusion which continues to condition his two later novels, The
Colonel’s Daughter (1931) and All Men are Enemies (1933), is somewhat dissipated in comparison.
For a short period in the 1920s Aldington worked as an assistant to a fellow ex-combatant, and already
experienced novelist, Ford Madox Ford. Ford (born Ford Hermann Hueffer) (1873-1939), the grandson of the painter
Ford Madox Brown, began his literary career in 1896 with a biography of his grandfather and developed his fictional
style through a close association with Joseph
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