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90 THIS DIFFICULT INDIVIDUAL
if I know my Ezra. This was his first taste of the English. He had
no luck with the English, then or at a later date, and was always
in his country a fish out of water . . ." 3
Lewis seems surprised that Ezra should have been angry at
being snubbed by a bunch of "Brits", but his observation that
Ezra would have no luck with the English was essentially true. In
1914, he was in his heyday there, but England became increasingly
cold to him in the next few years.
Pound printed some powerful boosts for Lewis in The Egoist.
He wrote, in the issue of June 15, 1914, "Mr. Wyndham Lewis is
one of the greatest masters of design yet born in the occident. . . .
The rabble and the bureaucracy have built a god in their own image
and that god is mediocrity. The great mass of mankind are
mediocre, that is axiomatic, it is a definition of the word mediocre.
The race is however divided into disproportionate segments; those
who worship their own belly-buttons and those who do not."
Pound also described Lewis as "Not a commentator but a protagonist.
. . . He is a man at war . . . you cannot be as intelligent
in that sort of way, without being prey to the furies."
In Instigations, Pound described Lewis' novel Tarr (1918), as
"the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time." 4
This
statement might seem to be an exaggeration, until one actually
compares it with the English novels of the time. Pound later noted,
in criticizing Lewis' Apes of God (1932), that it was somewhat
limited by Lewis' "peeve".
Lewis' striking drawings of Pound are typical Vorticist productions.
After viewing an exhibition of Lewis' work at the Goupil
Gallery, the Observer critic wrote, in describing one of the Pound
portraits, ". . . the synthetic reconstruction of personality in light
and pure terms of art."
Pound's other cohort in the Vorticist movement was a young
French sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. In his biography of this
artist, Pound describes their meeting:
"I was with O.S. [Olivia Shakespear] at a picture show in the
Albert Hall (International, Allied Artists or something). We
wandered about the upper galleries hunting for new work and trying
to find some good amid much bad, and a young man came after
us, like a well-made young wolf or some soft-moving, bright-eyed