White Fire

"In thin clockwork cadence . . ." Britain's Wyndham Lewis once wrote, "the delicate surf falls with the abrupt clash of glass, section by section." Embedded in his mocking, thumb-to-nose social satires (Tarr, The Apes of God), such descriptions helped make him famous.

Satirist Lewis has an artist's eye, has long liked to think of himself as more of an artist than a writer. Last week, to Lewis' unconcealed satisfaction, London's Redfern Gallery was staging a full-dress retrospective show of his paintings.

Tin & Turnips. The critics were kind, found some subtleties to admire in his abstractionist experiments. Said the New Statesman & Nation: "This Universe of ghosts with turnip heads and scrolls of tin for bodies is by no means unreal . . ." But what interested gallerygoers most were Lewis' portraits of some of his literary friends, e.g., Poets T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Stephen Spender. Using the diluted cubism that gives all his work a curiously geometrical air, Lewis had hit off an easily recognizable likeness every time.

He had painted Poet Eliot in 1938, had been chagrined to have the portrait rejected by the Royal Academy. This year, at 64, Lewis tried the same subject again, produced a picture that few would find either exciting or distasteful. When a TIME correspondent asked him to describe what he had done this time, Lewis obligingly sat down and wrote:

"Mr. Eliot has had a vision, as is well known, of 'the cactus land,' of a parched, desertic world--not of a dark so much as of an ash-grey age--in which the springs of life dried. In painting Mr. Eliot it has been my endeavor to convey . . . some vestige of all that. So you will see in his mask, drained of too hearty blood, a gazing strain, a patient contraction, the body slightly tilted (in the immaculate armor of sartorial convention) in resigned anticipation of the worst . . .

"When last I painted him he still had:--at least for me--a certain amount of uncouthness of the flesh about him, of the brazen and sardonic as well as the elegant ironic. This time I was painting a man who had passed through a white fire, who is specifically anointed."

Eyes & Mind. What did the subject think of all this? Said well-pleased Poet Eliot: "There is a good deal to be said for sticking to the same doctor . . . There is the same reason for sticking to the same painter--if he is a good painter; he knows the history of one's face as well as the expression assumed for the sitting--an expression which is sometimes a defensive or bogus one when exposed to the sustained scrutiny of an unfamiliar pair of eyes on the other side of the easel . . ."

Painter Lewis' own face, added Eliot, "is worth watching. Wearing a look of slightly quizzical inscrutability . . . behind which one suspects his mental muscles may be contracting for some unexpected pounce, he makes one feel that it would be undesirable, though not actually dangerous, to fall asleep in one's chair."

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