Wyndham Lewis, Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting Pot, Antelope Hill, 2024 (first published 1929)

Little remembered today, Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was an influential British painter, writer, and critic who still fascinates cultural historians. He developed a style of painting known as “Vorticism,� an attempt to combine cubism and futurism. His career was interrupted by the First World War, most of which he spent as an artillery officer. During the interwar years, he turned increasingly to writing satirical novels and stories as well as literary and cultural criticism.

Paleface was written in the late 1920s, near the end of the time when white men could freely express their views on race. A great variety of ideas were in circulation, including an early form of the “antiracism� that now strangles Western civilization. Debate was uninhibited and lively, and disagreement no cause for calling down curses on anyone. This alone makes revisiting those days a breath of fresh air.

Lewis was no scientific authority on race, and he was less concerned with racial differences as such than with the thinking of certain fashionable writers of his time. Having a strong satirical bent and no patience for any sort of sentimentality, Lewis was deeply suspicious of romantic primitivism or enthusiasm for the supposedly more authentic or natural ways of foreign races. He saw this in a then-recent piece of travel writing by D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (1927). Lewis quotes from the work, mixing in his own commentary:

“The commonest entertainment among the Indians is singing round the drum, at evening.� There are fishermen in the Outer Hebrides, [Lawrence] says, who do something of this sort, “approaching the Indian way,� but of course, being mere Whites, they do not reach or equal it. Still, the Outer Hebrideans do succeed in suggesting to Mr. Lawrence a realm inhabited by “beasts that . . . stare through . . . vivid, mindless eyes.� They do manage to become mindless: though not so mindless as the Indian, therefore inferior. . . . The Hebridean still sees himself human, and outside the great naturalistic influences.

The important thing to note is the insistence upon mindlessness as an essential quality of what is admirable. The Hebridean is not to be admired so much as the Mexican Indian because he still deals in “conceptual�, “pictorial� things; whereas the Mexican Indian is purely emotional. . . . “Face lifted and sightless, eyes half closed and visionless, mouth open and speechless, the sounds arise in his chest, from the consciousness in the abdomen.� A “consciousness in the abdomen� or a visceral consciousness is what we commonly should call unconsciousness. [It] removes the vital center into the viscera and takes the privilege of leadership away from the hated mind or intellect, established up above in the head.

Lawrence’s admiration for the Indian is bound up with his deprecation not merely of reason, speech, and image, but even of human individuality. Describing an Indian returning from the hunt, he writes:

But the man coming home from the bear hunt is any man, all men, the bear is any bear, every bear, all bear. There is no individual, isolated experience. It is the hunting . . . demon of manhood which has won against the . . . demon of all bears. The experience is generic, non-individual.

Lewis notes the similarity between Lawrence’s romantic primitivism and the collectivism in this passage from a Bolshevik tract:

It is only by such external functions as the millions have in common, their uniform and simultaneous movements, that the many can be united in a higher unity: marching, keeping in step, shouting “hurrah� in unison, festal singing in chorus, united attacks on the enemy, these are the manifestations of life which are to give birth to the new and superior type of humanity. Everything that divides the many from each other, that fosters the illusion of the individual importance of man, especially the “soul,� hinders this higher evolution and must consequently be destroyed.

The “higher evolution� of the communist is hard to distinguish from Lawrence’s Indian:

The Indian song is non-individual. . . . It is an experience of the human blood stream, not of the mind or spirit. Hence the subtle incessant, insistent rhythm of the drum, which is pulsated like the heart, and soulless, and inescapable. Hence the strange blind unanimity of the . . . men’s voices. . . . It is the dark blood falling back from the mind, from sight and speech and knowing, back to the great central source where is rest and unspeakable renewal.

Lawrence notes that “the Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness,� while “our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian.� One wonders how he managed to acquire his grasp of the metaphysics of Indian drumming, still more to communicate it to his presumably white reader, but no doubt that serves only to make his achievement all the more impressive.

D. H. Lawrence (Credit: ZUMA Press, Album / Fine Art Images)

Speaking for himself, Lewis writes:

I find the average White European often exceedingly ridiculous, no doubt, but much more interesting than the average Hopi or the average Negro. I would rather have the least man that thinks, than the average man that squats and drums and drums, with sightless, soulless eyes; I would rather have an ounce of human consciousness than a universe full of abdominal afflatus.

Lewis’s other major example of romantic primitivism is the American writer Sherwood Anderson, whose exemplary child of nature is the American black. “In any book of his that you pick up you will find, wherever Negroes occur, that they are used to score off the White . . . to take the White down a peg or two.� His is a message of “Black and White brotherhood, or rather of Black worship, and religious submission to the Black idea, as being a more primitive one than the white.�

Anderson’s most successful novel was Dark Laughter (1925). It is:

the story of a journalist who, having escaped from his wife in Chicago, gets employment in a small town in the South. He finds his employer’s wife attractive. She returns his love. She advertises for a gardener. He takes on the job. After what seems a very long time to the Negro woman watching from the kitchen, wife and hired man go up to the bedroom during [the husband’s] absence, and the “deed of darkness� is at last consummated.

The “dark laughter� of the title is the black servants’ laughter at how long it took the two whites to get down to business. The hero comes to share the black point of view, telling himself that he ought to “make less fuss, think about things less, act.�

Dark Laughter contains a passage in which a group of blacks lose their individuality: “The bodies of all the men running up and down the landing-stage were one body. One could not be distinguished from the other. Could the bodies of people be so lost in each other?�

Lewis finds Anderson’s romantic primitivism most plainly in his short story “I Want to Know Why,� which deals with a sixteen-year-old boy and three friends who run away from home to the horse races.

We got into Saratoga at night and went to the track. Bildad [a Negro] fed us up. He showed us a place to sleep in hay over a shed and promised to keep still. Niggers are all right about things like that. They won’t squeal on you. Often a white man you might meet, when you had run away from home like that, might appear to be alright, and give you a quarter of half dollar or something, and then go and give you away. White men will do that, but not a nigger. You can trust them. They are square with kids.

Lewis’s commentary:

Ah, the good kind nigger! Would that those hard unsympathetic White men were as good to kids as that! Give me a nigger every time — if you’re a little innocent kid (as I am for the moment, in misty-eyed memory) breaking the hard, cruel, White law, which forbids you to run away from home, and which imposes its disgusting White discipline on you. Ah, if the White Mommer and Pop only could understand! As the nigger understands! The child is a thing that requires understanding. He is a wild, Rousseauvian thing, a fragment of wild nature. He hates discipline! He wants to run wild! The nigger is nearer to nature: he understands the child. Up, the Nigger! Down, the White Momma! And especially, down the White Papa!�

Lewis suggests that Bildad may have been happy to help “the insurrectionary kid against his family� because he is “rather glad to cause a little anxiety and discomfort to the Adult white. All Bildads must have some sympathy with revolt in any form.�

Sherwood Anderson (Credit: ZUMA Press / Album)

Lewis acknowledges that:

the order of the White world was far from perfect, but it was nevertheless a form of order that should not utterly be allowed to decay. Discipline is the enemy of the ‘good time,’ certainly, whether it is discipline in a family, army, school, or state: but no good time ever was secured for very long by a studied neglect of disciplines.

Lewis characterizes this principle as one of the “elementary, universal, homely truths from which there is no escape . . . the first conditions of organization or ‘mind,’ as opposed to chaos or ‘sensation.’�

Sometimes, Paleface shifts to the white man himself. Lewis was no enthusiast for white rule over the colored races; at one point he speculates wistfully on how history might have been different if our ancestors had never bothered with exploration:

If the White world had kept more to itself and interfered less with other people, it would have remained politically intact, and no one would have molested it; the Negro would still be squatting outside a mud-hut on the banks of the Niger, the Delaware would still be chasing the buffalo.

But the great European expansion occurred, and we have no choice but to confront the resulting entanglements and resentments. As might be expected of a veteran of the Great War, Lewis saw European petty nationalism as one of the white man’s greatest weaknesses:

[A] Swiss peasant woman is in character and physical appearance often so identical with a Swedish, English, German, or French girl, that they might be twin sisters. It has always been fratricidal that these people should be taught to disembowel, blind and poison each other on the score of their quite imaginary “differences� of blood and mind, but today there is less excuse for it than ever before.

Wyndham Lewis, photograph by George Charles Beresford, 1917

Lewis was American on his father’s side and free of the anti-American prejudices common to Europeans of his time. He saw America as a “melting pot� of European nationalities (and excluding non-whites). He thought the American race problem would be a warning for Europeans:

For what our White skin is worth, it is in America that its destinies are today most clearly foreshadowed: the essential universality of the problems provided for the Palefaces of America by the Indian factor in Latin America, by the Negro in North America and the West Indies, and by the proximity of Asia to the western shores of the United States, makes their attitude in face of them of some moment to Europeans. And though there is no White man’s burden in Europe at present, the isolation of Europe is rather artificial.

Lewis hoped for the eventual unity of European nations: “So why not a melting pot, instead of more and more intensive discouragement of such a fusion? Europe is not so very large: why should it not have one speech like China and acquire one government?�

Wyndham Lewis’s death in 1957 saved him from learning that his hoped-for European unity, when it arrived, was the triumph of every romantic racial notion he despised, and would be the replacement of “palefaces� by the dusky hoards glorified by Lawrence and Anderson.