Vortex Out of German London 1

________ 2

3

Robert Bond 4

5

Focus on the ‘genuine’ hidden in the interstices between dogmatized 6

beliefs of the world, thus establishing a tradition of lost causes; giving 7

names to the hitherto unnamed. 8

Siegfried Kracauer1 9

10

The Action occurs in the Restaurant Gambetta, in German London, in October, 11

1914. […] 12

A very large brass vase in the middle, and a Russian wood-painting of a 13

Virgin and Child on narrow wall between the two windows, gives the German 14

cultured touch. 15

The peculiar situation of this Restaurant makes it indispensable to a few 16

people. 17

Wyndham Lewis, The Ideal Giant (1917) (CPP 123) 18

19

What is worse, they [‘these learned monsters’] do not know how to pass 20

over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past because they 21

purposely destroy that energy as dangerous to the states for which they 22

work – which it is, for any concrete thing is a danger to rhetoricians and 23

politicians, as dangerous as a hard coin is to a banker. 24

Charles Olson2 25

26

Extraterritorial 27

28

I was like laid off the docks. 29

Mark E. Smith on why he launched The Fall in 19763 30

31

In his review of Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggression (1979), Alan 32

Munton suggests that Jameson’s ‘rule-making rather than rule-breaking’ 33

contemporary academic methodologies cannot supply us with an 34

understanding of the ‘transgressive and pleasurable’ qualities of 35

Wyndham Lewis’s work. The ‘oppositional spirit’ or spirit of joyful 36

rebellion within Lewis’s writings and thinking can be conveyed by a 37

method which situates him alongside ‘illegitimate groupings’, however: 38

Munton points to the ‘illegitimate tradition in nineteenth-century 39

European writing’ – singular social theorists such as Fourier, Stirner, 40

and Nietzsche.4 In the course of this exploration, I want to argue that 41

we warm to Lewis’s specifically Vorticist transgression and illegitimacy, 42

as well as to what Walter Allen called the generally ‘profoundly 43

unEnglish quality’ of Lewis’s ideas, when we see that he is floating free: 44

Lewis’s rebelliousness is enabled by an extraterritoriality which was a 45

centrally defining quality of the Vorticism within which his 46

consciousness matured.5 Such extraterritoriality found expression in his 47

social role as an unattached intellectual; it also became manifest in the 48

‘super-national’ character of Lewis’s activities. This essay sets out one 49

specific manifestation of the émigré extraterritoriality which – I would 50

suggest – fascinatingly characterizes contemporary neo-Vorticist activity 51

as well as the Vorticist-period radical culture in London: the 52

involvement in Anglo-German cultural phenomena. 53

My enquiry develops into a documentation – which is by no 54

means complete – of the points of affinity between the visionary 55

sensibilities of a range of extraterritorial cultural phenomena across the 56

twentieth century: Vorticism, the ‘Lukács circle’, and Expressionism 57

around the First World War, along with the London neo-Vorticism 58

developed by Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling during the mid-1970s and 59

after. A major subtextual concern of my work is that the floating social 60

position, as well as the visionary perspective and strategies, adopted by 61

these extraterritorial avant-gardes may turn out to be of considerable 62

relevance to our neo-liberal intellectual life increasingly riven by reliance 63

on the short-term academic contract and random redundancy. This 64

sociological interest of mine has biographical motivations – motivations 65

which, for the moment at least, my writing cannot help wearing on its 66

sleeve. In many ways this somewhat fraught and fragmentary research 67

constitutes a plain description of how it feels to have an intended 68

academic career terminated by the irrationally competitive market 69

system. What happens to scholarly energy, to academic intent, when 70

one’s department unexpectedly informs one that one can no longer 71

practise that energy, develop one’s intellectual impulses? I began to need 72

to understand spiritual violences: the strange fruit of this society’s 73

almost unbearable frustration. I had sensed that at the core of every 74

aggression expressive of today’s often selfish social behaviour there 75

might lie a more positive, natural form of violence: energies which I 76

could begin to historicize within locatable genealogies of spiritual 77

passion. If we can discern these hidden energies more clearly, perhaps 78

we can begin to redeem the violence to which our intellectual life is now 79

reduced. To transfigure academic egotism into mental vitalities. 80

Philip Head has connected Karl Mannheim’s idea of the 81

Freischwebender – the ‘free-floater’ or unattached intellectual – to T. S. 82

Eliot’s description of Lewis’s political status as a ‘detached observer’; 83

though Head does note too that Mannheim’s canonical sociological 84

conception of a ‘relatively classless stratum [of intellectuals] which is not 85

too firmly situated in the social order’, is not quite identical to Lewis’s 86

ideal of a creative ministry ‘possessing no concerted and lawless power, 87

coming indifferently from all classes’.6 But Lewis’s vaunting, in Rude 88

Assignment (1950), of ‘unofficial, or private, or outside criticism’ – versus 89

intellectual work ‘in the propaganda service of the State’, which is seen 90

as ‘merely fascism’ (RA 81) – is a clear expression of his role as a free-91

floating, disaffiliated commentator. Like Iain Sinclair, unofficial social 92

critic in outside publications from The Kodak Mantra Diaries (1971) 93

onwards, Lewis arguably joins Deleuze’s Spinoza in ‘that line of “private 94

thinkers” who overturn values and construct their philosophy with 95

hammer blows’: unlike ‘the “public professors” (who, according to 96

Leibniz’s approving words, do not disturb the established sentiments, 97

the order of Morality and the Police)’.7 98

Head endorses Michael Löwy’s suggestion that Mannheim’s 99

concept of a grouping of unattached intellectuals drew on his own 100

experience of the group around Georg Lukács, ‘with whom he had been 101

associated in the so-called Free School for Cultural Studies in Budapest 102

in 1917’.8 In her important, yet rarely cited, study of the Lukács circle, 103

Mary Gluck quotes from the diary of one of the group’s most 104

prominent Freischwebender, Béla Balázs, in 1916: 105

106

I am the descendant of a spiritual type which has never appeared 107

in history as a separate race of people, of whom only theosophy 108

gives occasional glimpses, and which has sent only isolated, 109

individual messengers like myself into the world, who even in 110

their isolation and orphaned state recognize their own kind.9 111

112

Though such otherworldly spirito-intellectual messengers may feel able 113

to recognize few of their own kind in the contemporary academic 114

system, Mannheim’s formulation of the concept of the marginal, 115

unattached intellectual, which was ‘more or less complete by 1918’, as 116

Gluck notes, once represented ‘what amounted to a generational 117

manifesto’ within central Europe.10 A case could be made that under 118

existing university conditions the nurture of a singular soul or intellect, 119

the fulfilment of a genuine spirit, has been replaced by the Adorno-120

derived condemnation of idiosyncrasy as bourgeois ideology, ineffectual 121

rebellion; a condemnation paradoxically twinned with a self-publicizing 122

cultivation of truly ersatz, anti-capitalist rebellion itself determined 123

largely by the hustle for tenure. Cultural Marxism as New Labour in 124

polysyllables. The maintenance of hierarchy in the university as 125

elsewhere: today’s mass production of thought is overseen by those who 126

will best promote a false democracy, our complacent populism where 127

the people remain the victims. But in history, the Lukács circle 128

emblematized a wider phenomenon of self-nurturing, intellectual free-129

floaters; a phenomenon which persisted within Weimar Germany. As 130

Martin Jay has written, such Frankfurt School-aligned figures as Adorno, 131

Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer ‘were all unaffiliated and experimental 132

leftists who could have merited Benjamin’s description of Kracauer’s 133

“consistent outsiderness”’.11 A 1931 essay of Kracauer’s, ‘Revolt of the 134

Middle Classes’, adds a Marxist inflection to Deleuze’s general 135

characterization of the philosopher as free-floating Luftmensch, as 136

frequenting ‘various milieus […] in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a 137

traveller or boarding house lodger’.12 Kracauer’s essay, in observing that 138

‘it is the dispossessed middle classes that are rebelling’, hints how the 139

shadowy homelessness of the unattached intellectual prefigures a much 140

more widespread state of bourgeois dispossession within contemporary 141

capitalist society. ‘In economic terms, the middle classes today are to a 142

great extent proletarianized; in conceptual terms, they are homeless. 143

During the current crisis, this proletarianization has exacerbated their 144

resentment of capitalism.’13 145

Just as the paranoias of the Freischwebender are re-enacted in your 146

local Waitrose, Kracauer’s para-academic concept of extraterritoriality 147

has now become a mainstay of the global academic discourse of 148

German Studies – such as Weimar film studies – and critical theory. 149

Jay’s article ‘The Extraterritorial Life of Siegfried Kracauer’, which was 150

included in his collection Permanent Exiles (1985), records how Kracauer 151

filed a series of letters written in the 1960s under the heading of 152

‘extraterritoriality’. Kracauer’s marginality as an unattached intellectual 153

found expression both in his stammer – which, Jay wrote, ‘would 154

preclude, among other things, a teaching career at any time in his life’ – 155

and in his appearance. Jay notes that to Kracauer’s protégé Adorno, 156

‘who actually used the word “extraterritorial”’ when describing 157

Kracauer’s face, ‘he looked as if he were from the Far East’.14 The critic 158

Hans Mayer dubbed him a ‘Japanese painted by an Expressionist’, while 159

Asja Lacis added an ‘African’ allusion.15 Kracauer’s alien’s visage hence 160

alerted others to the way in which the extraterritorial unattached 161

intellectual is characteristically émigré. In his own History: The Last Things 162

Before the Last (1969), he remarked how the émigré (such as himself in 163

America) lives ‘in the near-vacuum of extraterritoriality’.16 Because he 164

saw that Germany itself in 1960 had become ‘no country but a place 165

lying somewhere in a vacuum’, Kracauer was happy to have escaped the 166

unreality of a space ‘frightening in its prosperity, politeness, sham depth, 167

and complete formlessness’.17 168

Extraterritorial Kracauer and Vorticist Lewis are connected 169

specifically by the way in which an émigré extraterritoriality of the 170

unattached intellectual, or artist, characterized London radical 171

modernism. In an essay for The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in 172

Britain 1900-1945 (1982), Charles Spencer noted how Slade-trained 173

Jewish modernists such as David Bomberg ensured that ‘foreignness, so 174

to speak, had been injected into the British art scene not only by the 175

French and Italian avant-garde [Cubo-Futurism], but from within by 176

these Jewish practitioners’.18 Pointing out that Bomberg’s reputation in 177

particular is now ‘probably higher than that of any British artist of his 178

generation and as high as any in the present century’, Spencer went on 179

to approve Andrew Forge’s remarks that ‘not a single one of the 180

generalisations that are usually made about British painting can be 181

applied to Bomberg’s work. It is not graphic, not illustrational, nor 182

anecdotal, nor is it gentle or refined.’19 His was of course not a British 183

art but instead an immigrant London art: cutting his task down to 184

expression, Bomberg was less strictly Vorticist than Expressionist, as he 185

conveyed through In the Hold (1913-14) what Richard Cork called the 186

‘agitation and strain’ of the physical process of migration. Citing Mark 187

Gertler’s memory of disembarkation – ‘All is chaos, selfish and 188

straining. I am being pushed and hustled’ – Cork has suggested that ‘the 189

grid’s explosive effect on the figures in Bomberg’s painting may, 190

therefore, be seen as a metaphor for the broken lives of the immigrants 191

he knew so well’. In the Hold was displayed in the ‘Jewish Section’, 192

organized by Bomberg, of the Twentieth Century Art exhibition held in 193

May 1914 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.20 194

As Muriel Emanuel has observed, it was all the more remarkable 195

that – within a refined and conservative Britain, where ‘foreigners and 196

their alien ideas were regarded with equal scepticism’ – it was ‘precisely 197

in the successful marriage of their cultural backgrounds, and their 198

responsiveness to the major avant-garde artistic developments on the 199

European continent’, that Bomberg’s generation made ‘its impact on 200

British art’.21 What Spencer calls the ‘highly individual and disturbing 201

nature’ of Bomberg’s own art can be traced to its combination of an 202

‘alien’ Jewishness and an ‘alien’ modernism.22 It is indeed precisely the 203

alien quality – that is, the tensed and disturbing quality of émigré 204

extraterritoriality – which Spencer suggests bonded Vorticism with 205

Jewish London modernism. Highlighting the fact that Gaudier-Brzeska 206

shared Jacob Epstein’s 1913 exhibition and became close friends with a 207

number of Jewish artists, Spencer notes that ‘what is significant is that as 208

an alien, by birth and in the daring nature of his work, he allied himself 209

to these Jewish colleagues’.23 Similarly, while Bomberg’s aesthetic 210

alignment with the Vorticist Lewis was of course tense, since it was 211

more a confluence of alien disturbances than an alliance, Walter 212

Michel’s remark that Bomberg ‘consistently rejected’ (M 72) Vorticism 213

does seem extreme. Bomberg refused Lewis’s invitations to contribute 214

illustrations to both issues of BLAST, and further refused to join the 215

Rebel Art Centre in Spring 1914; but he also united with the Vorticists 216

in their dissociation from Marinetti’s and Nevinson’s Futurist polemics, 217

and Bomberg did appear in the special non-members section of the 218

1915 Vorticist Exhibition.24 Crucially, during Lewis’s visit to Bomberg’s 219

Whitechapel home in the winter of 1912, Bomberg had ‘recognized in 220

the conversation, a Slade man honouring the same pledge to which I 221

was staking my life – namely a Partizan’.25 The London Expressionist 222

and the Vorticist were both partisans of extraterritorial disturbance. 223

I am particularly interested in one specific manifestation of the 224

mode of émigré extraterritoriality which characterized the Vorticist-period 225

radical culture in London: the involvement in Anglo-German ‘super-226

national’ artistic endeavours. Writing of ‘the structure of ideas about 227

“super-nationalism” and “universalism” that Lewis had formulated with 228

Nietzsche’s help in 1915’, Paul Edwards cites Ezra Pound’s 1918 remark 229

that Lewis ‘is a collection of races’. As Edwards also notes, Lewis’s 230

thinking about super-nationalism in relation to his (Vorticist) self-image 231

influenced his work on Tarr around the time of the war.26 Unworried by 232

the likely unpopularity of its stance at that time, that novel’s 1915 233

preface hoped for future Anglo-German cultural manifestations, as a 234

concretization of an already-beneficent alien influence: 235

236

Germany’s large leaden brain booms away in the centre of 237

Europe. Her brain-waves and titanic orchestrations have broken 238

round us for too long not to have had their effect. As we never 239

think ourselves, except a stray Irishman or American, we should 240

long ago have been swamped had it not been for the sea. […] 241

Germany has its mission and its beauty. But I do not believe it 242

will ever be able to benefit, itself, by its power and passion. The 243

English may a little more: I hope Russia will. (T1 13-14) 244

245

Lewis’s suggestion here that English culture may continue to be 246

influenced by the ‘power and passion’ of German culture, hints that he 247

conceived of Vorticism and Expressionism, say, as twin artistic 248

movements in some way forming a unified aesthetic project. Looking 249

back on this experimental time so as to assert its essential super-250

nationalism, he indeed wrote that the conjoined ‘vorticist, cubist, and 251

expressionist movements’ had ‘presupposed a new human ethos, which 252

undoubtedly must have superseded, in some measure, modes of feeling 253

of a merely national order’ (WLA 306). The art-movements’ 254

revolutionary affinities meant that ‘in some measure’, for Lewis, the 255

international war could not happen. But it was also the war which, in 256

objectively terminating the movements prematurely, affined them. One 257

central resemblance between Vorticism and Expressionism was their 258

incomplete, speculative nature as cultural phenomena: the movements 259

after all only ‘aimed at a renewal of our artistic sensibility, and to provide 260

it with a novel alphabet of shapes and colours with which to express 261

itself’. Lewis’s crucial retrospective description of Vorticism as ‘a 262

program, rather than an accomplished fact’ (WLA 339), sees it to be as 263

much of a provocative spectre, a semi-formed cultural undercurrent, as 264

Ernst Bloch’s Expressionism. Expressionist architectural innovation – 265

in the form of Bruno Taut’s Glass House, and the surrounding 266

Werkbund Exposition in Cologne – had been shut down prematurely 267

already in August 1914 on account of the First World War.27 Yet as late 268

as 1938 Bloch commented that ‘the inheritance of Expressionism is not 269

yet at an end, because it has not yet been started on at all’.28 Sinclair’s 270

visionary tract ‘Slade & the Tyrannicides’ (in his Suicide Bridge (1979), the 271

text dedicated to Lewis) seems to launch a comparable conception of 272

neo-Vorticism, as a hyper-articulate aesthetic ‘potential’ locked within a 273

clot of inarticulacy and frustrated delivery: 274

275

They [‘Hand & Hyle’] are enclosed in personal sandstorms, 276

furious vortex: questions, accusations are latent, unspoken. 277

The tragedy cannot get into gear. The Miracle Play remains 278

a potential, without text. The craftsmen are absent. The audience 279

is distanced, complacent; egoic attention, half-hearing, repulsed by 280

syntactic crudities. It does not touch them. 281

But the speed: from car to Slade is frenzy, garbled rush of 282

Orphic Mysteries, messenger who cannot get the speech 283

performed in the allowed interval.29 284

285

286

Brian Catling himself stammers, as Kracauer did; and arguably the 287

impeded avant-gardes of Vorticism and Expressionism alike can be 288

placed in what Kracauer termed ‘a tradition of lost causes’. It is also 289

worth underlining the fact that, as such abortive aesthetic programmes, 290

Vorticism and Expressionism – and in particular what Timothy O. 291

Benson has called ‘the urban phase of early Expressionism, centred in 292

Berlin just prior to World War I’ – were affined too by a shared super-293

national quality.30 It seems that such extraterritoriality was precisely a 294

product of a distinctive ‘power and passion’ which marked a certain 295

mode of cultural production across Europe around 1912. Head has 296

noted, crucially, how ‘the implicit criticism of the orthodox critic, in 297

wartime, that Vorticism was un-English’ was ‘curiously paralleled’ by 298

‘German orthodoxy that found Expressionism un-German’. Head 299

argues that the critics believed that the avant-gardes ‘concentrated on 300

self-expression rather than the representation of the cultural values of 301

their national societies’; we could add that it was the peculiarly 302

passionate and severe quality of their expression – Ludwig Meidner’s 303

apocalypticism, for example, and what Head calls Vorticism’s ‘pictorial 304

intensity and implicit violence’ – to which the orthodox especially 305

objected.31 The clairvoyant expression of the frustrated can be troubling, 306

and today Sinclair’s writing – a writing ‘crazy, dangerous, prophetic’, in 307

Angela Carter’s apt words – continues to raise the hackles of those who 308

would delete passion from culture.32 In a sense it was precisely because 309

the force of Vorticist and Expressionist imagery powerfully registered 310

social tension and prophesized the coming war (and while the 311

newspaper critics looked the other way), that The Times could go on, in 312

1915, to accuse the Vorticists of an aesthetic violence worthy of the 313

Junker, ‘should the Junker happily take to painting, instead of disturbing 314

the peace of Europe’.33 As Lewis would write in Rude Assignment, 315

‘[s]everity [in visual art], like Satire, will only in the end be tolerated in 316

the foreigner’ (RA 132). In his 1978 essay ‘Servant to the Stars’, Sinclair 317

identified this extraterritorial passion, ‘solar’ disturbance, as the defining 318

feature of the neo-Vorticism of Catling’s Pleiades in Nine (1976). ‘The 319

same alienated “foreign” quality: solar men. The sun roaring beneath the 320

formal English surface: “Saxon or photon”.’34 321

As Head sees, Expressionism and Vorticism ‘shared what 322

Eksteins calls “a motif of violence – in theme, in form, in colour – 323

which was more intense than that to be found in either cubism or 324

futurism”’.35 This is just one of the affinities between Vorticism and 325

Expressionism recorded in Head’s brilliantly and extensively 326

documented article ‘Vorticist Antecedents’; yet, arguably, it is precisely 327

this affinity which most explains why, as Edwards has put it, ‘visual 328

Vorticism’s connections with Cubism and Futurism have been 329

acknowledged more fully than its no less important connections with 330

Expressionism’.36 As if seeking to develop Sinclair’s solar imagery into a 331

full-blown imagery of informal sunspot – or sunstream – passion, Head 332

contends that ‘Vorticism’s relationship to Expressionism is best 333

visualised as a flow of two streams fed, in part, and unevenly, from a 334

common proto-Expressionist, proto-Vorticist source, rather than as a 335

flow from one stream to the other’. Head points to the image of the 336

vortex, when adopted as a motif of ‘transcendental experience’ (or 337

P/passion), as a common source: this concept of the vortex was used in 338

Edwardian England by the Theosophical Society (which directly 339

influenced Kandinsky and Mondrian), and also within artistic Munich 340

around 1900, where the vortex – Head states – was ‘readily visualized in 341

the years preceding the emergence of the “new art” as a point of 342

experience at which the long-dominant traditions of naturalist art […] 343

could be supplanted by a creative vision which combined the ecstatic 344

with the geometric’.37 The suggestion is that Expressionism and 345

Vorticism sprang out as two trajectories from the ur-modernist project 346

of capturing transcendental passion within aesthetic form. 347

Neil H. Donahue has noted how within Hugo von 348

Hofmannsthal’s originary document of German literary modernism, 349

‘The Chandos Letter’ (1902), the vortex-image ‘represents the 350

concentration of his disordered vision into sudden visions of a higher 351

order’. ‘The figure of the vortex’ is ‘the only image to be repeated in the 352

letter’, Donahue observes, adding that ‘the figure of the vortex controls 353

the formal organization of the letter in its different stages and represents 354

its increasing density as a self-reflexive construction.’38 In his 355

introduction to the 1963 Penguin anthology of Twentieth-Century German 356

Verse, Patrick Bridgwater similarly summarized the work of early 357

Expressionist poet August Stramm, in terms of its ‘dynamic, […] highly 358

concentrated expressions of an inner state or vision’: 359

360

[Stramm’s poems] are dynamic, staccato, abstract, highly 361

concentrated expressions of an inner state or vision. By means of 362

neologisms (verbs formed from adjectives and nouns, etc.), an 363

absence of punctuation, more or less arbitrary line-breaks, 364

Stramm seeks – successfully – to convey the immediate dynamism 365

of the moment of sensation. […] Together with Arno Holz’s 366

impressionistic ‘central axis’ poetry, Stramm’s work is closest to 367

the work of non-German poets: Italian Futurism (Ungaretti and 368

the early Montale) and Anglo-American Vorticism.39 369

370

The preoccupation with art as a geometrical, ‘abstract’ capturing of 371

visionary dynamics arguably constituted the basis for what Bridgwater 372

calls the ‘closeness between Expressionist poetry and Vorticism, at least 373

in their theoretical substructure’.40 Head’s findings consistently 374

underline how this preoccupation was sourced in the proto-Expressionist 375

aesthetics of Munich around 1900. Recording that Hermann Obrist’s 376

unpublished papers include art criticism from 1895 titled Ecstatic Vortex, 377

and that Peg Weiss described this compilation as offering ‘an 378

astonishing anticipation of Vorticist poetry’, Head refers to Obrist’s idea 379

that (in Wilhelm Weber’s words) ‘the spiral is one of the basic forms 380

that visualize dynamic force’.41 Lewis’s susceptibility to this somewhat 381

subterranean notion – and its central significance as a fundamental 382

‘common proto-Expressionist, proto-Vorticist source’ for Vorticism – is 383

suggested by the six months he spent in Munich in 1906, when he 384

studied art at the Akademie Heymann, as well as by his remarks in the 385

editorial for the second volume of BLAST (1915) that ‘unofficial 386

Germany has done more for the movement that this paper was founded 387

to propagate, and for all branches of contemporary activity in Science 388

and Art, than any other country. It would be the absurdest ingratitude 389

on the part of artists to forget this’ (B2 5).42 390

It may well have been an idea of the visionary vortex that Lewis 391

had in mind when he defended, in this mid-war editorial, the historical 392

link between un-German, ‘unofficial’ cognition from Germany and un-393

English, equally spectral, Vorticist cognition from London. Elsewhere in 394

BLAST, it was Enemy of the Stars (1914) which represented – in 395

Edwards’s words – ‘English Modernism’s most concerted attempt to 396

come to terms with the Expressionist heritage of German culture’: 397

moreover ‘it [Enemy of the Stars] is, at least for Lewis, at the heart of the 398

Vorticist project’.43 Edwards also traces the spectral obscurity of Enemy 399

of the Stars within contemporary English studies to its (un-)German, 400

Expressionist heritage. ‘If Enemy of the Stars is not a well-known 401

modernist literary text, that is at least partly because its affiliations are 402

with Expressionism, and its intellectual lineage, correspondingly, is 403

through Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Max Stirner.’44 The relation of 404

Blast to Expressionist visual art is signalled most obviously by the fact 405

that the major Berlin Expressionist journal Der Sturm was, as Richard 406

Humphreys wrote, ‘clearly an influence on the title and contents of the 407

London magazine’.45 Der Sturm had a travelling show in London in 408

February 1914; Lewis contributed a ‘Note [on Some German Woodcuts 409

at the Twenty-One Gallery]’ to BLAST in 1914 (see B1 136).46 Still in 410

1921, in his foreword to the ‘Tyros and Portraits’ exhibition catalogue, 411

Lewis was comparing ‘the experiments of the 1914 Vorticists’ to 412

‘Kandinsky’s expressionism’ (CWB 354). Kandinsky had made regular 413

contributions to the Allied Artists’ Association Salons in London 414

throughout the period from 1909 to 1914; the first volume of BLAST 415

included ‘Inner Necessity’ (B1 119-25), the Vorticist Edward 416

Wadsworth’s substantial review of Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in 417

Art (über das Geistige in der Kunst; 1912).47 418

‘Inner Necessity’, in citing Kandinsky’s emphasis on the 419

inevitability of expression in the visual arts – ‘“the inevitable desire to 420

express the objective is the force which is here termed Inner Necessity”’ 421

(B1 120; trans. Wadsworth) – resonated with the proto-Expressionist 422

poetic theory of Arno Holz. As Bridgwater notes, Arno Holz’s Revolution 423

der Lyrik (1899) recommended the use of ‘“inevitable” inner rhythms’, 424

along with the assembly of images or lines on ‘an invisible central axis’; 425

Holz’s advocacy of a compulsive, if spectral, centralizing focus ‘suggests 426

a parallel with the theory behind the Vorticist movement of 1914, and 427

points to the later experiments of August Stramm’.48 This sort of 428

alliance between the driven objectives of visual art and writing was 429

exemplary of Expressionist production, which stressed what Sigrid 430

Bauschinger has called a ‘complementary interaction between a work of 431

visual art and poetry’: for example, the September 1912 issue of Der 432

Sturm featured both Franz Marc’s woodcut Versöhnung and Else Lasker-433

Schüler’s poem ‘Der Versöhnungstag’ (‘Reconciliation’; also ‘Yom 434

Kippur’). The aim ‘to represent a cohesive aesthetic vision by employing 435

a diversity of artistic media and methods’, Bauschinger points out, was 436

an idea ‘at the heart of Expressionism’ – typified by Herwarth Walden’s 437

gathering of Der Sturm itself.49 Rosemarie Haag Bletter has documented 438

that in 1914, while he was designing the Glass House, Taut published an 439

essay in Der Sturm proposing an ideal building ‘in which all the arts 440

would be unified’ – perhaps as if inevitably, on an invisible axis since, as 441

Bletter points out, Taut’s essay ‘reveals his awareness of the work of 442

Kandinsky and other Expressionist artists and sculptors’.50 443

If the Expressionist multi-media method is suggestive of the 444

Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, Vorticism – in its duality of visual and 445

literary impulses – harks back to Blake. Andrew Causey argues that 446

Lewis’s designs, like Blake’s, ‘reflect ideas arising out of his writing’ 447

because Lewis, like Blake, made his visual project the ‘representation of 448

ideas’ – or the representation of faculties such as reason and the 449

imagination. ‘Among painters Lewis was intellectually in a class of his 450

own, a philosopher-artist like William Blake, rationalizing issues through 451

writing and painting.’51 Vorticism expressed Lewis’s role as writer-artist. 452

As he later wrote of his ‘new philosophy called Vorticism’, it had 453

offered an ‘inflammatory doctrine [which] affected equally the images 454

which issued from its visual inspiration, and likewise the rather less 455

evident literary sources of its ebullience’ (CHC 378). In his memoir of 456

Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound agreed that with Vorticism ‘we wished a 457

designation that would be equally applicable to a certain basis for all the 458

arts’.52 Stressing that a meta-art historical perspective on Vorticism is the 459

most appropriate one to adopt – when we understand Vorticism to have 460

constituted ‘a program for all the arts’ – Reed Way Dasenbrock argues 461

that it ‘was not the isolated and abortive movement it might seem to be 462

to an art historian, for its impact and influence was primarily on 463

Modernist literature, not on the visual arts’. Dasenbrock points out, 464

referring specifically to Yeats, that ‘the dynamic formism Vorticism 465

advocated and represented became a formal pattern underlying central 466

works of modernist literature’.53 I am interested specifically in the neo-467

modernist, neo-Vorticist preoccupation with the formalization of 468

visionary dynamics. Indeed it is, as I have argued elsewhere, precisely 469

within the London neo-Vorticist oeuvre of the mid-1970s that the 470

dynamic formist ambition was most evidently and powerfully 471

recurrent.54 472

Writing of Catling’s ‘conceptual apparatus’, Allen Fisher has 473

remarked on how it ‘links directly to aspects of Expressionism, to ideas 474

of revealing the unseen and clasping an inner life into outer presence’.55 475

We could speculate that Brian Kim Stefans was thinking of the influence 476

of Expressionism on Sinclair, when he wrote that Veronica Forrest-477

Thomson, amongst contemporary poets, was ‘one of the few, along 478

with J. H. Prynne and perhaps Iain Sinclair, who appeared to engage 479

with the most difficult traditions of modernism’.56 (One thing shared by 480

Forrest-Thomson’s and Sinclair’s poetries of the mid-late 1970s is a 481

concern with the constitutive violence of the Cambridge intellectual 482

environment, and with the repression of spiritual energies – perhaps the 483

negative of the Expressionist project of revealing the unseen.) Probably 484

the most well-known indication of the Expressionist influence on 485

Sinclair’s work was the use of Meidner’s ‘Apocalyptic Landscape’ (1913) 486

as a dust-wrapper illustration for the millennial anti-epic Downriver 487

(1991): that fiction’s Dr Adam Tenbrücke (a Wapping-based collector of 488

Expressionist art) might be interested to learn that, coincidentally, this 489

‘Apocalyptic Landscape’ was the only colour illustration in the first 490

Meidner monograph, Lothar Brieger’s Meidner (1919).57 Sinclair’s first 491

novel, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (1987), had already featured on its 492

dust jacket ‘Time and the Raven’ by John Bellany – an artist later 493

labelled by Sinclair ‘the distinguished expressionist’.58 The ‘Time and the 494

Raven’ dust jacket was reproduced in the catalogue The Shamanism of 495

Intent (1991), a publication of Sinclair’s from the same year as Downriver 496

which also features his essay ‘The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective 497

Manifesto’.59 498

This essay saw the attempted renewal of Expressionist (and also 499

Neo-Romantic) apocalypticism to be a defining strategy of 500

contemporary art in need of enlivenment. ‘We somnambulated through 501

a house of mirrors, soliciting only those images capable of doubling as a 502

distortion of the familiar – Born Again Expressionism (without trauma), 503

or a second life for trembling Romantics, twilight garglers, playboys of 504

ruin.’ It is arguably just because such neo-Expressionism expresses 505

present-day spiritual disturbance (psychic tremble), that it represents a 506

not entirely depleted art for Sinclair, and can converge with what he 507

goes on to call ‘the visionary revival – deregulated shamanism’, such as 508

manifested in the work of Gavin Jones.60 Importantly, in another essay 509

published in 1991, ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent’, Sinclair 510

presents Catling’s neo-Vorticist text The Stumbling Block: Its Index (1990) 511

as an aspect of the visionary revival – a ‘dictation from the furies’ – 512

which is as disturbed, convulsed, as Meidner’s apocalyptic, Expressionist 513

visual art.61 ‘This dictation from the furies could be blocked, seamlessly, 514

alongside Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy of the Stars: it re-defined the notion 515

of “prose-poetry” – as a rolling sequence of frantic, but disciplined, 516

convulsions of language.’62 Sinclair’s conception of Catling’s Spitalfields 517

neo-Vorticism seems to refer, extraterritorially, to an Expressionist 518

convulsive passion roaring (or gargling) beneath ‘the formal English 519

surface’ of prose poetry. These spiritual convulsions recall the ‘sequence 520

of pushes towards that silence in which THE THING can be made’ – 521

the involuntary regulation of breath in terms of which Sinclair described 522

Catling’s stammering action in the Lud Heat (1975) essay ‘A Theory of 523

Hay Fevers’. Here the convulsive pushes end in a moment of discipline 524

– of invocatory silence – rather as, in ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism 525

of Intent’, Catling’s neo-Vorticist energies are held to achieve an 526

Expressionist ‘balance’ of visual and literary impulses. ‘Catling’s work 527

has achieved this balance, the ability to swerve between furnace-forged 528

speech and articulate objects, and to map a field of consciousness eager 529

to sustain them both.’ Sinclair here compares Catling to writer-artist 530

Lewis. He returned to the comparison in Lights Out for the Territory 531

(1997), when describing Catling’s neo-Vorticist poetry books of the 532

mid-1970s, such as Vorticegarden (1974), as ‘subliminal triumphs, 533

unreviewed by literary clubmen, ignored by the art establishment. 534

Catling’s gifts, like those of Wyndham Lewis, made him a leper at both 535

sets of tables.’63 536

537

538

Exilic Magic: A Genealogy 539

540

How all his words followed an unknown needle! 541

He was driven to the unborn from tyranny, persecution, 542

Driven from Prague, Vienna, 543

At last to Paris, the place of Heine’s exile. 544

-Vernon Watkins, ‘The Shooting of Werfel’64 545

546

it was an art & is now a function 547

-Anna Mendelssohn65 548

549

Lewis in ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator’ (1925) suggested a connection 550

between obscure artistic singularity and the supernatural, when he wrote 551

of how, ‘in touch in an organized way with a supernatural world of 552

whose potentialities we can form no conception, the art of Egypt is as 553

rare and irreplaceable a thing as would be some communication 554

dropped upon our earth from another planet’ (WLA 240). I would 555

suggest that this quality of being magically irreplaceable – of being ‘from 556

another planet’, leper-like, perhaps because tuned into a different, more 557

transcendental register or aesthetic tone – is deeply characteristic of 558

such neo-Vorticist work as ‘Servant to the Stars’, just as of such original 559

Vorticist productions as Enemy of the Stars. Arguably, combined ideas of 560

hidden intellectual excellence and of contact with another world are 561

particularly relevant to the present moment, when, following a religious 562

turn in the humanities, ‘it is not simply a matter of believing or not,’ – as 563

Žižek has argued – ‘but, rather, a matter of certain radical experience, of 564

the ability to open oneself to a certain unheard-of dimension’. In The 565

Puppet and the Dwarf (2003), Žižek sees present-day academics’ spirituality 566

to partake of leperdom: ‘what we are getting today is a kind of 567

“suspended” belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) 568

admitted, as a private obscene secret’.66 Neo-Vorticism, with its 569

hermetic spiritual violence and violent textual hermeticism, seems 570

peculiarly illustrative of an art that expresses the contemporary 571

experience of the spiritual as a private obscene secret, at a time when 572

spiritual passion is twinned by the media imagination with migrant 573

terrorist threat. 574

In The Verbals (2003), Sinclair suggested that he viewed the artists 575

he assembled for the 1991 exhibition at the Goldmark Gallery, The 576

Shamanism of Intent, as private, singular: ‘it wasn’t an aesthetic or political 577

movement’, he argued. ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, as a ‘blanket area 578

that I was trying to pitch’, signified instead ‘the notion of some kind of 579

possession or magic, outside the usual parameters’. Sinclair’s relation of 580

these extraterritorial creators, such as Catling, to magical practice recalls 581

the Lukács circle and the way in which, for Balázs in 1916, identification 582

with ‘isolated, individual messengers’ generated the adoption of a 583

magical stance and sensibility: recognition of his exilic status brought 584

him to align himself with ‘theosophy’.67 Gluck refers to Balázs’s 585

childhood sense, which she describes as being already ‘essentially 586

magical’, that ‘behind the appearance of everyday reality there lurked a 587

different secret sphere of life in which “all objects and people are totally 588

different from those here, and are connected to each other in totally 589

different ways.”’68 In Lud Heat Sinclair similarly propounded occult 590

connectivity, with a quote from J. G. Frazer: ‘things which have once 591

been in physical contact continue to act on each other at a distance after 592

contact has been broken’69. Gluck’s account of the Lukács group 593

stresses that the longing for connection was what underpinned its 594

members’ magical interests – as when she quotes from Anna Lesznai’s 595

diaries of the late 1920s. ‘What are the phenomena existing in society 596

and the individual psyche, which have retained strong magical 597

tendencies? These are art, certain facets of religion, erotic love, a whole 598

series of spiritual experiences such as presentiment, telepathy, déjà vu, 599

suggestibility.’ The group was fascinated by magical experiences since 600

such experiences, as Gluck writes, ‘seemed to give a premonition of a 601

radically new form of existence in which direct communion and identity 602

between subject and object would be possible’.70 603

Gluck stressed that ‘members of the Sunday Circle felt, both 604

individually and collectively, almost completely isolated in their own 605

country, and their sense of radical homelessness forms a constant 606

refrain in their letters, essays, and novels.’ With such an exemplarily 607

extraterritorial grouping of ‘radically disaffected or dislocated 608

individuals’, as Gluck notes, ‘it is hardly surprising’ that they ‘could not 609

translate their discontents into the conventional language of radical 610

politics’; she goes on to quote Lesznai: ‘in reality, our group had a closer 611

resemblance to a religious gathering than to a political club: the get-612

togethers had a ritualistic, quasireligious tone’.71 (This description will 613

strike a chord with anyone who has seen the photograph, in The Verbals, 614

of the Fieldgate Street launch party-ritual for Downriver.)72 Citing 615

Lukács’s remark that his circle’s ‘attempt at inner liberation from the 616

spiritual crisis of official Hungary took the form of extolling European 617

modernism’, Gluck emphasizes that for the group ‘cultural radicalism’ 618

seemed ‘not only more congenial but more fundamental than the 619

political radicalism of socialists and other oppositional groups’. Rather 620

as Sinclair has turned to the Burroughsian magico-aesthetic practice of 621

deconditioning of reflexes, for Lukács ‘the modernists stood for an 622

“inner revolution” whose intention was to transform the internal life 623

and the consciousness of individuals, not merely their external power 624

relationships in the social and political world’.73 But of course precisely 625

the internal exiles’ claim for inner revolution – what Balázs called his 626

‘lifelong longing for inner independence and freedom’ – can be seen to 627

affine them to a radical social project.74 To adopt some of David 628

Frisby’s words in relation to the German context, though Kracauer’s 629

(extraterritorial) position may rely on a ‘quasi-religious existentialism’ 630

and so offer a plain ‘existential critique of the existing social order’, it 631

nonetheless remains ‘based on the necessity of the fulfilment of a 632

human essence in the personality’ – a fundamental Marxist necessity.75 633

Free-floating thinkers have often noticed the reduction of 634

fulfilling professional life to hyper-competitive bureaucratic life, such as 635

in our university system now where the free creation of original 636

knowledges has become almost entirely supplanted by the 637

administration of pre-existing knowledges and the battle for status. 638

‘Sharp practice’ becomes an end in itself – so that little of reality is 639

actually practised. In 1986, Burroughs reminded an interviewer that 640

within society ‘at one time each person did have something to do, but 641

less and less as time goes on. You now have one role and a million 642

applicants, and not a very good role at that.’76 Kracauer too – during the 643

time of Vorticism and Expressionism – had sensed that, as Frisby puts 644

it, ‘the feelings and values of the individual can no longer be integrated 645

into the social functions that are available’. Kracauer’s first known 646

publication, ‘On the Experience of the War’ (1915), had taken up with 647

Georg Simmel’s wartime emphasis on the separation of an objective 648

material culture from ‘an unrealized subjective culture of the individual’ 649

(Frisby). ‘Above all else, the most important need of the soul, the 650

religious, lay broken; there were no living, universally binding beliefs, 651

that expressed our essence.’ Kracauer saw the curtailment of human 652

existence within social forms: for him it was precisely the professional 653

social roles of ‘the teacher, the artist and the politician’, what Sinclair 654

would call their parameters, which were ‘incapable of liberating essential 655

inner needs’. What attracts me is the suggestion, hinted at by Kracauer, 656

that a spiritual project of the articulation of inner needs – the fulfilment 657

of individuals – through the definition of ‘living, universally binding 658

beliefs’, or a pursuit of an absolute, could be twinned with a recoil from 659

wage economy and professional status characteristic of the 660

extraterritorial Freischwebender. That figure’s social alienation – her exilic 661

character – again seems peculiarly tuned to ‘the notion of some kind of 662

possession or magic, outside the usual parameters’.77 Bridgwater wrote 663

of Erich Fried – the translator of Dylan Thomas who moved to London 664

in 1938, and whom Bridgwater called ‘the chief representative of the 665

second generation of German-speaking poets to have lived in England’ 666

– that ‘the fact of living in exile has clearly influenced Fried’s attitude to 667

his language: not being the language of everyday communication, it has 668

gained in magic and mystery’. (Celan’s poetry, judged Bridgwater, 669

represented a ‘magic that is over-aware of its own seriousness’.)78 670

Commenting on Bomberg’s extraterritorial semi-Vorticist period around 671

1912, Peter Fuller senses that Bomberg shifted into his ‘profoundly un-672

Modern’ abstraction ‘in the hope of intensifying his eschatological, even 673

biblical, motifs’: the exilic sensibility’s pursuit of an absolute again 674

becomes visible.79 675

By 1920, in his essay ‘Schicksalswende der Kunst’ (‘Art’s Turn of 676

Fate’), Kracauer was arguing that Expressionism was effectively defunct. 677

This was the case, he claimed, because it no longer offered a vitalist-678

spiritualist mode of resistance to mundane capitalist life. Before the war, 679

by contrast – Kracauer suggested – Expressionism had struggled 680

towards that ‘which the great social revolutions of the present set as 681

their task in the realms of real life: the destruction of the powers of 682

existence that have hitherto been valid.’ Kracauer defined the pre-war 683

Expressionist project as the expression of ‘the inner needs of the human 684

being transformed into a primal self [Ur-ich]’. Kracauer wrote of this Ur-685

ich as ‘a soul [in] search of a God’, undergoing Stumbling Block-like 686

‘ecstatic convulsions’: in the face of the objective culture of rationalized, 687

mechanized society. ‘Painter and poet endeavour to strip existing reality 688

of its power and to reveal it for what it actually is: a deceptive, 689

shadowlike essence, a chaos without soul, without meaning.’ The artist’s 690

elemental spirituality may be accused of being equally shadowlike, 691

spectral, but for Kracauer the earlier Expressionist could ‘cast the 692

burning torch into the buildings of our existence and inflame the ghosts 693

into revolution.’ With Expressionism we saw the extraterritorial ghosts 694

broach the barricades; while the citizen remains condemned to a ‘God-695

estranged reality’, as if encased in a ‘brazen solid wall’, it had once been 696

Expressionism’s ‘historical merit to have forced a breach in this wall, to 697

have reduced it to ruins.’80 Looking back on Vorticism in Blasting and 698

Bombardiering (1937), Lewis similarly ascribed insurrectionary capacities 699

to the spirituality of an extraterritorial avant-garde. Lewis commented 700

on how, to Asquith, Vorticist ‘pictures looked like plastic cyphers or 701

properties of the magician. And here was its high-priest! […] This 702

learned P.M. was reminded of illuminism, doubtless’ (BB 51). Lewis’s 703

retrospective account projects Vorticism as a threatening leper colony – 704

or an invisible revolutionary community which may be spiritualist or 705

may be political: ‘I might [to Asquith] almost have been the member of 706

a powerful secret society’ (BB 53). There was in fact, Lewis added, a ‘tidy 707

bit of political contraband tucked away in our technical militancy’ (BB 708

253). 709

Kracauer offered what Frisby called a ‘more specific analysis of 710

Expressionism’ in his 1921 article ‘Max Beckmann’.81 Sinclair too turned 711

to Beckmann, when, in ‘The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective 712

Manifesto’, he sought to stress the collision of the spiritual and the 713

political, of subjective and objective cultures, within our contemporary 714

art economy. ‘For the great Max Beckmann there were two worlds, the 715

“spiritual life” and “political reality”; worlds that his paintings, 716

paradoxically, insisted upon fusing. The heavenly and the mundane 717

interpenetrate any of the present worlds that we can retain for a 718

moment before our eyes.’ Yet Sinclair here was concerned to develop a 719

critique of a mundane, or fake, performance transcendentalism which 720

undermines an implicit purity of the transcendental. Contemporary art-721

spirituality is seen by Sinclair to be not an absolutism oppositional to 722

capitalism, but instead deeply complicit with it; a new twist in the career. 723

In the contemporary art world ‘apparently occult acts are revealed as 724

survivalist reflexes. Shamanism has developed its own realpolitik. […] 725

This art of secrets, remote or hidden beneath the ground, is also an art 726

of expediency.’82 Interestingly, Beckmann’s own ‘Creative Credo’ 727

(written in 1918 and published in 1920) itself attacked the notion of a 728

pure – or more precisely an abstract – transcendental. ‘Complete 729

withdrawal in order to achieve that famous purity people talk about as 730

well as the loss of self in God, right now all that is too bloodless and 731

also loveless for me.’ An engaged vitalism seemed to be moving 732

Beckmann away from an adolescent, abstract transcendentalism – ‘that 733

false, sentimental, and swooning mysticism’ – and towards a mature 734

‘transcendental objectivity’: ‘I hope we will achieve a transcendental 735

objectivity out of a deep love for nature and mankind.’ I have argued 736

elsewhere that a comparable enriched abstraction is precisely the goal of 737

the Vorticist and neo-Vorticist visionary mode.83 738

It had indeed been their state of disengagement – alienation – 739

which had originally drawn exilic modernists to mysticism. Writing of 740

the German Expressionists around 1910 in her article ‘Jewish 741

Renaissance – Jewish Modernism’, Inka Bertz noted how ‘social 742

isolation and the artist’s alienation from the public now became a 743

dominant theme – for example, in the journal Das neue Pathos. Artists 744

sought to overcome their anomie through mysticism, theosophy, and a 745

religion of art.’84 Simultaneously in Hungary, as Gluck records, 746

Mannheim’s ‘growing interest in the philosophic problems of mysticism 747

coincided with Lukács’ discovery in 1911 of Buber’s work on Chassidic 748

mysticism’.85 Yet Gluck stresses that for the Lukács group ‘antirational 749

phenomena such as mysticism, erotic love, and the world of fairy tales 750

were merely oblique symbols of metaphysical possibilities in some far-751

off future, rather than genuine options and solutions for the present’.86 752

Lajos Fülep’s comment that ‘quite simply, we are the seekers of a higher, 753

spiritual world outlook, and we are not to be confused with any sects’, 754

points forward to Sinclair’s disavowal of ‘movement’ status for the 755

group involved with The Shamanism of Intent.87 756

As spirituals but not spiritualists or sectaries, the continental 757

extraterritorial modernists were of course also affined to Vorticist Lewis 758

– in particular, to Lewis’s critique of Kandinsky’s abstraction. Lewis’s 759

ambivalent view of supernatural interests has been summarized usefully 760

by Richard Humphreys, who notes that ‘although [Lewis] was usually 761

scornful of most varieties of spiritualism he had a persistent attraction to 762

metaphysical and theological interpretations of reality’. Lewis indeed 763

lectured at the occultist Quest Society in 1914, and Humphreys even 764

writes of a ‘central role of occultist thought in his work’ of the Vorticist 765

period. Lewis ‘was not a believer in table-tapping or levitation, but 766

rather saw the artist’s close engagement with the material world as a 767

complex relationship with psychic and metaphysical realities. Without 768

this visionary impulse he believed art would be inert naturalism or mere 769

“significant form”’.88 But Kandinsky’s abstraction too could be attacked; 770

what Giovanni Cianci has termed Kandinsky’s ‘lyrico-mysticism’ led 771

Lewis to view the Expressionist as being, ‘at the best, wandering and 772

slack’ (B2 40).89 Lewis’s objection to spiritualist diffusionism returned in 773

Men Without Art (1934): ‘The massive sculpture of the Pharaohs is 774

preferable to the mist of the automatic or spirit-picture. Then, the 775

dreamy and disordered naturalism of so much European art is akin to 776

the floating, ill-organized, vapours of the plastic of the spiritist’ (MWA 777

99). It should be emphasized that this extremist reaction against the ill-778

organized and unsolid derived from the originary Vorticist, visionary 779

demand for heightened definition. Lewis suspected that the quest for 780

magical definition could be impeded by movements of Expressionist 781

subjectivism. In Head’s words, Lewis ‘had seen Kandinsky as probably 782

the most logical of the artists directing their attention to abstract 783

experiment, but he also found “too much of the vagueness, of the effect 784

of a drunken tracery, that spirit drawings have”. Kandinsky, “docile to 785

the intuitive fluctuations of his soul”, receded into a “cloud-world, out 786

of the material and solid universe”.’90 787

Sinclair, in his essay ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, his Churches’, from 788

the neo-Vorticist period of Lud Heat, famously describes the affinity of 789

Hawksmoor’s east London churches to Egyptian massive sculpture. 790

‘Certain features are in common: extravagant design, massive, almost 791

slave-built, strength – not democratic.’ Each Hawksmoor building ‘is an 792

enclosure of force’ or spiritual energy-trap precisely because its own 793

architecture has been massively, extravagantly, defined.91 Lewis, 794

developing his Vorticist concern with logical abstraction in The Art of 795

Being Ruled (1926), had held ‘this simplicity, conceptual quality, hard 796

exact outline, grand architectural proportion’ to be prerequisites for ‘the 797

greatest art’ (ABR 338). In the encyclopaedic polemic published the 798

following year, Time and Western Man (1927), Lewis noted his early 799

‘propensity for the exactly-defined and also, fanatically it may be, the 800

physical or the concrete’: this designer’s constructivism was ‘no doubt 801

what made [him], to begin with, a painter’. As a ‘graphic artist’ he 802

required ‘that definition and logical integrity’. Here Lewis recognized 803

that ‘the processes of creative genius, however, are not so dissimilar to 804

those of the spirit-draughtsman’. But though ‘the act of artistic creation 805

is a trance or dream-state’, it is one ‘very different from that experienced 806

by the entranced medium’. ‘A world of the most extreme and logically 807

exacting physical definition is built up out of this susceptible condition 808

in the case of the greatest art, in contrast to the cloudy phantasies of the 809

spiritist’ (all TWM 109). Vernon Watkins, moreover, maintained that 810

‘vagueness is an enemy of holiness; the soul of harmony continually 811

thirsts for definition’.92 812

813

814

Space Discipline 815

816

In his review of White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings, W. L. Webb referred to 817

Sinclair’s ‘sketches as hard and definitive as a Wyndham Lewis 818

portrait’.93 For the Vorticist Lewis, spiritual definition and visionary 819

clarity is achieved through organization: in ‘The Dithyrambic Spectator’, 820

as we have seen, the exemplarily otherworldly ‘art of Egypt’ is held to be 821

‘in touch in an organized way with a supernatural world of whose 822

potentialities we can form no conception’. In Time and Western Man, 823

when asserting the ‘magical quality in artistic expression’, Lewis similarly 824

wrote of the artist ‘tapping the supernatural sources and potentialities of 825

our existence’ (TWM 188). The artist is tapping with intent, questioning; 826

interrogating: manipulating: 827

828

The production of a work of art is, I believe, strictly the work of a 829

visionary. […] Shakespeare, writing his King Lear, was evidently in 830

some sort of a trance; for the production of such a work of art an 831

entranced condition seems as essential as it was for Blake when 832

he conversed with the Man who Built the Pyramids. […] 833

If you say that creative art is a spell, a talisman, an 834

incantation – that it is magic, in short, there, too, I believe you 835

would be correctly describing it. That the artist uses and 836

manipulates a supernatural power seems very likely. (TWM 187) 837

838

Of course the artist too is being organized (and re-organized), by 839

magico-artistic forces – as Lewis suggests in The Diabolical Principle and the 840

Dithyrambic Spectator (1931) when he writes that ‘art at its fullest is a very 841

great force indeed, a magical force, a sort of life, a very great “reality”’ 842

(DPDS 69). But Vorticist art, in particular, seemed to be characterized 843

by the artist’s organization of supernatural forces or impulses, when 844

artistic creation was a type of ordering ritual. Humphreys’s use of the 845

phrase ‘aesthetic “magic” ritual’ to describe Lewis’s production in 1913, 846

is backed up by Thomas Kush’s insight that Enemy of the Stars shared 847

with Expressionist drama a reliance on ‘ritualized action’.94 In his 1934 848

essay ‘Art in a Machine Age’, Lewis stressed that art ‘is in the same class 849

as ritual, as civilized behaviour and all ceremonial observances – such 850

for that matter as those in which it has its roots historically: it is a 851

symbolic discipline’ (WLA 272). 852

In The Verbals, Sinclair spoke of the influence of ‘elements’ of 853

North African ‘ritual magic’ on Catling’s ‘later collections of poems’ – 854

this refers to books such as The Tulpa Index (1983).95 But it is in relation 855

to Catling’s neo-Vorticist Pleiades in Nine, of the mid-1970s, that Sinclair 856

most interestingly identifies Catling’s poetry as an organizing – defining, 857

clarifying – ritual practice. Sinclair in ‘Servant to the Stars’, like Lewis, 858

cannot see spiritual definition or visionary clarity achieved through a 859

diffusing performance spiritism. ‘Pleiades sustains that urge towards a 860

new purifying ritual magic, or transformation. Light. No pose or 861

Yeatsian séance or scribbled automatic writ.’ These sentences appear 862

immediately after the essay’s references to the neo-Vorticist ‘alienated 863

“foreign” quality’, of a ‘sun roaring beneath the formal English surface’: 864

for Sinclair defined extraterritorial passion, clear ‘solar’ disturbance, is 865

precisely the frequency of visionary light to which Catling’s aesthetic 866

practice of purifying ritual magic aspires. Rather as for Lewis artistic 867

magic built up a ‘world of the most extreme and logically exacting 868

physical definition’, or for Watkins ’the soul of harmony continually 869

thirsts for definition’, so for Sinclair the neo-Vorticist visionary stance 870

means that ‘the face is resolutely turned towards that beam of light that 871

is fed with compressed images (and meanings): “beyond the faint glow / 872

of sainted domestic / fury”.’96 The sense is that this cognitive beam is a 873

more violent, more compacted and more intelligent transcendental – 874

passion – than that afforded by psychoanalytically-sanctioned, domestic 875

psychodrama; that it denotes a passionate spiritual knowledge reflective 876

of our present sharp social decay. 877

Lewis described Vorticist art-making in a letter to Charles 878

Handley-Read, on 2 September 1949. ‘The way those things were done 879

– are done, by whoever uses this method of expression – is that a 880

mental-emotive impulse is let loose upon a lot of blocks and lines of 881

various dimensions, and encouraged to push them around and to 882

arrange them as it will’ (L 504). In a footnote Lewis glosses ‘mental-883

emotive’: ‘[b]y this is meant subjective intellection, like magic or religion’ 884

(L 505). Lewis’s identification of disciplined formal design with the 885

operation of a magical ‘impulse’, itself beam-like and intelligently 886

manipulating (within) space, found an analogue twenty years later in 887

‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, when J. H. Prynne proposed another space-888

ordering impulse – an extension of spiritual attention, or ‘mythic 889

duration of/ spirit’ extending over lines: 890

891

[…] The Hyper- 892

borean paradise was likewise no general 893

term but the mythic duration of 894

spirit into the bone 895

laid out in patterns 896

on the ground.97 897

898

Within Expressionism however – as Kracauer suggested when, in ‘Art’s 899

Turn of Fate’, he wrote of Expressionist art’s ‘texture of lines and 900

bodylike forms, whose structure is almost exclusively determined by the 901

inner needs of the human being transformed into a primal self’ – it was 902

less that a mental-emotive impulse detachedly ordered aesthetic form, 903

than that inner impulses were themselves the aesthetic structure; our inner 904

needs were themselves to constitute and form art’s ‘patterns’.98 But 905

before we too readily separate off a subjectivist Expressionism from an 906

anti-subjectivist Vorticism, we could recall too Head’s argument – and 907

Bridgwater’s evidence, already cited, supporting this argument – that 908

‘the most substantial link between Lewis’s Vorticism and Kandinsky’s 909

Expressionism was a shared belief in the primacy of “inner necessity” in 910

genuine art’.99 Indeed still in Snooty Baronet – the novel published in the 911

same year (1932) as the revised version of Enemy of the Stars – the 912

narrator is driven by an impulsive inner necessity, by his ‘nature 913

consistent with itself, organized upon a single-gauge track so to speak’ 914

(SB 99). This particular mono-track ‘starts’, Lewis stresses, ‘from a 915

nucleus of impulse and of passion’: ‘I pursue the pattern set up by my 916

powerfulest [sic] sensation to its ultimate conclusion’ (SB 99). Snooty 917

runs according to a psycho-predestination – an extremist behaviourism 918

– so that his impulses and passions themselves become the aesthetic 919

form of the narrative. This means that his inner needs can be seen to 920

form inevitably into a fictional ritual; rather as Sinclair, in The Verbals, 921

saw the narrative structure of White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings to be ‘pre-922

ordinated in quite a fixed form, like a series of rituals’. That novel, 923

Sinclair felt, was ‘a much more possessed book [than Downriver]’; one 924

which – just like Enemy of the Stars – ‘enacts itself like theatre’.100 925

Vorticist art-making, then, involves a mental-emotive impulse 926

detachedly ordering inner necessity into ritualistic aesthetic form; but 927

impulses, or inner necessity, are also shaping themselves into form. 928

Head helpfully summarizes: 929

930

Lewis did not disavow this force of ‘inner necessity’ in art, but 931

modified Kandinsky’s subjectivism by insisting that a principle of 932

classicism, something ‘nobly defined and exact’ but not in itself ‘a 933

finished thing’, was needed to reinforce it with an ‘outer necessity’ 934

of a formal order.101 935

936

In Time and Western Man Lewis then held the artist to be, properly 937

speaking, a ‘transformed magician’: one who organizes inner necessity 938

‘personally’ (which is to say impersonally, objectively but experimentally, 939

productively): 940

941

For me art is the civilized substitute for magic; as philosophy is 942

what, on a higher or more complex plane, takes the place of 943

religion. […] [T]hough the artist is certainly not devoid of 944

religious emotion, it is exercised personally, as it were; and he is in 945

temper the opposite of the religionist. The man-of-science is 946

another sort of transformed magician. (TWM 188) 947

948

The idea is that the transformed magician is making a work which is a 949

free ritual, a mobile ritual (Catling’s performance work provides obvious 950

performed examples). We could remember Adorno’s argument to 951

Benjamin, in his letter of 18 March 1936, concerning ‘the magical 952

element that persists in the bourgeois work of art’. Adorno stressed that 953

‘the heart of the autonomous work of art […] compounds within itself 954

the magical element with the sign of freedom’. Paradoxically the very 955

magical, ritualistic urge to dominate inner necessity into something 956

nobly-defined and exact, Adorno suggested, ensures that the resulting 957

art-ritual is a conscious, free, ‘materialist’ mode of production – or 958

offers us a prophetic image of such rational experiment: 959

960

[…] precisely the uttermost consistency in the pursuit of the 961

technical laws of autonomous art actually transforms this art 962

itself, and, instead of turning it into a fetish or taboo, brings it that 963

much closer to a state of freedom, to something that can be 964

consciously produced and made.102 965

966

We get a strong sense of Lewis’s ambition that Vorticist ritualist 967

‘symbolic discipline’, the construction of ‘a world of the most extreme 968

and logically exacting physical definition’, might become such a 969

freedom, when in his 1956 retrospective account ‘The Vorticists’ he 970

writes that the artist in refusal of mimetic naturalism should ‘invent 971

shapes of his own, and assemble them – “compose” them – in full 972

independence, just as the musician does his sounds’ (CHC 378). Hence 973

Lewis’s concept of the pictorial alphabet: Vorticist practice is to be the 974

shuffling and reshuffling of ‘a closely-packed, brightly-coloured alphabet 975

of objects, with a logic of its own’ (CHC 380). But Lewis’s builder’s 976

terminology – the shapes are to be assembled, and closely packed – 977

always continues to hint that Vorticism, precisely when experimentally 978

and consciously produced, is a symbolic discipline aiming at ‘hard exact 979

outline, grand architectural proportion’. For the construction of a world 980

of the most extreme and logically exacting physical definition aimed to 981

enact a revelation of the Vorticist picture’s buried tectonic form. 982

As Head notes, ‘the term “vortex” was never applied with much 983

exactitude to painterly work which more often sought to articulate 984

virtual space in constructivist, tectonic modes than by means of spirals 985

and curvilinear forms’.103 Lewis’s 1934 article ‘Plain Home-Builder: 986

Where is Your Vorticist?’ stressed that Vorticism ‘was, in a sense, a 987

substitute of architecture for painting’ (CHC 278). Lewis had gone on, post-988

war in 1919, to publish The Caliph’s Design: Architects! Where is Your 989

Vortex?, because Vorticism always was ‘aimed essentially at an 990

architectural reform’; ‘the Vorticist was peculiarly preoccupied with the 991

pictorial architectonics at the bottom of picture-making – the logical 992

skeleton of the sensuous pictorial idea’ (CHC 278). For Lewis Vorticist 993

art was to make incarnate, make manifest the logical skeleton, rather as 994

for Sinclair’s Hawksmoor ‘the temple is a map of the idea’.104 In his 995

1934 essay Lewis called Vorticist images ‘pictorial spells, as it were, cast 996

by us, designed to attract the architectural shell that was wanting’ (CHC 997

278). You could say Lewis wanted another London conjured up out of 998

the hidden armature of inner necessity – out of the very structure of our 999

desirous, needy cognition. 1000

The aim to define exactly so as to ‘cast’ potential spatial structures 1001

persists in neo-Vorticism. Simon Perril has wondered what the 1002

‘fascinating diagrammatic line-drawings’ contained in Catling’s The First 1003

Electron Heresy (1972) represent – maybe ‘planned installations’, he 1004

speculates.105 At one point in ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of 1005

Intent’, Sinclair remarks that ‘everything’ Catling attempts is ‘concerned 1006

with acts of definition – dowsing, aligning, recording – so that he might 1007

open up a place of potential enchantment’.106 The action of definition 1008

can be seen working towards Catling’s creation of what ‘Servant to the 1009

Stars’ called architectural ‘fixed shape’, or ‘locked-power enclosures’.107 1010

Sinclair, crucially, read Pleiades in Nine as itself such an enclosure: an 1011

impulse-trap. ‘A Tarot of Value, a magical system which is also an 1012

enclosure, or trap, for what the life is. And that is the form of what 1013

these poems are. Their reason for being.’108 Already in Vorticegarden, 1014

Catling had written of ‘Shifting the rock to pin / their energies down’. 1015

Catling described with Celanian exactness and menace how fractions of 1016

life are to be mensurated and pinned down within insect-level spatial 1017

division: 1018

1019

Cockroach intervals divide the calm; 1020

tight as stars, hunting pinprick 1021

life.109 1022

1023

Perril suggests the social background for Catling’s preoccupation with 1024

spatial definition and entrapment in Pleiades in Nine; his poetry 1025

allegorizes how ‘the city has become an enclosure, incarcerating the 1026

terminally “un-productive” in the snares of the poverty trap’.110 It is 1027

bureaucracy which lays down, 1028

1029

a peg board to string out 1030

the city’s pathology 1031

pins and paper 1032

marking the connections.111 1033

1034

These connections recall the ‘shadow-lines’ linking Hawksmoor’s 1035

locked-power enclosures for Sinclair in Lud Heat. ‘Each church is an 1036

enclosure of force, a trap, a sight-block, a raised place with an 1037

unacknowledged influence over events created within the shadow-lines 1038

of their towers.’112 Lewis too had referred to unacknowledged influence, 1039

in his 1914 BLAST essay ‘Fêng Shui and Contemporary Form’, when 1040

outlining Chinese geomancy. ‘Geomancy is the art by which the 1041

favourable influence of the shape of trees, weight of neighbouring water 1042

and it’s [sic] colour, height of surrounding houses, is determined’ (B1 1043

138). Lewis as a Vorticist identified with geomancers: comparing ‘good 1044

Geomancers’ to ‘good artists’, he thought that ‘their functions and 1045

intellectual equipment should be very alike’ (B1 138). The key attribute 1046

was sensitivity to a space’s ‘favourable influence’, ‘to the volume, to the 1047

life and passion of lines’ – and in fact for Lewis, as for Sinclair writing 1048

on the Hawkmoor structures, a spatial ‘genius’ could be ‘good or evil’, 1049

its influence favourable or unfavourable: 1050

1051

Sensitiveness to volume, to the life and passion of lines, meaning 1052

of water, hurried conversation of the sky, or the silence, 1053

impossible propinquity of endless clay nothing will right, a 1054

mountain that is a genius (good or evil) or a bore, makes the 1055

artist. (B1 138) 1056

1057

1058

Spiritual Violences 1059

1060

No plain bore, the stone ‘genius’ that is Hawksmoor’s St George-in-the-1061

East, in Lud Heat, represents for Sinclair an expression of spiritual 1062

violence; a violent geometry.113 ‘St George is Blake’s East in The Marriage 1063

of Heaven and Hell: “spiritual wrath.” The lions of Urizen forge the 1064

geometric shapes that underlie the material universe.’114 To forge 1065

architectural structures thus is to ‘fix them in/ their awful stations’, in 1066

Blake’s words quoted on the succeeding page of ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor, 1067

his Churches’: later Sinclair sees the standing stones prophesying 1068

apocalyptic threat, writing of how ‘future suns of blinding energy do 1069

glint in the mute pallor of the stone’.115 The sense is that awful stations, 1070

static built arrangements, hold in menace – just as the ‘Tarot of Value’, 1071

the magical system which is Catling’s neo-Vorticist poetic, ‘is also an 1072

enclosure, or trap, for what the life is’. Buildings become containers of 1073

wrathful impulses, passionate energies. Writing of how ‘spirals of 1074

magnetism/ mesh & clench’, Catling in Vorticegarden recapitulated the 1075

cone design familiar to readers of Blast, figuring an elliptical motion of 1076

visual passions; moving yet clenched in. 1077

1078

The image frame locked 1079

hissing in the coned 1080

momentum.116 1081

1082

So in a sense a neo-Vorticist spatial structure does become a ‘bore’, a 1083

cone drilling and forging in, like ‘the storm of matter [which] turns at 1084

the central mercury well, hollowed in dream architecture’, in Pleiades in 1085

Nine.117 As it hisses, the dream matter can give the impression of having 1086

broken free, like the horizontal headstones strewn across the churchyard 1087

of St George-in-the-East. Appropriately located alongside the mural 1088

narrating the battle of Cable Street, this must be the most wrecked 1089

hallow site in London, hollowed over by the milky red light of the 1090

nearby river. 1091

Commenting on two major Vorticist works of Lewis’s of 1913-14, 1092

‘Plan of War’ and ‘Slow Attack’, Cianci – just like Sinclair commenting 1093

on St George-in-the-East – locates a violence in geometric shapes. ‘Slow 1094

Attack’ vividly anticipated, Cianci sees, imminent Anglo-German 1095

antagonism: ‘this geometry in conflict, with its severely mechanistic 1096

forms, is war’: 1097

1098

[In ‘Plan of War’] [a] rigid constructional design […] both 1099

expresses all the energy and menacing force of these interlocking 1100

geometries and at the same time prevents their disintegration and 1101

dispersion. […] [In ‘Slow Attack’] the greater density of the 1102

shapes, as well as their more accentuated collision and 1103

interpenetration, together with the more numerous diagonals 1104

structuring the surface, again result in a composition which 1105

succeeds in locking all the turmoil of these convulsed, conflicting 1106

geometrical forms, preventing them from scattering.118 1107

1108

The geometrical shapes are in turmoil themselves, fixed in ‘convulsed’, 1109

awful stations, because they are repositories of turmoil. Sinclair returned 1110

to this Vorticist idea of immanent passion in ‘Servant to the Stars’, when 1111

treating Catling’s way of fixing in awful stations within his sculpture 1112

spaces: Catling’s concern with ‘Place as Set’. ‘This is a sculptural 1113

consciousness: to map the potential actions in a stilled set, to plant all 1114

the possible movements in metal or wood exhibited in an apparently 1115

static condition.’119 The turmoil locked within neo-Vorticist spatial 1116

arrangements hence consists of future-bound movements of impulse or 1117

energy: incipient spiritual actions, intent spiritual violences. The First 1118

Electron Heresy speaks of ‘hungry shells waiting for epileptic vibrations to 1119

be thrown into them.’120 1120

The London neo-Vorticist association of spiritual wrath with 1121

futural ‘possible movements’ recalls the prophetic – apocalyptic but also 1122

potentially utopian – register of early urban Expressionist art, such as 1123

Meidner’s. Meidner was particularly praised in Kurt Hiller’s memorable 1124

review for Die Aktion of the Pathetiker group show at Der Sturm gallery, 1125

in that crucial year, 1912. Hiller’s article took the opportunity to 1126

advocate a contemporary aesthetic ‘spirit’ – ‘Jewish in modality’ rather 1127

than necessarily in terms of tradition or even race – of spiritual violence. 1128

Urban art at odds with the contemporary ‘kingdom of Prussia’, such as 1129

Meidner’s, is identified by Hiller as animated, ‘conflicted’, even 1130

unashamedly hysteric: it fights through psychic pain in pursuit of a new 1131

morality. I personally know of few better descriptions than these 1132

sentences of Hiller’s of the ethical climate of the best neo-Vorticist 1133

writing, such as Sinclair’s in White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings: 1134

1135

The true fully Jewish artist would not be Jewish in subject matter, 1136

but rather Jewish in modality; he would scarcely paint something 1137

biblical, educational, or episodes from the past, but rather he 1138

would paint something contemporary with a Jewish spirit (by 1139

which I mean: with spirit). A glaringly Jewish noble spirit in the 1140

kingdom of Prussia (1912) does not look like a naïve celebrant of 1141

national memories, but rather seems intellectual, future-oriented, 1142

and conflicted.121 1143

1144

In London: City of Disappearances (2006) Sinclair emphasizes how precisely 1145

Meidner’s spiritual agitation, his restless civic morality, makes him the 1146

visionary prophet of ‘the tremble that lies beneath the confident fabric 1147

of long-established cities’. In Berlin he sees the immanent turmoil of the 1148

future, the passionate shift into possible movements; he ‘caught that 1149

instant of fracture, the rip in the temporal membrane, before it was 1150

obvious to less agitated citizens’.122 Exiled in north London, ‘reputation 1151

occulted, he studied Blake and began to write’.123 1152

The future-avid ‘hungry shells’ of The First Electron Heresy of 1153

course also return us to the original Vorticist conception of the vortex 1154

as a focus and processor of spiritual energies. Pound, in 1916, famously 1155

proposed that ‘the Image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it 1156

is […] a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, 1157

ideas are constantly rushing’.124 In ‘The Vorticists’ Lewis recalled that 1158

‘[t]he origin of the term “Vorticism” was the idea of a mass of excited 1159

thinking, engrossed in a whirling centre’ (CHC 378). Here Lewis was 1160

characteristically projecting his persona – ‘I was at once calm and 1161

whirling, […] magnetic and incandescent’ (CHC 378) – over the 1162

aesthetic, but he was also pointing to the metropolitan essence of the 1163

Vorticist movement. In his introduction to the catalogue of the 1974 1164

Vorticism and Its Allies retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, Cork related 1165

the concept of the vortex to Pound’s ‘desire for a whirling force which 1166

drew all the most positive innovatory elements of the time into an 1167

energetic synthesis’: Pound desired pre-war London, with its 1168

‘unprecedented blend of hectic gaiety and experimental vitality’ – such 1169

as the Modern German Art show early in 1914.125 For Catling likewise, in 1170

Written Rooms and Pencilled Crimes (1992), the contemporary artist is to 1171

attend to, and process through visionary hermeneutics, the city’s 1172

centripetal spiritual violences. ‘The hermit’s task is to absorb the 1173

demons of his chosen desert, to funnel their appetites and magnitude 1174

through his open observing soul. The central station of the city is the 1175

wilderness for this urban anchorite.’126 1176

It is likely that Sinclair’s description of the transposition of the 1177

Silbury energy-vortex to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in Muscat’s Würm 1178

(1972), refers to the Albion Island Vortex exhibition which Sinclair 1179

organized at the Whitechapel that year: 1180

1181

the spiral of Silbury 1182

painted on the floor of the Whitechapel Gallery 1183

1184

as the Ripper walks into it127 1185

1186

This particular central station, here reconvening the Silbury desert, is 1187

perhaps the archetypal Vorticist one. As we have seen already, the 1188

gallery was also the scene of the Twentieth Century Art show in the 1189

summer of 1914, in which Bomberg played a prominent part; the 1190

Whitechapel also hosted a Bomberg retrospective in 1979 – the year of 1191

the publication of Sinclair’s neo-Vorticist Suicide Bridge. Yet we could 1192

also recall Sinclair’s statements in The Verbals remembering how Albion 1193

Island Vortex was only ‘slightly Vorticist in impulse’. Though it was 1194

Catling’s ‘first public show’, the vortex that the exhibition showcased 1195

was only slightly urban. With its focus on ‘sacred sites’ and ‘numinous 1196

sites’ across Albion from Wiltshire to Wales, Albion Island Vortex 1197

understood the vortex as a spatial focus of spiritual energies in terms of 1198

‘the landscape of Britain as a mythological centre’.128 By the time of the 1199

Shamanism of Intent exhibition – or ‘three-dimensional event’, as The 1200

Verbals has it – at the Goldmark Gallery in 1991, the very site of the 1201

neo-Vorticist art vortex had shifted to a defiantly nonmetropolitan 1202

station: Uppingham.129 1203

This provincialization of neo-Vorticism may teach us something 1204

about the inertia of the London creative world. For Catling in Written 1205

Rooms and Pencilled Crimes the urban vortex is a spatial focus of spiritual 1206

energies; but Catling suggests these spiritual violences paradoxically have 1207

more material presence, more ‘magnitude’ and also more desirous 1208

‘appetites’, than the enveloping wilderness, affectless non-space that is 1209

the contemporary material city. In Rude Assignment Lewis sketched 1210

modern urban capitalism as a landscape of spiritual absence. ‘The 1211

machine-age of the mercantile classes is a polar wilderness, or a “dark 1212

continent”, for the authentic “intellectual”’ (RA 111). In the first 1213

BLAST, however, Lewis sees precisely our techno-industrial 1214

soullessness engendering Vorticist spiritual energies in reaction; as 1215

Catling would too, Lewis couples the flattened-out vacuity of the 1216

‘steppes’ with the emergence of art of great magnitude. 1217

1218

As the steppes and the rigours of the Russian winter, when the 1219

peasant has to lie for weeks in his hut, produces that 1220

extraordinary acuity of feeling and intelligence we associate with 1221

the Slav; so England is just now the most favourable country for 1222

the appearance of a great art. (B1 ) 1223

1224

Sinclair would similarly call Norwich ‘the perfect desert’ in which 1225

Catling could achieve his work of the early 1980s.130 Yet Pound’s 1226

September 1914 article ‘Vorticism’ had described Lewis’s 1912 Timon 1227

designs as addressing ‘the fury of intelligence baffled and shut in by 1228

circumjacent stupidity’.131 The First Electron Heresy returns to the 1229

containment of spiritual violences within an environment of contentless 1230

dullness, when Catling writes of ‘the hard knot of cerebral violence in 1231

the impassive blankness’; but again, Catling’s words are revealingly 1232

ambiguous: is the weave of intelligence itself formed – compacted – by 1233

the enveloping inaction, or simply situated within it?132 The overall 1234

Vorticist message seems to be that spiritual violences need not simply be 1235

a product of confinement within surrounding urban soullessness: that 1236

they can pre-exist autonomously. 1237

I would argue that the vitalist primitivism of Vorticism, laid out 1238

first by Lewis in BLAST, leads the aesthetic to refuse the purposeless 1239

progressivism and stop-gap meliorism typically associated with modern 1240

citizenship, yet also to occupy a place within a traceable lineage of 1241

visionary London writing concerned with the citizen’s spiritual passion. 1242

This explains why Vorticism interfaces with the exilic modernist 1243

sensibility developed within central Europe, which similarly fused 1244

romantic anti-capitalism with a magical perspective. The spiritual 1245

demands made at this interface may be absolutist, but they are also free-1246

form, shambolic and anarchic, and so offer us potent ways of resisting 1247

the authoritarian, ‘best practice’ perfectibilism of capitalist secularism: 1248

1249

The artist of the modern movement is a savage (in no sense an 1250

“advanced,” perfected, democratic, Futurist individual of Mr. 1251

Marinetti’s limited imagination): this enormous, jangling, 1252

journalistic, fairy desert of modern life serves him as Nature did 1253

more technically primitive man. (B1 33) 1254

1255

Notes 1256

1 Siegfried Kracauer [completed after the author’s death by Paul Oskar Kristeller], History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 219. 2 Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 163. 3 Smith quoted from the BBC4 documentary The Fall: The Wonderful and Frightening World of Mark E. Smith (c. 2005). 4 Alan Munton, ‘Fredric Jameson: Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist’, in Seamus Cooney (ed.), BLAST 3 (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1984): 345-51, 351. 5 Quoted in Philip Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk: Aspects of Wyndham Lewis on Art and Society (Borough Green: Green Knight, 1999), 154. 6 Ibid., 33 and 39. 7 Iain Sinclair, The Kodak Mantra Diaries: October 1966 to June 1971 (London: Albion Village Press, 1971); Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988), 11. Originally appeared as Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1970). 8 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 36. 9 Quoted in Mary Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 1900-1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 74. 10 Ibid. 11 Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 161. 12 Deleuze, Spinoza, 4. 13 Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays , trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 122. Original German version of ‘Revolt of the Middle Classes’ is 1931; The Mass Ornament was originally published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1963 (as Das Ornament der Masse: Essays). 14 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 152-53. 15 Ibid. 16 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 165 (quoting Kracauer, History, 83). 17 Jay, Permanent Exiles, 172. 18 Charles Spencer, ‘Anglo-Jewish Artists: The Migrant Generations’, in The Immigrant Generations: Jewish Artists in Britain 1900-1945 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1982): 21-37, 30. 19 Ibid., 33 and 32.

20 Richard Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, in David Bomberg (London: Tate Gallery, 1988): 11-52, 18. 21 Emanuel in Spencer, ‘Anglo-Jewish Artists’, 43 22 Spencer, ‘Anglo-Jewish Artists’, 31. 23 Ibid., 30. 24 Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, 18, 20, 54, and 20. 25 Ibid., 15-16 (quoting Bomberg). 26 Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 194-95. 27 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream: Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 40. 1 (March 1981): 20-43, 34. 28 Quoted in David Frisby, ‘Social Theory, the Metropolis, and Expressionism’, in Timothy O. Benson (ed.), Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001): 88-111, 108. 29 Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge (London: Vintage, 1995), 204. 30 Timothy O. Benson, ‘Introduction’, in Benson (ed.), Expressionist Utopias: 8-11, 8. 31 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 and 101. 32 Carter’s words are printed on the cover of Iain Sinclair, Downriver: (Or, the Vessels of Wrath), a Narrative in Twelve Tales (London: Paladin, 1991). In academic conversation, I have found negative reactions to Sinclair’s passion to range from David Trotter’s attribution of ungenteel ‘backwoodsman’ status to Sinclair’s oeuvre, to Leigh Wilson’s outright rejection of Sinclair’s work on account of its masculine ‘wildness’. 33 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 (quoting The Times). 34 Iain Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars: Brian Catling’s Pleiades in Nine, the Autolystic Defiances’, in Simon Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: The Works of Brian Catling (Cambridge: CCCP, 2001): 46-56, 55. Compare the lines ‘fuses saxon/ & photon/ tunes’ in Brian Catling, Pleiades in Nine (London: Albion Village Press, 1976), 21. 35 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 101. 36 Paul Edwards, ‘”You Must Speak with Two Tongues”: Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Aesthetics and Literature’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), BLAST: Vorticism 1914-1918 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000): 113-20, 114. 37 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 103 and 104. 38 Neil H. Donahue, Forms of Disruption: Abstraction in Modern German Prose (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 40, 44, and 47.

39 Patrick Bridgwater, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Bridgwater (ed.),Twentieth-Century German Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963): xli-lxxiii, liv. 40 Quoted in Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 102 41 Ibid., 103. 42 Ibid., 89. 43 Edwards, Wyndham Lewis, 143. 44 Edwards, ‘”You Must Speak with Two Tongues”, 114. 45 Richard Humphreys, Wyndham Lewis (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 31. 46 Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (1957; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), 272. 47 Richard Cork, ‘Introduction: Vorticism and Its Allies’, in Vorticism and Its Allies (Hayward Gallery: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1974): 5-28, 6. 48 Bridgwater, x (compare with xlv). 49 Sigrid Bauschinger, ‘The Berlin Moderns: Else Lasker-Schüler and Café Culture’, in Emily D. Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999): 58-83, 72. 50 Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream’, 34, n. 58. 51 Andrew Causey, ‘The Hero and the Crowd: The Art of Wyndham Lewis in the Twenties’, in Paul Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: Essays on Wyndham Lewis’s Painting & Writing (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1996): 87-102, 87. 52 Quoted in William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), 6. 53 Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘Vorticism Among the Isms’, in Cooney (ed.), BLAST 3: 40-46, 45. 54 Robert Bond, ‘“A Dark Insect Swarming”: The Vorticist Visionary Mode of Wyndham Lewis and Iain Sinclair’, in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007): 10-31. 55 Allen Fisher, ‘Diligence and Dilemmas and Aspects of Work by Brian Catling’, in Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: 57-65, 63. 56 Brian Kim Stefans, ‘Veronica Forrest-Thomson and High Artifice’, Jacket, 14 (July 2001): http://jacketmagazine.com/14/stefans-vft.html (accessed 21 June 2012). 57 Brieger referred to in Victor H. Miesel, ‘Ludwig Meidner’, in Ludwig Meidner: An Expressionist Master (University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1978): 1-23, 22. 58 The ‘Time and the Raven’ dust jacket is reproduced in Iain Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: Some Flights of Redemption (Uppingham: Goldmark, 1991), 22 (see also 51 and 52) 59 Iain Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex: The Shamanism of Intent’, Modern Painters, 4. 2 (Summer 1991): 46-51, 50.

60 Iain Sinclair, ‘The Shamanism of Intent: A Retrospective Manifesto’, in Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent: 5-19, 7. 61 Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex’, 51. 62 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 68. 63 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (London: Granta Books, 1997), 267. 64 Vernon Watkins, The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 2000), 31. 65 Anna Mendelssohn, Implacable Art (Cambridge: Folio/ Equipage, 2000), 85. 66 Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 6. 67 Iain Sinclair in conversation with Kevin Jackson, The Verbals (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003), 126. 68 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 66. 69 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 70. 70 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 152 (quoting Lesznai). 71 Ibid., 23 and 24. 72 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 119. 73 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 64-65 (quoting Lukács). 74 Ibid., 69 (quoting Balázs). 75 David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin (1985; Cambridge: Polity, 1988), 114. 76 Allen Hibbard (ed.), Conversations with William S. Burroughs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 167. 77 Frisby, Fragments of Modernity, 114 and 111-12 (quoting Kracauer). 78 Bridgwater, xxx and xxxi. 79 John McDonald (ed.), Peter Fuller’s Modern Painters: Reflections on British Art (London: Methuen, 1993), 118. 80 Quoted in Frisby, ‘Social Theory’, 104-05. 81 Ibid., 110, n. 56. 82 Sinclair, ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, 17 and 19. 83 Max Beckmann, ‘Creative Credo’ (1920), in Victor H. Miesel (ed.), Voices of German Expressionism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970):107-9, 109. Compare the article of mine referenced at the end of n. 49, above. 84 Inka Bertz, ‘Jewish Renaissance – Jewish Modernism’, in Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: 164-87, 184. 85 Gluck, Georg Lukács and His Generation, 153 (compare 239, n. 72). 86 Ibid., 156. 87 Quoted in ibid., 19.

88 Humphreys, Lewis, 26-27. 89 Giovanni Cianci, ‘A Man at War: Lewis’s Vital Geometries’, in Edwards (ed.), Volcanic Heaven: 11-24, 19. 90 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 126 (quoting Lewis). 91 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 20. 92 Vernon Watkins, New Selected Poems, ed. Richard Ramsbotham (Manchester: Carcanet, 2006), 101. 93 Webb’s Guardian review quoted from the back cover of Iain Sinclair, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (London: Paladin, 1988). 94 Humphreys, Lewis, 28; Thomas Kush, Wyndham Lewis’s Pictorial Integer (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 78. 95 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 126. 96 Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars’, 55. 97 J. H. Prynne, Poems, second edn (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005), 93. 98 Quoted in Frisby, ‘Social Theory’, 104. 99 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 99. 100 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 122. 101 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 8. 102 Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, ed. Henri Lonitz (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), 128 and 129. 103 Head, Some Enemy Fight-Talk, 105-6. 104 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 32. 105 Simon Perril, ‘“A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things”: A Catling Overview’, in Perril (ed.), Tending the Vortex: 23-45, 29. 106 Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex’, 50. 107 Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars’, 50. 108 Ibid., 55. 109 Brian Catling, Vorticegarden (London: Albion Village Press, 1974), n.p. 110 Perril, ‘“A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things”’, 32. 111 Catling, Pleiades in Nine, 30. 112 Sinclair, Lud Heat / Suicide Bridge, 20. 113 Ibid., 35. 114 Ibid., 36. 115 Ibid., 38. 116 Catling, Vorticegarden, n.p. 117 Catling, Pleiades in Nine, 41. 118 Cianci, ‘A Man at War’, 20. 119 Sinclair, ‘Servant to the Stars’, 55 and 53. 120 Brian Catling, The First Electron Heresy (London: Albion Village Press, 1972), 8.

121 Quoted in Emily D. Bilski, ‘Images of Identity and Urban Life: Jewish Artists in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin’, in Bilski (ed.), Berlin Metropolis: 102-45, 140. 122 Iain Sinclair (ed.), London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), 7. 123 Ibid., 8. 124 Quoted in Bridgwater, lii. 125 Cork, ‘Introduction: Vorticism and Its Allies’, 6. 126 Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, and Brian Catling, Future Exiles: 3 London Poets, Paladin Re/Active Anthology No. I (London: Paladin, 1992), 351. 127 Iain Sinclair, Muscat’s Würm (London: Albion Village Press, 1972), 22; Cork, ‘Bomberg’s Odyssey’, 52, n. 153. 128 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 68 dates Albion Island Vortex to 1972, as does the catalogue (which is in box XXVI of the Texas Sinclair Archive). Nevertheless the spectral, unfixed quality of neo-Vorticism is stressed by the show’s floating date in other records. See Sinclair, The Shamanism of Intent, 50, which dates the exhibition to 1973, while Perril, ‘“A Ghost is Being Built from the More / Solid Things”’, 26 dates it to 1974. For the reference to Twentieth Century Art, see n. 20 above and Cork, Vorticism and Its Allies, 6 and 29. 129 Sinclair and Jackson, The Verbals, 68 and 125. 130 Sinclair, ‘A New Vortex’, 50. 131 BLAST, p. 123 n. 32 (compare the similar phrases, from Pound’s ‘Wyndham Lewis’ of June 1914, quoted in Wyndham Lewis, p. 89). 132 Catling, The First Electron Heresy, 12.