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Article Excerpt
On December 3, 1924, Ezra Pound wrote frosm the Italian town of Rapallo to Percy Wyndham Lewis in London: "I have just, ten years and a bit after its appearance, and in this far distant locus, taken out a copy of the great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus. We were hefty guys in them days; and of what has come after us, we seem to have survived without a great mass of successors" (Lewis and Pound 138). The "great MAGENTA cover'd opusculus" to which Pound refers in his letter was the first number of the magazine BLAST, published in June 1914. (1) The painter and writer Wyndham Lewis--its main editor--recalled BLAST as the "hugest and pinkest of all magazines" (Rude Assignment 135). The magazine clearly had a special significance for both men, who cite it throughout their forty-three-year-long correspondence; indeed, no other entry is indexed as frequently as BLAST, which literally spans from the first to the last letter (cf. Pound and Lewis). Pound in particular keeps coming back to it over and over; in 1914, he requests galley proofs of the magazine from Lewis, and in 1957, only a month before Lewis's death brought an end to their long, complicated friendship, Pound complains of a radio show which "in noticing the disease of modern awt listed all movements save the VORT/ AND as the listed movements were precisely those criticized in BLAST of holy memOry, and as by chance the main VORTS opposed pinkismo from the beginning the coINcidence shd/ be USED" (Lewis and Pound 302).
In this passage, Pound uses a term that had entered the world along with BLAST in the subtitle of the magazine: "Review of the Great English Vortex." Pound writes VORT and invokes the neologisms he himself had derived from the Vortex: Vorticism referring to the movement, and Vorticists to the artists who made up the group. Neither for the first nor for the last time in this radio show, Vorticism had been omitted from a list of avant-garde art movements. The reason for this exclusion may be that the First World War had erupted only a month after the declaration of Vorticism; as a result, the London avant-garde project never became as well known as other continental groups whose birth either long predated the war or emerged in its aftermath.
What is remarkable about the Pound-Lewis correspondence is that it reveals Pound's enduring commitment to Vorticism's goals forty years after its short life ended and his desire to see Vorticism reinvigorated. Something deeper than nostalgia is at work. As will be shown in this paper, the Vortex had a special and complex meaning for Pound's development as an artist; in citing it so frequently, rather than taking a trip down memory lane with an old friend, he was honoring this influence.
Although Lewis and Pound were co-founders of Vorticism, right from the start their views of it differed significantly. Whereas Pound was mainly interested in what the Vortex could bring to poetry, Lewis, a serious painter as well as a writer, saw it largely in relation to the visual arts. In a letter to the editor of the Partisan Review, which, for some reason, he never sent, Lewis insisted that the movement had been his brain-child and that it "was purely a painters [sic] affair" whereas Imagism--Pound's earlier project--"was a purely literary movement, having no relation whatever to vorticism, nor anything in common with it" (Lewis, Letters 492). Lewis's efforts to define Vorticism as a "painters' affair" enjoyed considerable success; insofar as the movement is known today, it is largely as a visual arts project. The result has been an unfortunate distortion in our understanding of the movement. For it was Ezra Pound who invented the name, and it possessed a broader significance and deeper meaning for the poet than for any of the other artists involved in Vorticism, including Lewis himself.
The Birth of Vorticism
In the spring of 1914, Lewis had been working on the publication of a magazine, for which BLAST had been considered as a title. Progress of this "revue cubiste" (Pound and Shakespear 315), as Pound called it in a letter to his fiancee, was slow. In April 1914 Pound wrote to James Joyce that "Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly.... I cant tell, it is mostly a painters magazine with me to do the poems" (Joyce and Pound 26). No mention yet of a vortex, let alone Vorticism. The immediate inspiration for launching the journal was to offer a British alternative to Italian Futurism. Initially captivated by Futurism, Pound, Lewis, and other British artists were disillusioned by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's increasingly arrogant behavior during his visits to London in the early 1910s. In a June 1914 article Lewis sneered: "England practically invented this civilisation that Signor Marinetti has come to preach to us about" (Cork I, 234). When Marinetti published an English Futurist manifesto and used the names of some London artists as signatures without asking their permission or interest, Lewis soon assembled "a determined band of miscellaneous antifuturists" (Lewis, Blasting 36). But Lewis and his co-conspirators had no wish to call themselves anti-Futurists in public, since this would have meant giving too much credit and publicity to Marinetti, whom they despised. The solution came in mid-June 1914, when the name Vorticism seemed to appear out of nowhere. At last, here was a term that allowed for the propagandistic self-assertion of a homegrown British avant-garde, one that stood apart from influential continental rivals such as Italian Futurism, French Cubism, and German Expressionism. The Yorkshire Observer could now write: "Futurism in this country has hardly been born before it has budded off into Vorticism" (Cork I, 234). Lewis became the head of Vorticism, Pound the baptizer and one of its most articulate publicists.
But why Vorticism? What did the vortex mean, and what made it seem so peculiarly English? Was it the whirling "vortex" of the city of London that Pound had already used as a metaphor in 1913 when writing a letter to his friend William Carlos Williams back in America (Pound and Williams 23)? Or was it the vortex that he considered crucial for any artistic development in a letter to his fiancee, Dorothy Shakespear: "Energy depends on ones ability to make a vortex--genius meme" (Pound and Shakespear 251).
For the majority of the Vorticists, including Wyndham Lewis, Pound's choice of the word never much mattered. On the occasion of a Vorticism retrospective at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, Lewis wrote: "Vorticism. This name is an invention of Ezra Pound.... What does this word mean? I do not know. How anyone can get angry about it, I cannot imagine, but let me say I did not ask for this meaningless word to be revived at the Tate" (Lewis, Letters 567).
Back in 1914 the Vorticists-to-be adopted the name quickly and invested it with their own meanings. The first issue of BLAST carried three articles on the vortex by Lewis, Pound, and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The art historian Walter Michel has lucidly characterized their different interpretations of the Vortex in a...
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