Journey into Barbary 9781780763521

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Original, ferociously witty, controversial, Wyndham Lewis (1882– 1957) is celebrated as a painter – co-founder of the Vorticist movement – and writer. His most well-known novels include The Revenge for Love and Tarr, as well as a major work of fiction, The Human Age. He served in France during World War I and his subsequent paintings of war earned him a place as one of the early twentieth century’s most dynamic artists. C.J. Fox, for some time a book reviewer for The Independent and other British publications, has been involved in editing several collections of Wyndham Lewis’s writings, including (with Walter Michel) Wyndham Lewis on Art.

‘Bears witness to Lewis’s vigorous admiration for the character and culture of the Berbers... and to Lewis’s unconventional vision brought to bear on landscape, architecture and human beings.’ TLS ‘Lewis was one of those high-powered, controversial and prophetic figures to whom no one can react with indifference. ... But his eye for the comic surface of things is marvellous.’ Philip Toynbee, Observer ‘The most fascinating personality of our time.’ T.S. Eliot

Sheikh’s Wife by Wyndham Lewis, 1939 (copyright The Wyndham Lewis Trust, reproduced with kind permission ING Commercial Banking) Sheikh’s Wife by Wyndham Lewis, 1939 (copyright The Wyndham Lewis Trust, reproduced with kind permission ING Commercial Banking)

Sheik’s Wife by Wyndham Lewis, 1936 (copyright The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust, reproduced with kind permission ING Commercial Banking).

Tauris Parke Paperbacks is an imprint of I.B.Tauris. It is dedicated to publishing books in accessible paperback editions for the serious general reader within a wide range of categories, including biography, history, travel, art and the ancient world. The list includes select, critically acclaimed works of top quality writing by distinguished authors that continue to challenge, to inform and to inspire, These are books that possess those subtle but intrinsic elements that mark them out as something exceptional. The Colophon of Tauris Parke Paperbacks is a representation of the ancient Egyptian ibis, sacred to the god Thoth, who was himself often depicted in the form of this most elegant of birds. Thoth was credited in antiquity as the scribe of the ancient Egyptian gods and as the inventor of writing and was associated with many aspects of wisdom and learning.

JOURNEY INTO BARBARY Travels across Morocco Wyndham Lewis Edited and with a new foreword by C.J. Fox

TPP TA U R I S PA R K E PA P E R B A C K S

This book is dedicated to Froanna who also made the journey New paperback edition published in 2013 by Tauris Parke Paperbacks An imprint of I.B.Tauris and Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com Distributed in the United States and Canada Exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 This edition published in 1987 by Penguin Books Copyright © 1984, 1987, 2013 The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust Copyright introduction and notes © 1983 C.J. Fox Copyright foreword © 2013 C.J. Fox Cover image: Berber Horseman by Wyndham Lewis (reproduced with kind permission David Gault) The right of Wyndham Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 78076 352 1 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Printed and bound in Sweden by Scanbook

EDITOR’S FOREWORD Thirty years after the first appearance of this selection of writings and pictures occasioned by Wyndham Lewis’s visit to Morocco, the ghost of the embattled author/painter seems to have come in, so to speak, from the bled. During his lifetime, Lewis had joyfully cultivated a position of aggressive isolation as the self-proclaimed “Enemy” of conventional socio-cultural opinion in the West. But his self-isolation was compounded externally by the ideological and personal antipathy of powerful rivals. Journey into Barbary—a compendium highlighted by the bulk of his brilliant travel book Filibusters in Barbary—made its debut via America in 1983. Even then, Lewis’s sharp separation from the mainstream still clouded his accomplishments though he had been dead since the mid-Fifties. By the early twenty-first century, however, the extent of the Enemy’s exclusion had apparently diminished—a result of many new printings and translations of his books, a flurry of additional publications about him, major exhibitions of his pictures in Britain, mainland Europe and Canada, and the rejuvenated efforts of organizations promoting his work. The reception of Journey into Barbary on its first appearance may have signalled the relief to come. It was one of the numerous specially edited re-issues of Lewis’s writings produced by the daringly independent California publisher John Martin of Black Sparrow Press. The book slipped into the world unmolested—by contrast with the troubled launches of Filibusters in Barbary (“suppressed” in Britain amid libel fears after its 1932 appearance) and of other provocative Lewis works. There were now welcoming words from the TLS of London (23 September 1983) for Journey – highlighting the redoubtable Lewis, of course, but also commending the collection’s editorial introduction. In 1987 the book was granted the laurel of British publication as a Penguin paperback. Later an outspoken American guidebook to Morocco praised Lewis for his “trenchant observations” of the 1931 scene there, declaring that Journey contained “some of the finest writing of its kind.” On the visual front, the original of at least one of the component illustrations to Journey into Barbary joined a burgeoning “super-colvii

lection” of Lewis drawings and oils newly housed at the Courtauld Institute in London. Pictures from this trove powered a striking Lewis exhibition in 2004. Six years later, a spectacular display of the prolific Hispanophile’s visual and literary achievements was mounted in Madrid. Reflecting Spain’s historical ties with Morocco, the show’s vast catalogue reproduced in colour two of the artist’s Moroccan pictures featured in the present book and approvingly cited his fascination, as prose chronicler, with the “mysterious” multi-racial connections and vigorous culture of the Berbers. As Journey into Barbary returns yet again, the recent Lewis resurgence goes on, but not without debate. In 2008, from the London publishers Palgrave Macmillan came an American treatise called Modernism’s Middle East (which bore a familiar-sounding sub-title, Journeys to Barbary!). The combative book, by university English specialist Joanna Grant, sorted through the “Orientalist fantasies” of Lewis and other British and US modernist writers. To Grant’s mind, the writers concerned had portrayed the Middle (and “Near”) Eastern scene as a source of life-healing lessons for the ailing West—or a “topos for remaking of the self,” as she put it in the abstruse dialect of academic “Literary Theory.” In her scrutiny of Lewis-on-Morocco, she usefully recalls other works by him somehow engaged with the Arabs. In one case, she suggests—darkly so—that his 1919 art “parable,” The Caliph’s Design, constituted “an authoritarian vision” of the way forward for architecture in the West and might even be construed as “a carrier of Fascist ideology.” Grant indicates too that Lewis’s penetrating lampoons of the Western interlopers he encountered on his visit—concoctors of “fakesheik” movies, for example—really exemplified a deadly-serious critique by the overall modernist movement of all things “kitsch.” Although showing little appreciation of Lewis’s satirical gusto, she defers to his art and uses as her book’s cover illustration what she concedes in the text to be a “great” painting—his dazzling Bagdad (1927). But she doesn’t share Lewis’s admiration for the best-known French Resident-General of colonial Morocco, Hubert Lyautey. Thus she over-eagerly paraphrases my introduction to Journey into Barbary as bluntly condensing Lyautey’s pacification policy in rebel areas to a simple one of bribery or violence. In fact, Lewis’s enthusiasm for Lyautey seems even more tenable now than in 1932. For one thing, the emerging Charles de Gaulle’s support in the Twenties for the hard-pressed “Resident” (as against the anti-Lyautey machinations of Philippe Pétain) has become widely viii

known, putting Lewis into good company. One French liberal scholar, Bernard Lafourcade, has written that to call the pro-Lyautey author of Filibusters a reactionary would be “clearly simplistic.” Extending the perceived significance of Lewis’s North African descriptions was a comment made in the 2008 Wyndham Lewis Annual by Canadian anthropologist Victor Barac. He argued that Filibusters in Barbary reached invaluably beyond the level of conventional travel book and into the realm of anthropology. It was “a kind of ethnographic narrative unavailable to professional anthropologists of [Lewis’s] era,” Barac contended. Still, Lewis remained primarily a master satirist as he documented the Morocco-based “filibusters”—the latter-day commercial and political freebooters he met in what once constituted the wilds known as Barbary. Beyond that, it would perhaps be useful to recall the words of one of his fictional characters as a clue to the motivation for his Morocco expedition. Writer John Porter Kemp in Lewis’s 1918 play The Ideal Giant loudly laments at one point what he terms the “shrivelling up of our horizons.” And he continues: We need those horizons, and action and adventure as much as our books need exercise. We have been rendered sedentary by perfected transport. Our minds have become home-keeping. We do not think as boldly: [...] We must contrive; find a new Exit.1 Morocco provided Lewis with a regenerating Exit, if only a temporary one. 


1 See Wyndham Lewis’s Collected Poems and Plays, ed. A. Munton (Man-

chester: 2003 imp.). The guidebook praising Journey was the 2009 Morocco volume of the Culture Shock! series published in Tarrytown, N.Y. The WL pictures in the Madrid show are Nos. 136–7 in the exhibiting Juan March Foundation’s descriptive catalogue. On Lyautey, see Jean Lacouture’s De Gaulle, Vol. I (Paris: 1984). Lafourcade’s comment is in his French Wyndham Lewis Anthologie (Lausanne: 1985). ix