Imaginary Letters

(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)

Wyndham Lewis

Petrograd, February, 1917.

My dear Lydia:

Once more to the charge= In your answer to my letter I feel the new touch of an independent attack. Villerant comes in, but I feel this time that you have set your own dear person up for a rebuff. You have not sent me any Aunt Sally, but my Grecian wife. I will take two things and answer them.=First, you object to my treatment of the Gentleman, because you sharply maintain, more or less, that I by no means object to being a gentleman myself.=On that point, my dear girl, you have not got me. For many purposes, on occasion I should not hesitate to emphasize the fact that I was not born in the gutter. If, for instance, I was applying for a post where such a qualification was necessary, Harrow would not be forgotten. The Gutter generally spoils a man’s complexion in childhood. He grows up with sores around his mouth and a constantly dirty skin. His eyes, unless he has them well in hand, become wolfish and hard, etc. Who would not be better pleased that he was born on the sunny side of the wall? All that has nothing to do with my argument. Those things are in themselves nothing to linger round, although the opposite, squalor and meanness, it is more excusable to remember and lament.

But in your last letter you reveal an idea that seems chiefly to have struck you, and which is at the bottom of your present obstinacy. In your letter of last month you kept it in the background, or did not state it in so many words.

(In once more reading through your present letter, I find you have not even stated it there. But I see, I believe, the notion that has found favour with you.) I will give you my opinion on it in the form of a criticism of an article I read yesterday in an English paper (one of those you sent me).

A Russian war-novel is discussed. The writer of the article “does not care much for Russian books,” he finds that “the Englishman begins where the Russian leaves off.” The Russian book seems to deal with the inner conflict of a Russian grocer on the outbreak of War. The Russian grocer is confused and annoyed. He asks what all this bloody trouble has to do with him—the small grocer. He cogitates on the causes of such upheavals, and is not convinced that there is anything in them calling for his participation. But eventually he realizes that there is a great and moving abstraction called Russia=the old abstraction in fact, the old Pied Piper whistling his mournful airs, and waving towards a snow-bound horizon. And—le voilà in khaki=or the Russian equivalent. At this point he becomes “noble,” and of interest to the writer of the article—But there, alas, the book ends.= Now, (of course the writer of the article continues) we in England do not do things in that way. We do not portray the boring and hardly respectable conflict. No Englishman (all Englishmen having the instincts of gentlemen) admits the possibility of such a conflict. We are accomplished beings, des hommes, ou plutôt des gentlemen faits! We should begin with the English grocer already in khaki, quite calm, (he would probably be described as a little “grim” withal) in the midst of his military training on Salisbury Plain. A Kiplingesque picture of that: Revetting would come in, and bomb-throwing at night. He next would be in the trenches. The writer would show, without the cunning, hardly respectable, disguise of any art, how the Balham grocer of to-day was the same soldier, really, that won at Waterloo= You would not get a person or a fact, but a piece of patriotic propaganda (the writer of course being meanwhile a shrewd fellow, highly approved and well-paid).

Now glance at Tolstoi for a moment, that arch Russian bore, and at his book of Sebastopol sketches. He was an hereditary noble, and it is rather difficult to say that an hereditary noble is not a gentleman. But can the English journalist in his “fort interieur” admit that Tolstoi was a gentleman, all things considered? These foreign “nobles” are a funny sort of gentlemen, anyway. For let us see how Tolstoi writes of the Russians at Sebastopol.= He arrives at the town of Sebastopol. He has read in the Moscow newspapers of the “heroic defenders of Sebastopol.” His first impression is one of astonishment and disappointment of a sort. For there is nothing noticeably heroic about the demeanour of the soldiers working at the quays or walking in the streets. They are not even heroic by reason of the ineffable “cheeriness” of the British Tommy—(No journalist would be tolerated for a moment who did not, once in every twenty lines, remark on this ineffable national heroism of humour.)=Tolstoi, that is, does not want to see heroes, but men under given conditions and, that is, sure enough, what he sees. He also, being an hereditary noble and so on, does not want to make his living. One more opportunity of truth and clearness! Next, when Tolstoi gets up to the bastions, he again sees no heroes with any ineffable national cachet. The “heroes” of his sketches and tales, in fact, stoop and scurry along behind parapets in lonely sectors, and when they see another man coming straighten themselves out, and clank their spurs. They kill people in nightmares, and pray pessimistically to their God. You cannot at the end apply any labels to them. Tolstoi’s account of their sensations and genuine exploits would not strike terror in the heart of future enemies of the Russian race; it is not an advertisement, or the ordinary mawkish bluff thrown over a reality. He had the sense to see human beings and not Russians. And Russians are chiefly redoubtable, and admirable, because of this capacity of impersonal seeing and feeling. Where they are least Russian in fact.

The discriminating enemy in reading these sketches, would fear that more than he would any unreal or interested gush.

There always remains the question as to whether, by gush and bluff and painting a pretty picture of a man, you cannot make him become that picture=and whether, politically, it may not be desirable to manufacture illusions of that description. But what have we got to do with politicians?

Again, I am not saying that Russians have not a national gush. Tolstoi himself indulges in it. Everybody indulges in such things. It is a question only of the scale of such indulgence; of the absence per head in a population of the reverse.

So then, what the paper-writer’s point amounted to was that only gentlemen (or, sententiously, men) were worth writing about=or only at the moment when a man becomes a “gentleman” is he interesting, worth noticing, or suitable for portrayal. We all, however, know the simple rules and manifestations of this ideal figure. There is not much left to say on the subject. Ah yes, but there is such and such a one’s ineffable way of being a gentleman!—

In London you will meet few educated people who really are willing or able to give Russian books their due. Dostoevsky is a sort of epileptic bore, Tolstoi a wrong-headed old altruistic bore, Gorky a Tramp-stunt bore, Turgenev, even, although in another category, in some way disappointing.—All Russian writers insist on discovering America, opening discussions on matters that our institutions, our position in society, our Franco-English intelligence preclude any consideration of. There is something permanently transcendental and disconcerting about the Slav infant, and he pours his words out and argues interminably, and is such an inveterate drunkard,—as though his natural powers of indecorum and earnestness were not already enough.

What really could be said of the Russian is this=Shakespeare is evidently better than any Russian novelist, or more permanently valuable. But the little Russian Grocer could rival Hamlet in vacillation; or any Russian, Shakespeare, in his portrayal of the machinery of the mind. Dostoevsky is not more dark and furious than Shakespeare’s pessimistic figures, Lear, Macbeth, etc. But we are not Englishmen of Shakespeare’s days.

We are very pleased that in the time of Elizabeth such a national ornament existed. But Shakespeare would be an anachronism to-day.

Dostoevsky and Co. were anachronisms as contemporaries of Tennyson and Napoleon III. Had they been embedded two centuries back in Sixteenth Century Russia, they would not be read, but would not cause annoyance and be called epileptic bores. Epilepsy would have been all right in those distances.—There is nothing dévoué about epilepsy to-day, any more than there is about a King!

I think I have been lucid, if rather long-winded=

How I look on these Christian Demi-Gods of the Steppes you know. I like them immensely. For a single brandyish whiff from one of Dostovesky’s mouths, at some vivid angle of turpitude I would give all English literature back to Shelley’s songs. Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches enchant me. They are so sober, delicate and nonchalant; I can think of nothing like them. Gogol’s Tchichikoff is back with Cervantes, Sterne and the others who have not any peers in these days.

Today=the requirements of the little man, especially of this day, are a similar thing to the Russian, the Englishman, etc. We must disembarrass ourselves of this fetish or gush, as of that other.—I want to live with Shakespeare and Cervantes=and I have gone to war for good with all things that would oppose a return to those realities.

I feel you, in my absence, becoming enmeshed in environing respectability and its amiable notions. I feel that this letter may require another fervour to drive home, or excuse, its own=A coup de poing is the best method of enforcing an idea (or a shell)=the mouth is similarly a more satisfactory aperture than the ear for introducing a philosophy into another body. Yorke is the embodiment of my philosophy. I love Yorke in exactly the way that I love a character in Molière or Turgenev. Yorke is the only living thing except yourself, that I know or find alive to the same extent.

I shall stick here a little longer, and see what comes of my new venture. There have been lots of delays and difficulties which I will recite to you when we meet. I can, I am afraid, say absolutely nothing definite about my return. But I will write to you in a few days and tell you more certainly. Meantime, much love, my dear girl. I wish you were here with me. But on seeing how active the Germans are, it is out of the question your crossing the North Sea.

I am looking forward to your next letter. Much love.

Yours, W. B. Burn.

(Next letter of series will appear in July number.)