Imaginary Letters

(Six Letters of William Bland Burn to his Wife)

Wyndham Lewis

Petrograd, January 7, 1917.

Dear Lydia,

Your amiable letter to hand. I am glad Yorke’s cold is better. He has not a throat of iron—tout comme son pere. But I should not wrap it up—When he hears me in the house he always comes leaping in my direction; but the moment he sees me, he seems to grow old and sober, rather than shy, and when he gets within about five yards of me, makes some innocently aggressive remark. I wish I could see him more. These long absences at the ends of the Earth prevent that. He thinks me a casual beggar I believe.

I am glad you ask me those questions. “Why not be happy?” The chief use of a wife, after love, is to disgust you with your weaknesses, and to watch them constantly returning, by all sorts of bye-ways, to the attack. Or rather they seem to regard a wife as ideal “cover,” and a first-rate avenue of return. You kick one out one day, and you find him the next skulking beneath your wife’s petticoat waiting his chance. The conjugal skirt is a trap from which, any day you feel like hunting, you can return with a full bag.

“Why not be happy?” That is, why not abandon the plane of exasperation and restlessness, and be content with the approximations and self-deceptions of the majority? Well, of course happiness of that sort is not within my grasp, if I wished it. But why expect from you a perpetual discipline? That discipline is however, at least as easy for you as for me, if you think of it. The serenity and ease with which you accomplish the most gruesome self-restraints at first surprised me—until I remembered that you did not take them seriously, like me, or suffer from their necessity. Not having a sense of values (very roughly a masculine corner) but only the complacency of an obedient mummer, you cover the harshest ground with Spartan face. It is only when you are left alone that you complain or question seriously. You forget a little the intricacies of our ceremonial dance, and find that worrying. Don’t be offended at what I have been saying. You need not be ashamed of being calmly hypnotic. Yorke was older than you when he was born. We should all be mad if our mothers did not invigorate us with the airs of a twinkling, early and sweet world, and feed us with a remote “happiness.”

You want more “happiness,” though, for your child. Why? I would not be anything but what I am (unless I could find something “unhappier”) and why should he, in the future, wish to be anything but what I think he will become? There is an intoxication in the vistas of effort and self-castigation which cannot be bought with “happiness.” Again you might say, “Why be so hard on this person or on that, and not accept him as a “good fellow,” or take him at the valuation of the world, and derive amusement and sentimental satisfaction from him, Richards, Hepburn, Tom, Mrs. Fisher Wake etc., etc. They have all been “quarrelled with.” That is, I have not been civil, and we do not see them. But I have left you a Menu of equally amusing birds to while away life with. You would have quarrelled with the first lot in time and in due course on unreasonable grounds, if I had not forestalled you. I have merely done the job cleanly and reasonably. Clean is not the word, you argue, for this cold-blooded process. It is not veiled in the forms and frenzies of life, but indecently done before people shocked into attention. The intellect is cruel and repugnant. Dirty, that is. (Everything loathesome is related to dirt).

I am attributing a line of argument to you and a tone, which your questions do not warrant. But I am taking them to their ultimate development. I must always do this, c’est mon mal et mon gloire.

Thousands of beautiful women have spent their lives in cloisters; there are millions of old maids. When I am with you I show a full, if not excessive, appreciation of your sex. You have a child. With a sort of lofty cunning you dote on my cleverness and improve your own. You would not be with me if you required anything much different from what you get. But still you deplore some of my notions and habits. I suspect my friend Villerant of having smiled at my naivete, and also suggested that in some things I was cracked and difficult.

I will follow the line of argument that your questions imply: “Why not ease off a little?” You would say, “You will admit that it is uncomfortable to be at loggerheads with anybody. You flatter a person by taking so much notice of him as to turn your back.”

(At this point I interject: “It is nevertheless more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than to be polite. It is a physical discomfort not to show, after a time, my feelings.”)

You continue: “Being so easily disgusted with people suggests a naive idealism. We are all ridiculous, looked at properly, by means of our little forked bodies. We are disgusting physically (except a few in their fluffy and velvety youth). So why carp, and glare, and sheer off? Take life, in the English-civilized way, as a joke; our funny bodies and their peculiar needs, our ambitions, greeds, as comic stunts of an evidently gentleman-creator, who is most unquestionably “a sport.”

At this point, my dear lady, I am going to stop you, and bring in the counter-flux; release the over-mounting objections.

First. I feel that we are obviously in the position of Ulysses’ companions; and there is nothing I resent more than people settling down to become what is sensible for a swine. I will still stalk about with my stumpy legs, and hold my snout high, however absurd it may be. We must get through this enchantment without too many memories of abasement. We most need, in the inner fact, changing back into men again! And I don’t want the “happiness” of the swill-pail, but a perpetual restlessness until the magic is over! I set out somewhere on a legendary expedition= I do not date from Nineteen Two.= I do not feel like sniggering over our plight. I am permanently in a bad temper!= (I am not a “a sport.”)

So! So! So!

Society, most people, have their little bit of beauty and energy which is a small compartment of life. The rest is the gentleman-animal, which ambles along, the end-in-itself= oh yes!

I do not like the gentleman-animal. He is a poor beast. His glory is to belong to a distinguished herd. He prefers to himself a Human Cliche of manners, catch-phrases, fashionable slang, herd-voice (when he Baas the well-instructed can instantly tell that he comes from a very distinguished herd; or from a quite good herd; or from a respectable herd; as the case may be). When he hears a similar Baa he pricks his ears up, and Baas more loudly and lispingly himself, to show his label and that he is there, he prefers a code which is, most of it, imbecile in its inductions, impracticable, and not holding water. Human weakness, human need—is the worse for a gloss. You do not agree? I have that feeling very strongly.

But I have amplified too much, and will return to what I wished immediately to say.= The best that most people can see is the amiable-comic, the comfortable, the advantages of the gentleman-animal. I, who see beauty and energy so much that they bulk and outweigh a thousand times these cowardly contentments and pis-allers, why should you expect me to admit society as anything but an organized poltrooney and forgetfulness? The gentleman-animal has his points. And it is just when he is successful that we should dislike him most. For he is the most cunning effort of society to close its eyes and clog its ears. He is the great sham reconciliation and justifying of ease.

I must leave you at this, my dear woman, as I have to correct proofs wanted tomorrow and twice written for.= In glancing through what I have written in this letter, I find things that, were I writing for any but a familiar ear, would require restating. There is an implication, for instance, that enthusiastic herd-man could, if he would, produce some excellent ego in place of his social self, and that it is this immoral waste of fine material that I object to= whereas of course he is radically boring and obnoxious. He is a perfect metis, the gentleman-animal, having crossed consummately his human and inhuman qualities. I like to see things side by side, perfectly dual and unmixed. Neither side of a man is responsible for the other.

But you know my ideas on these subjects and can dialogue for me as I have for you.

I wish, Lydia, you were here, with your body rasping under mine now. We could beat out this argument to another tune.

Send me more of Villerant’s Aunt Sally’s, or anybody else’s, to bowl at. I like these immemorial phizzes stuck up within easy reach. I have bags full of cocoa-nuts!

As far as I can see I shall be stopping over here at least another six weeks. The war continues! I was sorry to hear Grant had been blown up. It sounds like a practical joke. I hope Pampas will take care of himself.= Much occurs here of the strangest. The Russian factor is quite curious in this game. It is really, much more than the other countries, a theatre to itself, carrying on a play of quite a different description. Kiss Yorke for me. All love to yourself.

Yours, William Burn.

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