Self Condemned Read Free

to pick up portrait commissions from wealthy Americans and Canadians. Regrettably, very few actual commissions materialized, though he did paint Eleanor Martin, the mother of former Prime Minister Paul Martin. A recurring cycle of bad luck, debt, cash-flow problems, and social isolation all contributed to the Lewises’ largely unhappy stay in the long-gone Tudor Hotel on Sherbourne Street in Toronto — a dismal refuge that Lewis at the time generalized as his “Tudor period” ( Letters , 311). Strangely, he took very little advantage of his family connections in Montreal, which was, of course, a lively cultural centre even in the 1940s. Indeed, some Montreal painters and writers — among them, Jori Smith, Marion Scott, John Lyman, and Prudence Heward — were readers of his work. Lewis made several notorious pronouncements about Canada and Toronto of the 1940s, which rankle or delight, depending on one’s sensibility. He referred to Canada as “a sanctimonious icebox,” and offered this diagnosis of Toronto the Good: “‘Methodism and Money’ in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness” ( Letters , 309, 327).
    But it would be a mistake to confuse the novel with autobiography. René Harding, the main character, is not Wyndham Lewis. Nor is Hester Lewis’s wife, Froanna. The differences are crucial. In the novel, René Harding, a professor of modern history, decides to renounce his professorship and chooses intellectual and social isolation in Canada, rather than remain in Europe and watch the brutal spectacle of the Second World War. His self-imposed exile from Britain to Canada on the eve of war (engineered by him without Hester’s knowledge) is a form of “protest” against the ravening psychosis of history, of which the coming war figures as a prime example. Rather than become what he imagines as inevitable — an apologist for the collapse of imperialism — he gives up his teaching post, offers a condescending farewell to his mother and siblings, and thrusts himself and his wife into poverty.
    The couple’s ultimately disastrous move to Momaco (the fictional double for Toronto) accelerates the process by which René’s sense of agency shrinks to that of a small room. In this respect, the novel is a fascinating example of the kind of externalized psychology Lewis believed in. That is to say, he wasn’t a believer in psychoanalysis or any interior notion of consciousness; mind and body are locked in combat with each other, but the field of battle is always an external one. Lewis tended to regard people (himself included) as having what one might call an exoskeletal psychology; relationships were about the external play and clash of shells, carapaces, pelts, rather than the internal conflicts of different souls or psyches. The novel is a compelling anatomization of Harding’s psychic collapse, whose overweening intellectual arrogance and seemingly limitless capacity for denial lead him and his wife into a domestic inferno.

    Wyndham Lewis and his wife, Gladys, aboard the Empress of Britain , bound for North America in September 1939.
    This dualism, which recalls that of Descartes (Lewis gave Harding the name René with good reason), is projected both onto the Hardings’ marriage and onto the room they are forced to inhabit. These projections become the occasion for one of the most sustained metaphors in the novel. Part Two of the story, entitled “The Room,” is an extended meditation on the emotional effects of co-existing in a hotel room extending only twenty-five feet by twelve. The Hardings’ relationship becomes a study in paranoia as the Room begins to take on the status of a separate consciousness, as if a mind were something which “could be entered through a door and sat down in” ( Self Condemned , 214). As their idea of themselves as independent people continues to crumble, bodies become estranged from their voices. The voice, an important symbol of one’s individuality, begins