The Revenge for Love by Wyndham Lewis

First published: 1937

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: 1936

Locale: Andalusia and Navarre, Spain, and London, England

Principal Characters:

• Percy Hardcaster, a British Communist organizer wounded in Spain
• Don Alvaro Morato, a Spanish prison guard
• Serafin, a Spanish double agent
• Josefa de la Asuncion, a Spanish peasant girl
• Sister Teresa, a Spanish nun and a hospital nurse
• Victor Stamp, a failed Australian artist and art forger
• Gwendolyn Margaret (Margot) Savage, Victor’s wife
• Tristram (Tristy) Phipps, Victor’s friend, a painter and a Communist
• Gillian (Jill) Phipps, Tristram’s wife, an upper-class Communist
• John (Jack) Cruze, a tax actuary and a womanizer
• Sean O’Hara, a Communist employee and a gunrunner
• Eileen O’Hara, Sean’s wife
• Ellen Mulliner, a spy and friend of Percy
• Agnus Irons, a feminist, an amateur golf champion, and a “New Woman”
• Freddie Salmon, an art forger and a gunrunner
• Abershaw, a forger and a gunrunner
• Isaac Wohl, a Jewish artist and a forger
• Don Maten (Mat), a Communist and a hotel owner

The Novel

No one can be expected to love satire, especially the reader, Wyndham Lewis wrote in 1934, but for the writer it is otherwise. Like his other works of fiction, The Revenge for Love is a satire, but it is satire with a difference. Not only is the novel considered his best, if not his most typical, but also it is a much gentler book, one in which the characters assume a human dimension often missing in his other satires.

The book is divided into seven parts and begins in Spain, where Percy Hardcaster, a British Communist organizer, is awaiting trial for his political activities. It is uncertain whether he will be shot or pardoned. Because of this uncertainty, he decides to escape with the aid of the prison guard, Serafin, and with some help from the outside. During the attempt, the guard is killed and Percy is shot in the leg, which he eventually loses. The end of the opening section finds Percy recuperating in a Spanish hospital attended by devoted nuns.

The second part of the novel moves the story to London and introduces the reader into the world of left-wing politics among the intellectuals and artists of England. The reader meets Victor Stamp, an Australian painter of uncertain talent, and his devoted wife, Gwendolyn Margaret Savage (Margot), and learns of their dire economic situation and of Victor’s doubts about his artistic abilities. Section 3 begins with a description of John (Jack) Cruze’s office, where he advises his clients on their tax difficulties and where one is also introduced to Tristram (Tristy) Phipps, a rather well-known and successful young painter who, because he occasionally paints nudes, attracts Jack’s interest. At Tristy’s apartment, Jack meets the painter’s wife, Gillian (Jill), and immediately falls in love with her. On a subsequent visit, Jack spies Jill in the nude, considerably inflaming his lust and strengthening his resolve to make her his next “bit of skirt.”

The fourth part of The Revenge for Love contains a wonderfully funny party episode at the house of Sean O’Hara, a gunrunner, during which Wyndham Lewis makes fun of British parlor leftists of every stripe. Percy Hardcaster is also reintroduced to the narrative, having returned from Spain a wounded hero of the war against Fascism. The affair between Jack and Jill (now called Jill Communist because of her fierce left-wing beliefs) heats up in the next part, and Percy is beaten by Jack for attacking Jill’s political leanings as false and meretricious. The episode allows Lewis, through Percy, to vent his contempt for the fashionable leftism of the 1930’s.

The next section takes the reader into the world of the art forgers, among whom are now numbered both Victor Stamp and Tristy Phipps, neither of whom can make enough money elsewhere to keep themselves alive. The art factory is run by Freddie Salmon and a man named Abershaw, who proves to be the most treacherous and unprincipled character in the novel. It is in this section that the two men arrange for Victor to accompany Percy back to Spain in order to run guns to the Communists in their fight against the Fascists.

Part 7, the final section, moves the story once again to Spain, as Victor, accompanied by Margot, has encamped on the French-Spanish border in preparation for transporting the arms. Margot receives several premonitions of impending disaster, including a bizarre incident with a dwarf, and she repeatedly begs Victor to abandon the project. At the last minute, she does in fact warn her husband of his imminent arrest, and, in perhaps the most action-filled scenes ever written by Lewis, they escape the Spanish authorities. Percy is not as lucky: He is recaptured by the Guard Civil and put in prison, where he reads of the accidental deaths of Victor and Margot, who have been killed by walking off a cliff during a storm as they were making their way back to France. The novel concludes in a most un-Lewisian manner, with Percy, in a moment of both self-pity and genuine grief, weeping over the death of his friends and the loss of his ideals.

The Characters

By the mid-1930’s, Lewis, that lonely old volcano of the Right, as Auden called him, began to enjoy his place as the “Enemy,” the British intellectual of the decade who could and would debunk the flourishing left-wing activities of the rest of his crowd. The Revenge for Love carries out such debunking through its three central characters: Percy, Victor, and Margot. As is often true of Lewis’ fictional creations, each character represents a cluster of political and moral values. Percy is a genuine lower-class figure who has become an organizer for the British Communist Party. Although he remains loyal to the party and to most of its tenets, he has lost any sense of idealism through his association with other party members and through his activity for the party in Spain. His attitudes toward leftists in general, and those of Lewis as well, are spelled out in his speech to Jill Communist, which results in his beating by Jack Cruze. In that speech, he offends the various parlor pinks, university leftists, radical dons, and artistic politicos in an attempt to get Jill to see the sham and fraud that infects the Socialist movement. Rather than showing Jill the light, however, he merely infuriates her with his truth-telling, and she retaliates by having him beaten. Her upper-class snootiness and his lower-class obedience in this scene take on a mockingly unegalitarian and decidedly non-Communistic flavor, which proves Lewis’ point about the depth of the commitment to socialism of such shallow figures as Jill.

It is to Percy that the story returns for its conclusion, and it is through his character that the fiction resolves itself in a curiously sentimental and human way. It is Percy who, in the last pages of the book, weeps genuine, if mixed, tears for the true heroes of the novel, Victor and Margot: for Victor because he is the one person in the narrative who does not sell out or capitulate to the political claptrap of the left, and for Margot because she is so selflessly devoted to Victor, enveloping him in a love so positive that in her is created the first sympathetic female figure in all of Lewis’ fiction. Both Victor and Margot retain a wonderfully innocent relationship to the world and thereby retain a purity of nature seldom depicted in satire. It is because of this purity that their death genuinely moves Percy to tears, even though he is in the midst of once again taking on his sham personality as an “Injured Party” in the Spanish jail.

Of the other supporting characters in The Revenge for Love, certainly the most noteworthy are Jack Cruze, Jill Communist, and Abershaw. Jack is the hard-drinking, womanizing, obtuse country squire, making him the perfect, if incongruous, figure to unmask the pretensions and shams of the others in the novel. Bordering on a Fascist bully, Jack stumbles through life illuminating it while blindly chasing after his next bit of skirt. In her odd combination of upper-crust background and attitudes and her fashionable adherence to an ill-conceived notion of the class struggle, Jill is a bogus figure, destructive of the Socialist cause without ever being aware of her negative influence, until, that is, Percy calls it to her attention. A woman who has nothing to lose by her political beliefs, she can remain stupid and cruel while appearing knowing and benign.

Abershaw is probably the most evil character of all of Lewis’ creations. Motivated solely by his own greed and power, he sucks innocent and guilty alike into his vortex of manipulation and deceit. He unthinkingly involves Victor and Margot in a sham gunrunning operation and willingly disposes of them without remorse. He is the central symbol for the novel, which Lewis originally intended to call “False Bottoms” and which possesses at its beginning and end images of concealed or hidden compartments, echoing the themes of deception and betrayal which dog the footsteps of the characters throughout the novel.

Critical Context

The Revenge for Love is regarded by many critics as Lewis’ best novel. In part, the novel has fared so well because, unlike his others, it contains likable characters, a degree of human sentiment, and a drop, at least, of compassion. Most of his satires, especially of the 1930’s, contain savage assaults on the British intellectual establishment, which was overwhelmingly leftist in its political leanings and which rather effectively froze Lewis out. Both as an artist and as an intellectual of some force and energy, Lewis became an embarrassment in England. Much of his rightist political stance he subsequently retracted, as he witnessed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and his behavior toward the Jews, so that in later years he has been treated more kindly by the critics, who have focused more on his artistic and fictional career than on his political one.

It would be untrue, however, to think that Lewis stood alone during the 1930’s. D. H. Lawrence, a favorite target of his, as well as T. S. Eliot, shared many of Lewis’ concerns, as did a good number of people outside the intellectual circles of both England and America. Lewis’ warnings against Socialist excesses turned out to have been prophetic, and some of those who opposed him in the 1930’s sided with him after World War II. Lewis is now viewed as an eccentric but important figure in the modernist movement. As a writer, an artist, and an intransigent polemicist, he occupied a central place in the European artistic and intellectual world between the wars.

Bibliography

Kenner, Hugh. Wyndham Lewis, 1954.

Materer, Timothy. Wyndham Lewis the Novelist, 1976.

Meyer, Jeffrey, ed. Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation, 1980.

Pritchard, William H. Wyndham Lewis, 1968.

Wagner, Geoffrey. Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy, 1957.