Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis

First published: 1932

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: New York, London, Provence, and Persia

Principal Characters:

• Sir Michael Kell-Imrie (Snooty), a man of letters, baronet, and war hero with a mechanical leg
• Captain Humphrey (Humph) Cooper Carter, Snooty’s literary agent
• Valerie (Val) Ritter, Snooty’s girlfriend, a pornographic novelist
• Lily Tagel, Snooty’s other girlfriend, a salesperson at the Victoria Station tobacco Kiosk
• Bob McPhall, Snooty’s friend, a bullfighting expert
• Pat Bostock, Snooty’s guide to Persia
• Ali Akbar, a Persian bandit

The Novel

Snooty Baronet is a broad social satire which focuses on Sir Michael Kell-Impie, the “Snooty Baronet” of the title, a minor writer of some celebrity, with a mechanical leg and an obscure Scottish title. The novel begins with the writer introducing himself to the reader by confessing that authors are unaccustomed to opening books in the first person, singular, but that the presence of his mechanical leg necessitates such an approach since it is impossible to extricate himself from the cab in which he is riding with any other voice. The opening sentences introduce the reader to Snooty in all of his eccentricities, both verbal and physical, and establish the confessional/hortatory tone of the fiction from the start.

Snooty soon leaves New York to return to his native country of England, and the trip to London provides an opportunity for him to give vent to his various prejudices against contemporary British society through a running monologue on various indices of imminent collapse such as billboards and the popular press. Waiting for him on his return is a note from his lover of long standing, Mrs. Valerie Ritter, and one from his agent, Captain Humphrey Cooper Carter. Both want to see him. His appointment with Val that night leads to a debauch and an invitation from Val to spend some time together in the south of France. The next morning, Snooty visits his agent, from whom he receives an invitation to write a book on the cult of Mithras in Persia, a volume Humph believes will equal Snooty’s book on fish in public interest. The invitation is a thinly disguised ruse to get Snooty captured in Persia by Ali Akbar, the bandit, so that his books will gain sales through the resultant publicity. The scenes with Val lend themselves to a satire on modern love affairs, and the scenes with Humph give Wyndham Lewis a place to air his thoughts on literary agents. In these scenes, as in the entire novel, Lewis sets up episodes as often for malicious asides as for plot development, and indeed, the book is designed as a series of episodes, or set pieces.

After a brief interlude during which Snooty talks about the bull cult of Mithras and has some fun with a parody of D. H. Lawrence, the reader meets Lily Tagel, the tobacco salesperson. Unlike Val, she has no literary pretensions. She is much more down-to-earth, lower class and, as Snooty confesses, much more to his liking. Although she has discovered Snooty’s real identity as a Baronet and author, something he kept from her, she is not overly impressed by her discoveries, a point which Snooty admires.

During a second meeting with Humph, Snooty confesses that Val will be accompanying him to Persia. They have already made plans for a vacation and he cannot back out of their arrangement; as a gentleman, he has given his word. On their way to Persia, however, Snooty and Val stop in the south of France to try to persuade Bob McPhail, a bullfighting expert and friend of Snooty, to accompany them to Persia, where he will also be commissioned by Humph to write a book, and where he can provide expert advice for Snooty’s book on Mithraism. During an amateur competition in the local bullring on the afternoon of their arrival, however, Bob is killed when a bull throws him against a barricade while he is trying to help another amateur who has been foolish enough to get caught by the animal. Snooty and Val must proceed on to Persia without their friend and adviser.

After brief stopovers in Damascus, Baghdad, before Val and Snooty continue to the town of Yes, where they are to meet the bandit leader who will take them into the hills and provide the sources for Snooty’s book, they rest in Tehran. Val and Humph, who has joined them, do not get along, and the friction between the two causes sufficient grief for Snooty that he takes to hiding out in a brothel, the most exclusive in the capital city. The novel stampedes to a conclusion outside the town of Yes, where, having met with the brigands, Humph is shot and killed by Snooty in a show of bravado marksmanship and where he abandons Val to the clutches of the chieftain before returning home to write the novel the reader is now reading.

The Characters

The central character and voice of the fiction is the “Snooty Baronet,” a journalistic epithet used by Michael Kell-Imrie, a former serviceman who sustained an unbelievable number of wounds during the Great War, leaving him with a mechanical leg, which squeaks if it is not oiled often enough, and a plate in his head, which bothers him during weather changes. This opinionated and acerbic writer stumbled into his profession by trying to write a book in which he takes the side of Moby Dick against Ahab and the gang of louts who hunt him. His fish book, as Snooty calls it, received a publicity boost when on a fishing trip Snooty actually caught an unbelievably large game fish, a feat which attracted nationwide attention in the press. This publicity, along with his minor title, provides him with sufficient notoriety to be able to earn a living by his ideas. What he really wants to write about, however, is how people behave, but his conclusions are so radical that they disconcert his readers. Thus, his books on social behavior do not sell very well. The interesting relationship between works of fiction and unpopular philosophical or political volumes mirrors Lewis’ career during the 1930’s, when his political and social beliefs became quite objectionable.

Val and Lily represent two types of fictional heroines popular in the serious fiction of the interwar years. Val as an artist manque retains faint echos of Aldous Huxley’s characters in such works as Crome Yellow (1921) and Point Counter Point (1928). Lily, with her class connections, is also reminiscent of various characters from the works of D. H. Lawrence, an author elsewhere attacked in the pages of Snooty Baronet. It is interesting to note that Snooty prefers Lily to Val, who has designs on his title and on him. When he leaves her behind in Persia, he does so with little regret. Just as he is repelled by Val’s literary impulses, he is charmed by Lily’s disingenuous attempts to support herself through the male members of her extended “family.”

Humph is modeled on any number of literary figures from Lewis’ life. He is meant to suggest the venal side of art, with its disregard of quality and genuineness. Because Lewis was constantly being cautioned by his editors about the flagrant attacks on other writers which appeared in his works, one could suppose that Humph represents any conservative literary type then extant in the British literary scene.

Val, Lily, and Humph, however, represent types in this book, types which bear the brunt of Lewis’ attack on contemporary society. The characters in this novel, like the novel itself, provide cardboard targets for the barbs Snooty wishes to throw at them. It is one of the criticisms leveled at this novel, as indeed at all the fiction Lewis wrote, that he dismissed characters with such coldness and lack of remorse.

Critical Context

Lewis is ranked with Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh as one of the finest interwar satirists. Unlike Huxley’s diffident intellectuals or Waugh’s innocent young men, Lewis’ characters tend to be persons of action. Rather than simply being content to absorb life’s buffetings, they flail through life trying to establish a place, albeit a tenuous one, amid the uncertainties and violence of the modern world.

Snooty Baronet generates an energy and develops a geographical scope worthy of Waugh’s novels. Unlike Lewis’ earlier novel, the Apes of God (1930), which is confined to London and its surroundings, Snooty Baronet encompasses a locale as wide as the far-flung reaches of the empire. Students of Lewis’ work have slighted this book, preferring The Apes of God or the later The Revenge for Love (1937), ignoring the advances made in this novel toward a greater dependence on narrative and character over polemic. The plot is diffuse, and the characters, especially Snooty, are at times unsympathetic, but the handling of point of view and the wonderful tension Lewis maintains between Snooty and the reader deserve better treatment than has been accorded them.

Bibliography

Chapman, Robert T. Wyndham Lewis: Fictions and Satires, 1973.

Materer, Timothy. Wyndham Lewis: The Novelist, 1976.

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

The Observer. August 12, 1984, p. 19.

Pritchard, William H. Wyndham Lewis, 1968.

Punch. CCLXXXVI, June 20, 1984, p. 57.

Quill and Quire. L, June, 1984, p. 37.

Times Literary Supplement. July 6, 1984, p. 762.

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