Gore Vidal once remarked that he loathed screenwriting in Hollywood, but that his fury had  inspired his work: “I am angry most of the time when I am there, which might be unbearable for

someone else, but for me it’s fuel for my writing.” As I discovered when writing biographies, including a perverse character in the book, a target of hate who betrays the subject in subtle

ways, can also be inspiring.  This nasty person not only balances my admiration for the main character and heightens the emotional intensity of the biography, but also supplies a cathartic

focus for my resentment.  Often frustrated and angry with archivists and editors, and with a difficult project that is devouring years of my life, I can vent my spleen on this hate-figure.

crippling mother in my Robert Lowell.  The most outstanding example of well-deserved hate is the painter and critic Roger Fry in my biography of Wyndham Lewis.  In the latter, his rival

inspired intense hostility and choice invective, and I relished describing the fury of Lewis as he demolished his wicked adversary. In July 1913 the valuable and prestigious commission to

paint the murals for the Ideal Home exhibition in London was definitely awarded to Wyndham Lewis, but stolen by Roger Fry.  He personally loathed Fry, despised his conventional art and hated

his followers in the influential Bloomsbury Group.  He said the retrograde Fry “was all for the amateur, all for the eternal Child, and wished to make of the painting-world of London a

tight little right little world, safe for the amateur to live in.”  He attacked Fry’s lack of taste and lack of morality, and (alluding to Charles Dickens’ hypocritical character) called him

“the Pecksniff-shark, a timid but voracious journalistic monster, unscrupulous, smooth-tongued and mischievous.”  In short, “a bad shit”.   The impoverished Lewis, swindled by the wealthy

Fry (heir of the vast chocolate fortune), fired off an artillery barrage that seemed at once rude, truculent, caustic, outrageous and brutal.  But he was completely honest and absolutely

right. Lewis knew that Fry had maliciously sought revenge for Lewis’ bitter exposure of his shady practices during the Ideal Home controversy; that the rest of Bloomsbury, jealous of Lewis’

superior achievement in both art and literature, had actively assisted in Fry’s covert campaign to deliberately damage his career.  Lewis felt that Bloomsbury, that malefic sect of militant

amateurs, who tried to deny Fry’s lies and greed, had infected English culture and society like a strangely privileged fungus. He then extended his field of fire to Fry’s devoted disciples,

and condemned their social snobbery, Victorian aestheticism, fake bohemianism, confusion of money and taste, lack of originality and mutual glorification.  He disliked the Bloomsbury set’s

aesthetic values, snobbish behaviour and homosexual ethos.  Their politics and pacifism had enabled them to cravenly escape the war, which had killed his talented comrades Henri

Gaudier-Brzeska and T. E. Hulme, and destroyed the most creative years of his own life.  The Bloomsberries even mocked the young Gerald Brenan when he returned from the war with a Military

Cross. Lewis convincingly argued that Bloomsbury aesthetics were decorative and old-fashioned, and that they used their connections with the Paris art world to puff their own inferior work.

  He lamented that the reactionary fungus had spread from England to France: “a small group of people which is of almost purely eminent Victorian origin, saturated with William Morris’

prettiness and fervour, ‘Art’s for Art’s sake,’—I refer to the Bloomsbury painters—are those who are apt to act most as mediators between people working here and the Continent, especially

Paris.  And Paris gets most of its notions on the subject of English painting through this medium.”  He quoted Picasso’s deadly question, “Why, when I ask about modern artists in England, am

I always told about Duncan Grant?”  Lewis confirmed that “Fry, the publicist and painter, is their honoured leader; Mr. Duncan Grant their darling star-performer.  Mr. Clive Bell, second in

command, almost too articulate with emotion whenever he refers to either of these figures.” Lewis rightly emphasized the tremendous contrast between his own emotionally charged paintings

and the tepid imitations of the French by Fry, Grant, his lover Vanessa Bell, and her husband and cheerleader, the critic Clive Bell.  A comparison of Lewis’ highly original paintings with

the derivative work of Fry and Grant justifies his rage at their success and his own failure.  He was naturally furious that second-rate painters, far inferior to himself, controlled the

English art world through their talentless Bloomsbury cabal.  Comparing his own art to useful voltaic therapy, he declared that his enemies would be jolted out of their tame complacency when

confronted by his powerful work. Fry and his friend Bell would sustain salutary shock after shock from the unceremonious vigour of his painting: “Charged with a strange zeal, it outrages in

turn all the traditional principles of their English training and their essential respectability.” Lewis’ bitter quarrel with Roger Fry was a critical turning point in his career.  The

controversy began his lifelong conflict with Bloomsbury and permanently damaged his ability to earn his living as an artist. It established his distrust and dislike of art impresarios—from

Fry and Clive Bell to Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark.  It stigmatised Lewis in the eyes of the art world as an instigator of rude public combats and gave him the reputation of an Enemy,

which he adopted as his public persona.  But there were also positive results from this conflict.  His violent controversy with Fry and break with Fry’s tame Omega Workshops, which he called

“a curtain and pincushion factory,” freed him from the bonds of traditional art, led directly to his own triumphant Rebel Art Centre, and to the mature works that first made him famous: his

Vorticist paintings and his journal _BLAST_. _Jeffrey Meyers will publish both _James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist _and _Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath

_with Louisiana State University Press in 2024._ _ _ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to

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