"This implacable doctrine": Behaviorism in Wyndham Lewis's Snooty Baronet

Wyndham Lewis's 1932 novel Snooty Baronet has received little of the attention that focuses on this spikily provocative writer's work. Two of the most valuable book-length studies of Lewis, Fredric Jameson's Fables of Aggression and David Ayers's Whydham Lewis and Western Man, barely mention it. One earlier study, Hugh Kenner's Wyndham Lewis, characterized the novel as likable but minor, "peppy and pointless" (109), and another, William Pritchard's Wyndham Lewis, saw it as "the novelist's last gesture in a blind alley" (114).

The relative obscurity in which Snooty Baronet abides fell upon it as early as its original publication. Bradford Morrow and Bernard Lafour-cade, Lewis's chief bibliographers, found only three contemporary reviews (288-89). The bad odor lingering from the receptions of The Apes of God (1930), an enormous and impolitic satire on several highly recognizable London literary figures, and of Hitler (1931), a myopic piece of special pleading for the not-yet-in-power Nazis and their leader, may explain the silence. Lewis himself suspected a boycott, (1) but Morrow and Lafourcade located 12 notices of The Doom of Youth, a polemical work, and nine of Filibusters in Barbary, a travel book, both published in 1932, so there is no reason to suppose Lewis's books were being systematically ignored (286-89). Snooty Baronet certainly ran into unusually hard circumstances, however. It was the first of his novels for which he found no US publisher (the first US edition was a Haskell House reprint in 1971). In England, according to Lewis, both Boots's and Smith's lending libraries, uncomfortable with the novel's passages of sexual description, hit upon the singularly effective suppressive strategy of buying only 25 copies and keeping them off the public display shelves, thus restricting the novel's availability without giving it the sales boost that an outright ban might have effected (Creatures 184-85). As if all that were not enough, Rupert Grayson, whose firm had published Filibusters in Barbary, initiated a suit for libel on detecting his own likeness in Humphrey Cooper, one of Snooty Baronet's characters (Meyers 218-19). Inscribing a copy for an acquaintance years later, Lewis wrote, "This is the bad hat of my family of books [...]" (qtd. in Materer 100).

Bad hat though it may be, Snooty Baronet deserves and rewards attention, as I hope to show with a two-track argument. First, there is the question of whether "Lewis merely employs fiction as a means to explore the violent implications of current social theories" (Foshay 108). The novel certainly targets the ideas of John B. Watson, the American behaviorist psychologist, but to take that as closing discussion of the book, rather than opening it, is to miss an opportunity to situate the novel in Lewis's career as a polemicist and to explore the craggy, fissured contours of his worldview, one of Anglo-American modernism's vastest and strangest ideological edifices. That the novel emerges from Lewis's campaign against behaviorist psychology is quite true, but it should not be the horizon of discussion, because behaviorism was messily cathected to everything else Lewis feared and loathed.

Second, the reading proposed here will argue that behaviorism is for Lewis no ordinary antagonist. Like a tar-baby, it is one from which he cannot extricate himself. Two of the novel's relatively few advocates, Timothy Materer and Daniel Schenker, see its main value in its attack on behaviorism and its main formal achievement in Lewis's orchestration of an unwitting self-exposure, by the narrator and title character, Sir Michael Keil-Imrie, of his own viciousness and moral inanity. Materer compares Lewis's novel to Lolita in that Kell-Imrie, like Humbert Humbert, attempts a narrative of self-justification but instead, at length, more clearly reveals his own guilt, making plain the "pseudo-scientific inhumanity" of the behaviorist theories Lewis was satirizing (101). Schenker also sees the novel as a satire, "more properly religious than moral," and Kell-Imrie as "a character whose brutally mechanistic assumptions about his fellow man differ in degree but not in kind from the assumptions embodied in our commer cial, educational, political, and, of course, military institutions" (93).

Kell-Imrie inspires little to no readerly sympathy, but the idea that he is straightforwardly satirized needs complicating, for he is remarkably congruent with Lewis himself. Geoffrey Wagner long ago described Kell-Imrie as "semi-autobiographical" (256), a suggestion carried forward by Lafourcade in his afterword to the novel: "Snooty's unique contradictory nature is due to his being so much modelled on the author himself, though half the time expressing views totally opposed to his" (265). In early drafts of the novel, Kell-Imrie was named Carr--Orr (Snooty Baronet 255, 298), aligning him with Kerr-Orr, the Lewisian persona to whom the stories, sketches, and theories of human behavior collected in The Complete Wild Body are attributed. Kerr-Orr is "a showman with a full name and a family history secretly and ironically modeled on [Lewis's] own," notes Lafourcade in his afterword to The Complete Wild Body (407). Furthermore, the seventh and eighth chapters of Snooty Baronet were written before the others, ori ginally intended for Filibusters in Barbary, Lewis's travel book; Lewis's retention of first-person narration--which he used in no other novel--makes Kell-Imrie's voice all but indistinguishable from the voice Lewis adopts when writing in his own person, as in Filibusters or Blasting and Bombardiering The texture of the prose, clotted with dashes, stuffed with elaborate parentheses, maniacally allusive, given to sudden barking with italics and exclamations, is the very texture of Lewis's critical and polemical prose in its most embattled passages. The text is even "signed" in a peculiar way. A digression on an eighteenth-century politician and an ironic suggestion for improving bullfights inscribe the author's name both in the text and in the character Kell-Imrie. "And if I had to pick out of our annals a figure to explain myself by," Kell-Imrie abruptly declares at one point, "I could think of no better one than that of the famous disciple of Burke, namely William Windham" (100). Many pages later, attending a bullfight, he notes, "I should prefer a Lewis-gun to these lances and swords. The former gives better the measure of the genius of man--the Lewis-gun. (Of man the individual--I mean Lewis of course)" (172).