Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis enters Ernest Hemingway’s account through a meeting in Ezra Pound’s studio, where boxing, artistic allegiance, and first impressions collide. Hemingway presents Lewis less through biography than through his own unusually hostile gaze: the wide black hat, the old-fashioned artist’s clothes, the supercilious watching, and the face he cannot stop trying to describe. Gertrude Stein’s nickname for him, “the Measuring Worm,” offers a more comic explanation of his artistic method, but Hemingway’s first impression remains the scene’s emotional center.

Identity and Artistic Context

Lewis appears as one of Pound’s friends in a circle of writers and artists whose work and loyalties are regularly discussed. Pound liked Lewis’s painting very much; Hemingway disliked it. Hemingway says he kept silent about works he did not like, because he understood affection for a friend’s art as something akin to affection for family: criticizing it could be impolite, even when his own judgment differed. The disagreement therefore remains unspoken, but it gives the encounter a context of competing aesthetic loyalties. Pound’s enthusiasm for his friends’ work is presented as generous, though Hemingway observes that loyalty can also make judgment disastrous.

The meeting takes place while Hemingway is teaching Pound to box. Pound has not been boxing long and knows fencing; Hemingway is working on elementary movements, including making Pound’s left hand his boxing hand and moving his left foot forward with the right foot parallel. He has not yet taught Pound to throw a left hook, and shortening the right hand remains a future task. The detailed, unfinished instruction matters: Lewis arrives not at a formal artistic gathering but in the middle of a practical lesson, where Pound is still learning and Hemingway is trying to protect him from embarrassment.

The Studio Encounter

Lewis wears a wide black hat and clothes Hemingway associates with La Bohème and with the uniform of a prewar artist. That outfit seems out of place to Hemingway, who recalls that they believed artists could wear whatever clothes they owned and had no official uniform. The contrast turns clothing into evidence in the narrator’s appraisal: Lewis’s appearance seems to him not simply dated but self-consciously representative of an older artistic type. Hemingway watches him watching Pound, and describes the look as supercilious while he slips Pound’s left leads or blocks them with an open right glove.

Hemingway wants to stop the sparring, but Lewis insists they continue. Hemingway interprets Lewis’s attention as a hope that Pound will be hurt, though nothing in the account establishes Lewis’s motive beyond the narrator’s reading of his expression and behavior. No injury occurs. Hemingway does not counter; instead, he keeps Pound moving, with Pound extending his left hand and throwing a few right hands. Hemingway then ends the lesson. The practical sequence—gloves, movement, a few punches, and the decision to stop—contrasts with the menace he attributes to Lewis, whose presence makes an ordinary exercise feel like a test of loyalty and protection.

Afterward, the men have a drink, and Hemingway listens as Pound and Lewis talk about people in London and Paris. He watches Lewis without seeming to look at him, as he says one does when boxing. The comparison carries the scene’s tension forward: even after the sparring ends, Hemingway’s attention remains guarded and alert. His judgment of Lewis is emphatically personal, grounded in watching him rather than in any account of Lewis’s work or conversation.

A Face Read as a Character

Walking home, Hemingway tries to work out what Lewis’s face reminds him of. The comparisons he considers are mostly medical, with one slang exception, but he says he can isolate only the eyes. Beneath the black hat, they had seemed to him to belong to an unsuccessful rapist. This is a revealing limit as much as an insult: Hemingway attempts to break the face into describable parts, yet the eyes become the image that fixes his first impression. Earlier he has compared Lewis’s face to that of an ordinary frog and imagined Paris as too large a puddle for him. Such images do not provide neutral description; they show how thoroughly the narrator’s dislike shapes what he sees.

Hemingway tells his wife that he has met the nastiest man he has ever seen. She asks him not to tell her about Lewis because they are going to have dinner. The brief exchange checks the intensity of Hemingway’s account with a domestic refusal to entertain it. His disgust is central to his telling, but it does not automatically become the household’s subject. The episode thus makes room for a distinction between the strength of his reaction and the importance others are willing to give it.

Stein’s Nickname and the Revised Impression

About a week later, Hemingway meets Gertrude Stein and asks whether she has met Lewis. Stein calls him “the Measuring Worm” and describes him studying a good picture with a pencil and thumb, measuring how it is done, then returning to London to imitate it without getting the result right. In her explanation, Lewis can identify a picture’s measurable procedure but misses what it is about. The nickname converts Hemingway’s hostility into a compact criticism of imitation: the problem is not that Lewis fails to look closely, but that close looking does not, in Stein’s account, lead to understanding.

Hemingway finds Stein’s label kinder and more Christian than his own first thoughts. He later tries to like Lewis and be friends with him, as he says he did with nearly all of Pound’s friends once Pound had explained them to him. The account does not establish that they became friends. Instead, it preserves a change in Hemingway’s approach: the first encounter’s bodily suspicion is followed by an effort at accommodation, aided by Pound’s explanations and Stein’s wry formulation.

Narrative Role

Lewis’s brief appearance shows how quickly Hemingway’s narration turns observation into judgment—and how that judgment can be qualified without being erased. The same person is viewed through several competing frames: Pound’s friend and favored painter, the conspicuously dressed observer at a boxing lesson, the face Hemingway reads as nasty, and Stein’s artist who measures pictures but misses their meaning. The episode never resolves these descriptions into a single verdict. Its significance lies instead in the gap between seeing and understanding, a gap that Stein names in artistic terms and Hemingway reveals in his own effort to describe Lewis.