Wyndham Lewis

...We are now living in the thick of that benumbed, rampaging transition which Lewis considered his particular province as critic and creative writer...

...The Revenge for Love and Self Condemned...

...His characters are all tics, mannerisms, visual idiosyncracies...

...And personality is extremely important in any evaluation of Lewis...

...Thus his criticism of Spengler, Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson, Joyce, Pound, Gertrude Stein, Sartre, Hemingway, Malraux and Orwell...

...He is of the school of brilliance, which depends wholly for its effects on "epithetic sparkle," clear, aggressive ideas, a bravura finish, and whose exponents are so numerous in French and so few in English literature...

...World War I had introduced him to violence and the machine, but World War II was a much more drastic experience, since it convinced him that the patterns evolved by the writer in his study could not be applied wholesale to political life without great destructiveness and suffering...

...but it is far more difficult to observe oneself in that hard and exquisite light...

...Self is the race that lost...

...He is not an academic making things clear to students, or a literary journalist being polite at a party, or a lecturer to a lot of old ladies being purring and condescending, but just a man, at once alert and excited, amusing himself about equals, among equals...

...Lewis' estimate was both very low and very high...

...Once, when discussing this very chaos and unpredictability, Paul Valery declared that "We are all backing into the Future.' What he meant was that no matter how daring and "advanced" a scientist or artist was, his mind and sensibility were conservative structures, based on habits, beliefs and methods that were precious inheritances from the rapidly receding past...

...they include such excellent critics as Walter Allen...

...It is the one piece of property all communities have agreed it is illegal to possess Self is the ancient race, the rest are the new one...

...For Lewis, the mind and its transforming gift rescued all of reality from chaos and insignificance...

...But all the fierceness has been transformed into laughter...

...This active, shaping attitude was, if anything, intensified by the fact that Lewis was also a painter who approached life from a predominantly plastic, visual standpoint...

...John Holloway puts his finger on a crucial spot when he says that "Lewis was no mere Jeremiah futilely declaiming against decay...

...This forked, strange-scented, blond-skinned gut-bag, with its two bright rolling marbles with which it sees, bull's-eyes full of mockery and madness, is my stalking horse...

...He knew that decay means transmutation...

...Characteristically, however, he saw these ideas through the magnifying, unromantic lens of laughter...

...It is as a mediator between that Past and that Future, sometimes as a defender of the Past against the encroachments of the Future, sometimes as a proponent of the Future against the dead hand of the Past, that Wyndham Lewis assumes his value and importance today...

...In this sense, certainly, Wyndham Lewis is not a great writer and T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Ezra Pound, his contemporaries, certainly are...

...Like many of the artists of his generation, who imagined that the breakthrough symbolized by modernism had given them the means to construct an entirely new world, manipulating people as they manipulated paints or words, Lewis tended toward an authoritarian solution of political problems which, so it seemed, were simply annoying disturbances invading the orderly calm of the artist's workshop...

...What emerges above all from The Art of Being Ruled is the conviction of an imminent planetary change in human life so profound as essentially to be a transmutation in the biological sense...

...The place of honor is outside,' Lewis declared in one of his last critical books, and the pride and courage, the radicalism, of that declaration still does not conceal its pathos...

...Only Ben Jonson and Thomas Nashe, the "snarling satirists" of the Elizabethan age, give us the proper literary antecedents for Lewis's peculiar stance...

...Here we have Lewis looking rather benignly back on almost a quarter of a century of his own destructive criticism...

...To put it briefly: The body is an absurd machine, the Self or personality is wrested from the Not-Self or the natural, material world by the moulding, creative force of the intellectual, yet, inevitably "the process and condition of life . is a grotesque degradation and 'souillure' of the original solitude of the soul.' "Self, sacred act of violence, is like murder on my hands...

...others are wary...

...Opposed to the main direction taken by his great contemporaries, his art wished to be a public art, both in the sense of speaking to an entire educated society and of refusing to descend into some private, dimly-lit corner of privileged consciousness...

...It is comparatively easy," he says in his early essay, "The Meaning of the Wild Body, "to see that another man, as an animal, is absurd...

...I hang somewhere in its midst operating it with detachment...

...Sartre performed this office for the most recent great German pessimist...

...It is this quality of fearless generosity that attracted me to Lewis's work long ago in the '30s and still exercises its spell today...

...He is not a writer who eases you into experience, enticing you by a beguiling, unaccentuated flow in which his ideas are unobtrusively inserted...

...They chug like extremely mobile mechanisms through their cavernous, flashy milieus, charged by the explosive ideological manias of an increasingly ideological age...

...The public stage, with live actors—in contrast to the private mystery, staged in a rich patron's cellar, tor an audience of cognoscenti of shadow pictures of an obscure emotional...

...Yet many critics have insisted that Lewis belongs in this company, as an equal and, owing to the greater breadth and receptivity of his thought, that he is perhaps an even more provocative writer, with more to say to us at this particular juncture of history and art...

...Fraser, however, is not concerned with an element that I consider still more valuable: Lewis as cultural critic, responding to the Zeitgeist and combatting it...

...Propelled forward by a blind mechanical force, he had to look back, for to consent to the destruction of these inheritances would be tantamount to destroying the ancient premises on which civilization had been built and has managed to survive until now...

...and perhaps the most admirable thing about his whole achievement as a man was the seemingly intense effort of concentration which he brought to apprehend and register this transmutation...

...underworld—is what now stands empty...

...An unremitting, dazzling consciousness, which sometimes could degenerate into mere self-consciousness, distinguishes Lewis's prose...

...It all depends on what your estimate of man happens to be...

...What made man like a God, his intellectual and creative power, was, in his eyes, matched on the other end of the scale by the men who were living the "sleep of the machine" and who asked for nothing better than a rule, a convention, a uniform, to rid them of the burden of freedom and responsibility...

...As Lewis said later, in The Writer and the Absolute, 1952: "Since 1939 any German thinker needs a chaperone or escort to circulate in the outside world, or even someone who will impersonate him...

...still others are frightened to death...

...Kerr-Orr, the showman, is a "laughing machine," a "Soldier of Humor," "disposed to forget that people are real—that they are, that is, subjective patterns belonging specifically to me, in the course of this jokelife, which indeed has for its very principle a denial of the accepted actual...

...Its little dark and stony desert has flowered...

...He hustles you into it, abruptly, peremptorily, almost brutally...

...Holloway also facilitates a penetration of Lewis's RAYMOND ROSENTHAL'S anthology of Lewis, The Soldier of Humor and Other Writings, will be published in 1966...

...The essay is drawn from his introduction world—and it is a world—by pointing out the central meaning of violence, the machine and megalopolis, in Lewis's vision of contemporary life Yet he scants, it seems to me, the personal and esthetic underpinnings on which Lewis's vision was based...

...It is based on an intricate conception of the relations that exist between society and the individual, the body and the spirit, the "gut-bag" and the "subjective patterns" of this "joke-life...

...I move on a more primitive level than most men, I expose the essential me quite coolly, and all men shy a little...

...For him, the body was not a sacred vessel but a prison which could only be brightened and civilized by the vigorous play of the intellect...

...Lewis's role as "outsider" came to him, so to speak, naturally, by birth...

...Thus, in novel after novel, from Tarr to Snooty Baronet to Childermas, Lewis seems intent on exposing both the solidity and delusiveness of external appearances...

...It is all brilliant and it is all controlled by a concern for the individual, whom Lewis claimed would be the first great casualty of the technological revolution...

...The stain won't come out," Lewis says in The Enemy of the Stars...

...In contrast to Joyce or Pound, whose personalities tend with almost classical reticence to disappear in their greatest works, Lewis or his surrogate is always at the center of the stage, announced by an indelible stylistic flourish and surrounded by a throng of embattled opinions...

...Like a prison art, or the introspection of the recluse, or the strange genius of the demented, it will survive in some form, as an integral part of our cultural expression [But] Art of the first order must be lost in this cul-de-sac...

...A whole society, not an unrepresentative fragment, is demanded by great gifts of speech and great interests in public affairs such as Dante and Milton possessed, for instance...

...The opposition is usually silent or hurriedly disdainful...

...Out of its [modern art's] very limitations and frustrations," Lewis said in his autobiography, Rude Assignment, "it has created something...

...Throughout his work, that heavy human mass, always ready to be galvanized into violent life by some apocalyptic political creed, hovers about him as a constant threat...

...The son of an American father and an English mother, he was born on a ship in the Bay of Fundy on November 18, 1882, went to school in England and spent his youth roaming the European continent, trying, as he put it, "to overcome the effects of an English education...

...These are the friendly voices...

...There is a prophetic quality to all of Lewis's writing, but it is not a prophecy that can be formulated and used as a recipe against the chaos and unpredictability at the heart of the contemporary situation...

...In truth, the world has been turned into a vast laboratory and all of us are the objects of an experiment whose outcome the experts are not quite sure of...

...Esthetically, in fact, it is his great charm and his great limitation...

...Lewis's equals and contemporaries regarded him as a kind of necessary wild man who said the uncomfortable, true things that they either felt would be subsumed in their works or enacted in history...

...It was valuable destruction, for, as G. S. Fraser has so exactly put it: "Wyndham Lewis seems to me one of the very greatest critics of this century chiefly because he had this extraordinary gift of, as it were, transferring directly to the page the blurted and indiscreet conversational insights of an artist, to artists, about artists...

...But there was a strikingly modern depth to Lewis's "surface," for he had discovered and described the absurd, the anguish of being caught between being and the void, long before these ideas reached us as an intellectual fashion elaborated in Paris on the framework of the latest German metaphysics...

...At the same time, the costume of personality, with its cozily familiar trappings of race, national trait and individual idiosyncracy, is totally absent...

...The rigor of these categories resembles in a startling way the bleak, unearthly terminology of a Manichean or a modern religious mystic, not only because of the position of evident inferiority in which the body is placed, but also because of the strict separation of spheres and powers, the careful allotment of qualities, the mapping, so to say, of the grounds of spiritual conflict...

...His satiric, sardonic humor, which is another way of saying his art, was his sole means of escape from the cage of implacable antinomies that he himself had erected, having first discovered them in reality...

...A vulgarized adaptation of the scientific attitude of "wait and see" has seeped into quarters one would have imagined immune to such inhibiting disciplines...

...Such consciousness must be of the nature of a thunderbolt...

...But this brash approach to experience is not merely stylistic swagger...

...The "inferno of moronic idiocy and decay" Lewis saw in the wake of the modernist revolution has come into its own, and the "advanced" artists have settled down with relative comfort on their quaint reservations, devoting themselves to strange rites and magics incomprehensible to the broad society...

...Believing, as he did, that the world was in a permanent revolutionary crisis and transition, engineered by the conjunction of science and technology, Lewis tried to trace this social cataclysm in the most representative works of philosophy and art...

...Unfortunately, to understand Lewis one must read all of his work, right down to the obscure pamphlets and fugitive articles, since he is a writer with a highly personal system who never bothered to describe this system except by indirection and irony...

...As a consequence, there are many times in his fiction when the sheer sensation of animal triviality overwhelms him, when the incessant, thudding movement of his style becomes a fatiguing diversion to conceal from himself the terror of "absolute revelation.' Yet the continuing struggle with the self-imposed limits of his vision opens out at last, in his later years, into the rich, hard-won, fully matured humanity of his finest novels...

...But no man has ever continued to live who has observed himself in that manner for longer than a flash...

...even to accept it, to adapt himself to it, in spite of clear and profound revulsion...

...But this shining, sounding universe could become dead, gray and inert whenever the mind went astray or abdicated its function and "the sleep of the machine" supervened...

...A violent opponent of nationalism and its tribal mumbo-jumbo, which he saw being swept away by the standardization attendant on the victory of the machine, Lewis had a temperamental predilection for the stark impersonality and uprootedness that modern life was favoring all around him...

...At the inception of his career, in his poetic essay, "Inferior Religions," and his play, The Enemy of the Stars, Lewis illustrated his special standpoint with a density and allusiveness that have been the delight and despair of the critics...

...Strangely, rather appallingly, Lewis lived, at least as an artist, in precisely that "difficult" manner for all the rest of his days...

...Yet Lewis, though obsessed by such patterns throughout his artistic career, was a determined agnostic...

...His genius as a critic was to state, in an unforgettable fashion, the permanently damaging things that could be said...

...Neither Swift nor Smollett, despite their similarity to him as satirists and historians of morals and manners, can stand as models in this lonely field...

...He seems to have been successful, for in one of his first published stories, "The Soldier of Humor," we meet the quirky, aloof, severe, energetic personage whom Lewis concocted out of his sense of difference and uprootedness: "My body is large, white and savage...

...John Holloway and G. S. Fraser...

...Some people are exhilarated by the prospect...