A Malign Modernist

...he was, someone said, "creative only in his hates...

...Fry did him out of a commission and Lewis denounced Fry's whole approach, winning the permanent enmity of the Bloomsbury group...

...Others thought Lewis one of the best talkers in England, and the handsomest...

...But at a time when Joyce, Stein, Pound and the others still had to be fought for in the colleges, I was startled to find them being attacked so within modernist ranks and in such unaccustomed terms...

...In his paranoia Lewis saw them all as intersupportive...

...Medical complications from untreated venereal disease added to the miseries of the late '30s, but four years of being stuck in Canada during World War II, as recounted in Self-Condemned, were for Lewis even worse...

...Yet more and more continues to be written about Lewis...

...Of a later Lewis attack, Virginia Woolf confided to her diary that it made her ill for several days: "I am publicly demolished...

...Augustus John, a recent graduate, soon became his model and mentor...

...Lewis' The Wild Body had appeared the year before...

...Considering how arbitrary many modernist notions were ("Vorticism," Lewis admitted, "was what I was doing at the moment"), and how frequently their proponents changed sides, it may seem absurd to teach students to discriminate carefully among these ideas and movements...

...To help Lewis was to court disaster...

...Lewis was a Priapist and angry man whose lusts and resentments provided drama for his fictions, exacerbated his politics and kept him in poverty until he was old and blind...

...Lewis' 50 scandalous and libelous books (several had to be withdrawn) excited the circles he aimed them at, but sold in the mere hundreds...

...Fascism enabled him to attack liberal, parliamentary capitalism and the culture engendered by it with a penetrating negativism that Marxism can now profit from...

...Lewis published in Blast Eliot's earliest poems to appear in England...

...In a combative way (initially ally, then attacker) he was involved with half the major figures of his time...

...No college professors I know of ever assign them in class...

...After running off with a chambermaid and then deserting her for later loves, the father sent increasingly less money to his wife and son, who lived in poverty in greater London...

...The demonic energy that produced his magazine Blast in 1914 still sets the critical seismographs quivering, blurred and contradictory though the readings may be...

...Back in England, determined to be famous, Lewis joined Roger Fry'sOme-ga Workshops...

...To cultural historians, Lewis is also irresistible...

...Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist...

...The issues of his mistresses who gave birth were put out for adoption...

...Quentin Bell meant the term "Fascist" literally...

...The most fascinating personality of our time," wrote T.S...

...His father was a wealthy, idle Canadian who paid Wyndham's fees at Rugby...

...Of Lewis'afterworld fantasy Childermass, I. A. Richards wrote, "To an agonizing degree we are not allowed to know what this is all about...

...But he soon led followers to physically disrupt Marinetti's meetings, then founded his own Vorticist movement...

...And Apes of God is cumbersomely unfunny...

...Fredric Jameson, the Yale Marxist critic, says it is because he best demonstrates the linkage between modernism and protofascism...

...Hugh Kenner, whose The Pound Era has two chapters on Lewis, tends to minimize the anti-Semitism and proto-fascism of Pound and his peers—an instance of the current antihistorical stance of academic literary studies...

...Unless, of course, you want to free literature from politics, as students and teachers, in reaction to the late '60s, have tended recently to do...

...Considering the date, homosexuality is depicted with amazing freedom...

...After two years on the Western Front in World War I (described in the autobiographical Blasting and Bombardier-ing) and a productive stint as official Canadian War artist, Lewis devoted half the 1920s to a "megalomastadonic masterpiece" that was to be the largest book ever produced...

...For seven years Lewis lived in France, Holland, Spain, and Germany on remittances from home...

...To women, whom he cruelly exploited sexually and financially, Lewis was irresistible...

...On the great modernists he was close to, Lewis' effect was malign...

...Lewis' book and Oswald Sptng\ex's Decline of the West, which I found on the same shelves, taught me to see artistic styles, abstract ideas and political movements as parts of a single complex—to be conceived rather differently when I read Marx two years later...

...To prove he was no anti-Semite he wrote The Jews, Are They Human?, a book that was as tactless and condescending as its title...

...In Nancy Cunard's Authors TakeSides on the Spanish Civil War, for example, only William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and the South African poet Roy Campbell supported Franco...

...Meyers is author of Homosexuality and Literature and biographies of George Orwell, T.E...

...He knows the period well, and having no particular thesis, treats Lewis fairly, but his abstract praise conflicts oddly with concrete evidence of Lewis' sloppy writing, muddled thinking and abominable behavior...

...Usually Lewis first comes to attention because of his striking portraits of Gertrude Stein, T.S...

...In 1929 Yeats wrote of Lewis, "I am reading Time and Western Man with ever growing admiration and envy—what energy...

...Eliot in an early review of Lewis' novel Tarr, and 40 years later: "one of the permanent masters of style in the English language...

...The bright Jewish lady has made a clown of Ernest Hemingway by teaching him her baby talk, though he has never taken it over into the jiggering and baboonish stage as has Miss Stein...

...Totally blind—perhaps as a result of syphilis, perhaps from a tumor like Milton's—Lewis courageously kept on writing and contending with his enemies...

...For Lewis, to be both homosexual and Jewish, like Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust, was a double demerit...

...An adventure novel, Revenge for Love, about the disasters of British Leftists in Spain, would have seemed prophetic, except, as it happened, the publishers delayed four years in bringing it out...

...Shivering, penniless, alienating would-be benefaclorsas usual, he felt snubbed and ignored...

...Lewis was against humor, though...

...Friends organized a retrospective exhibition of his paintings...

...Publishers said No, so instead eight books came out in two years, among them The ArtofBeing Ruled, The Lion and the Fox, Timeand Western Man, The Wild Body, Chil-dermass, Pale Face, and the satire Apes of Cod...

...Eliot, in turn, frequently ran Lewis in Criterion, as he did Charles Maurras, leader of Action Francaise...

...Behind him he left a long trail of emotional wreckage that had as often fallen about his own head as the heads of his victims...

...At Rugby, Lewis performed miserably and the frequent floggings were of no help...

...The critical works were badly assembled, overdependent on long quotations, stitched together by derisive comment and doctrinaire hyperboles, but unified by the impudence of their attack on everything Lewis disliked: Communism, feminism, pacifism, Blooms-bury, the Sitwells, time philosophy, the interior monologue, homosexuals, the cult of the child, the alleged dark wisdom of blacks and American Indians...

...With their tedious conversations, the rambling fictions are decisive only in their violence and have no center, no heart...

...Why, then, cannot critics let Lewis rest...

...A wise master who noticed his drawing suggested a shift at 16 to the Slade School of Art...

...When Filippo Marinetti, subsequently one of Mussolini's inspirers, brought his Futurist cult of machines and violence to England, Lewis joined enthusiastically...

...Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield...

...At the Sorbonne he took a course with Henri Bergson, basing most of his later satires and the theories behind them on Bergson's perception of the mechanical element in the comic...

...In Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist, Jameson sets high value on Lewis...

...Meyers lists by name some 30—a small proportion—of those he bedded, heiresses and countesses among them...

...Of all the writers Geoffrey Grigson knew, "only Auden equalled Lewis in intelligence...

...I encountered Time and Western Man in 1928 on the open shelves of the HarvardUnion'sbrowsingroom...

...Later he explained that he was trying to prevent a second World War...

...As in Meyers' biography of Mansfield, sex permeates the whole—here justifiably...

...The son adored his mother, but drained her of money...

...Jameson's logic unhappily recalls the time in Germany when the Social Democrats were attacked by the Communists to the benefit of the Nazis, on the assumption that the Nazis would soon have to yield power to them...

...Lewis had contempt for women and no use for children...

...In a reflex that was to occur wherever indebtedness was concerned, Lewis condemned Bergson for being a Jewish "time-philospher" in Time and Western Man...

...At the Closerie de Lilas he sat in on a cenacle of ultra-Rightists presided over by Maurras...

...In his generally bilious A Moveable Feast, Hemingway wrote of Lewis: "I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man...

...Two were by Iris Barry, who later created the film collection at the Museum of Modern Art...

...Waugh's Vile Bodies has a strong tinge of Lewis in ideas, comic style and title...

...Moreover, they appear in transparent disguises in his novels as he does in theirs...

...Its magazine, Blast, borrowing the idea from Guillaume Apol-linaire, judged all British culture in a series of "blasts" and "blesses...

...Eliot and Edith Sit well...

...Eliot a permanent elitist, antidemocratic, antiromantic bias 20 years earlier...

...the answer was "hundreds...

...Jeffrey Meyers' is at least the 10th substantial treatment, not to mention dissertations, bibliographies, illustrated catalogues of Lewis' painting, and editions of his art criticism in periodicals...

...Miss Gertrude Stein should get out of English," he cried...

...Many, although liberated spirits, wrote him abject letters after being dropped...

...I was prepared for Lewis' general attitude because I had been listening to the lectures of Irving Babbitt, who had given T.S...

...Nearly as striking, and as commonly reproduced, are photographs of Lewis himself around 1912 affecting a hidalgo costume with cape or long scarf, imitated from Augustus John...

...Hard to find, they are equally unread now...

...It was a time of schools and movements, Fauv-ist, Cubist, Symbolist, Expressionist, Post-Impressionist...

...In addition to fighting entanglements with women (the subject of Tarr), he copied masterpieces in museums and read voraciously, fashioning a political philosophy out of Sorel, Nietzsche and "the counter-revolutionist's Bible," Dostoevsky's The Possessed...

...Lewis was born in 1882 on a yacht off Nova Scotia...

...Back home Lewis found the tide turning in his favor...

...But as Meyers' book well reminds us, even very temporary ideas and slogans—the apparent ephemera of history—can have lasting consequences in art and cause unredeemable human suffering...

...James Joyce once politely asked Lewis how many children he had...

...Money, and even some modest official honors, began coming in...

...With much fresh documentation and hours of taped interviews with survivors (including Lewis' wife), The Enemy makes lively reading on every level, from politics and ideas to venereal disease and flat-hunting...

...Lewis influenced them all politically...

...He dashed off an immoderate defense of Hitler that blackened his reputation for years...

...He had an impact, however, on the work of two Canadian writer-admirers, Marshall McLuhan and Hugh Kenner...

...When she brought one back from the hospital, she had to wait outside on the steps until Lewis finished making love to Nancy Cunard...

...Despite such indebtedness, I find Lewis impossible to read today...

...In 1931 Lewis went to Berlin, where he was repelled by the "night circuses, Negertanz palaces, naktballeten, flagellation bars and sad wells of super-masculine loneliness" that had drawn Christopher Isherwood, Auden and Spender to Germany...

...Childermass was performed on the BBC in a six-hour dramatization...

...And the first issue of the British Union of Fascists quarterly, Oswald Mosley's organ, contained work by Pound, Lewis, Campbell and the Norwegian traitor, Vidkun Quisling...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia ONE OF "NATURE'S FASCISTI," as Quentin Bell called him, the painter-writer Wyndham Lewis blasted, borrowed, charmed, bullied, betrayed, glittered, lied, and seduced his stormy way through a half-century of English avant-gardism...

...nothing is left of me...

...With Stephen Spender as the novel's moronic, effeminate ingenu, The Apes of God makes sport of "two tyrannous queens," Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf, "and their asphyxiating coteries...

...Theex-pository works are confused, hasty, arbitrary...

...he thought it made things too easy for the reader...