Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer
Paul Edwards
Yale £40, pp583
Buy it at BOL
Who, today, reads Wyndham Lewis? Who derives enrichment or recognition from the paintings and drawings in half a dozen media? Arguably, the last Wyndham Lewis hour was that of his retrospective at the Tate in the summer of 1956, the year before the artist and writer's death. What successor has he had, with the single exception of that other splendidly gifted outsider, Michael Ayrton?
It is this condition of eclipse which, manifestly, incenses Paul Edwards. He bears witness to a sense of scandalous injustice. Wyndham Lewis the artist, novelist, social critic, pamphleteer, must be restored to his high place in the pantheon of English arts and letters.
This quest (the quixotic is generously in order) has engendered an awesome monograph. It is awesome in its dimensions, in the floodtide of scholarly detail, in its tone of relentless advocacy.
Yale University Press has produced a resplendent tome. Though the type is very small, the layout is inspired and the 332 illustrations are of extraordinary quality. They leap off the page as Lewis purposed. The 'select bibliography' is appropriately monumental. The sheer weight of the work makes for awkward handling, but this again is apposite to its subject and polemic voice. A coffee-table volume would be wholly inappropriate; something stronger, more bitter is called for.
Edwards analyses, minutely, the aesthetic and intellectual background. What he justly identifies as a most unusual fusion of philosophy and satire, of aesthetic ideology and journalistic mockery, had tangled roots. These comprised cubism and futurism, the vitalist psychology of Bergson and the tactical 'primitivism' of Picasso, but also a lineage of anger in British letters which includes medieval 'flyting', as well as the ironies of Swift and of Hazlitt.
From the outset, moreover, Wyndham Lewis strove to break through both as painter and novelist, as literary adviser and graphic virtuoso. It was not till the summer of 1914, with the publication of Blast, that the concept of vorticism, in which Ezra Pound's role was seminal, achieved definition.
It may be, even beyond Edwards's inferences, that the founding text was Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. Like Marx and Karl Kraus, fellow adepts at anger and haters of the bourgeoisie, Lewis prized this erratic block in the canon. He felt kinship with Timon's assault on human greed and hypocrisy, with the inspired loathing of Timon's solitude. The portfolio of abstract evocations of the play (1912-1913) is among Lewis's finest works. The fury is made colder by the unyielding stricture of the lines.
Having experienced fitful but exposed action in the First World War, Lewis returned to the shredded bohemia of London. He was now convinced that European civilisation was, as Pound put it, 'a bitch gone rotten in the teeth'. Almost single-handed, Lewis set out to expound a blueprint for renascence. Steiner and Nietzsche, the purities of egotism and the dream of a new man inspired his raging critique and proposals. From The Apes of God to Self-Condemned 30 years later, there followed an outpouring of programmatic fictions, satires, political-cultural tracts and pamphlets.
Edwards examines these with often ecstatic care. Thus Enemy of the Stars 'was probably the most comprehensively self-reflexive text produced in English since Tristram Shandy... it is impressively successful'. Time and Western Man, which is commented upon as if it were Aquinas or Hume, turns out to be 'one of the great books of the twentieth century'. The Childermass, with its allegory of true modernism, was left incomplete - 'an appropriately Michelangelesque note on which to conclude this analysis'.
As a matter of fact, most of this material borders on the illegible. There are sparkling passages, mordant sarcasms. Often, Wyndham Lewis achieves a distinct level of hectoring energy. Overall, however, the books and tracts are moribund. Edwards's hype makes this more evident.
Even his cult of Wyndham Lewis is severely tested by certain publications during the Thirties. Hitler appeared in 1931; The Jews: Are they Human? in 1939. Edwards's embarrassed apologies are no doubt valid in so far as Lewis's brand of 'proto-Nazism' was idiosyncratic and utopian.
Much in these and other pronouncements is muddled crankiness. 'The Hitlerist dream is full of an imminent classical serenity - leisure and abundance.' An Arcadia marred, hitherto by the wretched Jews. Behind 'this ill-judged populist rhetoric', pleads Edwards, lies a 'desperate sincerity'. No doubt. But, to echo René Char's great maxim: 'It is not given to everyone to be midnight.' In Céline's loathsome views, in Pound's, the context of formal genius is undeniable. Not in Wyndham Lewis.
Lewis the painter and draughtsman is another matter. A number of his portraits are classics of incisiveness. His hieratic portrayal of Edith Sitwell remains definitive; there is a wonderful, gently ironic perception in the representations of T.S. Eliot; the drawings and canvases which have Ezra Pound for their subject are generous in their penetration.
Lewis's drawing of Rebecca West, the Portrait of the Artist's Wife (now at Kelvingrove), the relatively early seated figure of Edwin Eaves or the Smiling Gentleman of 1939 will, surely endure. As may some of the depictions, at once apocalyptic and down-to-earth, of Canadian gun-pits and batteries first drawn in July-August 1917. And there is a magic of bucolic forgiveness in the pen and ink sketches and water-colours of bathing women which Lewis produced during his long absence from England in the Forties.
In the art also, however, there are problems. Nothing or almost nothing seems to have evolved. The harsh linearity, the tricks of semi-abstraction in faces and figures, the cubist angles are constant from the start. What ripens? Edwards's phrase, a 'cryptic immaturity' applies to far more than Lewis's early literary products. It is in play throughout. Are we dealing, as Edwards claims, with a willed concentration on the 'imperfections of life' and the saturation of modern existence by the mechanical? Or, rather with a clenched lack of humanity as insidious in the art as it is in the writings? There is a betraying myopia in Lewis's condescensions towards the thronging humanity of Joyce's Ulysses.
A shorter, critically balanced study would have done more to advance this controversial cause. None the less, Edwards's impassioned industry and the splendour of the illustrations command respect.
