A short life of the author
Percy Wyndham Lewis (18 November 1882 – 7 March 1957) was a British painter, novelist, critic, and polemicist who was one of the most formidable and least likeable figures of Anglo-American modernism. He co-founded Vorticism — the only distinctively English avant-garde movement — edited the incendiary magazine BLAST (1914–1915), painted some of the most powerful portraits of the twentieth century, and wrote novels and critical works of ferocious intelligence. He quarrelled with virtually everyone — with Ezra Pound, with the Bloomsbury group, with Roger Fry, with Gertrude Stein — and his combative personality, combined with his catastrophic political misjudgments in the 1930s (he briefly admired Hitler), has kept him on the margins of literary reputation. But his best work — the novels Tarr (1918), The Apes of God (1930), and Self Condemned (1954), and the critical trilogy The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), and The Lion and the Fox (1927) — is among the most intellectually ambitious writing of the modernist period.
Life
Lewis was born on his father’s yacht off the coast of Nova Scotia — a suitably eccentric origin for a suitably eccentric man. His father was American; his mother was English. He was educated at Rugby School and the Slade School of Fine Art in London, and spent several years in Paris, where he absorbed the latest developments in European painting and met the artists and writers who would shape his career.
He returned to London and in 1914, with Ezra Pound, launched Vorticism — a movement that drew on Cubism and Futurism but rejected Futurism’s worship of the machine in favour of a harder, more angular, more intellectual aesthetic. The magazine BLAST — printed in lurid pink, with enormous block lettering, and containing manifestos that alternately “blasted” and “blessed” various aspects of English life — was one of the great avant-garde publications of the century. Only two issues appeared (June 1914 and July 1915); the war killed the movement.
Lewis served as a bombardier and war artist on the Western Front. The experience confirmed his view of human nature as fundamentally violent and stupid — a view that pervades his fiction and criticism.
Fiction
Tarr (1918) is Lewis’s first novel — a portrait of bohemian life in pre-war Paris that combines savage satirical comedy with a serious exploration of the relationship between art and bourgeois convention. The novel’s protagonist, Frederick Tarr, is an English painter in Paris who must extricate himself from a sentimental love affair in order to become a serious artist. The prose is hard, angular, and deliberately anti-lyrical — Lewis writes as if he is carving rather than flowing.
The Apes of God (1930) is Lewis’s masterpiece of satire — a 600-page assault on the London art world of the 1920s, in which the “apes” are the wealthy dilettantes and salon hostesses who patronise and corrupt serious art. The book is savagely funny and almost unbearably long, and it alienated most of the people Lewis knew.
The Childermass (1928) — the first volume of a planned trilogy called The Human Age (completed by Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta, both 1955) — is set in a surreal afterworld where recently dead souls are subjected to a philosophical interrogation. The book is Lewis’s most experimental and most difficult work.
Self Condemned (1954) — about an English professor who emigrates to Canada during World War II and is destroyed by isolation and bitterness — is Lewis’s most personal and most emotionally devastating novel.
Critical Work
Lewis was one of the most important critical thinkers of his generation. Time and Western Man (1927) attacks the philosophy of Henri Bergson, the stream-of-consciousness techniques of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, and the “time-cult” that Lewis saw as the dominant intellectual fashion of his era. His argument — that spatial, visual, intellectual values should take precedence over temporal, musical, emotional ones — is the theoretical foundation of his entire artistic practice.
The Political Problem
Lewis’s brief flirtation with fascism in the early 1930s — particularly his book Hitler (1931), which expressed admiration for the German leader — is the permanent stain on his reputation. Lewis later recanted, and his novel The Hitler Cult (1939) attacked Nazism, but the damage was done. The combination of political misjudgment, personal abrasiveness, and literary difficulty has kept Lewis at the margins of the modernist canon.
Collecting Lewis
BLAST (1914, 1915) — the two issues of the Vorticist magazine — are among the great collectibles of modernism: individual issues bring $3,000–$10,000. Tarr (1918, The Egoist Press) in first edition brings $500–$1,500. The Apes of God (1930, The Arthur Press) brings $200–$500. Lewis’s paintings and drawings are major auction items. His books, given their difficulty, are underpriced relative to other modernists.