Wyndham Lewis -An Appeal
The name Wyndham Lewis has had a weird appeal for me for a few years years now, due to the respect afforded him by people I respect. Mark Smith's frequent name-checking for one, Michael Bracewell's examination in England's Dreaming (see post below) another.
There seems a heretical, dirty scent which I find wrongly alluring. The Blast Manifesto always sounded fascinating in its heroic hopelessness and misanthropy , and I've always been interested in those outsider figures who manage to inspire, antagonise and appal everyone at the same time.
I would like to read a Wyndham Lewis novel, and wondered if any Splinters readers would care to suggest where I should start, or indeed if I should start? Lewis may well turn out to be one of those figures more interesting to read about than to read (a literary equivalent of Captain Beefheart), and if you think that I'd like to know that too. In a way I'd love to loathe his prose just as I loathe his Fascist flirtations. Its easier that way. On the other hand I can't help thinking of Louis Ferdinand Celine, another outcast whose Nazi tendencies were even more appalling than Lewis's, but whose Journey to the End of the Night I found absolutely riveting. But that's down to great writing, nothing more certainly, but nothing less either. For all I know, for all Lewis' "interesting" sounding nature he may not write well for shit.
But if he does, what's his best work? Apes of God? Tarr? Where should I start, or should I not be bovvered? Please guide me wise readers...
Well, MES name-checks Lovecraft a lot too, but it’s more an indication of his favorite themes than literary merit per se. In the case of Wyndham Lewis, we must recall that MES has always been fascinated by Nazis.
For the full-on Lewis experience, go straight to Time and Western Man; unless you have a weakness for his prose (which ain’t up to much, in my opinion), there’s nothing in the novels that you won’t find in TAWM in more distilled form. Celine is readable–brilliant even–because he is not an ideologue; Lewis is nothing but.
For a more intriguing fascist, I recommend Olive Moore.
Knut Hamsun is another example of a problematic figure; fascinating novels compromised by the author’s Nazism.
Tarr is probably the best introduction to Wyndham, though from a personal perspective I’d suggest that the Captain Beefheart comparison has a lot to it.
Thanks for your comments Mr Waggish and Richard. Thanks also to Sean from the Midnight Bell, who e-mailed me with his thought-provoking and generally positive outlook on Lewis in this MB post
http://www.themidnightbell.com/tmb/?p=7
It seems you go for the prose or you don’t, Sean does, Waggish doesn’t. On balance, I think I will give it a go, and go for Tarr first, for, as Sean suggested, its short and gives you a quick overview.
What I never mentioned in my post, a pretty big ommision, is the artful frigging with the language I’ve read in the too-brief extracts of BLAST I’ve read (as reflected well in Sean’s post) is just as big an appeal as the “heretical” aspect, and I do think its that, more than the Nazi element which inspired MES.
In MES’s old list of heroes here, he’s actually at pains to defend Lewis from the Nazi tag!
http://www.visi.com/fall/gigography/86sep27.html
Anyway, all interesting stuff, and thanks again all.
I too am looking for Tarr. The connection with Canada, both at birth and as an outcast, so it seems, from Europe is worth looking into.
Celine DOES come to mind. So does Ezra Pound, though many of his friends vouched that he was not a fascist during his internment as a psyciatric case.
I’m interested: did he gain Canadian citizenship by birth in her waters off Nova Scotia or were there like-minded Europeans who had already settled in Windsor, Ontario?
Sounds like he was given the political cold shoulder by the Canadian literati and artist community.
I would start with Tarr, in which the forceful BIG PERSONALITY battling is entertaining rather than the reverse, as in The Apes of God, and the style is concise.
I would also strongly recommend the stories collected in The Wild Body: their aesthetic is less extreme than in his middle period novels and of course the stories are shorter, which helps.
Then again there’s his early potboiler ‘Mrs Duke’s Millions’, which he said he wrote only for the money, but is actually not that dire, and also contains early examples some of his obsessions with masks and surface appearances.
His later stuff thaws somewhat his rather brutal attitude to humans and human thought, and Self-Condemned, though clunkily meditative in places, is quite tender in its portrait of a marriage and soul in exile.
His short essay on his blindness called I believe ‘The Sea Mists of Winter’ is also quite touching and is to be found, I think, in Blasting and Bombardiering.
If I may be so bold – I would only agree with Mr Waggish to a certain extent; I think Wyndham Lewis is often an idealogue, but not always, and that even when he is an idealogue, he can be an aesthetic idealogue or a political idealogue. The latter is rather crude and childish, but is also subservient to the former, which is frequently entertaining and, well, accurate it seems to me, albeit rather agressively so. I think good examples of this are to be found in his analyses of writers in Time and Western Man.
Was it TS Eliot or Joyce who said this was the best adverse criticism they ever had?
But then I also have a taste for Lewis’s prose, and I would certainly agree with Mr Waggish that its flavour is rather strong and possibly more suited to tin palates such as what mine is.
Hope this isn’t overlong, by which I mean of course it’s overlong I know, for which I apologise.
FC
No need for apologies Fitzroy – an interesting outlook, and futher confirmation for me that its the Tarr way I shall go. Apologies to Blogaulaire for my non-reply, the truth is I simply have no information about the Canadian connection. I appreciate your contribution nontheless. I do not of course appreciate the “contributions” of the verminous fuck-pig who stuck his four shitty adverts on an otherwise decent thread. Ta-ra, and to Tarr I shall go!
If I may just attempt a little clearing up about the Canada question: when I first heard of Wyndham Lewis I was under the impression that he was born in international waters, just off the coast of Nova Scotia, in a yacht, and had no birth certificate.
It was rather an attractive idea considering Lewis’s cultivated enemy outsider stance and general adoption of masks and characters in later life; indeed it was a story that he perpetrated.
However, Lewis’s recent biographer Paul O’Keefe in his okayish biography of Lewis (Some Sort of Genius – Pimlico) probes rather sceptically at the facts -
“Leaving aside the improbability of a man embarking upon a boating trip with a nine-months pregnant wife, in winter and in such potentially perilous waters, one constituent of the myth is exploded by Lloyd’s of London, whose yacht register lists the Wanda as having been built [...] ion 1883, the after Charles Lewis’s son [Wyndham] saw the light of day.”
and he continues,
“At the opposite end of Fundy to the island of Campobello, just inland of a stretch of water called the Cumberland Basin, lies the town of Amherst. There, according to his mother’s sworn statement, and in all probability on dry land, Percy Wyndham Lewis was born.”
For the Canadian connection later in life, Self-Condemned is the crucial book to read; a thinly fictionalised version of his time out there, not at all without merits, though rather susceptible at times to locating its dynamism in static description rather than any sort of novelistic flow. To put it plainly, it can be rather hard going at times.
His time in Canada was not a success, and was characterised, as was much of his life, by belligerence and poverty but also, again like much of his life, by anecdotes attesting to his geniality and the excellence, when he chose, of his conversation.
It is perhaps little wonder that Mark E Smith is a fan, although how HE goes down in Canada remains, I am afraid, a mystery.
Fitz Psyche
Grrr – unintentionally posted before reading – here’s the errata slip
‘However, Paul O’Keefe in his okayish biography of Lewis…’
(instead of the rather palindromic rune I produced)
and
‘lists the Wanda as having been built [...] in 1883, the year after Charles Lewis’…’ etc.
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