Percy’s Portraits - More Wyndham Lewis
An exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of his portraits has led to renewed interest in the media for Mr Wyndham Lewis recently. Since my initial curiosity I have grown into a great interest in the man and his work, having hugely enjoyed Tarr, Blast!, and various of his artwork.
I probably won’t be able to make it to the exhibition sadly, but can enjoy parts of it elsewhere nonetheless.
In the Guardian, Ian Sinclair gives a good overview. Here in the Observer though, Laura Cumming indulges in soft-soaping treatment of Lewis over his apalling politics. It really won’t do to claim he has been terribly hard done by due to some naive “early, repudiated” support for Hitler, because its just not true.  Lewis’ support for Fascism went a lot further and went on a lot longer than that, as his bit part in the Mosley story makes clear. Even after he denounced the “actually existing” Nazi dictatorship in practice, he retained an intensely elitist, misanthropic world view that could only ever result in retrograde evil if put into practice.
Its not just as simple as realising the obvious truth that apalling people with appaling politics, like Lewis, can create wonderful writing and art however. Often the very self-same asocial elitism of the mind and/or malignancy of spirit is responsible for both. In other words, you couldn’t have one without the other. See also Lewis’ pal T.S. Eliot, and for that matter Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Philip Larkin, Fyodor Dostoyevksy  and H.P. Lovecraft too.
Postcript: See also Waldemar Januszczak’s fun piece in the Times, he’s wrong about his literary output, but very right that “only his Percyness held him back.” Â Â
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Other Splinters posts of interest:
- Wyndham Lewis -An Appeal
- Finally, Tarr
- Reading in 2007 - Tenuous Intent
- Lewis and Eugenides on Joyce, Modernism and formal innovation in general
- Nothing else ever
