Wyndham Lewis Books

This book is hard to find. I have been hunting for it for 3 years. I guess I will look further on still...........

But if you are still looking try the second hand shops in the Charing Cross Road, London.

For those who don't know, 'The C' is a 1920s book of the dead, in which there is a mass processing hold-up on the banks of the Styx due to the slaughter of WWI, and I suppose you could add the flu epidemic. WL dictated two sequels into a taperecorder 30 years later when he was blind.

amazon does not have the hardcover of this book despite what this page says. i've ordered it twice and they are both paperback.

This impressionistic book would appeal to fans of DEVO and Thomas Pynchon; it makes no bones about the devolved status of the human race, but there remains a hard core of affection and good sense. The novel takes place somewhen over the river Styx, where the casualties of World War I have piled up and are waiting to be processed through to the Magnetic City. Their mediator is a Punch-like character called the Bailiff, who alternately panders to and mocks the candidates with the intent of purifying their motives and helping solidify their personalities. If you've seen Patrick McGoohan's TV series "The Prisoner", well... the Bailiff is like The President in the episode "Fall-Out". I have to confess that this is only the first book of a series and that I haven't read the others yet ("Monstre Gai" and "Malign Fiesta", which were followed by "The Judgement of Man"-- the fourth novel was left in outline form on Lewis' death). "The Childermass" was well-received at the time it was first published but is not very widely read these days; I think it has a great deal of relevance still and will hopefully find a new audience among present-day readers.

Lewis can be laugh-out-loud funny in the middle of a serious bit of social criticism, and here he manages to get in a few laughs at the expense of James Joyce (who was writing 'Finnegans Wake' at the time) and Gertrude Stein. I would recommend his books "Men Without Art" and "Time and Western Man" for more material in this area.

My only real complaint with this book is that it just seems to break off in the middle of the story for no apparent reason; but now I'll have to read the other books!

Wyndham Lewis is the kind of writer who everyone respects
but almost no one reads. Apes of God has all the trappings of a masterpiece: iconoclastic prose style, heavy-duty intellectual content, penetrating psychology and a shadowy and mythic, bombastic and possibly insane authour.

The book however, has 2 serious faults IMHO

The first could also be an advantage, depending on your point of view. Wyndham Lewis was a very, very bad man. He shared Ezra Pound's addiction to Fascism and had, in the words of Hemingway "the eyes of an unsuccesful rapist."
His "right-wing" politics were/are the reason he is not generally taught in universities or colleges. He is called a mysogynist, and indeed his female charaters are all exceptionally shallow and stupid. I happen to like the brilliant vitriol and Lewis makes no claim to objectivity.

Secondly Apes of God is too long and exceptionally boring in parts. The long satires of the artsy-fartsy social scene accomplish their goal, but personally I don't find reading about the insipidity of dinner parties very titillating. My biggest gripe however is The Sex. Sexual tension holds the plot together, but Lewis has a strangely victorian inability to write about the act itself. The Socratic homosexual relationship between Dan and the Protaganist Zagreus is rendered in a totally sterile manner.

Wyndham Lewis's ( founder of VORTICISM= the only British Avant-Garde movement of the 20th century)Apes of God is a vicious satire exposing the posture and posuers of the art world then (circa 1920's London/Paris/New York et.al.)and's wholly applicable before and aft as all areas not just the arts are riddled through with scavengery: shams and fakers lusting after popularity, getting on their knees in curtsies and bows before their corrupt Gods whom they shamelessly ape (ie.copy,mimick)in the devout worship of finance and social prestige; for which they sacrifice and abuse the very name of ART, using it only to profit greedy wiles and have no concern whatever as regards beauty or the bettering of humankind, much less the quest for absolute knowledge and solutions to humankinds varied cosmic dilemmas. The apes practice strictly black magic, a voodoo of the dollar whence they make idiot dolls of both the public, and their brethen, and mock the genuine bohemia by fostering appearances, such as upper middle-class citizens dressing in expensive outfits to look poor---the absurdity of the accepted norm really does summons an image of apes wearing clothes to fit in with humans! As comparison is legit and somewhat inevitable, Lewis' satire exceeds in both depth and vituperation that of George Orwell,and in its lyrical balled is more beautiful than Jonathan Swifts'. Lewis is of that rare species of sufficient force to prosper and forge single-handedly a one man advanced guard, as his graphic works equal in everyway and exist on a perfect par with his literary works; he was also, besides brilliant novelist, satirist, and painter who by many is said to best Picasso,he was a profound philosopher, an essayist of biting wit, a rare playwright and poet who wrote "An Enemy Of The Stars" - a futurist-fuelled expressionistic masterpeice published in one of several of his literary journasls' as a fearless, undaunted and unswayable critic he established himself in the guise he took in all his eclectic works: THE ENEMY! In which sense his condemnation was itself a form of praise, testifying to the fact he considered it worthy of his towering abuses. His works, published extensively by Black Sparrow Press, numbers perhaps 50 titles, many of them numbering well over half a thousand pages apeice; he even wrote, as his last major work a spiritual science-fiction trilogy which I pray will be published in the near future...Lastly, Wyndham Lewis unlike his contemporaries, including those like Pound and Eliot who champion his works, has over time wholly retained all the vigour initially constructed round that swirling vortex he single-handedly created, a veritable tower of Babel of achievments which will stand for centuries to come as one of the great wonders of the world of Art; and The Apes Of God, though some claim to be an elephant,ghostly white with wide red eyes, still romps through the literary jungles, levelling with terrifying stomping power all in its way, and a trailing desolation in its wake. His Apes Of God are still pounding their chests, all claiming to reign sole and supreme king of the jungle, yet scatter like field-mice at the approaching tank of a man that is Wyndham Lewis, perhaps the only artist left from his generation or this one that's capable of killing every last one of them who would otherwise take over the planet. I am, and remain, grateful some select few still can revel in his handsomely republished works such as this missive, thanks to undaunted publishers such as John Martin at Black Sparrow, dedicated to the works they print, which is a rare enough occurence these days.

This is an insightful and entertaining account of Wyndham Lewis' travels in northwest Africa; Lewis deals not only with the native cultures of the Grand Atlas area but also with the European interaction with these cultures. The descriptions of the Berber strongholds are especially vivid, and Lewis creates an overall picture of the area that makes one want to go there immediately and check it out. I wonder how much of Lewis' subject matter is still there...

"Malign Fiesta" is the third book in Wyndham Lewis' Childermass series; it was the last one Lewis wrote, but not the last one he wanted to write (in that sense it was like Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, which Lewis liked very much). So the series ends on a note of suspense, and I would be grateful if anyone who has read Lewis' notes for 'The Judgment of Man' could say something about it...

Anyway... Pullman (the protagonist of the Childermass novels) has managed to work his way into the confidence and good graces of Satan, who decides that his fallen angels are missing something and could do with a good dose of human nature. Pullman, who is not really evil but who is scared of the Devil and just wants to get along, proposes a fiesta-- a huge party at which the fallen angels can be exposed to human women, dancing and merriment. This is just what the Devil wants, because his purpose is to corrupt the angelic nature itself. And that's what happens; almost immediately one angel murders another (in the manner of Cain and Abel) over a romantic dispute.

God has been trying to get through to Pullman, but the Devil has been intercepting God's messengers and taking them into 'protective custody'. Finally God sends an angelic guard that can not be held back, and with reassuring words they take Pullman to Heaven for judgment.

And that's where the book ends.

Lewis outlined the next book, 'The Judgment of Man', but he died before he could write it. I assume (based on the title) that it would have been more didactic than the previous novels, but that's all I can say. And I don't know how it ends, but I think his novels 'The Revenge For Love" and "Self-Condemned' may throw some light on the subject.

"Monstre Gai" is the second volume in Wyndham Lewis' "Childermass" series; it first appeared in print a long time after "The Childermass" was published and is written in a more conventional style. Pullman and Satterthwaite, the protagonists of "The Childermass", have passed through an afterlife experience, and with the help of The Bailliff (a morally ambiguous authority figure) have come to live in the Magnetic City (now referred to as 'Third City'). They find life in Third City to be cheap, stupid and tawdry and come to the conclusion that wherever they are, they're not in Heaven. But the Devil is constantly attacking Third City (the clashes between the Divine and Satanic forces corresponding with the state of affairs on Earth), and during one especially violent attack Pullman and Satters escape with the Bailliff to the infernal planet of Dis, where the Devil (who prefers to call himself Samael and insists that he and God have long ago patched up their differences) uses a combination of niceness and veiled threats to try and win Pullman-- a non-judgmental, politically-correct type-- over to his side. In fact, Samael's hold over Pullman seems a lot like Vito Corleone's hold over the members of his 'family'. Satters, on the other hand, seems too innocent and childish for the forces of evil to bother with.

A major theme of the Childermass books is the insidious pull that evil can have on people who are intellectually equiped to justify it; in that sense the books are very similar to C. S. Lewis' Perelandra trilogy (especially 'That Hideous Strength') and to George Orwell's "1984". But in the Childermass series, Pullman is morally apathetic and has nothing to fall back on except for a vague feeling that he's doing something wrong. This feeling comes to a head in the next book, "Malign Fiesta".

I love the refutation on this book it brought great analyzing terms. The thesis was quiet hard to relate to the title. I found it quiet interesting.

If you were to take with you on vacation Wyndham Lewis's Tarr as a beach read, it'd somehow manage to kick sand in your face. It isn't breezy, nor especially pleasant. There really isn't a character to like in the whole work. And, upon finishing it, you'll feel as if you spent a long time at a greatly demoralizing task like checking behind the testicles of prisoner after prisoner for crack rocks or razor blades.

Yet, the novel succeeds on its own terms. Lewis's puerile Nietzscheanism blares from every page, and his prose is as jagged as his Vorticist paintings. But Lewis really was the modernist's modernist (sorry Joyce fans, but it's true), almost singlehandedly introducing Cubism to Ruskin-worshiping Albion, and, of course, shaking up the literary scene with his journal, Blast. In Tarr you see just this sort of modernist: a writer not afraid to take risks, not reluctant to enrage a reading public fattened on the solicitous complacency of realist novelists.

Make no mistake, the guy was a fascist and a raging misogynist. But he was also a great artist.

Oh, and take special care to get only the 1918 edition; Lewis heavily revised Tarr in the twenties, much to the novel's detriment.

With Tarr, Wyndham Lewis drags the reader through a few months in the lives of a collection of relentlessly self-absorbed and repulsive expatriates infesting the cafes and pensions of Paris just prior to the First World War. Cynicism and fermenting racial hatreds simmer just below the surface of a stew of intellectual banter and social intrigue. Conspicuous in its absence is any sense of sincerity or personal integrity of feelings. When a sincere response does erupt, it results in absurdity as when Tarr attacks the hat of his opponent in frustration after failing to win his point in a philosophical discussion. All of the principal characters are obsessive poseurs whose every behavior towards one another is propelled by a calculated maneuvering designed to improve one's position in an informal, but powerful, pecking order. The machinations are as complex as the motivations are shallow. More often than not, an agenda outruns the control of the agent who sets it in motion and the character then watches helplessly as events destined to blight his life unfold before him. Depressingly, the players do not appear to gain any insight from their foibles regarding the error of their ways and Lewis' dim view of the character of his fellow man is unleavened by the humor that finds its way into his later novels. The greatest flaw I found in Lewis' Tarr is one typical of the first novels of writers possessing an active intellect. The narrative flow is occasionally disrupted by the author's attempt to incorporate his own social and philosophical theories into the dialogue of his characters. And although this volume lacks the imagination and sophistication of Lewis' later works, there are a number of finely wrought passages which foreshadow the talent he is beginning to develop. My favorite;

For the last hour he had been accumulating difficulties, or rather unearthing some new one at every step. Impossible to tackle "en masse," they were all there before him. The thought of "settling everything before he went," now appeared monstrous. He had, anyhow, started these local monsters and demons, fishing them to the light. Each had a different vocal explosiveness, inveighing unintelligibly against each other. The only thing to be done was to herd them all together and march them away for inspection at leisure.

Tarr, The 1918 Version is an enjoyable and worthwhile read if you have the time, but if you will read only one book by Lewis, leave this one on the shelf and, instead, make a grab for The Apes of God.

Wyndham's power derives from his tendency to be reactionary. Orwell, Pound, T.S. Elliot and Lewis all began with leftist tendencies, and evolved into a realization of the folly of superimposed mind control as practiced by the left. This novel is a stark satire of these "artistic" propoganda aspects as channeled through art. To attempt to label Lewis with all the ghastly "--isms" is to attempt to superimpose a like kind of modern leftist template over a wonderful '30's rebellion against exactly this kind of labelling. Hard as it may be to believe it, this putative thought control was even worse then, during the political ascendancy of communism.

In his first novel, set in the cafes and nightspots of Paris during the beginning of the twentieth century, Wyndham Lewis presents the reader with a gallery of figures who live as a master race of artists. The action consists mostly of rows, one culminating in violence, during which the cast of poseurs and atavists engage in esoteric debates, which enable Lewis to weave in his own political and artistic concerns into the manifold of polemic. Typically of his novels, with their Fascist, racist, sexist, elitist biases, "Tarr" pulls no punches, assailing conventional bourgeois values in art and culture and proclaiming the figure of the artist as supreme. Along with Ezra Pound, Lewis was the founder of Vorticism, the British counterpart of Futurism, and also the joint editor of Blast!, the magazine in which Vorticist views were enunciated. With its glorification of velocity, violence, modernity and the machine, Vorticism's major tenets are consistently applied in the novel, with its brutal, striking, seemingly spontaneous prose style and its portrayal of the artist as a sort of automaton who will risk everything to attain his end, regardless of the damage that this may cause to others. However, the novel is let down by its lack of incident and the way in which the author blatantly allows his characters to act as mouthpieces for views which are clearly his own. A minor, and now almost forgotten, classic.

as we used to say. Does it surpise anyone that a man from Atlanta seems to find feminist critism boring?
This is an illuminating and very interesting book, clearly written and scholorly.

Ms Loewenstein is one of those talented individuals who is able to read verbatim Gloria Steinem in the very words of Shakespeare. This talent she artfully employs in her treatment of Charles Williams. I'm Jewish and a great fan of Charles Williams, one of the authors Ms Lowenstein critiques.

Williams, accused by some Christians of being a womanizer, occultist and universalist, is converted by Ms Loewenstein into a femalephobe, witch-hunter and Jew-hater. She does this so convincingly that those unfamiliar with the genius of his works believe her. If you are interested in spirituality and philosophy, or just looking for a crackling novel exploring the dmz between life and death, I cannot more highly recommend this author's works (I of course mean Williams's works, not those of Lowenstein).

For that's where Wyndham Lewis is, due to his political beliefs in the 1930s, his quick temper and pugilistic behaviour, and in part because as a painter, polemicist, satirist, commentator and novelist he skewered everyone and everything, from T.S. Eliot to Pound to Joyce to the Sitwells. Without mercy.

So, why read such a book, by such a man? Because in _Rude Assignment_ Lewis, to a degree, explains himself, and defines his position, and evolution, in a sharp, often witty manner, without an apologetic air. His description of satire, his defence against an attack by Orwell, are alone worth reading. His opinions still ruffle, yet if we only read those who were well-bred (presuming we could agree on who would get on such a list) we would never understand much of what goes on in any time or country. Lewis is, in some respects, that dreadful uncle who was involved in who knows what with _those_ people, visiting on family occasions with a little too much bile and bite for polite conversation, livening things up considerably before flying out the door again and leaving behind red faces and higher blood pressures, and a string of arguments in people's mouths.

The english novel needed a tonic, and Lewis provided it. He is a missing link in english letters, and this book - which one would normally come to via the novels - captures nicely the spirit of the man in his last years. Just remember, it's called "rude" to indicate something not well-formed like a traditional autobiographical work, and also because of the opinions expressed. It isn't on the same level as his excellent novel _The Apes of God_, but it is well worth reading and thinking about, even as one disagrees.

Wyndham Lewis and I were more like brothers than anything else, so I take great offense to the pervasive coverup about the real life and views of Lewis that take place in this book. What of his belief in the Universal Debate? Or his idea for the Rotating Senate Whip? If you read this book, you wouldn't know about 'em! The omission of Lewis's idea for the Endless Speech Party - a party he founded but later betrayed - makes this book a juvenile attempt at a real review of Lewis. I did, however, enjoy the frank way in which Lewis's obsession with politics was delt with.