Hugh Kenner - Wyndham Lewis

"What is the use of your taking me to the play, if you suppress the plot?"

-- The Childermass

" WYNDHAM LEWIS, THE MAN WHO WAS WRONG ABOUT EVERYthing except the superiority of live mind to dead mind; for which basic verity God bless his holy name."--thus Ezra Pound's summary appraisal of his long-time friend and associate. He is one of the great painters of the twentieth century--in the perhaps unguarded judgment of Walter Sickert "the greatest portraitist who ever lived." He has written The Revenge for Love, a twentieth-century classic; Tarr, "the first book of an epoch," a novel of great sporadic power; and Time and Western Man, one of the key books for the student of modern thought. Yet so much achievement seems less than that of several other contemporaries, and less than would seem to be promised by a career of ceaseless intellectual activity that since 1909 has spawned --almost as by-products--forty books and countless pictures. It is not wholly because of boycott (though he has

-xiii-

been boycotted steadily by one clique or another ever since he first became known) that his name does not come as readily to the reviewer's pen as, say, that of Eliot, who once called him "the most fascinating personality of our time." It is because, perhaps, his career itself has more meaning--though it doesn't come to more--than any of its manifestations. It even holds in thrall his undoubtable successes: for all their vitality ("so great a realist that he makes you shiver" said Ford Madox Ford of the author of Tarr) they don't so much possess their own life as bring to unusual articulation at critical points the continuing drama of Wyndham Lewis's war with Time and Self--as significant an assault on the nant as that of Swift.

"Not a commentator but a protagonist," Pound wrote of him nearly four decades ago. "He is a man at war.... You cannot be as intelligent, in that sort of way, without being prey to the furies."

No historian's model of the age of Joyce, Eliot, and Pound is intelligible without Lewis in it. More than any of these men, whose craft functioned with comparative freedom within the time, Lewis reveals the time's nature. He does this as much by disregarding nearly everything the artist is officially supposed to undertake, as by succeeding--so far as he has succeeded--in what he chose to do instead. Afoot in the void, his savagely energetic intelligence hunting down chimerical images of itself not only enacts in a dream-play the suicide of the West, but demonstrates the ubiquity of the illusions into which more fortunate intelligences have from time to time barely succeeded in not being betrayed.

It hasn't been safe for men of letters to think since the

-xiv-

seventeenth century, when ideas were substituted for things as the accredited materials of thought. In the teeth of the respected view that the artist expresses the emotional equivalent of whatever thought happens to be going on, Lewis has denounced a conspiracy against the mind and asserted that when official thinking is in bad shape the artist must do his own. It is with his creative mind that he has thought, however: hence the bustle with which he has reared so many scaffoldings. If Lewis has stood for intelligence rather than intuition, for creation rather than craftsmanship, for Western Man rather than his daemon the Zeitgeist, without ever personifying any of these things quite convincingly, yet even in illustrating the radical incapacity of will alone to do the work of patience, he has discredited the spuriousness we meticulously reward.