The Childermass

The Human Age #1

by Wyndham Lewis

The Childermass is the first volume of the unfinished epic "The Human Age" and is unarguably the most radical, outlandish, and formally experimental work in Lewis’s oeuvre. The novel follows the adventures of two Englishmen, Sattersthwaite and Pullman, presumably killed in the Great War, as they posthumously navigate a bizarre purgatorial afterlife while awaiting admission to something called The Magnetic City. Lewis in "The Childermass" spends a good deal of time dramatizing his theoretical, political, and aesthetic concerns. Along the way, he produces extensive parodies of the styles of both James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, while also pushing the inimitable Lewisean sentence he had developed in Tarr to its extreme limits.

Genres: Fiction, Fantasy, Classics, 20th Century, Novels, British Literature, Literature

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).

After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.

The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Childermass is a massacre of the innocents…
“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under…” Matthew 2:16
In the posthumous existence massacre continues…
The Childermass is many things… It is a trip through the afterlife… It is an eschatological dystopia… It is a thicket of words and a locus of narrative experimentation… And to my great chagrin is a lot of claptrap…
The protagonist is a self-sure independent man… Or is he just a simulacrum?

…the man-sparrow, who multiplies precise movements, an organism which in place of speech has evolved a peripatetic system of response to a dead environment. It has wandered beside this Styx, a lost automaton rather than a lost soul. It has taken the measure of its universe: man is the measure: it rears itself up, steadily confronts and moves along these shadows.

Unexpectedly he encounters his schooldays friend who feels lost and so he becomes his patron of sorts…

Satterthwaite is in knee-cords, football stogies, tasselled golf stockings, a Fair Isle jumper, a frogged mess jacket, a Mons Star pinned upon the left breast, and a Rugby cap, the tinsel rusted, of out-size, canted forward.

They hike around together… Everything is odd and shapeshifting… They are outside of heaven… They wait for salvation or some kind of decision… They return to their posthumous camp and the Bailiff’s prolonged harangue begins… And all those endless arguments and discussions are as boring as parliamentary debates…
And on the horizon there is a city of the dead… Or probably it’s the City of the Sun… 
On the ancient Roman tombstone there once was an epitaph: “Es, bibe, lude, veni” – Eat, drink, enjoy thyself, follow me.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's an almost plotless book with no chapter breaks and really dense prose, and most of the second half of the book is the two main guys watching some other people debate philosophy. really cool

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly "difficult" book - hard to sustain in the 30 page chunks of one's daily commute, but nor is it one that you can't wait to curl up with of an evening and plow through 100 pages.

The Childermass was published in 1928 as the first part of a trilogy whose latter two volumes did not appear until 1955 - Lewis was not a "professional" writer in the late 20th century pattern of Roth, Updike, Atwood, Drabble, Amis et al., cranking out a new quasi-masterpiece every three years (his parallel work as a visual artist kept him busy, not to mention pamphleteering for Hitler at the start of the 30s, taking it all back at the end of the decade, etc.).

The first third of the book describes Sattersthwaite and Pullman (colloquially Satters and Pulley, of course), two Englishmen wandering in a vaguely Asian landscape; at first seemingly old, then schoolboys, finally specified as being in their late 20s, they are Vladimir and Estragon transplanted to a surrealist, ever-changing world. Subsequently it is made clear that they have died and are in a sort of purgatory, where a figure called The Bailiff presides over a court, ostensibly convened to send people on to Heaven or Hell, but as you might expect, had Godot actually arrived, nothing actually gets done. The Bailiff is like a Miltonic Saint Peter (with a dash of the Saint Peter of New Yorker cartoons) who is continually challenged by a cadre representing pre-Christian Hellenism.

There is no real plot, and the prose veers wildly into the territory of Joyce in the years of "Work In Progress", including pages of phonetically rendered Cockney that are easily skimmed. Some sources say he is simply parodying Joyce and Gertrude Stein but the connection seems more symbiotic than that.

Not much discussed in my cursory look online is the strong homosexual angle - in this purgatory, the men arrive via the Yang Gate and (not mentioned until late in the book), the entirely absent women come via the Yin. There are continual intense teenage schoolboy attachments and mincing cross-dressed sailors doing music hall turns, though with no clear point, other than Lewis's disdain for just about everyone.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

There has possibly never been a book I have understood less... The beginning (like the first third?) is about two friends who have died and are walking through purgatory, contemplating the odd nature of the purgatorial world in comparison to the real world while they walk toward the Magentic City which I assume to be Heaven. This part was amazing without any qualifications.

Then came the Bailiff, the guard (?) who, based on interviews and conversations, allows people to go from Purgatory to Heaven, which leads to the last 2/3s of the book being debates that encompass literary satire, theology, Space-Time, homosexuality, class warfare, vorticism, etc. And while there were sections of this that I did understand and did like, most of it made little to no sense to me. It was cool, but I genuinely cannot say that I understood it.

But I did like the book in a way. The first third was an easy 5 stars, and what I understood of the second part was similar, but Jesus... I could not tell you what happened.

[Monty Milne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very discomposed by this strange work which I am inclined to think is something of a brilliant failure. What is one to make of sentences like this:

“Exit Fathers like a cohort of witches, turning tail at sight of the bristling righteous phalanx of incestuous masculine matrons, with Hittite profiles, hanging out like hatchets just clear of the chest, Eton cropped,…ten diamond corking-pins representing the decaceraphorous beast of the deliverance.”

This sentence – plucked more or less at random – has many of the book’s themes within it. The gender bending contributes to the general hilarity of the whole – it really is frequently laugh-out-loud absurd – but there is at the same time something manic and alarming about the humour. A lot of the fun is deciphering the obscure biblical references (Hittite profiles, decaceraphorous beast). Sometimes, it is a gloriously silly parody – such as when it lapses into a very funny mocking of Joyce’s Ulysses. (Incidentally, although a lot of the book is quite difficult to read, this is the only part which I found totally unreadable – which is of course the point).

A lot of this I found amusing and enjoyable, other parts less so….some of it was silly and a bit boring. At its best it is brilliant and original, but I don’t think the author quite pulls it off.

[Wreade1872 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've added a star for difficulty. I have many thoughts but i'm so uncertain about so many elements of this that it seems pointless to try to express them.

This is one for people who like a challenge.

Made available by the Merril Collection.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

review of
Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass
(Book One of The Human Age)
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 12-18, 2015

Hold onto yr spats! My review is "too long". This version's just cut off so if you want to read the full review (highly recommended by yrs truly) go here to "The Book of the Dagnabbited-all-to-Heck":

https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

In order to do this bk 'justice' I'd probably have to write a longer review than I'm planning to. I've probably had some vague knowledge of Lewis for decades, I've probably known of him mainly as a Vorticist painter. Vorticism appeals to me somewhat as a somewhat avant garde school of painting akin to Cubism & Italian Futurism that started very briefly after the latter 2 mvmts did. I knew that Lewis was a writer but probably thought of him 1st & foremost as a painter. Having now read The Childermass I have to give him more credit as an excellent & unique writer indeed.

The Human Age was published by Jupiter Books from London. They're a subset of John Calder. I'd known of Calder as the publishers of the editions that I have of Raymond Roussel's Impressions of Africa & Locus Solus & that's about as good as it gets. The back of The Childermass also mentions publishing work by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, & Jorge Luis Borges, amongst others - very interesting authors, all.

I'd probably read that Lewis was vaguely 'right wing' - akin to, perhaps, Céline - whose bks Journey to the End of Night & Rigadoon I've read & liked somewhat but the ellipsis technique wore on me quickly. Céline, notorious as a nazi sympathizer, comes across surprisingly as somewhat humanitarian & caring, albeit cynical, in the bks, as I remember these many decades later. Lewis has a similar reputation as a Fascist sympathizer & he & Ezra Pound were collaborators: "In 1914 Wyndham Lewis and the American poet and critic Ezra Pound together promoted Vorticism, an avant-garde movement celebrating the machine age" ( http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/l... ).

Italian Futurism also celebrated the machine age AND war - & its founder, Filippo Marinetti, was supported by Fascist leader Mussolini. Pound supported the Fascists in WWII while he was living in Italy & was incarcerated in St Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington DC b/c he was let off as insane rather than executed as a traitor. I recall reading that while in the reputedly luxurious confines of the hospital he was visited by George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. Unfortunately, I can't substantiate this so it might be a purely apocryphal story or even outright slander.

Given that I'm not in any hurry to read bks by Fascist or Nazi sympathizers I wasn't in a rush to read something by Lewis. What convinced me to read both him & Céline is that they're both experimental novelists & that's a primary interest of mine.

Perhaps my 1st question is: was Lewis really a Fascist or Fascist sympathizer? A Lewis enthusiast that I correspond w/ named "Miss Noma" claims that that's slander. In Lewis's 1941 novel The Vulgar Streak (13 yrs after The Childermass), wch I haven't read but wch I've glimpsed thru, there's this passage:

"["]you are quite unable to fathom the intensity of the religion of class, which in England restricts the personal development of any man or woman born outside the genteel pale. It denies espansion to him or to her as much as the shoes formerly worn by Chinese ladies denied normal development to the feet. It stops you from breathing freely—indeed from existing in freedom at all. If you are born one of the poor, you must go about disguised. It is the only way."" - p 175 of the 1985 Black Sparrow Press edition

I don't know how that fits in the overall novel but that doesn't strike me as very 'right wing' at all. Furthermore, in Paul Edwards's "Afterword" to the same bk, it's written that ""its politics are overtly liberal". (p 241) Edwards goes on to elucidate:

"If Lewis's self was a battleground of contradictory forces, his way of writing fiction (of "making strange") involved stressing aspects of his self that were not likely to receive ready social assent. But during the thirties his "Enemy" persona, at first the battleground of a multiplicity of cultural, artistic and intellectual oppositions, became increasingly defined in narrowly political discourse, until he could be described by Auden as "that lonely old volcano of the right."" - p 244

I particularly like the "making strange" description of the writing & will return to that now & then. Edwards appears to explore this complexity of Lewis's character convincingly in his Afterword:

"Lewis thought that his contributions to political debate in the thirties were "neutral," but the time belatedly arrived when he recognized that "to be neutral is to be anti-British" (The Hitler Cult, 1939), when he at last aligned himself with his only real audience, the intellectuals. There had been some signs already: in 1938 he had sent a picture to be auctioned for Republican Spain, and by mid-1939 he was regretting the fall of Barcelona to the Falangists as "the end of a chapter."" - p 244

"In his book on Lewis's politics, The Filibuster, D. G. Bridson tells us that the Munich crisis of September 1938 was one more such symbolic moment for Lewis: hearing Hitler hurling abuse at President Benes over the radio "came as sickening revelation" to him." - p 245

"["]in The Vulgar Streak it links Vincent with the collapse of that civilization as well as with those "diabolical machines of empty will, Hitler and Mussolini." - p 245

In support of a perception of Lewis's as by-no-means simple, I quote at length from Alan Munton's "Wyndham Lewis: From Proudhon to Hitler (and back): the Strange Political Journey of Wyndham Lewis":

"If the brief revisionist survey which follows appears to some readers to be a challenge too far to the prevailing orthodoxy, let me hint at the possibilities by quoting from the autobiography Blasting and Bombardiering, published in 1937 at about the time Lewis’s politics changed: “I am the most broadminded ‘leftwinger’ in England” (305).

"Lewis was in some meaningful sense on the Left until about 1930. During the mid-1920s he deals with ideas that open more naturally towards socialism and anarchism than they do towards the right and to fascism; some of these are discussed below. He also held a “culturalist” view by which revolutionary art and thought precedes revolutionary politics:

"'Before there can be political change there must have been some other more fundamental change [….] So all popular revolutions, of whatever nature, have always, before they occurred, virtually existed in the consciousness and behaviour of a minority, and often, visibly, in phalansteries and colonies [....] The merely political revolutionary is thus […] an interpreter only of a creative mind.'

"That was written in the conclusion to “The Diabolical Principle,” published in Lewis’s own journal The Enemy at the beginning of 1929 (Vol. 3, 74-5).The rightward turn occurred not long afterwards, during a visit to Germany in November 1930, two months after elections which had given the Nazi party over six million votes. Reflections on Hitler appeared as magazine articles in Time and Tide in January and February 1931, and as a book in March. This was the first book on Hitler published anywhere, and the dustjacket was adorned with Lewis’s own design, which featured several swastikas. That book was translated into German and published in Berlin in 1932. It was pulped in or just after 1933, for reasons that are unclear, though it seems likely that what displeased British readers was not enough to please Goebbels. Lewis remained politically on the right until 1937. During that time he attacked Communism and communists, was sympathetic to the Nationalist rebels in Spain, and allowed his pacifism and fear of another European war to permit a tolerance of Hitler that it is kind to call “radical appeasement.” Lewis’s polemics at this time were often directed against other intellectuals, particularly those on the Left, and gave rise to his phrase “Left wings,” as in the “bad” polemic of 1936 already mentioned, Left Wings over Europe. In early 1937 he published an article in the British Union Quarterly, the relaunched journal of Mosley’s fascists, entitled “‘Left Wings’ and the C3 Mind.” (The term “C3” derives from the armed forces’ lowest category of physical fitness.) In August of 1937 Lewis and his wife visited Berlin; they left quickly, Mrs Lewis later said, “because we found it very uncomfortable, or Wyndham did at least” (O’Keeffe, Some sort of genius, 371). Visible German militarism, and a visit to the ghetto in Warsaw, initiated the change in Lewis’s politics; in 1938 Kristallnacht (November 9-10) confirmed it." - https://erea.revues.org/220

The choice of Proudhon as a symbol of anarchy & more 'liberal' politics is yet-another problematic thing here insofar as many consider Proudhon to've been a virulent anti-Semite whose views cd've certainly been inspiring to Nazis:

"Pierre Joseph Proudhon 1847

"On the Jews

"Source: Carnets de P.J. Proudhon. Paris, M. Rivière, 1960;
"Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor.

"Translator’s note: Though some twentieth century writers have maintained that Proudhon was not an anti-Semite, we find in his notebooks proof of the contrary. In this selection from his notebooks Proudhon’s anti-Semitism goes far beyond that of Marx at approximately the same time, calling not for the end of what Jews represent, i.e., capitalism, but of the Jews as a people. Proudhon’s privately expressed thoughts were elaborated on in the same year as this entry by his follower Alphonse Toussenel in his “Les Juifs, Rois de l’Epoque,” The Jews, Kings of the Era. After reading the passage translated here it can come as no surprise that the founder of the royalist group Action Française, the Jew-hater Charles Maurras, drew inspiration from Proudhon.

"'December 26, 1847: Jews. Write an article against this race that poisons everything by sticking its nose into everything without ever mixing with any other people. Demand its expulsion from France with the exception of those individuals married to French women. Abolish synagogues and not admit them to any employment. Finally, pursue the abolition of this religion. It’s not without cause that the Christians called them deicide. The Jew is the enemy of humankind. They must be sent back to Asia or be exterminated. By steel or by fire or by expulsion the Jew must disappear.'" - https://www.marxists.org/reference/su...

Is Lewis anti-semitic? I'd say probably not but there are passages in The Childermass wch come uncomfortably close wch are probably insertions of expressions common for his time: "you are a disbelieving Jew !'" (p 101)

Pound, whose scholarliness has earned respect from such anti-Fascists as Beat poet Ed Sanders, clearly had a love for Italian culture that was probably greater than his love of American culture. When Fascism started in Italy as a nationalist mvmt it was by no means clear that it wd become as destructive as it did. It seems probable to me that Pound thought he was supporting Italian culture as much as anything. Then again, I've read very little Pound & can't discuss it intelligently.

Lewis's The Human Age is "obviously intended to parallel Dante's Divine Comedy" according to the blurb on The Childermass's back cover. " The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia [diˈviːna komˈmɛːdja]) is an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered the preeminent work of Italian literature and is seen as one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_... ) Considering The Divine Comedy 's profound importance in the history of writing it's possible that Lewis, like Pound, was a supporter of Italian culture & that that influenced his political views in the 1930s. That's speculation on my part, I still 'know' next to nothing about Lewis.

WHEW! The irony of my getting into these politics to the extent that I have here is that I find them mostly, if not entirely, irrelevant to The Childermass (1928)! Instead, I find the bk highly remarkable as a formallly imaginative work. In its meandering, frustrating 'nowhereness' it impresses me as a precursor to the writings of Maurice Blanchot, eg in Aminadab (1942), Samuel Beckett, eg in Waiting for Godot (1948-1949), Flann O'Brien, eg in The Third Policeman, Haruki Murakami, eg in Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), & Kazuo Ishiguro, eg in The Unconsoled (1995).

The Childermass is like an anxiety dream in wch nothing can be depended on & a fear of one's environment transforming in a hostile way is ever-present, if not always actualized. The only author whose threatening ambiguity I can think of as a precursor to Lewis is Franz Kafka, whose novels The Trial & The Castle were published posthumously in 1925 & 1926 respectively.

The Childermass isn't broken into chapters, making it immediately more difficult as a reading experience since there're no convenient stopping points for the reader. I wondered whether Lewis, like his fellow painter Salvador Dali, might not've written this novel in an intense stream-of-consciousness session over a short period of time - Dali having written his only novel, Hidden Faces, in a 2 wk period. Imagine writing a novel as a painter, focusing more on images than on sense, more on sensuality than on coherency. The Childermass isn't broken into chapters but it does have basically 2 parts: the 1st of wandering by Pullman & Satters, recently arrived in 'the afterlife'; followed by The Bailiff's interaction w/ the appellants implied to be seeking entrance into 'heaven'.

But is it 'heaven'? & wch of the parts of The Divine Comedy is The Childermass hypothetically parallel to? If The Human Age follows the progress of The Divine Comedy then this 1st bk wd be 'hell' & there are references to the heat.. but while the conditions are annoying, they're more like HECK than 'hell', more like a 'hell'-lite. Instead, this seems more like 'purgatory', more like the waiting ground where The Bailiff might be St Peter waiting at the Pearly Gates - wch may just turn out to be a gaping mouth ready to chomp its pearly teeth down on entrants. As of The Childermass the reader doesn't 'know' & I'm not so sure that the reader ever will - even after reading the following 2 bks: Monstre Gai & Malign Fiesta.

At 1st, I was mainly impressed by the language. As w/ Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, I found The Childermass to be astonishingly free of stock phrases. I love my own writing but even I just used "stock phrases", as I used "virulent anti-Semite" earlier - both of those being stock phrases - but if I'd written 'stock car racing heart market' wd you've understood me? I'm sooooooooo misunderstood.

"In burning appropriate soliloquy the first neuter show-baby hen-pecks his dolly Pulley to himself and comes out of his nursery, with a cave-man scowl for the rejuvenating mask at his side. The less stable ghost to which he has been attached, it seems, does not look at him now at all." - p 48

"Could it hear if it would? Can wood, a little head-wool, a neat waxen ear innocent of cerumen but also drumless, an eye of jade, can linen and shoe-leather respond? The bourgeois lay-figure says No with its dapper jutting sleek undisturbed profile." - p 61

"They both rest on their oars for an interval, Satters stumbling along short-winded, his breath sawing a little in his throat." - p 98

I don't know if mixed metaphors are still a no-no according to writing academics but I find them quite stimulating. Above, the 1st metaphor is a rowing one: exertion is paused while the exerters rest on the rowing apparatus, presumably wooden, instead of further exerting themselves w/ them. The 2nd metaphor has an over-exerted character manifesting his exertion w/ a rasping sound associated w/ cutting wood - wch cd be thought of as the wood of the oars.

The circumstances of this afterlife are mystifying rather than mystical:

"Satterthwaite is in knee-cords, football stogies, tasselled golf stocking, a Fair Ilse jumper, a frogged mess jacket, a Mons Star pinned upon the left breast, and a Rugby cap, the tinsel rusted, of out-size, canted forward.

"'Where the devil did you get that outlandish kit from?'

"'I know — !' He looks down without seeing. 'I'm damned if I know !'" - p 12

Our characters arrive in the afterlife w/ clothing not of their own choosing [stock phrase used by reviewer]. Images of the afterlife are always sortof WHA? to me anyway so why not have them have clothes? The typical Christinane image that I think of is people wearing white togas standing on clouds & playing harps. Where did that image come from? Certainly not from the much more imaginative Hieronymus Bosch! If I were to believe in an afterlife in that sense of I-will-continue-pretty-much-as-I-am-now, wch I don't, I certainly wdn't imagine myself in a white toga standing on clouds OR in a hodge-podge of sports & military clothing. One might hope that in 'heaven' (a ridiculous bit of wishful thinking) one cd at least go around starkers, eh?! In my 'heaven' there might be the Moslem virgin maidens (more ridiculous wishful thinking held out to the deprived as a reward they'll certainly never get in this lifetime) but what good is that if they stay virgins?! I need to fuck, lardy. In 'heaven' there's no testicular or breast cancer, right?

[Max Stoffel-Rosales · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the relative success of his first novel, Tarr, and a book of criticism entitled Time and Western Man (read widely enough to be mentioned in the war sequence of Powell's popular A Dance to the Music of Time), Lewis was given short shrift for The Childermass by major literary critics and contemporary writers alike. And while chances are good, given his "excruciatingly irrascible" character, that he had run afoul of them both beforehand, the fact nevertheless remains that the book is somewhat overripe with the same ideas that were given ampler room (and stricter form) to express themselves in The Apes of God, published two years later.

True to the author's form, The Childermass manages to be starkly radical in terms of what it has to "say" (the whole final 15 pages repeatedly intone the word "homosexual" as if it were a Vedic mantra), while at the same time treating of the precious, archetypal foppishness of Classicism, of Parliamentary "palaver", that has been a thorn in the side of the Everyman for the last 2000 years. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if Pullman and Satters, themselves said to be playing the roles of Virgil and Dante, were the models for the later Vladimir and Estragon, two similarly downtrodden old chums whose long desire is slowly, and painfully, frustrated by a pageant of dumb-show clowns.

Time and again I am flabbergasted to see how easily Lewis not merely uses, but arranges the types of witheringly abstruse words, names, (polyglot) idioms, puns, rebuses, dialectal phrases, liturgical & legal formulas he does: in short, the very same odds-&-ends of language from which the horrific boneyard that is Finnegans Wake was assembled. In fact, Lewis more than once parodies the Wake, which he would've seen only in fragments at this time, in an alarmingly accurate way.

You can at the least count on your man Percy to sneer at the very people whose brilliance he admires most. And really this book is, to my mind, the earliest proof of a prodigious talent, in no way inferior to the likes of Joyce.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy Yeats--you may have heard of him?--said the first hundred pages of The Childermass described “the first region of the dead as the ghosts everywhere describe it.” But this is no easy supernatural: this other dude, I.A. Richards (decently well-known I guess) commented that “to an agonizing degree, we are not allowed to know what this is all about.” Thomas Carter (who you legit probably haven’t heard of) said it “apotheosizes and exhibits permanently, as if under glass, what remains the best known, as it surely is the most dazzling phase in [Lewis’] development.”

And it really is stunningly powerful and almost impossibly strange in places: one of the weirdest books I’ve read (possibly the weirdest). 1928: a novel set in an apparently ceaselessly mutable afterlife, and an author set on illuminating the stakes of modern life.

Another reviewer said “almost plotless” and gave five stars: right on both counts. And I’m not that into exposition either. At this point this sounds intriguing or terrible (or both, I suppose). Below are some of the best parts of the book, excerpted. So read those. And if you do decide to read The Childermass with an eye to what the fuck may be happening and why, the following are some good resources to start with:
Hugh Kenner’s book Wyndham Lewis (fantastic book, though Kenner doesn’t really have that much to say, for him, about The Childermass—which should be more than enough to resign you to the prospect of some bafflement);
chapter 2 of Fredric Jameson’s Fables of Aggression;
Jonathan Goodwin’s essay “Wyndham Lewis’s The Childermass, and National Crisis”;
and perhaps the most useful short propaedeutic of all, Alan Munton’s essay in Wyndham Lewis: a Revaluation.

Ahem. Enough of me. There are so many other bits I could have chosen, but below are some of the most astonishing passages:

There are intersections of the tunnel that are cliffs of sunlight. Their sharp sides section the covered market, dropping plumb into its black aisle. These solid luminous slices have the consistence of smoked glass: apparitions gradually take shape in their substance, hesitate or arrive with fixity, become delicately plastic, increase their size, burst out of the wall like an inky exploding chrysalid, scuttling past the two schoolboys: near-sighted or dazzled, in a busy rush they often collide. Or figures at their side plunge into the glassy surface of the light. As they do so they are metamorphosed from black disquieting figures of mysterious Orientals (hangers-on or lotus-eating Arabian merchants) into transparent angelical presences, which fade slowly in the material of the milky wall. The two get in close beneath the eave of a shop to avoid accidents. Satters surreptitiously reaches out his hand to the cutting edge of the light. It is hard it’s more like marble. It is not sunlight or it is frozen beams. He hastily withdraws his hand, looking to see if Pullman has noticed.



Young Pulley is trembling with anger and as pale as possible, at old the opprobrious adjective his dander rises up to the boil, for half a minute he is quite unable to speak, he is speechless with insulted feelings. Braced in a compact little bristling passion, he remains glaring up at the swaggering jowl rehearsing in mastiff antics in thrust and counter-thrust with locked jaws the barbarities it contemplates if the whipper-snapper does not climb down and sing small a little and say he’ll make amends or look sorry or something.



This appellant at a first inspection would pass as a big public-schoolboy of about fifteen: his head is over-large, it has been coarsely upholstered from the pelt of a Highland sheltie, untidy fingers of hair shoot out naively above eyes-to-match which in their expression offer themselves boldly as specimens of the most opaque and pathological obtuseness that both love and money could fairly expect together to compass: a sensual value is involved, an animal claim staked out. The mouth, which is a coarse hole, promises as well complete absence of mind, nothing but matter and its gaping traps. The clothes are a size that has been overtaken by the furious animal budding of the boy-body; they make a theatrical eternal youngster and in places are burst at the seam and show the fresh leg-flesh. Of the elect of the circus this is a typical marionette of the schoolboy-pattern—he sits bolt upright, buxom and hieratic, with the air of a lumpish martyr to iron discipline. Should this figure become armorial, its escutcheon would contain only rods-in-pickle.

[Melbourne Bitter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Plain of Death (as its called in the book) inhabited by English Public schoolboys. In fact everyone seems to have got an old school tie (Bailiff = Dean, Hyperides = popular professor, MacRob = wise old Scottish groundskeeper). Very interesting first half, as the duo wander the landscape/time. Second half was (to use a Wyndham Lewis phrase) a crashing bore. Some parts are unreadable, like the phonetic Cockney. Now lets all sing the old school song....

[Terence]

4 out of 10.

[Fnaught · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most inventively difficult books I have ever read. It provides a way of framing the dilemma of what looks like a modern day Conservative Revolution (c.2030): the entertained liberal children managed by Lewis's villain the Bailiff, a kind of internet demon, versus the hateful and despondent mannish men overseen by the neo-reactionary philosopher Hyperides. The best parts of the novel form a debate between these extremes. It is feminised child man, who switches genders gleefully and freely, against Lewis's superior equivalent to Hustler's University.
In a previous and much longer review, I considered Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus' and spoke about it missing the dialectic of its own negation. Well, this book has what that one missed. Not only does Lewis negate his own Hyperidean values (and to some extent, arguably, his then extant anti-Semitism), but more interestingly yet, he negates the very BBC centrist idea that the middle between such extremities is somehow the right answer.
No -as I expect the rest of the trilogy will prove- it is something crazier!

[Gianni · Rating 4 out of 5]

James Joyce's bitterest, sourest-grapes rival sets out to write the most deliberately obfuscating thing ever (or so far) written (it predated the finished version of the Wake by over a decade) and generally succeeds at being obfuscating, and if you like that sort of thing, it's an interesting challenge even if Lewis's attitude toward the reader is contemptuous (and I don't think that was ever true of Joyce). A dark and hazy partial view of the afterlife to be completed in the rest of the trilogy, which must not have been very compelling, as he didn't get around to writing the other volumes (Monstre Gai, Malign Fiesta) until almost three decades later.

[Rosemary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pullman and Sattersthwaite are two dead young men, presumably killed in the First World War, who knew each other at boarding school and now meet in the afterlife, a bizarre kind of no-man's-land where they wander and observe for about half the book and then listen to a debate between the Bailiff (manning the heavenly gate) and his opponents for the second half, which includes much racism and homophobia as well as a great deal of schoolboy silliness.

I'm sure it's very clever - there are certainly plenty of long and little-used words - but the only part I got much from was the short philosophical discussion between the Bailiff and one Macrob.

[Nathan · Rating 1 out of 5]

what the heck did I just read?

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

exhausting

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Я это прочитала, но вам это не надо. Это жесть. Это пытка. Ох уж эта модернистская литература.
Начинается всё с того, что некий Саттерс оказывается в каком-то странном месте. Сначала кажется, что он путешествует, но очень скоро реальность начинает искажаться. В общем, он попал в Чистилище. Здесь он встречает своего очень старинного друга, которого давно не видел, который тут уже пообжился. Он его куда-то ведёт - цель путешествия не ясна, само путешествие утомительно и опасно. Вокруг снуют некие пеоны - не совсем люди, которые проделывают всю грязную работу по поддержанию порядка в этом странном месте. Старожил Пуллман советует их игнорировать. К середине книги герои пришли, куда их так настойчиво вёл Пуллман - в лагерь, где ежедневно проводит беседы некий бейлиф - оказывается, помимо «судебного пристава» у этого термина есть ещё значение «смотритель». Бейлиф - управляющий этим Чистилищем. В лагере он проводит что-то типа философских словесных поединков, впрочем, поединки могут оканчиваться совсем не словесно. По результатам собеседования бейлиф может пропустить соискателя дальше - в рай. Только попасть туда очень непросто - потому что этот бейлиф настоящий тиран и изувер, развращённый властью над столькими душами. Он насмехается, он лжёт, он сюсюкает. У него есть своя шайка единомышленников - автор называет их гайдуками. Все эти ежедневные представления - избиения младенцев.
В целом роман похож на описание типичной частной английской школы. Женщин в этом мире вообще нет - бейлиф намекает, что для них есть где-то другие ворота. При этом автор постоянно упоминает, кто и где повёл себя по-матерински или женственно - в чисто мужской среде любое проявление человечности не остаётся без внимания и как бы осуждается за недостаток маскулинности. Сильные сбиваются в банды и глумятся над более слабыми, а могут и применить силу - конечно толпой нападая на одного. Их разговоры вертятся вокруг расизма, бремени белого человека, гомосексуальности, феминизма (последние два уже в 1928 году угрожают хрупкой маскулинности), и всех остальных видов нетерпимости. Конечно, пеоны - обслуживающий персонал школы, который барчуки с детства приучены игнорировать. Конечно же, эти лицеисты видят себя прямыми потомками великих греческих философов, и считают, что их пространные разговоры имеют какой-то смысл. Все персонажи попеременно то рассуждают как взрослые, то возвращаются к шалостям и играм, чаще всего жестоким. В общем, всё как и должно быть в закрытой школе.
Книга не просто скучная, она зубодробительно скучная. На бреднях второй части книги глаза закрываются сами собой. Разбивки на главы нет - всё от начала до конца единый текст. Поскольку во второй часто автор фокусируется на диспутах, они уже записаны как в пьесах.
Я не знаю, кому и для чего писалась эта книга, но это просто чушь и муть.