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Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist As the Enemy
Excerpt from Wyndham Lewis
The most fascinating personality of our time was T. S. Eliot's description of Wyndham Lewis in The E goist for September 1918, an opinion recently reinforced in the Winter 1955 issue of The Hudson Review where he called Lewis the most distinguished living English novelist. Speaking on the bbc. Just after the last war, Geoffrey Grigson said: If we could have a collected edition of Wyndham Lewis — a collecting of novels, stories, criticism, treatises, essays which have never been collected — we should understand, as perhaps we don't, his immense unity. V. S. Pritchett, on the other hand, denies this unity to Lewis' work; if one looks at the first and last sentences of any of his paragraphs, Pritchett asserts, the two will rarely be found to have any logical connection. The present study attempts to discover that logical connection. It is divided into four parts, roughly on the basis of the interest Lewis has shown in each field. All his writings are covered to date, al though perhaps one point should be mentioned: I have not asked my printer to follow the atomic typography of Blast. The checklist which concludes this work, while it is perhaps the most thorough of its kind to be attempted, does not pretend to be definitive; I know from letters of Lewis I have examined that there is at least one item outstanding. The chronology of this list is only threatened, I believe, when I have been unable to trace month of publication in the usual way and the work in question has been relegated to the end of its year. The secondary sources simply gather a fairly arbitrary selection of works with divergent views on Lewis that seem worth preserving. In this listing the ordinary contemporary review is not included, al though reference to such may be found in the text.
The most fascinating personality of our time was T. S. Eliot's description of Wyndham Lewis in The E goist for September 1918, an opinion recently reinforced in the Winter 1955 issue of The Hudson Review where he called Lewis the most distinguished living English novelist. Speaking on the bbc. Just after the last war, Geoffrey Grigson said: If we could have a collected edition of Wyndham Lewis — a collecting of novels, stories, criticism, treatises, essays which have never been collected — we should understand, as perhaps we don't, his immense unity. V. S. Pritchett, on the other hand, denies this unity to Lewis' work; if one looks at the first and last sentences of any of his paragraphs, Pritchett asserts, the two will rarely be found to have any logical connection. The present study attempts to discover that logical connection. It is divided into four parts, roughly on the basis of the interest Lewis has shown in each field. All his writings are covered to date, al though perhaps one point should be mentioned: I have not asked my printer to follow the atomic typography of Blast. The checklist which concludes this work, while it is perhaps the most thorough of its kind to be attempted, does not pretend to be definitive; I know from letters of Lewis I have examined that there is at least one item outstanding. The chronology of this list is only threatened, I believe, when I have been unable to trace month of publication in the usual way and the work in question has been relegated to the end of its year. The secondary sources simply gather a fairly arbitrary selection of works with divergent views on Lewis that seem worth preserving. In this listing the ordinary contemporary review is not included, al though reference to such may be found in the text.
363 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1973
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About the author
Geoffrey Wagner
57 books3 followersGeoffrey Atheling Wagner (born 1927) is an English-American scholar and writer. He has published numerous books exploring subjects such as feminism in literature, the life and work of English writer Wyndham Lewis, and the consequences of the Grenadian Revolution; translations of Baudelaire, Nerval, Kessel, and other French writers; fiction, travel books, and brochures; and several slim volumes of esoteric verse. Wagner is a professor emeritus of English and the Humanities at the City College of New York.
Erotica under the pseudonym P.N. Dedeaux.
Erotica under the pseudonym P.N. Dedeaux.
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