Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guidebook

by Hugh Kenner

This monograph on the English modernist Wyndham Lewis examines the eccentric's life and art. Primarily focused on his guiding aesthetic beliefs and the battles he waged against other artistic ideologies, Hugh Kenner's book analyzes Lewis' literary output and paintings not as a simple explanation for the viewer or reader but as an extension of Vorticist's polemics and Kenner's own philosophy of art.

Genres: Biography Memoir

169 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

Reviews

[philosophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was an informative, fast-paced book and, actually, a quite enjoyable one, as well. i learned a lot about wyndham lewis's writing style and his personality in general without getting bored. i'm really looking forward to checking more of hugh kenner's books out.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typically great effort from Kenner.

There's plenty of praise herein for "the most astonishing literary career of the 20th century, to be sure; the devastating critique comes wrapped in mostly merciful rhetoric. But the central problem is clear: Kenner's Lewis is an extreme case of a fascinating problem: that an artist can at once reach colossal heights and lack the self-knowledge to give an account thereof: "It belongs to the nature of Lewis's mind and material, of course, that its overwhelming merits lie very close to chaos. The details of his best prose depend on the author's will alone; there are no roads through a vacuum."

I self-administered this as book as both propaedeutic for a deep brave dive into the forbidding syntactical thickets of the Lewisian sentence, and a girding-up for facing the plethora of bad ideas the man had; it's useful on both fronts. Nice close readings of some key moments in the corpus; excellent summations of the bewildering political errors; and a dense plot climaxing elegantly in the deep existential instability of L's simultaneous investments in artistic salvationism & radical nihilism.

That Lewis was a monstrous idiot & profound embarrassment in many, many regards cannot be doubted. But if you can read him and not feel joyfully toppled by slabs of atemporal laughing brutality--well, that's your fucking problem.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

What an interesting guy. I mean Hugh Kenner. He's all over the place in this and it really works when talking about a weirdo like Lewis.

[J. Alfred · Rating 2 out of 5]

What Kenner says again and again without saying it is that Lewis is a morally unstable genius who makes aesthetic mistakes loudly. Which is to say that he's importantly interesting, or something like that: one gets the feeling that his importance resides solely in the biographical fact that he hung out with Ezra Pound. (Note: this is in fact why Wyndham Lewis is important.)
The library copy I read had, in the margins, the pencilled cry: "why LIKE this crap, Hugh?"
A not-unreasonable response.