The Apes of God

by Wyndham Lewis, Paul Edwards (Afterword)

Tutored by a 60-year-old Albino dilettante, Dan travels through the London art world. He is horrified, confused and bored by the contrived "broadcasts" of the "apes", a series of pseudo artists who resemble, on the one hand, absurd mechanical dolls, and on the other, specific personages of the era.

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

639 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

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 5 out of 5]

The Apes of God is a fine cynical lacework... The novel is an intricate rococo of words… And its title cleverly joints the origin of species with divinity… However in his wicked tale Wyndham Lewis sneers at the sham artistic beings who apishly attempt to imitate creative acts of God…

It is to what I have called the Apes of God that I am drawing your attention – those prosperous mountebanks who alternately imitate and mock at and traduce those figures they at once admire and hate. And bringing against such individuals and their productions all the artillery of the female, or bi-sexual tongue, will abuse the object of their envy one day, and imitate him the next: will attempt to identify themselves with him in people’s minds, but in the same breath attempt to belittle him – to lessen if possible the disadvantage for them that this neighbourhood will reveal. I will make them parade before you in their borrowed plumes like mannequins, spouting their trite tags, and you shall judge if my account is true.

Therefore, the inveterate man about town takes an infantile youth as an apprentice and together they embark on a journey into the heart of bohemian existence…
Horace Zagreus – a self-styled guru – is truly imposing…

Zagreus always has to be in the limelight, he is incredibly vain. – But he definitely has a screw loose.

Daniel Boleyn – a faithful disciple – is innocently brainless…

“Moron is his word – Do you understand moron? – He means a sort of rustic idiot you see.”
(Moron was a nice word! – I am his moron Dan thought, and since he always thought of himself as small – I am Horace’s little moron!)

Consequently, their exploration of the aesthetical environs at once turns into an egregious buffoonery…
When in the beginning of the creation “the eight-limbed cylinder is severed”, the humanity is forever divided into two parts:
The world of women…

“The wife knows everything – she is afraid of nothing. She enjoys all that the man hates. She loves the carrion! She loves, it-is-her-breath, the society…
She loves it at breakfast, luncheon, at supper – the hour entlang she will be pleased it is all one. She is for the man the scavenger. It is her business. She represents him – in the market-place, kitchen, the latrine.”

And the world of men…

We have the immense background of War and of Revolution. That is enough – the blood is gratis! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder – one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines.

All the world’s a puppet theatre, and all the men and women merely puppets…

[Paul Christensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few funny bits, including one hilarious scene with a bull dyke, but much that feels dated, faded, far more than ‘straightforward’ novels published the same year, e.g. Hesse’s ‘Narcissus and Goldmund’.

Objective depictions of Jews may explain why it’s been out of print since the ‘60s, and the Apes are still very much with us...

[Osiris Oliphant]

2001-06-06
the Planet of the Apes of God

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.
AFix

[Darran Mclaughlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got about 130 pages into this before I decided that life was too short to bother finishing it. Wyndham Lewis obviously had talent but he isn't the great neglected Modernist he is portrayed as by some people. He is justly neglected. This novel gets bandied around as a possible rival to Ulysses, which is a ludicrous idea. Ulysses is an almost inexhaustable masterpiece which belongs in the company of the likes of Paradise Lost and the works of Shakespeare. The Apes of God is an angry satire about wealthy dilettante writers and artists in 20's London, aimed primarily at the Bloomsbury group. The idea that they have anything in common is absurd. This is the third or fourth book of Lewis's I have read and I think I have cured myself of my curiosity about him as I have before with writers like William Burroughs and Ronald Firbank. His writing has moments of real originality and beauty but he is motivated entirely by hate and disdain and that isn't enough to sustain a literary legacy. By the time you get 130 pages into a book like Ulysses, Mrs Dalloway, The Secret Agent or Living it's obvious that, difficult though they may be, you are dealing with a great work of art. By the time I got 130 pages into this the only positive thing I could think of was at least it wasn't as difficult as I feared it might be. Then I realised that this wasn't a good enough reason to plough through the next 500 paages.

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

There are those instances where Lewis's writing very plainly outstrips that of his more famous contemporaries, with the type of unpitying acerbity that attracts many readers of the so-called post-modernists. And if it weren't for the constant use of perfunctory Victorian euphemisms & Francophone turns of phrase (which are, we acknowledge, symptoms of an age when patent references to flatulence threatened to destroy one's chance of being published), you can sometimes close your eyes and hear the sound of the 21st century:

'Knocking down indeed!' comes the angry echo from the tetchy hen called Hollindrake. The scrotum-skin of her withered apple-of-Adam was distended for her fierce admonitory cluck. (p. 219)

'My dear lad, no Scot was ever more in earnest' insisted the stationary mammoth idol before which he slightly charlestoned... (p. 38)

Spoilers in following paragraph.

There is even a touch of those bafflingly weird Pynchonian names (e.g. Willie Service, Julius "Joo" Ratner, and, most notably, Zulu Blades), and the zany post-modern travesties of Dan Boleyn (insipid pun on 'Anne Boleyn') being 'raped' by the brogue-wielding Irish beauty Mélanie, or the Split-man (Julius), an odious stereotyped Jew (named partly after John Rodker, and partly James Joyce) and one of the Apes who 'alternately imitate and mock at and traduce those figures they at once admire and hate', being sawn in half by the neo-pagan "conjurer" Horace Zagreus.

A difficult and bewildering book that has made a considerable impression on me in spite of the fact that pages upon pages of text fell and bounced off my skull like hailstones on an upturned soup tureen.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A scathing (and 600 page) novel about the London world of arts and letters in the mid-1920s. The "apes" are dilettante artists, mimicking a real creator without knowing what they are doing. Sixty-year old Horace Zagreus, a well-to-do, closeted homosexual who cultivates a succession of young men, telling them they are geniuses, has most recently discovered Dan Boleyn, a very awkward provincial young man from Ireland (who seems to possess no genius at all). When Boleyn hears the word "homosexual" he blushes in agony at the horrid medical term which he does not consciously connect with the pleasure he and his former schoolmates took in dressing up in women's clothes.
Zagreus sends Boleyn on a continual round of visits to artist studios and writers' salons, ostensibly to produce a journal and other documentation of the whole gimcrack world. This mainly serves for Lewis to whet his knives on the reputations of his contemporaries, since there is a strong roman à clef component to the list of characters. Additionally, there are rather long aesthetic discursions in the guise of party conversation.
His portrayals of Jews are hardly complimentary, though his Jewish characters participate as equal members of the ecosystem of scorn in which they live.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was really slow at first but it picks up a lo once it's just an endless parade of idiots that wyndham lewis didn't like. less outright funny than i expected though, probably because the people in the book aren't really people, they're weird automata that resemble people.

[Monty Milne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rather enjoyed this and I think it is a very remarkable book, but it is by no means easy to read. Even Ezra Pound found the first few chapters hard going, and you need to invest close attention and a lot of patience to get through the whole of this. I think it is brilliant, but also too long; had it been a couple of hundred pages shorter, I would have given it five stars.

The reason I like it is because the exuberant prose is just so lush and amusing. The absurdly camp and ineffectual Dan Boleyn is very funny…the scene where he is sent to spy on a lesbian artist, who mistakes him for a model and makes him strip naked, made me howl with laughter. Of course it is cruel, but all humour has a cruel edge. Much of the humour is arrestingly bizarre. I read of one character, for example, clad in “the mantle of Graziano – corrugated like a peplum…a black fustian jerkin with large silk buttons like plovers’ eggs.” As it happens this is exactly what I am wearing now as I compose this review…

The mockery of Bloomsbury is very well done and the humour, despite or because of its cruelty, works. Except perhaps for the anti Semitism, which is undeniably uncomfortable. But just because it mocks Bloomsbury doesn’t make it an apologia for Fascism, and just because it mocks the obviously homosexual Dan Boleyn and his older mentor Horace Zagreus doesn’t make it homophobic.

My edition had an excellent introduction which discusses the real people on whom many of the characters were based (Dan Boleyn is apparently Stephen Spender). Although it helps to know this, it isn’t essential: the absurdities being mocked here have never really gone away. I think this is far, far better than Joyce’s Ulysses because here I felt I was invited to be in on the joke, and if the joke was sometimes a bit cruel, this is because life too is cruel. One has to adopt some kind of armour to face the world, in all its insanity and foolishness, and it seems to me that Wyndham Lewis’s sense of “tragic delight” is as good a response as any.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really 3.5 stars, some fantastic passages but not his best.

[Deanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A chance to follow Daniel Boleyn, a young irishman makes his way around the various apes that make up the artistic set. A book which is very much a 1930's book, and mention is made of other people of the time including James Joyce and Proust.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where Captain Beefheart gets some ideas. Human animals. Shakespearian.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

satirical novel of the literary/artistic life in the 1920s...not bad but somewhat tedious and very long (over 600 pages)

[Peter Jakobsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best (and bitchiest) book of the art demi monde ever writ.

[Glass River]

Lewis called his memoir of the Great War Blasting and Bombardiering. He liked hurling explosives around and would declare (literary) war in order to find targets for his irrepressible belligerence. Taking a wide-angle view, The Apes of God is the angry side of his cool – and amazingly perceptive – Vorticist portraits of leading figures of the modernist movement (Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, et al.) and the Bloomsbury coterie (the Sitwells, Strachey, et al.). It has been suggested that the ‘moronic’ Dan Boleyn spoofs the young Stephen Spender, a writer novelists just could not leave alone. The two men had met when Spender invited Lewis to Oxford to address the Poetry Society. Lewis was evidently not much impressed with his host – although he later painted a very fine portrait of Spender.
Few artists (none ranks with him for ambidexterity) could blow so hot and so cold as Wyndham Lewis. The Apes of God blows very hot indeed. It is wilfully disorganised (‘author in a rage’) and – as angry people will – goes on at inordinate length. One episode, ‘Lord Osmund’s Lenten Party’, is, at over 250 pages, of novel-length in itself. And tedious.
The narrative is set in the mid-1920s, climaxing in the General Strike of 1926, when it looked as if the whole country might go bang. Emergent Blackshirtism and Redflagism are described prophetically (Lewis was an acute political observer). The plot pivots on a version of Julien Benda’s trahison des clercs thesis – the clever people have let the country go to pieces. Not villainy, but weak knees and degeneracy are to blame. Lewis satirises an anaemic artistic London, its reddest blood having been spilled by the riverful in France while aesthetes (of deviant sexual inclination, typically) thrived at home alongside the soft-faced businessmen who did very well out of the war, thank you very much. Everything enfeebled in British culture was, Lewis felt, incarnate in writers like the Sitwells, skewered in his novel as the ‘Finnian Shaws’. They responded to his assault with what Lewis described as the ‘sly Bloomsbury sniff’. The novel takes wild haymaking sideswipes at James Joyce (Lewis makes him Jewish – a poke at Leopold Bloom), Virginia Woolf, and – most vituperatively – Gertrude Stein. All these are ‘apes’ in the sense of ‘aping’, going through the motions, capable of nothing original.
The ingénu hero, Dan Boleyn, is a would-be littérateur (there is an obvious echo in the name, but the allusion to Henry’s luckless queen goes nowhere obvious). Dan finds himself adrift in London, where he receives his education in literary apedom. He is instructed by such sages as the albino homosexual Horace Zagreus (who is as grotesque as his name); he regards Dan’s ‘moronism’ as a tabula rasa on which he can inscribe his teachings. Somewhere in the background is Pierpoint (a name traditionally associated with hangmen), who seems to be a Lewisian mouthpiece. A papal figure, deistically above it all, the offstage Pierpoint communicates by written ‘bulls’. One of the problems with the book was that, for all its ferocity, it was never entirely clear – three miles outside Soho anyway – who was being targeted. This is a problem which has become more acute with the passing of time. As Lewis’ targets have faded into the obscurities he gleefully predicted, The Apes of God has found itself comprehensively and respectfully noted in literary historical chronicles purely because of its sheer percussive force. Its bang. It is, as one critic neatly puts it, ‘no one’s favourite novel’. But, read with some judicious skipping, the bangs are highly enjoyable.

[Rosemary · Rating 3 out of 5]

A clever but vicious satire on the Bloomsbury set and especially the gay and lesbian London intellectuals of the 1920s, this has some funny moments but also a lot of racial and homophobic slurs. Regardless of content, I thought it was way too long for satire. It could have been cut by one section in every two all the way through the book and not lost anything, IMO.

I liked the character of Dan, a young gay man who idolises his older lover, a man who declares all his latest fancies to have "genius" and educates them in the ways of the literary and artistic set, the "apes" of the title. Dan is ridiculously ignorant and passive, and surely not meant to be admired, but I thought he was sweet, and I would have completely lost patience with this book without him.

[Tony Hannan]

31. The Apes of God, by Wyndham Lewis. My goodness this was a slog. Hard to find due to being out of print (and easy to see why), it's essentially a hideously overwritten, brain-numbingly dreary in-joke whose furiously-satirical take on figures in early 20th century modern art like Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Edith Sitwell and the Bloomsbury set (them again) must have meant something to about 50 pseudo-intellectuals, even upon publication. His paintings are better. 2/10 #SutherlandChallenge #Books

[Ravanagh Allan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lewis is a great observer of men, but there is never any plot whatsoever to draw you on to the end of one of his books!

[Djuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wortgewaltig, humorvoll, avantgardistisch …

[Taylor Woolstenhulme · Rating 4 out of 5]

there’s petty and then there’s “I’m gonna write a thousand page book to shit on the entire English literary & art scene” petty

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

black and bitter and hard, lewis's underappreciation is a damn shame

[Vittorio Ducoli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una lettura faticosa

Il libro è complesso, secondo me troppo legato alla società letteraria londinese degli anni '20 del novecento, e quindi in alcuni passaggi oscuro e di difficile interpretazione. Tuttavia non mancano i momenti gradevoli e di pura satira corrosiva.
Un "operatore culturale", tale Zagreus, ispirato dal misterioso Pierpoint, introduce il giovane, ebete, silezioso e perennemente arrossente Dan nella società londinese, insegnandogli a riconoscere le scimmie di dio, finti intellettuali.

[John Kemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I still maintain Lewis is a far more interesting writer than painter. This monumental satire is aggressively visual, full -blooded, combative: its subject matter completely dwarfed by the tremendous intellectual energy that Lewis brings to bear on it. A painter's novel in its concentration on stylistic effects and the rendering of internal states through the ruthless anatomising of external details.

[Hater Shepard]

I am adding a few too many books to the "read" shelf. Some are pretty obvbious. But besides bragging to myself, I do have it in mind to list titles that I love and for which I have not found many other people to appreciate 'em with me.

Anyone glancing around here, please speak up if it turns out you like one of these too.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome!

[Lynn]

Widener PR6023.E97 A85 1981

[Jacob Benjamin Paramore · Rating 2 out of 5]

High brow lit. Typically raised and held up by the pompous.