The BURIED Book Club discussion

Writer & Artist, Wyndham Lewis, as suggested by Friend Enrique.

This writer himself makes for a fascinating study! What then, to say of his 'buried' & some not-so-buried works!
Digging into his life brought the same age-old conundrum to the fore — should a writer be judged solely on the merits of their work or their life – I leave that to the fellow BBC members to judge for themselves, i.e. if a judging itself is required!?
Personally, for example, while I distance myself from Roman Polanski's personal life, I do enjoy watching his films, so there.

"In the words of his lifelong friend T. S. Eliot, Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) was “the most fascinating personality of our time.” For not only was Lewis an extraordinarily gifted artist and writer, he was fully involved throughout his career in the problem of identifying the individual in the modern world. American on his father’s side, he soon found congenial company with Eliot and Pound, and with these “men of 1914” (including Joyce in the typically militant phrase) he expressed a cultural stance."
Here's the link:
The University Bookman: A Call to Timelessness

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/b...

"Percy Wyndham Lewis had a talent for making himself unpopular. He enjoyed making enemies and courted controversy at every twist and every turn of his tortuous career as painter, novelist, satirist, cultural critic and political demagogue. His opinions were as volatile as his temperament, and he generally made sure that they flowed against the tide of the consensus view. One minute he was playing devil’s advocate for Hitler and the National Socialists, the next – having taken the trouble to go and see what was actually going on in Berlin – he was fulminating against the Nazis and cursing Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. A master of caricature, Lewis was himself easily caricatured – as racist and misogynist, Fascist and homophobe – but not so easily pigeonholed. He was especially detested by the Bloomsbury set, whom he attacked mercilessly at every opportunity, but such loathing was by no means confined to the British Isles. Ernest Hemingway memorably wrote of him that “I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man. Under a black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes were those of an unsuccessful rapist.”

Here's the very interesting article in full :

Archives: Wyndham Lewis: Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery
http://www.andrewgrahamdixon.com/arch...

"Cosy is one thing Lewis definitely was not. His prickly public comportment, and where it got him, provide a sobering lesson on how not to behave if you want to get ahead in the very personal profession of publishing."

Read it here in full: Wyndham Lewis: overlooked scourge of mediocrity

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/books...

A most modern misanthrope: Wyndham Lewis and the pursuit of anti-pathos

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/...

Wyndham Lewis' Goodreads page: ( in case you didn't click on the pic above!).

http://www.goodreads.com/author/list/...

The Goodreads page doesn't list all of his works. Wikipedia mentions but doesn't list all of his 40 works.
Google shows the following books:

Tarr
The Ape of God
Blasting and Bombardiering
Time and Western Man
The Wild Body
The Art of Being
Self-Condenmed
Snooty Baronet
Rude Assignment
The Caliph's Design
The Vulgar Streak
The Complete Wild Body
Paleface: The Philosophy of the "Melting-Pot"
America and Cosmic Man ( full text available on archive.org)
The Diabolical Principle and the Dithyrambic Spectator
The Old Gang and the New Gang
America,I presume
Filibusters in Barbary

I felt really bad reading abt his destitute yrs — such fate shdn't befall any creative person no matter what their transgressions.
I don't have any solid philosophical arguements to base my claims on but I feel writers, artists, creative people of any kind are above the moral standards that 'normal' folks are judged by 'cause their genius puts them in a different sphere.
I'm really surprised that he ridiculed Ulysses when he had already derided V Woolf for riffing off it for Mrs.Dalloway! Maybe when he had a falling out with Joyce...
Pls do share images of his artwork here, esp. the portraits - they are stunning!
In fact, I was distracted by his paintings so the thread took some time.
And many many thanks for bringing this amazing talent to our notice.

I think Nietzsche's concept of Übermensch covers that thought but I'm not sure, I read him so long ago.
Here's the quote:

"I love those that know not how to live except as down-goers, for they are the over-goers.

I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.

I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going down and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth of the Superman may hereafter arrive.

I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeks he his own down-going."

How abt portraits of Eliot & Pound & the pencil sketch of Joyce? It's funny how he first painted subjects & then had a falling out with them & lampooned them. The Sitwell portrait took him longest & caused him endless pain, if I remember correctly!

And that Hemingway line "unsuccessful rapist" – now that's some put down – classic!

Great! Have you noticed the difference between the two portraits? The Sitwell one looks like a puppet or an empty sack - just the face & neck & loose clothing hanging below - the wife one, is of course,a labour of love!
Sketchbook is the one to give expert advice on this.
Btw, have you heard of this writer called Stuart Mitchner? I think he qualifies for buried status.

Mala wrote: "Btw,have you heard of this writer called Stuart Mitchner? I think he qualifies for buried status."

Almost as though he doesn't existent to an extent sufficient to have been BURIED; Stuart Mitchner. Add, please.

I made the Mitchner thread but it's so skeletal that perhaps you'd need to add some body of details!

Here's Proust, on Artist & Morality from Within a Budding Grove :

"Perhaps it is only in really vicious lives that the moral problem can arise in all its disquieting strength. And of this problem the artist finds a solution in the terms not of his own personal life but of what is for him the true life, a general, a literary solution. As the great Doctors of the Church began often, without losing their virtue, by acquainting themselves with the sins of all mankind, out of which they extracted their own personal sanctity, so great artists often, while being thoroughly wicked, make use of their vices in order to arrive at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all. It is the vices (or merely the weaknesses and follies) of the circle in which they live, the meaningless conversation, the frivolous or shocking lives of their daughters, the infidelity of their wives,or their own misdeeds that writers have most often castigated in their books, without, however, thinking it necessary to alter their domestic economy or to improve the tone of their households. And this contrast had never before been so striking as it was in Bergotte’s time, because, on the one hand, in proportion as society grew more corrupt, our notions of morality were increasingly exalted, while on the other hand the public were now told far more than they had ever hitherto known about the private lives of literary men."

i actually own 30 books by or about wyndham lewis, so not a bad collection. the only one i've read so far though, is The Apes of God.

That's great! Enrique will be happy to know you :-)

Forgot to ask earlier Bill, but if you've reviewed The Apes of God, then pls share your review here.

the books i have are:
Wyndham Lewis: A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy
Pound/Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, the Correspondence of Ezra Pound
The Letters of Wyndham Lewis
Blasting and Bombardiering
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
Some Sort of Genius
The Red Priest
The Roaring Queen
The Apes Of God
Time and Western Man
Men Without Art
The Art Of Being Ruled
The Vulgar Streak
Rotting Hill
Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change:

Essays on Art, Literature and Society, 1914-1956
Rude Assignment: An Intellectual
Autobiography
Self Condemned
The Revenge For Love
Snooty Baronet
Journey Into Barbary: Morocco Writings and Drawings of Wyndham Lewis
Tarr
The Complete Wild Body
The Childermass
Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! Or, A New War In The Making
Unlucky For Pringle: Unpublished And Other
Stories
Makers of the New: The Revolution in Literature,
1912-1939

I also have a few that don't seem to be in goodreads database:

Mrs. Duke's Millions
The Human age
The Filibuster-D.G. Bridson
Wyndham Lewis A Reevalution
Blast 1

Hope this is of some use!

Just found Lewis's Wild Body on Gutenberg. Has anyone read this?

Great,Meenakshi! I'll download it pronto!
Why don't you be the first to read & review it for our club? There are no reviews of this book on Gr.

I'll get to it asap, Mala.
Here's a link :
http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewisw-wil...

archive.org also has America and the Cosmic Man.

Enrique wrote: "That is just outstanding. Where O where to begin?! It certainly will be put to good use. How long have you been collecting Wyndham Lewis? How did he catch your collector's eye? I've been readi..."

i've been collecting lewis for several years now. i bought one book of his...probably The Apes Of God, and then i was in a used bookstore, and they had 6 or 8 beautiful, like new, black sparrow editions of his books, so i bought them all, and it's just carried on from there.

in 1978 black sparrow press released a Bibliography of the Writings of Wyndham Lewis created by Bradford Morrow & Bernard Lafourcade. Intro by Hugh Kenner (Lafourcade and Kenner were listed in ABE; the goodreads entry for this seems incomplete—Kenner also did a "critical guidebook" of his own on Lewis.).

From the various listings for this title on ABE, it seems that the bibliography contains "numerous textual illustrations" and was published in two runs, the more limited of which was packaged with Crossing the Frontier, an unpublished fragment by Lewis found after his death.

Crossing the Frontier seems not to have been published since, as it is not in the GR database on its own.

The bibliography is listed for under 30 USD though I wonder if those listings are for the 2 volume edition or just the bibliography.

The link you shared here, the one with the cool $175 tag, includes everything – First Edition: Two Volumes. I didn't check the other listings but customer service would answer your query, no?
Leave that – pick one of the books instead - Enrique lists Ape of God amongst his favs- knowing his taste, I guess it would surely be a good one to try!

I hope there's no problem with bumping this thread, which hasn't been posted in since 2013.
I've read a bit of Lewis, The Apes of God, and The Revenge For Love. Apes of God I sort of liked, but with reservations - it's a satire, but not as funny as you'd expect - he had a strange idea of satire, I read a description of it that talked about how be basically reduces people to automata with no inner life, and I'd say that's accurate - the people satirised have no inner lives at all, they're more like machinery. It's a strange thing to read and I can't recommend it as place to start, but there was quite a lot of interest in there as well. The Revenge For Love I enjoyed much more, and it's much more accessible. I don't have any particular comments to make, but it's quite witty and the characters are memorable and often drawn in quite humorous ways.

Lewis on the whole seems like a tough guy to get your head around, I'm still not quite sure what to make of him even after reading these two, and if you search you can find literary critics saying much the same thing - there's no consistent view of him, earlier critics stressed the period when he supported fascism, but that seems to be a simplification. I'm very interested in reading The Human Age, which is a trilogy apparently about a sort of allegorical version of hell, but those ones seem particularly hard to find, and his books aren't very common anyway.

If anyone is interested in his work with the vorticists, the two journals of BLAST, which go for quite high prices in physical form have been digitised as part of the University of Brown's Modernist journal project here: http://modjourn.org/render.php?id=115...

Thomas wrote: "I hope there's no problem with bumping this thread, which hasn't been posted in since 2013.
I've read a bit of Lewis, The Apes of God, and The Revenge For Love. Apes of God I sort of liked, but wi..."

Welcome to the BBC, Thomas, & thanks for reviving this thread.
As you can see, without proper advocacy, a writer gets buried again!
I've a few of his books: Tarr, Rotting Hill, Self Condemned, Blasting and Bombardiering, & The Writer and the Absolute. If you are interested in reading (& hopefully reviewing) them; I'll be glad to share.
And thanks for the link.

@ NR: Other than the credit at the top, I've edited most of the references to Enrique here. He nuked his account & deleted all his comments & I'm looking silly talking to myself there!

Mala wrote: "@ NR: Other than the credit at the top, I've edited most of the references to Enrique here. He nuked his account & deleted all his comments & I'm looking silly talking to myself there!"

Yeah, my groups are starting to look a little nuts with all these account deletions. Woman&Men is pretty much decimated with one=single account deletion. But, yes, edit your comments as you best see fit!

Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Mala wrote: "@ NR: Other than the credit at the top, I've edited most of the references to Enrique here. He nuked his account & deleted all his comments & I'm looking silly talking to myself there!..."

Looks like Enrique isn't the only reason I need to keep on editing - my spellchecker is giving me hell. It turns Steven into Stephen, MJ into Major, & BBC into BBB!
I don't know what algorithm it follows! I wish I had a "cantankerous keyboard" to blame :p

i just read The Childermass and it's very cool. it's also very dense and hard to read, and has almost no plot. later on the layout almost becomes like a play, with character's names written before they talk. the second half onwards is mostly just the 2 main characters listening to other characters talk about philosophy, which sounds boring but the writing is really good so it's actually a compelling read. there's also a character who starts speaking in finnegans wake sentences at one point, which is fun.

Thomas wrote: "i just read The Childermass and it's very cool. it's also very dense and hard to read, and has almost no plot. later on the layout almost becomes like a play, with character's names ..."

I'm glad to hear it!
Checked the page for The Childermass & was very surprised to see lots of people adding it to their tbr from September 2015 onwards -- wonder what caused it!
Also skimmed a rather long review of this book -- yours is cute by contrast!

Wyndham Lewis was an early influence on Marshall McLuhan.

Wyndham Lewis : "The environment as programmed teaching machine."
McLuhan : " that's where I got it ! "

most of his theoretical writing is supposed to be along those lines and extremely ahead of its time, although i've not really tackled any of it. i read a review of his travel book about morroco in an old wyndham lewis newsletter that made it sound fascinating as well, those newsletters can be found over here and are worth looking at if you're interested in him: http://www.wyndhamlewis.org/jwls