In a few lines of verse from his satiric self-portrait “If So the Man You Are,” Wyndham Lewis described with uncanny accuracy his place in English letters as it stood in 1933 and has continued to the present day:

I am an “outcast” and a man “maudit.”
But how romantic! Don't you envy me?
A sort of Villon, bar the gallows: but
Even there I may be accommodated yet.
Why yet it's very jolly to be picked
As the person not so much as to be kicked,
As the person who de facto is not there,
As the person relegated to the back-stair.

(CPP 51)

Lewis wrote these lines during a two-and-a-half-year period when he published eight books and an art portfolio but received few of the customary rewards of authorship. Despite his reputation as a serious artist and thinker, his advances from publishers were small, usually in the £150 range, and earnings from his book sales almost never recouped these meager sums.¹ Even more than poverty, though, he resented his exclusion from the public notoriety that had come to other avant-garde artists of his acquaintance. Around 1920, Ezra Pound had written of Wyndham Lewis and James Joyce that “the English prose fiction of my decade is the work of this pair of authors.”² In 1931, however, when people violated federal laws to obtain copies of Ulysses, Lewis's novel Tarr, published by Knopf and legally available, sold eleven copies in the United States.³

Still, we can discern through the bitterness of his sarcastic comparison with Villon a defiant spirit that tells us just how much Lewis could enjoy the role of outcast and how, paradoxically, it could assuage, if not quite fulfill, the need for recognition. To be kicked means that one is merely a nuisance; to be condemned to virtual nonbeing implies that one represents a formidable threat to the established order. Lewis wanted us to see him (and wanted to see himself) as a one-man memento mori of contemporary culture: invisible to the eye but lurking just beneath the horizon of consciousness, he promises to come flying up the back stair to speak words we would rather not hear about ourselves. On several occasions, Lewis compared himself with Machiavelli as one who explored the unpleasant realities of human nature. Archetypal predecessors in this enterprise might also include Milton's Satan and Byron's Manfred; it was indeed a romantic persona that Lewis had created for himself.

Lewis's insistence on playing the role of adversary or “Enemy,” as he liked to call himself, brings us to the major stumbling block in beginning a critical study of his life and work. Simply stated, Lewis created a highly polemical art that forces the reader to be either for him or against him: he opposed his vision of an agonistic relationship between man and the world to what he saw as attempts in every area of modern cultural life to obliterate this necessary opposition, which he once described as “the ancient and valuable iranian principle of duality” (ABR 25). He saw himself as a kind of spiritual aristocrat and opposed efforts to resolve conflicts (usually through man's / the self's / the subject's conquest of the world / the other / the object) meant to achieve such utilitarian ends as the greatest good for the greatest number. His uncompromising attitude on this point marks him as a kind of zealot and also connects him with an Old Testament tradition that extends from Amos and Elijah down through such latter-day prophets as William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Lewis's relatively few critics have tried to see his volatility as both the symptom of, and sometimes even cure for, the ills of modern life. Pound established the pattern for this approach in the essay cited above and published not long after the appearance of Lewis's novel Tarr:

The book's interest is not due to the “style” in so far as “style” is generally taken to mean “smoothness of finish,” orderly arrangement of sentences, coherence to the Flaubertian method.

It is due to the fact that we have a highly-energized mind performing a huge act of scavenging; cleaning up a great lot of rubbish, cultural, Bohemian, romantico-Tennysonish, arty, societish, gutterish.⁴

Three decades later, looking back over Lewis's career in the first comprehensive survey of his work, Hugh Kenner echoed these same sentiments:

Afoot in the void, his savagely energetic intelligence hunting down chimerical images of itself not only enacts in a dream-play the suicide of the West, but demonstrates the ubiquity of the illusions into which more fortunate intelligences have from time to time barely succeeded in not being betrayed. … If Lewis has stood for intelligence rather than intuition, for creation rather than craftsmanship, for Western Man rather than his daemon the Zeitgeist, without ever personifying any of these things quite convincingly, yet even in illustrating the radical incapacity of will alone to do the work of patience, he has discredited the spuriousness we meticulously reward. … He is the necessary antidote to everything, from Freud and Lawrence to the cults which have surrounded Eliot and Joyce.⁵

While this approach has successfully brought other dissenting artists into the canon (one thinks immediately of Pound), Lewis remains almost as much an outsider as he has ever been. Neither have two waves of republication (Methuen and Regnery in the mid-1950s, and Black Sparrow in the past decade) brought the revival of interest sought by his admirers. Lewis cannot simply be dismissed as an inept writer; testimonials to his accomplishment come from such contemporaries as Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, and Ford Madox Ford. What, then, has been the cause of his continuing status as “the least read and most unfamiliar of all the great modernists of his generation”?⁶

Most of us can live with an artist's obnoxious politics, clumsy prose, or immoral conduct if we can identify a sense of unity and purpose in his or her career, directed toward the fulfillment of some recognizable (and forgivable) human need. Wyndham Lewis fails to meet this important criterion, exhibiting, on the contrary, a set of internal divisions that have always made it difficult for readers to “place” him. First, he harbored divided cultural loyalties that affected the substance of his art and politics; second, he pursued commitments to the practice of what he saw as two diametrically opposed arts; and finally, though not a conventionally religious man, he understood life as a struggle between the human and the divine and tended to side with God against man. Let us briefly consider each of these divisions and its effect upon Lewis's reputation.

For Lewis more than for any of his contemporaries, the three milieus that contributed to the development of twentieth-century modernism—American, British, and Continental—lay almost equal claim to importance in his own artistic development. Certainly other writers of his generation traveled a good deal and spent years in unlikely places under the constraints of self-imposed exile; but Joyce in Trieste, Pound in Rapallo, and Lawrence in Taos, New Mexico, remained quintessentially the Irishman, American, and Englishman each had been born, respectively. Lewis's origins, however, spanned two continents. He had an American father (with a distinguished Civil War record) and an English mother and was born on his family's yacht in the harbor at Amherst, Nova Scotia, on November 18, 1882.⁷ (Lewis retained Canadian citizenship for the rest of his life.) In the late 1880s, the family moved to England, but within a few years, his parents separated when his father ran off with one of the maids; Lewis remained in England with his mother. He attended the prestigious Rugby School, but as his abysmal performance there would suggest (he finished twenty-sixth in a class of twenty-six), Lewis seems to have detested English morals and manners from the time he was old enough to have opinions on the subject (perhaps partly on account of his American ancestry). A few years at London's Slade School of Art told him that the English also had little to teach him about aesthetics, and thus he removed himself to Paris and the Continent when barely out of his teens. Here he began to develop his mature style in painting and writing out of French, Italian, and Russian models; he also spent a number of summers in Brittany painting and meditating upon the Celtic inhabitants, whose rather primitive way of life made as deep an impression upon Lewis as the Polynesians had made upon Gauguin. When the allowance from his estranged father ran out and he returned to England in 1912, the English barely recognized him as one of their own; indeed, the early reviewers of Tarr (which began serial publication in The Egoist in 1916) praised the work for qualities uncharacteristic of most English novels. Rebecca West called it “a beautiful and serious work of art that reminds one of Dostoevsky only because it is too inquisitive about the soul”;⁸ Ezra Pound also drew the comparison with Dostoevsky after remarking dryly that Lewis was “the rarest of phenomena, an Englishman who has achieved the triumph of being also a European.”⁹

The First World War put an end to this early phase of his career just as he had brought out the first issue of the journal BLAST and more or less established himself as leader of the English avant-garde. When Lewis returned to the public eye at the end of the war, Continental painting—the cubist and futurist art that had gone by the name “postimpressionism” when it first appeared in England around 1910—had started to gain a measure of acceptance in local circles. Ironically, Lewis's experiences at the front had made him uneasy about the dehumanizing effect of the abstract style he had been perfecting in 1914, and his own work now took an insular turn toward more naturalistic representation. Lewis had once again managed to misplace himself: he became the most English sort of artist—a portrait painter—at the precise moment English audiences were becoming more European in their tolerance for abstraction.

Divided loyalties also contributed to his disastrous views on foreign policy during the thirties. As with the practice of his art, Lewis's political behavior seems to have been rooted in a desire to promote cultural diversity within the domain of Western civilization. While the League of Nations was proving itself ineffectual against the rising tide of nationalism in Europe, and while the English were growing increasingly confirmed in their worst fears about the hostile intentions of their neighbors on the Continent, Lewis wrote in 1936 and 1937 two polemical works that argued that England should follow an essentially internationalist policy, at least insofar as this meant keeping an open door to Germany. Lewis's position seems to have been informed as much by self-interest as by fellow-traveling attraction to authoritarian rule: his career had already been derailed once by a European war, and as an artist, he would have much to lose by the renewal of hostilities; avant-garde movements of the sort Lewis deemed essential cannot flourish apart from the free exchange of people and ideas across borders. Lewis was not alone in wanting to maintain peaceful relations with Hitler, of course; it remained the policy of the British government through the better part of the decade. Hitler's aggression after Munich shocked Lewis as much as it did the politicians, and in two books published in 1939, he disavowed his former ingenuousness about German intentions. Unfortunately, Lewis's earlier books remained in print (one came out in a cheap edition at the time of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia), and one of the two later books only appeared three months after the outbreak of war, by which time nobody needed to be told that Hitler was a villain. But the issue of politics in Lewis's career had now become moot for another reason: in September 1939, Lewis commenced an unhappy period of geographical misplacement back in North America, undertaken in the vain belief that he would find greater opportunity to exercise his talents as a portrait painter.

A number of Lewis's contemporaries had found new homes across the Atlantic by the end of the thirties, and one can imagine that Lewis might have followed suit. His former mentor, Ford Madox Ford, had been teaching at a small college in Michigan for several years before his death in June 1939; both W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had moved to New York in January that year. On several occasions during his six-year residence, Lewis tried to make the arrangement permanent, actively seeking artist-in-residence positions at several American universities (an ambition that he continued to pursue even after his return to England in 1945). But once again his heterogeneous cultural alliances seem to have undermined his chances of finding a comfortable niche in his ancestral homeland. As an Englishman, he found America unbearably commercial; as a European, unbearably provincial (though Canada's French population somewhat alleviated the Anglo-Saxon monotony). Nor did the fact of his having been born in America appreciably help the situation; in some ways, it actually made matters worse. Soon after Lewis arrived in 1939, he went to look up some of his relatives in Buffalo, New York. The results were not encouraging. One cousin thought Lewis “a kind of screwball,” and Lewis later referred to his somewhat snobbish relations as “shits.”¹⁰ The net effect of the encounter seems only to have reinforced Lewis's sense of not belonging in America. Lewis managed to recover a semblance of his prewar reputation upon returning to England but continued in the ways of cultural misplacement. At a time when the English were turning inward once again, preoccupying themselves with the dismantling of the empire and the creation of the welfare state, Lewis became an outspoken advocate of maintaining cultural ties with America and the Continent and of the eventual establishment of some kind of world government.

A second internal division involved Lewis's equal commitment to two different arts, which to a degree has earned him the suspicion of full-time practitioners (and critics) of one art or the other. With the exceptions of Blake and possibly Rossetti, no other Englishman so fully devoted himself to painting and writing. Lewis traced his interest in the two arts back to the activities of his parents: “My mother and father's principal way of spending their time at the period of my birth was the same as mine now: my mother painting pictures of the farm house in which we lived, my father writing books inside it.”¹¹ His own career, he tells us, began at the age of eight as a chronicler of the wars between Redskins and Palefaces: “These lines of lifeless foemen converge, where they meet gesticulation is sometimes indicated. There is much action in the text, but practically none in its visual accompaniment” (RA 118). Ironically, when painting became a serious vocation for him as a student at the Slade, he first gained recognition from teachers and upperclassmen as a writer, having composed numerous Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnets. “To these elders I was known as a ‘poet,’” Lewis remarks in his autobiography. “The Fine Arts they imagined were already in good hands, namely their own” (RA 123). Lewis's first published works were in prose, however, not poetry. His account of the writing of his first story both illuminates the nature of his creative process and also serves to distinguish him from the few other English artists who worked in both words and paint:

It was the sun, a Breton instead of a British, that brought forth my first short story—“The Ankou” I believe it was: the Death-god of Plouilliou. I was painting a blind Armorican beggar. The “short story” was the crystallization of what I had to keep out of my consciousness while painting. Otherwise the painting would have been a bad painting. That is how I began to write in earnest. A lot of discarded matter collected there, as I was painting or drawing, in the back of my mind—in the back of my consciousness. As I squeezed out everything that smacked of literature from my vision of the beggar, it collected at the back of my mind. It imposed itself upon me as a complementary creation. That is what I meant by saying, to start with, that I was so naturally a painter that the two arts, with me, have co-existed in peculiar harmony. There has been no mixing of the genres. The waste product of every painting, when it is a painter's painting, makes the most highly selective and ideal material for the pure writer. (WB 374)

Curiously, Lewis in this passage asserts the priority of painting over writing in his career, while covertly arguing that only the ideal painter can be an ideal writer; he also tells us that the two arts coexist within him in “peculiar harmony,” at the same time implying a violent struggle between the two modes of understanding (“As I squeezed out everything that smacked of literature”). To some degree, the language in this passage simply reflects Lewis's commitment to the romantic belief that art emerges through conflict: the short story comes into being on account of a struggle between both his cultural alliances (Breton versus British) and his artistic instincts (painting versus writing). Lewis's insistence upon separation can also be seen as part of a larger movement to establish the unique formal properties of the various arts, a movement that gathered strength at about the time when photography began to challenge the mimetic supremacy of traditional painting. The mechanical accuracy of photographs obliged painters to see that their work involved as much mediation as representation and told them that photographs would always surpass paintings when optical fidelity was the goal. But if painting was a medium, so too was photography, one condemned to a certain kind of “vulgar realism,” as its detractors pointed out. Though less visually accurate, painting could see where the photograph could only observe. In the late 1870s, James McNeill Whistler urged artists to paint something beyond what was before their eyes and to begin thinking of the natural world not as a “model” but rather as a “key” to the complex experience of perception and understanding.¹² The shift from model to key, readily apparent in the practice of a late-nineteenth-century artist such as Paul Cézanne, anticipates the more radical move toward wholly nonrepresentational art in the early twentieth century. If an artist could not re-create the physical object on canvas, why should he even bother to try? A painting should be nothing more or less than a painting—not a thing or a narrative or a dissertation. As Wassily Kandinsky explained the matter in The Art of Spiritual Harmony, “The impossibility and, in art, the purposelessness of copying an object, the desire to make the object express itself, are the beginning of leading the artist away from ‘literary’ colour to artistic, i.e. pictorial aims.”¹³ Lewis would have been well acquainted with this way of thinking from his years in Paris and had already executed a number of works in a radically abstract style by the time Kandinsky's influential book appeared in English in 1912.

But while Lewis recognized the opportunities opened up by abstract art, he also must have felt its limitations. In the struggle for possession of the real, art may have gained the high ground from science and technology by shifting from imitation to spiritual harmonies, but at the same time, it lost the texture of the ordinary, which perhaps has only lately been recaptured in the work of the photo-realists. The point of the artistic revolution for Lewis seems to have been less liberation than limits: an awareness that no single style of art¹⁴ and no single art among all the arts could encompass the full register of any experience. Thus, the moral of the story about the beggar is that painting and writing have their inherent limitations. Lewis's subject had an imposing physical presence that could be captured only by a visual medium; but the blind Armorican also belonged to a mythological tradition that could not be conveyed except in words. Efforts to overcome this division by mixing the arts would only result in blunting the formal precision of each medium. Synesthetic projects of artists such as Richard Wagner ignored another important insight of the revolution in the arts: that not only could no single style or art encompass an experience, but no single artist could either. The attempt to do so reveals a desire to see the world with the eyes of God, perhaps a respectable position for a romantic but certainly not for a modern.¹⁵

Lewis's acute sense of aesthetic boundaries is closely related to his awareness of an estrangement between the human and the divine, which, to the extent that it has influenced his artistic practice, has probably been the most significant factor in his poor critical reputation. T. S. Eliot touched upon this issue in a 1955 review of Lewis's apocalyptic novel Monstre Gai, a sequel to The Childermass (published over a quarter-century earlier), when he remarked that the latter work showed a marked gain in “maturity” over its predecessor:

The difference in maturity between The Childermass and Monstre Gai is not merely that the philosophy is riper or more explicit or more coherent: there is, I believe, also a development in humanity. In the first part of The Childermass one is too often, and too irritatingly reminded that Pulley and Satters belong to Mr. Lewis's puppet gallery. It is not that their creator failed to make them real—it is that he denied them more than a measure of reality. Just as one of them seemed about to behave like a human being, instead of like a caricature (though a caricature which only Lewis could have drawn) the author would give a little twitch of the string (and how often, and how tiresomely, we are reminded that Pulley is a “little” man) to put him in his place: “if you are going to try to behave like human beings I'll slap you back into your puppet box.”¹⁶

In short, Lewis refuses to present us with “rounded” characters with whom we can readily identify. Even on those few occasions when Lewis attempted to write popular fiction (because he desperately needed the money), he rejected what Hugh Kenner calls “a cardinal motif of best-sellerdom, empathy: a sequence of small unfakeable indications that a good time is being made available for us all to share, that the writer in some fundamental important way enjoys the world he is presenting.”¹⁷ Lewis's unwillingness to play fiction by the rules of the game could have been chiefly a consequence of temperament and disposition. There have always been writers who took a sardonic view of their fellow man and similarly employed an aesthetic of caricature to express their scorn; Lewis himself recognized the affinities between his own art and that of Ben Jonson, whose work he did not otherwise hold in high esteem (MWA 91). Personal considerations aside, however, we should be aware that Lewis's practice does reflect some of the changed thinking about man and his place in the scheme of things current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What distinguishes Lewis from his contemporaries was his determination to pursue these insights to their unpleasant logical conclusion.

Lewis came to maturity at a time when the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and, to a lesser extent, Freud had already begun to frame discussions of every subject from politics to paleontology. Underlying this intellectual upheaval at the end of the nineteenth century was the notion that men had not so much discovered the world as they had invented it. Consider, for example, the traditional postulates about something as fundamental as time and space. The Bible authoritatively placed the origins of the universe at a point some six thousand years ago—a long time, certainly, but not much longer than the span of cultural memory. Darwin's expansion of the time scale from six thousand to several millions of years made the biblical account appear as the prejudiced contrivance of a tragically short-lived creature whose history now seemed less a beginning and an end than a mere episode in some larger evolutionary process. Similarly, our conception of space lost its absolute character. Stephen Kern observes that in the early years of this century not only did scientists assert that people of different cultures have different perceptions of space, but that the various species of animals experience distinct spatial realities. Kern continues: “This reminder that there are complete worlds with distinctive spatial orientations scattered all along the phylogenetic scale challenged the egocentrism of man.”¹⁸

More radical still than the undermining of time and space was the attack upon the idea of truth itself. Two thousand years ago, Plato asserted against the Sophists that an unchanging reality lay somewhere behind the confusing multiplicity of experience. Philosophers since Plato had argued about our degree of access to this reality (which eventually became identified with God), but not until the nineteenth century did anyone seriously doubt its ultimate existence. Then Friedrich Nietzsche announced, in effect, that the Sophists had been right all along: that the metaphysical system of the West was a linguistic artifact, a peculiarly successful piece of rhetoric that served and reflected a variety of human needs:

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins. … [Mankind] forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.¹⁹

The arts contributed in their various ways to this assault upon absolutes. Arguably the most influential painting of the early twentieth century, Picasso's 1907 work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (allusions to which may appear in Lewis's own painting as early as 1909²⁰) leads the viewer to at least two important recognitions: first, that human beings do not stand apart from their environment but are rather continuous with it, arising from and sinking back into its intersecting planes and angles; and second, that the artist can present his subject from only a small fraction of an apparently infinite number of possible perspectives. In fiction and poetry, James Joyce's and T. S. Eliot's use of the “mythical method” (as the latter described it²¹) instead of a cause-and-effect, temporally sequenced narrative to organize their material implied the reversibility of time and the irrelevance of individual identity: someone wandering the streets of contemporary Dublin or London could be the avatar of a person (or any number of persons) who had participated in the heroic struggles of ancient Greece (or the struggles of some other time and place).

But Lewis came to believe that while this new understanding of the world challenged human egocentrism, it failed to replace it with a modus vivendi appropriate to our changed circumstances. Indeed, one could argue, as the theologian Mark C. Taylor recently has, that since the Renaissance each displacement of man from his once pivotal place in the cosmic order has left him in an increasingly dominant position vis-à-vis his natural, cultural, and spiritual environments: “[The] inversion of heaven and earth effectively shifts value from the divine to the human subject. Far from suffering the disorientation brought by the loss of center, modern humanism is self-confidently anthropocentric. While denying God, the humanist clings to the sovereignty of the self.”²² In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus explains that the “personality of the artist … refines itself out of existence,” not to diminish the artist but, on the contrary, to bring him to a condition “like the God of the creation.”²³ A similar paradox obtains in Ulysses, long praised for its celebration of a contingent universe in which character dissolves, narrative voices multiply, and people and things roil around together in an Irish stew of space-time; yet Lewis sensed that these goings on bespoke not the self-consciousness of an ephemeral creature on a speck of interstellar dust but rather an authorial virtuosity, a hubris about one's creative power that surpasses the imaginative daring of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, just as modern technology surpasses the material power of earlier ages. Lewis almost certainly had Joyce in mind when one of the characters in his satire The Apes of God (1930), attacking what today we would call the survival of the subject, observes the simultaneous appearance of “(1) a school of unabashed personal Fiction, and (2) a universal cult of ‘impersonality’”; he goes on to complain that this appearance of impersonality “is a wonderful patent behind which the individual can indulge in a riot of personal egotism, impossible to earlier writers, not provided with such a disguise” (AG 259, 260). To the extent that a reader identifies with the authorial presence in Ulysses, he or she vicariously participates in this celebration of the human as divine.²⁴

Biographical accounts of Wyndham Lewis portray him as a self-centered man, thoroughly convinced of his own importance in the world (the legacy perhaps of having been the only child of a woman abandoned by her husband) and openly contemptuous of those who failed to acknowledge his genius. Yet for the better part of his career, Lewis practiced an iconoclastic art founded on the assumption that modern science had indeed knocked man off his cosmological high horse and brought the reign of humanism to an end. His visual art first disassembled the human form, then eliminated it altogether, and finally offered it grudging admission to a chilly world of eternal artifices; his fiction, as noted earlier, turned people into puppets and spun out tragical narratives that, unlike Oedipus or King Lear, refuse to end with affirmations of human dignity. In a sense, Lewis carried out the project that his contemporary T. E. Hulme envisioned as “A Critique of Satisfaction.” At about the time Lewis was experimenting with abstraction in painting and prose, Hulme was trying to formulate a systematic philosophy free from anthropomorphism. He believed that he had identified a common mistake in all modern philosophies and wanted to rectify the problem:

The philosophers share a view of what would be a satisfying destiny for man, which they take over from the Renaissance. They are all satisfied with certain conceptions of the relation of man to the world. These conclusions are never questioned in this respect. Their truth may be questioned, but never their satisfactoriness. … These canons of satisfaction, which are the results of an entirely uncritical humanism, should be subject to a critique.²⁵

Had Hulme survived World War I and gone on to elaborate his critique of satisfaction, he might have encountered two of the problems that eventually led Lewis to withdraw from this position of radical antihumanism. First, no matter how one tries to step outside his particular perspective and imagine the world from the world's point of view, one cannot honestly claim to have seen anything except through human eyes. Hulme himself indirectly acknowledged the problem when he recalled hearing a philosopher whose objective vocabulary and scientific method he admired give a lecture on his religious views, and suddenly realizing that “the overwhelming and elaborate method [of his philosophy] only served to express a perfectly simple and fallible human attitude.”²⁶ Much of Lewis's criticism from the late twenties onward has a curiously postmodern feel to it precisely because he devotes himself to showing the abuses of objectivity and thus revealing the ghost in the machine. Lewis also saw a problem that Hulme never seems to have recognized: that any attempt by a man to step outside the circle of his needs and offer a wholly disinterested account of the world must itself be looked upon as an act of hubris. Man would thus claim for himself a power that medieval theologians denied even to God: the right to will Himself out of existence. The impact of these developments in Lewis's thinking marks the turning points in his artistic practice, as we shall see later.

That one cannot not be human, that throughout life one remains a prisoner of nature, culture, and language, for Lewis constituted a tragic awareness. But given the fact that one had to live as a man or woman, what kind of life ought one to pursue? Or to put the question in a more self-interested way, what sort of social and individual behavior would ensure the survival of a world sympathetic to art? Whatever the precise answer, Lewis believed that it would still involve an acute sensitivity to limits. To be human does not require one to abandon the critique of satisfaction and embrace the values of a humanism that sees the world created in our own image. Indeed, Lewis continued to believe that behavior in accord with the humanistic values whose origins Hulme traced back to the close of the Middle Ages was making any kind of life on earth increasingly impossible. Although committed to a rhetoric of artistic progress and development early in his career, Lewis later came to realize that the momentum of modernity toward making the world over in our own image (the goal of Western technology, modernity's most characteristic expression) ultimately destroys the context for meaningful human activity.

Anxiety over the effective use of material and intellectual power will always be the luxury of ostensibly successful communities. Serious misgivings about the imposition of human values upon nature (and indeed, the recognition of “nature” as a separate entity with a life of its own) begin to surface in Europe only with the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas about man and nature Lewis critiques in Tarr, identified man's fall from grace—his estrangement from himself and others—with the introduction of agriculture and metallurgy,²⁷ arts that allow men to see the earth not as a power and a spirit worthy of respect, but merely as an instrument for the satisfaction of their own desires. The English romantic poets who followed Rousseau in the last years of the eighteenth century were part of the first generation in history to observe catastrophic social and ecological changes within the span of a single lifetime. By his mid-thirties, Wordsworth had witnessed not only the French Revolution but also the numerous effects of what Lewis would bitterly call the discovery “that England was really a coal mine” (RA 121). An excellent summary of the consequences of human success can be found in John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy. Mill, an admirer of the romantics, who took solace in Wordsworth's poems during a period of youthful depression, looks ahead to the time when the human species populates every corner of the globe. But he despairs

in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose the great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.²⁸

Mill focuses upon the loss of “pleasantness,” a practical tonic (which he also found in Wordsworth) for the nerves of men and women cut off by urban life from regular contact with scenes of natural beauty. Other writers of the period, notably Dickens and Arnold, went beyond the utilitarian question and considered the effects of a technologically sophisticated civilization upon man's sense of himself and his place in the cosmos. These responses, which look more to spiritual than pragmatic concerns, have been summarized by J. Hillis Miller in his study of nineteenth-century English literature, The Disappearance of God:

The industralization and urbanization of man means the progressive transformation of the world. Everything is changed from its natural state into something useful or meaningful to man. Everywhere the world mirrors back to man his own image, and nowhere can he make vivifying contact with what is not human. Even the fog is not a natural fog, rolling in from the sea, but is half soot and smoke. The city is the literal representation of the progressive humanization of the world. And where is there room for God in the city? Though it is impossible to tell whether man has excluded God by building the great cities, or whether the cities have been built because God has disappeared, in any case the two go together. Life in the city is the way in which many men have experienced most directly what it means to live without God in the world.²⁹

As Miller's passage indicates, the apprehension of “what is not human” has traditionally been the province of religion. When Hulme wanted to distinguish his position from that of humanism, he too chose the term “religious,” though with a certain amount of reluctance. He wanted his readers to understand that for him religion had no necessary connection with receiving baptism or going to church on Sunday. Hulme observed:

It would perhaps have been better to have avoided the word religious, as that to the “emancipated” man at once suggests something exotic, or mystical, or some sentimental reaction. I am not, however, concerned so much with religion, as with the attitude, the “way of thinking,” the categories, from which a religion springs, and which often survive it. While this attitude tends to find expression in myth, it is independent of myth.³⁰

A few artists of Lewis's generation, most notably T.S. Eliot, found religious orthodoxy strong enough to shatter the mirror of a humanized nature that condemns man to solipsism. (In After Strange Gods, Eliot forcefully presents the argument against human hegemony and praises the Southern Agrarians in his original University of Virginia audience for opposing unlimited industrial development.³¹) Most, however, found the established religious myths and symbols inadequate for their purposes; in an age when science has so undermined the stability of religious myth that theologians have seriously debated the merits of emptying religion of its mythical content,³² the artist's adoption of an orthodox religious viewpoint can easily be interpreted as a reactionary gesture, as Hulme himself feared.

Lewis belongs in this latter company, which includes not only Hulme but also Joyce, Pound, and, to a lesser extent, W.B. Yeats. All of them share in varying degrees a commitment to modernity: the idea that the forms of artistic and intellectual life must somehow respond to the changing conditions of material life. Accordingly, Lewis refused to bind himself to a traditional worldview, as, for example, Eliot bound himself to Christianity. On the other hand, Lewis and his modernist contemporaries broke from many of their immediate predecessors in doubting that change could be identified with progress and perfectability. Some years before the shock of World War I made pessimism fashionable for a “Lost Generation,” Hulme had called for the revival of the doctrine of Original Sin and a general acknowledgment of human limits in an infinitely vast and mysterious universe. In his first volume of memoirs, Lewis reflected upon the value of Hulme's contribution to the philosophical debate about the nature of man:

For people who had definitely become queasy, after listening for a good many years to adulation of the mortal state—of man-in-the-raw—this theology acted as a tonic. The atmosphere had become fuggy with all the greasy incense to Mr. Everyman. And here was somebody who had the bright idea of throwing the window open. There were the stars again! And even if the Star of Bethlehem was among them, well what matter! (BB 102)

Hulme, a philosopher, insisted that his commitment to the religious attitude was both absolute and impersonal: “It is not … that I put up with the dogma for the sake of the sentiment, but that I may possibly swallow the sentiment for the sake of the dogma.”³³ Lewis, an artist, does allow a measure of sentiment to influence the forms of his religious expression. As we shall see later, while Lewis holds an essentially Catholic/classical view of man's subordinate place in a graduated cosmic hierarchy, he often presents himself as an inspired poet-prophet closer to the Protestant/romantic tradition of individual witness. Moreover, while Hulme claimed that the religious attitude could find expression independent of myth, Lewis never dispensed with myth entirely (even in his iconoclastic vorticist period) and almost seems to have reinvented Christian myth as an appropriate medium for his mature religious vision.

Although Lewis's career does not exhibit as orderly a progression through various phases as Joyce's, his development does follow a path reminiscent of the one that Kierkegaard outlined for the person who struggles with the temptations and disappointments of modernity.³⁴ One begins in an “aesthetic” stage characterized by feelings of resentment at the loss of the sacred to human progress and the turning inward to a cultivation of those rare and evanescent sensations (such as love) that seem emissaries from the divine. When the emptiness of this exercise becomes apparent (as Kierkegaard demonstrated in his various analyses of the Don Juan legend), the individual attempts to locate the focus of ultimate concern in the shared life of the community around him. This “ethical” stage often sees the development of intense social and political commitments. And yet, to the extent that the ethical demands the subordination of the particular to the universal (to obey the law is not always to do what one knows is right), it implies a certain flattening out or even evasion of existence. An individual life possesses a value that exceeds that of any ethical imperative to which it must be sacrificed in whole or in part. At this point one passes into the “religious” stage, which Kierkegaard understood as an unmediated encounter with the conditions of one's own existence.

This movement from self to other, accompanied by a paradoxical increase in self-knowledge, can be traced throughout modern literature. We see its outlines in the idealized progress through lyric, epic, and dramatic genres that Stephen Dedalus describes for the artist in A Portrait, and that Joyce himself seems to have followed (with a number of detours) in his own career from the poems of Chamber Music to the theatrics of Finnegans Wake. Lewis, because of his peculiar love/hate relationship with romanticism, would never enunciate a theory of personal growth and development, but this general scheme nonetheless provides a useful approach to his career. His early works (Mrs. Dukes' Million, The Enemy of the Stars, Tarr) partake of the brooding aestheticism of a young artist in the last years of Victorian England; his works of middle age (The Childermass, The Apes of God, Snooty Baronet, Time and Western Man) consist of harsh social satire and extensive nonfiction analyses of politics and ideology; and in old age, after World War II and the coming of the atomic age, he turns (most notably in The Human Age) to serious theological speculation as a way to transcend the increasingly destructive impulses of humankind.

Part of the excitement in reading Wyndham Lewis is suggested by Fredric Jameson's remark that in him we discover “a modernism which is still extant and breathing, an archaic survival, like the antediluvian creatures of Conan Doyle's Lost World.”³⁵ But as this also implies, Lewis's work has about it a monstrous and inhuman quality, which, if it has served to keep him alive, has also excluded him from the mainstream of a literary tradition that, despite occasional bows toward the dissolution of subjects, still values the human image above all else. In a way, Lewis's absence from survey courses and anthologies (not to mention publishers' lists) has been as it should be: his skepticism about the ultimate value of man in the cosmos probably runs deeper than that of any modern writer, and readers can perhaps be forgiven for having shied away from him. In the study that follows, therefore, I do not propose to domesticate Lewis according to the tenets of a humanist tradition he consistently rejected, but rather to place him in the context of a religious outlook we can learn to appreciate, if not always love.

Notes

1. Jeffrey Meyers, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 207.

2. Ezra Pound, “Wyndham Lewis,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 424.

3. Meyers, Enemy, 207.

4. Pound, Essays, 428-29.

5. Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), xiv-xv.

6. Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 1.

7. Many of the facts in the following account are drawn from Meyers's biography of Wyndham Lewis cited above. Meyers also observes the disruptive effects of American, English, and European influences upon Lewis's character and career (1).

8. Cited in Meyers, Enemy, 85.

9. Pound, Essays, 424.

10. Meyers, Enemy, 250-51.

11. Ibid., 4.

12. Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 194.

13. Cited in Scharf, 197.

14. Though Lewis turned away from abstraction and back toward naturalism in the 1920s, he never abandoned his abstract manner altogether, holding it in reserve for subjects that resisted representational treatment.

15. Lewis reserved some of his harshest words of criticism for English aesthetes and German romantics who sought to demonstrate the underlying unity of the arts and thus to argue for an unalienated relationship between man and the world, a view that Lewis recognized as anthropocentric and potentially self-serving. In this robust passage from Time and Western Man (1927), he attacks Oswald Spengler, behind whom Lewis saw Walter Pater and Richard Wagner:

    Spengler sets “Plastic” and “Music” at each other's throats, in an eliminating contest. It is world power or downfall for Gothic Music as interpreted by this warlike professor; and the arts become weapons in his hands, which he wields with a picturesque barbaric clumsiness, brandishing them hither and thither. There is no room upon the same earth for two such opposite things as Plastic and Music. He insists characteristically on a unity in everything. So Music eats up the Plastic, dissolves it, and it streams out to “infinity.” There is then only Music throughout the triumphantly Gothic World. (285-86)

    Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot's teacher at Harvard and an important figure in the effort to define the spirit of the modern age, also argued for the recognition of distinct aesthetic boundaries in his The New Laokoön: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910). Susanne K. Langer summed up this view of the matter when she remarked that “there are no happy marriages in art—only successful rape” (Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures [New York: Scribner's, 1957], 86).

16. T. S. Eliot, “A Note on Monstre Gai,” Hudson Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1955): 524.

17. Hugh Kenner, “Mrs. Dukes' Million: The Stunt of an Illusionist,” in Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation, ed. Jeffrey Meyers (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1980), 87.

18. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 137.

19. Cited in Sanford Schwartz, The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 77.

20. Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis: Paintings and Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 48.

21. T. S. Eliot, “‘Ulysses,’ Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 178.

22. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 33.

23. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. C. G. Anderson (1916; New York: Viking Press, 1964), 215.

24. Since Lewis's time, critics have become increasingly attuned to ironies in Joyce's text that warn us against taking his characters' words at face value. For discussions of the personal element in Joyce's “impersonal” narrative voice, see Jeremy Lane, “His Master's Voice? The Questioning of Authority in Literature,” in The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer, and the Work, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (London: Open Books, 1976), 113-29; and John Paul Riquelme, Teller and Tale in Joyce's Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 131-34.

25. T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read, 2d ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936), 16-17.

26. Ibid., 19.

27. The Indispensable Rousseau, ed. John Hope Mason (London: Quartet Books, 1979), 60.

28. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, ed. J. M. Robson (1848; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 756.

29. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 5.

30. Hulme, Speculations, 46.

31. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), 15-18.

32. Rudolf Bultmann was probably the most important and influential member of this school. See “New Testament and Mythology,” in New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings, trans. and ed. Schubert M. Ogden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).

33. Hulme, Speculations, 71.

34. For a good overview of Kierkegaard's “stages of existence” and their various interpretations, see Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 62-78. Kierkegaard's most accessible treatment of the movement from the “aesthetic” and the “ethical” can be found in the various essays and fictions of Either/Or, vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), and Either/Or, vol. 2, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); he analyzes the movement from the “ethical” to the “religious” in a meditation upon the biblical patriarch Abraham's near sacrifice of his son Isaac in Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).

35. Jameson, 3.