LITERATURE AND HUMANITIES

WYNDHAM LEWIS, WRITER AND PAINTER

Introduced by Paul Edwards, Bath College of Higher Education, on 20 May 1997

Wyndham Lewis (1882 - 1957) has been relatively neglected for a number of reasons, chiefly the
immense variety of his work and his political alignments during the 30's.
Underlying all Lewis's work is a sense of wonder at the human condition: being matter, but with a
conciousness partly detached from our quasi-mechanical bodies. This condition was, for Lewis,
fundamentally absurd and was the object of his metaphysical' satire in words and paint. But our limited
mechanical' status also gives us a standard by which we can measure the greatness of our creative
imagination, so Lewis also celebrates our limitations. He was above all a Modernist and he participated in
the Modernist drive to reinvent human conciousness in the light of the material and philosophical changes
brought about through science. His qualified enthusiasm for the modern city and its technological
transformation of our capacities was expressed in the magazine Blast (1914) and in his abstract Vorticist
paintings. In The Caliph's Design: Architects! Where is Your Vortex? (1919) he recommends the rebuilding
of London using the forms of modern painting as the basis of a new architecture. This work is somewhat at
odds with the paintings he produced as an official war artist (eg A Battery Shelled (1919)) in which the
Vorticist style was modified to show how men involved in mechanised war became mechanised themselves.
During the 20's he abandoned painting and embarked on a comprehensive reassessment of
Western culture since the Enlightenment, resulting in The Lion and the Fox (1927), The Art of Being Ruled
(1926) and Time and Western Man (1927). These books were admired but failed to sell. Publication in 1930
of his satire on the London art world, The Apes of God, and in 1931 of his admiring account of Hitler (from
which he departed later) damaged his reputation almost irretrievably. The 30's were spent writing novels,
criticism and a renewed period of oil painting, culminating in the rejection by the Royal Academy of his
portrait of T S Eliot in 1938. His novel The Revenge of Love (1937), a satirical political thriller, has been
described as one of the greatest political novels of the century.
He spent the Second World War in the USA and Canada, described in Self Condemned. In 1951
he had become blind and this book is partly a meditation on the gradual loss of conciousness he was
noticing in himself and feared was the destiny of the European Enlightenment. His final project, unfinished
at his death in 1957, was the completion of a theological fantasy begun in 1928. It is a reaffirmation of his
conviction that the state of limitation of the human being is more desirable than the state of the automaton'.
For Lewis it was better to be a human being than a puppet or an angel, however awe-inspiring such
perfections must be for us.

Paul Edwards