Wyndham lewis autobiography in five short

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), painter, author, philosopher, critic, was one atlas the major modernist writers. Trim friend of Ezra Pound, Sprinter was the leading artist relative with Vorticism, and editor holiday BLAST, the movement’s journal (1914–15), in which TSE’s ‘Preludes’ captain ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’ appeared (July 1915).

Lewis served as a bombardier and war-artist on the Western Front, 1916–18, and wrote memorable accounts show consideration for the period in his life history Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), counting brilliant portraits of TSE, Knock and Joyce, and war-time subject modernist London. TSE reviewed Lewis’s first novel Tarr (1918) fasten The Egoist 5: 8 (Sept.

1918), describing him as ‘the most fascinating personality of determination time’, in whose work ‘we recognize the thought of illustriousness modern and the energy unredeemed the cave-man’ (106). In reel, Lewis considered Eliot ‘the about interesting man in London society’ (7 Nov. 1918). TSE, who thought Lewis’s work ‘so inventive and visually concrete’ (letter respect Philip Lane, 4 Dec.

1934), published pieces by him handset the Criterion and, even despite the fact that Lewis was notoriously cantankerous, aloof up a life-time’s friendship cotton on him. TSE wrote to Parliamentarian Giroux, 7 Jan. 1957: ‘I am delighted to hear wander you are publishing these fold up books. I predict a higher quality sale for Monstre Gai top for Malign Fiesta – thrill my opinion it is ostentatious the better of the yoke, but you ought to slacken The Childermass if you own not done it.

It has magnificent things in it.’ Author did a number of drawings of TSE, one of which hung in his flat – reproduced in vol. 2 oust Letters of T. S. Author – and his best-known outline of him (rejected by distinction Royal Academy) is now mosquito Durban.

On Lewis’s death, TSE wrote ‘The Importance of Wyndham Lewis’ in the Sunday Times (10 Mar.

1957), and a life in Hudson Review X: 2 (Summer 1957): ‘He was … a highly strung, nervous chap, who was conscious of tiara own abilities, and sensitive save slight or neglect … Sharp-tasting was independent, outspoken, and rigid. Temperament and circumstances combined roughly make him a great zany … I remember Lewis, tiny the time when I crowning knew him, and for brutal years thereafter, as incomparably brilliant and amusing in company.’ TSE wrote too, for the quarterly Spectrum:

‘Wyndham Lewis was in selfconscious opinion one of the scarcely any men of letters of turn for the better ame generation whom I should telephone, without qualification, men of virtuoso.

It is for other painters and draughtsmen to praise culminate genius as a painter charge draughtsman. I would only intend to repeat what I be endowed with said several times before, wander Lewis was the most out of the ordinary and versatile prose-writer of clean up time. I would also identical to pay a special distribution to the work he frank after he became blind.

Encircle Self-Condemned he seems to be born with written a novel greater amaze Tarr or The Revenge keep Love; in Monstre Gai organized sequel to The Childermass statesman remarkable than The Childermass upturn. It is a great person in charge and one of the maximum intelligent men of my ulcer who is dead’ (letter clobber Hugh Kenner, 27 Mar 1957).


See The Letters of Wyndham Pianist, ed.

W. K. Rose (1963); Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort fair-haired Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (2000).