cover image Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer

Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer

Paul Edwards. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, $75 (592pp) ISBN 978-0-300-08209-8

British novelist-painter Lewis (1882-1957) has long been recognized as one of the most intriguing figures in modernist arts circles, a combative friend and colleague of figures like Pound, Eliot and Joyce. Well explicated over the years by critics like Hugh Kenner and Frederic Jameson, Lewis's harsh satiric novels like Apes of God and Monstre Gai still resonate with a vigor that places them above mere experiments. But this vast and well-illustrated volume is the first to fully blend discussion of Lewis's writing and his art. Author Edwards lectures in the English department of Bath Spa University in England. His strength is in rather dense analyses of Lewis's writings; not as fun to read as Kenner, Edwards fully confronts Lewis's often ghastly anti-Semitism, a fault Lewis famously shared with Eliot and Pound, although past critics' apologetics have sometimes obscured this. Edwards, however, has a less acute eye for visuals. Sometimes the works are read curiously: a 1912 pen and ink, Two Mechanics, showing men inert like academic nudes or posed musclemen, are described as ""plodding through a... landscape,"" whereas the painting The Crowd (1914-1915) is termed one of Lewis's ""most important,"" though it looks here like nothing better than a weakly decorative wallpaper design. The author tends to skirt the erotic implications of paintings like The Pole Vault or a suggestion of oral sex in 1933's The Convalescent, as he does with a series of nude drawings, which may form the basis for Lewis's greatest achievement in art, Lewis's portraits of Pound, Eliot and Joyce. The man Lewis remains elusive, even as his books and paintings (via more than 300 illustrations, evenly split between b&w and color) are usefully assembled together for further analysis. (Aug.)