William H. Pritchard
ON WYNDHAM LEWIS
"Are you not ashamed to be reading a book by such an
insignificant author - whose works are thought so poorly
of ... that no one has ever thought it worth while to ask
his permission to use them in an anthology, or include them
in an edition of 'contemporary classics' - or whatever they
called their series of well-thought of contemporary authors?"
Wyndham Lewis put the question in 1950 as he took a
retrospective look at his career. Seventeen years later, with most of
his
books out of print and unread, the question's sardonic edge is
still appropriate. Lewis rationalized his failure to become a well–
thought-of contemporary author by insisting that he had been "sup–
pressed" because of the unfashionably rightist character of his politics
in the thirties.
It
is easy to dispose of such lamentation simply by
claiming that Lewis suffered from a persecution complex, or that his
situation was no worse than anybody else's in a cruel world; but it
is also undeniable that he had become in the minds of many so
wholly identified with and reduced to a perverse, wrongheaded and
sentimentally hard-boiled politics that he figured as little more than
an illustrative example of how not to think, or as a writer who richly
deserved the neglect into which he fell . Auden could refer to him,
affectionately, as " that lonely old Volcano of the Right"; a more
usual response was Irving Howe's asperity in his "Age of Conformity"
essay: "... when a charlatan like Wyndham Lewis is revived and
praised for his wisdom, it is done, predictably, by a Hugh Kenner in
the
Hudson R eview."
Howe was merely invoking Lewis to make
a point about liberalism and the literary scene; what's interesting is
