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WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
the no-nonsense assurance with which he is placed as a charlatan.
Howe's essay, published in 1954, is strong evidence that Lewis was
unsuccessful in his attempts (over the previous sixteen or so years)
to recant. He might and did proclaim himself a supporter of the
genre humain,
an admirer of Harry S. Truman, a loyal harrassed
participant in post-war England's Socialist experiment; none of these
did much to remove memories of his earlier infatuation with Hitler.
But, rightly convinced as Lewis was that Politics had played a
fatally important role in his "suppression," it is worth entertaining
the notion that - the Hitler book or no - his activities as a bother–
some satirist and critic of other men's work precipitated the decline
of his reputation. A quotation from
Palefac e
suggests that the kind of
polemical-philosophical mission Lewis embarked on in the late twen–
ties was not designed to Win Him Friends and Influence People:
In the arts of formal expression, a "dark night of the soul" is settling
down. A kind of mental language is in process of invention, flouting
and overriding the larynx and the tongue. Yet an art that is "sub–
jective" and can look to no common factor of knowledge or feeling,
and lean on no tradition, is exposed to the necessity, first of all, of
instructing itself far more profoundly as to the origins of its impulses
and the nature and history of the formulas with which it works;
or else it is committed to becoming a jealous parrot of systems and
judgments that reach it from the unknown.
As
he worked to complete
The Apes of God,
his own monstrous
parody of twentieth-century mental language, Lewis became increas–
ingly committed to the instructing of his literary contemporaries. The
instruction went on mainly in the three issues of his one-man polemical
magazine,
The Enemy
(1927-29), and made up a significant part
of
Time and Western Man
(1927),
Paleface
(1929) and
The Dia–
bolical Principle
(1931). Then after
Apes
was published, and Lewis'
reputation began to slide (the Hitler book appeared in 1931), he
wrote a number of disenchanted articles and collected them in the
gloomy and brilliant
M en Without Art
(1934). This body of
po–
lemical writing can be praised and attacked on many grounds, but
when sifted and combined it yields a literary criticism consistent and
intelligent enough to be admired as it is not at the moment.
As
a literary critic there are a good many things Lewis was not:
he never approached a book or a writer with the sole intention of
understanding and communicating that understanding to someone
