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WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD
pleasure in the highbrow art of all four writers goes along with an
explanation of why in 1937, when he published his reminiscences
of the "men" in
Blasting and Bombardiering,
that art had been left
high and dry. In this memoir Lewis claimed boldly that by contrast
to Shaw, Wells, even Oscar Wilde, all of whom were public identities
to which the pursuit of art took second place, Joyce, Eliot, Pound
and himself represented a rejection of romantic in favor of classical
art, and a movement away from political propaganda into the detach–
ment of true literature. A glance at the literary landscape of 1937
convinced him that their group attempt had failed, but only because
the world with its wars, revolutions and economic depressions had
sold out. The Men of 1914 should be thought of then as
"the first
men of a Future that has not materialized."
So much the worse for
the world, runs the argument.
Such defiant nos:algia is attractively suited to the colloquial ease
of a memoir, but there is no need to let it obscure the truth that
the men of 1914 marched under no such banner, with no such unity
of purpose as Lewis later claimed. The ironic fact is that Lewis had
spent a good deal of energy in bringing out, through analysis of the
other Men, their romantic predilections, and therefore vices; it was
the pretense of classical affiliation, whether at the level of technique
or temperament, that he set out to expose in Pound, Joyce and Eliot.
His success in doing so had somewhat the effect of leaving himself
high and dry, and at least on one occasion he recognized what had
happened. The interest of his criticism lies, however, in the way he
conducts the exposures.
POUND
The simplest and most amiable of these "exposures" is found in
Lewis' criticism of Ezra Pound, located in two chapters from
Time
and W estern Man,
one of them titled "A Man in Love with the
Past." Tributes to Pound's kind nature as an individual are inter–
spersed with a more critical assessment of his virtues and limitations
as a poet. In the latter role Lewis finds him to be a person "without
a trace of originality of any sort," a "great intellectual parasite"
(though not, he adds, an unpleasant one) who lives off truly original
artists. Because of his allegiances to so many figures and places in
times gone by, he is also "an extremely untrustworthy guide to the
present." What Lewis elsewhere calls Pound's "tendency to regard a
