Volume 38, Number 10 · May 30, 1991
'Nothing But a Writer'
By Malcolm Bradbury
Ford Madox Ford
by Alan Judd
Harvard University Press, 476 pp., $27.50
Violet
by Barbara Belford
Simon and Schuster, 351 pp., $22.95
An Immodest Violet: The Life of Violet Hunt
by Joan Hardwick
André Deutsch, 205 pp., £14.99
In his 1937 memoir Blasting and Bombardiering, Wyndham Lewis—writer, painter, founder of Vorticism, and survivor of the Great War—looked back on the prewar years of British Modernism, between around 1910 and 1914, when, he said, a spirit of extraordinary and golden promise filled the air: 'Europe was full of titanic stirrings and snortings—a new art coming into flower to celebrate or to announce a 'new age.' ' London became a cosmopolitan capital; exhibitions of Cubist paintings transformed aesthetic attitudes; an avant garde flourished, started new magazines and new movements. A great new school was in formation, which would, said Lewis, make future critics rub their eyes. It will all appear 'an island of incomparable bliss, dwelt by strange shapes labelled 'Pound,' 'Joyce,' 'Weaver,' 'Hulme'…. What energy!—what impossible spartan standards, men will exclaim!… We are the first men of a future that had not materialized!'
Review, 4432 words
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