Volume 29, Number 7 · April 29, 1982
Bright and Silly
By Denis Donoghue
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
by Jeffrey Meyers
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 391 pp., $19.95
Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist
by Fredric Jameson
University of California Press,, 190 pp., $15.95; $5.95 (paper)
'Wyndham Lewis is surely the least read and most unfamiliar of all the great modernists of his generation,' Fredric Jameson remarks, 'a generation that included the names of Pound and Eliot, Joyce, Lawrence and Yeats; nor can it be said that his painting has been assimilated any more successfully into the visual canon.' Lewis's work is normally reckoned less than the sum of its many parts: novelist, painter, poet, polemicist, critic, but in the end nearly a dead letter. His repute might now be higher if he had written less and painted more: if he had written only Tarr (1918, 1928), Time and Western Man (1927), The Revenge for Love (1937), and Self Condemned (1954), and otherwise kept his brushes active and his mouth shut.
Review, 3062 words
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