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Wyndham Lewis
‐
Writer and artist
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Place of death
London
Date of time spent in Britain
1888–1901, 1908–39, 1945–57
About
Wyndham Lewis was born in 1882 to an American father and an English mother of Scotch Irish descent. The family lived on the Isle of Wight, England from 1888 to 1893. After his parents separated in 1893, Lewis lived with his mother in England. He was educated at Rugby School, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1898 and 1901. After leaving the Slade, he travelled in Europe, visiting Spain, Germany and the Netherlands, and spent much time in Paris.
He returned to England in 1908 and soon established himself as a major avant-garde artist and writer. In 1909 he made his literary debut by publishing stories in the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford). In 1912 Lewis had his art works exhibited in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition organized by Roger Fry. In 1913 Lewis joined Fry’s Omega Workshops, only to split from the group with several other Omega artists later that year. In 1914 Lewis set up a group of his own, the Rebel Art Centre; this gave rise to a new art movement, Vorticism. The Vorticist journal Blast first appeared in July 1914, under Lewis’s editorship, and was published by the Bodley Head. Ezra Pound, whom Lewis first met in 1908 at the Vienna Café near the British Museum, was a collaborator of the movement and introduced Lewis in 1915 to T. S. Eliot, who became his close friend. Lewis fought in the First World War and his first novel Tarr was published in 1918.
Later in life, Lewis’s polemical views and his brutal attacks on contemporary artists turned him into an isolated figure. His 1930 novel, The Apes of God, for instance, is a satire of London intellectual life, featuring caricatures of the Sitwells and some members of the Bloomsbury group. Hitler (1931) is Lewis’s uncritical appraisal of the German dictator, which proved to be highly controversial. During the Second World War, he spent time in the US and Canada, and returned to England in 1945. He became blind in 1951, but continued to write till his death in 1957.
In 1946 Lewis approached Tambimuttu, who agreed to publish his America and Cosmic Man. Tambimuttu also planned to publish Lewis’s work Château Rex (the original title of Self Condemned) and The Writer and the Absolute, but delays in publication led Lewis to terminate the contract with Tambimuttu’s Poetry London. America and Cosmic Man was eventually published in 1948 under the imprint of Nicholson and Watson.
Richard Aldington, W. H. Auden, Clive Bell, Laurence Binyon, Roy Campbell, Nancy Cunard, Raymond Drey, T.S. Eliot, Jacob Epstein, Frederick Etchells, Roland Firbank, Ford Madox Ford, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Roger Fry, David Garnett, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Cuthbert Hamilton, Ernest Hemingway, T. E. Hulme, Augustus John, James Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, Marshall McLuhan, Kathleen Mansfield, Filippo Marinetti, Naomi Mitchison, Thomas Sturge Moore, William Orpen, Ezra Pound, John Quinn, Herbert Read, John Rodker, William Rothenstein, Sydney Schiff, The Sitwells, Stephen Spender, Gertrude Stein, Lytton Strachey, A. Symons, M. J. Tambimuttu, Edward Wadsworth, William Walton, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Richard Wyndham, W. B. Yeats, Anton Zwemmer.
The Ideal Giant, The Code of a Herdsman, Cantleman’s Spring-Mate (London: Little Review, 1917)
Tarr (London: The Egoist, 1918)
The Caliph’s Design. Architects! Where Is Your Vortex? (London: The Egoist, 1919)
(with Louis F. Fergusson) Harold Gilman: An Appreciation (London: Chatto & Windus, 1919)
The Art of Being Ruled (London: Chatto & Windus, 1926)
The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (London: Grant Richards, 1927)
Time and Western Man (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927)
The Wild Body: A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories (London: Chatto & Windus, 1927)
The Childermass, Section I (London: Chatto & Windus, 1928)
Paleface: The Philosophy of the ‘Melting Pot’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929)
The Apes of God (London: Arthur Press, 1930)
Satire & Fiction (London: Arthur Press, 1930)
Hitler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931)
The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931)
The Doom of Youth (New York: Robert McBride, 1932)
Filibusters in Barbary (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1932)
The Enemy of the Stars (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932)
Snooty Baronet (London: Cassell, 1932)
The Old Gang and the New Gang (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1933)
One-Way Song (London: Faber & Faber, 1933)
Men Without Art (London: Cassell, 1934)
Left Wings Over Europe: or, How to Make a War about Nothing (London: Cape, 1936)
Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! or A New War in the Making (London: Dickson, 1937)
The Revenge for Love (London: Cassell, 1937)
Blasting and Bombardiering (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937)
The Mysterious Mr. Bull (London: Robert Hale, 1938)
The Jews, Are They Human? (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939)
Wyndham Lewis the Artist from Blast to Burlington House (London: Laidlaw & Laidlaw, 1939)
The Hitler Cult (London: Dent, 1939)
America, I Presume (New York: Howell, Soskin, 1940)
Anglosaxony: The League That Works (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1941)
The Vulgar Streak (London: Robert Hale, 1941)
America and Cosmic Man (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1948)
Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career (London: Hutchinson, 1950)
Rotting Hill (London: Methuen, 1951)
The Writer and the Absolute (London: Methuen, 1952)
Self Condemned (London: Methuen, 1954)
The Demon of Progress in the Arts (London: Methuen, 1954)
The Red Priest (London: Methuen, 1956)
The Human Age, Book 2 Monstre Gai & Book 3 Malign Fiesta (London: Methuen, 1955)
The Human Age, Book 1: Childermass (London: Methuen, 1956)
Ayers, David, Wyndham Lewis and Western Man (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992)
Campbell, Roy, Wyndham Lewis, ed. by Jeffrey Meyers (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1985)
Corbett, David Peters (ed.) Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Edwards, Paul, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000)
Eliot, T. S., ‘Wyndham Lewis’, Hudson Review 10.2 (1957), pp. 167–70
Gasiorek, Andrzej, Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (Tavistock: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2004)
Gawsworth, John [Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong], Apes, Japes and Hitlerism: A Study and Bibliography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Unicorn Press, 1932)
Grigson, Geoffrey, A Master of Our Time: A Study of Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen & Co., 1951)
Jaime, Carmelo Cunchillos (ed.) Wyndham Lewis the Radical: Essays on Literature and Modernity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007)
Jameson, Fredric, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1979)
Kenner, Hugh, Wyndham Lewis (London: Methuen, 1954)
McLuhan, Marshall, ‘Wyndham Lewis’, Atlantic Monthly 224 (December 1969), pp. 93–8
Meyers, Jeffrey, The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980)
Meyers, Jeffrey (ed.) Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation: New Essays (London: Athlone Press, 1980)
O’Keeffe, Paul, Some Sort of Genius: A Life of Wyndham Lewis (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000)
Prichard, William Harrison, Wyndham Lewis (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968)
Porteus, Hugh Gordon, Wyndham Lewis: A Discursive Exposition (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932)
Pound, Omar S. and Grover, Phillip, Wyndham Lewis: A Descriptive Bibliography (Folkestone: Dawson, 1978)
Wagner, Geoffrey Atheling, Wyndham Lewis. A Portrait of the Artist as the Enemy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957)
Manuscripts, British Library, St Pancras
Collection Number: 4612, The Wyndham Lewis collection, Rare and Manuscript Collections, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Mss and letters, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
Letters to Thomas Sturge, Thomas Sturge Moore papers, Senate House Library, University of London
The Poetry/Rare Books Collection, University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo
She [Katherine Mayo] has had the satisfaction of insulting three hundred million people: and should it be that three hundred million of her ancestors sustained insults, or one of her most prominent ancestors three hundred millions insults, this should do something towards wiping that out. (Such fantastic assumptions come to your mind: for what can make a person want to write such a book?) There have already been mass meetings of protest in India. Her little book is assured of its place in the pantheon of Hate...
and, finally, when she claims that the music of the spinning wheel of Gandhi has been a main inspiration to her in writing her book, she pollutes one of the only saintly figures in the world; and it is to be hoped that he will use all the lustrational resources of his caste-training to cleanse himself of any traces left by the passage of Miss Mayo: also, in connection with Gandhi, she is not so naïve as not to know that her super-American gospel of dogmatic modernist reform (or is it American, or rather should Americans in general be held responsible for their Mayos? I believe not) can scarcely be said to have anything to do with what Gandhi teaches.
‘Mother India’, Enemy 2 (1927), pp. xiii–xx; pp. xiv, xviii
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© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
