_The Childermass_: Lewis's best?

LAST MONTH I was re-reading Wyndham Lewis's The Childermass for I think the fourth time, inspiring a series of thoughts that I will record here because...well, because what else is this blog for?

(1) This being the fourth time through, my copy--a paperback from the 1960s--is coming apart. Why, of why, I implore deaf heaven, did the Black Sparrow reprint series run out of gas before they got to The Childermass? They must have been planning one; someone must have been working on it. Will it ever see the light of day? What a thing it would be to have, say, a nice hefty Black Sparrow, edited by Peter Caracciolo, of The Childermass...of all the ones they did not get to, it's the missed opportunity I regret most keenly. (Number two on that list: Blasting and Bombardiering.)

(2) Is this the best book by Wyndham Lewis? I'm leaning that way. The Revenge for Love and Self-Condemned  would get more votes, I imagine, as they deliver more recognizably narrative goods than The Childermass does; Tarr and Snooty Baronet  would probably get more votes, too. But we know Lewis himself held The Childermass in particularly high regard ("my principal work in fiction I suppose," he told one correspondent).

I also recall my late friend Dennis McGucken, who died quite a few years ago. Our first conversation occurred at a party at his apartment in the late 1980s, when we both slogging in the post-doc/ABD/non-tenure track trenches, and I saw he had a shelf of Lewis novels. Do you like Lewis? I asked. He did, and we were off to the races, the first of many conversations about a wide number of things. Dennis was probably the mlost brilliant person I ever regularly talked to. And his favorite Lewis novel was The Childermass.

For him, and for me, it was the continuous high energy of the prose. In some respects little happens in the novel; Pulley and Satters wander around in a landscape where none of the rules of physics or stable personal identity apply, and then we settle into a debate over relatively obscure matters. But in the sentences, there is always something happening. The prose positively crackles.

And the Bailiff! He's the bad guy...but he is so entertaining, so unpredictable, so wily, that even when the book veers into polemics it never loses steam, never stops being supremely comic.

(3) And at the same time--here is the irony--I would never assign it. It's out of print, for one thing. I only teach undergraduates, for another--the sheer amount of background information one would have to go into...whew. How explain Bergson, or why Lewis had such a beef with him? Then there are the frequent passages that smack of racism, or anti-semitism, or homophobia. Then there is the fact that there are no female characters at all, that Lewis's afterlife is all-male for reasons that are never specified. Finally, while with Ulysses or The Waves or The Sound and the Fury one has a fighting chance of finding a theme or event or character or situation that might distantly resonate with a 21st century undergraduate, is there one in a hundred, one in a thousand undergraduates who would get a kick out of Hyperides dressing down the Bailiff about the Child-cult, or the Time-cult, or any of Lewis's bêtes noires?

(4) I'm not sure I would even recommend it to anyone who has not already read a few other Lewis books. I've been asked (maybe ten times, if I happen to get into a conversation about why I am so interested in this writer), "So, what would you say I should read by him?" I usually say Tarr  or The Revenge for Love. Can't go wrong there. The Wild Body  would be a good one too. But you have to be a Lewis obsessive to get anything out of The Childermass...

...but if you in fact are a Lewis obsessive, it's the mother lode.