LONGTIME READERS OF this blog know that I am peculiarly besotted with the work of British writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), friend and associate of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and (for a time) James Joyce, wielder of one of the 20th century’s most distinctive and bristling prose styles.
Lewis’s politics were so rebarbative— even D. H. Lawrence comes across as woke next to Lewis—that he will likely never enjoy much of a readership. In my lonely enthusiasm, I relish the few occasions when signs appear that Lewis is still read and valued. And just this summer I came across a couple.
The third of the six parts of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth, covering the years 1968 to 1975, bears the title “The Moronic Inferno”—a phrase from Lewis’s The Art of Being Ruled (1926), an examination of politics and culture. Since the phrase was picked up by Saul Bellow and Martin Amis, Bailey’s use of it does not necessarily signal familiarity with Lewis...but still, I was tickled to see it.
I am also (and much more slowly) working my way through Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology. Jameson published a valuable book on Lewis back in 1979, Fables of Aggression, so I already knew he was a reader of Lewis, but even so it was gratifying to come across this on p. 81:
For a more dispassionate observer (for whom philosophies, as indispensable as they are in articulating new feelings to a historically world, are still essentially symptoms), the new philosophy reflects the coming of what Wyndham Lewis used to call “the human age,” that is, the obliteration of a former nature by man-made objects of all kinds (very much including the information technology which constitutes a dialectically new stage in this humanization).
I am not at all confident I wholly understand this sentence—I’m not sure what the phrase “historically world” means, and I suspect that the “which” ought to be a “that”—but I am happy that Jameson is doing a little to keep the Lewisian flame flickering.
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