Wyndham Lewis and the Avant-Garde: The Politics of the Intellect

Alan Thomas is an associate professor of English at the University of
Toronto.

Wyndham Lewis, born a late Victorian, possessed that age’s fearsome
energy and wholehearted enthusiasm for the full life, which caused him,
as an individual, to groan at what he saw as the failures of modern life
in the early 20th century. An artilleryman from 1914 to 1918, he
regarded war’s confusions and waste of lives as symptomatic of a
diminished sense of order and purpose: nations had fallen into
egalitarianism and other collectivist pettiness. As a painter, he
appeared to be in a perpetual state of furious despair at the generally
reduced place of the arts in the society of the new century. “You must
get Painting, Sculpture and Design out of the studio and into life
somehow or other,” he pronounced in one of his numerous outpourings
against narrow artistic careerism. Lewis believed that the indulgence of
the cubist and other schools in formal experiment, coupled with their
tendency toward abstraction, led to a trivialized and passive social
content in their work; consequently, he could both admire Picasso’s
virtuosity and deplore his example.

Toby Foshay’s book captures this paradox in Lewis of the artist who
could not accept an aestheticized art. Foshay also shows how Lewis’s
social vision brought him into disrepute; his admiration for the Nazi
movement, as a possibly unifying hegemony for the enfeebled societies of
Europe, was expressed in a short book, Hitler (1930). This created a
stain not expunged by his later withdrawal of support. Lewis left
Britain for North America at the outset of World War II. Misjudging the
nature of North American artistic life, and overestimating his own
capacity for adaptation, Lewis spent a tormented year in New York, and a
further, protracted span of exile in Toronto, which may have been an
even worse experience.

Foshay, following Lewis’s literary output closely, points to the
novel Self Condemned (1954) as revealing Lewis’s willingness to
examine himself following these years of intense trial. Although full of
Lewis’s life, this book aims at intellectual history rather than
biography. Foshay argues that in the contemporary era of so-called
postmodernism, the figure of Lewis appears as a curiously pertinent
commentator on the nature and boundaries of modernism. For instance,
Lewis’s writings (circa 1920) show suggestive parallels with recent
critical discussions of the necessity for distinctions to be made
between the avant-garde and modernism.