Wyndham Lewis: forgotten man

Miles Johnson, in The Guardian's arts blog, notes that the 50th anniversary of Wyndham Lewis's passed recently. It did so without television specials or special anniversary editions of Lewis's work. Apparently, we've forgotten the man, the (ahem) seminal figure, behind some of the early twentieth century's most vibrant, vigourous, and unconventional art. The avant-garde's master at arms.

The silence might well be due to Lewis's regrettable, abhorrent fascism and racism. But if we can recover and "rehabilitate" Yeats and Eliot, for example, why not "recover" Lewis? Let's investigate how his fascism seeps into his aesthetic, and how that aesthetic seeps into "high" modernism.

I wonder, however, what would happen if we excised all of the modernists with fascist inclinations? How many great Anglo-American writers of 1900-1940 would we have left (that, surely, is telling)?

Addendum 5/3/08
And months later, I discover another tribute to Lewis that questions his status as "forgotten modernist"; the blogger also includes a poem he wrote that references the "men of 1914." And Eliot. You can read both items at "My Life."