Wyndham Lewis, Revisited

At The Guardian’s books page, Nigel Beale notes The National Portrait Gallery’s decision to present a retrospective of Wyndham Lewis’s portraits. In an article, “Wyndham Lewis: overlooked scourge of mediocrity,” Beale reviews Lewis’s reputation as a class-A jerk because he vocalized his scorn (loudly) at the art world’s increasing collaboration with the business world (he also supported Hitler in the 1920s. Lewis rejected fascism in the 1930s). As a result of his hostile commentary on the “commercialisation of literature” and his tendency to burn economic bridges, Lewis, one of the early architects of Modernism, the co-creator of Vorticism, the editor of the journal BLAST, died penniless. As Beale writes:

His life is proof that prodigious, widely recognised talent isn't enough to secure reputation: ass-kissing and fib-telling, flattery and tongue-biting are often required to make careers. The alternative, for those incapable of sycophancy is squalor: the kind in which he lived, blind, during the final years [. . . .] Lewis's range of knowledge and intellectual vitality, his gale-force energy and daring honesty, his vigorous experimentation and fighting spirit, his caustic wit and analytic ingenuity, his whip-cracking prose and astonishing invention are unmatched in the twentieth century." National Gallery [retrospective] notwithstanding, it seems if you want to tell the truth without compromising, you have to die poor and have your literary immortality postponed for at least 50 years.

It's true that Lewis maintained some egregious socio-political views (see his early support for Hitler), but the man was, indeed, gifted (see his 1915 novel Tarr). This new retrospective will, no doubt, reignite the contentious debate that pits an artist’s views against his or her product (e.g., should we read the work of an anti-Semite? Should we applaud that of a misogynist?). So be it. At the very least, Lewis will be introduced to a new audience, one that, I hope, will consider and evaluate his work judiciously. A fresh look at Lewis would further inform our understanding of “modernism” in both its aesthetic and historical sense, thereby adding to our understanding of English (and by extension) American culture in the early twentieth century.