Nietzsche among the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis

Lewis and Nietzsche: Antithetical Views

The first phase of Nietzsche's influence on European philosophy, politics, and literature began in earnest only in the last decade of the nineteenth century, gathering considerable momentum in the early decades of the twentieth century, and reaching a height, in Germany, in the early 1930s, when his thought was effectively appropriated by the ideologues of the Nazi Party, principally through the stewardship of Alfred Baeumler, professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 and author of Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Nietzsche the Philosopher and Politician [1931]).¹ Reacting against Baeumler's reading of Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger delivered a major series of lectures on the philosopher between 1936 and 1940 at the University of Freiburg, culminating in a critical analysis of Nietzsche's conception of "European nihilism." Within the ambit of English literature, however, perhaps no writer of the first half of the twentieth century has more often been seen as under the influence of both Nietzsche's thought and his style than Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957). Indeed, for almost all commentators on Lewis's oeuvre, Nietzsche remains an absolutely decisive figure, although the precise nature of Nietzsche's influence on Lewis has tended to be conceived in two, more or less diametrically opposed, ways.

On the one hand, there is the position exemplified by John Carey in his 1992 book The Intellectuals and the Masses. Here, in a chapter provocatively entitled "Wyndham Lewis and Hitler," Carey identifies Lewis as essentially Nietzschean in order simply to dismiss him out of hand. In an act of radical literary decanonization, Carey claims that in his early career Lewis "greatly admired" Nietzsche, an admiration unreservedly reflected in Lewis's 1917 essay "The Code of a Herdsman," at the heart of which is a distinction between "the herd" and "the mountain people," the latter being called upon to "mock the herd perpetually with the grimace of its own garrulity or deadness" and to "eschew all clichés implying a herd personality."² In the briefest of analyses, Carey argues that in "The Code of a Herdsman" Lewis simply "adopts the familiar Nietzschean symbolic landscape."³ There is much in Lewis's oeuvre to support Carey's claim that Lewis remains an essentially Nietzschean thinker: in addition to his privileging of an intellectual élite over the many, there is his early rejection of democracy, his celebration of what in the first issue of Blast (June 1914) he terms the "proud, handsome and predatory," his Vorticist conception of the "northern"—"We assert that the art for these climates, then, must be a northern flower"; "Tragic humour is the birthright of the North"—his unremitting polemicism, and, perhaps above all, his foundational distinction between the artist or, more precisely, the artist-intellectual and the "average" or "common" man.⁴

What Carey leaves out of account, however, no doubt because it does not fit quite so neatly into his own polemical discourse on the modern, is the host of complications that render any simple connection between the "Nietzschean symbolic landscape," Lewis, and Nazism decidedly problematical. For instance, even in "The Code of a Herdsman" Lewis is already barring the "mountain people" from the realm of the political: "Do not play with political notions, aristocratisms or the reverse, for that is a compromise with the herd" (EWL, 27). We shall have reason to return to this banning of the artist-intellectual from the political, and indeed the possibility of an art that would be free of any political position. Secondly, and no less significantly, point 16 of "The Code" reads: "Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up" (EWL, 29). It is contradiction, polemical energy turned back on the self and on the coherence of that self's work, that is one of the structuring-destructuring principles of Lewis's entire oeuvre. Indeed, the very repetitiveness of that oeuvre, upon which Carey remarks so dismissively, is arguably the repetitiveness of an iteration that, paradoxically, both reinforces and weakens its argument.

Furthermore, in order to reduce the early Lewis to no more than an acolyte...