Wyndham Lewis Annual (review)

Scholarly journals devoted to a single author are endeavors both valuable and hazardous. At their best, they feature essays firmly grounded in archival research and a command of the author’s work and milieu that illuminate both; at their worst, they offer partisan polemics that overstate authorial achievements or deny limitations, discuss broad topics only insofar as they compliment the author, or respond indignantly to critics who do not toe the party line. The challenge for editors of and contributors to such journals is to exploit the benefits of partisanship while sidestepping its pitfalls: to practice an historically responsible scholarship that avoids excessive narrowness, special pleading, and pontification.

When the author in question is Wyndham Lewis, whose literary and artistic project was designed to antagonize, satirize, and attack the artistic and social orthodoxies of his moment, and whose cultural politics—especially his flirtation with Nazism and theatrical swipes at women, Jews, and homosexuals—are for us particularly offensive, partisan scholars may find themselves pushed into didactic defensiveness merely in the effort to counter the reductive, if well intentioned, assaults of critics animated by various species of moral or political indignation. These concerns are addressed in the new Lewis Annual, the successor to the Lewis Society’s previous publication, Enemy News. In the opening editorial, Paul Edwards reiterates his commitment to the old journal’s ambition to serve as “the chief vehicle for the publication of articles about Lewis,” but asserts that the new Annual will extend its range: to become not only “indispensable to anyone wanting to understand or study” Lewis, but also “useful to anyone interested or researching in modernism” (1). That the Annual is edited by Edwards, who perhaps knows more about Lewis than any other living scholar (he’s edited a number of the Black Sparrow Press reissues and is at work on what will surely become a major book on Lewis’s oeuvre), and has an editorial board including most of those who match Edwards’s expertise (C. J. Fox, Alan Munton, Reed Way Dasenbrock, and Paul O’Keeffe, among others), insures that the Annual will fulfill its pledge of indispensability for students of Lewis. The real question (and promise) the Annual poses is whether it will achieve the second aim of discussing Lewis and his place in twentieth-century art, literature, and criticism in ways that appeal to, and are even indispensable for, students and scholars of modernism more generally.

The first issue occasionally suggests—especially in some of the book reviews—that the Annual runs the risk of becoming too narrow, too partisan, of interest finally only to Lewisians. But at its best moments, it provides solid evidence of the potential to fulfill its larger promise, becoming a venue for the balanced discussion of Lewis’s legacy that also raises and illuminates more general problems of modernism: its controversial politics, its conflicted relations to popular culture and mass political movements, its academic institutionalization. The myths of modernism—whether propounded by the modernists themselves or their partisans and antagonists—are so firmly established that they have become serious impediments in current efforts to assess and discuss the movement. Productive study of modernism today requires us to complicate, analyze, and, in certain cases, disperse those myths. Lewis is particularly useful in this project not simply because he was an incorrigible self-mystifier, even as his project was strongly motivated to demolish the aesthetic and political orthodoxies of his moment. More important, his achievement and reputation are nearly choked by a fog of current antimodernist myths. When the first issue of the Annual is most useful, it questions and helps dispel them.

The essays of greatest value cast new light on Lewis’s neglected early literary works and his self-proclaimed role as Britain’s modern satirist. Walter Michel’s piece on Lewis’s overlooked early stories (first published in little magazines like Ford’s English...