Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer (review)

Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. Paul Edwards. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. viii+584. Illus. 162b/w+179 color. $75.00.

In the recent surge of Lewis criticism, few studies have attempted to broach the touchy issue of what makes this writer, painter, and philosopher a worthwhile subject for serious scholarly interest. For his advocates, Lewis's status in the development of British and international modernism is a given, partly because of what contemporaries like Eliot and Pound thought of him. For his detractors, he remains an exemplary failure from the period, because instances of mediocrity in his writings and paintings abound, and, more spectacularly, because of his misogyny, his anti-Semitism, and his erstwhile support of Hitler in the early 1930s. This dichotomy has resulted in a scarcity of middle ground regarding Lewis, and consequently studies of his work generally reflect a kind of critical schizophrenia, in which it is difficult to ascertain whether either side has an investment in convincing the other that it should reconsider its perspective on this often perplexing gadfly modernist.

Into this gap arrives Edwards's comprehensive study of Lewis's entire oeuvre of visual art and writing. What stands out first of all is the appearance of this book: its stunning visual presence and size suggest prominence, and, at a time when Lewis criticism has emerged primarily in articles and in chapters of books surveying modernist cultures or genres, its scope is impressive and even daring. Besides being a pleasure to look at, however, this text functions well on several levels. For Lewis scholars, Edwards provides extensive historical research and thorough theoretical analysis of Lewis's intellectual and artistic development. Thus, because of its range and depth, his book promises to be an invaluable touchstone for studies on Lewis's writing and painting. Yet, more importantly, it should also serve as a key component in studies of modernism for newcomers and experts alike, because Edwards offers a compelling and persuasive account of why Lewis's work, despite its flaws and miscalculations, must once again be considered "central to an understanding of the culture of the twentieth century" (7).

The thesis of Edwards's book weaves together the cultural histories, philosophies, politics, and aesthetic ideas that constitute the fabric of modernism--and Lewis's work--within the period. Modernism, he says, extends and modifies the grand narratives of Romanticism in response to the vicissitudes of a technological culture. In its effort to relocate coherence and authenticity, modernism simultaneously embodies its universalizing accounts and disrupts them, thus opening the door for postmodernism's turn toward particularization. Lewis's work satirizes or, at its most strident, condemns other efforts to find ultimate value in psychological interiors, offering instead an external style that valorizes a purely aesthetic world. Edwards demonstrates this external aesthetic in its various guises, explaining in the process that Lewis's work remains distinct from that of his contemporaries because he did not attempt to articulate epiphanic moments or seek to capture the ineffable. Even in his later, more naturalistic portraits of the 1930s, Lewis remained committed to the idea of art organizing nature, Edwards asserts, always aware finally "that it was our privilege to be no more than imperfect imitators of that authenticity" (549).

Edwards negotiates these complexities with a lucid balance that acknowledges Lewis's high points and critiques his shortcomings, situating both the writing and the visual art within a wide array of concurrent cultural developments. To perform this balancing act, he alternates between texts and images, differentiating in his readings their unique achievements and pointing to conceptual parallels that foreground Lewis's two arts. His achievement is to provide both a narrative of Lewis's place within modernism and, divided into diachronic sections, authoritative critical readings of specific writings and paintings.

Almost without exception, Edwards avoids making the kinds of nonreflective claims for Lewis's individual greatness that sometimes appear in other biographical and critical accounts of his life and work. Instead, he traces...