Castor Oil for Conservatives: Wyndham Lewis's Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! and "Bolsho-Tory" Politics

Wyndham Lewis's 1937 polemical work, Count Your Dead: They Are Alive!, was written, I argue, as a contribution to the efforts of a distinct group of British and American "revolutionary conservatives" to reinvigorate political conservatism. Lewis saw himself and the group as striving to force mainstream conservatives to reexamine their principles in light of what Lewis portrayed as the "castor oil" being administered to European politics by fascism—castor oil being for Lewis a metaphor for political "truth." My analysis highlights the crucial distinction in Lewis's political thought between the conservative revolutionaries he admonished and the revolutionary conservatives he admired.