Abstract:

Broadly accepting of the greater tolerance and visibility of gay men in artistic circles in interwar London, Wyndham Lewis nonetheless frequently wrote of this phenomenon with misgivings, even anxiety. Judith Butler's suggestion that such anxiety may be a form of melancholia—blocked mourning for the loss of a love that cannot be acknowledged—and Lewis's estrangement at an early age from his father may together account for his feelings about male homosexuality. His polemical and critical works of the interwar period (The Art of Being Ruled, The Doom of Youth, The Lion and the Fox) link homosexuality with violence against fathers, and his early play Enemy of the Stars can be read as an erotically-inflected agon between a father and a son.