Book description
Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic,
Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorisation. He launched
the only twentieth-century English avant garde movement, Vorticism, in
1914. His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918. During the
intervening World War, as an artillery officer at the third battle of
Ypres, he gained his 'political education under fire'. Anti-war books of
the 1930s argued against what he regarded as a war-mongering left-wing
orthodoxy, and presented the case for the right. This placed him in the
position somewhere between an advocate of appeasement and what looked
uncomfortably like a Nazi sympathizer. Despite an admission, in 1939,
that he had been wrong about Hitler, his reputation never recovered from
the stigma of Fascism. After the Second World War, spent in penniless
and bitter exile in Canada, he returned to London and, in the last
decade of his life, received some measure of the success and recognition
he had been denied for so long. It coincided, tragically, with the
realisation that he was going blind. Visual expression denied him, he
devoted all his remaining energies to writing. Seven books in as many
years, written in laborious longhand when he was unable to see the
Paul O'Keeffe is a freelance lecturer and writer based in Liverpool. He
gained his Ph. D. with a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr.
